“… How do you know how crazy you are? By how genuinely nuts you get when you’re NOT doing (or not being allowed to do) what being crazy makes you want to do in the first place.
“But this state of mind isn’t really crazy. It comes from the gods. It’s a species of divine madness. Socrates called the poetic variety of this condition ‘possession by the Muses’ (and rated it superior to technical mastery), though he could have referred with equal accuracy to seizure by any Olympian deity. When this kind of nuttiness grabs us, we are possessed by forces we can’t name and can’t see, can’t measure or quantify, and whose very existence is doubted by much of the conventional world.
“But this state of possession is real, as anyone who has experienced it will testify–and so are the forces that inflict it on us. What do these forces demand? First and foremost, they want depth….”
(via Darrelyn Saloom)