They have pills for that now you know?

There is something about madness, insanity, crazy-people what have you, that is practically endearing to us as people.  There are characters who are so crazy, they know they're insane.  Their own mental instability pains them, drives them to hold on to anything that makes them seem normal.  It makes the heart weep to know that they will never be healed, there is just a recursive spiral of hope and failure.  They want to be right and good, but they cannot for the life of them manage it.  The schizophrenic who exiles themselves, or multiple personalities that are barley contained.  Or what of the one who wears their instability like a cloak, wrapped up and safe in madness, giggling and running towards the darkness.  They know they go the wrong way, but it is their right way.  The ones who delight in the new bazaar worlds you can see within.  There is almost a magic in being able to embrace it, to see beyond to real world to the imagined and the hidden.  There is even an idea, of a person who is so sane, they are crazy.  Their grip on reality is so tight and unyielding that they break it into tiny fragments that can be recognized as sanity, but will never be reassembled. 

Insanity.  It's a well documented disease stemming from a variety of chemical imbalances, brain damage, or psychological imbalances.  But it's almost as if its catching.  Everyone, at one time or another, has thought to themselves, "I must be crazy."  I personally prefer to be described as mad.  It's said that the people who don't question their sanity are the truly crazy, but I disagree.  I think everyone is crazy, you'd have to be to put up with some of the shit we do.  I think the people who are to afraid to admit their imbalance are the dangerous ones, because they only grasp at the veneer of sanity and rationality without actually looking close enough to see the flaws.

I have often times toyed with loosening the hold that reality has on my mind.  By depriving my mind of sleep, I am able to change everything about me, simply by changing how I perceive the world.  I find it exhilarating to look out at the world from my own eyes and see something completely different and alien.  People pass by as shapes of consciousness, with effable goals and drives.  Trees become magical fractal constructs of life and creation.  Birds fucking FLY!  There are magical things and mysteries under every rock and within every bole.  The world's majesty is there for us to but open our eyes.  And while our eyes are surely open, and we see and navigate its tremulous corridors, we do not peek in the alcoves at its hidden arts, to busy are we at rushing through it.  We run, blind to the wonders it holds, just hoping that it wont all collapse on us before we get to the end.  But the end, is it.  So stay a while and listen to the music the reverberations play, and watch how the birds fly.  Maybe at the end of the day, we'll actually see all the real worlds.

An Analysis

Music is cyclical.  Setting aside the compositional aspects of repeating rhythms and themes which conclude within the arch of the song, we are left with the design of it all.  It invokes our emotions and is made from them.  Did the earliest people whistle while they worked?  Did their mothers sing them to sleep before language?  When one of their own died, did they wail out the grief, or was it a melodic recitation of their life and the pain the hole their existence leaves behind?  These are some interesting questions, but I will be looking at music, as I interpret its effects on myself, without actual music.  Seeing as how I have no musical talent to speak of (I sing in the key of off), I will be using words, which are still a powerful aspect of the process sometimes.

At a broad view, music is designed to entertain and communicate.  What and how it does this is as varried as the aspects of the human condition. But there are certain aspects that are consistent, which ply on our feelings.  When I listen to music, it draws out feelings that I have.  Brings them to the light without diluting them.  When I'm angry, songs that have an alien quality to them, something which sets aside humanity is a commonality.  The best ones also use a human voice to counterpoint this, and the lyrics will cut through the pseudo-psychic bullshit to whats pricking at my anger.  It pierces the shell and pulls out the pain, bringing it to the fore of my consciousness.  The pain envelops me and drowns everything in a white-hot rage.  It burns cold and bright, leaving a core of logic and calm, and I can move through it without fear.   

I have also found, that in depression, music can accentuate it to a point.  The sadness that I feel is nothing when compared to the simple joy of being alive to hear this wonderfully apt song.  My hurting is real, so real that I relish the chance to feel even that.  I am able to grab some fucking happiness out of the black, and push back the fear and melancholy with the knowledge that just feeling, even torment, is more powerful than anything.  I find euphoria within it, and I'm just happy to know I can feel.

Love songs.  To write about love songs, is like drawing stick figures for the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, or seeing a sunset through purple glass.  It is inadequate in every way, though I am compelled.  Even the ones about unrequited love bring a swelling of the heart, and an insane happiness with them.  I wish ever so fervently that I could write something that could move someone as much as music can move me.  I dream of love in terms of love songs, and sonnets, beautiful and whole, their composition a masterwork of longing and fantasies.  It isn't that music creates these flights of feeling, but they are always there, nestled in the deeps, just waiting the right touch to let them free.  I will forever quest for the proper string of characters to convey who I am, and though my quest may be fruitless, I will never quit.

