When The World's Gone Mad

I

I don’t quite remember what it is to write. Is it double-checking thoughts and not being sure that now this thing is the exact thing I want to write? The responsibility makes me anxious, and being anxious is a slippery slope no one can afford to step on these days. Writing these two sentences is the most mentally exhausting thing I’ve done in ages but it’s still not too different from thinking inside your head. Different is the physical aspect of writing. It’s so sophisticated. All those hooks and squiggles eventually combine into letters, words and then sentences. It’s a craft. We used to learn it in childhood. We needed to be consistent because like with any form of craft it requires steady practice. Maybe abandoning writing is what made us all go mad eventually.

Yes, I don’t quite remember what it is to write. My body forgot. My hands forgot. No muscle memory to remind me. My handwriting has always been anti-calligraphic but in the past, I could read it easily – now I can’t. Maybe I should draw an emoji? Probably not. I’m an awful drawer. Yet emoji simplified life greatly. R.I.P emoji. On the bright side, words come together so eloquently when you write with your own hand. It also feels archaic. This is funny because now it’s hard to say what is or isn’t modern. Technological Middle Ages.

Can I write just for myself? I’m wondering. It’s like I pretend I’m writing for therapeutic purposes, or to make life less boring but, actually, I’m writing for someone. For you. I’m writing because I hope someone will read this. Why? There’re probably many reasons. To feel less lonely. To feel like I belong somewhere or to someone. To be recognized or remembered for something. To be. Can you be if no one except yourself knows that you are? I used to tell clients that they don’t need anyone else to feel wholesome. Now I think I was mistaken. We’re stupidly and irreversibly social beings. You can masturbate as much as you wish but the reward is never as satisfying as sexual intercourse with another human being. This is the most primitive yet powerful proof of our limitations. The further one deepens into human biology the more complicated it gets. Back to writing. The answer is probably no – I can’t write just for yourself. I’m writing for you, my reader. I want this odd sensation of human interaction that might actually never happen. You might read this sometime in the future, but more likely you won’t. Still, even such an illusionary possibility makes my writing worthwhile.

There was a moment when we all thought that writing would die. A couple of years before The Madness happened pictures and sounds seemed to replace letters and words in our life completely. It happened with me, at least. But then the world had gone mad, and everything became… erstwhile? Maybe it’s some perverted form of Renaissance. Maybe it’s an obvious decadence. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that a word survived while many other things didn’t. Do I dare to say that words and writing are the two greatest inventions of humanity? Now it doesn’t sound too implausible. A human starts where a word starts. A human ends where a word ends. And here I’m –writing - even though I didn’t write anything for many years. I didn’t even type. Everything was done for me. Now it sounds like something you could read in a sci-fi book way back. Welcome to the new world. The Mad World.

Wow. That reads seriously dramatic. The Mad World. Jees. But, I mean, it’s dramatic, isn’t it? Okay, maybe on a daily basis it’s not. You get used to living in madness after a while. But, on a large scale of things, the world going mad does sound dramatic. I’ve always loved good drama but living in drama is not the same as watching it. I don’t remember. I actually don’t remember. The last time I watched a film was when?