Tag Archives: madness

Cat in the Hat ©️

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They worshipped cats before they worshipped gods in their own image. In ancient Egypt, cats were not simply animals: they were the threshold, the hinge between mortal life and whatever lay behind it. Bastet, their goddess, began as lioness, her rage hot as desert noon, her jaws red with conquest. Over centuries she softened into the form of the house cat, yet her dominion did not diminish—it sharpened. For who can resist the power of what slips between your ankles, brushes your leg, and disappears into shadow before you can name it?

The Egyptians lined their temples with statues of her—slender bronze forms, ears sharp as blades, eyes like waiting lanterns. Cats were buried in their own necropolises, swaddled in linen, entombed with the care of princes. To kill one, even by mistake, was to trespass against the order of the cosmos itself, a crime so grave it brought the punishment of death. They believed cats hunted not only the vermin of the earth but the vermin of the soul: serpents unseen, spirits that slithered in darkness. The cat, they said, could see what men could not.

I did not know this then. I only knew that one night, brittle with the edges of a manic break, I carried my parents’ cat into my cottage on Monte Sano. It was the first time she had ever been there, the first time her paws pressed against those old boards. Before sleep I had been reading the Bible, hoping to tether myself to something unbroken. But the night uncoiled in another direction.

Through the hours, my actions repeated, the crucifixion repeated. It was not dream, not vision, but recurrence—like a needle stuck in the groove of eternity. I stood trial. I was condemned. I carried the beam, stumbled, rose, and fell again. I was nailed, lifted, left to hang. And again. And again. Each time the crowd’s faces shifted—neighbors, strangers, policemen—but the sentence never changed. I was to be crucified. And in this reality, the crucifixion bled into my movements, until my own actions mimicked the same doom, and by morning I was locked in jail.

But in that cottage, in the dark before dawn, there was one stillness that did not repeat. The cat. She moved with a quiet so absolute it pressed against the walls. And the last thing I saw, before slipping into the ether where the images swallowed me whole, was her gaze—steady, unblinking, black pools catching what little light remained. She stared as though she were weighing me, as though she alone could decide whether I broke or endured.

The Egyptians would have buried her in linen, named her divine. I only carried her into a cottage. Yet in that hour she was Bastet, she was threshold, she was guardian. My crucifixion looped, my actions collapsed, my body stumbled toward its jailhouse dawn—but her eyes held me for one last moment, anchoring me to a silence older than madness, older than belief itself.

Tyrant’s Restraint ©️

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There is a strange, unsettling sweetness in gazing at evil. Not in committing it, not in endorsing it, but in allowing the mind to linger over its architecture. When I study Hitler and the machinery of Nazi Germany, I feel something akin to delight—not the innocent delight of a child in sunlight, but the darker, sharper kind one feels when a wound aches and one presses against it anyway.

Why should this be so? Perhaps because evil, at its height, is clarity without conscience. It is the cold perfection of a thought stripped of hesitation. There is a terrible music in it: every note exact, every silence weighted, every motion deliberate. In a world that often stutters, dithers, and meanders, the Nazi machine appears as a pure line, a straight path without doubt. My delight is not in their cruelty—it is in the starkness of their conviction.

And yet the delight is also rebellion. I was raised, like many, to shun certain thoughts, to hold fast to boundaries of good and evil. To wander past those fences feels transgressive, intoxicating. There is a rush in touching what is forbidden, in allowing the mind to whisper what it has been taught never to say aloud. Evil fascinates because it is the shadow of freedom: it represents not what I will do, but what I could do, if all restraints fell away.

Delight comes, too, from recognition. In the monstrous efficiency of the Nazis, I glimpse the raw human urge to master chaos, to impose order at any cost. That same urge runs in me. I delight because I recognize the reflection, even if the reflection horrifies me. There is a satisfaction in admitting: yes, I too could become this, if the compass of love were lost.

But the delight is never innocent. It burns at the edges. It warns me. It tells me that to enjoy the abyss is to risk being consumed by it. Still, the attraction remains. To deny it would be dishonest. To indulge it fully would be ruin. And so I hold it carefully, like fire cupped in my hands: a dangerous delight, a reminder of how thin the line truly is between vision and monstrosity, between creation and destruction, between the self that endures and the self that devours.

The Loony Bin ©️

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Rise in the hour where shadows grow thin, Where the light stumbles drunken, unsteady with sin, And the breath of the house, thick with its ghosts, Swirls in the lungs of the living, its hosts.

The doors groan awake, their hinges alive, Each creak a confession, each whisper contrived. The floors swell and buckle, drunk on despair, Carrying feet that move nowhere, nowhere.

At the long gray table, a carnival of dread, Where laughter shivers, where hunger is fed. Plates hold their secrets, mute and profound, Forks strike their rhythm, but never a sound.

The gardens outside—if gardens they are—Are fenced with the ribcage of some dying star. The trees are frozen in screams of green, While the wind gnaws the air, rabid and keen.

In the midmorning haze, they march us to prayer, Kneeling in pews that don’t take our weight, And the hymn of the broken, with voices undone, Rises to rafters that swallow the sun.

Afternoon sways in its lunatic tide, With a shuffle of hands and dreams misapplied. Paintbrushes falter on canvases torn, Where visions are birthed, but stillborn, stillborn.

Then comes the night, the hallowed despair, Where pills are handed like sacrament there. One for the silence, one for the screams, One to deny the betrayal of dreams.

The walls hum their madness, their cobwebbed tune, While the moon hangs limp like a punctured balloon. And the voices—oh, the voices—they rise, they fall, A choir of sorrow echoing all.

Sleep is a rumor, a gambler’s deceit, A shadowy promise that falters, retreats. The bed becomes prison, the pillow a stone, And you lie there unburied, yet utterly alone.

And so, the wheel turns, the cycle restarts, A parade of the damned with clockwork hearts. But the house breathes on, devouring the years, Feeding its belly with whispers and tears.

Oh, to tear through the dawn like a thief in the sun, To break this mad orbit, to end what’s begun, But the house is a labyrinth, a trap sprung deep, And its strange routine is the price of sleep.