A letter from a Wicked Uncle
(this is mainly in reply to a blog post from my niece)
There are no conclusions. We live in a narrative arc of which we shall not live to see the end. I also am mad, but it does not matter. My goal — and, I suggest, yours also — should not be to cease to be mad, not be to be 'cured', but to live well and fruitfully as we are. To quote a famous prayer
The Great Replumbing
You'll recall, if you've been reading this blog with any attention, that I built this house in a hurry, as protection from winter, at a time when I was broke and suffering significantly from depression, and with the intention that it should be a temporary dwelling while I sought planning permission for the house I really wanted to build.
There were things which were done poorly, partly because I was broke and partly because I wasn't anywhere near the top of my game. I salvaged a gas hob a caravan that was being demolished. It was free, and was a heck of a lot better than the camping stove I'd used in the summer palace, but it was partly broken and burned poorly, creating lots of soot. I couldn't work out how to get to the jets to clean them, and over time all my pans became hideously sooty. Over the past six months, I've become increasingly aware that the dirt it was producing was itself depressing me.
Then, the hot water system. The hot water system was put together in a hurry, and not well. I plumbed the hot cylinder directly into the thermosyphon circuit rather than using its indirect coil, largely because doing so used less copper pipe and copper pipe is expensive. This meant, of course, that iron sludge from the back boiler in the stove accumulated in the cylinder and stained the hot water, which again isn't perfect.
The Winter Palace as philosophical object
The first little pig built his house of straw, and so did I.
I've written previously about this house as structure and as politics. Now it's time to write about it as a philosophical statement, and as a philosophical statement, the fact that it is built of straw is significant.
Madness as symptom
OK, I know this is something of an obsession of mine, but that's OK. I'm mad, and mad people are allowed to have obsessions...
This morning on the radio yet another 'scientist' was interviewed about a theory he had of what's 'wrong' with mad people, and how you might 'cure' it. I get seriously pissed off about this trope.
What's wrong is, it's category error. It's missing the point. What's wrong with mad people is that there is nothing wrong with mad people. Granted it isn't comfortable being mad, granted we'd all of us very much rather not be mad. But there's nothing wrong with us. We do not have a disease. We are not a disease. We are a symptom. What's sick is society. We are people with a lower tolerance to stress — and with more dramatic abreactions to stress — than the norm. We're the canary in the mine shaft. We instrument the level of stress and disharmony in the societies in which we live.
Bother, said Pooh
People who keep up with my news will be aware that three weeks ago, I very stupidly dug through my own electricity cable. I actually got it fixed last week, but we've had a fortnight of uncharacteristically calm weather; the wind has not blown, and consequently despite the repaired cable my battery bank has not recharged.
And consequently I have been being extremely parsimonious with electricity, because, essentially, I haven't had any.
And consequently I've been more or less off the net. While I was off the net, the node of Amazons cloud which hosted journeyman.cc died, and the image of journeyman.cc was lost. Unfortunately, the backup was not complete. That was my fault, not Amazon's. I lost much more than just my blog, but my blog was one of the things that was lost. Of course, I had planned to transfer my blog here — to blogger — for some time, but I hadn't done it. I shall transfer all the stories which were in my backup of the database here shortly.