My stepson just got a bill for a one-night stay in the hospital: $45,000, I kid you not. He fell off of his motorcycle and had one laceration stapled on his head. I called Sutter Health. Here are some of the charges:
CT scans $6000
Trauma Room $4000
Stapling a superficial laceration in the trauma room: $8000
Of course he can't pay it, and the billing person I spoke to is going to send him a "charity" application. You wonder what's wrong with the healthcare system? It's unbelievably expensive, and Sutter Health does all it can to make a payday.
Determined to start a garden once again before the deer get hungry, I spent $250 on flowering plants only yesterday, eschewing all vegetables, and most of the flowers are in the daisy/poppy category, supposedly deer resistant--although deer will eat anything when they're hungry, in my experience. I love poppies, though. Showy, primitive flowers with four petals (Icelandic), though I've put in some new varieties.
It's hot on the coast today, maybe 70 and windy. I'm soaking the new plants for fear they may dry out. I must interrupt this post to move the soaker.
Back! For any who missed the announcement, I now have 24 songs ready for free download from Soundclick; all you need to do is click on the picture of me playing bottleneck in the upper right corner here. Feedback welcome; some cuts are professional studio work, some rough cuts at home on this very computer. My voice will soon improve when we quit smoking again on April 1, no fooling. But I pride myself most on melody, which I find in short supply in much contemporary music, to say the least.
I've been fighting a cold but it was suppressed by the prednisone I took for a week to combat my tick bite allergy; the prednisone also had me flirting with depression. Powerful stuff. Steroids, NSAIDs and antihistamines are all dangerous drugs for causing depression in my case. Our brain chemistry is weird, what?
In April some new reviews of my book will be out in Eclectica and Pedestal and elsewhere, I think. I'll post them here, naturally.
Tonight at our men's circle I'll be leading a discussion group on "The River of Life: Embracing the Feminine," the topic I hope will be picked up for this year's retreat. I'll be going through Jung's four female archetypes, from Eve to Helen to Mary to Sophia. Each represents ongoing progress in understanding the feminine, and Sophia is the internalization of the feminine--as my friend, Kelton, says: "I'm married to my inner bitch." LOL!
So far I've received only five entries in the contest for a signed hardback copy of "Unexpected Light." I need more entries! Simply mail them with the subject header "Contest" to cechaffin at gmail dot com.
That's all for today, save the obligatory poem. Let me look through my unpublished archives, as I have not written much of anything for a week. Ah, this seems appropriate as it is nearly Easter:
The Arrest
They thought it would be easy
to cow him with eagled breastplates
and the clank of scabbards on greaves
until they saw the royal
toleration in his eyes.
In the glaze of a Mideastern sun
he could have been Apollo.
“If any man thirsts, let him come after me”
--a thirst beyond Roman canteens.
“No man spoke like this man,”
they told their fuming captain.
He knew better than to go himself;
his god had warned him.
1 Kilobunny,
CE
p.s. I just re-read this post and felt ashamed--this boy seemed so full of himself that trivial detail passes for blog material. He's worse than the Confessionalist poets. But I promise to repent.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Rototilling; New Old Poem
First, as to the poetry contest here and at Facebook I've received only four entries thus far which make the odds of winning 50%. I'm sure there are many of you waiting until the April 15 deadline, just be sure to get your entries in with your taxes and don't forget to send me the refund.
Today, at some cost to my back, I rototilled the garden and planted some spring flowers to go with those already blooming. My goal is to have the whole yard littered in color. I'm trying mainly to plant the daisy family, as they are supposed to be deer-resistant. I also have my deer-repelling motion-activated sprinkler turned on. I want to plant many perennials as well, so they will continue to bloom every year. I'm a haphazard gardener at best; I learn as I go. I find out what works and try to duplicate it. But this I know: the rules for planting are just like the rules of real estate: location, location, location!
I'm excited about my soundclick page where there are now no less than 24 songs for your downloading pleasure, a number I intend to increase to 100 over the coming months. I have such a backlog of compositions I've never recorded seriously that I have a lot of pleasurable work ahead of me, though I need a bass guitar desperately to fill out the sound. My Fender bass is presently in the hands of my former bass player in Oceanside, CA, and I don't know how to get a hold of him.
The whales are still moving north here to their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea and below. We saw them spouting this morning when it was calm.
I'm happy to report that my garden has a healthy population of earthworms. After rototilling today, Kathleen said: "And now you've doubled them!"
It was my younger brother's birthday yesterday and I failed to call him, but he called me tonight to make up for it (that is, before 12 AM so it was still his birthday). I'm trying to think of a gift for him besides a CD or a book but it's hard. Remember buying gifts for Dad? How he must have tired of ties and pens. At least my girls always send me Simpsons or Lakers stuff.
As you can see, I have little to say tonight. Here's my soundclick link again for free downloading of songs by Dr. C.
There are songs there on everything from organ donors to reggae doctors to conspiratorial flounders. Truly eclectic in substance and style. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Here's an unpublished poem for my sign-off:
Back to Sleep
I went back to sleep and saw
the scorched ruins of my philosophy
begging for green wood
though I wouldn't ax a sapling
for my greater good.
I went back to sleep and saw
the Madonna of the Tortilla
in blue maize and white flour.
“Your time has come," she said
though it was not my hour.
I went back to sleep and saw
the present swallow the future
as the past swallowed the present
then woke with a start to the clock
that said I was and I wasn't.
Thine at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Today, at some cost to my back, I rototilled the garden and planted some spring flowers to go with those already blooming. My goal is to have the whole yard littered in color. I'm trying mainly to plant the daisy family, as they are supposed to be deer-resistant. I also have my deer-repelling motion-activated sprinkler turned on. I want to plant many perennials as well, so they will continue to bloom every year. I'm a haphazard gardener at best; I learn as I go. I find out what works and try to duplicate it. But this I know: the rules for planting are just like the rules of real estate: location, location, location!
I'm excited about my soundclick page where there are now no less than 24 songs for your downloading pleasure, a number I intend to increase to 100 over the coming months. I have such a backlog of compositions I've never recorded seriously that I have a lot of pleasurable work ahead of me, though I need a bass guitar desperately to fill out the sound. My Fender bass is presently in the hands of my former bass player in Oceanside, CA, and I don't know how to get a hold of him.
The whales are still moving north here to their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea and below. We saw them spouting this morning when it was calm.
I'm happy to report that my garden has a healthy population of earthworms. After rototilling today, Kathleen said: "And now you've doubled them!"
It was my younger brother's birthday yesterday and I failed to call him, but he called me tonight to make up for it (that is, before 12 AM so it was still his birthday). I'm trying to think of a gift for him besides a CD or a book but it's hard. Remember buying gifts for Dad? How he must have tired of ties and pens. At least my girls always send me Simpsons or Lakers stuff.
As you can see, I have little to say tonight. Here's my soundclick link again for free downloading of songs by Dr. C.
There are songs there on everything from organ donors to reggae doctors to conspiratorial flounders. Truly eclectic in substance and style. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Here's an unpublished poem for my sign-off:
Back to Sleep
I went back to sleep and saw
the scorched ruins of my philosophy
begging for green wood
though I wouldn't ax a sapling
for my greater good.
I went back to sleep and saw
the Madonna of the Tortilla
in blue maize and white flour.
“Your time has come," she said
though it was not my hour.
I went back to sleep and saw
the present swallow the future
as the past swallowed the present
then woke with a start to the clock
that said I was and I wasn't.
Thine at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Friday, March 20, 2009
New Poetry Contest and How to Access My Music!
I have decided to host a little poetry contest for those who peek in here. Send your best poem to cechaffin (at) gmail (dot) com, and with the help of my editor, Kathleen, we will choose the winner. Send one poem only, your "best," whether published or unpublished. In the subject line put "Contest."
The deadline is April 15. The winner receives a signed hardback of my new book (see above). No entry fee, no strings attached. I'll publish the winner (and perhaps near-winners) here with comment.
Gentlemen, start your literary engines!
As for recent news, I have suffered a triad of illnesses: an abscessed tooth, pulled yesterday (oh the sound of the roots being wrenched from their socket!), a tick bite with another allergic reaction (I'm on prednisone now), as well as a cold I picked up from my lawyer coughing on me in court. I knew I was doomed when his droplets hit the air. But I'm recovering from these minor irritations, a mere blip on the radar when compared to depression, ugh!
For those who don't know, I've been writing and performing songs for forty years. Now I've uploaded fifteen, of various vintages and style, at Soundclick under "Dr. CE." You can listen there and download for free. I would dearly appreciate comment on my work.
Do I have a new poem today? Hmmm.... at least a recently revised one:
Among Schoolchildren
A old man in a brown cardigan
walks a black Chow
on a chain leash
beside a fence
where children throng and
in a supplication of white fingers
reach through galvanized diamonds of steel,
each clamoring for a touch,
the soft substantial feel
of mammalian welcome:
fur, abundant fur.
Would they trade
their fence for the leash?
Freedom, too, is relative.
As for my mood, despite my scare last week, I'm doing fine. My shrink even considered lowering one of my medications, a sure sign of stability, though he hasn't done it yet. For each pill I don't take, my percentage of normality increases incrementally. But to go off all medication would be an exceedingly stupid thing, and I urge all my fellow sufferers to keep popping their pills.
I just heard that a new review of my book is due out in Eclectica come April, along with three poems.
All for now.
At 1 Kilobunny,
CE
The deadline is April 15. The winner receives a signed hardback of my new book (see above). No entry fee, no strings attached. I'll publish the winner (and perhaps near-winners) here with comment.
Gentlemen, start your literary engines!
As for recent news, I have suffered a triad of illnesses: an abscessed tooth, pulled yesterday (oh the sound of the roots being wrenched from their socket!), a tick bite with another allergic reaction (I'm on prednisone now), as well as a cold I picked up from my lawyer coughing on me in court. I knew I was doomed when his droplets hit the air. But I'm recovering from these minor irritations, a mere blip on the radar when compared to depression, ugh!
For those who don't know, I've been writing and performing songs for forty years. Now I've uploaded fifteen, of various vintages and style, at Soundclick under "Dr. CE." You can listen there and download for free. I would dearly appreciate comment on my work.
Do I have a new poem today? Hmmm.... at least a recently revised one:
Among Schoolchildren
A old man in a brown cardigan
walks a black Chow
on a chain leash
beside a fence
where children throng and
in a supplication of white fingers
reach through galvanized diamonds of steel,
each clamoring for a touch,
the soft substantial feel
of mammalian welcome:
fur, abundant fur.
Would they trade
their fence for the leash?
Freedom, too, is relative.
As for my mood, despite my scare last week, I'm doing fine. My shrink even considered lowering one of my medications, a sure sign of stability, though he hasn't done it yet. For each pill I don't take, my percentage of normality increases incrementally. But to go off all medication would be an exceedingly stupid thing, and I urge all my fellow sufferers to keep popping their pills.
I just heard that a new review of my book is due out in Eclectica come April, along with three poems.
All for now.
At 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Monday, March 16, 2009
New Poem?
Here's a new poem which is also a song:
Song
I am the eyes in the ash of the slats of the fence that borders the meadow.
My eyes migrate to the top of my head like contacts for a flounder.
Fishy, you say? I cannot deny
that the stench of dead flounder can poison the sky.
Rocks don't talk but neither does God in any language we understand.
The nape of my neck will not protect my cervical spine from cancer.
Fishy, you say? I cannot deny
that a language of cancer might poison the sky.
A Sheba Inu's butt is white but so is that of the Roosevelt elk.
But first an implantation in your ear for better reception.
Fishy, you say? I cannot deny
that the flounder's a fish you mistake for a pie.
For the song go to Soundclick and click on "Flounders."
Enjoy or not,
Craig Erick
Song
I am the eyes in the ash of the slats of the fence that borders the meadow.
My eyes migrate to the top of my head like contacts for a flounder.
Fishy, you say? I cannot deny
that the stench of dead flounder can poison the sky.
Rocks don't talk but neither does God in any language we understand.
The nape of my neck will not protect my cervical spine from cancer.
Fishy, you say? I cannot deny
that a language of cancer might poison the sky.
A Sheba Inu's butt is white but so is that of the Roosevelt elk.
But first an implantation in your ear for better reception.
Fishy, you say? I cannot deny
that the flounder's a fish you mistake for a pie.
For the song go to Soundclick and click on "Flounders."
Enjoy or not,
Craig Erick
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Tears and the Devil
I haven't blogged in a while, have been to LA and back.
First a poem from my old home town:
Before the Long Beach Grand Prix
Stripes of light interrupted
fall on shaded grass
under the grandstands
as if it were a highway
marked in fluorescent green.
A faux lighthouse warns no one.
Motor heads will come
from Bellflower, Agoura, Pasadena
to watch man wed machine
in a growl of gears
and a squeeze of brakes.
Topped in poles with chain link,
concrete barriers line the course.
Chances are no car will tumble over
Yet as in bullfights there is always
the unspoken, hidden rush of Cain
down where we keep the dark things
that keep us up at night,
a burning body maybe--
the Aztecs had nothing on us.
Human nature doesn't change, does it? In individual cases we see moral progress, but mankind taken as a whole has not, by the average or median improved at all. The numbers are larger, though it's doubtful that the proportions have changed: 6 million in Germany (and Poland), 800,000 in Rwanda, God knows how many in Iraq, Mao and Stalin directly or indirectly killed somewhere around 30 million. Need I go on?
So many of us live with the delusion that we are getting better when the fact is that we haven't changed in years. It is a delusion in most cases, still an optimistic override obtains for the individual--what we call hope. Still a hope to be better is already the hope of one above average in charity. As I said to my men's group when asked what I wanted out of the process, I said: "I want you to help me be a better man."
