MADNESS IS A SURVIVAL BENEFIT

Madness is a survival benefit.

We all worry about getting enough sleep—which is perhaps the greatest health benefit of all. Most of us have trouble falling asleep at night, but when my thoughts start becoming crazy and disjointed, when my reflections begin to make no sense, it’s not long before I fall asleep. The dreams I have are crazy, too. If one lies awake with clear, cogent worries or grievances, one is never going to fall asleep. Madness is the secret of ease.

Madness is the voyage to good sleep, which equals health and happiness.

This is to say nothing of the ‘crazy trance’ which often accompanies outside-the-box thinking, ingenious breakthroughs in science, and creativity in general.

Plato’s famous dialogue ‘The Phaedrus,” inquires whether the friend or the lover is more trustworthy—only the mad, Plato implies early in the dialogue, would favor the lover, since a friend is reasonable, and a lover is mad—desperate, infantile, jealous.

How is crazy ever good?

It doesn’t seem like it should be.

But it is.

And the first serious defense of madness comes from Plato.

Plato changes things up in “The Phaedrus”—in the second half of the dialogue, Socrates says he fears he has offended the god of love and launches into a speech to make amends—-and the rest is history.

Without Plato, it is hard to imagine the Bible, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Shelley, Poe.

It is also difficult to imagine divine madness, and “things are not what they seem.”

Deliciously crazy thoughts last night ushered me into sleep, and I dreamed—which gave me insight into what I knew, but hadn’t been able to articulate, even in the middle of writing this, but which I can describe now.

In my dream, I chanced upon my old lover; a simple street during a serene evening; there were a few others around (always those vague others in love scenarios). We were not happy to see each other, only surprised, since we are estranged, and never meet. She in the dream was not as surprised as I, but only because she was the essence of the dream, perhaps. My brief conversation with her was strangely different from any in life (she was whimsical and judgmental at the same time—I was aloof) affected me deeply. Never had I been so moved by her, though our love in real life was profound. Was it her appearance? (She didn’t quite look like herself). I don’t know.

Knowing she, in this dream, was entirely a vision of my own, I had to acknowledge this was not her–she belonged to my madness, my vision, alone. To acknowledge she exists in this dream without any connection to the real world indicates I’m not crazy—my madness is a method, useful to prophets and poets.

She, in my dream, exists and does not exist, exists for me, and not for me, in a manner which is poetically crazy, but not clinically crazy.

The dream experience is real—it affected me emotionally. But the experience is also unreal—merely madness.

This is what Socrates was getting at in “The Phaedrus” when he had that change of heart—after defending the worldly behavior of the friend, Socrates reversed course—defending, in the name of divine and visionary love, the madness of the lover.

Sublime madness is not the complete madness of the psychotic, who stupidly, selfishly, and carelessly acts on the fullness of their madness; Plato’s sublime madness is the useful, reflective madness of the visionary poet

In most of our lives, we work, and the nature of that work defines us. We work from home, perhaps, and the strange object—created by others—which sits on our desk—wholly determines what we do in our defined livelihood—we must do our work, even as it chokes our soul, and any good which lies in the specific work we do wholly belongs to someone else.

But our rebellion against work and responsibility is often just as soul-killing.

Our rebellion is not divine; it only trades what doesn’t concern us for what selfishly does, and this just leads to more pain and suffering in uninspired, sensual existence.

How do we know madness is divine, and not just silliness or stupidity?

When it leads to a good night’s sleep.

When it makes us fall in love with dreams.