Rant: The Dream That Commands the Hand
He is not mad, he is merely disobedient to the image
“The soul rots not from failure, but from betraying the thing it was asked to make real.”
Why does man suffer? Not from hunger, not from war, not even from the humiliations of love or poverty, though those are sharp, yes, and they carve their initials into the meat of the soul. But the true suffering, the long ache, the wound that festers quietly in the dark of his being, is this: he has seen something. Not with his eyes, no, but with something behind the eyes. And having seen it, he is damned to chase it.
Every man walks with a phantom, a vision he cannot name, yet recognizes more intimately than his own reflection. It is an image, sometimes vague, sometimes blindingly precise, but always insistent. It drips down into his thoughts like water through rotting ceiling boards. It mutters behind every small joy. It mocks him during dinner. It demands birth. It wants out.
So he writes. He paints. He builds. He makes music or machines or movement or madness. Not to entertain. Not to impress. But to survive. Because when the image lives inside and is not given form, it begins to eat him from the inside out. He becomes bitter, disoriented, ill. He screams at the wrong people, drinks too much, weeps in public for reasons he can’t explain. He thinks he is going mad. But he is not mad. He is simply disobedient to the image.
And here is the terrible paradox, this image, this phantom blueprint of some other world, is not invented. No. It was never invented. It was received. Like a dream, like a sentence whispered in a language without consonants. It is not his creation. He is merely the translator, the scribe. The work, if it is genius, is only genius in proportion to its obedience, how precisely the hand can follow the contours of the invisible.
You will know such work when you see it. Not because it explains something to you, but because it confirms something you already knew, long before you had words for it. It cuts through your ribcage like a hot wind and says, “Yes. You too. You also saw it.”
That is the essence of art. Not fiction, not fantasy, but truth in a purer dialect. A truth that bypasses the bureaucracies of reason and speaks directly to the animal in the skull, the dreamer in the chest. That is why stories move us more deeply than facts. The facts are clumsy. But the image is surgical. It knows precisely where to dig.
And every man, whether he admits it or not, is trying to give birth to that image. Every man wants to finally get it right, to make the thing he saw. And he will contort himself, ruin his body, fracture relationships, abandon comfort, just for a chance at doing it properly. Because when the inner and the outer align, even briefly, even imperfectly, it produces a joy that is so total, so crushing, that one can die with peace. That is what people call “purpose,” though they dress it up in career language and self-help rituals. But it is much older than all that. It is spiritual hunger. It is creative compulsion. It is a kind of madness.
You do not choose it. It chooses you. And you suffer until you obey.
“Every man walks with a vision he cannot name, and it ruins him until he brings it to life.”