I'm not comparing apples and oranges here exactly; there is a moral law but absolute comparisons between sinners' relative virtues is prevented by one's personal psychology and limitations, each person's uniqueness, inheritance, and DNA. Those who wish to improve themselves spiritually I salute. Know only that humility is the first grace. Without it we are lost. And no one has monopoly on truth. It can come from anywhere, truly from the mouths of babes. And love is a gift of grace. Grace is God's unmerited favor toward the human race. Notice "unmerited," which reduces us all to equals just as the law was designed to do by its impossible demands.
Now for another poem:
Impostor
I dreamed
of a frail old man
in a charcoal suit
of expensive cloth
of outmoded cut,
hands spotted with age,
for cuff links, crucifixes.
His thin white hair
was combed back
and his sympathetic
visage
made you feel
as if nothing
were your fault.
Money was changing
hands somewhere.
He sought
to distract me
with a grand-
fatherly smile.
I knew he was
the Devil.
This poem was based on an actual vision I had while chained to a hospital bed and shot up with Haldol in a manic spell. It still rings true to me. The Devil is kindness itself, save for the strings that pull you into slavery. Most of us give up a piece at a time. Few if any actually sign a contract. The Devil doesn't need your signature, only your guilty deeds. He is called "The accuser of the brethren." He's that voice inside believers that intimates you have something special with God, or alternately damned forever--both narcissistic traps, I might add.
I was in LA to fight for grandparents' visitation rights for my seven-year-old grandson, Jacob. I have not been allowed to see him by his father since my daughter Rachel's death in July 2007. It all goes back to Jacob being bitten by our dog while in Mexico under my watch. Therefore I am not to be trusted with Jacob in the father's personal mythology. And the biting incident in question occurred in 2003, and Jacob has no visible scars nor was he traumatized emotionally because of how we handled it. He still loves dogs. Besides, Kenyon had never bitten anyone in his life but Jacob provoked him and Kenyon only behaved like a pack animal, grabbing the smaller and younger pup by the head for discipline.
Unfortunately it did not go well.
When the judge issued his ruling in court I broke out in tears and wept openly. "You are a cruel man," I said and walked out weeping. It took a while to compose myself while my lawyer tried to encourage me that now we must go to trial to prove my bonding with Jacob means our relationship is in his best interest. And we need a judge with the balls to step out of line a bit from the traditional.
I has a premonition that this round was going to go this way. As the court date approached I felt heavier and heavier. I was not surprised at the ruling. Thankfully my daughters cheered me up afterwards--because I felt as if I were on a precipice staring down into a depression, uggh! Cluck, cluck! Kazooey!
As it turns out, my tears were normal feelings and my daughters said they would have done the same.
I'm glad my manhood allows me to cry in public over things that need to be cried over. Man needs his Jungian anima, his feminine side, to be complete. This is the theme I'll be suggesting for the next Men's retreat.
Over and out at Kiloneutral,
CE
First a poem from my old home town:
Before the Long Beach Grand Prix
Stripes of light interrupted
fall on shaded grass
under the grandstands
as if it were a highway
marked in fluorescent green.
A faux lighthouse warns no one.
Motor heads will come
from Bellflower, Agoura, Pasadena
to watch man wed machine
in a growl of gears
and a squeeze of brakes.
Topped in poles with chain link,
concrete barriers line the course.
Chances are no car will tumble over
Yet as in bullfights there is always
the unspoken, hidden rush of Cain
down where we keep the dark things
that keep us up at night,
a burning body maybe--
the Aztecs had nothing on us.
Human nature doesn't change, does it? In individual cases we see moral progress, but mankind taken as a whole has not, by the average or median improved at all. The numbers are larger, though it's doubtful that the proportions have changed: 6 million in Germany (and Poland), 800,000 in Rwanda, God knows how many in Iraq, Mao and Stalin directly or indirectly killed somewhere around 30 million. Need I go on?
So many of us live with the delusion that we are getting better when the fact is that we haven't changed in years. It is a delusion in most cases, still an optimistic override obtains for the individual--what we call hope. Still a hope to be better is already the hope of one above average in charity. As I said to my men's group when asked what I wanted out of the process, I said: "I want you to help me be a better man."
I'm not comparing apples and oranges here exactly; there is a moral law but absolute comparisons between sinners' relative virtues is prevented by one's personal psychology and limitations, each person's uniqueness, inheritance, and DNA. Those who wish to improve themselves spiritually I salute. Know only that humility is the first grace. Without it we are lost. And no one has monopoly on truth. It can come from anywhere, truly from the mouths of babes. And love is a gift of grace. Grace is God's unmerited favor toward the human race. Notice "unmerited," which reduces us all to equals just as the law was designed to do by its impossible demands.
Now for another poem:
Impostor
I dreamed
of a frail old man
in a charcoal suit
of expensive cloth
of outmoded cut,
hands spotted with age,
for cuff links, crucifixes.
His thin white hair
was combed back
and his sympathetic
visage
made you feel
as if nothing
were your fault.
Money was changing
hands somewhere.
He sought
to distract me
with a grand-
fatherly smile.
I knew he was
the Devil.
This poem was based on an actual vision I had while chained to a hospital bed and shot up with Haldol in a manic spell. It still rings true to me. The Devil is kindness itself, save for the strings that pull you into slavery. Most of us give up a piece at a time. Few if any actually sign a contract. The Devil doesn't need your signature, only your guilty deeds. He is called "The accuser of the brethren." He's that voice inside believers that intimates you have something special with God, or alternately damned forever--both narcissistic traps, I might add.
I was in LA to fight for grandparents' visitation rights for my seven-year-old grandson, Jacob. I have not been allowed to see him by his father since my daughter Rachel's death in July 2007. It all goes back to Jacob being bitten by our dog while in Mexico under my watch. Therefore I am not to be trusted with Jacob in the father's personal mythology. And the biting incident in question occurred in 2003, and Jacob has no visible scars nor was he traumatized emotionally because of how we handled it. He still loves dogs. Besides, Kenyon had never bitten anyone in his life but Jacob provoked him and Kenyon only behaved like a pack animal, grabbing the smaller and younger pup by the head for discipline.
Unfortunately it did not go well.
When the judge issued his ruling in court I broke out in tears and wept openly. "You are a cruel man," I said and walked out weeping. It took a while to compose myself while my lawyer tried to encourage me that now we must go to trial to prove my bonding with Jacob means our relationship is in his best interest. And we need a judge with the balls to step out of line a bit from the traditional.
I has a premonition that this round was going to go this way. As the court date approached I felt heavier and heavier. I was not surprised at the ruling. Thankfully my daughters cheered me up afterwards--because I felt as if I were on a precipice staring down into a depression, uggh! Cluck, cluck! Kazooey!
As it turns out, my tears were normal feelings and my daughters said they would have done the same.
I'm glad my manhood allows me to cry in public over things that need to be cried over. Man needs his Jungian anima, his feminine side, to be complete. This is the theme I'll be suggesting for the next Men's retreat.
Over and out at Kiloneutral,
CE
Friday, March 06, 2009
"Best of," cont'd: Recovery from Depression: Three Posts
I edited these posts for extraneous information but included the meat. Though sequential they are not necessarily consistent in their connections. But it's interesting to see that just over a year ago I entered recovery from depression.
From 4/5/08: How It Happened
I am now in recovery from depression, neither cured not expecting to be. It is a chronic disease in my case, and it would be unrealistic not to expect another occurrence or two in my remaining lifetime. When I think back on my life, before my diagnosis I suffered 5 major depressions; since I have suffered 3 more. The longest was the recent one, two years, provided I remain in remission. The deepest one was at age 29 when I was finally ushered into treatment.
Thus through age 29 I suffered five major depressions, and since being diagnosed, through age 53, while under treatment, I have suffered three more. This is not statistically significant in terms of prevention, unfortunately, but who knows how much I would have suffered without treatment? Just as alcoholics are in recovery, think of me as a melancholic in in recovery, though this parallel cannot stand much scrutiny, as the latter is more difficult to treat, in my experience.
Now you may rightly ask what concatenation of fortuitous circumstances led to my current recovery. In no particular order:
Spiritual: My friend Eric had a dream about Christ weeping over my body and healing me. About two weeks later, before the new antidepressant had had any effect, I wept in prayer while trying to pray as honestly as I possibly could. For the first time in I don't know how long, I felt some brief, inexplicable connection with the Light, a momentary piercing of the veil, so it seemed.
Chemical: On March 24 my doctor changed my antidepressant again। Within a week we upped it to therapeutic levels. Two-and-a-half weeks later, the usual time frame for response to an antidepressant (2 – 6 weeks), I began to feel a little better. This was on Thursday, April 10, when I was stranded in Lost Hills, CA, with a cracked radiator. Being confronted with a minor crisis was a pleasure in my state, as it got me out of myself. Thanks to a tip about some mechanics who hung around their shop late, we were able to move on the same night. (FGI (for general information) a plastic radiator can't be fixed with “Insta-Weld.” It must be replaced.)
Physical: Though ECT and Invega (an anti-psychotic whose effects on me were similar to the demonic Haldol) made me worse in Jan/Feb of this year, I requested an MRI of my brain while hospitalized and they discovered a bilateral, chronic maxillary sinus infection (everyone in my family seems to have allergies but I never paid them no mind). I remembered a case as a family practitioner where a depressive perked up after I treated her chronic sinus infection, so I went to our family doctor and requested treatment. After a month's antibiotics (the first two weeks spitting up a lot of schmegg), not only was my depression better but my voice had improved markedly. It's timbre and resonance had returned, I was no longer singing through pockets of mucous that robbed me of my natural timbre. So add this to my list of fortuitous concatenation of circumstances.
Behavioral and Social: In visiting my daughters and my oldest friend, though cruelly prevented from seeing my grandson, I had a chance to pretend to be myself, to pour myself into the mold of the upbeat, humorous, philosophizing, friendly, garrulous (and sometimes offensive) person I usually am. My second daughter, Keturah, invited me to Happy Hour the next day, April 11, and we had an exotic martini-drinking jamboree/competition at half-price. I was also able to see Sarah perform in a play for only the second time since middle school. And I sat for two hours in an old familiar bar, Joe Jost's, with Eric, talking while trying to avoid any mention of depression. I was so sick of talking about it.
When I returned home I continued to pretend to be myself with dogged courage. There were times when melancholy begged admission, but I refused to discuss my depression। I lied to Kathleen about how I was feeling as a matter of course. I even avoided seeing my psychiatrist because in nearing his office I burst into tears at the memory of all the times I had sat in his office depressed. I told him by e-mail and he understood। This Wednesday I will likely be well enough to see him.
Socially I should also mention that traveling 1200 miles with my stepson, Derek, was a tonic He's funny and upbeat Among other things he taught me the difference between Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap (through a plethora of too-loud examples).
In returning home my volunteer work began to pick up, obligating me to work with others while Iavoiding any mention of my condition. I am now involved with six different volunteer groups, including a musical gig for a group sing with the homeless and mentally ill every Friday.
To sum up, there was Eric's dream and my later prayer; a significant change in medication (I went off two meds and on two others); the discovery and treatment of a chronic infection, and the social/behavioral opportunity to be myself, a chance I clung to like a life raft in a flood. Without all three features I do not know if I would have improved, but I consider the change in antidepressants the most important, as without a slight elevation in mood I would not have thought of pretending to be myself. Antidepressants sometimes make you just well enough to get better with other help. And that help comes through doing, not being, as my shrink is fond of saying.
From 4/8/08: In Danger of Mania?
I had a manic dream last night, something so rare I can't remember the last one. And it's the second night I've had one. I attribute it to taking my second dose of Effexor too late. I need to take it in the afternoon apparently. But just as depressive dreams often warn me of on oncoming depression and have prevented its clinical eruption by such caution, so likewise my body may be warning me of flipping past euthymia into hypomania if not careful.
In the first night's dream I battled an armored dwarf who came after me with a machete'; after I disarmed him, he picked up a battle-ax and assaulted me with increased vigor। Again I disarmed him easily and told him that if that sort of behavior turned him on, I might have to pay attention, but that his aggressions would be better served in some other way. He was crestfallen and felt diminished, though I didn't discount future attacks. I acted as if this sort of thing happened every day and that I was more than competent to deal with murderous dwarfs. Which reminds of the time when, while manic, I kept a police dog (German Shepherd) at bay with one hand, slapping him repeatedly when he tried to leap, keeping the other hand free to smoke, gesture, and reason with an arresting officer. The dog gave up; he realized that I was too quick for him and I don't know how hard I slap when I'm manic; very hard, I expect. I still have scars on my right hand from the occasional tooth.
In last night's dream we were in Mexico (Kathleen and I and her mother and Derek), where I would become enraged at the slightest deviation from my way, to the point of belittling my dear wife and shocking her mother while I ran around a beachside Mexican resort looking for conflict with with anyone from “the dark side।” I can't remember any physical altercations. It's pointless resisting me when in any case I'm manic, whether in a dream or reality. Either calm me down (which has been done by loved ones) or call the authorities.
At the supermarket yesterday late in the afternoon I snapped at Kathleen because I was “houchy” (so hungry I was grouchy), but luckily she didn't hear it। When my blood sugar dips too far I can get like that, in a mini-manic explosion of anger, but I got some Safeway sushi in time to quiet the demon.
This is the Scylla and Charybdis of my disease: in treating a depression you may overshoot into mania, and vice-versa. Yet as an informed consumer, the first logical step is to take my second dose of Effexor earlier; the second is to skip the second dose altogether. In addition I increased my mood-stabilizing agent, Klonopin, to 2 mg. last night, which made me sleep until noon, but I felt it a necessary precaution after two nights of manic dreams.
