9/27/42

Sometimes I feel so much wiser than my body: then I begin to feel wiser than my head, and finally wonder what it is that feels wiser, that is wiser, which brings me once more to the insolvable problem of what am I? I do not believe in happiness or the so-called normalcy as the ideal of human life. People who are “ideally happy” are ideally stupid. Consequently I do not believe in the remedial work of modern psychiatrists. The greatest contribution they could make to the world and to all its posterity would be to leave abnormal people alone to follow their own noses, stars, lodestones, divining rods, phantasies or what have you.

The world is filled with the peas that have rolled down the center of the board into the most full partition. Psychiatrists spend their time trying to push the odd peas over the barrier into the already crowded mean, in order to make mere regular peas to which they sincerely intend to point with pride. I believe that people should be allowed to go the whole hog with their perversions, abnormalities, unhappinesses and construction or destruction. Mad people are the only active people. They have built the world. Mad people, constructive geniuses, should have only enough normal intelligence to enable them to escape the forces that would normalize them.