Let Madness

Let Madness

A poem with background story.

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Lethe is a cure to madness –

a sharp cut through the frontal lobe;

Madness is wide-eyed and handsome

as a bearded Prince waiting...

smiling and standing against

a thing howling in the rushes.

Who could sleep with madness birthing

dreams in the soul like moons,

coldly burning, brightly beautiful?

That ancient sun-blackened word

for the special ability

to carry visions at the edge

of the eyes....

It's a half-life that's the price

for living beyond the means

of the soul.

The true place of business for Marrakesh, Morocco, is in the old-town far from familiar cash-register queues. It is a market place with no central area only bordering, white walls, whitened buildings, then desert, and then distant, bluish mountains.

Stalls and tents stave off the sun and form banks and islands in what is a turbulent stream of motley. The desert air diffuses the heated smells of wool in rug and cloth and swirls it with the smoke of roasting meat and spice. It is a labyrinth alive with babble and call and bleat. I have seen little that feels as ancient as this. When the world cracked and humanity emerged, this must have been among the first of gathering places.

The old market is a place of a thousand encounters.

From a brass-bangled hawker I buy and drink warm water that tastes of the goat skin it streams from.

I am stopped by a slight man who argues that I should purchase a veiled woman, who is twice my bulk. I listen, shaking my head and idly wondering how I would get her past customs.

A robed man and I barter in French over a djellaba. Your robe is too thin for that price! My family will starve with what you are offering me! Hands wave in the air as if anger was being tossed between us. Then, I am calmly invited to step around the stall, to sit and accept a kif pipe. We pass the small-boweled pipe between us, inhaling the drug and talking pleasantly of events or other matters. The crowd passes around us as the strong flavored kif makes all soft edges more distinct. Kif is both what is smoked and the tranquil state it brings you to. The stall becomes more then an island, it is a refuge from the chaotic color and the endless movement and need. The calm allows us to simply savor.

The pipe is out and its ash dislodged by a tap against the forearm. Knowing this to be a signal, I step out and back around to the front and begin again an argument on the robe’s worth. Eventually I walk away, satisfied that I payed well below the full price, while, behind me, the merchant smiles knowing that he has unloaded a robe worth half what he sold it for.

It was deep within this tent-quilted marketplace where I met a priest of the Koran. He had a little stand, actually no more than a tray on legs, from which he sold grilled meat. I often sat and talked with him as desert figures and the occasional tourist streamed by, and I never saw him sell any meat. He told me he was really there to watch the people and learn. He had a soft manner of speaking, whether it was of desert-born human needs or the difficulties of love (a favorite theme of both mystics and those not so blessed). His words were gentle whispers that measured the time.

I sat by him greedily. Like the kif smoking interlude, this priest was an eye of calm in the robed storm; a devout rock that the river ran round. He made sense when I could not follow the thread in the many other encounters around me. He fed my hunger for knowledge; something I have always considered Apollo-given and wonderfully mysterious. Yet, though I thought I was collecting a scholar’s wisdom, I find myself, instead, with only ribbons of cherished images wavering in thin heat.

One day our discussion lasted well into the cooling night; the buyers had already made their way home and the sellers had packed up their wares by firelight. Like a pool emptied of water, the market place took on different meanings in the dark. Several clusters of venders gathered on one side in groups of four or five, pinned back the folds of night with blazing torches, and discussed in hushed, easy voices. Sometimes a word of French would reach me, and at other times, the older Arabic. Sitting where the torchlight only weakly touched, it all looked as though it were taking place in a huge cavern.

The priest and I were still conversing when I noticed that the general sound level, already low, quieted even more. When I looked around, I followed the focus and noticed the presence of an energetic man in his forties who was dressed like a prince out of Ali Baba. The priest stood, looking at the newcomer, and I followed suit. I had no idea what was taking place, and I don’t think it was expected by any there.

Even at the distance of around 70 feet, I was struck by how clean and bright he appeared. Two others followed him at a relaxed pace behind. He leisurely approached the first group beneath the torches, greeting a number of them with a smile and a nod. I could not hear the few words that passed between them. Others that he neared also smiled and assumed a stance of deference and bowed before him, indicating a man of importance.

He had greeted at least two groups, when he paused and casually looked across the square to see me. His eyes leapt the distance making a connection I could feel. His smile grew broader as he made his way to me, never taking his eyes from my face. Those he passed inclined their heads one after the other as if choreographed. He left his two companions behind and came on into the center alone.

