You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus…

One day - a cold, clear day - lifetimes before my spirits were born, I awoke blinded and masked in a big blue chair, polished blue-steel blade in hand, forever contemplating death. My eyes had been sewn shut. The mask affixed perfectly to manifest cruel suffocation. Angelic whispers in icy song told me that the room was windowless and bare with fleeting walls painted a clean breath-stroke of cobalt blue. Though sightless, I somehow knew that the walls were fluid and formless. Though breathless, I understood that the air was thin and pure. The room - my room - contained everything that I knew to be real. Which is to say that it contained nothing. Forever nothing. But those beautiful whispers, as would the innocent kiss of nascent time, soothed. Their melody caressed and intimated that my sutured eyes and suffocating mask were the only protection against the pure freedoms offered beyond the security of those infinite, diaphanous walls. Content, I lived - blind and masked - in that cobalt room for eternities.

But then - one warm, comforting day - a day that has repeated itself over and over again for each of those self-same eternities, I broke free. I broke free to self-suffer the bite of that blue-steel blade. Heart pierced, I bled. Whispers silent, I died. And soon, there came the flames. Endless flames.

And I burned alive in my perfect death.

Alight, I could see. I could breathe. I saw fire and I breathed fire. I, eternally, saw the room for what it had always been. And, finally, I was free...

Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,
You and I shall laugh together with the storm,
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.

- Gibran, 1918

Thus, I became a madman. Dangerous…