We start with the written letter. A random stroke: in any language.
And breath. The intake and outtake of wind, another arbitrary movement.
Both magic: the former a symbol that acquires meaning for civilizations, the latter, a random spirit that creates life and being. From where does our movement originate? Our diaphragm, our heart. Really, where? Perhaps the wind and a spirit.
We forget that the world once was magic. There were service magicians, as described in Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore. They catered to the bewildering world of the 17th century of medieval and early modern Europe. They were not feared as witches or revered as saints. Their magic played a prominent place in the operation of alleviating social challenges: finding lost items, healing broken relationships, or recovering from an illness. And magic still is a part of our chaotic, overwhelming world. Wishing on stars, blowing out candles on a birthday cake, gambling, saying “break a leg,” and not to forget magical thinking. Rooted in who we are. Why does this matter? The world is delicate. The world rests on a fragile dichotomy of crazy and sane. Embedded deep in our language, thoughts, and actions. We are ridden with this schism. As if there is one shade of a realm that is not meant to be trod upon. Craziness. Why has this developed? Perhaps I need to more deeply read Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, This Way Madness Lies, by Mike Jay, Roy Porter’s Madness: A Brief History and Pettèri Pietikäinen: Madness: A History; or others: they write of the history. How did craziness develop? There once was a civilization that was inclusive of madness. The categories were not so sharply divided. There certainly was not a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, five versions of them up to now, to discern categories of sanity. A language wasn’t there to divide crazy from normal. I wonder, and this, too, is up to explore, that if two thousand years ago, civilizations, Greek for example, had words to split the language so divisively between normal and abnormal. Our language is littered with words for “crazy:” “loopy,” “wild,” “zany,” “postal,” “wacko.” Look at Roget’s Thesaurus and you will see a plethora of words to separate those who are so-called crazy from those who are sane.
Why does this separation exist in the first place? There was a time where there was no difference. Humans walked the earth as one. Think of Bruegel paintings, if you know them. A cacophony of individuals interrelating, of humans, fat and thin, tall and short, pointy noses, men on crutches, others playing a mandolin, poor and rich, skewered pigs, some people peeking out of windows, jesters, two women carrying a frame of a platform with a gaunt man on a tall green seat holding a paddle with fish on it wearing a basket on his head: all sorts of human configurations with no particular regard for an idea of “sick.”
Then came a time when persons were committed to madhouses, asylums and then hospitals. There developed places and language to differentiate insanity. My question “why” is still under exploration. We find it so ordinary that craziness is different from abnormal in our culture, but why? Why did this separation begin to occur? What if, say, craziness was normalized into something acceptable? What once was psychotic were flattened out, so to speak, and integrated into the mainstream as a possible language? Acceptable. Not crazy, not wonky, but accepted to the common ear.
Humans are miraculous to start with: inhaling in, inhaling out. The spirit. Craziness is a part of this magic manifestation. Maybe a yin-yang, a balance, a necessary means to hold our animal spirit in place this wild segment of our human self (do animals manifest craziness?). Maybe this is our spirit, just a part of the necessity of it all, for without the division, the struggle might not be there and maybe the struggle is the damned part of being the human animal whom we are. For that I’m not sure why.
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