MADNESS

At my most brilliant moments I flirt a little with madness - toying and teasing it as though it holds the answer that will catapult me from my rut. I have never quite gone over the edge though because I lack that creative genius and daring that only the privileged few are blessed with.

Unlike Nikos Kazantzakis' character, Alexis Zorba, I am too attached to my finger to slice it off for the sake of a pot - no, not even for a perfect pot. Nor can I cut off my ear with a razor and throw it at the foot of a man I fancy, though I would very much enjoy doing this if there was guarantee that it could be stitched back on again. But madness comes with no guarantees.

Once the threshold is crossed there is no stepping back from the fuse of inspired destruction...but what a way to be destroyed! Like a human firework blitzkrieging to athanasia...like Van Gogh, like Sylvia Plath, like Kurt Cobain, like Virginia Woolf, like Edgar Allan Poe, like Michael Jackson, like Friedrich Nietzche, like an endless list of immortal lunatics.

Would they have been geniuses had they not been crazy? Sometimes I even wonder if these people were really "ill". Perhaps they just perceived a world that the rest of us are blind to simply becuse we don't have the capacity to hear the voices that may or may not be there. If you could conquer your fear of destruction while at the same time embosoming and enhancing it and turn your life and death into brilliant art in an all-consuming manic rage of psychotic artistic originality, would you? Perhaps the price of greatness is sanity...Is it worth the price?

"Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical."
Sylvia Plath, an excerpt from her poem "Daddy"