Tuesday 24 February 2009

Pure Madness

We want, for some strange reason, to find a centre of absolute unreality, an epicentre of madness, so where do we go? "A lunatic asylum of course!" I see what you mean, but no. The asylum is an epicentre of madness, true enough, but a collection of disparate islands of madness, each self-contained. It is more a geographical centre- where mad people inhabit the same physical edifice but not actually inhabiting the same structure of madness itself.
No, if we want to find people sharing the same actual edifice of delusion, then a stock exchange would seem to be our most obvious destination, or at least the first that comes to my mind: the collectivised, frenzied focusing on an edifice of pure unreal forms, a kingdom of substanceless symbols, and even the symbols in constant flux. Flux in relation to what? Other symbols. And if people stopped believing in the reality of the edifice- the mental, not the physical; what would happen? It would instantly dissolve. Though it could be said that like any edifice of madness it doesn't really exist in the first place, so how can 'it', which is not, dissolve?

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