At 3 Kilorats and Slipping

Rather than dwelling entirely on myself, I thought I'd post a photo of two people more important to me than myself, if anyone can truly say that: My red-headed first-born and her red-headed son, Rachel and Jacob. Don't they look happy? Aren't I lucky? And I have two other daughters besides.

When I first became depressed in April, Kathleen left for New York and I went south to be with Rachel and Jacob for about a week, helping out as best I could. What was great about Jacob is that when you're taking care of him, you have no time to think about yourself. At four years old he's very physically active and self-directed, which makes for a difficult combination. But not for me. Every distraction, every need, every threatened behavioral violation by Jacob helps keep me out of myself. No rest for the depressed. The same obtains to a lesser degree with Kenyon. Since Kathleen went to a new job today, I had to make Kenyon's breakfast when I first got up. Washing the dishes helps, too. Mindless physical tasks to keep my soul in the material world and out of the whirlpool of madness.

Oh, talked to my younger brother last night. He has too much noise in his head, and anhedonia, is going to see his shrink today. My sister is a bipolar II, but doing very well. Our father, an alcoholic manic-depressive, committed suicide at 62. Both my grandmothers were manic-depressive, both hospitalized at least twice. Bipolar disease in our family has been named "The Chaffin Curse." I recently had a Betti Chaffin write me from Missouri about the curse. I have no direct relation to her except our last name, but she had questions about the disease in relation to her Chaffin family.

It was yesterday I started to break down again. I was fragile; just a little normal sarcasm from Kathleen questioning my decision to try to reach an ocean cove from the headlands down a steep bluff took all my confidence away. I could have made it down, but not Kenyon and likely not Kathleen, since she didn't bring her hiking boots. Afterwards I gave the car keys to Kathleen and resigned from any leadership role. Then we went to our usual beach and watched Kenyon fetch his bottle over and over again. My emotional hurt came from Kathleen saying, "How many ticks you got?" while she waited behind on the bluff. My reaction to that slight mockery of my attempt to find a new place for Kenyon to swim was way out of proportion to anything my normal self might have had.

I called my shrink for stronger meds today; looks like I went off the antispychotic too soon. In Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon he credits Zyprexa, a new atypical antispychotic, for keeping him from depression, which is strange because he isn't even bipolar, he's a unipolar depressive. I took it recently but it extends the QT interval on the cardiogram and I get off-beats in my heart and my stamina goes to nothing; climbing the stairs exhausts me, and my heart seems to hesitate when recovering. Still, the pain of depression is eminently worth the risk of taking the drug.

Sorry I wrote so much. I'm verbose. It's hard, by long practice of writing essays, for me to sit down and write less than 1000 words. I know blogs should be brief; unfortunately, I am not. Anyone who read to the end of this deserves a medal. I will try to be more brief tomorrow. This is no way to engage readers.

At 3 Kilorats and slipping,

CE

Sadness Is Not Depression

Good morning. In writing about my mood fluctuations, I do not for a minute consider my experience unique. And I don't write primarily for therapy or renown. I think, given my training and literary bent, that perhaps, as in poetry, I may be able to capture something in words that other sufferers may lack words for. One function of poetry is to say for others what they wish they had words for.

Yesterday I was tearful most of the day. If I began to speak to Kathleen about how I was feeling, tears would start. I did my best to halt them, as in my experience, as a manic-depressive, when tearfulness turns into crying jags you're worse off than before.

But yesterday was different; as I said, I'm at 1.5 - 2 kilorats. (For those new to this blog, that's a measure of depression. It's explained in a previous post.) Yet my tearfulness was not from despair; it was not the chemical hopelessness depressives know. I was still human. I was grieving about my past. I had objects to be sad about, history, and my life stretched back like a dark road between blasted trees narrowing to a sky pregnant with black-bottomed clouds. So my life appeared. But I was not in despair; I was grieving. "Regrets, I've had a few." Grieving feels so much better than the black hole of despair, where tears are pointless because they are disconnected from any objects. To put it simply, I was feeling sad more than depressed, a distinction many bipolars have trouble making, since our sadness is too often a gate to despair.

I wrote yesterday about how coming out of a depression is like being born, like having a new personality, indeed being a new person. At first it's a bit frightening and you try to re-acquaint yourself with the simplest things in order to get your bearings. Below, a poem from the second half of Sine Wave about coming out of a depression after electroconvulsive therapy, where the simple thing is my moustache.


ECT

“That’s me in the corner, losing my religion.” –REM


Each day for years
I sacrificed my heart to God.

My smile got so tight
I had to eat through a straw.

Every sin in my head
brought the same familiar sirens

until I recognized myself
in the silver lenses of a policeman

who looked like me. It was then I knew
all the wanted posters of Jesus were meant for me.

I peeled them off like a bad paint job—
underneath was a darkness more terrible

than a starless, starless sky,
the pupil of a salmon’s eye

staring through display glass, black as hell.
After the electrodes and the gel

and two weeks at Hospital Hotel
it was enough to finger my own face.

Was that my moustache?
Will anyone recognize me on the street?

Prepare a face to meet the faces you will meet.

How this Blog Came to Be About Bipolar Disease and Poetry

Naturally I don't share everything here. I share what I can while preserving a modicum of privacy, because of this medium; and I don't want to pander to Peyton Place voyeurism. But today I think people thirst for the authentically personal because their lives are inundated with impersonal information.

It's odd how this blog has evolved. I started with humorous essays, of which I've published dozens elsewhere. They weren't very popular. Then I related our difficulties in Mexico, where Kathleen's hearing-ear-dog was held for a $10,000 ransom. I would have paid the money if I'd had it. Instead there were six months of captivity in a land I have come to detest. People were interested in that struggle.

Finally, after that stress was over, and we got our own place back in California, I sank into a depression. It's somewhat typical for a bipolar to react after the stress is over, much like migraine sufferers get their headaches when the final is over. How I wish I only suffered migraines! But suffering is not ours to choose. "Adventure is chosen, suffering is imposed."

So now my blog has morphed into two streams--probably the two things I know most about on this planet--manic-depression and poetry. I dread the former and love the latter. The fact that the two are inextricably linked through history makes for a nice fit, though I'd rather talk about poetry than mood disorders.

I teach poetry online. I also counsel bipolars. And many of the poets I know are also bipolar. One student, long since graduated, has been in the bughouse nearly 30 times, and she goes on. But she's in that "lucky" 15% of bipolars who suffer more from mania than depression.

On the net I'm best known as a poet. Yet in my bios I pointedly included my bipolar disease for the sake of honesty. Am I proud to be a bipolar? No, that would be like being proud of my height. I had little to do with either; they were the cards I was dealt, along with lumbar scoliosis, and later, severe degenerative disk disease.

Frankly, I resent the hell out of being manic-depressive. It has been a curse and also the strongest single determinant in the major choices of my life. My great burden is that I have been able to function at a high level even while psychotic, which prevented treatment. I've won many academic awards while essentially psychotic and wondering why they were given to me.

Thus I came to treatment late. In my psychiatry residency I was the golden boy so no one on the faculty considered the possibility I might have major mental illness when I got sick and had to drop out.

So, in a sense, my intelligence and the stoic endurance my mother instilled in me have worked against me. I never knew when to say "uncle." When I was finally diagnosed it took a good friend, also a psych resident, to persuade me to come to his hospital for treatment. And in my 30th year I finally met a doctor who made the diagnosis in all of half an hour. And so it goes.

Today I'm probably at 1.5 kilorats. On the bright side, when I awoke, I did have feelings of love for my beautiful wife. It's good to know they're still there, since depression reduces all feelings to a flat landscape of obsidian squares beneath a brass sky.

I'm laying off posting poems for now. If any readers wish for me to post them more often, I'll be happy to comply.


Thine in Truth and Art,

CE

Crawling out of depression...

I was a bit melancholy today, maybe at 1 kilorat (or a little more) of depression.

There has been a push in psychiatry of late to determine the success of treating depression by complete remission, not merely improvement.

I am not in remission.

Depression always hits me like a ton of bricks. I wake up one day and the world has gone black-and-white and my core has been removed. Luckily, for years I've been warned by depressive dreams to increase or augment my medication a number of times. This time I can't remember a warning, and I've been struggling for over three months.

Although for me the onset of depression seems instantaneous, coming out of it can be very gradual.

For those who have not experienced it, being depressed is like a being hollowed out. Afterwards nothing remains between the dead walls of the log that encircle what never was.

With treatment, the log has to imagine it's being filled with wood again. But that wood now has a ghostly quality, because bipolars and serious unipolars, though they regain their lives, can never forget how their lives were so easily snatched from them. Life never has the same solidity again. Which makes one's personality feel very much like a construct even when one's mood returns to "normal."

A bad depression is a death and a birth, For example, as I improve I'm trying to get to know my wife again and why I love her so much--what it feels like to love her instead of acting intellectually as if I did. That's how I survive depressions, by the way, "having to construct something to hope upon"--pretending. Pretending in my chemical despair until my neurotransmitters recalibrate and life becomes real again.

I write this today because it's rarely talked about. There's much more to say about it, but I'm done for now.


