Michelangelo, The Torment of St. Anthony (via Wikimedia Commons)
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Standing aside from the busy doings of mankind, and drawing NIGH to the divine [pros to theio gignomenos], he is rebuked by the multitude as being out of his wits, for they know not that he is possessed by a deity [enthousiazon].
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX— Plato, Phaedrus
NEARLY mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxXXXX— H. P. Lovecraft, The Outsider
The pattern he has selected may seem queer, out of the way, and VERGING on insanity; but this happens because it is isolated from its inner context, and is appraised mechanically and superficially, by the outer and conventional measures of normality. Very often, the inward aim of the dynamic patterns animating the lives of such apparently insane persons is God, or Truth.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxXXXX— Meher Baba, The Wayfarers
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Madness, an obscurely essential theme in The Cloud of Unknowing, appears there in several modes traversing the boundaries between human, God, and devil.
First, there is the madness to which all demons are driven by “the werk of the soule,” the apophatic forgetting of creation and dwelling in the cloud or darkness between oneself and God.{{1}}[[1]]The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997). References are to chapter number.[[1]] “Alle seintes and aungelles han joie of this werk, and hasten hem to helpe it in al here might. Alle feendes ben wood whan thou thus doste, and proven for to felle it in alle that thei kun” (3).
Second, there is the madness to which phantasmatically deluded contemplatives drive themselves under the devil’s guidance by perceptually confounding and inverting the natural order of corporeal and spiritual things. This spiritual mis-work “is neither bodily worching ne goostly worching. . . . it is a worching agens kynde, and the devel is the cheef worcher thereof. And it is the rediest way to deth of body and of soule, for it is woodnes and no wisdom, and ledith a man even to woodnes. And yit thei wene not thus, for thei purpose hem in this werk to think on nought bot on God.” Not sensing the true mystical or hidden prepositionality of spiritual ascent—“how a man schal drawe alle his witte withinne hymself, or how he schal clymbe aboven himself”—they “turn theire bodily wittes inwardes to theire body agens the cours of kynde; and streynen hem, as thei wolde see inwards with theire bodily ighen, and heren inwards with theire eren, and so forthe of all theire wittes, smellen, taasten, and felyn inwardes. And thus thei reverse hem agens the cours of kynde and with this coriousté thei travayle theire ymaginacion so undiscreetly, that at the last thei turne here brayne in here hedes.” Thus set in error, the contemplative falls prey to the devil who, hiding under this distorted remembrance of God—“the mynde of God wol he [the devil] not put fro hem, for feerde that he schuld be had in suspecte”—intensifies and validates the delusion with “fals light or sounes, swete smelles in theire noses, wonderful tastes in theire mowthes, and many queynte hetes and brennynges in theire bodily brestes or in theire bowelles, in theire backes and in theire reynes, and in their pryvé membres,” so that without the intervention of a “merciful miracle” they “schul go staryng wood to the devil” (51-53).
Third, there is the pure madness of the devil’s essential infernal nature whose direct sight instantly causes permanent madness, which the Cloud-author addresses in the context of judgmental religious zealotry and the loss of discretion. Persons suffering from this condition are deceived by the devil, who “ful wonderfuly . . . wol enflaume here braynes to meinteyne Goddes lawe, and to distroie synne in all other men.” Reproving everyone, they “sey that thei ben steryd therto by the fiire of charité and of Goddes love in theire hertes. And trewly thei lighe, for it is with the fire of helle wellyng in theire braynes and in theire ymaginacion.” While not defined as madness per se, this inferno-critical zeal formally participates in the devil’s own nature, as reported by “some disciples of nygromauncye . . . unto whom the feende hath apperid in bodily licnes.” For when the devil thus appears, he always has “bot o nose-therel, and that is grete and wyde. And he wil glady kast it up, that a man may see in therate to his brayne up in his heed. The whiche brayn is not elles bot the fiire of helle, for the feende may have none other brayn. And yif he might make a man loke in therate, he kepeth no beter; for at that lokyng he schuld lese his witte for ever” (55). So, as the devil “figureth in some qualité of his body what his servauntes ben in spirit,” such indiscreet reprovers “have bot o nose-therel goostly,” in contradiction with the naturally split nostrils of humans that “bitokeneth that a man schulde have discrecion goostly, and kun dissevre the good fro the ivel, and the yvel fro the worse, and the good fro the betyr” (55).
