The inversion of reality - a prescient line from 1994
The inversion of reality - a prescient line from 1994
Notes From the Desk: No. 23 - 2024.02.08
Notes From the Desk are periodic posts that summarize recent topics of interest or other brief notable commentary that might otherwise be a tweet or note.
The world is the asylum
In 1994 I watched In the Mouth of Madness in the theater and there was a line from that film I never forgot. It struck me in an odd way that I found intriguing. Something that seemed eerily prescient and foreboding, but at that time not something that appeared could ever happen in reality.
“A reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority. You would find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering what happened to the world.” -- Linda Styles
As a thought experiment, there seemed to be truth to the statement. As time has passed over the years the thought experiment has mutated into an experiment on reality itself.
As modernity has cast objective reality to the side, we are now living it. The world has become the asylum and the inmates its wardens. Sanity has become madness and madness has become sanity in a world that is now upside down and inside out. Who else saw the film and what was your takeaway? Any other prescient lines from that film or other films that have become true?
A guide to understanding much of what has led the way to our collective insanity can be found in the essay Uniform Thought Machines
No compass through the dark exists without hope of reaching the other side and the belief that it matters …
Every person has an untold story. Tell your stories before they are lost. The wisdom of a single individual sometimes becomes the wisdom of a generation.
I have not seen In the Mouth of Madness, but I am familiar with the haunting notion here. In fact I wrote about this concept in my last book of poems...
Fits & Misfits
There’s always an unforeseen factor
that’ll melt a nuclear reactor,
but what one fails to imagine,
in his world doesn’t happen,
till it does; upon which he observes,
Well, it isn’t supposed to occur.
Never put into so many words,
his thoughts are vorpal swords,
fencing in mythical fields of logic
—half nonsense, half verbal magic.
And this delusional vanity,
this childish toying with reality
is all fine with me (I’m a madman
after all); what rattles my can
is how randomly an age splits
its fits from its misfits,
as though a shift in culture
wouldn’t upend the nomenclature,
and, a revolution later, the norm
become the madness of the age before.