Essay 2

Justin Toney

It's Madness or Nothing

I find myself in a moment when a shadow creeps across the ceiling. I see it, but think that I do not. Or
else I do not see it, but only think I do. And before I can ask myself about the difference, the shadow has eaten
the whole space above my bed and is asking me if I am awake.
My shoulders stiffen, but I can not move. I close my eyes, and the surprise of seeing the shadow
everywhere frightens them back open. But I must not move or it will see me—no, not see. It can not see; it
knows nothing of light. It simply knows. It knows I am afraid to move, so it moves me instead. I rise slowly,
suspended above my bed by a vacuum. The feeling of weightlessness is stranger than I had. With nothing to
press against or pull upon I drift helpless and lonely. The covers, the window, my glow-in-the-dark alarm clock,
my teddy bear could be right beside me and still seem as far away as little balloons fading into a blue sky.
I reach nothing. I touch nothing: the shadow that swallows the orphan sock's twin; that makes elderly
grandparents vanish at impromptu Thanksgivings in black; that kidnaps all the little boys who are never found.
That un-thing gapes above me, beside me, now slowly empties the world beneath me. And soon it will take
everything away: my room, my toys, my parents down the hall, the grass outside where I play, even the play.
And now I must reach out or disappear. My fingers stretch across vast empty space and.. just.. touch the glow-
in-the-dark robot alarm clock sitting on my dresser.
Now the clock starts making noise. The shadow shakes me and tells me in deafening bursts of silence to
hold still. It lifts me further into nothing and says to stay in bed. The sound of a little toy clock grinds and bleats
furiously that something is wrong. Something is wrong. I pull. I pull from nothing, and land on the floor beside
my bed. I scrape my knee and start to cry. The shadow is gone, but the sound of the clock grows louder, the
stuffed animals stare maliciously, and the monster in the radiator grumbles. My mother rushes in to find me
shivering on the floor. She takes the Ronald McDonald penny bank from off the clock's robot arm, ceasing the
sound. She picks me up, and carries me across the room and back to my bed. "Go to sleep this time," she says,
"No more playing with your toys at night. That's why it's so scary. If you just sleep you won't get scarred,
okay?"
I do not argue with my mother. She re-covers me, and strokes my hair. Her fingers are long and
powerful. Her footsteps are loud and few. As she leaves me, I watch with blurry eyes while she puts the penny
bank back in its spot beside the clock on the dresser across the room.
Wait.
That doesn't make sense. Am I dreaming or did something very strange just? I'm not in that room from
all those years and years ago. No, I'm here dozing off in front of the computer. Each detail of that dark memory
floats through my senses as clearly and easily as the here and now, but I still don't remember how much of it
was a dream, or whether I ever believed it to have been false, or if I ever remembered it before this moment. It
is this moment, either way. I know it, and feel it. The sheets had gotten cold after she left. They are cold now
too. And she is just as far away. Down the hall, behind a door, and across the infinite distance between a child
and what he does not see, my mother is crawling into bed with my father to forget yet another midnight
distraction.
I can't sleep now. Thinking about the shadow keeps me awake. I resent my mother for assuming I had
been doing wrong, but I also regret not telling her what I saw. My eyes hurt from being open so long. Edges and
patterns around the room are starting to vibrate and shift. I do not feel sleepy, but I am old enough to recognize
that I am going to sleep soon. Still, I am running my fingers over the blanket. I am still moving in my young
insomnia, trying not to notice that the shadow is now on my ceiling. The clock across the room glows at me
threateningly. I look away from it, because my eyes are making the numbers change. The shadow is not
growing anymore. It looks distant, but I can still feel its weightlessness near me. I still see its non-light, hear its
un-sound telling me that surrounding every thing is nothing.
I can feel it everywhere and nowhere. It is dissolving that which separates the things of this world: light,
night, dream, emptiness, loneliness, togetherness, love, loss, fear, doubt, guilt, trust. My room is gone. Now it is
the room I have known in seven different homes, all in one. And I'm starting to see that it has always been this,
and will always be this, because what I see is everything. And though the pieces do not fit properly, and the
logic and sense of my world and my words are starting to fall apart as well, I can accept this because I
understand now that in the blending of what I see and what I expect to see, I have found a thing called me. But
what I see is nothing. My mad little moment is all alone, glowing outward into an endless void. This world I see
is everything, but nothingness surrounds it.
And as if I had never come to this moment, I leave it.