Thine in Kilorats or Kilobunnies,

C. E. Chaffin

Poetry Thursday: "Already"

Already

If you haven’t filed your taxes in years
and with a dry throat call the 800 number
to be put on hold forever while dying to hang up,
tempted to one more dereliction in a life of derelictions,

or if your teenagers grieve you by apathy
and drug abuse, reminding you
of your own adolescence so you can’t draw the line
without feeling hypocritical,

or if you cultivate a false smile over coffee
because you went to bed angry at your mate,
pretending to polite conversation
while entertaining fantasies of divorce,

or if you write a hopeful piece
instead of your usual blue ramblings
and fear others will find it facile, your art
of no account, just therapy for the overeducated,

then reach out through the stillness
for a thimbleful of light poured
into your words without measure.
Look! It is already in your palm.


(published in Kimera (print))


This poem is the fifth in the second part of Sine Wave, showing the gradual elevation of the speaker's mood. I love saying that a poem is "self-explanatory," like this one, because that means I didn't overdo it, didn't require too much of the reader, didn't obfuscate my meaning by overindulgence in form. Those who have taken my poetry tutorial know whereof I speak. Speaking of which, I'm still teaching the course and the link is on the left, below. References on request. I think most of my former students will say it's one of the best bargains on the net.

Thine,

CE

Bipolar Poet Approaches Normal Mood

I'm approaching that blissful state of normality where I am neither moving too slow nor too fast, where I laugh but not too much, where the Tesla coil of my mind only throws out one bolt of blue lightning at a time. For most people not under the influence of some drug, that's how it is every day. Anxiety can get them riled up and moving too fast, but that passes, just as they might be slowed by grief--failing an exam, missing a promotion, losing a pet, but that passes, too.

For a bipolar the mind is either filled with devils running in Dantean circles or hyperactive angels bouncing off the cranium. And those angels are not "the better angels of our nature," no, just dopamine/serotonin/noradrenaline-powered sprites.

Bipolars are often mistaken for being smarter than they are because their minds can move so quickly--think Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters, two sufferers (although Williams has not come out of the closet). These high-octane comedians can only do what they do because they have the gene. If you overwhelm someone with information at high speed, they're going to think you're bright.

Beware: there's a big difference between bright and quick.

Although tomorrow is "Poetry Thursday," I'm going to post a poem today that, like "American Zen," tries to capture that neutal plane between depression and mania, retardation and hyperactivity, that has been so hard for me to maintain in life--why I take multiple medications and once had to undergo electroshock.

Other folks take drugs to feel different; I take drugs to feel normal.

Here's the poem:



Nothing to Say

I have nothing needful to say,
no comment on the glittering bay
or the dark, snow-topped wall
of the San Gabriels.

Things used to be pulled from me,
uprooted lilke weeds from a garden.
I let the weeds bloom now.

The red-throated bird
that lives in my chipped balcony light
sings for a mate I have never seen.

I let my words run like watercolors.
Time runs only forward.
Why should art be different?
Here is the last line.



(unpublished)

--CE

1000 Rats Euthanized: Vogon Poem: Feeling Nearly Neutral

I'm really coming close to neutral, mood-wise, and it scares me. My mind is fairly blank. Depressed, my mind works overtime on the same insoluble problems--no, I wouldn't call it work, more like useless ruminations, while in better-than-neutral moods, say a touch of hypmania, I have too many ideas. It's a pleasure to have fewer ideas knocking around in my mind.

First, go have a poem produced by the BBC Hitchhiker's Guide Vogon machine. You'll love this. It's easy and you'll smile at the result.

**********************

For those who haven't heard, Roger Dier's nation of rats was euthanized. Apparently his naive hope that most humans would find rats delightful pets may have been in part due to his missing the Middle Ages in school.

Rats are things people pay other people to keep away! Scientists buy them just to torture them. They are useful as one of the last mammalian links in the scavenging of garbage, a useful pursuit if only it didn't produce more rats. An absence of garbage in a city would soon put an end to rats. Rats and garbage are like home prices and interest rates.

Roger told us "rats were clean"--except under his care, sinch health officers found a near unbearable stench when they broke into rat nation. They were properly careful of white rats with shaved heads and swastikas.

Did you know that Roger Dier is an ex-con who was involved in Frank Sinatra Jr.'s kidnapping and served time for it? Rat Pack, meet Rat Man!

As for the rats being euthanized, I don't know the method. One assumes gas would be most efficient. Hmmm...I see a comfortable little dentist's chair with Muzak playing where each rat is led and a tiny mask applied. They think it's nitrous oxide but it's really fatal!

And the beauty of it is that none of the rats in the waiting room suspect it. They think they're going to have their teeth sharpened like Ferengis.

Out back waits a 1000-rat hearse lined with disposable plastic. And at the end of this brutal day the black ambulance drives to the rodentorium. Que sera, sera.


At only half a kilorat,

Thine,

CE

New Photo; Depression Update

I had to post this picture in order to have a URL from which to transfer it to my profile's photo. In it I'm younger and thinner but it still bears a fair resemblance to me, and I think it's not quite so doughty as the others I've borrowed from various e-zines who were good enough to include a photo.

I'm at about 1000 kilorats of depression, where I can work in my garden or schlep 250 lbs. of rat food if need be. But I still somewhat recoil from any affectionate touching by my wife. I fear intimacy and don't understand why anyone would want to be affectionate towards me.

I am getting better, I know the signs. At times Nature almost appears beautiful, but I have as yet no inner response to the sublime, no overawed appreciation of the redwood coast where I live, which my NY-raised wife says is the most beautiful place she's ever seen. I can see that it's beautiful, but the consequent feeling is as yet lacking. It will come, I'm sure.

This has been my worst and longest depression in 10 years, near as I can remember. The last one followed a mania and resulted in my last hospitalization and also, eventually, my retirement from medicine. This one's already past three months in duration but the meds seem to be kicking in, thank Pfizer!

In view of my hoped-for recovery, I'll need a new measure for feeling above average, or hypomanic, or God forbid, manic. For this I propose another rodent, a happy, bouncing, soft, cuddly one: a bunny! Mood above the mean will now be measured in kilobunnies. I look forward to that day when I tell you, dear reader, that I'm feeling around three kilobunnies.


Thine,

CE

Celebrate blog's upcoming birthday; poetry, zeolite, and magic beans.

Hi! Come July 27 this blog will have a first birthday.

Until June of 2006 I didn't know the first thing about blogging. I thank Carl Bryant and Cynthia Bagley for schooling me in how to get a stat counter, how to back-link, how to participate in the online community.

I'm a little surprised that videoblogs have not taken over yet, but perhaps the Net is a more literary medium by nature. Most of us have televisions.

One thing I have yet to learn about blogging is how to be brief. It's hard for me to sit down and write less than 1000 words. Most blog updates are not more than 200. I'm a natural bloviator.

Tonight at an open mic where only singer-guitarists played, I recited my poem, "The Deprivathon," for the second time (it appears earlier in this blog). It's a diary of quitting smoking. The crowd was not prepared for it but they treated me well.

I was the unexpected poet. Kind of nice to be in a singular category at a music-oriented open mic.

I made myself go read although I was tired. Why? Because in my still lingering depression,though now mild to moderate, I tried to behave on the basis of commitment, not feeling. I didn't particularly want to go. But as a poet I need to commit myself to whatever outlets invite me. It's not like poetry's a paying gig, so you don't have the dollar driving you. You have to drive yourself.

I've probably gone beyond 200 words now.

I met a fellow on the beach today who told me zeolite would cure all forms of cancer--how he beat it himself. I went home to the Net and disovered one animal study suggesting zeolite might be helpful as an adjunct to Doxyrubicin, a standard chemotherapeutic agent.

I love the human capacity to believe. More than half of us would trade our cow for a bag of magic beans. Isn't that just the way it goes?

Thine,

CE

Sonnet Sunday: Psilocybin

My depression continus to improve as my weight continues to increase.

I didn't mean to skewer poor 67-yr.-old Roger Dier out of SchadenFreude, I just thought the whole thing worth a dark laugh, although some of you may want to see LKD's comment on that column.

Having only recently learned of "Poetry Thursday" as a blog tradition, I want to challenge other bloggers to join me in "Sonnet Sunday." The sonnets don't have to be that good as long as they fulfill the form. I have noticed, however, among my poetry students, that many have difficulty with traditional form. It is still my antedeluvian contention that no poet should write "free verse" until he has mastered form to some degree. The course I teach (see link left margin below) first forces form upon my students before letting them become "free-range" poets.

Below, one I just wrote, of no particular merit, I suppose, though based on real experiences in Mexico.



Not My Drug of Choice

We walked on Mushroom Mountain and found
Two varieties of psilocybin-
Laced fungi; one was orange and one
Was white, small and bland for toadstools’ kin.
We found the most in cow pies near the shade,
Their pale stalks rising from manure green.
The cows that milled around were unafraid,
Small-brained herbivores, mainly Holstein.
My son collected more and ate a bunch
Without washing; I declined for hygiene’s
Sake (and in order to keep my lunch),
Also because I hate the rainbow sheen
That coats everything when I’m tripping
In an oily film, light prismed and dripping.


--CE

Picnic Ideas for the 4th of July Weekend

For the Fourth of July weekend I'm pasting in excerpts from a previous column that, like much of my work on the Net, has been depublished. It's meant as an aid to menus for Independence day. (Or every dog has its day.)

