I'm passing pages 100, 101. They are glowing shining comprehending, Adam's paragraphs. The book feels too good for me. Behind me lies a pile of largely unedited, even unread, words that I've catapulted into English, into my Swedish Word program. In the middle there is a wonderful book, a striking experience, reality shattering formulations; you, I, can feel the inner right of mania, the Orphic faith of it. The pervasiveness of a normalized mania nevertheless, living to earn money. Yesterday, after meeting a lovely woman at a bar I received this email from her, a parcel of a larger conversation:

"Theoretically everyone is a product of their environment, whether good or bad. Those who don't follow what society deems as 'normal' are deviants and diagnosed with something as though they're somehow less than the rest of us who have learned how to play the game. People with schizophrenia just have a different reality than you or me and can't survive in the community."

I replied:

"Likewise the environment is a product of our actions, and therefore the community is not merely given, rather it is something struggled over. Also, those who are 'outside' the community nevertheless are essential to its identity. Another way to put this maybe is that you can't exclude reality, or rather that exclusion is part of a never immediately graspable reality that is more than any community. The risk that I read into your 1am summation is that community is conceived of as a given thing, that can be pointed to, rather than a process that includes exclusion (as part of the process). At one point in my life my reality landed me in a mental institution, and it could again. For me being able to survive in the community while not subordinating my experience to its norms, is the struggle for existence (god that sounds grandiose), let's say being existent, as an individual that can speak and communicate (in and with the community) and is not left in the dustbin of irreconcilable difference. There is the potential that respect for such difference is part and parcel of a certain conservatism about what constitutes the social order, and patronizes while being in awe of the exoticism of the other."

It's wonderful that Åsa and Adam could live together when they did. In a way the grounding of manic insight is the recognition of that impossibility in the everyday. The going over toward what cannot be settled upon, but is nevertheless re-engaged. Another woman I met last night described Tango to me, the pushing against each other of the bodies, the friction of it, allows each to know where the other is, and how to (re)act. Without that tension, a slackening, harboring the abyss or our individuality.