Fourth, there is the near or virtual madness of the real mystic who, in working to destroy the final and foundational obstacle between himself and God, namely, the “the nakid wetyng and felyng of thin owen beyng,” goes “ni wood for sorow.” “Alle men han mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote and felith that he is. Alle other sorowes ben unto this in comparison bot as it were games to ernest. For he may make sorow earnestly that wote and felith not onli what he is, bot that he is. And whoso felid never this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit never parfite sorow. This sorow . . . makith a soule abil to ressseive that joye, which revith fro a man alle wetyng and felyng of his being. This sorow, yif it be trewly coseyvid, is ful of holy desire; and elles might never man in this liif abide it ne bere it. For ne were it that a soule were sumwhat fed with a maner of counforte of his right worching, elles schuld he not mow bere the pyne that he hath of the wetyng and felyng of his being. For as ofte as he wolde have a trewe wetyng and a felyng of his God in purtee of spirit, as it may be here, and sithen felith that he may not – for he findeth evermore his wetyng and his felyng as it were ocupied and fillyd with a foule stynkyng lumpe of himself . . . – as ofte he goth ni wood for sorow; insomochel, that we wepith and weilith, strivith, cursith, and banneth, and schortly to sey, hym thinkith that he berith so hevy a birthen of hymself that he rechith never what worth of hym, so that God were plesid. And yit in al this sorrow he desireth not to unbe, for that were develles woodnes and despite unto God” (44).
Illustration from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi (via Wikimedia Commons)
I am interested in the principle of necessity at work within this de facto mystical typology of madness. Why? Because I do not see that there can be any real theory of madness, any intellectual vision of it, that is not a knowing of its necessity. Seeing madness for what it is means seeing that it must be, its self-identical immanence, at once in itself (the space wherein the mad one, to truly be mad, must be mad, really at his wits’ end) and in relation to madness’s own end, what it is driving one to (the space where the mad one is mad for some mantic reason), in this context, hell or God. Nietzsche expresses this necessity, identifying madness as a vital condition for noetic novelty, the only way new ideas become real: “when . . . new and deviate ideas . . . again and again broke out, they did so accompanied by a dreadful attendant: almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea . . . Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this? Something in voice and bearing as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of weather and the sea . . .? Let us go a step further: all superior men . . . had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad.”{{2}}[[2]]Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. Maudemaire Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §14.[[2]] Crucially, Nietzsche’s words attend without nomination to a kind of Quixotian play or indetermination between actual and virtual madness, indicating a subtle relation between madness’s noetic necessity and its nearness, a secret intersection between the power and the proximity of madness.
Such is the dynamism that is communicated between the hands and madness, for example, in the clenched and hidden hands that reveal a turning of the manual power back into the mind.{{3}}[[3]]For artistic examples, see Sander L. Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: Wiley, 1982), chapter 3.[[3]] Likewise, Augustine’s mind reaches for a hand to hold still the heart in a vision of the real Present: “Who will hold fast the human heart so that it may stand and see how eternity, standing beyond past and future, speaks both past and future? Is my hand capable of this? Or can the hand of my mouth accomplish such a great thing through language?”{{4}}[[4]]”Quis tenebit cor hominis, ut stet et videat, quomodo stans dictet futura et praeterita tempora nec futura nec praeterita aeternitas? Numquid manus mea valet hoc aut manus oris mei per loquellas agit tam grandem rem?” (Augustine, Confessions [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951], 11.11).[[4]] The hand of madness, the haptic nearness of its power, is a matter of present time. Its necessity pertains to the temporal substance that is neither chronos or aiôn but the too-immanent dilation or stretching open of the present beyond the limitations of past and future. The need to be mad is itself the nearness of the active or creative present, a must-be that belongs, not to the twin hallucinations of instant and eternity (the duplex apparitional phantasm of what is always/never passing), but to the more original and universal now that demonically exists beside them, that attends like weather from a cosmic outside and waves from dark inner seas. Madness is so intimate with time, so fiendishly present to it, that it is radically reasonable to say that madness is time. Discover this equation. It is the broken, present-at-hand yet paradoxically nevertheless and all-the-more ready means of warding off the foetid apparition, the foul stinking lump of oneself, which presses so close.
