A Touch of Madness

My hands poised on the keyboard tingled with an odd neuropathy as words threatened to explode through my fingertips. I yanked my hands back. My knees hit the bottom of the desktop as I stood, rattling pens in a ceramic mug on the desk. The glare from the computer screen I’d stared at for too long in the dark room had nearly blinded me. Arms outstretched, I stumbled to the wall, felt for the switch, and flipped it. Although soft light flooded the room from the fixture above, darkness remained.

In my mind.

My soul.

Or wherever it was the words had originated.

It would be many years before I discovered that “Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet” as well as Madeleine L’Engle’s words about Plato’s exertion in her extraordinary book, Walking on Water: “It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go our safe self-control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety.”

What I once feared—access to a dark space within myself where it felt like chaos swirled blending what I could only identify as some form of crazy—I’ve learned to welcome. Invite even. It is something I long to conjure on my own when the page is blank and my mind more blank.

But it comes unbidden. Spirit-like. Divine. It imparts words, ideas, and emotion I didn’t know I knew. Or maybe have never known.

My own belief system, like L’Engle’s, leads me to identify this otherness as holy—the indwelling spirit of God who knows all, both dark and light. I am not as often aware of the presence as I would like and though I invite it into my writing, I can pinpoint only a handful of scenes written that I know I did not write myself, though the words seemingly seeped from my own mind, through my fingertips, onto the page.

Perhaps this dark side of the divine, as L’Engle referenced, reveals the other side of light so that the writer might empathize with those who’ve experienced what the writer can only imagine. In darkness, in empathy, the light shines brightest.

So I quiet my mind, fingers on the keys, and I invite. I wait. And I hope. So that I might offer light…

Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet... Click To Tweet

I can pinpoint only a handful of scenes written that I know I did not write myself... Click To Tweet