* * * * *

As the children's song says, "Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream." The mind takes
what it sees and builds a reality by which to organize and understand it. Ideally, each mind's reality should
resemble the shared objective universe of every other mind. However, every attempt to verify this ideology is
thwarted by the previous understanding that everything we think and know is based upon an estimation of what
we sense. So even if we do sense an real and concrete universe, all we will ever know is the universe that we
have built in our mind: our reality.
Reality, as I use it, is a personal approximation of space, time, and meaning based upon a logical
structure developed by the observation of similarities and consistencies in one's sensory perceptions.
Logic, then, is as specific to a mind as that mind's reality. It is the filter formed by sensory information,
which in turn acts to organize and manipulate later sensory information even as it continues to be formed by it.
Imagine a sort of vertical tunnel (the mind) made of rock (the brain). Sand (information) is poured through this
tunnel, some of it clinging to the rock (being remembered). As the remainder of the sand falls, the slowly
developing crust of retained sand (memory) forms into a crystal shape (logic) that then obstructs and directs the
flow of sand. But as the sand keeps flowing, the shape of that crystal develops into something else, and
sometimes looses grains (forgets). In this way, all logic is always originally deductive though it may later
become inductive.
Just as logic constantly changes, so too does reality. But though this creates a world of terrible relativism
in regards to the nature of the universe, one's personal reality does afford one very certain and unchangeable
truth: that what you observe is exactly what you observe. I may have dreamt the shadow, but I did see it and I
did feel it just as much as I have seen or felt anything. In truth, I have never truly seen the sun. My eye has, but
not me—I am not my eye. My nose can smell a rose, but then it has to tell the mind what it was like. Life is but
a dream. The only difference between waking and sleeping is that when awake, the dream is not just our own.
When waking, we listen to our senses speak with the voice of the universe. In sleeping, we hear our own voice
like we hear our own heartbeats in deepest silence.
Simply put, Voice is the replication or representation of a pattern of thoughts, experiences, structures of
logic, and methods of expression that compose what we perceive as a human personality. Confusing, yes. Let
me put it this way: The difference in the sound of my voice from your voice is directly caused by the
differences in the physical structure of our vocal cavities. Energy bounces off the complex space in our throats
in a huge yet limited range, forming an audible pattern which generally indicates the physical structure of our
vocal organs. Likewise, the difference between our creative voices is caused by the differences in the structure
of thought in our minds. Here, meaning reverberates through various but still limited mediums (like essays),
forming a perceivable pattern which generally indicates the metaphysical structure of our thinking/knowing
organs. Like a handprint in a cave or an inflection in the word "memory", human creations are physical
indications of characteristics unique to their originator.
The origin of everything is hidden from view, like the beginning of life or our own births. Even the
present moment is a distortion of an echo. If life, then is just unknowing, unseeing, and misunderstanding—if
our realities are built upon the understanding that these things are implicit, then our logics must then
acknowledge that anything is possible. Nothing is ever perfectly achieved in a world that admits it is untrue, but
to see the world otherwise would be to look through eyes intentionally distorted, purposefully untrue. To look
through colored glasses upon a broken world and see it whole is the essence of Madness. But as things stand, it's
madness or nothing.