The identity of time and madness is visible in Augustine’s perpetuated remark about time’s inverted apophatic intelligibility, its being known in negative unknowing, that is, not negating that you know, but in purely negating, as if in absolute spontaneous preemption, that you do not: “What therefore is time? If no one [nemo] asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone questioning me, I do not know.”{{5}}[[5]]“Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio” (Augustine, Confessions, 11.14).[[5]] The literal meaning is supreme: time is known in the negative-without-negation presence of a nemo, a not-man (ne + homo) who asks what is time, a question posed by nobody. Time is known mantically, through a positively mad intuition whose madness lies in its having no time to be about time in the form of answer to anyone’s question, in its necessarily being a knowledge that answers (to) no one. The explanation of time to someone, by contrast, is a negatively mad ignorance, the madness of an explaining that eclipses knowledge of the explained.{{6}}[[6]]Note how the logic identically applies to madness as explanation for all-too-intuited horror: “madness . . . was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naïve as to deny that each of us may have harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely” (H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, [New York: Modern Library, 2005), 38). That time itself a horror is a maddening horror is of course central principal of this work: “the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like through the eternal ice . . . we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species . . . we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least 500, 000 years, and in all probability even longer . . . The pictorial bands . . . had an artistic force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design . . . embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity” (46-56).[[6]] Note the formal similarity between such knowing of time through no one’s query and the negative, solely monitory wisdom of the Socratic daimon, never named as a spiritual entity, but only as an impersonal but familiar divine sign—a prophetic presence whose singular doubling of identity is occasionally there yet never inoperative (Socrates says it always [aei] warns him) and thus deeply analogous to consciousness itself as a necessary, inevitable dilation of the momentary, so that there is, for example, time to do anything.
Time-madness identity is more clearly visible in Meher Baba’s speedy distinction between God, man, madman, and mast (divinely mad person): “Mind stopped, is God. / Mind working, is man. / Mind slowed down, is mast. / Mind working fast, is mad.”{{7}}[[7]]The Wayfarers, 19.[[7]] Here it is the temporality of mind itself that ontically modulates between God and human on a spectrum of madness (though it should be emphasized that the ‘human’ has no genetic or historical specificity in his evolutionary cosmology; it simply means the form in which the development of consciousness is full and thus capable of God/Self-realization). The human, vis-à-vis self-conscious divinity or God, is flanked by opposed but temporally correlative forms of madness such that its own ordinary operative nature looks like only a median mind-speed, a mediocre or B-minus madness that both ensures practical functioning and displaces radical development. Doubly framed by insanity and God-intoxication, the human emerges as a utile but essentially obsolescent state of time. “Level-1 or world space,” writes Nick Land, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level 2?”{{8}}[[8]]Nick Land, “Meltdown,” in Fanged Noumena, eds. Robin Mackay & Ray Brassier (London/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011), 456.[[8]] Land’s term garbage time eloquently captures the complex of an expiring or evaporating state (perforce ungraspable as such from within its sanity-to-itself and perceivable only in near-madness) in which production of and concern for refuse are constitutionally fused into self-obsolescence or being-garbage. And there is every reason to keep open the comparison here between the anthropocenic ecological echo of the idea—the spectacle of homo sapiens garbaging itself to death—and the negative or tensional complicity between mystical madness and filth. Just as the cloud-dwelling contemplative goes nearly mad for sorrow over his own foetid facticity as the only and ultimate escape route out of individuated existence,{{9}}[[9]]Cf. Hegel’s understanding of the necessity of madness (for development of higher rationality) as expression of contradiction in individuated being – “The necessity of madness, that is, the necessity of going through the stage of madness, is due to the fact that ‘the soul is already in itself the contradiction of being an individual, a singular, and yet at the same time immediately identical with the universal natural soul, with its substance’ (Enz. 164, 125)” (Ferit Güven, Madness and Death in Philosophy [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005], 37) – and Levinas’s definition of the grounds of escape: “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même]. . . . It is being itself or the ‘one-self’ from which escape flees, and in no wise being’s limitation. In escape the I flees itself, not in opposition to the infinity of what it is not or of what it will not become, but rather due to the very fact that it is or that it becomes” (Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 55). Rosmini comments on Hegel: “What reason could we find for this whim that being would have to negate itself, to refuse to recognize itself, to make this mad attempt to annihilate itself?” (Saggio storico-critico sulle categorie e la dialettica). See also Nicola Masciandaro, “The Sorrow of Being” Qui Parle 19 (2010): 9-35 and “Eros as Cosmic Sorrow: Locating the Limits of Difference in Julian of Norwich’s Divine Shewings and The Cloud of Unknowing,” Mystics Quarterly 35 (2009): 59-103.