The Madman

 

You ask me how I became a madman. 

It happened thus: 

One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives. I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, 

"Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves."

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, 

"He is a madman." 

I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, 

"Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. 

Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

The normal person wears masks in order to function in society, to maintain self-identity in a world that corrodes the self and redefines it for its collective purpose. 

To act without a mask, to think and speak and behave without this veil of illusion, without Maya interposed before one's eyes, is to be mad. 

To lose these masks, to be true to self and therefore true to nature and reality, is to be free. 

This freedom, taken against society, has its risk of loneliness and misunderstanding, but it safeguards intuition and self from the intolerant masses and their expectation of conformity, of mask-wearing.

Let's begin to explore the ramifications of masklessness, of madness. 

Before God, one can be neither slave, creature, nor child. 

One can only be equal to God, not in a frivolous egoistic sense but in terms of identify of being and substance, for to lose the contrived masks of society is to reveal the divine power in the universe and the self.

Among others, therefore, we inevitably become estranged and incompatible.

The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and there in it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.

I would not have you believe in what I say nor trust in what I do -- for my words are naught but your own thoughts in sound and my deeds your own hopes in action.

When you say,

 "The wind blows eastward," 

I say, 

"Yes, it does blow eastward"; for I would not have you know that my mind does not dwell upon the wind but upon the sea.

You cannot understand my seafaring thoughts, nor would I have you understand. 

I would be at sea alone.

When it is day with you, my friend, it is night with me; yet even then I speak of the noontide that dances upon the hills and of the purple shadow that steals its way across the valley; for you cannot hear the songs of my darkness nor see my wings beating against the stars -- and I fain would not have you hear or see. I would be with night alone.

When you ascend to your Heaven I descend to my Hell - even then you call to me across the unbridgeable gulf, "My companion, my comrade," and I call back to you, "My comrade, my companion" - for I would not have you see my Hell. The flame would burn your eyesight and the smoke would crowd your nostrils. And I love my Hell too well to have you visit it. I would be in Hell alone.

You love Truth and Beauty and Righteousness; and I for your sake say it is well and seemly to love these things. But in my heart I laugh at your love. Yet I would not have you see my laughter. I would laugh alone.

My friend, you are good and cautious and wise; no, you are perfect -- and I, too, speak with you wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone.

My friend, you are not my friend, but how shall I make you understand? 

My path is not your path, yet together we walk, hand in hand.

This is how the madman and the hermit must live, not in antagonism or controversy but alone and separate, in silence. Not donning a new mask, the poet instead demurs and disengages and lets other go their way, safeguarding his own path.

Khalil Gibran

in, The Madman