There are many ways to categorize insanity but I am content to rely upon
origin to divide it into three gently blurred groups. First, there is a
mental disruption that is caused by chemical instability. Secondly, there
is the sort that arises from some sort of encounter, be it violence or disappointment.
Without walls or a floor of their former world or the ability to absorb
terror into a new system of belief, they retreat. Lastly, insanity is the
creation of a new structure of belief or reality, an alternate way of thought.
Brief bouts. Perhaps you will put me away---if I say this. Once I saw my
sanity slipping away, hovering above me. A pale blue kidney shaped oblong
shimmering sideways, wafting upwards. When your double voice won't stop
talking, criticizing, hissing, when your mind is whirling at five hundred
miles an hour---round and round until the belt is worn smooth and grey---you
know you are slipping. You cannot sleep and you are slipping.
Perhaps you are flung two hundred miles above the earth---everything is
small and easily suffocated. And you begin to see how small things really
are. They are invisible to the eye. Your existence, your pain, your fury
even, is a series of small jewels set against a dark background. They are
as meaningless as stars.
That is what I think of when I think of God---a creature looking up at the
night sky, impervious to prayers, lashings, month-long revival meetings---noticing
the stars---so many of them--- not even imagining what we have become.
Regardless of whether we have one or not---Why do we need the concept of
a God---to uphold our morality? To assert our divine origin above animals?
To buffer our isolation and disappointment or perhaps even deflect our
immediate revenge? Or does he simply serve as a gobetween for ourselves
and our immortality? What does he do? Erase pain? Do people naturally have
an urge to be controlled, subjugated? Or is God simply a symbol for our
desire to abandon this world? Is he in short, the alternative to suicide?