Random

I love the random things that happen which I get to view as providence.  I know in reality that random happenstance is really just that, a statistically generated possibility of outcomes.  But my brain gets to see it as the universe taking a little time out to string together a sequence of events that come out in my favor.  I've said before that this happens frequently to me, so I have ample opportunity to analyze this phenomenon at the personal level.  It’s odd however, that my first visceral reaction is to think that the sequence of events was supposed to play out the way it did.  I then step back and think.  If it events hadn't happened in this way, they would have happened in an equally random way.  Some people will think this takes the magic out of miracles, but think about it.  Which is more miraculous, that an omnipotent being with a grand plan, an interest in our every move, and observing only this one planet in the multitudes of the cosmos?  OR, that in a universe so vast as to be near infinite, we are on this one spheroid, are born out of a random pairing of two distinct genetic sequences, have varying degrees of talent and ability, create things and share them with others, and after all that, my Ipod will put two songs next to each other on shuffle that counter point each other and my mood?  The likely-hood of the latter is so vastly impossible that it doesn't merit computation.

Of course, you could break down every bit of the second question into different probability functions, with variables for each sections, and express it in a formula, but I don't do any of that in my head.

But speaking on this particular random event which I am enamored of, it was beautiful.  I was on the train home after confronting, and being comforted about, a particularly intense phobia I have, and reading.  I was reading about two cosmologists, Beatrice Tinsley and Allan Sandage arguing about whether the universe is open or closed.  I paused for a moment in my reading to digest a little bit of information, and realized this has been a big week for me.  I've been faced with everyday, huge fears that have until this point ruled my life.  People.  I'm terrified of them because on the whole, I understand that I will never know someone like I know myself.  But this week I've begun this blog, attempted extroversion, and attended a social gathering with people I'd never met all alone in someone’s home.  I've done these things for the simple reason of defying myself. 

However, I realized that I hadn't given myself sufficient time to celebrate these achievements.  So I took my Ipod off shuffle.  This is big, because I feel like I must keep it on there so that I can at least be reminded of all the music I own and justify its existence on the device.  But I treated myself to listening to something I really wanted to.  So I put on "Mumford and Son's" song White Blank Page because it speaks to me of tranquility and then onslaught of horrid emotion into the calm of your soul.  The keynote point in the song of course is the crescendo which accompanies two phrases, "a white blank page, and a swelling rage," which pretty much sums up writers block for me. 

I read some online blogs, all of which have the connecting thread that their authors are people I admire.  One of them, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, writer for Penny Arcade, has said in interviews that he feels that he has to keep justifying the work he does, that if he doesn't live up to the standards, it will be taken away from him.  I can say many nice things about this man, but I will simply say that he has a talent no one can take from him.  But this is very much how I feel sometimes, staring at a blank piece of paper, or white computer screen.  I MUST fill it, or I will lose it all.  This is very true in that not exercising my linguistic talents may cause them to atrophy.  However, the reverse is also true, writing this much over this short a period of time has caused me to think about things that I want to write about almost constantly.  This in turn makes me wonder if I will ever, even with my diverse areas of curiosity, run out of things to write/think about.  I don't think so, but if I ever draw a blank I'll make a game out of it.

Genius say's Why?

So many people, through history, have attempted to define the term, I think in an effort to make it apply to themselves. That is not my desire, though I do have some thoughts on its definition. What I want out of this inquiry, is to tell what genius means to me. What makes another a genius, brilliant, and extraordinary. I think however, for the sake of clarity, I should delve into the clouded, murky waters of this topic.

Genius' (that’s the pluralization people), differ from prodigies. A prodigy is an individual who possess a heightened ability. We must point out though, that these are often in fields like math, music, chess, fields where after learning the concepts, the rest in natural ability. There are no prodigies in quantum physics, or engineering, or writing, because the concepts aren't enough to fully grasp the tasks at hand and start solving problems. A child can make mathematical discoveries after learning some things about math, the speed at which they make these is what makes them a prodigy. But we're digressing.

A genius is someone who sees with their mind. Musical genius' can visualize the sound waves in their head and feel the harmonies rightness, and mathematical ones can manipulate numbers unconsciously. Richard Feynman, a notable physicist who worked on the Manhattan project, said that he could see the functions he was working on interacting with one another. He describes it in such a way that even though they exist completely in his mind, they have a life of their own, his brain holds such an intimate and complete understanding of them her worked them out unconsciously. (I am not a physicist, nor have I read the book in which I read this for quite a while, so you'll forgive if I forgo citation). To me, there are only two things that make a genius. A mind which can learn something so completely, that it literally becomes part of them, an unconscious fifth limb, and the opportunity to confront a really unique and interesting problem. Statistically speaking, there are several thousand people with the same IQ as Steven Hawking and Albert Einstein walking around right now. What keeps them from getting noticed is that they never find their interesting problem.

Now for some fun with the definition. Levels of human experience are often ranked on a continuum, with genius and madness being almost indistinguishably separate. Does this mean sanity and stupidity are likewise closely related? Genius isn't even close to madness, and here is why; Sanity is simply an agreed upon way to perceive reality as defined by a majority of the population. If every one but you saw the moon as a giant smiling face, or the clouds as spaceships, they would look at you as if crazy if you were to tell them its a hunk of rock, or wisps of water vapor. They would be wrong to do so, since you can obviously test both hypothesis, but you'd still be crazy because everyone knows the "clouds" are where our robot masters live. So sanity is a matter of perceived reality and popularity, but what about when we delve into the part of reality we cannot see? Our brains don't all have the necessary materials to work out quantum physics from birth. So, a genius is someone who can see, through effort and ingenuity, to different levels of reality.