And yes, poetry has come back to me and I'm enjoying it. I have been posting at three boards and my poem, “Queen Melancholy,” was solicited by an editor.
The obvious question: Will Craig grow manic?
Not if he can help it. And it is much easier to tame a mania than to reverse a depression.
From 4/12/08: On Joy
Joy is much harder to capture in words than fear or sorrow. And by joy I do not mean contentment or happiness, but a deeper feeling, echoed in passages like Romans 8:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time, waiting in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, for the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God। For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord।” (NIV version, 8:19 ff.)
What is the Kingdom of Heaven but the indescribable joy of inseparable, insuperable eternal love, the very thing we craved from our first banishment from the dumb joy of the womb?
Keats comes closest, in of all places, his “Ode on Melancholy,” where the sorrow-tinged exaltation of which he speaks approaches Joy:
"But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud...
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
"She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine."
Schiller's Ode to Joy, made famous by Beethoven's 9th, falls short of this standard:
Let the cosmos embrace you, you millions!
This kiss goes to the entire world!...
Whoever has had the great fortune
To know true friendship
Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife,
Add his to our jubilation."
(My translation, excerpted from the second stanza।)
This ode, written on the cusp when the Augustan age gave over to the Romantic, still contains more subject-object distance from joy than Keats. As such it may be that only my anachronistic eye fails to feel the joy of this piece, though the music certainly conveys it—music based on a German beer hall song, incidentally.
Yesterday I was sitting on an old redwood log facing a pasturer where wild turkeys flocked and deer feasted on the long grass. Stellar's Jays, supernaturally blue, hopped and pecked in the grass beside a robin. I listened to the bird song and wind and nothing else। I took my shirt off and lit a hand-rolled cigarette and guiltlessly enjoyed the smoke and the scene, experiencing a richness beyond words. In the distance small whitecaps erupted on the royal blue Pacific. There was nothing I wanted or didn't want, and to illustrate the paucity of words, I can only say I felt like I was in a Disney movie.
This is in part what Eliot meant by “the timeless moment,” that out-of-self experience of all- encompassing joy. When my cigarette was done I wandered out into the pasture, staring at blue-eyed grass and yellow-eyed grass and the lavender and white profusion of wild radishes. A six-point buck pranced away at my approach, his body leaping, his neck proudly erect like a war horse. Joy in his motion, joy in his freedom, joy in his perfection.
It is in our most extreme states that our hearts turns toward the numinous. If we think of God at all, we are most apt to think of him in our deepest sorrow or greatest joy.
There is a moment in “The Screw Tape Letters” where the protagonist is being oppressed by a demon with a mild depression, and he decides to go for a walk in the country. The beauty of nature transports him out of himself and back into awareness of God.
Afterwards the demon is scolded by his superior: “How could you possibly let the subject do something he enjoyed? You risked him getting out of himself. We want his pleasures circumscribed—the club, television, liquor, not something so dangerous as nature. You fool!”
Exactly. Extreme joy and sorrow are two paths to the same place, another point made in Eliot's “Four Quartets,” though not so directly; in its famous conclusion, sorrow and joy, earthly suffering and isolated moments of transport are fused:
“All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
C. E. Chaffin
From 4/5/08: How It Happened
I am now in recovery from depression, neither cured not expecting to be. It is a chronic disease in my case, and it would be unrealistic not to expect another occurrence or two in my remaining lifetime. When I think back on my life, before my diagnosis I suffered 5 major depressions; since I have suffered 3 more. The longest was the recent one, two years, provided I remain in remission. The deepest one was at age 29 when I was finally ushered into treatment.
Thus through age 29 I suffered five major depressions, and since being diagnosed, through age 53, while under treatment, I have suffered three more. This is not statistically significant in terms of prevention, unfortunately, but who knows how much I would have suffered without treatment? Just as alcoholics are in recovery, think of me as a melancholic in in recovery, though this parallel cannot stand much scrutiny, as the latter is more difficult to treat, in my experience.
Now you may rightly ask what concatenation of fortuitous circumstances led to my current recovery. In no particular order:
Spiritual: My friend Eric had a dream about Christ weeping over my body and healing me. About two weeks later, before the new antidepressant had had any effect, I wept in prayer while trying to pray as honestly as I possibly could. For the first time in I don't know how long, I felt some brief, inexplicable connection with the Light, a momentary piercing of the veil, so it seemed.
Chemical: On March 24 my doctor changed my antidepressant again। Within a week we upped it to therapeutic levels. Two-and-a-half weeks later, the usual time frame for response to an antidepressant (2 – 6 weeks), I began to feel a little better. This was on Thursday, April 10, when I was stranded in Lost Hills, CA, with a cracked radiator. Being confronted with a minor crisis was a pleasure in my state, as it got me out of myself. Thanks to a tip about some mechanics who hung around their shop late, we were able to move on the same night. (FGI (for general information) a plastic radiator can't be fixed with “Insta-Weld.” It must be replaced.)
Physical: Though ECT and Invega (an anti-psychotic whose effects on me were similar to the demonic Haldol) made me worse in Jan/Feb of this year, I requested an MRI of my brain while hospitalized and they discovered a bilateral, chronic maxillary sinus infection (everyone in my family seems to have allergies but I never paid them no mind). I remembered a case as a family practitioner where a depressive perked up after I treated her chronic sinus infection, so I went to our family doctor and requested treatment. After a month's antibiotics (the first two weeks spitting up a lot of schmegg), not only was my depression better but my voice had improved markedly. It's timbre and resonance had returned, I was no longer singing through pockets of mucous that robbed me of my natural timbre. So add this to my list of fortuitous concatenation of circumstances.
Behavioral and Social: In visiting my daughters and my oldest friend, though cruelly prevented from seeing my grandson, I had a chance to pretend to be myself, to pour myself into the mold of the upbeat, humorous, philosophizing, friendly, garrulous (and sometimes offensive) person I usually am. My second daughter, Keturah, invited me to Happy Hour the next day, April 11, and we had an exotic martini-drinking jamboree/competition at half-price. I was also able to see Sarah perform in a play for only the second time since middle school. And I sat for two hours in an old familiar bar, Joe Jost's, with Eric, talking while trying to avoid any mention of depression. I was so sick of talking about it.
When I returned home I continued to pretend to be myself with dogged courage. There were times when melancholy begged admission, but I refused to discuss my depression। I lied to Kathleen about how I was feeling as a matter of course. I even avoided seeing my psychiatrist because in nearing his office I burst into tears at the memory of all the times I had sat in his office depressed. I told him by e-mail and he understood। This Wednesday I will likely be well enough to see him.
Socially I should also mention that traveling 1200 miles with my stepson, Derek, was a tonic He's funny and upbeat Among other things he taught me the difference between Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap (through a plethora of too-loud examples).
In returning home my volunteer work began to pick up, obligating me to work with others while Iavoiding any mention of my condition. I am now involved with six different volunteer groups, including a musical gig for a group sing with the homeless and mentally ill every Friday.
To sum up, there was Eric's dream and my later prayer; a significant change in medication (I went off two meds and on two others); the discovery and treatment of a chronic infection, and the social/behavioral opportunity to be myself, a chance I clung to like a life raft in a flood. Without all three features I do not know if I would have improved, but I consider the change in antidepressants the most important, as without a slight elevation in mood I would not have thought of pretending to be myself. Antidepressants sometimes make you just well enough to get better with other help. And that help comes through doing, not being, as my shrink is fond of saying.
From 4/8/08: In Danger of Mania?
I had a manic dream last night, something so rare I can't remember the last one. And it's the second night I've had one. I attribute it to taking my second dose of Effexor too late. I need to take it in the afternoon apparently. But just as depressive dreams often warn me of on oncoming depression and have prevented its clinical eruption by such caution, so likewise my body may be warning me of flipping past euthymia into hypomania if not careful.
In the first night's dream I battled an armored dwarf who came after me with a machete'; after I disarmed him, he picked up a battle-ax and assaulted me with increased vigor। Again I disarmed him easily and told him that if that sort of behavior turned him on, I might have to pay attention, but that his aggressions would be better served in some other way. He was crestfallen and felt diminished, though I didn't discount future attacks. I acted as if this sort of thing happened every day and that I was more than competent to deal with murderous dwarfs. Which reminds of the time when, while manic, I kept a police dog (German Shepherd) at bay with one hand, slapping him repeatedly when he tried to leap, keeping the other hand free to smoke, gesture, and reason with an arresting officer. The dog gave up; he realized that I was too quick for him and I don't know how hard I slap when I'm manic; very hard, I expect. I still have scars on my right hand from the occasional tooth.
In last night's dream we were in Mexico (Kathleen and I and her mother and Derek), where I would become enraged at the slightest deviation from my way, to the point of belittling my dear wife and shocking her mother while I ran around a beachside Mexican resort looking for conflict with with anyone from “the dark side।” I can't remember any physical altercations. It's pointless resisting me when in any case I'm manic, whether in a dream or reality. Either calm me down (which has been done by loved ones) or call the authorities.
At the supermarket yesterday late in the afternoon I snapped at Kathleen because I was “houchy” (so hungry I was grouchy), but luckily she didn't hear it। When my blood sugar dips too far I can get like that, in a mini-manic explosion of anger, but I got some Safeway sushi in time to quiet the demon.
This is the Scylla and Charybdis of my disease: in treating a depression you may overshoot into mania, and vice-versa. Yet as an informed consumer, the first logical step is to take my second dose of Effexor earlier; the second is to skip the second dose altogether. In addition I increased my mood-stabilizing agent, Klonopin, to 2 mg. last night, which made me sleep until noon, but I felt it a necessary precaution after two nights of manic dreams.
And yes, poetry has come back to me and I'm enjoying it. I have been posting at three boards and my poem, “Queen Melancholy,” was solicited by an editor.
The obvious question: Will Craig grow manic?
Not if he can help it. And it is much easier to tame a mania than to reverse a depression.
From 4/12/08: On Joy
Joy is much harder to capture in words than fear or sorrow. And by joy I do not mean contentment or happiness, but a deeper feeling, echoed in passages like Romans 8:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time, waiting in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, for the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God। For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord।” (NIV version, 8:19 ff.)
What is the Kingdom of Heaven but the indescribable joy of inseparable, insuperable eternal love, the very thing we craved from our first banishment from the dumb joy of the womb?
Keats comes closest, in of all places, his “Ode on Melancholy,” where the sorrow-tinged exaltation of which he speaks approaches Joy:
"But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud...
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
"She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine."
Schiller's Ode to Joy, made famous by Beethoven's 9th, falls short of this standard:
Let the cosmos embrace you, you millions!
This kiss goes to the entire world!...
Whoever has had the great fortune
To know true friendship
Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife,
Add his to our jubilation."
(My translation, excerpted from the second stanza।)
This ode, written on the cusp when the Augustan age gave over to the Romantic, still contains more subject-object distance from joy than Keats. As such it may be that only my anachronistic eye fails to feel the joy of this piece, though the music certainly conveys it—music based on a German beer hall song, incidentally.
Yesterday I was sitting on an old redwood log facing a pasturer where wild turkeys flocked and deer feasted on the long grass. Stellar's Jays, supernaturally blue, hopped and pecked in the grass beside a robin. I listened to the bird song and wind and nothing else। I took my shirt off and lit a hand-rolled cigarette and guiltlessly enjoyed the smoke and the scene, experiencing a richness beyond words. In the distance small whitecaps erupted on the royal blue Pacific. There was nothing I wanted or didn't want, and to illustrate the paucity of words, I can only say I felt like I was in a Disney movie.
This is in part what Eliot meant by “the timeless moment,” that out-of-self experience of all- encompassing joy. When my cigarette was done I wandered out into the pasture, staring at blue-eyed grass and yellow-eyed grass and the lavender and white profusion of wild radishes. A six-point buck pranced away at my approach, his body leaping, his neck proudly erect like a war horse. Joy in his motion, joy in his freedom, joy in his perfection.
It is in our most extreme states that our hearts turns toward the numinous. If we think of God at all, we are most apt to think of him in our deepest sorrow or greatest joy.
There is a moment in “The Screw Tape Letters” where the protagonist is being oppressed by a demon with a mild depression, and he decides to go for a walk in the country. The beauty of nature transports him out of himself and back into awareness of God.
Afterwards the demon is scolded by his superior: “How could you possibly let the subject do something he enjoyed? You risked him getting out of himself. We want his pleasures circumscribed—the club, television, liquor, not something so dangerous as nature. You fool!”
Exactly. Extreme joy and sorrow are two paths to the same place, another point made in Eliot's “Four Quartets,” though not so directly; in its famous conclusion, sorrow and joy, earthly suffering and isolated moments of transport are fused:
“All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
C. E. Chaffin
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Best of, cont'd: Post-ECT Musings
It's been a while since a "Best of" post, which I think a good sign. I have gotten these posts to within a year of today, and will hopefully bring them up to date in the near future. Sunday I leave for LA to sue for visitation rights re: my grandson. I'm anxious about the trip but trust my mood will hold for the hearings.
Now for the harrowing aftermath of ECT.
From 3/20/08 Post-ECT:
Having something to do with my hands is a blessing. I recall prior to my ECT that I generally made Kathleen lunches and tried to make dinner, but just like my former exercise regimen, ECT seemed to amputate my past from my future. The threads of things I was doing before the treatments I have had trouble reconnecting with. There was a chapbook contest I intended to enter, for example, and I had the chapbook done, but I no longer know where to send it. And I found myself published in a journal I didn't know was publishing me. I think the entire experience of ECT resembles a major concussive syndrome, with selective anterograde amnesia and a general disconnect with one's former life. If I were to do it over again, and I never plan to given the recent results, I would take the time to write down in a notebook beforehand all my ongoing activities and goals in a detailed fashion, so that I would have a guide for resuming my life. As it is, things crop up--”I was going to do that?” “I had promised to do that?” “There's a deadline for what?” “I owe whom a letter?”
