There have been occurrences where I unravel and am met with dismay or concern and a suggestion to see a psychiatrist. But I understand why, and keep myself at bay. By no means unhinged, just willing to entertain anything at all with how little I know.
Of course you want to write intelligibly, but sometimes the way thought works, reason breaks down to raw experience — something to that effect. There are implicits that just can’t be carried through words. And if you veer off too much then you completely diminish your ethos into something like divine insight at best and madness the rest.
As I’ve wrestled with expression all my life I bundled it into a stairway metaphor.
We’re all on this stairway of sanity, and you can walk up and down it. Those who are closer in steps you will find intelligible, but those who are far away enough, up or down, you’ll see them as completely divorced from reality; likewise, they could say the same of you.
When you’re a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Grenada feeding seagulls, your point of view will just not make sense to the hair-licked college freshman. Same could be said of the priest altar, the cult follower, the pseudonymous blogger.
A stairway as metaphor is, of course, derived from the popular idiom, .descent into madness.. But I wanted to clarify and modify it: the stairway is not strictly down. And it assumes a binary state: either you are sane or insane. I reject this fully; there are layers. Sanity’s Stairwell is infinite. That which seems insane could be perfectly rational depending on where you’re at in the stairwell. Although tantalizing to write off someone as insane and give not a second thought, there is always a method to someone’s madness. All truth is first ridiculed! Consider all of the breakthroughs that now define our world.
Would you not call the electrician insane if you were used to horses and candlelight?
Would you not call the psychiatrist insane when you’re used to alcohol swigs and a quick death anyway?
Would you not call the pasteurizer insane if you were from a world where digesting cow milk and cheese was unknown?
Would you not scoff at the Luddite, only then to witness the extreme breakdown of community, dust towns and sickness abound?
Some of the above choices I disagree with, but I can see their sanity.
So we’re stuck here, together, on Sanity’s Stairwell. How far away are we from each other? A willingness to see the stairway may flatten it, where we could at least see eye-to-eye. But it also may render you unintelligible as you lose sense of what would appear nominally .insane.. Every conversation is already taking a normalized graph of modern rationality and plotting your plead on it… except now you’re blindfolded.
To those that hear voices, to those that exorcise, to those that hex, and to those that bless their gems and chant Armageddon is near — you must remember they’re on the same stairwell. You are left to discern which direction they’re going, which direction you’re going, which direction this conversation is going: up or down.
Aye, I will merge two worlds — the soulless corporate lingo of Scout Mindset and the tribal mystics. It’s incumbent upon you, upon this ever-arching quest toward distilled truth, clean sanity — aye, to become the Scout Shaman. Ward away delusions, keep your perception pure. And may you find company, for it’s a long spiral ahead.