MetaJess

2/2: '... that the man who dances might be superior to myself– word-bound and unable to dance… I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts.’

‘If I hadn’t thrown away everything that my teachers taught me, I could never have written [my play]. These teachers, who were so sure of the rules, didn’t produce anything themselves at all.’

Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe.Then we experience ourselves as ‘thinking up an idea’, but what we’re really doing is faking up the sort of imagination we think we ought to have.

'If I tell a student ‘say a word’ he’ll probably gawp. He wants a context in which his answer will be ‘right’. He wants his answer to bring credit to him, that’s what he’s been taught answers are for.'

‘My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence because we don’t want to be rejected by other people –and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way’

‘We all know instinctively what ‘mad’ thought is: mad thoughts are those which people find unacceptable, and train us not to talk about, but which we go to the theatre to see expressed.’

1/3: ‘I once read about a man who believed himself to have a fish in his jaw. This fish moved about, and caused him a lot of discomfort. When he tried to tell people about the fish, they thought him ‘crazy’, which led to violent arguments. After he’d been hospitalised...

2/3: ... several times –with not effect on the fish– it was suggested that perhaps he shouldn’t tell anyone. After all it was the quarrels which were getting him put away, rather than the delusion.