I am not a pretty, attractive or pleasing poet.I have searched. I have looked into all the passing and coming faces and I have not seen a 'Winged One', a tormented soul. I have seen the devils that portray that they got this way because someone at some time hurt them, and therefore it is their god-given right to hurt all life. I have met those who present themselves as teachers, lawyers, doctors, religious leaders, statesmen and the “helpers” of our burning and divided world. They all seek recognition and a well-organized life, in which they are recognized for “selling” the suffering of millions, or the sacrifice of one.
They all gather together in the name of ‘humanity', or 'progress', or 'enlightment', or even worse, 'love'. But I have not seen one who does not seek payment in either prestige, fame, recognition, wealth or nomination for a noble prize. I have struggled with this concept of being rewarded for what your blood and hands make; to be rewarded and given an elitist life. How can one expect to be paid for selling the seriousness, the misery or death of others? We pay to bring back the burning of others, and when we know, we still sit there using such empty words as 'horrible', 'disgusting' but then continue to eat our chocolate cake. The fire of the world, the suffering of others, keeps filling our emptiness but we do not live the truth of this loss and burning in our hearts and active hand, we move on to the next 'story' or at best express it only through the safest way - through our chequebook. We buy the silence of their screams; we buy the silence of the living and proclaim them mad; we buy the silence of the sold and burned. We buy their lives and after the butchers and murderers finish removing the skin from the bones, we then switch off our conscience and crush the bones so that we will not be held accountable for what we have passively and actively allowed to happen. If it is possible, we are worse than the murderers of the lives of others, for we then make it 'acceptable', 'justifiable', and we make an industry from the crushing of the bones - we then write OUR history of the event; there are no witnesses to oppose OUR books, and if there are, we will remove their voice and then we have only OUR history remaining! So we have two institutions for the 'Winged Ones', the seed carriers, the madhouse or the slaughterhouse. Nietzsche decided on the madhouse. We allowed him to live for 11 years under house-arrest.
Thoughts from the Journey
You should know by now, that I have not sought followers; you know how empty this following leaves one. When you have followers there is something so terribly wrong with you, to want to escape life and its entire struggle by making yourself a thief of other peoples lives.
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I am going mad, they say that I am mad ’I don’t understand their language, I don’t understand their ways, and I don’t want nor plan for all the things that fill in the emptiness of existence. I can't live without the search, without the fire and without the struggle. How can I tell them. "I don’t want to have a life that is comfortable and planned out for me". I want the danger and joy of finding my own heart, my own destiny, creating a world in the world, giving birth to a universe that never dies.
I have travelled into the madness of never being found, never being captured or contained. And yet they still come after me with nets and words to maim and prevent me going too far under or above.
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Sometimes I do not want to get out of bed, and I do prefer it better when Ariadne is with me; we could spend more time in bed, for I desire the physical, actually I burn in the physical. Have I startled you? All my life I sought her, and when I could hear her and see her but could not touch her, I became mad with my longing, and now that she has found me and sleeps with me, I do not want to get out of bed. I know that what I have written has not been understood. Dare you mention blood and fire, passion and desire and you will be escorted to the madhouse or the slaughterhouse. The ones that feed from me have kept me like a dead saint, in long gowns and strange portraits as if my words were contagious, instead they have build more walls to hide behind. No, what I have is not contagious, it is a journey that consumes the navigator. It cannot be taught to others. It is carnivorous and it is most carnivorous when it smiles!Now you see the intellectuals falling over my gowns, or at least hanging on. They fall over my quotes and dry paper. They are like dry paper; they seek to watch life from the fading ink of another.
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Yes, my darling, my sweet woman you are in the madhouse. You so desired it, for you are safe here among us, we can travel anywhere at any time and they with all their plans and formulas cannot keep us from this journey inward. The world lives inward, forever inward. I no longer feel deeply alone, you are here. I have felt so deeply alone when others came into my life and heart and professed to understand my language, my way of life, and the best they could do is paraphrase to fill in their emptiness, they wanted to use me for their benefit and gain, for their crutch. I broke upon their weight.
I, for one, have never kissed where I have spat.
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When I spoke of solitude I meant to be left alone for a long period of time. So if I chose to remain alone, what I longed for was solitude, not this kind of waiting, my soul shattered on the horizon. I have met many people, I have lectured and I have travelled; I kept running from my family and friends, hoping to find the thread of Ariadne and find her sleeping and waiting place. In the spring of my youth I sought her, in the autumn of my life she sought me, and now we have found each other. I found many people who spoke the same language and followed the "taught" and safe roads of planned streets and planned trips, and their lives were as structured as their small houses, and there above their fireplace in the shadows of the flames I could see the small ship sealed in the bottle that never set sail...
I left them all, and in turn they asked me to leave, when in truth all they wanted was to collect my fire and journey to fill in their empty hours, to make an art of discussing the suffering of another, but not to know anything of suffering personally. Some learned passages off by heart, as if a poet from the furies can be translated into a comfortable "love song" of admiration or an annoying rejection.
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Why do I want to write about you? What could I have to add or take away from the many books and lectures that have been given about you?
Did you ever think that it would come to this, that you would have followers? Did you ever believe that it would come to this, that your followers would want to lead you? And like all the other seed carriers of light you have been used and abused for power, for privilege and many have lived from your suffering, but as Kierkegaard writes -“When my books will come into fashion, I shall be misunderstood". The nature of the 'professor' is not of a philosopher endowed with moral force and a strong character' as was the case in “know thyself”. Instead, remunerated as an employee, he is harmless and ineffectual. He is a eunuch and fits well into this characterless world. All he wants is to conform to it. What lies outside his specialized field, he ignores. The imitation of Christ is alien to him. However, he is a professor, learned in the destruction of someone else. His business is not suffering but studying suffering. Thus he lives off the sufferings of the glorious ones. But even worse, he robs them of the seriousness of their lives, he robs them of their impact by serving up the sufferings of others as 'interesting knowledge'.”
Notes from the Madhouse: Background Paper
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