From "Running Chicken":

Does "free range" chicken sometimes make you wonder where they get all those little cowboys on rabbits to round them up? Then there's the Chinese solution. They have, I'm told, genetically engineered a chicken with a body like a cube-- with one feather, no wings, a head and feet. It's about a half an inch wide and can be raised in bureau drawers and teacups. It'll eat anything, and when fully grown (which may take up to a week depending on which steroids one employs), it's easy to dress. Chop, chop, pull one feather and voila! There you have it-- a chicken cube, or 'nugget' as Americans prefer to call them. So if you order orange chicken at a Chinese restaurant and you find yourself looking at small cubes united by a lot of batter, at least you'll know it's genuine Chinese chicken, not the herded variety now popular with yuppies.

I did eat rabbit recently and I want to say, unequivocally, that it does not taste like chicken. The meat was longer and stringier, and there was a hint of sage and grass in it, some reminder of a sunny meadow from its past life. I really like rabbit. Yet if they invented rabbit nuggets I doubt they would taste as good. Then nuggets are never served as nuggets except when breaded to look like parts of a natural animal, and of course, "Parts is parts."

Curiously, in Korea they have two kinds of dogs—the small, yellowish short hairs they keep in pens to sell for the dinner table and the regular varieties we call pets. One thing I learned from reading about the World Cup this year is that Seoul has about 400 restaurants that serve dog. I've never eaten dog, but I think it's odd that the breed of dog raised for Oriental consumption ended up roughly the same color as chickens.

For those who don't know, dog was a favorite food of the American Indians, so I think we should add it to our Independence Day menu, along with our venerable hot dogs, to honor the Fourth of July. Yet although our (pet) dog is yellow, or golden, it is not a short hair. I fear if I cooked him my wife would go to prison for murder although my troubles would be over. I can hear my pitiful excuse as she holds a gun to my head: "But honey, I didn't mean to really cook him, I was just demonstrating, you know, and we got to talking… and then after a couple of beers we noticed his fur was burning and he wouldn't wake up so we skinned him to make it easier on everybody."

Of course, if Cher and Madonna and Barbara Streisand and Sally Fields all started eating dog, everyone else in Hollywood would try it. "It's not as if they're pets," I can hear Ed Asner saying. "They were raised for food."

How about a dog nugget? A little more complicated for bioengineers, given the four legs and a tail, but certainly not an insurmountable challenge. You put enough batter on something and people believe there must be meat in it.

To these thoughts I'll add an appropriate poem from one of my favorite poets, whom we featured in The Melic Review twice. For more of his work, click on his name below.

--CE


Censored from Larousse Gastronomique

To cook a puppy, hang the carcass from its hind feet
with a nylon rope--eighth-inch will do: it's strong
but pliant too. Now slice around the ankles
with a boning knife (unless you have a flenser,
which is better still.) Part the skin along the thighs
and join these cuts--a sort of wye--to a clean incision
crotch to chin. Take care not to break
the peritoneum: it's a mess if all the guts get out.
Pull off the skin in one soft piece. You'll need to tug
to get across the head. Think, "Child's pajama top,"
and you'll have it right first time you try.
Sever the rectum from the anus and the stomach from the throat.
Gently scoop the entrails to your waste pail. Puppy sweetbreads
are a different recipe, as are the heart and lungs
which we discard as well. Truss the carcass you have cleaned
to a roasting spit and rub with sea-salt, crushed garlic, sage.
Cook turning often, as you would a capon
or a suckling pig. Serves two for puppies aged six weeks,
three for larger breeds.

--Scott Murphy

Read more Murphy

Penis-Pumping Judge

From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, AP: "Former Judge Donald D. Thompson, a veteran of 23 years on the bench, is on trial on charges he used a penis pump on himself in the courtroom while sitting in the judgment of others."

More: "She [court reporter Lisa Foster] testified that during a trial in 2002, she heard the pump during the emotional testimony of a murdered toddler’s grandmother."

And: "The allegation came to light after a police officer...heard pumping sounds."

My, after such a long and distinguished career, already receiving a $7500/mo. pension, Donald D. must find this deflating.

He (in my opinion) pump-perjured himself in testimony when he claimed the device was just a gag gift he should have thrown away. But isn't it really an anti-gag gift, since it won't gag as some humans are known to do (even if it can't swallow)?

As a pre-Viagra doctor I used to prescribe these things. They are generally composed of a plastic cylinder with a pump that sucks air out of it, creating a negative pressure, so that when the open end of the cylinder is placed closely around the base of the penis, the penis fills with blood. They're clumsy, and the erection is hard to sustain. so many of these devices come with rubber cock rings to slip down the erect penis before the blood leaks out. And in my examining room I used to have to estimate what size ring to prescribe. That's a good way to ruin your practice.

Sexy, huh?

The devices weren't very successful in my experience, for the most part producing a hard-on with the attitude of a drooping hot dog. And I never had a patient tell me the experience produced an orgasm, so don't think of poor Donald D. as soiling his robes--this story isn't that juicy.

My dear and darling wife, Kathleen was rather horrified by this revelation, but I said, "Hey, trials are boring, think of it as if he were just chewing gum." In reply she said, "Craig Erick, you are disgusting!" I knew that.

But seriously, have some compassion for this man. He had to wear a big black dress and sit on his ass all day, listening to procedural drivel and picayune wrangling while trying to appear attentive. After 20 years of this he needed something to keep him attentive--yes, a little risky, but I think playing with the pump kept him sharp. As for indecent exposure, how did the clerk or policeman peek that far behind the bench? I'd say the judge's privacy was invaded.

He could get 40 years and have to register as a sex-offender if convicted, a sentence crazier than using the pump. For Donald's sake I hope the judge that handles this case also handles himself occasionally to stay attentive.

Still, isn't the possible sentence taking the rod of justice too far? I say, what is done under the bench stays under the bench. Let the poor guy go. So he took an infantile comfort in this penis pump, did he hurt anybody? Only the court reporter's sense of propriety. Get over it, lady, and wait until your man gets old.

Of course the Freudian aspects of his behavior are obvious: He's acting out as the naughty little boy with Oedipal problems, willing to risk everything to pretend to dominance, while secretly hoping to be caught, punished, and relieved of the responsibility of the bench by a powerful mother figure. He should have just gotten a private spanking partner for these urges. No need to humiliate oneself when another would gladly do it.

There's a whole cult of spankers out there, btw, claiming not to have intercourse but simply exchanging swats. They think it wholesome. I knew one who was spanking his best friend's wife and vice-versa; his friend never found out. There's millions of paddlers out there, trust me. There's something about sex that brings the infantile out in all of us.

For any interested, I'm at about 1.5 kilo rats of depression. I actually had a few positive feelings in inspecting my vegetable garden yesterday. And even in the worst of depressions, I never quite lose my sense of humor, even if I can't laugh. Humor, Freud taught us, is a mature defense. In my family of origin that means black humor. (Is there any other kind?)


Thine as Always,

C. E. Chaffin

Depression and Weight Gain

There has been quite a response to my last post on kilorats of depression, so I want to thank those who read it.

My intent all along in this blog has been to make people laugh.

In that spirit, bloggers have informed me that Thursday is the traditional day for bloggers to post poems. Notice I have a link to "Poetry Thursday."

Again, for the veterans here, if you look at my profile at the top of the page you may have noticed that my weight has changed from 250 lbs. to 270. I blame this on quitting smoking and the weight-gaining medications I'm taking for my depression like lithium and olanzapine (Zyprexa). But I'd much rather be fat and happy then svelte and depressed, and I am improving incrementally. It helps when Kathleen makes fun of me. It seems in my depressions only abuse feels ego-syntonic, probably because I think I deserve it. And in that abuse by my friends and family, I find a certain sanity, and a connection to my own humanity I might otherwise not make.

Satirizing me when depressed helps much more than compassion, as sympathy will bring the "tears, idle tears" of which Tennyson wrote. He was, incidentally, likely a bipolar II and his uncle (or father?) "Mad Jack" was definitely a bipolar I. At least 20% of recognized poets through the ages have been manic-depressive, the highest of any known artistic pursuit, and I suspect it's even higher when you look at self-treatment with laudenum and alcohol.

But enough statistics. I'm posting a poem today about weight gain as a consequence or defense against depression, a poem that should convince the skeptic that poetry can actually be fun. Here goes:


Pseudovillanelle

Two days ago I woke up fat.
I'm not gonna hate myself for that.
I did indulge my appetite

like a starving rat,
So I avoid mirrors and dress in black.
I’m not gonna hate myself for that.

I may be fat but I'm not blind.
I did indulge my appetite
because depression savaged my mind.

You see, it's not easy to be easy on me.
I'm all spiky inside like a cactus.
Two days ago I woke up fat.

I may be fat but I'm not blind.
If I did indulge my appetite,
it was only to distract

my stomach’s acid pit
from the black hole of my mind,
too melancholy to react.


(published in Ygdrasil)

(click on the magazine to see this poem and others)

And what does all this prove? That fat people aren't always jolly!

Though improved, I'm at least in a 2 kilorat depression.


Thine in Calories and Committment,

CE

In Petaluma, CA: Roger Dier's 1000-Rat Depression

No more need for the Hamilton Depression Inventory or other studied tools of medical discovery. A man in Petaluma, CA, has provided us with a new measure of depression.

Last week Roger Dier was apprehended with 1000 rats in his apartment, mostly in cages, some free range. Everything in his small house had been gnawed on. He had to buy 250 lbs. of rat food every five days to support his charges. He slept at his office to avoid the smell and noise of his own menagerie at night.

From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat 6/24: "Dier said depression, loneliness, denial and his recent bout with ill health were to blame for the rats."

