I woke up deep into -ude rhymes (lewd, stewed, imbued, crude, shrewd), first simple rhymes, then diphthongs, polysyllables, slant rhymes (crude, crowd, crowed, accrued, creed). My persistence pestered me (pester, pastor, poster). I was not, best I knew (bester, boaster, booster) scheduled to deliver at some fetid fete a doggerel rhymed toast (a cringe-worthy literary form). I’d not recently been stumped for an -ude word (best I nude), for which, in the lonely labyrinths of sleep I ruefully sought. Instead of useful missive-worthy notions, I was bobbing on a sonic (chronic?) ocean of word wackiness as wearying and worrisome as a funhouse mirror gallery.

What in blazes, I blinked, was going on? Did madness feel thus – captured in rapture by raptors? (“Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,/What is’t but to be nothing else but mad” – Hamlet, Act three – but there were no acts then, were there? (Acts me no questions…))

Each of us, I’m guessing, has comparable concept-bogs our not-quite-sleeping brain flails in while reason reaches for flotsam not to drown. We towel off dream-notions like scruff, bemused by our absurdity, but an uneasy feeling dogs us through our dawn, This too is who we are. Peep into our brain-sessions and they are not orderly deliberations proceeding amongst toga’d senators, but a caterwauling confusion, like our current Congress. How we “make up our mind,” as the saying goes, far from reassuring, is a hot mess, a chaos from which defensible decisions emerge because they must. “Homo sapiens” we’ve labeled our species – what wishful thinking! “Homo bizarro” is more apt.

I’d decided not to write about this topic – what would I say? That insanity is our essence, no exception? That Reason, though it may harness our horses, does not drag our chariots across the sky? That what we think isn’t what we think but a complex calculus concerning what’s best to think under the circumstances, so we survive and thrive?

Americans, for almost a decade now, have been observing ourselves slip-sliding into what feels like communal insanity. Why would anybody opt for Trump or his ghoulish adherents? How can an entire political party loathe gays, unwed moms, childless parents, immigrants, truth, LBGTQ kids, and when asked whence these convictions come, wag a Bible? Blushing Republicans explain, “But our hearts are good.” Come again? If that’s evidence of a good heart, make mine vile!

Have we gone mad, many wonder, shaking our heads.

The answer, my dream-jabbering suggests, is we were always mad, not angelic but devilish in our core, and Reason is a prophylactic in which we sheath our madness, lest we maul each other. The evidence for this conclusion is ubiquitous, not just my morning muddle. Every day something horribly hare-brained happens – gun-toters slaughter strangers; wolfish rapists pounce; we gobble a gallon of ice cream lickety-split; cops turn to crime… What’s “gotten into us” is what’s been there all along, straightjacketed by the sense we mistakenly call common.

To derogate one’s enemies as maniacs seems convenient condescension. So it is. No doubt they think the same of me – that I “just don’t get it.” Mutual demonization is an inevitable consequence of war.

I agree – I am crazy. Each dawn I must corral the chaos in my brain into practicable concepts, tame my wackiness with grammar and syllogisms, subject my flailing feelings to the greater good, do my best to “think things through.”

Sanity is not innate. It takes work: sobriety, humility, subservience to truth. We depend, I’m persuaded, on language to order our thoughts. Many today trust their feelings to guide them truly. They endanger us all.