it takes extremely fragile and extremely solid people to risk and even gain from the encounter with madness without succumbing or being taken by it to destruction and death
(here’s the link for reference to Ghetto Life 101, the radio diary of LeAlan Jones, then thirteen, and Lloyd Newman, fourteen, recorded in 1993 on Chicago’s South Side.
(It is in a BBC-backed programme that LeAlan Jones revisits the diary fifteen years later and comments on his mother’s mental illness, at the onset of which she conversed with Ronald Reagan on the porch: her paranoia was politically inspired … he goes on to wonder about how many such mental illnesses are politically inspired.)
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