ECT is a great interruption in the flow of one's life. Naturally anyone considering it would not call their life normal. But even depressed, as I have been, there are connections and recollections that seem to have been whited out by ECT.
Of course, underneath the inevitable progression of my bipolar disease lies the grief at the loss of my first-born daughter, Rachel, on July 29, 2007. At the time I welcomed the sad feelings because they were legitimate grief, and grief felt better than depression, but in the emotional economy of the human psyche one wonders if that great loss has not been feeding my depression at some level. Experientially I can't say so; theoretically it makes sense.
I've been worrying a lot about old age lately, where we might live, how we will afford to live and all the attendant worries. But I like what Bob Dylan said: “He who isn't busy being born is busy dying.” Also, T. S. Eliot: “Old men should be explorers.”
Fine quotes to live up to. Fear is the mind-killer. Once faith in yourself is undermined, faith in anything else becomes near impossible.
So, outside myself, I've shopped and cooked two meals. Tonight I will be playing a tune I wrote for a Spring Equinox ceremony. The performance, of course, fills me with fear. But the way around my basic fear of non-being, or global incompetence of my person, is to do the things of which I'm afraid. I know this and have done this many times in my approach to life. I even called the Medical Board about the status of my medical license renewal today. (They told me to call back Monday.)
Oh, I fed the cats and brought Kathleen coffee and provided her with a lunch today. Every little useful thing helps. I don't know how it is for others, but in my advanced mental illness I have so much trouble trying to inhabit my body. My body becomes a thing, not part of my person, and to heal my mind must slow down or speed up to the rhythm of my body, so that in washing dishes, for instance, my hands and mind can work in concert. This idea hearkens back to the “moral treatment” enlightened Christians first used on the mentally ill after saving them from asylums. Farming was a big part of that therapy. My capacity for abstraction puts me at risk of losing contact with the material universe and my necessary role in it.
I have tried to keep today's post from undue solipsism. This does not mean that I am necessarily better, only that I am trying to follow my own prescription for improved health.
From 3/25: Post-ECT: My Failure as an Author
Ignoring my depression doesn't seem to be working, so I'll indulge in writing as therapy, believing it helps objectify my suffering. Suffering can never be compared; each of us has suffered to a degree we would be afraid to exceed, as one can only know greater suffering when the soul is stretched beyond its former capacity for suffering. With enough suffering comes a numbness, as in Holocaust survivors, the mind's defense mechanism against overwhelming grief and terror. Depression differs from grief and trauma in that it comes from the inside out instead of from the outside in. It is self-generating.
As a form of suffering I find depression to be one of the worst varieties, because it darkens everything, it makes one unable to experience pleasure, it robs you of yourself--with all the history and attachments that implies. The past seems meaningless and the future seems a terror, while you spend every spare minute accusing yourself of one failure or another. Today my mind chose to accuse myself of not doing enough to end my depression--this despite exercise, ECT, compliance with psychiatric meds, attempts at gardening and cooking, continuing occasional publication of my poetry, hiking, and yes, a lot of basketball watching.
How do I enjoy basketball while being depressed? First, it generally comes on in the evening, when depression itself improves, as depression is usually worse in the morning and better at night. Second, it is essentially trivial. The fate of the chinook salmon or the arctic ice pack does not hang from a basketball rim. It's just a simple game with one ball and two hoops. When I was younger I could play it, which adds to my appreciation. Still the main reason I can "enjoy" (better "be distracted by") basketball is that it demands nothing of me except that I be a mindless fan, an illogical and irrational position and thus a relief from significance.
I will admit that I don't have enough to do. When my depression was less severe I spent a lot of time writing, but now that I've decided I'll never make it as an author I hardly have the heart to keep generating books that won't be published. My novel, "The Abomination," is so boring I can't finish it (Amazon.com published one copy of it for my perusal when I entered their first novel contest; I think I mentioned that out of 5,000 entrants, I didn't even make the cut for the top 1000. But I do have the souvenir book!) I had high hopes for the novel to be a thriller, a page-turner, but I realize in reading it that the characters do not demand the kind of interest that makes for an interesting novel. I don't really care about the characters when I read it.
As for my poetry and literary criticism, I still have faith that some of it has merit beyond my lifetime, but I don't expect to be discovered any time soon.
I recently picked up a new collection of Charles Simic, our present poet laureate, and found no brilliance to envy. Why he is lauded above others I can only attribute to the usual East Coast Old Boys' network. His poems are workmanlike but underwhelming.
To be fair, my sense of failure as an author has not been properly earned because I haven't pulled out every stop and made every sacrifice to succeed. But I have become disheartened, and I don't know how to return to writing without confidence--a writer must have the conceit that he has something worth saying--lacking that at present, I don't write about anything, excepting the therapy of this blog.
So, how did I do today? I hit upon one thing that distracts me from depression: Basketball! I passed a small opinion on our poet laureate. And I confessed that my inner critic thinks I haven't done enough to come out of my depression; but what is enough? It doesn't get more serious than ECT, from which I'm still recovering in terms of memory and cognitive functioning. But what if ECT was a way of avoiding some other aspect of depression? The mind won't let up, the hook is set and the brain reels it in over and over again. That's a good metaphor for depression: having set the hook deep in your soul and afterwards trying to reel it in--you are the fish and the fisherman and therefore can never succeed. And the more you yank on the line the worse it gets. One of the best lines I ever heard about depression was, "If your car is stuck in the mud, don't spin your wheels, just wait for the sun to come out and dry the road and you'll be able to drive away." It's the waiting that kills us. I spin my wheels too much.
Now for the harrowing aftermath of ECT.
From 3/20/08 Post-ECT:
Having something to do with my hands is a blessing. I recall prior to my ECT that I generally made Kathleen lunches and tried to make dinner, but just like my former exercise regimen, ECT seemed to amputate my past from my future. The threads of things I was doing before the treatments I have had trouble reconnecting with. There was a chapbook contest I intended to enter, for example, and I had the chapbook done, but I no longer know where to send it. And I found myself published in a journal I didn't know was publishing me. I think the entire experience of ECT resembles a major concussive syndrome, with selective anterograde amnesia and a general disconnect with one's former life. If I were to do it over again, and I never plan to given the recent results, I would take the time to write down in a notebook beforehand all my ongoing activities and goals in a detailed fashion, so that I would have a guide for resuming my life. As it is, things crop up--”I was going to do that?” “I had promised to do that?” “There's a deadline for what?” “I owe whom a letter?”
ECT is a great interruption in the flow of one's life. Naturally anyone considering it would not call their life normal. But even depressed, as I have been, there are connections and recollections that seem to have been whited out by ECT.
Of course, underneath the inevitable progression of my bipolar disease lies the grief at the loss of my first-born daughter, Rachel, on July 29, 2007. At the time I welcomed the sad feelings because they were legitimate grief, and grief felt better than depression, but in the emotional economy of the human psyche one wonders if that great loss has not been feeding my depression at some level. Experientially I can't say so; theoretically it makes sense.
I've been worrying a lot about old age lately, where we might live, how we will afford to live and all the attendant worries. But I like what Bob Dylan said: “He who isn't busy being born is busy dying.” Also, T. S. Eliot: “Old men should be explorers.”
Fine quotes to live up to. Fear is the mind-killer. Once faith in yourself is undermined, faith in anything else becomes near impossible.
So, outside myself, I've shopped and cooked two meals. Tonight I will be playing a tune I wrote for a Spring Equinox ceremony. The performance, of course, fills me with fear. But the way around my basic fear of non-being, or global incompetence of my person, is to do the things of which I'm afraid. I know this and have done this many times in my approach to life. I even called the Medical Board about the status of my medical license renewal today. (They told me to call back Monday.)
Oh, I fed the cats and brought Kathleen coffee and provided her with a lunch today. Every little useful thing helps. I don't know how it is for others, but in my advanced mental illness I have so much trouble trying to inhabit my body. My body becomes a thing, not part of my person, and to heal my mind must slow down or speed up to the rhythm of my body, so that in washing dishes, for instance, my hands and mind can work in concert. This idea hearkens back to the “moral treatment” enlightened Christians first used on the mentally ill after saving them from asylums. Farming was a big part of that therapy. My capacity for abstraction puts me at risk of losing contact with the material universe and my necessary role in it.
I have tried to keep today's post from undue solipsism. This does not mean that I am necessarily better, only that I am trying to follow my own prescription for improved health.
From 3/25: Post-ECT: My Failure as an Author
Ignoring my depression doesn't seem to be working, so I'll indulge in writing as therapy, believing it helps objectify my suffering. Suffering can never be compared; each of us has suffered to a degree we would be afraid to exceed, as one can only know greater suffering when the soul is stretched beyond its former capacity for suffering. With enough suffering comes a numbness, as in Holocaust survivors, the mind's defense mechanism against overwhelming grief and terror. Depression differs from grief and trauma in that it comes from the inside out instead of from the outside in. It is self-generating.
As a form of suffering I find depression to be one of the worst varieties, because it darkens everything, it makes one unable to experience pleasure, it robs you of yourself--with all the history and attachments that implies. The past seems meaningless and the future seems a terror, while you spend every spare minute accusing yourself of one failure or another. Today my mind chose to accuse myself of not doing enough to end my depression--this despite exercise, ECT, compliance with psychiatric meds, attempts at gardening and cooking, continuing occasional publication of my poetry, hiking, and yes, a lot of basketball watching.
How do I enjoy basketball while being depressed? First, it generally comes on in the evening, when depression itself improves, as depression is usually worse in the morning and better at night. Second, it is essentially trivial. The fate of the chinook salmon or the arctic ice pack does not hang from a basketball rim. It's just a simple game with one ball and two hoops. When I was younger I could play it, which adds to my appreciation. Still the main reason I can "enjoy" (better "be distracted by") basketball is that it demands nothing of me except that I be a mindless fan, an illogical and irrational position and thus a relief from significance.
I will admit that I don't have enough to do. When my depression was less severe I spent a lot of time writing, but now that I've decided I'll never make it as an author I hardly have the heart to keep generating books that won't be published. My novel, "The Abomination," is so boring I can't finish it (Amazon.com published one copy of it for my perusal when I entered their first novel contest; I think I mentioned that out of 5,000 entrants, I didn't even make the cut for the top 1000. But I do have the souvenir book!) I had high hopes for the novel to be a thriller, a page-turner, but I realize in reading it that the characters do not demand the kind of interest that makes for an interesting novel. I don't really care about the characters when I read it.
As for my poetry and literary criticism, I still have faith that some of it has merit beyond my lifetime, but I don't expect to be discovered any time soon.
I recently picked up a new collection of Charles Simic, our present poet laureate, and found no brilliance to envy. Why he is lauded above others I can only attribute to the usual East Coast Old Boys' network. His poems are workmanlike but underwhelming.
To be fair, my sense of failure as an author has not been properly earned because I haven't pulled out every stop and made every sacrifice to succeed. But I have become disheartened, and I don't know how to return to writing without confidence--a writer must have the conceit that he has something worth saying--lacking that at present, I don't write about anything, excepting the therapy of this blog.
So, how did I do today? I hit upon one thing that distracts me from depression: Basketball! I passed a small opinion on our poet laureate. And I confessed that my inner critic thinks I haven't done enough to come out of my depression; but what is enough? It doesn't get more serious than ECT, from which I'm still recovering in terms of memory and cognitive functioning. But what if ECT was a way of avoiding some other aspect of depression? The mind won't let up, the hook is set and the brain reels it in over and over again. That's a good metaphor for depression: having set the hook deep in your soul and afterwards trying to reel it in--you are the fish and the fisherman and therefore can never succeed. And the more you yank on the line the worse it gets. One of the best lines I ever heard about depression was, "If your car is stuck in the mud, don't spin your wheels, just wait for the sun to come out and dry the road and you'll be able to drive away." It's the waiting that kills us. I spin my wheels too much.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Lassoing the Ineffable
I remarked to Kathleen yesterday that my first book of poetry, "Elementary," was mainly concerned with nature, while my second book (above) concerns itself with human nature. This made me think of a third volume beyond any nature, after which I scribbled this poem, not the usual variety to which my readers have become accustomed:
Greenwood Beach
tsunami of my eyes
holocaust of my lungs
volcano of my mouth
sun's halo on the water
dark amethyst clouds
how rain spouts ascended
holy nasturtium grove
ice plant invading
scourge of freeways
not here, Lord
sea otter dipping
pelagic cormorant
shakes, submerges
brutally lavender horizon
the thin reed squealing
how a shovel functions
who kept the monster quiet
while gesturing and walking
who fed it arms and legs
there in the final desert
Ozymandias sands
the far reaches
hallelujah the ego has come
no need to piece it together
make it all mine
tsunami of my eyes
holocaust of my lungs
volcano of my mouth
Greenwood beach is beyond words, beyond nature in a sense, any attempt to grasp it seemed selfish, thus the undermining of the first and last stanzas by the possessive pronoun, "my." If this doesn't make sense it's OK, I was just experimenting. Here's another poem more to the point that I revised yesterday:
Big Creek at Sunrise
Tongues of white flame
bob downstream
like votive candles
held aloft by a horde
of gleaming water striders
scattering and coalescing
into glitter-ripples,
splinters like the first flare
of a match in broken
bits of mirror—white,
white, silver-white!
The cold fury of light.
