around, on, or insanity

Every so often, I am struck again by the notion of how intricate and how fragile the human mind truly is. It's as though I somehow forget; as though I slips out my brain again that when it comes right down to it, the little world that everyone builds for him- or herself hinges upon this fey little organ that we carry about in our skulls.

Anyway, despite all that, I'm not going to subject you, gallant reader, to some sort of intellectual masturbation about the brain, where I propound some sort of grand insight at which I feel I have arrived. No, I just wanted to point it out that so much could go wrong; God knows the threat I pose to my own brain, after all.

What really got me started was that I finally got around to reading The Collector by John Fowles. For those not interested in following the link, it's the story of Frederick, a mild, obsequious clerk who collects butterflies, and Miranda, a beautiful art student who he watches from his window...until he wins the football pool, comes into a large sum of money, and decides to make her his "guest" with some chloroform and a newly-acquired house far from civilization. I like Fowles; I'd read Magus a few years back (wow, it still strikes me as odd to say that about college) and I highly recommend it. He did a great job again in Collector (actually, he wrote that one first), very vividly bringing to light the psychological states of his characters--both captive and captor--with a stream-of-consciousness sort of narrative. It got me wondering about what it is like to be a person with such psychological problems, "from the inside." What is it like to be that obsessed with a person? The character of Frederick tells it all in a very procedural sort of way; it isn't about what he's doing, so much as it is about how. Is that really what it seems like? Does a crazy person know that he's crazy? Can he?

Whatever it is like, I suppose (and hope!) that I'll never really know. It's as though every time I start to wonder if I'm insane, there's a reminder showing me what real insane is about. Not that my mind doesn't have it's own little quirks; a good portion of my mental life is spent in what Josh and I call "the Meta." For me, it's a sort of mental retreat; a part of my mind watches the rest of itself work, analyzing trains of thought, emotions, reactions, etc. Usually, there's a normative aspect as well--I tend to judge myself against some ideal that is unattainable by definition (what would be the point of a reachable ideal?). Anyway, I'm going to derail this before I start analyzing it too much (already too late).

Still, I guess all of this is hopefully useful, as I have been fortunate enough to land a role in another Rough Magic show, Executive Function: or a story about a dog named Rudolph which will be opening January 31, 2008.

So, with that, here's wishing you all a merry Christmas (why is the "merry" usually capitalized, anyway?), a happy Hanukkah, a great winter festival, a nice Tuesday...whatever you want, it's all the same to me, since all I actually care about is beaming out some peace and love.