The Madonna of the Rocks

Of all the faethers growing against the grain of God's teeth, I am perhaps the most privileged, for to begin with my gift of madness is pure, it is not the result of shellshock or incest or the abuse of solvents, spirits and cough syrup, it is not an outcome of extreme poverty, hunger, sickness or neglect, it is madness of a natural occurrence, simply the way things are, occurring against the flow of human civilisation where with little appreciation or sympathy for such predispositions I find myself often quite rather alone, not truly comfortable in the company of people, and yet always am I seeking, unassuming yes but aware of the insufficiency of many things, of everything, even this my gift of madness and thus always in a state of suffering, of an encampment of self away from where things are sought, at least commonly sought because in my mind I know that there is infinity, a mystery yet unknown, sweetly uknowable, the inconvenient secret of all desires, like the sound of the strings of a fiddle playing under water and one wonders if someone had drowned in a cup of coffee or a pot of tea in the morning when it is too early to discern whether the fiddler was really playing the bagpipes at a state funeral and I indulge in the to and fro of my solitude as it takes shape, dissipates and takes shape again, where some such moments are more powerful than others, so powerful that I have to sit or lie down and pay attention to the manifestations of the mind's mystery, so therein lies my privilege, my immunity from cure, cure as others would have it, and certainly my exemption from conformity as others struggle against obligation of compliance, I can worship and blaspheme my god in a single breath and ponder upon such distances between faith and faith, I can consider the innumerable hallucinations of carnal and gastronomic pleasures without culpability, or the compulsive mechanisms of procreation and murder without remorse, like the splitting of the atom and the dropping of the bomb upon those who hurt and ridicule me, a magnificently crafted curse released into the wind and whose whereabouts I can no longer know or care about because by then I would be most preoccupied with the rocking of my cradle, the breaking of the bough, and the many hours of whittling away, of carving into shape the next mystery, and the next, all without the reward of solving the last, all with just the task of observing the behaviour of these objects of my madness, the voices, the sounds, the light, the irrepressible fantasies of violence, the conversations with the spirit of my father, the glory of my supernal anger at those who receive my love with the insufficiency of their mortal minds, and how I condole for them whom I cannot redeem from their bland banal solitude, those who could be like me but could not be because their souls are burning of a curse cast upon them by their pathetic diabolical egos, and herein lies yet another of my privileges, the rare gift of a companion, a truly wise fool, my beating and walking stick, a rational man of volatile rational mind, a sensible prototype of a theoretical computing machine, infinitely computing itself and thus too busy to be afraid of my anger, the turbulence of my mind, the carnality of my flesh and bones, which consequently keep my fire alight, nourishes my madness with that delicate rarity called - dare I say - love, I am woman, I am mad, my cradle rocks! and you and the rest of you can eat fluffle cake!