So, this guy who claims to be depressed nevertheless has it together to schlepp 250 lbs. of rat food every five days to spare these dear creatures? The horde, incidentally, began when Roger spared a baby rat trying to escape from being dinner for his three-foot python, who would not eat dead rodents.

Frankly, I don't think much of this fellow's depression. A 1000-rat depression must therefore be considered fairly mild. I mean, he's still feeding the rats! So his depression must weigh less than 250 lbs.

Later in the same article Roger is quoted: "I did not set out to do this. I do acknowledge irresponsibility and there's a case for laziness, denial, incompetence and just plain foolishness." But, "It was not all my fault," he added. "It was this force of nature that overwhelmed me." More: "I was aware of the crushing burden of having to take care of them all," he said.

For starters, whether I were depressed or manic, I would have it together not to be overwhelmed by pet rats. I mean, one would have to be beyond using toilet paper to be so neglectful of reality--nearly catatonic with self-neglect--and this guy wasn't. I think this 60-something dude is just an elder slacker.

Seriously, how depressed could he be? He still has feelings for the rats, which means he still has some positive feelings for himself. And he can't bear to face the holocaust of their future; he's the Oskar Schindler of rodents! So much to live for.

In another article I learned that "animal hoarders" are typically women and involve cats, which made Roger's case even more interesting.

In a true depression I would not feel qualified to care for rats.

Maybe I could manage one dog or cat. Yet the serious depressive might give his beloved pet up for fear that association with its owner could be having a deleterious effect upon the poor animal.

So, a 1000-rat depression I take as a mild depression. Henceforth I propose that all depressions be estimated in kilorats. The upper limit might be 10 kilorats, for which I nominate melancholic catatonia. Naturally, the depression of suicides must be excluded, not only because they must communicate from beyond the grave but because their participation would be unfair to those of us who have never summoned the courage. Besides, suicide is for wimps. I've had worse depressions when I felt that suicide would draw unwarranted attention to myself, which I did not deserve, hence suicide would be crediting myself with too much importance. I'd give that sort of depression nine kilorats, as well as any depression requiring ECT. Right now I'd rate myself at two kilorats; my depression has been slowly improving, as you can see by the lighter material offered today.

I have a poem today that shares something with Mr. Dier's rat problem, below. Watch your kilorats. If you get over three, please see a doctor, but don't bother me, I just play one on the Net.

Until the next post,

CE



The Intruder

Evil seeped through floorboards.
Only the dead could endure it.
From a faint bud it blossomed
into a putrid flower
stuffing every pore, rank as hell.
So I imagined
a dead whale beneath the house
in blubbery liquefaction,
or corpses bloated with gas,
or death itself, if it has a smell.

The red velvet of my guitar case
began to stink.
We called a professional.

I led him to the crawl space vent
where it reeked so thickly
I thought the air had died.
Gowned and masked
for his grotesque midwifery,
he pulled a rigid possum out,
pink tail curled like a stiff worm dangling,
fur falling out in chunks
like some cheap carnival toy.

And the sharp-toothed grin
on that pointed face
with its obsidian eyes
looked mean, even vengeful,
as if he decomposed to spite us.


(published in Afternoon Magazine, no archives now available)

Poem #4 in ascent to mania; current mood not congruent with poem.

The poem below is the fourth in the second half of Sine Wave which leads from a neutral mood to a manic state as it ascends and intensifies. This poem was previously published in 2 River View. I think it is mainly the intensity of the language, a language seeking to capture light, that gives this poem a manic air, along with the rather freedom-flaunting diction. No, it does not reflect my present mood, but that is of no consequence in art. For me to be out-of-synch with my art as I post it makes me more an artist than not. My works exist apart from me and my current mood cycle. If I have been successful, my poems achieve an existence entirely separate from me or even any consideration of my personality or biography.

I think I wrote this in Oklahoma while attending an Oral Roberts University conference on "Christianity and Medicine." I must have been 24. Don't ask me about the conference or Oral. I did visit the prayer tower, however. Apparently Oral thought the higher we pray, the quicker we got to God. He really should have leased a room in the Sears Tower IMHO.

Still depressed, and thinking about Oral Roberts' prayer tower just makes it worse.



Telephone Wires at Dusk

These wires, iced at sunset with duskfire,
have a brightness beside themselves,
their taut lengths humming with unknown conversations
lipping their secrets electrically
through the copper entrails
of the black rubber body,
transfigured at twilight into phosphorescence
of brightwire, a thin white welder’s rod
of incandescent tongues.
-------------------------As if the light could see
the cold particulars passing between ears
at this second dawn, dying of day
and night’s birth; and if the sun
could expose it all by omniscient heliotelepathy—
and if the words were fire laced with the salt of reason,
leaving the burnt scent of compassion
in the air—
-------------If but the words,
the words between men I mean,
were true as these flaming wires,
how beautiful these transient fires would be:
fit companions of stars.

(published in 2 River View)
(click link for original publication)

Self-Esteem Problems; New Poem

I changed my photo again, the new one's from a reading in San Francisco sponsored by Pedestal Magazine.

I did not plan to blog today, but in trying to change my picture I ended up here.

I already had my morning catharsis by writing a long letter to a friend. While writing I started crying about my chronic self-esteem issues, how nothing I ever did was good enough, and besides, how accomplishments would never bring me love, much less self-love. But knowing how you're fucked up often doesn't help you're being fucked up.

Self-esteem is a gift that cannot be earned. Those who try to earn it will eventually be disappointed by their own efforts. Knowing this does not deliver one from being driven, sadly.

Why is it so many good people feel bad about themselves and so many bad people feel good about themselves?

I had a depressive dream last night with the recurrent theme: Why didn't you finish your psychiatry residency? (I had just a year to go.) When I woke I remembered the reason I dropped out was severe depression, something no one on the faculty could diagnose in me because I was their "golden boy" and none presumed that I might be suffering from one of the two major mental illnesses, the one that inspired the term, "lunatic."

Today I'm going to post a poem from my For Kathleen: Love Poems manuscript, because she was insightful enough to instantly recognize my self-esteem problem, sending me a piece of jewelry as an antidote back in '99. The poem tells the story well enough:


About the Bracelet

You sent me a silver bracelet.
"Damn I'm good," it said. But I found it
heavy and constricting, even painful
in its alien density. I was forgetting
my body again, how any restriction
burns like handcuffs, even a watchband,
but you know this—so I hung it from my keychain.
I like the heft of it there, I like to stretch
my knuckles against its links and feel
the ache of constant use relax.

What if all the righteous faded
by subtle increments to stark transparency
until no one could see them but themselves?
Left to our sordid board games,
would we even notice their absence?
In this scenario, you'd have disappeared
before we met. I'm so glad I see you!
And this bracelet, whether it marks my wrist
or jabbers with the keys, proves
I am also visible to you:

You saw the poor boy in the rich man's house.
You clothed him in your sea-green light.
You kissed him with your coral lips,
sucked poison from his stonefish heart
and smoothed the ragged seaweed
from his brow with patient fingers, whispering,
"You are loved, little boy, you are loved."


(published in Niederngasse)

If you click on the Niederngasse link above, you can read six more love poems from my feature.


Thine in ups and downs,

CE

Poem #30; Depression Continues

On the Anthropic Principle

Here at the spoke-ends of our galaxy
it is easy to forget the central axle moving
insensibly slow, still the silvery-white
dispersion of stars soothes randomly
until we impose a pattern, like the Magi,
like the Greeks.
-------------------And despite the most
accurate of calendars, dawn remains a wager
until the great lion of the sun peers over the plains
with a growl of heat and the day blooms and withers
toward the violet hour where even wise men
arrive as strangers because the arrangement
is never the same.
-------------------As the latest layer of bones,
can we ever appreciate how far
the swan’s neck stretched to uphold its head,
how far the spider’s strand thinned without snapping?
Can we recall the dark alternatives dodged,
any of which could have unmade us?
Always there were detours where the river
never creased the rock that never
rose from the sea that never
spawned a single fossil.
-------------------------When light illumines
the Grand Canyon in winter’s slant at sundown,
the stripes of ages burn with every visible color.
What is the color of a radio wave?
Only a man asks that.



(I had to used dashes because I couldn't figure out how to html the spacing; published in Poetry Now)


I’m proud of today’s poem in that my ambition in poetry has always been to combine philosophy with music, substance with form, and I thought this one turned out pretty well. That I can say this may indicate my depression is not as severe. If so I can only credit the addition of an antipsychotic drug two days ago. In addition I’m taking two mood stabilizers and two classes of antidepressants. Since 1996 this combination has not failed to eventually lift me out of the doldrums, and I say doldrums ironically, since the word sounds so harmless and normal. It’s not doldrums, it’s a maelstrom.

What the antipsychotic seems to do, besides increase my appetite, cause weight gain, and other fun side effects, is to dull the inner fear, the apprehension that constantly accompanies depression.

I wanted to mention another symptom of depression, which you likely won’t find in the textbooks. I call it dysynchrony. Here’s what it’s like: I go to make coffee. I have trouble remembering how to do it, and anxiety pushes me forward in time or keeps me behind, so the feeling is that there is an ideal time, a synchronous time in which I might make coffee smoothly, but I can’t drop into that stream of time. Instead I fall behind or clumsily speed ahead. I’m spooning coffee into the filter, for instance, but I spill because I’m thinking of putting the water in. Then the grounds that fell out into the plastic cone have to be washed out, and I shudder at the extra task, fearing the detour will ruin my chances at making coffee. It’s as if the linear progression of a nearly automatic task has been fragmented into pieces, and I’m trying to put them together in a row but they keep moving about. When I finally succeed in making the coffee, it seems like a miracle and I wonder how I did it.

