unentitled autumnal screed

Watch out for the Mad Men.

They say Milarepa, the Tibetan poet, was a wild and crazy guy in his day (eleventh and twelfth centuries). They say he killed some people, then went through a deep remorse for his actions and worked even harder than others to get outside his self-inflicted predicament to find peace of mind. They say he had an ear for music and he made up songs to help him remember the things he was taught. He was one of the Mad Men of his day.

So, short of poisoning 30 people at a party and redeeming yourself by meditating for the rest of your life, what is 'madness' anyway?

This week I had the pleasure of becoming better acquainted with the songs of Bertholt Brecht, who was perhaps a little bit mad himself, but in the modern sense sometimes romanticized as the archetypal politically Angry Young Man. Germany between the wars was not a pretty sight, I'm told, and people with their eyes open, like Brecht, had a bone to pick with the emerging political economy, so they wrote songs with titles like "There's Nothing Quite Like Money," "German Miserere," and "Ballad of Why Human Effort Is Always Futile." Happy stuff.

Maybe madness is nothing but excess. Excessive anger or giddiness, talkativeness or silence, eating and drinking or abstinence, work or rest, acceptance or criticism, lethargy or activity, deliberation or decisiveness, mobility or stillness, discipline or laziness, patience or impulsiveness, questioning or answering, complication or simplicity, attraction or repulsion, contact or separation. Excessive use of commas. Excessive cheese consumption. Excessive list making.

Like an imbalance of the humors, it's being a little off-center to the point where other people think you have a problem.

Madness itself is a rather old-fashioned term. The psychological profession has come a long way, and the vocabulary for labeling the continuum from 'sanity' (mental cleanliness) to 'insanity' has grown with it. Thanks for Dr. Freud and others, we have an abundant and varied menu of conditions such as neurosis, psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and many more to choose from. May you live in interesting times.

What do you call the sudden awareness of your own condition, when it hits you that you have no escape hatch, no way out of a predicament of your own making, and all of your best-laid plans for turning things around have no chance of realization? When you see once and for all that your adversaries are correct, and you are, after all, completely inadequate for the task you are attempting. There must be a word for finally facing the fact that one is guilty of all the shortcomings others have found in you. In short, you are doomed.

I call it optimism. In spite of being unfit for everything now on the horizon, the closing of one path could be the perfect opportunity to re-invent oneself in a different environment, under a new regime, with a brand-new title, an altered persona, and a different attitude. At least outwardly. A chance to make connections with a new set of people, to hear what is on their minds, and to reconnect with other people whose situations have also changed.

Sometimes people do re-invent themselves, like Don Draper did when he came back from Korea wearing another (dead) man's dog tags and made a decisive break with his unenviable past. Others just lower their standards when they find out that they've been trying to land a fish rated 10 when they only have the bait and tackle to catch a 7 fish. Maybe 'lower their standards' is too harsh; maybe 'refocus' is more accurate.

If I always wanted to be editor of the New York Times AND teach journalism at Columbia, while raising goats on the roof of my coop in Central Park West, maybe it's appropriate to use my current midlife crisis (my third) to adjust my game plan and aim a little, uh, differently. When I grow up, I wanna be a production coordinator and teach a class at the rec center, and grow cayenne peppers in the backyard in Methodistville!