[[9]] so is global eco-emergency a form of mass secular and semi-insane mystical sorrow expressive of deeply vexed impatience with, and desire for, intensified immediacy of the forced temporariness and disposableness, or more essentially, the necessary disposality, of human-being. Note furthermore the important psychic link between sorrow, or affective counter-volitional refusal,{{10}}[[10]]“[C]um . . . dissentimus ab eo quod nolentibus accidit, talis voluntas tristitia est” (Augustine, De civitate Dei, 14.6, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb, 5th ed. [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981]) [sorrow is the will’s disagreement with something that happened against our will].[[10]] and refuse as what is rejected and cast away. Here is found the weird paradoxical link between madness and filth, the madman’s personal affinity for dirt that is grounded in rigorous and essential indifference towards it, an indifference that may radically express or be rooted in real mental cleanliness, the perfectly careless purity of a playing soul that will not be washed, yet a non-innocent purity strangely continuous with the deathly seriousness of someone who must be clean of oneself.{{11}}[[11]]“From general standards of society, religion, health, morality and so forth, cleanliness of body and mind are indispensable. It is, however, very easy to keep the body clean; but cleanliness of mind is very difficult indeed. The more one gets attached to body cleanliness for merely selfish reasons, the less are the chances of having a clean mind. If, however, one is given up wholly to mental cleanliness, which means becoming free from low, selfish, impure desires and thoughts of lust, greed, anger, backbiting, etc., the less is one’s mind attached to bodily needs and bodily cleanliness. All this applies to ordinary persons. Now of the five types—God-merged, God-intoxicated, God-absorbed, God-communed and God-mad—the God-absorbed and God-communed can more or less keep their bodies clean. Their minds are almost automatically clean due to their being absorbed in God, or in communion with God. But the God-mad, the God-intoxicated and the God-merged all invariably have dirty bodies, live in dirty surroundings, and may have dirty physical habits. A God-mad has a clean, pure mind. A God-intoxicated has a mind, but no thoughts, for his mind is simply enjoying the intoxicated state. A God-merged has no mind—he is fully merged in God. So in these three cases their mental cleanliness and purity cannot be questioned. Now why should their bodies and environments be dirty? You will find that the majority of ordinary mad people have very little consciousness of their bodies. So if an ordinary mind, when mad, does not pay attention to bodily cleanliness, then the three types of God men, who unconsciously or consciously know all the universe to be zero, body to be a shadow, and whose minds are absolutely unattached to the body, cannot be expected to keep their bodies and surroundings clean. When the mind does not pay attention to the body, the body, naturally, automatically survives and looks after itself. Now because of a kind of universal working on the gross plane, a sort of automatic attraction takes place, which causes a man who is indifferent to cleanliness to be attracted to place himself in dirty surroundings. He does not purposely choose an unclean place, but tends to gravitate towards it, for he is himself quite indifferent either to cleanliness or to dirt on the physical plane. For those who are God-mad, God-intoxicated, or God-merged, this dirtiness does not affect their health, because the mind is not attached to the body. For these souls, good or bad, cleanliness or dirt, a palace or a hut, a spotless avenue or a filthy gutter are all the same, and they are driven into any of these places according to circumstance. It is natural for a mast to have a dirty body, and it is natural for him to be driven to dirty surroundings; but if the devotee of a mast happens to give him comfort and cleanliness, he takes it because it is forced on him—but he is quite indifferent to it” (Meher Baba, Wayfarers, 33-4).[[11]] “I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness [says a Lovecraftian hero] in my single-minded fever to unearth the lurking fear.”{{12}}[[12]]H. P. Lovecraft, “The Lurking Fear,” in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2004), 75.[[12]] And filthiness too is a matter of proximate affinity: dirt itself is clean. So near-madness can be visualized as the achievement of a purifying and essential cleanliness of being-in-dirt. Or as St. Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2).
