someone asked ‘what is sanity?’ and lo, the following ran off my fingertips like raindrops. hah. i dub it ‘an insane ramble’.
this may be a bit of a ramble. if so, s’cuse the meandering and the lack of caps as well. have to type faster when the mind is running, and caps just get in the way.
sanity. to be sane. i always roll back to the root when there’s some matter of discussion at hand. both to establish initial context, and to decide and discover where i leave the path of commonality or reification or whatever flavor is popular this week in the mainstream. it’s good to know where you are in relation to it all… especially if you want to keep out of the briars (social or mental or both).
the latin root ‘san’ is generally translated as ‘sound’ (connotation = correct, proper):
san -us -a -um [sound , healthy, uninjured; of sound mind, rational, sane]; of style, [correct]. Hence adv. sane, [rationally, sensibly]. Transf., [really, indeed, to be sure]; with imperatives, [then, if you will]; ‘sane quam’, [exceedingly, extremely].
what’s interesting is that most reference materials will give the root as ‘sanus’ which is ‘healthy’ (also as in ‘sanare’ [to heal, cure]) which seems to lend the implication that there is a natural state which is free of all impediment and that it is this state that is ‘sanus’ or ‘sane’.
the ideal of ‘the natural state’ in which any human has ever conceivably existed beyond the moment of birth seems rather… er… insane, pardon the contradiction. what human has ever existed in anything approixmating ‘the natural state’ since we left off the hunter/gatherer cycle? (excluding those courageous souls who scorn society, technology, et al and have retreated to communal existance, etc.)
indeed, how does one set forth the qualitative boundary from which a judgment of ‘sanity’ may be conferred? in a day and time when every aspect of western culture and most of the societies affiliated therewith are actively seeking distinction and discrimination – defining themselves not by what they share, but by or through how they differ – is it even possible to say there IS a ‘natural state’ anymore without inciting either war or commitment?
what systems and traditions are still in play and which seek to define this ‘natural state’ struggle in the face of technology and an ever-shrinking global awareness, often finding themselves relegated to the fringe simply because there doesn’t seem to be any room for ‘the natural state’ in either the vaunted spaces of the ivory tower or the various striations between it and the place where the rubber meets the road – the every day, the usual, and the increasingly common routine that is anything except something that would be recognized by those humble souls in centuries past. have we ever had any definition of ‘the natural state’ that stood the test of time since the greek master philosophers? or any definition that has ever risen since?
so then, what of this vaunted ‘sanity’ — the thing by which so much of society and culture are actively shored up and through which almost all of any control mechanism set in place is maintained? and which groups get to decide the new definition? shall it be left to those who make living from finding disease and dysfunction? i believe that terrible tome of mental maladies is a thing that spans three volumes or more these days… resembling the tax code in rather amazing and frightening ways.
damn it. the question is unanswered. what is sanity? what is sane? and in this silence, an errie sense of possibility and paranoia, for without the handrails of the reified, and in the face of an ever more insistant world chanting ‘progress’, how do we know anymore?
is it sane to be able to adapt and float on the Himalayan barges of information? is it sane to withdraw and set one’s own boundaries? is it sane to reject it all, and adjourn to the sparse, rare places left without all this ‘civilization’? (do such places yet exist?) is it sane to stand quietly in the midst of it, deny it all, and simply say that ‘sanity’ is merely knowing how to avoid being arrested?
it occurs here that perhaps, just perhaps, the entire world has gone insane and the only way any of us even manage to remain standing is the mass delusion that nothing’s changed except the materials and how we use them. perhaps in our minds, there is the analogy of the highway as the forest path… the automobile as the faithful mount… the cubicle as the field… and the family huddled in their four walls as the tribe.
but i ask you, as much frustrated as aching, is this sanity?