P.N.P. (POETRY NOT PILLS)Madness has always fascinated and terrified the mind of man, in equal measure. In today's medicalized, 'normalized' world, it has come to be seen simply as a 'disease', an ugly blight on the smooth, cog-like operation of the social organism. Our very language has become impoverished by the steady stream of scientistic neologisms which have rushed to take its stead, leaving us with only the cold apparatus of an all-too suspect, bullying and anti-septic 'reason'. Once the most intimate bedfellow not only of depthless despair, but also of high ecstasy and genius, we seem to have all but forgotten the myriad enchantments with which this fateful 'daimon' - to quote Socrates - once tempted us. This book is both a chronicling of the author's own personal voyage through such altered states of consciousness, through to the far greater, far more intimidating battle with the very system that was allegedly put in place to try to 'heal' him. Here is his invitation to all sufferers and practitioners alike to glimpse beyond the borders of the straight-jacketed, dysfunctional status quo, and just maybe rekindle that sense of mystery and magic, the sense of possibility, once associated with this most uncanny and uncompromising of guests. At times an exuberant Jubilee to pure lunacy, at others a scathing, disabused presentation of the current 'Mental Health' establishment, and at still others as melancholy, cathartic a song as the trail of Dionysus's adoring attendants: 'Madness: a form of love' is a gambit not to anesthetize and sedate our 'dangerous gifts', but to joyfully embrace them - and with them our own secret innermost selves - to live authentically in light of the absurd, inconvenient, M.A.D. (short for 'Miracles A Dozen') truths of our existence.(Caution: This book contains POETRY, side-effects include ecstatic, trance-like states, life-changing epiphanies, rebellious outrage, vomiting up society's propaganda, foaming at the mouth, increased working vocabulary, uncontrollable weeping or laughter, mild shortness of breath and slight dizziness!)
About the Author: Still-born God, biding his time forever in the cold, damp, wombly valleys of Southern Wales, aka 'The Depths Of Despair'. The Final 'Philoserpher' Of The West. Born crown-prince of Hell, aka the dreary and poverty-stricken South Wales valleys, Max James Lewy (1983-) spent an eternity in limbo before arising to take his proper and rightful throne. As he was scaling the almighty steps of the empyreal palace, called the Word, a beast most foul and uncouth, in the garb of a physician, cast itself upon him. The chemical-wielding barbarian known to the slumbering masses respectfully as a 'psychiatrist' slew by dint of overwhelming idiocy what a million petty hours of boredom (and computer games) had only mildly arrested. He lingers on merely as a memento to this unhappy happening, worshiping and picking over the ever-fragrant corpses of his spiritual ancestors, such as the great and lonely Friedrich Nietzsche, the wily Leo Strauss, the exquisite fanatic Yukio Mishima, and the electrocuted yet graceful Townes Van Zandt.