Sunday, January 27, 2013

A Dedication to the Idiot



We usually look to the New Year as a new beginning to officially leave parts of us in the past. This year, I experienced a few eye opening events, which has changed me forever. Which is why, I am not the same person I was yesterday. And looking back at older blog post, I find myself having completely different opinions – I no longer firmly believe in the things I use to firmly believe in. Life show’s you evolution, and it’s not as complex as Darwin would have made us think it was. The evolution of mind is happening every day, right now even. And as my mind evolved I realized that there comes a time in one’s life (especially my own), that you have to follow your heart.

The Idiot Asylum originated as a haven for the mentally wounded. The doors of the Asylum were always left open for the ingenuous, simple minded, and complacent. Here, we offered a different way of viewing things – thinking out side of the symmetrical cube laid before us. And just as your mind should have evolved, the Asylum too will evolve.

For 2013, the asylum will get a little more personal. A little more real. A little more provocative. And it will all be a representation of us and the issues we try to leave inside the closet.
 
In 2013, I don’t want to make a list of things I want to do, but rather the things I want to change. I want to kick the habit of bad habits. I want to destroy certain behavior patterns that have caused me to not have the complete life of happiness that I long for.

In closing, I would like to leave an excerpt of my favorite quote. This passage proved me the inspiration for this blog, because I, too, have experienced the fear of my very own existence.


"While in a state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon we without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially, nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate; if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since."
– William James