Tuesday, August 05, 2003
Essay on Sanityby Stephen Dunn
I am tired of hearing the insane
lauded for their clear
thinking. If they do
get to the reddest heart of things
it's because they can't see
the world of appearances,
where you are, struggling to separate
the difficult jewel from the
chalcedony that surrounds it.
And I love the world
of appearances with its blue veils,
its bright tintinnabulations, I
wouldn't give it up for that dark laser
the mad point
in no special direction.
(Except, of course,
for an afternoon of white light
with you somewhere.)
The point is you, who romanticize
those who are wise and sad
and tortured, you wouldn't
want to be them. And, sure,
we are sad too in our daily indifference
to the moon inside us, in
our sleeping bodies, but there is
a difference - it is, say,
having breakfast with someone
you love, the calm small ordinary
exchanges between people
who know knives
every once in a while are not
the silvercoated castrati
of their worst dreams. People who
can read a book or newspaper, play
ball or attend an orgy, who can do
all these things without carrying around
a picture of that cracked ceiling and its
one enormous spider, who can do
everything without the fear
that their heads can be entered
by a dark god, a terrible
flickering clarity.
Let us not romanticize them! They
who can't return to the small talk
of any given evening.
Who is sane is a question
of resistance, the mind saying No
to the sanctioned lies, the body
speaking up to the inner ear
that has been educated to hear it.
It is a question
of moments; people in the first rush
of love are the most sane,
the most able to feel their way
into importance. When the sign says
Underarm Deodorants, they will put
their tongues into each other's
armpits. When someone publishes a treatise
on love, theirs will be the pantomime
that mocks it - just as
the truly sane person will mock
this poem by simply walking
into any room!
Nevertheless it is with our poems
that we must visit ourselves, who are
neither here
nor there. And those never astonished
by their own humanity, smack
in the arid middle.
But I am tired of insanity
being attributed to the middle
class. Even they know the real issue
is lack of courage, a standing still
while the distant children
of their desires cry out
from a burning building. Insight
is the awful burden. They know this.
To be sane, perhaps, is to bring it
to the magnificent thin-as-ice world
of appearances, making sure the rope
that keeps you from the abyss
is secured around your waist,
so you're free enough
to know everything superficial
is as real as that which
it conceals. The mad, those who
are so beautiful
when years later we read what they said,
reject the smile for the teeth
behind it, cannot help
themselves, remind us always,
like conscience, they are
terrible companions.
(Can you blame me for loving the guy? Working on some sleevenotes poems.)
posted by styrene at 7:49 AM-comment?
