All about me, for those who have an interest to know, is summed up in the fact that I grew up facing down a near-infinite dragon of madness.
To be surrounded by madness is to never be at peace, but to never be at open war either. It is a constant battle of wills, which rarely flares into open combat and hatred.
To be raised by madness is to be like being clay and attempting - by reason alone - to resist the mad manipulations of an insane potter. Madness strives to drive rationality out of the human soul as a priest drives a demon from a shaking body.
Madness is a form of vanity, a hysteria of self-regard, which places the survival of the moment far above the sanity of the future.
Madness is a pathology of avoidance of criticism – which doubtless stems from an excess of self-hatred. Madness is a form of interpersonal domination, and can never leave those around it well enough alone. Madness fails and falters in the face of mere empirical sensual reality – it can only survive by reproducing in the minds of others. If it is a fish, the world is air, and its children are water.
Madness repels, and thus must breed, so it does not end up alone. Madness is so repulsive that it must propagandize, otherwise the voluntarism of recoiling relationships might heal its endless deviations.
My family’s madness was most centered around my mother, and my mother’s madness is difficult of course for me to diagnose, as it must be for anyone, because it is a kind of quicksilver that resists and avoids any fencing in through language, or even basic cause-and-effect.
My mother was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1937, and it’s hard to imagine a worse time in history to draw your first breath. Totalitarianism, insistent propaganda and warmongering, shortages and hysteria and the gathering fists of war, all closing around the population. Hitler did not ban Germans from leaving Germany, unlike many communist countries, and I suppose my grandparents decided to cross their fingers and wait it out.
It was a bad idea.
The first thousand-plane raid of the second world war occurred over Dresden in 1944, and took the life of my grandmother, who had an important job of some kind, and stayed in the city for work purposes, while her husband and my mother fled.
According to my mother, when they returned the next day, their house was completely destroyed, and the only thing they found of my grandmother’s was the clasp of her purse – she had been completely vaporized, it seems.
I had few stories of the war from my mother – madness hides its origins, just as a squirrel hides nuts in the winter, to sustain itself. One I remember was that she had to flirt with and cuddle up to a Soviet tank commander, for fear that he would destroy the village she was in. This would be when she was seven or eight years old, which shows a remarkable resourcefulness, and even courage – at the expense of any kind of sane progression of childhood maturation.
My mother left Germany as soon as she could, and worked as a courier on airplanes, delivering packages around the world – on one such trip, she met my father. She enjoyed his wit and intelligence, he enjoyed her conversational skills and diaphanous female beauty, and they merged together like hugging ghosts...