I suppose this could be nature beyond nature, to some degree. An eastern Sierra creek at sunrise, just like that, closest I could come in words, but do they deliver? I honestly don't know. The light is uberfantastic. How to get at the light. Painters and film makers have the advantage of us, Virgil.
Nature inspires me, its otherness, its other-than-selfness, how we project a face on a cliff when there is no face, how we unfailingly seek tropes to anthropomorphize what cannot be reduced from its whole. There's no way to encompass the ocean in a poem, or the deep neon dark purple- lavender-amethyst color of the low clouds against the horizon yesterday. And the grove of nasturtiums in the middle of nowhere on shore, but also the ice plant that reminded me of LA parking lots and freeways--non-native just like the nasturtium--I know the poem doesn't make sense particularly, just curious as to whether it left a sense of something.
The more sublime the subject, the more impossible poetry becomes. We have to piece and parcel the universe out in subjecting it to words, hoping those words might bear a trace of the experience, but how can you transmit the glory of the Milky Way as you stare up from your sleeping bag on a campout? Or the crest of a towering wave before it breaks, the after-hollow, the degeneration into a white wall of suds, then the flattening, the hiss, the death on sand... it's all too much.
Here's a poem where I attempted to describe Denali:
Denali (Mt. McKinley)
Like a white fist clenched against the blue arctic sky,
Denali rises 20,000 feet high.
Beside it I am no taller than the blueberries
woven through ocher tundra at my feet.
Through a break in the clouds Valhalla beckons
where no slope should be.
Proportion withers like a December sun.
From now on mankind will be for me divided
into those who have and have not seen
"The Great One."
Denali and the Grand Canyon are the two greatest natural wonders I have seen, leaving me slack-jawed and speechless. Another poem from my new volume, "On the Anthropic Principle," includes the Grand Canyon in passing but by no means encompasses it.
In poetry, as in life, we must filter out the threads we can weave into our limited consciousness and leave the rest; we must partialize existence so that it does not overwhelm us by its sheer enormity, and that enormity includes the very miracle of consciousness itself, which allows us to appreciate the gap between experience and our homage to that experience.
Consciousness also promotes two of the most basic numinous instincts, gratefulness and awe.
Strangely some folks lack the gene for "nature appreciation" and notice only mosquitoes and the smell of smoke in their clothes. They want to get to the next thing--dinner, tourist trap, movie--they cannot dwell on the ineffable, it's not in them, they'd rather buy a postcard and leave it at that and say, "I was there," when they really weren't, at least not as a nature lover would be. I know people like this. They are more concerned with poison oak exposure than to be high on the humbling thereness all around. But see how language breaks down as we approach the other? I resort to "thereness!"
Like life, poetry must partialize to make sense, but the plain truth of it is, we cannot fully apprehend the ineffable, all our attempts to note it necessarily limit the experience-- you can't carry a mountain around in your pocket, now, can you? For me poetry come the closest, though a photograph of the quality of Ansel Adams' work does nicely--but photographs are static and do not capture the personal experience.
As for my mood, I'm doing fine, though a little apprehensive about the upcoming court date where I fight for visitation rights for my one and only grandchild, but again, the whole process is a legal partialization of what's best for the kid, and what's best for him is to stay in contact with his late mother's family, not to have that family treated as pariahs because some happen to suffer from mood disorders--disorders that are manageable, as this blog demonstrates--a blog which the child's father cherry-picked to try to prove me an unfit grandfather.
In depression my blog functioned as therapy and should not be taken out of context to assert that I could not cope with life. Yet by baring my heart in words in the worst of my depression I was able to comfort many who wrote me to say, "That's exactly how I felt only you express it better." That's all a writer can hope for, and I am glad my blogtherapy went beyond myself to encompass the needs of others, only I fervently pray not to have to go through that again any time soon--I would hope never--except that as this is a cyclic illness I'm likely to have at least one or two major depressions before my chapter on this earth is up.
As for Jacob's father, I only hope he receives his due. Justice is the worst I can wish people. "Mercy triumphs over justice."
Our plum tree is blooming, the ornamental apple is sure to follow, narcissus and tulips and daffodils are coming up, even some Icelandic poppies and snapdragons are blooming from last year. This year, as I've stated, I'm going for a garden of deer-resistant flowers, to hell with the vegetables, I don't want to go another three rounds with the late night or early morning deer; they will prevail as they have before. I want my garden a profuse and disordered mass of color. More to come, and eventually photos, I hope.
How I do go on when I have nothing to say. I read a story by Henry James last night and wondered as to whether he may go beyond language in his prose; his psychological distinctions are so finely drawn that at times I lose the thread altogether and must backtrack for paragraphs to pick it up. His writing is so reified, and Latinate in construction to a degree, with many dependent clauses and lots of abstractions, yet somehow he pulls off character and plot in a display of amazing technical mastery. The prose of Henry James is some of the most highly evolved prose extant. It was of its age, the Victorian, where many writers arrived at the pinnacle of high technique, like Dickens and Tennyson and Swinburne and Hopkins and the like. This pinnacle rightly preceded the revolution of the Moderns.
Enough. Or too much.
I should mention that at Blue's Cruzio Cafe there's a new animated feature of me reciting a love poem, along with other poets' features. These are really entertaining; do click on the link!
At 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Greenwood Beach
tsunami of my eyes
holocaust of my lungs
volcano of my mouth
sun's halo on the water
dark amethyst clouds
how rain spouts ascended
holy nasturtium grove
ice plant invading
scourge of freeways
not here, Lord
sea otter dipping
pelagic cormorant
shakes, submerges
brutally lavender horizon
the thin reed squealing
how a shovel functions
who kept the monster quiet
while gesturing and walking
who fed it arms and legs
there in the final desert
Ozymandias sands
the far reaches
hallelujah the ego has come
no need to piece it together
make it all mine
tsunami of my eyes
holocaust of my lungs
volcano of my mouth
Greenwood beach is beyond words, beyond nature in a sense, any attempt to grasp it seemed selfish, thus the undermining of the first and last stanzas by the possessive pronoun, "my." If this doesn't make sense it's OK, I was just experimenting. Here's another poem more to the point that I revised yesterday:
Big Creek at Sunrise
Tongues of white flame
bob downstream
like votive candles
held aloft by a horde
of gleaming water striders
scattering and coalescing
into glitter-ripples,
splinters like the first flare
of a match in broken
bits of mirror—white,
white, silver-white!
The cold fury of light.
I suppose this could be nature beyond nature, to some degree. An eastern Sierra creek at sunrise, just like that, closest I could come in words, but do they deliver? I honestly don't know. The light is uberfantastic. How to get at the light. Painters and film makers have the advantage of us, Virgil.
Nature inspires me, its otherness, its other-than-selfness, how we project a face on a cliff when there is no face, how we unfailingly seek tropes to anthropomorphize what cannot be reduced from its whole. There's no way to encompass the ocean in a poem, or the deep neon dark purple- lavender-amethyst color of the low clouds against the horizon yesterday. And the grove of nasturtiums in the middle of nowhere on shore, but also the ice plant that reminded me of LA parking lots and freeways--non-native just like the nasturtium--I know the poem doesn't make sense particularly, just curious as to whether it left a sense of something.
The more sublime the subject, the more impossible poetry becomes. We have to piece and parcel the universe out in subjecting it to words, hoping those words might bear a trace of the experience, but how can you transmit the glory of the Milky Way as you stare up from your sleeping bag on a campout? Or the crest of a towering wave before it breaks, the after-hollow, the degeneration into a white wall of suds, then the flattening, the hiss, the death on sand... it's all too much.
Here's a poem where I attempted to describe Denali:
Denali (Mt. McKinley)
Like a white fist clenched against the blue arctic sky,
Denali rises 20,000 feet high.
Beside it I am no taller than the blueberries
woven through ocher tundra at my feet.
Through a break in the clouds Valhalla beckons
where no slope should be.
Proportion withers like a December sun.
From now on mankind will be for me divided
into those who have and have not seen
"The Great One."
Denali and the Grand Canyon are the two greatest natural wonders I have seen, leaving me slack-jawed and speechless. Another poem from my new volume, "On the Anthropic Principle," includes the Grand Canyon in passing but by no means encompasses it.
In poetry, as in life, we must filter out the threads we can weave into our limited consciousness and leave the rest; we must partialize existence so that it does not overwhelm us by its sheer enormity, and that enormity includes the very miracle of consciousness itself, which allows us to appreciate the gap between experience and our homage to that experience.
Consciousness also promotes two of the most basic numinous instincts, gratefulness and awe.
Strangely some folks lack the gene for "nature appreciation" and notice only mosquitoes and the smell of smoke in their clothes. They want to get to the next thing--dinner, tourist trap, movie--they cannot dwell on the ineffable, it's not in them, they'd rather buy a postcard and leave it at that and say, "I was there," when they really weren't, at least not as a nature lover would be. I know people like this. They are more concerned with poison oak exposure than to be high on the humbling thereness all around. But see how language breaks down as we approach the other? I resort to "thereness!"
Like life, poetry must partialize to make sense, but the plain truth of it is, we cannot fully apprehend the ineffable, all our attempts to note it necessarily limit the experience-- you can't carry a mountain around in your pocket, now, can you? For me poetry come the closest, though a photograph of the quality of Ansel Adams' work does nicely--but photographs are static and do not capture the personal experience.
As for my mood, I'm doing fine, though a little apprehensive about the upcoming court date where I fight for visitation rights for my one and only grandchild, but again, the whole process is a legal partialization of what's best for the kid, and what's best for him is to stay in contact with his late mother's family, not to have that family treated as pariahs because some happen to suffer from mood disorders--disorders that are manageable, as this blog demonstrates--a blog which the child's father cherry-picked to try to prove me an unfit grandfather.
In depression my blog functioned as therapy and should not be taken out of context to assert that I could not cope with life. Yet by baring my heart in words in the worst of my depression I was able to comfort many who wrote me to say, "That's exactly how I felt only you express it better." That's all a writer can hope for, and I am glad my blogtherapy went beyond myself to encompass the needs of others, only I fervently pray not to have to go through that again any time soon--I would hope never--except that as this is a cyclic illness I'm likely to have at least one or two major depressions before my chapter on this earth is up.
As for Jacob's father, I only hope he receives his due. Justice is the worst I can wish people. "Mercy triumphs over justice."
Our plum tree is blooming, the ornamental apple is sure to follow, narcissus and tulips and daffodils are coming up, even some Icelandic poppies and snapdragons are blooming from last year. This year, as I've stated, I'm going for a garden of deer-resistant flowers, to hell with the vegetables, I don't want to go another three rounds with the late night or early morning deer; they will prevail as they have before. I want my garden a profuse and disordered mass of color. More to come, and eventually photos, I hope.
How I do go on when I have nothing to say. I read a story by Henry James last night and wondered as to whether he may go beyond language in his prose; his psychological distinctions are so finely drawn that at times I lose the thread altogether and must backtrack for paragraphs to pick it up. His writing is so reified, and Latinate in construction to a degree, with many dependent clauses and lots of abstractions, yet somehow he pulls off character and plot in a display of amazing technical mastery. The prose of Henry James is some of the most highly evolved prose extant. It was of its age, the Victorian, where many writers arrived at the pinnacle of high technique, like Dickens and Tennyson and Swinburne and Hopkins and the like. This pinnacle rightly preceded the revolution of the Moderns.
Enough. Or too much.
I should mention that at Blue's Cruzio Cafe there's a new animated feature of me reciting a love poem, along with other poets' features. These are really entertaining; do click on the link!
At 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Friday, February 27, 2009
First Reading from "Unexpected Light"
Last night at Colored Horse Studios in Ukiah I gave my first featured reading from the new book. Out of a crowd of 14 (not counting Kathleen, me and the dog) I sold three books. I also received an honorarium of $75. I could get used to this! So if any of you west coast readers have connections to venues, "just call on me and I'll send it along / with love from me to you."
In paging through the book while reading, I concentrated on lighter pieces. For some reason I didn't want to get into depression or anything else too flypapery. I got a lot of laughs with "Fat" and "The Obesion," for instance.
One woman bought a book for her manic-depressive son, who happens to be my size; another bought the book because of "At the Vietnam Memorial;" and another bought the book for the power of the reading. Afterwards was an open mic where--well, let's just say it was an open mic. A good time was had by all, with red wine and chocolate for refreshments.
Here's "Fat":
Fat
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 ravaged to react.
On second thought it's not entirely light. But that's the thing about the book, as one reviewer put it: it's "slanted" light. Dark humor. Unexpected twists of light. It's hard for me to be all this or that in a poem. Modulation requires shifts to retain the reader's attention and entertain him. Without such contrasts it would be greeting card verse. Ah Helen Steiner Rice and Susan Polis Schulz!
Not much to report otherwise except the fact that I intend to assay my garden today and try to uncover some of the bloomables from beneath the encroachment of weeds.
Oh, J. Alfred ditched me the other night on our walk, I suppose because it was getting too dark. I crated him when I got home out of anger. I think he understood. If not, it let me do something with my pissed-offness.
Another light poem from the volume? Why the hell not? (Though if you get it free here, why buy the book? Because many of the poems have been published through journals since defunct, therefore you can't find them on the net. Still, if you google me, as we recently discussed, you will have more than enough to read. But ah hell, get out of the cyberworld and get your hands on a real book. The hardback is the best value.) Here's the poem:
God and Cheetos
Don’t we all want to meet God,
engage omnipotence in conversation warm and natural
as in why Pete Rose is banned from Cooperstown
and whether Augustine’s "Confessions" are more an exercise
in literary narcissism than true devotion?
I prefer Pascal, but what would God think?
Picture us on a park bench, dispensing crusts
to avian communicants while sharing
Cheetos from an inexhaustible bag.
