You are in the madhouse. You are in a play in the madhouse. The play is about you.
This is the tale of a man who is struck by lightning, loses his identity because of it, is burned bald and blue by it, thrown in gaol as a consequence of it, and ends up in some monstrous carnival in a madhouse about it. That man is Jack. Alas, poor Jack. Even his name is not his own.
Ha!
Imagine that. Imagine this.
Jack speaks in his own vernacular, a mixture of criminal cant as heard in the alleys, and words he makes up. He challenges. He provokes. He kills, so it is said. Not everything he says is true. Not everything that happens is real. And not everyone is his friend.
Jack seeks freedom.
He is haunted by images of storms. He has no memory of a self before an event he does not recall. And that troubles him. Yet, he comes to know himself as he is. Jack comes to understand what it is to be alive.
This, then, is a dark fairy tale about the juxtaposition of life and death when the latter beckons. Life; or death? This is one interpretation of that reality.
Taste it.
Feel it.
Be consumed.