The worst experience of this, which I think I already mentioned in this blog, was when I was hospitalized for depression in 1996. I was trying to figure out how to tie my boots. I stared and stared at the eyelets, I didn’t know where to begin, or how to pull the laces diagonally across the tongue. I thought I would never figure it out, that I might never wear shoes again or that I might have to go barefoot about the hospital. I was too paralyzed to ask for help, but I finally managed it myself. That depression, incidentally, lasted eleven months, and necessitated my going on disability. Since I have not had to work as a doctor I haven’t been hospitalized again. But I’ve also become more skillful in managing my meds.

I don’t want today’s memo to sound too hopeful. As I re-read it, it sounds much too positive for my present state. I’m far from being out of the woods.

All for today,

CE

Though Depressed, frightens neighbors and upsets wife but makes it to gym.Though depressed, upsets wife, frightens neighbors and goes to gym..

Last night our neighbors reminded me of how I'd cavalierly spoken of suicide during my last visit, which they thought was... well, harsh... then they're from Malibu. In any case I didn't remember, though no doubt I likely did make said remarks, since I think of suicide as part of life's woof and warp and not a subject to be feared or avoided.

I answered the "suicide question" at age 30. I don't like to let the idea of it remain in my brain for very long since it is therefore of of no comfort, contrary to Nietzsche's cheerful prescription.

It is an old misnomer that people who really commit suicide don't talk about it: they do--until those last hours or minutes when the thought goes on automatic, when it's too late to call out because they've already hopped the train.

Unless otherwise proven, most cases of suicide are clearly the result of inadequately treated depression, which we have all around us.

********************

Yesterday was extremely stressful. I was out in the world, and my mate keep asking me questions, like, "Do you need anything from the market?" In my depressed state the pressure of making decisions is fearful. I finally blurted: "Don't ask me any more questions, please!" which, although it made Kathleen angry, also gave me some protection from going daffy-odo-yodel-hoo, if you get my drift.

Later when she asked me if I wanted pepper or salt on my sandwich I made my own rather than respond to another query. She was miffed by this as well. So we avoided each other all night and I went to bed early, afraid of her coming up, afraid I might accidentally touch her when she got in bed, since I had been so clearly shoved away. When she got into bed and put her hand on my wrist, I was afraid to touch her back, not knowing if it were better that I protected myself and allowed no connection, or to pretened that things were normal and reciprocate. I finally touched her back, hesitantly, feeling no connection but hoping the behavior she expected might mollify her for the night.



***************


I did something yesterday in my depression for which I deserve a medal. I haven't been to a gym in years, but we'd joined one here, and I hadn't been yet in two months. Kathleen dropped me off. I did my floor exercises, mild weight-lifting, 10 min. at level 2 on the Stairmaster, and 500 yards of swimming.

When depressed and forcing yourself to exercise like this, each stroke of the arm in the pool makes the next one more difficult to believe, but you persist, almost like a cartoon being drawn by another hand, and you get through it, though you can't believe it afterwards. Exercise in depression, something very hard to make oneself do, has this advantage: no human contact necessary.

**************

Now, ironically, I get to paste in a happier poem than my present mood can tolerate, from Sine Wave Part II: "To the Apogee...And Down Again."

At the Aquarium of the Pacific

I saw a brilliant angelfish whose tail

and fins shimmered yellow until it turned

and silver spread like an undercoat of fur

when stroked against the nap, across its scales.

Black as caviar and rimmed with gold,

its eyes, though flat as dimes, looked deep as wells.

The clownfish cruising by above the shells,

its idiotic smile painted bold,

passed disinterested as if it’d seen

it all before. Maybe. But I've heard
fish see only black-and-white, so why

this purple puffer and iridescent green
parrot fish-- and for whom? It's absurd

to credit chance. Either for us or for the light.

(pubished in Niederngasse)

Dr. Chaffin Capitulates; Blog Resumed

I remember when I first heard of web diaries or journals; an e-zine for which I wrote a column was giving an award for the best web journal. I paid it no mind, even though that's essentially what the other columnist at the magazine wrote (a diary of living in New York).

My columns were more set pieces: distilled to amuse and graze the absurd. As such they were not about me, merely processed through my mind. Still, the voice of a written piece exerts an influence on how material is presented so that even when one is writing about something, the personal is unavoidable. Call it "the unavoidable subjective."

Objectivity is voiceless; without a voice written pieces don't interest, except for technical information. And even instruction manuals have a voice: "Put tab A in Slot B;" "Be sure to disconnect these wires before proceeding." The voice of such manuals strikes me as the voice of an early TV robot, as in Lost in Space, trying to give instructions in a jerky, solicitious manner which, by imitating the foibles of a machine, emphasized its humanity.

If the unavoidable subjective is celebrated and admitted, as in the typical blog, then an opposite danger arises: that in habitual confession of one's actual view the view begins to assume a life of its own, until it can become a parody of itself and no longer honest, though it strive to be honest--at this point the autobiographical becomes a noose for creativity.

In writing fiction characters must be created. Of course there is part of the writer and parts of people he's observed in such characters, as they don't arrive from nowhere. But a good writer of fiction is praised not for being himself, but for being someone in his characters.

What if I were to reverse this trend by writing autobiographically while actually becoming different characters because of my mood disorder?

This may not work because my defenses mask the disease. In fact, my brother and his wife, who were just up to visit and he had no idea I was seriously depressed until I told him near the end of our second outing.

"You hide it so well!" he said.

"I don't like depression to get in the way of having fun," I deadpanned. (I almost laughed at that.)

Although I took no pleasure to our outing to the beach with the dogs, I am committed to going through the motions as if I were not depressed, as in depression one thing's just as bad as another. When the terror of solitude is equal to the terror of company, why not endure company? You're just killing time.

If I write confessionally to utmost of my abilities, trying to deliver my inner experience to the reader, will it result in multiple characters because of manic-depression? Probably not, because the voice I write in to communicate the different persons will have and equalizing effect.

This is why the poems about manic-depression are important to me, though I have published more poems about other things; because in poetry one can change the form, the substance and the voice so that one poem can incarnate a different character, or at least the distortions of a phase.

To be present, right now I bore myself to tears. I feel fractured; my past endeavors and roles seem to recede below me into paper dolls. If I pass a janitor I begin to wonder why I'm not a janitor, and I envy the concrete tasks he has before him, and I want to be a janitor; what a failure I am compared to that janitor! Look how useful he is! But if I consider the job of the janitor it fills me with anxiety, too, because what would I say to the principal? What if I hurt myself? Being a janitor is equally scary.

The self wants to get out of the self into something else in depression, but the problem is that in inhabiting another self for purposes of escape from the self, the self that imagines that alternate self brings its own sense of pervasive worthlesness with it and ruins it all. The grass is greener on the other side of the hill but it's just the same old grass, because there you are.

I'll start posting the second half of my ms., Sine Wave, even though my life belongs in the first half of depression. Today's poem:



American Zen

I lay on a railroad track
and felt the thrum
of approaching engines
until the near shiver
nudged me down
the gravel skirt to safety.

I was not suicidal,
just possessed
of a beingness
so elementary
I wouldn't know
I was marble
if you chiseled out my eyes.

Like the meniscus
of an abandoned well
walled from wind
by a chimney of stone
there is no bucket
to disturb my black transparency.

I am beyond boredom,
so occupied with nothing
I lack all patience with sentience.


The poem, obviously, tries to convey of a state of acceptance beyond the ravages of feeling. A "neutral" poem in the middle of the ms.

CE

Still Depressed: Should I Continue?

I said I wouldn't post for a month.

Therefore this cannot be considered a post.

I have received encouragement from approximately 5% of those who sample this page.

I asked for 10%.

Why? Because I'm depressed. Because I crave validation. Because I want to be loved and think that I am useful. So far the response to this blog has been more validating than my numerous publications of poems, essays and stories by magazines.

Call it my first self-publishing venture.


Still melancholic, anhedonic and terminally insignificant,

CE

************************

From C. E.'s agent:

Keep those cards and letters coming. Either post here or write to cechaffin@hotmail.com Busy volunteers will be counting letters of encouragement as we pursue our budget goal.

Think: Just another ten messages of encouragement could keep CE blogging. And if you act now, you can get a free NPR tote bag autographed by Terry Gross and emblazoned with: "Blog on, CE!"

Sine Wave Part I Ends; No More Posts Until July Unless You Want Me.

Integration

The child is not the father to the man,
only an impressionable embryo.

Casualties ooze between my fingers
like congealed blood, unredeemable:

The little deaths of growing older:
the genuine smile now forced,

The honest glance engineered,
the green hope dissembled.

Is adulthood a capitulation,
a choice, or a deterioration?

I only know that the inevitable
losses we collect by living

Are best accepted and transformed
into a volume of forgiveness

Equal to the innocence displaced.


(Published in Solitary Harvest)

Amazingly, their archives are still available, just click on the link above. They feature two poets by name: myself and Marc Awodey. In the early days of the net he was prominent so I was happy to follow him and try to get published in the magazines in which he had appeared. I was not his fan neither but neither did I dislike his poetry; I took him for a trailblazer in polling art's worth: Did editors consider my poems worthy of publication? I considered him a somebody and I wanted to be one, too.