Perhaps we’d join the shoeless fellowship
of mumbling schizophrenics
or join in cursing citations on windshields.
And could he take his own name in vain?
There are some things even God can’t do,
like changing history--that would be dishonest.
Lord, thank you for the consciousness
that allows me to scribble this.
How about an autograph? In blood, of course.
So rudely forced into human form— how divine
it must have been when you rejoined yourself!
OK, so there are a few dark threads dangling, but overall a happy poem? How would I know? I can't rightly judge my own work.
Oprah, I'm calling you, I need a sales boost! You can have me on your couch to discuss romantic love in the new millennium and manic-depression as well.
In fun at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
In paging through the book while reading, I concentrated on lighter pieces. For some reason I didn't want to get into depression or anything else too flypapery. I got a lot of laughs with "Fat" and "The Obesion," for instance.
One woman bought a book for her manic-depressive son, who happens to be my size; another bought the book because of "At the Vietnam Memorial;" and another bought the book for the power of the reading. Afterwards was an open mic where--well, let's just say it was an open mic. A good time was had by all, with red wine and chocolate for refreshments.
Here's "Fat":
Fat
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 ravaged to react.
On second thought it's not entirely light. But that's the thing about the book, as one reviewer put it: it's "slanted" light. Dark humor. Unexpected twists of light. It's hard for me to be all this or that in a poem. Modulation requires shifts to retain the reader's attention and entertain him. Without such contrasts it would be greeting card verse. Ah Helen Steiner Rice and Susan Polis Schulz!
Not much to report otherwise except the fact that I intend to assay my garden today and try to uncover some of the bloomables from beneath the encroachment of weeds.
Oh, J. Alfred ditched me the other night on our walk, I suppose because it was getting too dark. I crated him when I got home out of anger. I think he understood. If not, it let me do something with my pissed-offness.
Another light poem from the volume? Why the hell not? (Though if you get it free here, why buy the book? Because many of the poems have been published through journals since defunct, therefore you can't find them on the net. Still, if you google me, as we recently discussed, you will have more than enough to read. But ah hell, get out of the cyberworld and get your hands on a real book. The hardback is the best value.) Here's the poem:
God and Cheetos
Don’t we all want to meet God,
engage omnipotence in conversation warm and natural
as in why Pete Rose is banned from Cooperstown
and whether Augustine’s "Confessions" are more an exercise
in literary narcissism than true devotion?
I prefer Pascal, but what would God think?
Picture us on a park bench, dispensing crusts
to avian communicants while sharing
Cheetos from an inexhaustible bag.
Perhaps we’d join the shoeless fellowship
of mumbling schizophrenics
or join in cursing citations on windshields.
And could he take his own name in vain?
There are some things even God can’t do,
like changing history--that would be dishonest.
Lord, thank you for the consciousness
that allows me to scribble this.
How about an autograph? In blood, of course.
So rudely forced into human form— how divine
it must have been when you rejoined yourself!
OK, so there are a few dark threads dangling, but overall a happy poem? How would I know? I can't rightly judge my own work.
Oprah, I'm calling you, I need a sales boost! You can have me on your couch to discuss romantic love in the new millennium and manic-depression as well.
In fun at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Googling oneself and the Internet; Book Reviews
It's hilarious to watch Homer Simpson google himself in his childllike narcissism, and no doubt many of us do it. It's amazing how Google constantly pares references down for redundancy until they build up again. When I google myself I find it much work; I find published poems whose web pages I never bothered to save, comments about me at forums that I sometimes reply to, references from lists of which I'm not aware--and it becomes work, and slightly unmanageable at that.
It's like eavesdropping on oneself in the cyberworld--but not oneself, rather the objectified self of one's work. Since my metier is poetry, most of the references concern it, excepting my essays and contributions from my blog. My music is starting to pop up since I added it to my website, and that's gratifying. But these objectified representations of me are not me. Nor are they celebrity; even Billy Collins could walk through a supermarket unrecognized, one of the benefits or our arcane art. No one wants to know the size of my underwear--at least yet (I don't wear it). As P. D. James wrote, "Privacy is the last luxury"--and through media overload, privacy is sacrificed for promotion, though in my case it's the work and not me. Still I am horrified to see my address and phone number listed at various poets' lists.
In all of this I remind myself it's the work, the process of the work, that counts, not the result or the resultant attention. Still, the web invites us to objectify ourselves in a way not heretofore seen.
I think the four greatest inventions in human history are fire, language (spoken then written--recorded history does not begin until about 3500 B.C.), the Gutenburg press, and the Internet. Think of that--the most transforming technological advance in the last 600 years has been within our lifetime. The implications of Big Brother's spying in this context are immense, but on the other hand, the sheer volume of information makes it somewhat unmanageable--what search algorithms are for.
Spit out into the ether and it will find a wall to dry on.
The convenience of the net is also incredible. Last night I wondered if moles were really blind, and I found that some can sense light and motion. Now I have to look into bats to make sure the trope, "Blind as a bat," is not undermined as well.
I read a new book by Anny Ballardini that is truly unique: "Ghost Dance in 33 Movements," essentially her master's thesis for a MFA. It chronicles 33 avante garde movies in verse and quotations, trying to reproduce the experience of film in symbols. A noble attempt, and one that spurs the reader to investigate the films she has chosen, which can be referenced through UbuWeb It's published by Otoliths, whose journal I've been lucky enough to appear in. Given the miracle of the web, I could write Anny immediately through Facebook and get a reply.
The world is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and you are part of it. The objectification of humans is proceeding apace, and any yahoo can put up a website or start a magazine or put a movie out on U Tube. It's amazing, this universal forum, and I think the greatest enemy of Totalitarianism the world has ever seen. Imagine if the Jews had had the internet during the beginning of their persecution in Nazi Germany. The whole world would have known of it, and powers would have been summoned to their defense. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the internet is the most powerful engine to date in changing history, and we are a part of it. As the exponential explosion of information proceeds, there will be little that is not known anymore, much less not available to anyone who wants to stick their nose in it.
When I think about my first computer and the dot matrix printer and the early manifestations of the internet and compare it to the canvas we now have, its evolution is also astounding. And here I am, typing into the ether again.
I don't know if I've mentioned some new publications for your perusal. So far two reviews are out about my book, one at the Hobble Creek Review blog (see Feb. 15th's post) and one in the new issue of Centrifugal Eye (see pg. 71; I also have two poems in the issue). Moreover, Ambush Arts has featured me with a poem, an interview, an artist's statment and myriad links. John Thomas treats his authors well, though it was difficult to qualify. I first sent him five poems and he liked one, then asked me to send more. He finally chose my recent, "With My Dog in the Rain," from the second batch, which I posted here, though he had an editorial suggestion to which I submitted. A demanding and discerning editor.
Meanwhile I need to stop these literary activities and concentrate on my garden, which I've avoided because of the recent weeks of rain. This year I plan to plant only deer-resistant flowers. Those of you who follow this blog will remember last year's war with the deer, which I lost. I don't want any vegetables tempting them this time around.
False spring continues on the Mendocino coast; daffodils and hyacinths are blooming, even blackberry brambles--all too early for our normal timeline. Even rhododendrons have begun. It's spring in February.
I've also begun a theological correspondence with the Christian editor of Rose and Thorn, a magazine that will soon feature another review of my book. (They have nominated me for a Pushcart Prize in the past, but I don't think Pushcart gives much credence to net publications.) So far the reviews are distinctly encouraging; I may be a poet after all! ;-)
And have I spoken recently of the joy my dog, J. Alfred Prufrock, gives me? He walks me daily, and to see his diminutive form leap over the tall grass like a gazelle in pursuit of deer gives me unspeakable pleasure, pure joy in his athleticism and indomitable hunting instincts. I love the daily experiences that transport me beyond language.
At 1 Kilobunny,
CE
It's like eavesdropping on oneself in the cyberworld--but not oneself, rather the objectified self of one's work. Since my metier is poetry, most of the references concern it, excepting my essays and contributions from my blog. My music is starting to pop up since I added it to my website, and that's gratifying. But these objectified representations of me are not me. Nor are they celebrity; even Billy Collins could walk through a supermarket unrecognized, one of the benefits or our arcane art. No one wants to know the size of my underwear--at least yet (I don't wear it). As P. D. James wrote, "Privacy is the last luxury"--and through media overload, privacy is sacrificed for promotion, though in my case it's the work and not me. Still I am horrified to see my address and phone number listed at various poets' lists.
In all of this I remind myself it's the work, the process of the work, that counts, not the result or the resultant attention. Still, the web invites us to objectify ourselves in a way not heretofore seen.
I think the four greatest inventions in human history are fire, language (spoken then written--recorded history does not begin until about 3500 B.C.), the Gutenburg press, and the Internet. Think of that--the most transforming technological advance in the last 600 years has been within our lifetime. The implications of Big Brother's spying in this context are immense, but on the other hand, the sheer volume of information makes it somewhat unmanageable--what search algorithms are for.
Spit out into the ether and it will find a wall to dry on.
The convenience of the net is also incredible. Last night I wondered if moles were really blind, and I found that some can sense light and motion. Now I have to look into bats to make sure the trope, "Blind as a bat," is not undermined as well.
I read a new book by Anny Ballardini that is truly unique: "Ghost Dance in 33 Movements," essentially her master's thesis for a MFA. It chronicles 33 avante garde movies in verse and quotations, trying to reproduce the experience of film in symbols. A noble attempt, and one that spurs the reader to investigate the films she has chosen, which can be referenced through UbuWeb It's published by Otoliths, whose journal I've been lucky enough to appear in. Given the miracle of the web, I could write Anny immediately through Facebook and get a reply.
The world is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and you are part of it. The objectification of humans is proceeding apace, and any yahoo can put up a website or start a magazine or put a movie out on U Tube. It's amazing, this universal forum, and I think the greatest enemy of Totalitarianism the world has ever seen. Imagine if the Jews had had the internet during the beginning of their persecution in Nazi Germany. The whole world would have known of it, and powers would have been summoned to their defense. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the internet is the most powerful engine to date in changing history, and we are a part of it. As the exponential explosion of information proceeds, there will be little that is not known anymore, much less not available to anyone who wants to stick their nose in it.
When I think about my first computer and the dot matrix printer and the early manifestations of the internet and compare it to the canvas we now have, its evolution is also astounding. And here I am, typing into the ether again.
I don't know if I've mentioned some new publications for your perusal. So far two reviews are out about my book, one at the Hobble Creek Review blog (see Feb. 15th's post) and one in the new issue of Centrifugal Eye (see pg. 71; I also have two poems in the issue). Moreover, Ambush Arts has featured me with a poem, an interview, an artist's statment and myriad links. John Thomas treats his authors well, though it was difficult to qualify. I first sent him five poems and he liked one, then asked me to send more. He finally chose my recent, "With My Dog in the Rain," from the second batch, which I posted here, though he had an editorial suggestion to which I submitted. A demanding and discerning editor.
Meanwhile I need to stop these literary activities and concentrate on my garden, which I've avoided because of the recent weeks of rain. This year I plan to plant only deer-resistant flowers. Those of you who follow this blog will remember last year's war with the deer, which I lost. I don't want any vegetables tempting them this time around.
False spring continues on the Mendocino coast; daffodils and hyacinths are blooming, even blackberry brambles--all too early for our normal timeline. Even rhododendrons have begun. It's spring in February.
I've also begun a theological correspondence with the Christian editor of Rose and Thorn, a magazine that will soon feature another review of my book. (They have nominated me for a Pushcart Prize in the past, but I don't think Pushcart gives much credence to net publications.) So far the reviews are distinctly encouraging; I may be a poet after all! ;-)
And have I spoken recently of the joy my dog, J. Alfred Prufrock, gives me? He walks me daily, and to see his diminutive form leap over the tall grass like a gazelle in pursuit of deer gives me unspeakable pleasure, pure joy in his athleticism and indomitable hunting instincts. I love the daily experiences that transport me beyond language.
At 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Two New Poems; Warning on Afghanistan
Here's a couple of new poems:
This
Is a poem about nothing
as in the center of a windsock,
the form of a shovel,
the dome of a cereal bowl,
the space between petals
of a flaming rhododendron.
Cup your hands, open your mouth:
the haven between barbwire,
empty esophagus.
Spread your fingers and look:
the open-ended triangles.
You say, “But there's air!”
Air defines the borders
of what isn't there.
This is a poem about nothing,
the dull ending of despair
where no feeling lurks,
the empty crib, the empty throne
where Solomon once sat,
a gourd, a scooped-out pumpkin,
a glove, a jacket, how these wrap
themselves around a space
expecting something--
a sudden pregnancy of substance!
Substance is as much defined
by nothing as by something,
the spaces between stanzas,
hollows in these letters,
the blank stare, the pause
of the Alzheimer's patient,
a boot, a candy wrapper,
a picture frame, gazebo,
how a poem begins from nothing
What a Man Wants
To sharpen a Buck knife on your front porch
until you can whittle hickory,
jump naked in a glacial stream
and dry in the High Sierra wind,
hit a home run and savor its arc
as you slowly trot the bases,
bring the hammer down at a circus
and ring the bell on your first try,
ride a Harley in the Mojave
through the carpets of spring,
see the Grateful Dead once more,
sit courtside at a Lakers game,
worship a woman with your body
and have enough dough to buy
the red dress in the display window for her,
discover a new kind of meat,
make spoons from coconuts,
have an obedient dog that walks you daily,
get good and drunk with no explaining to do
and sleep with an easy conscience.
Why post two at once? Because I'm greedy? Because I'm lazy? Because I wrote them since I last blogged? The phones are open, winner to be announced later.