Teodor Axentowicz, The Anchorite (via Wikimedia Commons)
To see the necessity of madness in the Cloud of Unknowing demands, not diffusive explaining or theorizing, but the single-mindedness of envisioning or theorying the unitary time of its fourfold appearance, intellectually entering the wholism of its must-be. In other words, seeing this madness with the radical, transcendent-immanent literalism of photography, described by Laruelle as “a hyperphenomenology of the real” that thinks the “undivided giveness of the apparition,” the givenness that “is the thing itself in-its image, rather than the image-of-the-thing”{{13}}[[13]]François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photographyi, trans. Robin Mackay (London/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011), 95.[[13]]—a blind but open visioning homologous to knowing when no one asks or answering via questioning-by-camera. Such seeing is itself proper to the supreme, unconquerable ordinariness of mysticism as a mode of vision that finds ultimate truth in a flattening of knower and known which inversionally releases, like a Petrine cross, the infinite and total intensive depth of reality.{{14}}[[14]]“They hanged him this way and he began to speak. ‘Learn ye the mystery of all nature, and the beginning of all things, what it was. For the first man, whose race I bear in mine appearance (or, of the race of whom I bear the likeness), fell (was borne) head downwards, and showed forth a manner of birth such as was not heretofore: for it was dead, having no motion. He, then, being pulled down—who also cast his first state down upon the earth—established this whole disposition of all things, being hanged up an image of the creation wherein he made the things of the right hand into left hand and the left hand into right hand, and changed about all the marks of their nature, so that he thought those things that were not fair to be fair, and those that were in truth evil, to be good. Concerning which the Lord saith in a mystery: Unless ye make the things of the right hand as those of the left, and those of the left as those of the right, and those that are above as those below, and those that are behind as those that are before, ye shall not have knowledge of the kingdom. This thought, therefore, have I declared unto you; and the figure wherein ye now see me hanging is the representation of that man that first came unto birth’” (Acts of Peter).[[14]] “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me.”{{15}}[[15]]Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 57.[[15]] I.e. the eternally identifying vision-in-One whose durational projection is the proverbial too long it takes to go mad looking in a mirror. This is the world where the image looks back, a capacious no-place whose abyss sees into you and the lovely reflection loves Narcissus. Similarly, perceiving the Cloud’s madness is needing to see it all-at-once, in a way that makes it look back as the very mode of its perceiving, in the inescapability of a now that is not instantaneous but fluidly frozen or solidly dilated, just as a photograph, or the multiple sense of medieval scripture, finds different forms pressed within a unitary temporal plane. A vision of necessity that madly intersects with the necessity of vision itself and thus also sees the moment of vision within the principle of madness.