This was an important phase to me. I should never denigrate the encouragement early e-zines afforded me as a poet. I wonder where Marc is now, and whether I shall disappear as he did, and another writer and friend, Alan Kaufman (he went on to the paying media).

***************************

I'll give you a hint about today's piece, which signals a return to normal mood. It's not about "Time heals all wounds." It's about spiritual work, keeping current with the past, going to your brother before you go to the altar with an offering for some unknowable god as an excuse not to face your human burden.

Habits that help sustain sanity, in other words.

****************

As the title of my post states, I will not post again until July. I know many of you are going on vacation, life goes on, etc.

Nevertheless, and I'm not pulling an Oral Roberts here, I need to know if enough people benefit from this blog that I should continue writing. If 10% of those on my mailing list respond, I will continue. If not, I have better things to do with my time. I don't mean this as sour grapes but as a simple calculation of the best investment of my limited talent in the lottery of human need.

Until July (if you wish),

CE

Sine Wave #26 and How Do Agnostics Sustain Optimism?

The Existential Don Quixote

I am no knight in titanium armor
pushing destiny's buttons with a mailed finger,
more a janitor of chance collisions
sweeping up debris.

As a toddler I would have petted
the snakes Hercules strangled—
and his reward? A poison shirt
woven from immortal jealousy.

I was never captain of my soul,
just a kite's dream of control,
a myth of wind, the string too thin
to see between the windmill blades.


(Published in the now defunct shallow end.)

********************

This is my penultimate posting before the NBA Finals break.

Above the speaker no longer dwells upon the significance of his own chemically-induced sorrow, instead endorses entropy, admitting how little control he has over anything, including himself--a good therapeutic negotiation.

Hercules is used as an example; as the son of Zeus he did nearly everything right, and when he didn't, he repented and tried to make restitution. But that's not good enough for the gods; they are capricious. He died not in battle but by trickery, and a painful death it was. Ironically it was the blood of his own tutor, Chiron the centaur, that killed him, possibly because he did not follow his teacher's precepts as well as he might have--if one looks for a moral in the story.

If this is how a son of God was treated, how could I deserve anything better? Long-term the hard question is: If I were wrongly condemned to death and executed, would I still believe in the goodness of God? That's an easy "yes" for a believer. For the unbeliever I find it hard to understand optimism as derived from experience. "If mercy were based on evidence, I'd shoot you," I wrote in an earlier poem. If life sucks, why believe in anything better?

Jack London's Wolf Larsen declares man's individual ambition to be the ability to indulge in more "piggishness" than others. There is little to refute this in this world. "Steal a little and you go to jail, steal a lot and they make you king."

I'm sure I'm being too simplistic for enlightened humanists, but without a supernatural hope about the nature of the universe, morality is as much an impediment as anything else. From where do the agnostic majority derive hope? Radio gurus, self-help books, self-talk? Does it matter if such things are true or merely that they help?

I did read a great Arab proverb today: "If you ask a mule who his father was, he'll say, 'My mother was a horse.'" (from Wallace Stegner)


--CE

Cockroaches and Depression: Sine Wave #25

Kitchen Talk

The world's expert on melancholy
cringes in the corner.
"It's just my mood," he says
then scurries under the refrigerator,
safe in the compressor's hum.

Herky-jerky he scales the wall.

"Where are you going?" I ask.

"While that sweet motor still sings in my head
like the blessed cicadas, I must seize
this absence of self-absorption to scavenge."

"When will you return to human form?"

"When my shell chafes and I crave light
and faces don't look alien anymore."

"What about my face?"

"Don't make me look."


(unpublished)

******************

Strangely, this is one of the favorite poems of a former student of mine, Teresa White, whose website link appears on this blog (In What Furnace?).

You may not know her but if you google her you can sample her work.

Right now she is facing a serious health issue. My prayers are with her, but just as the speaker above cannot impose his view upon the cockroach, I will not try to impose compassion for a unknown friend upon readers.

Her husband is terrified.

Then the patient, after diagnosis, is often strangely protected by the dissociation between mind and body, the same dissociation doctors suffer from when discussing cases.

In any case I can give you the link to her being featured poet in The Melic Review: "Melic in Heat" --sexy stuff!

I have of late been receiving less comments about my blog, which may be due to the onset of summer or just the random concatenation of forces unknown. But do keep those cards and letters coming; though they won't reverse depression, they do help sustain me while I endure it.

I'm sending my finished manuscript on T. S. Eliot (T. S. Eliot: Dissociation and Incarnation) to a professor at a small Midwestern college tomorrow. I hope it doesn't seem too sophomoric to him, as he is someone I admire. He was also a great friend when I was a psychiatric resident in Michigan. We'd read our newly composed poems to each other over omelets on Saturday mornings. I can't even remember how I met him.

I often regret how geographical distance inhibits ongoing friendships. I imagine a village where all the people who've been close to me over the years live within walking distance. In modern life such an ambition is absurd, I suppose, despite Carole King's protestations. But isn't it interesting in this modern high-tech world that despite all our means of communication, there is no substitute for incarnation, for physical presence? When friends move away or I move away from them, a gradual loss ensues. Most of us are too busy to connect unless we remain in actual propinquity. This gives the lie to the phone, the Internet, and television evangelism.

Anyway, there's only two more days before Sine Wave Part I ("From the Nadir") will be entirely posted here. As I'm still suffering from depression, I'm not going to post the second half of the book until I have some confidence that my mood has improved and is likewise sustained for at least two weeks. I suppose most readers will be relieved by the break, and I don't blame them. Two weeks may not sound like much, but in severe depression it is an eternity. I am not severely depressed at present, but I'm definitely more submerged than above water, for reasons I explained in yesterday's post.

I must say, for those uninformed, that I found the saga of Laura VanRyn quite entertaining today. You can google the name if you wonder what all the fuss is about, but ironically, she is from the same area where I trained in psychiatry and met the aforementioned professor, Grand Rapids, Michigan.


May your optimism exceed your realism,

Thine,

CE

Sine Wave #24: "To My Psychiatrist": Mood Update

Poem redacted.

*****************************

I like working in form, and this poem, is, of course, a mangled villanelle. It is self-explanatory and almost whimsical when compared with some of the earlier pieces. The speaker's honesty with himself, while not entirely trusting himself to psychiatric intervention, shows good boundaries and perspective. He is a survivor, not a true believer. And he shows little shame for his habits; they mark the difference between psychiatric theory and what it's like for the patient.

*******************

I fell back into a depression about May 20, which I ascribe to resuming the analgesic therapy prescribed by my pain specialist, namely hydrocodone and acetaminophen. Along with Celebrex, these tablets work really well for my back pain. But, paradoxically, when I first take them they can render me hypomanic; at other times, continued use pushes me into melancholy. Withdrawal is certainly dangerous and may precipitate a depression, so withdrawal must be managed very incrementally.

The problem is change: my pain specialist is 600 miles away in San Diego, and will only give me enough medicine for two months, so unless I manage to get down there I have to withdraw. It is probably better that I don't take narcotics at all, but they are very seductive: Imagine a vacation from pain. And when one's mood is normal, the twin dangers of hypomania and depression don't appear so bad, one of the terrible things about a mood disorder: after a period of euthymia, or normal mood, we sometimes have trouble imagining the horrors of depression or the dangers of mania. As Heraclitus showed, you can't put your hand in the same stream twice, thus humans only notice change for the most part, and past lessons are hard to employ in present temptation.

Though I felt worthless yesterday, I did one good deed. Kathleen and I went to the local fair in Mendocino, a charming one-horse affair to raise money for local schools. Afterwards we strolled down in the village, and before I could turn my head, Kenyon and a larger, younger dog with the chest of a pit bull were locked in a mortal embrace; it took three of us to separate them, and afterwards Kenyon was bleeding; Kathleen came running out of the grocery store in tears, and I, of course, felt responsible.

Kenyon's wounds were not serious. A nice local lady offered to go bother her vet a few blocks over on his behalf; I explained I was a physician and could sew him up. Due to my dress and appearance no one ever believes me when I tell them this; so we finally left after her protestations. We drove home and I numbed Kenyon up and sewed up his two wounds with Kathleen restraining his head. He's a great patient, but it's hell on my back to kneel on the floor to do surgery; we don't have a table yet.

This incident didn't shock me out of depression; it only distracted me briefly. The dog is doing fine. Kathleen slept with him downstairs overnight. (The only thing better than being Kathleen's husband is to be her pet.)
*********

I still want to get back to the theme of the unknown artist, though to be fair, at least on the net, I am not entirely unknown. "Jealousy is the essence of narcissism," I wrote long ago, and the primitive emotion I often experience vis a vis recognized performers stems from the fact that I know I'm better; I know, for instance, that I can play blues and rock guitar better than most people who perform; I write poetry better than most featured readers (I used to be one, as I noted yesterday.) So I wonder if the emotion is not so much jealousy as a mistaken sense of fairness; Why should they be up there instead of me? Or better, why should they be up there at all when I know personally know better talents who go neglected? And then I remind myself: they wanted it more, they worked for it harder, their recognition may have even been harder to achieve with mediocre talent. Then I relax somewhat and tell myself: It is fair. They were willing to pay the price and you weren't, Dr. Chaffin. Still I can't seem to cure myself of this curious process.

