People think that I’m insane when I start

going on again about The Early Egyptians.

But what were they early for?

Has the event even yet taken place?

I imagine that their madmen

were grateful to be late for trepanation,

the Stone Age treatment of choice:

a hole drilled in the skull allowing

demons to escape. Long since abandoned

in favour of amulets and Abracadabras,

deciphered dreams, seductively somnolent

trips down the Nile, hallucinogenic rituals

in the white-walled temples of Memphis;

in short, the soft therapies.

 

Yet still the mentally ill were not placated,

their elopements went unabated,

the death-seeking flights across yawning deserts,

slow sacrificial steps into reptilian jaws

or the puncture of a rapid venom.

The Planners of Mental Health Services

drew a line in the sand and opted

for zero tolerance and a locked-door policy.

In a land awash with pyramids,

they sanctioned the building of yet more

in which to partition their lunatics.

Windowless, to deter would-be suicides;

a single door serving as both entrance and exit

to thwart potential escapees.

One attendant only entrusted with the password

to open and close the door.

We know what it is like not to remember passwords.

We perspire and swear, we stamp our feet

and curse the modern technology.

But imagine if the password is in hieroglyphics.

 

The inevitable happened, both inmates and custodians

remained trapped within the edifice for many days.

The patients, crazy to begin with, emerged

relatively unscathed. Not so their guards:

stress and suspense culminated in widespread

nervous breakdowns. When all had surfaced

there was seen to be little difference

between the insane and their keepers.

 

This phenomenon, whereby the sane become mad

through prolonged, involuntary confinement

at close quarters with the mentally ill,

earned the title “extrapyramidal symptoms”.

It could still be observed until the fag-end

of the twentieth century, before the closure

of asylums saw the condition all but disappear.

It survived only in isolated pockets under strictly

controlled conditions: Reality TV programmes,

Holiday Camps, the House of Commons.

 

Nobody could have foreseen that social media

would become so all embracing and addictive,

that the disease would mutate and re-emerge,

capable of transmission via cyberspace,

so that almost the whole human race

would be affected. But so it is.

 

There are those who believe this is the occasion

those Early Egyptians anticipated,

that they have waited in the wings

of eternity for aeons and now is the time

they would make their reappearance

on the stage of the world

if only they could remember the password.

 

 

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