immediate

Wednesday the twenty second of March, 2006

I like travelling - to see infirm people & on occasion, mad ones. Seeing how their compatriots treat them is generally how I form opinions about all sorts of things about foreignness.
There are quite a few instances of infirmity around the place; sort of exacerbations of social vulnerability, unwashed or overscrubbed, louse ridden, painfully shy, aggressive and wary - hey, I guess that's what inequality means - unforgiving, unheeded people.
They offer nothing that is wanted by the robust individuals of functioning units and yet ignoring them does not diminish them. It has an obverse effect, it diminishes the sum total of the particular societies value. To itself and that's the funniest thing. It's as ever present an evocation of what's "real" in a place as the filthy railway box I'm alive in.
The mad are another matter. These angry birds who have yet to form a coalition, who, (in the whole wide world and throughout millennia), are the most highly cohesive amalgam to combine penetrating thought, exemplary existential investigation with persistant voice.
Mad people are international. Mad people are very scary when they try to be friendly. Mad people are not affected to an overwhelming extent by, for example, their circumstances. This sets them apart from the infirm, whose existence, (and experience of their existence), is in large part, a product of their surroundings.
Mad people are relatively untouched by the normalcy which surrounds them - invarious forms, regional & national. But they are not unhinged, they are plugged in to some "higher", more insistant reality which is pressing on them. Thus, mad people are not placeless, and I like watching them, when I find one, watching those around them navigate around each other and doing their best to provide guidance.