![]() ![]() For every Tasso, Christopher Smart, or William Blake, whose madness generates art of visionary beauty and power, there are countless thousands whose madness generates screeds of barren verbiage, monotonous regurgitations of leaden "spiritual" or paranoiac fantasies that lack for us precisely the one thing-the shine of genuine transcendence-that make them so compelling to the sufferer. This is the great secret of madness, one obscured by the doctrine of "creative madness": its banality. I daresay for most people it would be negative (a heartsinking, an inward "oh no!"), not primarily from fear of physical harm-although of course there is cultural pressure to regard nutters as actively dangerous-but from fear of boredom. You are sitting on the train, or walking in the park, or perhaps you open your front door to an unexpected knock, when a stranger tells you: "I have had a divine revelation! God spoke to me! I have seen through the veil of illusion to the truth! Let me tell you about it!" What's your reaction? ![]()
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