I was fascinated by his garments and turban, all seemingly perfect and too white. There was a gold cloth about his waist and golden strands sewn into the turban that glinted with torchlight. He seemed illusory, belonging within the verse of Omar Khayyàm and not in any real world of heat and flies and midnight cold. Yet, in that place and time is exactly where he did belong. Shadows and torches and a sky dripping stars. . . this was his stage. . . where someone like him could feel alive and burn the brighter.

His eyes, which still never left mine as he approached, shone joyously in his pale, bearded face. I could not help but realize that I could clearly see the white around his irises. When he reached me, he asked, to my surprise since I thought it obvious, if I were an American. When I replied that I was, he said he had a poem that was very important and which I would appreciate and understand. He then launched into his poem with a storyteller’s voice and with eyes, wide and liquid, raised to the vast sky.

Once again, I found myself in the center of a calm simply because I was the spectator, but no passive one. This man brought to me golden words, gem-studded images reflecting a flame of joy.

In the poem he spoke of traveling through space with suns and worlds hurtling past him; all the stars were not above him, but around him. He walked the great spaces with the celestial breeze cooling him until the earth hung like a cracked, turquoise ball at his feet. The colors whirled around his upright hands and a thousand rainbows swirled and clung to his beard and clothes; he was an ecstatic observer of the glory and beauty of God. These images, I thought, must have been like those that greeted Adam when he first opened his eyes.

When done, he bowed smilingly, fastened his eyes on me once more, then turned away. In that last glance, I read satisfaction and a completion. I watched as he strode back into the dark gathered at the edge of the square. All, again, nodded at his passing yet nothing was said. In only a moment he had slipped away into the dark without looking in any direction but his own. To this day, I cannot recall clearly what happened next, but I know the market emptied and the torches were extinguished. The priest and I followed the others away in silence to the last of the flickering lights.

Later, needing the world around me, I stood on the roof of a low building in the old section where I had a room. My mind was circling around the realization that this man was mad –– not crazy or eccentric –– but classically and wonderfully mad.

Unable to sleep, I gazed upward at the starred ocean to which the poet had risen and walked. All of the earth held soft edges while the vast wilds of the sky were brilliantly in focus. There was the impression of order, yet, behind this desert curtain was a swirl of colors, a constant movement that seemed of chaos. Can we humans be any different, I wondered? What lies beneath the order of our consciousness may be a glorious pandemonium of energy that has bound us to creation for well over a million years –– of which, only the last small percentage has been spent as human.

Sometimes a member of the northern Inuit people went mad because of loss or desire or hurt. In this culture, which had a history of abandoning the old and unproductive upon ice flows to conserve vital resources, the mad were coddled. The People gathered around and provide for as long as it took, until some sort of reason returned to the one who had traveled to that other spiritual realm. They were heroes returning with a wisdom that may allow others to see the mundane with different eyes. It was The People’s way to allow for flexibility and growth. The returned became the shamans and storytellers, and, perhaps, the poets.

Between the desert and the city, stood a great lighted minaret. From there the muezzin called the people to face the birthplace of Mohammed. While on my roof top, my eyes settled upon it, anchoring me to the beauty. The minaret was a beacon holding the desert back and marking the heavens. It was at the calm center. In the next few days, each time I heard the muezzin’s call to prayer, I remembered the cadence of the poet’s swirling words, and I again felt his impassioned eyes upon me.

Years later, tossing words to a man knotted up and cross-legged in the exact center of a padded room, I saw another aspect of madness. I never, however, saw his eyes for he packed his palms tightly into them, shooting responses back to me, barely controlling muscles eager to be free. He knew he was “different” –– and wrong. When finished, I had the door unlocked and I opened it and went out. I turned and watched through a small window with wonder as the door clicked shut and the man exploded, ramming himself into one wall then instantly running for another.

Something within me ached for the healing of desert-born words.

I cannot remember all the poem for it was a long time ago, but its exultation remains. I never discovered whether it was something he had written and memorized or had uttered extemporaneously. It didn’t, and doesn’t, matter. The man shone as he spoke and I cannot forget that light.

The mad Moroccan has become part of my own personal folklore. I search for him in twisted statues whose faces watch the skies, within hero stories, and in the defeated eyes of children. I search for his light and passion, or for their ruins when both had been forbidden.

Did Alexander or Van Gogh also stretch out to the night sky? Remember Van Gogh’s swirling stars? What is the voice of reason to the likes of them? And what is birthed in the dreams of madness –– that blood kin to the fires of creation?