The
Ship of Fools - "But water adds to this the dark mass of its own
values; it carries off, but it does more: it purifies. Navigation
delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the
hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last.
It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools' boat;
it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks.
The madman's voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute
Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real,
half-imaginary geography, the madman's liminal position on the horizon
of medieval concern—a position symbolized and made real at the same time
by the madman's privilege of being confined within the city gates: his
exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another
prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He
is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly
symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own day, if
we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible fortress of
order has now become the castle of our conscience. Water and navigation
certainly play this role. Confined on the ship, from which there is no
escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the
sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to
everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the
openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the
Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the
land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from
which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that
fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him." ~
'Madness and Civilization'