Also, one measure of depression is that nothing could make you feel better. If they gave me the Nobel Prize tomorrow I would be nonplussed and assume they had made a mistake. My being given the award would naturally devalue the award--the defeatist logic of depression.

One other thing: I'm going to take a break from these daily postings on Thursday, when the first section of Sine Wave is complete. It also happens to be the first day of the NBA finals, and I am a huge fan, even if the Lakers aren't in it.

All for today,

Dr. Chaffin

Sine Wave #23: Aubade

Aubade

We like to make love in the morning
not because of the light
but because my medication levels
are lower before the morning dosage.
Since El Nino our frequency has increased.

I don't claim dawn’s light
renders us sexier, just less repulsive.
At night we use candles
for the same flattering effect.
Candles can be as forgiving
as a good marriage.
I have a belly and you use powder
to keep your thighs from chafing.
When did we go soft?

The sun is cruel to remind us
of our sin against California
where youth is beauty and beauty youth.
That is all you know out here
and all you need to know.


(pubished in Savoy)

****************************

Again, though melancholy, this poem shows progress in depression. The speaker is thinking about sex and marriage, even if his take is somewhat depressing, since he can't help judging himself by the standards of youth and advertising. An aubade is a morning song.

*************************

Last night I was surfing the net, looking for ms. contests for poetry. One publisher required a purchase from their catalogue as the price for entry. In perusing their titles, I noticed a former winner was my student of two years ago, whose chapbook, which I assume from the reviews formed the basis for her book, I extensively edited. I was given no credit, naturally, nor did she ever write me about her success, about which I am always glad to hear from former students. In my judgment she was not ready for publication of a book, although she was rather determined about it.

Anyway, the publisher listed who the judge of the next contest would be. That's always the most important thing in these contests, which I have rarely entered and never won. I went to look at his verse on the web and found it prolix and sophomorish. As I whined to my wife and editor, Kathleen, she gave me no comfort. "You can't have it both ways," she said. "Either you give the poetry world credit and play the game their way, or you resign from it, as I did years ago." I hated this either/or option, although her logic seems unassailable. If I do not respect the judgment of contemporary poetry, I have no right to complain if I have not been mainstreamed into it. I do not suffer fools gladly; I was blackballed in LA when I publicly derided the quality of poets at all the popular coffeehouse venues.

The world of poetry is small, and never is heard a discouraging word--you can't say anything critical about anyone else or you will be kicked out of the club. There is so much cronyism it is no better than Hollywood. Even the Pulitzer committee doesn't know what good poetry is anymore, why they usually make safe choices of poets who already have a reputation.

I tend to bite the hand that feeds me if the nails aren't clean. But I love poetry and I believe in mine; trouble is, I have very few connections academic or otherwise, and there is no one I can go to and say, "Give this manuscript a fair reading, won't you?" More and more I'm tempted to self-publish, since 85% of titles in the U.S. are self-published anyway. But all the gladhanding at major bookstores, where I would have to promote my work, and the required networking with no-talent powers that be--the whole scene makes me reluctant to set forth. So I sit here paralyzed, with a blog where I post my poetry at present, unable to embrace the larger world of self-congratulatory published wannabes, but unable to give up the dream of poetry. I should swallow my pride and jump through whatever hoops I need to jump through; unfortunately, when I used to be a featured reader in LA, I always had a bad feeling in my gut about the performances--and when I quit the game I felt a great relief.

Here's the link to my column on that experience: Tempted to Television

(My other column, Karaokepoetry, has been de-published.)

As Kathleen said, "You have no right to feel sorry for yourself." But I can't accept that I have only an either/or choice here. There is cynical participation, and there is rebellious participation, as in William Logan's case, but even rebellion requires an authority, and if I don't credit that authority, what is the basis for rebellion?

As to my mood, I'm still stuck in a lingering depression. I'll try to address that tomorrow.

Thanks for reading,

CE

Sine Wave Day 22: Tithonus

Tithonus

Wherever I volunteer I find myself
compassionately pushed to the periphery
like trash on a lake.

I don't blame the young.
I know how I must look to them
with my tissue paper skin
flaking from too many suns
and the flesh-colored hearing aid
stuck in my ear like chewing gum,
the bad shave and cologne
and the dentures that stain
the angles of my mouth with drool.

Mornings when I shuffle in
stooped like a question mark,
my sharp knees poking
through my slacks like coat hangers,
I can't help thinking
they wish I were a ghost
instead of a prophecy.


(published in Contrary)

**********************

One of the symptoms of clinical depression is the illusion of premature old age, often accompanied by fears of failing health. It's ironic that someone who entertains thoughts of suicide simultaneously suffers fears of impending physical doom. Then I remember what my mother always said about auto accidents: "I don't mind being killed, I just don't want to be maimed--and I don't want to linger."

For those who have forgotten their Edith Hamilton, Tithonus was a mortal whom a goddess loved. She asked Zeus that he might receive eternal life but forgot to request eternal youth. Thus she watched him shrivel and decay until he was mercifully transformed into a cricket.

T. S. Eliot wrote in the persona of an old man at age 30 in "Gerontion," and also explored the theme in several passages of Four Quartets. Yeats, on the other hand, in poems like "Among School Children," explored the them of old age when he was old. So did Tennyson in "Ulysses."

--CE

Climbing out of Depression Poem #21

You, Cardinal

Crimson startled the snow--
powder shook from his feet.
Between sunflower seeds
his raccoon eyes
gave no thought to benefactors
so I buried my face
in the editorial section
like a hunting blind,
hoping he’d linger.

Above the paper I'd spy him
handsome as a captain,
his pyramidal tuft
like a German helmet
and I had gotten used to him
and he, perhaps, to me,
when glancing through
the window he was gone.

The void surprised me.
What did I expect?
That he would stay?
Ah, the mind invents hopes
and you, cardinal,
though your feathers be dipped in blood,
know nothing of the sadness
new absences bring.

**********************

As we near the end of the speaker's depressive episode, having only six more poems to add to it, the speaker encounters a healthy emotion--sadness--(as opposed to the sadness-without-an-object of serious depression). And in a tradition as old as poetry, he envies a lesser being, one not so afflicted with memory, a bird. He recognizes their relationship is unequal, that he has invested more feeling in the cardinal than the cardinal in him; he realizes the bird will never connect the available winter food with the poet; even so the brief encounter is enough to generate a feeling of loss in a sensitive soul. If more optimistic the speaker might have thought about what new bird might come next, but as things stand, the speaker can only think about what he's lost.

--CE

Sine Wave Depression Poem #19

Distortions

I can be sane if you subtract
my father’s cruelty
and my mother’s worry.

Each was a carnival mirror
that elongated
or compacted me.

I was stretched like taffy
or pounded into a cube
depending on where I stood.

When I left home
they hid in my head—
This happens to everyone.

It took years for me to see
that they were bent
and I was fine.

Now I wonder
what my daughters
see in me.


(published in Disclosures)


*********************

In my experience most people don't really begin to see their parents as they are, or as they were in childhood, until about age thirty. That's when the shit hits the fan and we begin to see how they, wittingly or unwittingly, may have damaged our development.

And then, if we have kids, we rightly fear how we may be harming their growth in ways we can't fathom.

As my mother often said, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

As far as the cycle of depression goes, today's poem shows growth away from the generalities of "Entropy" and "Science," coming closer to involvement with real people. The speaker strikes me as more honest than bitter, and that's good. His reference to his daughters also shows a healthy humility with regard to his own inevitable missteps as a parent.

--CE

Sine Wave Poem #18

Advantages of Science

Is science all that distinguishes us
from earlier generations?
We still worship the rich and envy them,
pity the poor and despise them,
fear death and ignore it.
What did you expect?

Sometimes science gives us a chance
to do good, as when millions died
from famine in the Sudan.
This only got our attention
because science gave us television
to watch human scarecrows pull
their loose-skinned, accordion-ribbed cows
across the expanding Sahara,
children trailing behind like coat hangers.

By then the best we could do
was extend the misery of the living
by delivering enough food
to afflict parents with hope
while their children died.

Who could have dreamed
this infinitely little too much?


(Published in Disclosures)


**********************************

First, poetry aficionados may notice that the last two lines were lifted from Robinsion Jeffers' "Science."

Here the speaker, looking around at the world, still suffers from the zero-sum game of depression--how grand attempts that fuel hope only serve to increase suffering--and what is worse than watching your children die? Too little, too late.

Still the speaker exhibits a growing courage to face the world, however pointless it appears, while his misanthropy persists. His disgust is no longer just with himself, but with the whole damn world.

A loss of faith in science is familiar to any who recall Hiroshima. The late 19th century was much more sanguine about science. At the end of the 20th century, however, despite unprecedented material advances, western man had little to have faith in--a great loss also alluded to in "Colors."


Thanks for reading,

CE

Sine Wave #17

Entropy

Aphids savage the rosebush.
A marigold sickens and browns.
Milk sours in the refrigerator.
Roaches pick at particles of cheese.
I am told when there’s nothing to eat
they devour each other.

Ashtrays fill as if by magic,
the trash barrel is always full.
Lifting it, the garbage man buckles
as his spine twists like a snake.
He drives to the only hospital
that won’t take his insurance,
with its sawdust floors, straw beds
and spaghetti-stained nurses.

