Notes From The Middle Ground

1. How to live in the world at an angle of forty-five degrees to it.

1.1 It is impossible to live in it when this angle is perfectly zero degrees. One would have to become a mute stone to accomplish this feat, to be swept away by every passing wind.

1.1.1 Living in it at an angle of ninety-degrees is yet another impossibility. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing this, not even the hermit on Kailash who needs to scavenge for herbs and roots and who orients his life in terms of a vision that has been handed over to him by other people.

1.1.1.1. Thus to live on the thin red line that divides the two halves is an expression of the fundamental ambivalence in which the individual is located in the world. For some, it is a sign of wobbly weakness, for some an expression of dark despair, for some the joy of ironic play, and for others, it is simply a constitutive aspect of the human condition.

2. Sanity is a statistical concept.

2.1 If more people inhabit the right half rather than the left, you are rightly sane if you are in the former.

2.1.1 The scarecrow of insanity is ultimately one that threatens to undermine the very foundations of social existence. Which is why social norms are invented to police and discipline any trespassing of this line which, though otherwise fuzzy, is now made to appear rigid and uncrossable.

2.1.1.1. As a matter of fact, however, sanity is not the state of stolidly existing in the right half but an ongoing process of negotiation through which this line is shifted, played around with and criss-crossed in a never-ending dialectical motion.

2.1.1.1.1 Thus one becomes more 'sane' by becoming aware of the depths (or the heights?) of the 'insanity' one can descend into (or ascend towards?). 'Insanity' is the intimate stranger one loves to hate.