But seriously, folks, there's a new review of my book on pg. 71 of the newly-formatted Centrifugal Eye, along with two of my poems. Another review will be out soon. If you don't read the book at least read the reviews so you know what you're missing.
I have no comment on the Oscars except to say that the choices, per usual, were predictable, with the possible exception of Sean Penn over Mickey Rourke--but everyone knows which way Hollywood swings--not to take away from Penn's fine acting. His comments on Proposition 8 out here were nugatory, as I am one who still does not believe the vote on that issue. Who cares if homosexuals get married? I had not thought so many in California remained in the past. Also I should add that Hugh Jackman was great, and who knew he was a song-and-dance man?
Didn't Jerry Lewis look ancient? And Christopher Walken looked like the vampire he has so often played. He gives me the creeps.
False spring here has rhododendrons blooming already, imagine! Not to mention all the daffodils and heather. Perhaps spring has really come, albeit very early.
California, the world's sixth largest economy, finally has a budget and no one is happy per usual. Calls for a constitutional convention abound; our constitution is nearly four times the length of the U. S. Constitution and has over 500 amendments because of our yen for propositions, governance by polling the ignorant as opposed to government legislated by the informed corrupt.
Since Senator Burris is a liar, I think him well-qualified for the senate.
I adjure Obama not to stick his foot in it in Afghanistan. It has the population of Iraq with a quarter of its literacy. The only natural resources are tribalism, fanaticism, opium and corruption. Guns don't actual grow there, they are supplied by competing armies that fail to govern the mountainous intransigence of a nation better left to its medieval ways. It is a quagmire, one the British and the Soviets lost and left.
With unemployment rising, some might aver that it's better to leave our troops there; I say this is cynical. Bring them all home from unwinnable wars that we started.
People are also saying that Russian and Pakistan and North Korea and Iran are all taking advantage of Obama already. But beware a leader accused of weakness; Democrats have started most of our wars.
I'm sorry I have so little verve tonight. Best I could do. Hope you enjoyed the poems.
1 Kilobunny,
CE
This
Is a poem about nothing
as in the center of a windsock,
the form of a shovel,
the dome of a cereal bowl,
the space between petals
of a flaming rhododendron.
Cup your hands, open your mouth:
the haven between barbwire,
empty esophagus.
Spread your fingers and look:
the open-ended triangles.
You say, “But there's air!”
Air defines the borders
of what isn't there.
This is a poem about nothing,
the dull ending of despair
where no feeling lurks,
the empty crib, the empty throne
where Solomon once sat,
a gourd, a scooped-out pumpkin,
a glove, a jacket, how these wrap
themselves around a space
expecting something--
a sudden pregnancy of substance!
Substance is as much defined
by nothing as by something,
the spaces between stanzas,
hollows in these letters,
the blank stare, the pause
of the Alzheimer's patient,
a boot, a candy wrapper,
a picture frame, gazebo,
how a poem begins from nothing
What a Man Wants
To sharpen a Buck knife on your front porch
until you can whittle hickory,
jump naked in a glacial stream
and dry in the High Sierra wind,
hit a home run and savor its arc
as you slowly trot the bases,
bring the hammer down at a circus
and ring the bell on your first try,
ride a Harley in the Mojave
through the carpets of spring,
see the Grateful Dead once more,
sit courtside at a Lakers game,
worship a woman with your body
and have enough dough to buy
the red dress in the display window for her,
discover a new kind of meat,
make spoons from coconuts,
have an obedient dog that walks you daily,
get good and drunk with no explaining to do
and sleep with an easy conscience.
Why post two at once? Because I'm greedy? Because I'm lazy? Because I wrote them since I last blogged? The phones are open, winner to be announced later.
But seriously, folks, there's a new review of my book on pg. 71 of the newly-formatted Centrifugal Eye, along with two of my poems. Another review will be out soon. If you don't read the book at least read the reviews so you know what you're missing.
I have no comment on the Oscars except to say that the choices, per usual, were predictable, with the possible exception of Sean Penn over Mickey Rourke--but everyone knows which way Hollywood swings--not to take away from Penn's fine acting. His comments on Proposition 8 out here were nugatory, as I am one who still does not believe the vote on that issue. Who cares if homosexuals get married? I had not thought so many in California remained in the past. Also I should add that Hugh Jackman was great, and who knew he was a song-and-dance man?
Didn't Jerry Lewis look ancient? And Christopher Walken looked like the vampire he has so often played. He gives me the creeps.
False spring here has rhododendrons blooming already, imagine! Not to mention all the daffodils and heather. Perhaps spring has really come, albeit very early.
California, the world's sixth largest economy, finally has a budget and no one is happy per usual. Calls for a constitutional convention abound; our constitution is nearly four times the length of the U. S. Constitution and has over 500 amendments because of our yen for propositions, governance by polling the ignorant as opposed to government legislated by the informed corrupt.
Since Senator Burris is a liar, I think him well-qualified for the senate.
I adjure Obama not to stick his foot in it in Afghanistan. It has the population of Iraq with a quarter of its literacy. The only natural resources are tribalism, fanaticism, opium and corruption. Guns don't actual grow there, they are supplied by competing armies that fail to govern the mountainous intransigence of a nation better left to its medieval ways. It is a quagmire, one the British and the Soviets lost and left.
With unemployment rising, some might aver that it's better to leave our troops there; I say this is cynical. Bring them all home from unwinnable wars that we started.
People are also saying that Russian and Pakistan and North Korea and Iran are all taking advantage of Obama already. But beware a leader accused of weakness; Democrats have started most of our wars.
I'm sorry I have so little verve tonight. Best I could do. Hope you enjoyed the poems.
1 Kilobunny,
CE
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Depression, Mania and Poetry
I can't make sense of readers' statistics--posts I think interesting are often poorly attended, and others garner large numbers. My "Best of" has been a success, I expect because many are searching the web for help with their mood disorders. Then Wednesday I posted a couple of poems and the meter went up again. Here's what my blog says about itself:
"Ongoing personal narrative by C. E. Chaffin M.D., FAAFP, Editor of The Melic Review. Widely published as a poet, critic and essayist, he began this blog as therapy but fears it has a larger audience than his other works. As an unapologetic manic-depressive (bipolar), he also hopes his adventures in mood fluctuation may be of some benefit to others so afflicted."
The blurb implies poetry but does not outright state it. My general audience divides into those interested in mood disorders and those in poetry. That 20% of name poets suffer manic-depression blurs the borders between the two. Here's a short list: Christopher Marlowe, John Clare, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Hopkins, Crane, Plath, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and John Berryman. The list is much more extensive, these are just from the top of my head. But I have written a poem about this phenomenon:
For Example
I do not recommend geniuses as models:
Coleridge the laudanum king,
Sylvia born too late for Auschwitz,
Roethke the manic ballerina with the body of a bear,
Hart Crane reciting to the cod,
Ernest sucking on a steel cigar,
Ginsberg hysterical naked procuring boys
or Pound blaming everything on the Jews.
Emily died a virgin without taking orders,
Sexton became the Jesus of the Housewives
then killed herself to fill the hollow.
(I don't mean to devalue the drunkenness
of Berryman and Bukowski or forget
that Dylan Thomas drank himself to death
because he found it easier than poetry.)
No one wants to hear about a healthy genius,
because the world needs to believe
the great must suffer greatly, as if
only Icarus flew above those jealous eyes
and Daedelus never landed.
(published in Interface; also in my new book)
I think the chief gift of a mood disorder for poets is loose associations, even dissociation, a certain liberty of the mind that issues in unseen connections between what we observe and experience. It's as if the normal mental filters that feed rational thought have been suspended for creative purposes. You can't just grind a poem out by thinking about it: it must be born, thrive, grow, and finally achieve adulthood--the point at which further revision is pointless. Thus the dissociative tendencies issue later in applied craft, and Voila! A poem.
And what drives people to write poetry more often than not? Grief and loss. The poetry of joy is neglected by comparison. Non-poets attempt poetry because of love as well--in other words, what drives folks to attempt poetry at all is deep feelings. That some are better than others in expressing such feelings should come as no surprise; that is merely the gift of language, and many can write passably. What distinguishes a poet is the knack of saying something in a memorable way. One of the best compliments I've received as a poet is the statment, "I felt like that but I could never have said it so well." Bingo! What poets are supposed to do.
Raw feeling expressed is not poetry. Wordsworth called poetry "emotion recollected in tranquilty," but that doesn't entirely wash--sometimes poems are written in the grip of emotion and survive to excellence, but only because the poet was well-exercised in his craft. Furthermore, to say something fresh requires a knowledge of what poetry went before, else cliche' will inevitably raise its hoary head.
In severe depression it's difficult to write poetry at all, much less poetry that lasts, because the last chapter of despair is numbness--the inability to feel at all, at least feel in proportion to circumstance, as the feedback loop of depression goes on autopilot and the whole personality is dominated by the disease. Here's an attempt that was born from a depression, also in my new book:
For the Record
I am myself, even in the dark
without mirrors or clues.
I may be as inconsequential
as the point of a fading penlight
but I am not this feeling
of being buried alive.
If I fall through the ice
I am not my hypothermia.
I am not my heart's vacuum's
cruel absence of presence.
There are times this seems specious,
as if I were a Jesuit preaching in a sewer,
hoping echoes could convince me—
but all I have is this distinction.
I hold it in a cup like Christ's blood
as I fall through infinite separations.
I am still here.
I write this for the record.
To write during mania or hypomania is much easier, the words simply flow like water, good words, lots of them--but mania may impair editing activity afterwards, as one becomes so enamored of one's voice that it's too much labor to take months to perfect the initial outburst.
I hope I have not turned off my audience by too much promoting my book.
Thine at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
"Ongoing personal narrative by C. E. Chaffin M.D., FAAFP, Editor of The Melic Review. Widely published as a poet, critic and essayist, he began this blog as therapy but fears it has a larger audience than his other works. As an unapologetic manic-depressive (bipolar), he also hopes his adventures in mood fluctuation may be of some benefit to others so afflicted."
The blurb implies poetry but does not outright state it. My general audience divides into those interested in mood disorders and those in poetry. That 20% of name poets suffer manic-depression blurs the borders between the two. Here's a short list: Christopher Marlowe, John Clare, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Hopkins, Crane, Plath, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and John Berryman. The list is much more extensive, these are just from the top of my head. But I have written a poem about this phenomenon:
For Example
I do not recommend geniuses as models:
Coleridge the laudanum king,
Sylvia born too late for Auschwitz,
Roethke the manic ballerina with the body of a bear,
Hart Crane reciting to the cod,
Ernest sucking on a steel cigar,
Ginsberg hysterical naked procuring boys
or Pound blaming everything on the Jews.
Emily died a virgin without taking orders,
Sexton became the Jesus of the Housewives
then killed herself to fill the hollow.
(I don't mean to devalue the drunkenness
of Berryman and Bukowski or forget
that Dylan Thomas drank himself to death
because he found it easier than poetry.)
No one wants to hear about a healthy genius,
because the world needs to believe
the great must suffer greatly, as if
only Icarus flew above those jealous eyes
and Daedelus never landed.
(published in Interface; also in my new book)
I think the chief gift of a mood disorder for poets is loose associations, even dissociation, a certain liberty of the mind that issues in unseen connections between what we observe and experience. It's as if the normal mental filters that feed rational thought have been suspended for creative purposes. You can't just grind a poem out by thinking about it: it must be born, thrive, grow, and finally achieve adulthood--the point at which further revision is pointless. Thus the dissociative tendencies issue later in applied craft, and Voila! A poem.
And what drives people to write poetry more often than not? Grief and loss. The poetry of joy is neglected by comparison. Non-poets attempt poetry because of love as well--in other words, what drives folks to attempt poetry at all is deep feelings. That some are better than others in expressing such feelings should come as no surprise; that is merely the gift of language, and many can write passably. What distinguishes a poet is the knack of saying something in a memorable way. One of the best compliments I've received as a poet is the statment, "I felt like that but I could never have said it so well." Bingo! What poets are supposed to do.
Raw feeling expressed is not poetry. Wordsworth called poetry "emotion recollected in tranquilty," but that doesn't entirely wash--sometimes poems are written in the grip of emotion and survive to excellence, but only because the poet was well-exercised in his craft. Furthermore, to say something fresh requires a knowledge of what poetry went before, else cliche' will inevitably raise its hoary head.
In severe depression it's difficult to write poetry at all, much less poetry that lasts, because the last chapter of despair is numbness--the inability to feel at all, at least feel in proportion to circumstance, as the feedback loop of depression goes on autopilot and the whole personality is dominated by the disease. Here's an attempt that was born from a depression, also in my new book:
For the Record
I am myself, even in the dark
without mirrors or clues.
I may be as inconsequential
as the point of a fading penlight
but I am not this feeling
of being buried alive.
If I fall through the ice
I am not my hypothermia.
I am not my heart's vacuum's
cruel absence of presence.
There are times this seems specious,
as if I were a Jesuit preaching in a sewer,
hoping echoes could convince me—
but all I have is this distinction.
I hold it in a cup like Christ's blood
as I fall through infinite separations.
I am still here.
I write this for the record.
To write during mania or hypomania is much easier, the words simply flow like water, good words, lots of them--but mania may impair editing activity afterwards, as one becomes so enamored of one's voice that it's too much labor to take months to perfect the initial outburst.
I hope I have not turned off my audience by too much promoting my book.
Thine at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Valentine's Day Poem; Uxorious Marketing
Yesterday was Valentine's Day, a day when Romans used to whip women with leather strips to increase fertility and keep the wolves away and .
Who was St. Valentine? He may have defied the Roman Emperor when the Emperor forbid marriage for soldiers, marrying them in secret, dying in 270 A.D. But here from history.com is the pagan festival, Lupercella, that preceded our modern celebration:
"To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.
