On the Necessity of Being Insane

6/13/20

I again become aware of a small but irreducible psychic gap in me that prevents me from really believing certain truths, like many of those in front of us, here and now—most of all the intention to kill, the white cop's intentional knee on the black man's targeted neck, the tradition of it, the gasping crowd, the postcards, the signature, the job well done, the reward, the payoff, the message, the ancestry, the future. I sense that this tiny gap protects me from insanity. I also know that this gap is indelible evidence of the very insanity I mean to avoid. I need to maintain an insane gap in consciousness in order to protect myself from a much larger insane gap in consciousness. That single man doing the killing, his intention, his look of indifference, his apparent success—these cannot represent the whole thing. There must be a space, a gap, that allows for determinants, that puts him, this single man, at the end of a long, long line, a line that led here, to him, in him, through him, and, I am sure, from him onto and into others. Without that gap, the man is a hyena and I/and all of us simply his prey. Only the gap stops me from planning to kill this man, this single man, this hyena. The gap stands between me and murder, between me and insanity. The man is and is not what I see him to be. I can see the lines, the histories, the predecessors, the boy looking, seeing other men, other women, seeing their intending knees, their fists, their guns, their ropes, the boy looking and wanting, the boy wanting something and not knowing what he wants, that boy, flexing his muscles, feeling his own strength, wondering what to do with his body, what to be with his body, and seeing the others, seeing their bodies and what they are doing with them, white bodies, black bodies, seeing how bodies are being sorted, being mapped, being arranged, being walled off, being corralled, and landing, early on, this man with his murderously intending knee, or something almost certain, t