The near-sighted doctor can’t read
the overexposed X-ray
though the tech swears
it showed a death’s head smiling.
God bless chaos.

*********************

This is one of the oldest poems in the collection, written some 25 years ago. I hope it doesn't show. Its inclusion illustrates how I went through my archives to pick those poems I thought would forward the theme, instead of just those poems I thought my best. My best are, incidentally, contained in another unpublished ms.,For the Record, and were selected by Kathleen.

She recently sat down with me and decided on a division of labor. She will strive to find markets for my book-length works of prose, of which I have seven, while I will pursue a larger market for my poetry. The Net has made me lazy as I can avoid licking stamps and walking to the mail box. But the Net does not bring the recognition of print, even the best e-zines that pay. And I think I long ago cracked just about all the e-zines of reputation, though many have arisen since. It's impossible to keep up with them all.

Today's poem is perhaps the first in the series that contains a dark chuckle or two, especialy the non-authorized hospital. And the Greek angle is obvious: the world began in chaos, just as it does in the Bible. The second law of thermodynamics consistently strives to return us to that state, while life, and its high-energy requirements for order and complexity, fights against that degeneration.

I may have chosen the garbage man because I have chronic back problems which limited my ability to continue as a physician years ago. The pain is only a minor satellite in my conscious existence unless I have to do something like bend over or drive a fair distance. The only medication that allowed me to work in such pain, unfortunately, also precipitated hypomania--why I went on disability a decade ago.

The poem is really self-explanatory. I'm just speaking around it. But the surfacing of humor is a good sign and confirms we have but ten more poems to go in the depressive section before the speaker's mood can be considered normal. I'm sure you're all looking forward to that!

--CE

Sine Wave Depression Poem #16

Fairy Tale

Rejection seems as alien to you
as your face reflected in aquarium glass,
fish passing through your ears

Yet familiar as your mother’s sour breath
as she snored insensibly beside
a littoral of beer cans.

Each day brings floods, fires, crashes--
terror to those who never suspected
nature and neighbors as enemies.

If tragedy is interruption of the usual pain
by something greater, yours is
that nothing can make another love you.


*********************


In today's poem the speaker turns from memories to an actual person, addressing someone near though blind in his view.

After the soul-killing experience of depression the speaker has difficulty imagining what it must be like for the other person. How could she not suspect that anything, anytime, could turn on her? Worse, how can one's chief motive for living be to avoid rejection when rejection is inevitable? To live for the approval of others is to not have a life.

Rejection begins when we are thrust out of the womb and continues as we are weaned, expected to communicate through language, abandoned to our own locomotion, and later to our own lives. Independence requires an increasing loss of dependence; this is healthy and normal, but the pain of that loss cannot be helped.

To live for the approval of others means a stunted, infantile development. After surviving depression, the speaker finds this attitude beyond belief. Then perhaps he is being too hard on others?

--CE

Sine Wave Poem #15

Colors

The glass eyes of Chartres shine blue
with the order of ancient faith.
Now the blue light of television
flickers from apartment windows
as gun barrels ransom the news.

Even innocents kill
because a demon lover
is better than none at all,
to wear incendiary colors
better than invisible.

Late at night my veins run with words.
I think of their clotted freeways
and the interchanges of arteries.
It is hard to believe
there is blood in the heart
and not much else.

************************

There are 27 poems in the first section of Sine Wave, so we have passed the mid point of the depressive section, and now depression turns outward to focus on the world. Still the diseased mind makes a selection error in focusing on the dark side, as in the gangs alluded to above. There is also a mourning for a nobler past, for a medieval world view, for anything that holds together, unlike the modern fractionalization into the whining fractals of special interests.

This is certainly not the best poem in the collection, but I'm proud of the last stanza as a raw expression of pessismism.

--CE

Depression Poem #14; Readers' Comments

On the Left Brain

Sometimes I think my left hemisphere
swollen like some great infected testicle,
necrotic, convoluted and gray.
Its vein walls are thinner than the membranes
lizards use to shield their eyes
and inside blood flows so slowly
I consider it a miracle
that a single rational thought escapes.

The great vein of Galen sits
at the bottom of both hemispheres
like a distensible sewer line
that eventually empties
through the superior vena cava
into the heart’s right chamber
where its effluent mixes with blood
from the bowels and extremities,
pools in the lungs, and, re-oxygenated,
races from the left ventricle
back to everywhere else.

I tell you this because
the dream engine that pulls the body
has no conception of itself,
and though dependent on blood
is blind as an infected testicle,
as my metaphors bear witness
and your brain understands.


************************

A friend of mine (N. Ball) has told me that when medicine enters my poetry it has a chilling effect. Very well, I do get a little clinical above.

For those unfamiliar with Robert Sperry's work on the bicameral brain, you should know that humans really have two brains: one for detail and order and verbal definitions, the left, and one for holistic appreciation of space and shapes and associative commonalities of vision and sound, the right.

PET scans have shown that chemical depression tends to lodge in the left hemisphere, in the parietal area and the parahippocampal gyrus. But when depression generalizes it begins to involve everything, from the brainstem's startle reaction to the pineal gland's diurnal programming of melatonin.

I call the portion of the brain paralyzed by depression "the lizard brain," to emphasize its biological primitivism.

I know when chemically depressed that my lizard brain wants to take over. Because I'm human I try to put words to the feelings it communicates. Here's what the lizard brain sounds like:

"You're worthless. You've never done anything with your life. You're lazy. No one gives a shit about you. What's the point? Have another drink, that's right, you weakling. Can't face the music, pussy, can you? Why not just pack it in? What difference does it make anyway? You disgust me."

I know these negative comments are "verbal seizures" by a part of my brain that's diseased and should not be given any credence. Since the words echo how I'm "feeling," it nevertheless takes significant discipline to ignore the dark, repetitive narrative of the lizard brain.

In the poem above I try to de-mythologize the power of the left brain, comparing it to another diseased organ more easiy understood (women may substitute their ovaries for the same effect). I know it's not pleasant poetry, may indeed be "too graphic," even "gross;" but compared to the hell of depression the metaphor is only a weak reminder of the truth.

That would be all for today except that I'd like to post some of the comments I've received on this cycle of poems below:


The whole issue of depression is not new to me, as I mentioned my father's. I have also suffered many suicidal depressions over the years. But until this morning I have never been aware of anything as hideous as a 'psychotic depression with all the energy of mania'. I'm stunned. Often I've made the comment that there is no other hell than the hell-states right here on earth. I can't even imagine this, to be frank. I appreciate more than you know, your attempts to document these occurences. Your poetry is excellent, by the way, and I say that as a former lit major. You will always be in my prayers.

--A


I missed yesterday's email but this poem moved me deeply.

Thank you, L


These poems are cut-confessional, powerful. Thanks for sharing them. I haven't got to the whole manuscript, but reading 'CO' and 'Paternal', and now 'Keep The Faith' . I am quite blown away. I love the 'Holstein sky', I'm dying to cut out the 'but it's a nice day'... I sure hope you are sending these pieces out, everywhere, for publication.

All best, take care

--D

You know, after reading your site for the last month or so I've decided this is the best way to read poetry if one wants to understand what the poet wanted to say. I've been really enjoying these, and hope that they are doing what they should to help usher you through each phase of life/depression. It's been some time since I wanted to read poetry, but yours is so beautifully personal and occasionally raw that I'm really attracted to it. Keep going, ok?

--R

I am very encouraged that poets and non-poets alike have said some nice things about these postings, so I'll persist until the end of the manuscript, which should occur sometime in mid-July.


Grateful to be heard,

CE

Depression Poem #13: "Keep the Faith"

Keep the Faith

You say two friends were murdered
but it's a nice day
and there must be some middle ground
between the abandoned mineshaft
and the Holstein sky.

Ants kill ants as easily as popping sodas.
Some father fish swallow their fry,
others rock them gently inside their jaws.
Sometimes an ox is gored
by another ox and dies.

Sometimes a country sends its young
to float like dynamited carp
in distant rice paddies.
If mercy were based on evidence
I'd shoot you.


(published in Gravity)

******************************

Again, today's poem features that cynical anger that presages a recovery from depression, an anger still generalized but likely to soon fix on actual people and situations or a more distant re-examination of the self.

The only difficulty some may have with this poem is the use of "Holstein" as an adjective, which refers to the patchy design on the hide of that breed of cow, turning the sky into a sort of black-and-white montage.

--CE

Sine Wave #12: Prognosis for depression improves

First, thanks to all who have been taking this journey with me, friends too numerous to mention--and family, of course. All the great e-mails I've received are not shown as comments here at the blog, regrettably. Know that if you do post here, the comment is automatcally forwarded to me by e-mail. By posting her others can enjoy your remarks as well. Now for today's poem:


Countermeasures

Like a stiff current applied to the solar plexus
life fucks with us.

If you do not read psychology as a horoscope
of self-congratulation, you are ill.

Ask your pastor: "Suffering builds character;"
or your therapist: "Let's work through this."

Psychology encourages confessions
but prescribes defenses.

Better protect yourself.



***************


Today the speaker achieves anger, an important prognostic sign in coming out of a depression. It's better to be angry than sad, because anger energizes and sadness paralyzes. Besides, anger feels better. Here the speaker draws a necessary boundary for self preservation, with a dose of cynicism towards easy explanations and cures those unfamiliar with mood disorders often blithely advise. In other words, screw Dr. Phil!

--CE