Divine madness, also known as theia mania and crazy wisdom, refers to unconventional, outrageous, unexpected, or unpredictable behavior linked to religious or spiritual pursuits. It is usually explained as a manifestation of enlightened behavior by persons who have transcended societal norms, or as a means of spiritual practice or teaching among mendicants and teachers. These behaviors may seem to be symptoms of mental illness to mainstream society, but are a form of religious ecstasy, or deliberate strategic, purposeful activity, by highly self-aware individuals making strategic use of the theme of madness in the construction of their public personas.
"Pheu pheu, ti prosderkesthe m ommasin, tekna;"
𝘈𝘭𝘢𝘴, 𝘈𝘭𝘢𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘢𝘻𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴, 𝘮𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘯. Does one hear the children weeping, o my brothers, here the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers- And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows; The young birds are chirping in the nest; The young fawns are playing with the shadows; The young flowers are blowing toward the west. But the young, young children, they are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, in the country of the free.
Does one question the young children in the sorrow, why their tears are falling so? The old man may weep for his to-morrow which is lost in long ago. The old tree is leafless in the forest - The old year is ending in the frost - The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest - The old hope is hardest to be lost. Do they ask them why childs stand weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, in their happy fatherland?
What can be worse than craving a thing, but receiving none of it? Her dreams lay silents on the open sea. Didyme wishes to catch them, get a glimpse of their comfort... And here she stays in actuality. She wishes her home be returned to her, though she awakens and it is to tell her abode is far from the places she can reach.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while she pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. In these days, she begins slower, less responsive and her conversations get more unhinged. The entities in her living space allow crystalline in a form of water roll over her cheeks. Most of the scene is silent, save for cicadas. In the night she returns, scars all over her face he brutally dismembers the cynical girl, she simply was not meant to be a ronin. In many times she finds herself alone, it's snowing inside that cynical girl. The nerve Didyme has forced upon her skin is finally begins to hold her down. Droplets of blood stink from the interaction. By now, the arms which once held her warm start to appear as mortified, in a deep black colour. A numbing pain that pulses and spreads like needles throughout Didyme's shin and calf when she applies more power. She is lean weak, but have always allowed her physicality to outweigh her dooming mentalities. Injuries which the girl inflects upon her body in order to hurt like her mama does are to no avail, when she is getting worse, mother's eyes blood-shot red and face pale. 'Death is only the beginning', she keeps telling her daughter for the sake of ending her suffering. Although unknowingly to Eleandra, her daughter is breaking itself down, and she will soon just take up space, just as she once told her.
She has been waiting for the cure everyone seems to be getting but her. Why is she not fixable? 'Your mother will not last much longer', some maid announces with her thick Arabic tongue. She is really dying after all this time. Didyme sees it in the bruises poking out of her eyes, in the way her puke floods the areas her body contorts to. Mother keeps telling her that she is ready - It's too soon they are both too young. She will close her eyes when her gut tells her it happened, ans will look into her father's eyes and hold him instead. She has buried her younger self to built an unbreakable exterior. She has practiced biting her tongue and ignoring the triggers, changing her thought patters and disguising her sensitivity. Shedding her skin has been long and grim, but who wouldn't cooperate if it meant no one could take from her again?
Didyme is morphed into one with the pillows sitting in the foreign bed, a deep print being left, forming an outline of herself. It is day Thursday, August twenty-sixth, 1885. The house is quite, which heavily weighs on her. She shares a mortal rawness with those lights outside the door, so in return she pleads for their help. It's only fair that she gets a piece of them for herself; As they have every piece of her. Tasting the cold rain of her lullaby dreamscape, she is floated through her open streets like open veins where they carried out their transfusion of love. Such was the umbilical cord of trust between them, not a drop wasted. She swallowed the waters that were spilt in open corridors. Rivers wide and winter white ever fluid as they wound their way into her dreamscape. Spinning webs of reality from potential and on nights like this, Didyme wonders of who would have become if mother didn't love her. But she dared not and the cobwebs never spooled again. Never casted their wide nets out into the hungry world where babies go to die and never do well eat breakfasts with smiles. Didyme waited for her though she never came. It was then the girl knew the brutal cruelty of the world. How promises age like foul eggs wherein one thinks oneself soon to be fed. Cracks open the vault of life and go mad from the sights of the bitter truth that all men die of heartache long before their bodies give out, long before they never heard 'I love you'... From tongues not forked and lips not peppered with the winter wonders of myriad men.
With her first breath, Didyme begins to wander in the room till the air is knocked. And with her last draw of this world's breath an orphan she becomes. The dead woman's time well spent, her daughter takes her place to hear her distant drum. Dark dying thoughts once swallowed that girl like harpies chattering on the wind. But with the truth of death fresh at her door she greets him as a friend. Together they shall walk and talk stars will fall, the youngling will see the patterns which once hidden unfold, revealing it all. The worst part of a funeral is not the sombre faces, nor the awkwardness of people who know not how to be at such a time. It's not the heavy sense of sadness and loss that permeates the air or the brash jollity of those who over compensate. It's not standing to eulogise her mother in so few minutes when she was so vibrant and alive. Nor seeing in her mind's eye her face as she lays recumbent in the coffin's cushioned dark and airless embrace. Not the sobs that came in public as she sat after giving mama's farewell her all. The youngling's first eulogy and sadly probably not her last. No, the worst, the most awful thing was the wet thump of roses red falling on her coffin lid, she tossed a handful of dry earth, it sounded better. Seemed more fitting, an example followed by others. A better more respectful and indeed final fare well.
