Subject: Commonplace: Submission

From: [email-masked] (Joseph Zitt)
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 1994 21:57:02 -0400 (EDT)

>From _Dhalgren_ by Samuel R. Delany, page 53.

"Look, about ,,, being nuts."  He felt self-righteous and shy, looked
at the doubled fist of flesh, hair, horn, and callous pressed into
his groin; it sudenly seemed weighted with the bones in it.  "You're
not, and you never have been.  That means what you see, and hear, and
feel, and think... you think that that _is_ your mind.  But the real
mind is invisible; you're less aware of it, while you think, than you
are of your eye while you see ... until something goes wrong with it.
_Then_ you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its
rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when
you get a cinder in it.  Because it _hurts_ ... Sure, it distorts
things.  But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain
to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has
an unusual amount of sense -- stranger than the hallucinations, or the
voices, or the anxiety -- is the _way_ you begin to experience the
edges of the mind _itself_ ... in a way other people just can't."

Submitted by Joseph Zitt <[email-masked]>