So many sanity adages came to mind while reading “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” after Ted complains:

“I was the only one still sane and whole. Really!

AM had not tampered with my mind. Not at all.

I only had to suffer what he visited down on us.”

I thought about how people can’t commit themselves, because insane people don’t know they’re insane.

I thought of the definition: doing the same thing over again and expecting the same result.

I thought of the story of the bathtub, where someone wants to commit themselves for insanity and is given a test question: would you rather empty a bathtub with a teaspoon or a milk jug? The committee answers “Milk Jug,” and is committed: a sane person would pull the plug, the orderly explains.

I thought of the fever dream tumble down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, mocked here as the humans descend:

“Trailing along miles behind Ellen, I could see her every now and then, crashing into metal walls and surging on.”

And then I thought about hate–the primary insanity of the story.

Almost two years ago, in the red ruins of Masada, a tour guide pointed out how carelessly we use the word. “I hate my eyebrows in this selfie.” “Ugh, I hate you so much, BAE.” “I hate broccoli.” And then we went over it’s genuine applications in antisemitism and all other ultimately arbitrary forms of discrimination.

In the story, AM is driven to hatred by constriction.

“We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. ”

It seems to be that all forms of hatred and insanity come when we feel trapped. In our lives, in our jobs, in our families, in economics, by aspects of our identity, in post-apocalyptic computer caverns. When the only thing we can do is “be,” and be with others who also are “being.” The characters in the story can be, but little else. We tend to value being, to mourn when it leaves the people around us, through trainwrecks or cancer or icicles. But being is not the same as living, it would seem. Living takes motion.