Heretical Madness!

In her interviews, my Mom often reminds her fans that her childhood dreams were often about being a queen or a butterfly, that is, about being an object of beauty and envy. An object of beauty and envy.

What an interesting thing to be. To be an object that will forever stimulate the instinct for acquisition inside everyone. Or worse, the instinct for revenge and defilement, which could come to play whenever acquisition proves impossible while the desire for it is all too strong and overwhelming.

Indeed, what an interesting thing to be. What an interesting dream to foster, inside one, inside one’s own loved-ones. What an interesting dream to inherit.

Indeed. In my own childhood dreams, I became more than that, more than an object of beauty and envy. I became a redeeming figure of sorts. A redeeming figure. An object of yearning, desperate often, constant, unrelenting. Unrelenting.

To be, or rather, to feel oneself as, the object of yearning, and to yearn to be that object, and here is the tragic-comic nature of it all, has been the major theme of my all-too-slow, and still unfolding (my well-nigh forty years of living notwithstanding), coming of age experience.

I paid the price for that, of course. And I continue to pay. By the time I realized I am no one’s messiah, it was too late – the hallmark patterns of messianic behavior were already set inside of me, deep inside of me, in my ever-so-unreachable depths, it seems. If I should fail for just one day, one lousy little day, to get in touch with my own humanity, I will forever be a lost cause, forever an object of pity, and madness, my own, to be specific.

How is this for an intro into the politics of my soul?

But don’t worry about me though. I am not mad yet, not beyond recovery and redemption anyway. For I know these waters all too well, and I can chart a path clear through. But first, first, I need to get in touch with this old madness. It has been my driving force all along. My constant and faithful companion. How can I neglect it? What sort of a man will I be if I should neglect it?