Going Crazy

            During the last weekend of July, while our political representatives were hurling accusations at one another, a tattooed trio with roots in Southern Vermont showed the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival just how world-changing acoustic music could be. One minute, the respectful and attentive audience was sitting in folding chairs listening to three white kids with stringed instruments and the next minute, the tent exploded with pure sound. Liberated from gravity, the attendees flew from the folding chairs and started moving to the wild and crazy harmonies pulsing from Cooper’s banjo, Pete’s guitar, and Lucia’s standup bass.

            But pure sound does not just push fannies and elbows to shimmy and shake. At a certain moment in the set, the music stopped dictating dance moves and the ground beneath our feet fell away. From what I could tell, the stormy tattoo on Pete’s right forearm had transformed into a raptor, flown off his skin, slipped between the strings of his guitar and into the vortex of the sound box. We were in dreamtime and not entirely sure of its ways. It wasn’t just me, the entire tent gasped for air, unsure whether we could survive in this new atmosphere. Cooper and Lucia carried on, assuring the rest of us that we would not burn up in this insanity of sound. While the raptor flew, all sorts of useless things were incinerated; things like future plans and past obligations, things like professional identities and personal preferences. The wild and crazy bird just swept all those trivialities out of the tent, across Fort Adams State Park and out to sea. And what the tattooed bird didn’t reach, the final eruption of hoots and hollers effectively blew away.

            This is why we go hear live wild music: to lose ourselves and come out anew.

            Having been to the promised tent and back, it is clear to me that the people in Congress are not listening to enough live wild music. All those ideas they have, those past obligations and future plans, have stymied their minds. Their fannies are stuck to their office chairs when they should be shimmying this way and that. With no live music, no wild and crazy rhythms in the Capitol District, it’s no wonder those people can’t get out of their own way.

            Craziness, according to the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, is a useful tonic for one of Western thinking’s greatest maladies: its attachment to eternal and immutable truths. Deborah Bird Rose, an environmental philosopher from Australia, describes Shestov’s version of craziness as “a person’s immersion in the specific, situated, fully sensed, and fully committed life in the living world of birth and death.” Going crazy means stepping off the platform of certainty and into the vortex of swirling atoms that make up life on earth. The reward of all that swirling, all that flux and transience, is the sweet and sweaty consciousness of being alive.

           Shestov was particularly interested in the exchange between Western philosophy and tribal thought. The narrowness of rational thinking, he believed, could be expanded through ritual and animism. Not that one was good and the other bad, mind you, but that both modern rationalism and tribal irrationalism had something to offer the other. In other words, if sanity doesn’t offer a solution, try craziness.

            The craziness I’m recommending is not a disembodied insanity, the last refuge of a poor soul in too much pain. This is not a craziness that methamphetamine or heroin would recognize; not a craziness that avoids any close contact with the real. The type of craziness I found at the Newport Folk Festival put the participants in closer relationship to this living world, where songs begin mysteriously and then end just as you figure out the chorus. But precisely because you were crazy with rapture at being in this tent with these people and those guitars and that flying raptor, you are not undone when the final chord is played. Being there was enough.

            That’s the kind of craziness we need in Congress. Those modern, rational men and women need to get out of their chambers and into a tent. They need to unbutton their jackets and take off their socks and shoes. And as they sweat to the shim-sham shimmy, they might remember that even government is part of the living world of birth and death, that no decisions last forever, that ideas believed to be eternal and fixed are as malleable as the soft ground beneath a crowd in full rapture. Go crazy, you representatives of the people, come back to this blessed world. And once you’ve felt the sweet and sweaty consciousness of being fully alive, maybe you’ll think more reasonably about the needs of this tender land.