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To Madness and Back - Page 4

© John McManamy

I found myself prowling the bookshops, spending my dwindling supply of funds on books about Tibet and eastern religions and white magic. I tried to float out of my body and talk to spirits and will my hair to grow in and move objects by thought, knowing the only thing holding me back was my lack of ability to change my vibrations and concentrate my mind.

But it was only a matter of time.

But now there was the small matter of me on the floor emerging from a drunken stupor in a strange new country with no job, no friends, almost no money, and no hope of finding work. But just when the idea of jumping off a bridge seemed my only alternative, another option presented itself:

I'll write a book, I thought. On the stock market crash. The idea had actually crossed my mind much earlier, while still at work, but now there was a certain desperate quality to the proposition. That day I grabbed hold of a typewriter and began pounding on the keys:

"A stock market crash has no setting," I wrote. "It occurs in people's minds, a collective will that determines what is valuable and what is worthless, from day to day, minute to minute. To understand finance has nothing to do with economics or accounting. Instead, it is a philosophical discipline, of the mind determining reality, the natural territory of Kant and Plato and the rest."

In nothing flat I filled up a page, then another and another, all rushing out in a frothy stream requiring very little rewriting. Paradoxically, this new state of productive mania pulled me away from my more destructive old state. As the days went on, I began to enjoy my new life working from my apartment. I would pour a glass of wine or make myself a cup of tea, and put on Duke Ellington or Beethoven or any number of composers in between, and settle in for a pleasant round at the keyboard. Later I would go out for a walk in my urbanized Eden.

The creative afterburners were running white hot by the time I put sheet number two hundred in my typewriter: "One would never know there'd been a crash," I banged out. "It was a different sort of disaster in a new world of intangibles - far more subtle than a nuclear bomb - one that could practically be willed away in a Berkelian-Kantian outburst of subjective idealism - or was it the other way around?"

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