Pondering Madness

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I have recently started to use my Tarot cards again; this time I'm using the "Tarot of the Spirit" deck. I've learned a lot through interpreting the card patterns that fall into order. The way you use tarot is pretty straightforward. You shuffle the deck, then either fan out the cards and pick them individually or take the cards in order off the top of the deck. Many people will claim to get the same specific cards over and over again.

The ancient Chinese method of divination is called I Ching. They hypothesized that cards fall into order because everything is in flux, always changing, but also synchronized. This would explain why people get the same cards again and again. Coincidences are more than they appear at face value according to some, and people have explored the meaning of such coincidences since the dawn of human kind. These coincidences, according to your faith, are really signs.

Signs are all around us. Signs define us in almost every way. In poetry their meanings move us, and in the real world they have the ability to stop us from going places we shouldn't go. The ancients wrote about signs in the stars and the heavens, about signs in the body, of aging, and in the passing seasons of time. Our language is a collection of signs that were put together in an attempt to describe and calculate the world around us--and to give it purpose.

But what about a sign with no meaning that no one can relate to? What happens if we follow a sign that leads us nowhere but to our downfall? I've seen "WAR" painted on the stop signs around my town. To me, War's only synonym is destruction and death. In essence, war will have to stop because it is the antonym of progress. War does not mean peace. And then, there is the word schizophrenia. What does this word mean to you? Does schizophrenia have a symbol, a sign, that we can all relate to? Or is there a hidden world to schizophrenia that has yet to be revealed?

"Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through out the world." -- Carl Jung

This story is about western deviancy. It is about modern progress and the barefooted bandit who dares traverse the unknown world between there and beyond. We who are the walking zombies, in a lost world whose chaotic leaps are zig zagging across the time of times. We are a symphony of thoughts and ideas and dreams, and we hide within ourselves possibilities. In awe, we are gaping into the unknowns and all whilst the wires of industrialism attempt to strangle us of our fountain of youth.

It is too difficult to describe schizophrenia to a layperson. One has to have walked those miles in someone's shoes before they can truly understand the depth of this Western illness. Modern science has failed (and will) time and time again to describe the loss of contact, the parallelization between thoughts, the language gaps, the identity crises that can accompany a delusional state.

But, people are afraid of it. They are afraid because they do not see the inner beauty, the illuminating shining truth reflected in the mad souls of our generation. Mind's wisdom, free will, or poverty of thought. Existential crisis. Overlaps. Where is God? Where is the woman dressed in robes, swirling with the colors of a forest's song? Earth. Mother Nature. Gaea. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where will I go next?

I was fourteen when the world lost all color. They studied my brainwaves, my neurons fired off the charts and I spoke out of turn, beyond space...into a world beyond the eye's imagination. Into a place where dreams had the ability to become reality. Tortured back to perfection, the voices in my head screamed this is not freedom! Voices that only came after endless seconds turned into torturous infinities of isolation. I waited, in my dark cell, I waited to be let out. To be released for my crimes. I waited for sanity.

Sanity arrived in the bottle of pills I had been assigned. The secret fix to assail my broken mind, when at last I was free from "them". I  would always remember a life of sanity before schizophrenia. I was two, standing in Giant Eagle staring at a white and blue frosted birthday cake with choo choo trains on it and a big yellow number. It was the number 3. I felt euphoric. There were balloons on the cake. Someday I would be tall enough to reach things I wanted to reach, and be in charge of everything. Sometimes I shocked people because I was so young to be talking. The earliest memories are more of the depth of bright colors, thoughts and constant introspection.

My dad took me everywhere around the city in a blue strap on backpack. He took me to a large graveyard, and I remember the big stones and the awe and peace I felt. In a coffee shop down the street from my house, I'm in a stroller and the adults laugh and smile at what a pretty baby I am. Little did they know, I would not forget those words even when I was an adult.

Little did people know, even though I'm now diagnosed with schizophrenia, that I simply do not forget facts and details, like the smell of the coffee or the bagels. I had the kind of poetic depth of a writer and I was melancholy with bursts of blissful awe in experiencing the nature around me. Maybe autistic wouldn't be the right word. I soaked up everything, turned thoughts and ideas around constantly. I loved museums and plants and stars and God. Memories are intangible, and are never truly wiped away from the surface. That's because, God has a mind too. I mean, where do you think we all came from? The stars?

I loved my mother. My mother with her passionate ideas and constant beaming compassion for her children. Whose suicide attempts still perplex me, and by this I mean I sometimes wonder if they even really happened. I never saw the attempts, I never saw anything but bottles of pills, and then her leaving to go to a hospital where bad things seemed to happen and then her coming back, and being better, and then...years later it returning. The mania. The bipolar or whatever.

I felt anguished watching her battle with the world, the constant rage and fury held inside, at doctors, at war, at everything wrong with people. She was a peace activist. She was one of the 16 activists who crossed the line at Fort Benning, Georgia. Mom even flew to Palestine, to teach peace and conflict resolution to children. She was a teacher. When the local school asked for an explanation to the FBI interrogation when she was twenty-one, she threw her hands up in the air. Said, "if they didn't understand, then it wasn't worth it teaching at their school."

In a small world, the little things are what makes all the difference. lately, those little things afflict me with such deep curiosity. One small thing, an idea, a dream, a thought--it can grow into a mountain of little things and ideas, and then if you let it, it will consume you until your eyes dry out, till you can see nothing but the static on God's infinite Television screen. "What if?"

What if I had never taken that six hour trip to boarding school? Would I still be sane? Still unbroken by the smashed towers that split my world into halves and rang inside my ears until nothing was left, but screaming.. What if my mother had not gone that extra million miles to teach peace to children who grew up in a world confined to war, to rubber bullets, would she still be sane? Had she thought of only herself, and not the wars and bloodshed, would she still be safe inside her mind? And Sarah, the fictional character I invented when I was twelve.

Sarah who stood up against the angry world of brainwashed children. Sarah was a girl I wrote about before I became that girl. The girl who was sent to an institution because her mother wanted them to escape a system that did not allow for creative self expression and hope. As she cried through blinding white lights, and I lay in the darkness in isolation from a world gone mad, we both wondered still...why?

When my mother rambles in cut of sentences to the demons of war, is God laughing or crying? When the music still calls her to a place that is free...will she come home in a war torn world, or will she get her wish at last? Will heaven smile down on her one days, whole, eternal, great and expanding like the belly of the ocean? Will my mother's dream of peace ever come true?

The happy moments in the past, we hang onto like a vestige of what could have been...father tells me to get stronger, to be healthier and think of myself before humanity's concern tips me over the edge. He'll die of cancer if he doesn't change. Pill by pill, cure that never cures. We break the pieces into infinite tiny pieces, and the tiny pieces become the problems of concern. The screen goes black. We start over again.

We are dying to reach the pulse but we're so entrenched in pain. We are the ones with hope, the ones society deems insane. Genes or brain. Body or soul. This is the end, before the world is made whole again. The cruelty that permits such violence, will be wiped clean from their hands. They will drown in our ocean of hope, of love, they will cry themselves rivers. Because the sorrow I am not allowed to feel, is the sorrow they demand is not real.

The pain I cannot hold, was a story I once told. A dream is but a dream, reality on the screen. Pieces of the soul. Maybe we are all one after-all. We can say the chaos is just gibberish, static on the radio, not much of it affects the American Eyes, blinded by pride...we have forgotten the reason why. We have lost our way home, and painted over the signs.

Maybe  no one should ask why.