MADNESS

ho chiseled out our skull to carry dreams?

That same hand squeezed together perceptions and thoughts with such great emotion they fused into schizophrenia.

Psychosis is magical thinking gone awry. The creative misperceptions of the mad include defensive charms, transformational rituals, and imperative invocations. These are the same three expressive mechanisms employed by creative writers to impart verisimilitude to their compositions. Of course, for the writer, these actions sustain fictions, not delusions.

Writers call their defensive charms tropes, and they include metaphor, simile, hyperbole, synecdoche and metonymy. Just as with the mentally ill, these talismans defend against reality. But they remain effective only if correctly applied. Overuse evokes artless, disenchanted illusions without myth, mystery - or protection.

Life is an evil dream. The sane are phantoms, and the evil dream of life sifts through them like black ash. The evil dream collects into grave mounds as the sane drift through life fulfilling all the ordinary passages. Education, job, marriage, children and old age, each station punctuated by ceremonial holidays - precisely as multitudes have accomplished before them.

Only the insane are truly alive, for they know that life is an evil dream. They are the evil dream. And they live unique lives. Their rituals work directly upon themselves, with their personal energy, their own individualized evil, as they transmute thoughts into externalized experiences. When the ritual operates effectively, which is very rarely, madness alchemizes to method.

For the writer, the rituals are always the same: grammar, character and plot. The purpose is the purpose of all true magic - to transform the magician. If the ritual works, the writer is no longer a writer but a text.

Finally, the magic impulse of invocative imperatives often manifests for the schizophrenic as voices - God, Satan, the cherished or feared dead. Writers identify this imperative by many names: inspiration, Muse, duende, daimon, the unconscious. We all hear voices. But phantoms don’t have ears to listen. Among those who have ears and who heed the voices, discrimination distinguishes art from craziness. Magic comes in two varieties.

The psychotic experience is a crucial aspect of human being. Herman Melville observes, ". . . This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him, -- which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. . . ."

My attempt to portray the disease of archetypal misogyny in The Moon's Wife: A Hystery offended the so-called feminist publisher at HarperCollins so profoundly that she made certain my novel never appeared in mass market in the United States. Silenced, the holy legend of the Goddess lies dormant, poisoned by a witch and the very archetypal misogyny I presented! In the evil dream, black magic - power magic - trumps healing.

The magical interface of matter and mind is the theme of Solis. Atoms plus geometry = psyche. This scientific quality is mystifying, even bizarre. Science fiction provides an ideal vehicle for descent into the dark abysses where dream and organic molecules copulate. The frenzied passion of this union is everything we call soul.

The Irth Series addresses, in the form of an outrageous fantasy, the psychosis of megalomania, the grandiose, inflationary tendencies so prevalent - even dominant - in our species. What we call civilization is fundamentally and historically little more than homicidal power madness. The Dark Shore, Octoberland and The Shadow Eater are mythic adventures in the psychotic process of humanity’s true god, the warrior-magician.

The haunted insanity of the living dead personifies itself in Hellbound. The Crow is a visionary character conceived by James O’Barr in response to his own soulful experience of the evil dream. The archetypal and eternally renascent origins of this figure I expound in “The Crow Theory.”

Only the sane assume perception is empty of meaning. They lock up meaning in concepts. But for the insane, perception is revelation. The tender madness of creative writers is their awareness that the evil dream is itself revelation.