* * * * *
 I wake up at the age of fourteen. Joey is teasing me for falling asleep. Now he teases me for spelling the
word "peak" wrong 9 times in my Earth Science paper. Shut up, Joey, I'm in the middle of something. Well,
obviously not right in the middle of something. Just shut up a minute; I thought I had a dream just now. But
there never is a moment's silence with him, thus why we call him "Motor." Jason is no help either with the way
he's always laughing in my ear or making me draw comics with him when Mrs. Anderson is talking. Not like
she cares, Mrs. Anderson's too cool to get worked up over something dumb like stick-figure comics. She does
get mad when we talk over her, though. Can't say I blame her.
I look around. The class is covered with all types of maps and satellite pictures, cheesy motivational
posters, and smarter kids' better projects and error-proof papers. Jason scratches his scalp with his pencil. Joey
stands up and turns to his left. Mrs. Anderson walks in the room, and I am experiencing deja vu. When did I
dream this before? How did I know that she would walk in here pretending to look scared and concerned? I
remember, it was a month or so ago. The next thing that's going to happen is that she'll try to trick us.
She speaks with another teacher at the door, who rushes off down the hall. "Everyone! Everyone!"
This doesn't sound like her; the dream must be coming true. I smirk to myself. I must be someone special to
have seen this coming, and now I'm going to look real smart by revealing her joke. The rest of the class is
getting quiet except Joey, of course. Well, even he shut up. Imagine that.
Mrs. Anderson hesitates. She says with the straightest face she can that someone flew a plane into the
Twin Towers in New York city. I start laughing. She had already delivered the punch line. Flew a plane into a
tower! How stupid. My friends are laughing too. Others are still fooled by her serious face. When did she get so
angry just now? Goddamn she's making a fuss about this. Okay, I get it, so it actually happened. The guy's still
an idiot for flying into a tower.
I talk about how stupid you have to be to fly your plane into a tower while I walk with the rest of the
class and seemingly the rest of the school down the hall and to the library. CNN is playing choppy, poorly shot
videos of a shadowy plane flying into one of the rectangular buildings I barely recognize. I don't know what's
going on any more, but I'm just happy to be sitting next to Jackie Peters and not in class.
Somebody is making that irritating "Shhhh" sound. Sound in the room comes to a screeching halt.
Silence is even on the TV where reporters, live from New York pause to witness in silence. A second plane flies
out of the left side of the screen, and buries itself into the other tower. A huge fireball blows out the other side
the way it does in movies. Voices on the TV start speaking frantically to one another. I am the first one to speak
in the dumb room. "Holy fucking Christ."
This is not an accident. Somebody is doing this. They are taking over planes and turning them into
missiles. I have to think about this. Think. Actually, it wouldn't be that hard. With someone crazy enough, it
would just take some money and a lot of good planning. In fact, doing that would be one of the harder things
you could do. Why not just walk into an Emergency room with a bag full of grenades and just start hucking?
Why not go to some foreign country and catch a deadly virus, and then sneeze on everybody as you come back?
The world is open and free. Anyone can do anything.

Here's that weightless feeling again.

* * * * *

The world is a crazy place. Whether speaking of the reality of the mind, or of the universe beyond it,
anything with memory will tell you that there is a lot that simply can not make sense. Why is there suffering,
misunderstanding, deceit, hate, a lack of fate? Why is there anything? Is there? Tell me how far we have come
as a species to transcending the state of madness built into our realities, and you will know the distance between
one point and itself. Yet here we are, yelling and glowing into an endless void—hurtling from inescapable
chaos toward certain oblivion. From the cold eyes of the man on the moon, this planet can live no longer than
its sun. We are doomed, as individuals and as a species, to live selfish lives and die having never seen nor
achieved anything true or everlasting. Maybe this is why some would call it Hell to live forever.
And yet what else can we do, but keep on crying out? It is not a matter of hope. The damned are
damned. To see the universe as it truly is would be to change the very thing that makes us human: our madness.
It is not even bravery, for who could be brave when facing pure oblivion, as each of us does every second of
every day—whether timely or significant or visible or not. All die the same way in the end: they cease to be and
do not return. Still, we keep reaching out into the void, trying just to touch what we can't even see, knowing that
such a touch would ultimately change nothing.
It is everlasting torture to try and fail, and die so that your prodigy will try and fail and die. But between
Hell and oblivion, at least there's company in Hell.