All these criteria are precisely confirmed in the Cloud’s four-form scheme, which stretches the unwitnessability of madness itself between the pure fiery dementia of the demonic brain and the supremely proximate madness of the ecstatic mystic so that what-madness-is, its substance, is prismatically refracted across the space between human and demon, the entities who are photographically close, one to the other, in each definition of madness the text provides. This proximity is itself co-substantial with time, insofar that demon, as fallen angel, is simultaneously what negatively precedes and preconditions human and what perpetually strives to retard its afterlife towards chronic sub-eternity or damnation—a striving that is formally inseparable from and providentially bound to what it inverts: spiritual aspiration towards the eternal present.{{16}}[[16]]The inversion is precise in Dante’s representation of hell-dwellers as permanently blind to the present, as Farinata explains in Inferno 10.100-8. Infernal knowledge advances only towards a frozen chromos, pure archivicity: “tutta morta / fia nostra conoscienza da quell punto / che del future fia chiusa la porta” (Inf 10.106-8) [all our knowledge will be dead from that moment when the door of the future shall be closed]. Cf. worry as a displacement from the present that demands absolute release: “Worry is a necessary resultant of attachment to the past or to the anticipated future, and it always persists in some form or other until the mind is completely detached from everything” (Meher Baba, Discourses, 3.122).[[16]] The near-madness of existential mystical sorrow, dangerously shadowed by the rigorous volitional logic of the desire “to unbe . . . that [is] develles woodnes and despite unto God,” is the perfection or more properly apotheosis, of this proximity, its extremest realization that at once fulfills and fatally exceeds all other instances of it in the moment of becoming-divine. It is the anagogy or being raised up of the four senses of madness, the one that realizes and shows the necessity of their identity. Read this way, the real mystic is revealed to be, not one of several distinctions, but the truly immanent human as a madly inverted experientia crucis, a heretic body constituting—and needing to constitute as its only way out of itself—the upside down crucifixion of time. Not an essence, but a unitary hybrid never once and now no longer human, a friendly no-one or ‘nameless wild one’{{17}}[[17]] “One bright Sunday, as he was sitting withdrawn and deep in thought, there came to him in the calmness of his mind the figure of a rational being who was sophisticated in speech but inexperienced in deeds and who overflowed with rich ostentation. He began speaking to the figure thus: Where do you come from? It said: I never came from anywhere. He said: Tell me, what are you? It said: I am nothing. He said: What do you want? It answered and said: I want nothing. And he said: This is very strange. Tell me, what is your name? It said: I am called nameless wild one. The disciple said: You are well named ‘the wild one’ because your words and answers are completely wild. Now tell me something I shall ask you. Where does your wisdom take you? It said: to unrestrained liberty (Henry of Suso, The Little Book of Truth, Chapter 6, cited from Henry Suso: The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, ed. and trans. Frank Tobin [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989], 326). A hyper-negative liberty that must be distinguished from the deferred nothing-but-not-yet offered by nihilism: “That one must lose sight of names and nouns does not suggest that one must turn away from the world, which predication does serve to organize. The Nameless Wild One merely turns from this world when letting go the conventional delusion that this one is the only world possible (”Nameless Wild One: The Ethics of Anonymous Subjectivity – Medieval and Modern,” Common Knowledge 12 [2006]: 219-251).[[17]] for whom near-madness is not a flirtation or perilous approach of the mind towards its loss, but the putting-to-use or wielding of the very necessity of time as an operational nearness, the turning of time into a virtue or power by letting it fall to a never-ending halt. “Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful, and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.”{{18}}[[18]]Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing [Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publication, 1963], no. 37.[[18]] This near- madness—inverted name for intimacy with true, singular sanity—is the human becoming capable of being mad. Hanging in effortless liberatory flight, its body stretched across the intersection of the evolutionary or human need to ‘become what you are’ and the chaotic or demonic ‘desire to be everything’, this weirdly inevitable creature here touches all at once the four temporal dimensions of its loved torment. From this perspective what matters is not what each intellectually ‘means’, but the immediate and as-if neutral significance of their time-structure.
Author’s illustration of the Crucifixion of Time
At the right hand: the non-stop continuity that must end of demon-tormenting contemplation, that is, allegorical time, time whose truth lies in signifying other than it is. At the left hand, the instantaneous once-and-forever singular moment of looking through the devil’s nostril, that is, literal time, time whose truth lies in perfect and unique irrevocability. At the head: the illusory false present of perverse, seeing-what-you-do-not-have aesthetic imagination, that is, tropological time, time whose truth lies in the projection of what one must do/become. At the feet: the let it be now of mystical impatience, refusal of every this for the real Present, that is, anagogical time, time whose truth lies in absolutely untimely suspension—heels kicking at everything.
The necessity of being at one’s wits’ end is a pure necessity, a necessity without object, and thus a necessity that only frees one more and more from being a subject of needs. Near-madness is the only alternative for staying close to being what one must.
On the other hand, Firdawsi reports in the Book of Kings that the followers of Mazdak, the heretical 6th-century Persian wise man, “were planted there head down, with their feet in the air, like trees….If you have any sense, [he says] you will not follow Mazdak’s way.”
—Nicola Masciandaro
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Nicola Masciandaro is Professor of English at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a specialist in medieval literature. His non-pseudonymous works include The Voice of the Hammer (Notre Dame), Sufficient Unto the Day (Schism), and Floating Tomb (Mimesis).
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