Surely, my friend, I am mad, that’s exactly what I am! I see sounds, hear sights, taste smells, I touch things thinner than air, things whose existence the world denies, things whose shapes the world does not know. Stones I see as flowers, pebbles have soft shapes, water-smoothed at the water’s edge in the moonlight; as heavens sorceress smiles at me, they put out leaves, they soften, they glimmer and pulse, rising up like mute maniacs, like flowers—a kind of moon bird flower. I speak to them just as they speak to me, in a language, my friend, unwritten, unprinted, unspoken, uncomprehending, unheard. Their speech comes in ripples, my friend, to the moonlit Ganges shore. Surely, my friend, I am mad, that’s exactly what I am! You are clever, and wordy, your calculations exact and correct forever, but take one from one in my arithmetic, and you are still left with one. You use five senses, but I have six, you have a brain, my friend, but I have a heart. To you a rose is a rose, and nothing more, but I see Helen and Padmini, you are forceful prose, I am liquid poetry; you freeze as I am melting, you clear as I cloud over, and then it’s the other way around; your world is solid, mine vapor, your world is gross, mine subtle, you consider a stone an object, material hardness is your reality, but I try to grasp hold of dreams, just as you try to catch the rounded truths of cold, sweet, graven coins. My passion is that of a thorn, my friend, yours is for gold and diamonds, you say that the hills are deaf and dumb, I say that they are eloquent. Surely, my friend, mine is a loose inebriation, that’s exactly how I am. In the cold of the month of Magh I sat, enjoying the first white warmth of the star: the world called me a drifter. When they saw me staring blankly for seven days after my return from the cremation ghats they said I was possessed. When I saw the first frosts of Time on the hair of a beautiful woman, I wept for three days: the Buddha was touching my soul, but they said that I was raving! When they saw me dance on hearing the first cuckoo of spring, they called me a madman. A silent, moonless night once made me breathless, the agony of destruction made me jump, and on that day the fools put me in the stocks! One day I began to sing with the storm, the wise old men sent me off to Ranchi. One day I thought I was dead, I lay down fiat, a friend pinched me hard, and said, Hey, madman, you’re not dead yet! These things went on, year upon year, I am mad, my friend, that’s exactly what I am! I have called the rulers wine blood, the local whore a corpse, and the king a pauper. I have abused Alexander the Great, poured scorn on so-called great souls, but the lowly I have raised to the seventh heaven on a bridge of praise. Your great scholar is my great fool, your heaven my hell, your gold my iron, my friend, your righteousness my crime. Where you see yourself as clever, I see you to be an absolute dolt, your progress, my friend, is my decline, that’s how our values contradict. Your universe is as a single hair to me, certainly, my friend, I’m moonstruck, completely moonstruck, that’s what I am! I think the blind man is the leader of the world, the ascetic in his cave is a back-sliding deserter; those who walk the stage of falsehood I see as dark buffoons, those who fail I consider successful, progress for me is stagnation: I must be either cockeyed or mad— I am mad, my friend, I am mad. Look at the whorish dance of shameless leaderships tasteless tongues; watch them break the back of the people’s rights. When the black lies of sparrow-headed newsprint challenge Reason, the hero within me, with their webs of falsehood, then my cheeks grow red, my friend, as red as glowing charcoal. When voiceless people drink black poison, right before my eyes, and drink it through their ears, thinking that its nectar, then every hair on my body stands up, like the Gorgons serpent hair. When I see the tiger resolve to eat the deer, or the big fish the little one, then into even my rotten bones there comes the fearsome strength of Dadhichis soul, and it tries to speak out, my friend, like a stormy day which falls with a crash from Heaven. When Man does not regard his fellow as human, all my teeth grind together like Bhimsens, red with fury, my eyeballs roll round like a half-penny coin, and I stare at this inhuman world of Man with a look of lashing flame. My organs leap from their frame, there is tumult, tumult! My breath is a storm, my face is distorted, my brain burns, my friend, like a submarine fire, a submarine fire! Im insane like a forest ablaze, a lunatic, my friend, I would swallow the whole universe raw. I am a moon bird for the beautiful, a destroyer of the ugly, tender and cruel, the bird that steals the fire of Heaven, a son of the storm thrown up by an insane volcano, terror incarnate, surely, my friend, my brain is whirling, whirling,
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 07:33:48 +0000
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