Vincent van Gogh:
Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle
[La berceuse] (1889)

" … this song cemented our sanity."

A Special Kind Of Crazy

"It takes a special sort of Fool to write a song for you.
That Special Kind Of Crazy can't help but just shine through,
Other lives and other places
You with yours and my displacements,
We'll integrate or simply leave behind,
'cause I'm crazy of that very special kind."


And so I started what promised to be a really terrific tune. The first verse never tells the whole story, but it primarily exists to hint at just where this story's going, and this one, to my ear, even when I'd only started writing it, was definitely headed somewhere. I consider it a good sign—a sign of greatness, really—if I can start something with an admission. This levels my position within the creation, anchoring me as nobody particularly special, except in this case, that nobody special becomes a special kind of crazy, a rather ordinary kind of special, since everybody probably qualifies as their own special kind of crazy in this world. To start, though, owning this role, this identity, promises much to come. This song starts without delusion, feet firmly planted on level ground.

"It takes a special sort of someone to compose a love,
Delusional as the devil, snickering stars above.
All my changes seemed so clever,
fooling no one but this pretender.
I suppose we both suspected from the start,
This Special Kind Of Crazy in our hearts."

Composing a love song serves as further evidence that the author is, indeed, as he asserted in the first verse, crazy. He's taken on a genuine fool's mission. Even the stars can see the depth of his delusion yet her persists! He enlists the object of his affection. Having identified himself as a Special Kind Of Crazy, he invites his love to identify herself as at least holding some special crazy in her heart, too. He might be only fooling himself, but as a self-admitted crazy person, he's right even if he's wrong here, but it does not appear, after two full verses expended, that he will be proven wrong.

"Fools rush in where our angels crawl.
If we didn't have insanity, then we'd have no love at all.
Who can say what might come to pass?
Crazy begets crazy. How else could any love last?"

His chorus gives away his game. He's saying that love is A Special Kind Of Crazy and that if we didn't have crazy, we could not have love. He normalizes the aberrant to justify the evident. If we're in love, we're crazy by definition. Since it's us in love, then by definition, we're A Special Kind Of Crazy. That's self evident! Crazy must be love's sanity.

"I'll take a special sort of care with what I'm tryin' to say.
(Notice how I'm dancing around every cleverly turned-out phrase?)
All our lives, we're changing places,
Here and gone, whatever takes us,
When a Special Kind Of Crazy sings his song,
We'd be fools to be so crazy,
fools to be that crazy,
we'd have to be that Special Kind Of Crazy to sing along."

The final verse seals the invitation, come on in, the crazy's fine here. We'd have to be crazy to not jump at this chance to be crazy, a fine double bind! This final verse goes a little meta on itself. It catches itself dancing around, exhibiting the sort of nervousness that always accompanies true love. He's building up for his big ask, his huge admission. He's inviting acceptance of the way things just have to be if we're going to be in love, the way things obviously are now that he's opened the curtain. He made an implicit more explicit, always the start of something, the sort of something that simply cannot ever be undone. By the end of the story, he's merely stated the obvious and obviously gained acceptance. Who could deny this opportunity?

"Fools rush in where our angels crawl.
If we didn't have insanity, they we'd have no love at all.
Who's to say what might come to pass?
Crazy begets crazy,
Crazy begets crazy,
Crazy begets crazy!
How else could any love last?"
© 2010 by David A. Schmaltz, all rights reserved

I wrote this poem which only later became a song, on The Muse's birthday in 2010, her second birthday in exile. It proved to my mind that we'd actually survived the transplant and had begun setting roots and sending up new shoots. If I could write such a song when disconnected from the world I'd grown to count as my own, I might—we might together—manage to thrive in the alien climate and soil. By simply naming crazy as an essential and inescapable element of our lives together, this song cemented our sanity. It remains as reassuring today as it was the day it came into this crazy world.

————

Juggling Variables
My friend Franklin commented that this series has been proving to be the most biographical of any of the prior twenty-something I've written. I quickly agreed with his observation. I had not intended this series to become like this. I had not noticed just how much of myself, my history as well as my presence, I'd left on the shelf when I suspended performances. I have been rediscovering, really, and I suppose this wouldn't qualify as discovery or biography if I had known the story before I started trying to tell it. The story overtook me and has been showing me how to create it. It comes in pieces and out of eventual order, but that it comes at all feels very reassuring in this time when we all seem to be juggling variables. I suppose that I can depend upon my SetList to anchor me, but to enjoy this, I must maintain my SetList, or so SetTheory seems to be telling me.

I began my writing week by rediscovering and recovering one of my earliest compositions, OneMysteriousDream. "This one came back different than it packed away. It came back better than I could have ever expected. Out of its original intentional ambiguity, it matured to say precisely what needed saying, and continues doing that to this day."

I reincarnated another one the following morning with BornToSee. "Most learnings, I suspect, never really stick, but tend to need some reinforcement over time. Never learned, always learning, that might be the point of innocence as well as experience."

I spoke of the voice with which I speak and also of the voice that speaks only to me in TheVoices. "The critic never makes a noise yet still presumes to be able to sing significantly better than whomever's performing. He has no role anywhere near my head when I'm singing."

Rather than singing my fool head off, I considered how I might sing it on in FoolHead. " If I were in my right mind, with a wise head on my shoulders, I'd never successfully misdirect my better judgement in the general direction of genuine accomplishment."

By far the most popular posting this period was this piece, which was not written on the subject of this series, but on The Muse's progress through her cancer treatment, which has been Magick. "Magick performs its misdirection. It might wound while healing. It might materially misrepresent its eventual impact, starting unremarkably until one day, surprising."

I resurrected the iconic song from our exile period, InvisibleHusband. "I now hold prima facie evidence that impossibles do, indeed, sometimes come true, because The Muse and I once achieved a truly impossible plan. This fact now underlays our entire existence."

I ended my writing week with a small piece of irrelevance and irreverence, singing about my Underpants. "This Truly Terribly Traveling Tune will probably be my legacy. I can imagine worse."

Four songs recovered, two deep truths about performance stated, and one hopeful update on The Muse's condition. Call me crazy, even A Special Kind Of Crazy, but from this perspective, I think I made great progress this writing week. I would that every week went so well. It's under two months now until I intend to actually perform this SetList I have been so carefully grooming. I still need an enormous amount of practicing. I feel far from complacent, yet I'm finding the effort reassuring. It might be that I had not simply abandoned this legacy, but left it to cure, set it aside until I could properly care for it in this world. Now seems to be the time. I dare not wait a minute more! Thank you for so patiently and appreciatively following along beside me.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #SetTheory, #PureSchmaltz