In Search of Duende (2): Must We Burn?

Was there freedom in madness. I knew there was, I had believed there was, I had always been certain, but I suddenly doubted madness. I doubted not the existence, but the realm of madness. I realized that despite the popular usage of the term, which was vulgar, plain, I never felt aloof from it, not to say I was crazy, but I had always felt bored by normality, so I had without giving it much thought, assumed madness was normality, which was obviously not how most people meant it, when they said, you are crazy, or that's insane, and I didn't know what to reply, I just stared at them with a numb wit, scrambling to understand what they meant, losing my ground, what precisely of what I had just said did they think was insane? It was as if they believed there was a reality of concrete matter and a world of mental madness, which separated from the reality by a wide moat and an unbreachable wall. True, I couldn't tell anymore if I was on the inside or the outside, and if I was on the inside would I liberate myself by breaking out of this castle on the cliffs, and was madness in fact a prison, was I like De Sade locked up inside the Bastille, shouting at the masses, they are killing the prisoners, but then why had the defense walls been erected, in defense of what, as if madness was a prize, a tribute of war, the holy grail of sanity and the masses storming it on it outside, slowly losing their minds in the frenzy of blood hunger, smelling the power of madness, losing oneself, becoming god, or was I on the outside of the walls, and was madness the loss of perspective, without space, being able to follow the horizon in every direction and never approaching it, and was sanity the prison, like the asylum where De Sade found freedom, a safe harbor from the roaming infinity of madness. It was pitch dark. I couldn't tell if I had been dreaming or thoughtfully awake.