Reason has failed, so abandoning reason we now move into the world of impulses, feelings, unbridled emotional expression. . .even the irrational. The irrational doesn't make demands; it has few expectations; it is not difficult to interpret. Think for a moment how many silly plot lines in films, TV series, dramas that are simply resolved through a final appeal to madness, i.e., Fatal Attraction or The Silence of the Lambs. And even the madness cannot explain it all; madness is surely more interesting than logic.

It is like witnessing the "madness kick" all over again. It wasn't that long ago when Ronald Laing was arguing that "madness need not breakdown but could also be breakthrough." In The Politics of Experience, Laing wrote: "Psychosis is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality. It is not an illness to be treated but a "voyage' we should all take." Laing led the "Insane Liberation Front" through the crowded halls of Bedlam. He and David Cooper developed an "Ideology of madness": ". . .the truth is unspeakable madness." Author Norman Brown wrote glowingly of the "supernatural powers that come only with madness." Nietzsche said: "All that is now called culture, education, civilization, will one day have to appear before the incorruptible judge, Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, intoxication and madness."

Surely let us all not be mad. . .but let us all not be cool, detached and completely rational either. Melvin Maddocks once observed that those who worshipped the Appolonian ideal (order, logic, etc.) made a mistake very much like those who worshipped Dionysus. Those who worshipped logic and cool reason detached themselves from the aches and pains of the human condition; they failed to touch or to be touched by the agonies around them as they considered themselves above them. Dionysus' disciples, on the other hand, ironically made mistakes by plunging beneath the aches and pains inherent in the human condition.