It's raining snake venom from the clear blue skies, millions of bacteria. Stench of excrement and genes of mice and rats, lead powder dust. Quicksilver droplets on the planet of the 'reptiles' where piles of human corpses lie. They poisoned magic no less and all else is vague. Here comes hunger and agony, spells, and fire. Put your mask on, lock up your doors. Street is not the place to be, the horror is outdoors even the devil has come to take you to the camp, the great dying has begun. And Didyme is stealing time, blood-soaked to her knees, to defend herself with explosives, as the fool once said, graveyards will be too small for us all. Even on the verge of the abyss, no less, in the face of pestilence be fearless someone will remain. Children will be birthing just the same, thy will be done. The blood drips down her legs, oh my what have i done this time? The hot feeling of the blood leaking is the worst. However, it's comforting knowing the blood is real, knowing that she is still alive. The blood drips down her legs it stings a lot. What happened to the happy little kid she once where? "That's okay though." She whispers to herself.
Her feet drag her outside of the chamber. A huge home was Al Reda's mansion, and she was more than lucky to own this when growing up. Like a ghost, Didyme passes the paintings which are brought to life with enchantments and potions, she can see them hang from the walls till she reaches the staircase, the handrail of steel gives the curved staircase a perfect detail. Standing there, a horrific sent enters her nostrils. A rotten and puking smell... Her curiosity outrages. Hasty arriving to the main hallway Didyme's small body hides behind the wall, peeping out towards the drawing room, the girl is able to see Caravaggio's painting of Medusa, feared by the male heroes of Greek mythology. She is nine and she stands in the room filled with men, marble floors shinging and her breath echoing around the room. Medusa has her mouth open in a bloody, hysterical scream, her head decapitated; It is silenced by the glass separating the painting from her. Didyme reflects her face over Medusa's - A mirror. She is twelve now, and she wants to scream. Rage. Cry. They are told not to. The mythical woman's head, firmly attached to her neck, writhes with snakes of questions about this. She has no snakes for hair, yet her own contentious relationship with the concepts of beauty and ugliness seems to explain her having some sharp edges. When girls are weighed on the scale of beauty, of worth - Is she not allowed to simply exist? - The scale places rage on the negative end. Medusa is given trauma, has it forced down her throat and into her lungs; Medusa is given a blade to her neck for daring to be mad about it. Girls are given trauma, and they are given no place to put it down.
Her quirky eyes look around the room, a macabre scenography around her. The crimson colour paints the floorings so much that a pool is made in a vast circle. The liquid waits for the fool to be one with it. It awaits for their veins to spill this malicious liquid... Blood. The one liquid necessary for each and every one of our existences. Above the pool, is where the bodies lay. Those soulless, breathless, motionless bodies. The will and right of life was snatched right out of their humane corpses. Her heart aches and her breath hitches,
Didyme feels a deadly hole in her innards. Whimpers was the only thing that came out of her and it was the first thing that broke the dreadful silence. Didyme gulped her tears, choking in them. She could recognize the cadavers, their open eyes looked back at her. "Daughter!" He screams in the quiet house, the daughter doesn't listen.
"ديديم ، أين أنت ؟!"
"Didyme, where are you?!" The man speeds inside the house, his features holding a demonic delineation. Didyme's body quivers, unable to stop or change position. She stays quivering without moving neither her feet, nor her eyes away from the scene. He desperately calls again though quietens because of seeing her, her head turns instantly at it. Amos proceeds to take her in his arms like a mad man, and Didyme doesn't move due to her legs endure cut off. His clothes wet, distempered of fluid blood, he stains her with it. Suddenly, Didyme feels crushed. Mangled from the arms of her father as he holds her up and cries on her shoulder. Devastated by the looks of the dead. She feels so ravaged that she fears of taking her eyes out, on account of the sights they have been providing her. Questions make her brain throb and shut down. Her throat burns, and hands trembles. What in earth has happened here? One enchanted disaster after the other, Didyme envies the normal.
They look up with their pale and sunken faces, and their looks are sad to see, for the man's grief abhorrent, draws and presses down the cheeks of infancy. "Your old earth," They say, "Is very dreary;"
"Our young feet," They say, "Are very weak." Few paces she has taken, yet is weary. Her grave rest is very far to seek. Ask the old why they weep, and not the children, for the outside earth is cold - And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering, and the graves are for the old. Mama, died a week ago her grave is shapen like a snowball, in the rime. She looked into the pit prepared to take her - Was no room for any work in the close clay. From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her, crying, 'Get up, mama! It is day.' If listen by that grave, in sun and shower, with the ear down, mama never cries; Could they see her face, be sure we should not know her, For the smile has time for growing in her eyes ,- And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in the shroud, by the kirk-chime.
It is good when it happens? That one dies before it's time.
Alas, the wretched! They are seeking death in life, as best to have. They are binding up their hearts away from breaking, with a cerement from the grave. Go out, she, from the mine and from the city. Sing out, as the little thrushes do. Pluck handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty. Are your cowslips of the meadows like their weeds anear the mine? Leave them quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows, from her pleasures fair and fine. The wind comes in her face, - Till her heart turns, her head, with pulses burning, and the walls turn in their places turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling. Thus the long light that dropped down the wall, - Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling. All are turning, all the day, and they with all.
For a moment, mouth to mouth, let her touch hands, in a fresh wreathing of her tender human youth. Let her feel that this cold metallic motion is not all the life God fashions or reveals. Let her prove her inward souls against the notion that she live in the house, or under it.