"The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage."
Ah-hem. I wasn't very popular in high school but I know I would have made it with goathide strips dipped in blood with which to tease the girls.
I did write a Valentine's poem for my Mrs., though I have the unsettling feeling it is not quite soup yet. Nevertheless I will post it. But first there's a review out on my new book from Hobble Creek Review's Blog. (You will be happy to know that it's rather complimentary.)
Meanwhile one marketing angle my publicist has come up with is to present me as the uxorious husband, the man still desperately in love with his wife, which I am. The question is how to accomplish this in a photograph; my wife just ordered a charcoal zipper sweater for me for this assignment, under which I assume she will have me wear a flannel plaid for maximum uxoriousness. I suggested holding roses or kissing her picture but she says that's OTT. Better, I suggested we use only her picture, my inspiration. But that won't work because I'm the poet we're trying to market.
But here's a picture of Kathleen for the record:
Already I have crossed the line between personality and image as I comply with the publicist's vision of market share. We want frustrated women in their forties or fifties to embrace me as the next Neil Diamond--though married. Is he married? I saw him on the Grammys and my impression was that he was either single or gay. Let me look it up: actually he's been twice divorced. He's also known as the "Jewish Elvis." Maybe I can be the "Christian Elvis" of poetry. Ah c'mon!
But seriously folks, the work must stand on its own and sell itself. The market for poetry has been increasingly dismal since 1850, so those serious about their verse will just have to discover me, female and frustrated or not. Here's my Valentine's poem for Kathleen:
Valentine 2009
Love is our shibboleth.
A filament of doubt floats over lawns
only because you're gone.
Where will my seed find purchase
in your absence?
I say your name as if an awl
had pierced my heart
clean through to vertebrae.
How did I enter into such dependency?
My world is shrunk,
the last room of a nautilus.
The lighthouse flashes by daylight
with its flickering mirrors.
I cannot see myself without you
reflecting me in turn.
I bet my life on you, gambled away
my hiking boots and compass
at the bar where filmy circles
mar mahogany and heavy metal
roars from speakers meant
to engineer brief intimacies
by forcing all to shout.
I order your favorite drink.
Ice tickles my throat.
Some woman eyes me,
turns to show her ass.
I do not nod acknowledgement--
you taught me “the look”
long after all my looks
were spent on you.
Defenses that I summon
are but transparent armor.
The world sees through them.
I can browse your pictures if I wish,
compress your beauty into two dimensions,
but it's not adequate. You are
the wild iris by the snow-lined creek,
the single raven in the Douglas fir.
Did you know they mate for life?
Married before, I never mated
until I met the perfect counterweight
to everything I'd ever said or lived
or what lay fallow in the palm of time's god.
Days snail on, I sit at my computer,
compose aches and travails, dying falls,
redwoods uprooted by a northwest storm,
rabbit fur on meadow, bits of polished clams
strewn on the shingle and the setting sun
that prisms the horizon yellow to violet.
And when night swallows Sol
in a great forest of stars, Auriga, Draco,
you wear them as a cloak.
I hide beneath it. If I undressed
you to reveal the void,
what I once was without you,
I see a man who quit his gods,
content to reason from an armchair.
Suspended like a star I burn for you.
Because of you I burn twice as bright.
Where are the Twins, my mother's sign?
North of Orion. If not lovers we would be
fraternal twins at least, inseparable.
Look--there is Cygnus, our swan-shaped carriage.
I kiss your quivering lips!
The distance between New York and here
dissolves to nothing. I would engulf
or be engulfed, merge truly without
loss of me, worship your velvet skin
with fingers trained for surgery,
wrap you in all the stars and planets,
undress you again.
Like many of my love poems, this came during Kathleen's absence in New York. Absence does indeed make the heart grow, if not fonder, then more acutely aware of its dependence on another object. I could not be fonder of Kathleen, or if I could, I mightily aspire to it.
I will say something about the book: The first edition, now on sale, has a minor flaw in it which will make it unique as soon as the second edition is printed. (My first book, "Elementary," originally priced at $14.95, now goes for $150 on the net. Thus my motto is, "You need not read my poetry. Consider it a hedge against inflation.")
I have nothing more to add or subtract unless it be everything I already said, which if added and subtracted amounts to the same thing, namely nothing. I hope you all had a good time on Valentine's with your goathide strips. We actually went to a big band swing dance.
Thine at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Who was St. Valentine? He may have defied the Roman Emperor when the Emperor forbid marriage for soldiers, marrying them in secret, dying in 270 A.D. But here from history.com is the pagan festival, Lupercella, that preceded our modern celebration:
"To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.
"The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage."
Ah-hem. I wasn't very popular in high school but I know I would have made it with goathide strips dipped in blood with which to tease the girls.
I did write a Valentine's poem for my Mrs., though I have the unsettling feeling it is not quite soup yet. Nevertheless I will post it. But first there's a review out on my new book from Hobble Creek Review's Blog. (You will be happy to know that it's rather complimentary.)
Meanwhile one marketing angle my publicist has come up with is to present me as the uxorious husband, the man still desperately in love with his wife, which I am. The question is how to accomplish this in a photograph; my wife just ordered a charcoal zipper sweater for me for this assignment, under which I assume she will have me wear a flannel plaid for maximum uxoriousness. I suggested holding roses or kissing her picture but she says that's OTT. Better, I suggested we use only her picture, my inspiration. But that won't work because I'm the poet we're trying to market.
But here's a picture of Kathleen for the record:
Already I have crossed the line between personality and image as I comply with the publicist's vision of market share. We want frustrated women in their forties or fifties to embrace me as the next Neil Diamond--though married. Is he married? I saw him on the Grammys and my impression was that he was either single or gay. Let me look it up: actually he's been twice divorced. He's also known as the "Jewish Elvis." Maybe I can be the "Christian Elvis" of poetry. Ah c'mon!
But seriously folks, the work must stand on its own and sell itself. The market for poetry has been increasingly dismal since 1850, so those serious about their verse will just have to discover me, female and frustrated or not. Here's my Valentine's poem for Kathleen:
Valentine 2009
Love is our shibboleth.
A filament of doubt floats over lawns
only because you're gone.
Where will my seed find purchase
in your absence?
I say your name as if an awl
had pierced my heart
clean through to vertebrae.
How did I enter into such dependency?
My world is shrunk,
the last room of a nautilus.
The lighthouse flashes by daylight
with its flickering mirrors.
I cannot see myself without you
reflecting me in turn.
I bet my life on you, gambled away
my hiking boots and compass
at the bar where filmy circles
mar mahogany and heavy metal
roars from speakers meant
to engineer brief intimacies
by forcing all to shout.
I order your favorite drink.
Ice tickles my throat.
Some woman eyes me,
turns to show her ass.
I do not nod acknowledgement--
you taught me “the look”
long after all my looks
were spent on you.
Defenses that I summon
are but transparent armor.
The world sees through them.
I can browse your pictures if I wish,
compress your beauty into two dimensions,
but it's not adequate. You are
the wild iris by the snow-lined creek,
the single raven in the Douglas fir.
Did you know they mate for life?
Married before, I never mated
until I met the perfect counterweight
to everything I'd ever said or lived
or what lay fallow in the palm of time's god.
Days snail on, I sit at my computer,
compose aches and travails, dying falls,
redwoods uprooted by a northwest storm,
rabbit fur on meadow, bits of polished clams
strewn on the shingle and the setting sun
that prisms the horizon yellow to violet.
And when night swallows Sol
in a great forest of stars, Auriga, Draco,
you wear them as a cloak.
I hide beneath it. If I undressed
you to reveal the void,
what I once was without you,
I see a man who quit his gods,
content to reason from an armchair.
Suspended like a star I burn for you.
Because of you I burn twice as bright.
Where are the Twins, my mother's sign?
North of Orion. If not lovers we would be
fraternal twins at least, inseparable.
Look--there is Cygnus, our swan-shaped carriage.
I kiss your quivering lips!
The distance between New York and here
dissolves to nothing. I would engulf
or be engulfed, merge truly without
loss of me, worship your velvet skin
with fingers trained for surgery,
wrap you in all the stars and planets,
undress you again.
Like many of my love poems, this came during Kathleen's absence in New York. Absence does indeed make the heart grow, if not fonder, then more acutely aware of its dependence on another object. I could not be fonder of Kathleen, or if I could, I mightily aspire to it.
I will say something about the book: The first edition, now on sale, has a minor flaw in it which will make it unique as soon as the second edition is printed. (My first book, "Elementary," originally priced at $14.95, now goes for $150 on the net. Thus my motto is, "You need not read my poetry. Consider it a hedge against inflation.")
I have nothing more to add or subtract unless it be everything I already said, which if added and subtracted amounts to the same thing, namely nothing. I hope you all had a good time on Valentine's with your goathide strips. We actually went to a big band swing dance.
Thine at 1 Kilobunny,
CE
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
New Blog, New Poem
I was going to blog tonight but fear I expended my energy on this poem:
With My Dog in the Rain
Deer paths, thin passages
of hoof-flattened grass
sometimes widen into creeks
dividing the high brush
by which we follow, the dog
running circles around my
plodding subsidy to his energy,
down the slope to the stream,
riparian gully of sword ferns
and stunted birches with puffs
of pale lime moss. Follow to cliff
where water threads over,
carving through sand to surf.
Swells lift the ocean
in a parade of salt explosions
liquid tons thundering
against the jagged implacable
wall of sea-resisting rock
though wilting in time, soon gravel.
One cold rain drop splits my forehead
like chilled mercury, slips
between my eyebrows, sobers.
Meanwhile I continue to labor in the promotion of my book (see panels above) like a voice crying in the wilderness, subsisting on locusts and honey, like Atlas shouldering the world, like Sisyphus dueling the boulder up and down the hill. It is, btw, for your convenience, now available in paperback at Amazon.com.
How they are able to offer it so cheaply and so soon I have no idea. But the hardback is a better deal, which you can find at Diminuendo Press.
Just because I've had a complete work published does not mean that I'm over poetry and have quit writing it. Quite the contrary, the closure of the book has released me to write more freely than ever, as this rough draft above may demonstrate. I suppose I will always be at heart a Nature poet, and I make no apologies about it. My relationship to the urban has always been to seek the triumph of the natural within it, as in polished beach glass born of littering or dandelions blooming in asphalt cracks, hawks nesting in glass towers. Here's a short example:
Found Park
Downtown in a paved lot
ringed by sagging chain-link
I found a dandelion forest
where purple stalks
over six feet tall
sprouted from asphalt ridges
roots buckled for the sun.
There wasn't a trace of dirt.
Their white seed filaments
looked tightly bunched
inside green trumpets
unlike the silver
hundred-legged spiders
that hover over lawns.
Their flowers were deeper yellow,
smaller and thicker,
plentiful as stars.
(published in Terrain)
In any case, the carved wooden Indonesian frog doctor on my desk advises me, with his hooded eye, that it is past my bedtime. So be it.
1 Kilobunny,
CE
With My Dog in the Rain
Deer paths, thin passages
of hoof-flattened grass
sometimes widen into creeks
dividing the high brush
by which we follow, the dog
running circles around my
plodding subsidy to his energy,
down the slope to the stream,
riparian gully of sword ferns
and stunted birches with puffs
of pale lime moss. Follow to cliff
where water threads over,
carving through sand to surf.
Swells lift the ocean
in a parade of salt explosions
liquid tons thundering
against the jagged implacable
wall of sea-resisting rock
though wilting in time, soon gravel.
One cold rain drop splits my forehead
like chilled mercury, slips
between my eyebrows, sobers.
Meanwhile I continue to labor in the promotion of my book (see panels above) like a voice crying in the wilderness, subsisting on locusts and honey, like Atlas shouldering the world, like Sisyphus dueling the boulder up and down the hill. It is, btw, for your convenience, now available in paperback at Amazon.com.
How they are able to offer it so cheaply and so soon I have no idea. But the hardback is a better deal, which you can find at Diminuendo Press.
Just because I've had a complete work published does not mean that I'm over poetry and have quit writing it. Quite the contrary, the closure of the book has released me to write more freely than ever, as this rough draft above may demonstrate. I suppose I will always be at heart a Nature poet, and I make no apologies about it. My relationship to the urban has always been to seek the triumph of the natural within it, as in polished beach glass born of littering or dandelions blooming in asphalt cracks, hawks nesting in glass towers. Here's a short example:
Found Park
Downtown in a paved lot
ringed by sagging chain-link
I found a dandelion forest
where purple stalks
over six feet tall
sprouted from asphalt ridges
roots buckled for the sun.
There wasn't a trace of dirt.
Their white seed filaments
looked tightly bunched
inside green trumpets
unlike the silver
hundred-legged spiders
that hover over lawns.
Their flowers were deeper yellow,
smaller and thicker,
plentiful as stars.
(published in Terrain)
In any case, the carved wooden Indonesian frog doctor on my desk advises me, with his hooded eye, that it is past my bedtime. So be it.
1 Kilobunny,
CE
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Best of: ECT Failure
The following was written over a number of days. I see little merit in posting it, then I see little merit in anything these days. I am not just a depresso; I am an ECT failure. It doesn't get much worse than that, does it (excluding all the evils one can think of)?
3/12 How am I doing? I was tearful when I spoke with my shrink today; he added another medicine to my collection of wonder drugs that aren't working. He also encouraged me to seize any activity I can, which I'm already doing. In blogging right now, for instance, I'm hanging out at a mini-mall with wireless service, because it's better to be around people than to be alone.
Craig cries when trying to explain how he feels. Even the smallest task or decision can burden Craig with anxiety, which often requires relief through tears. Craig feels that life is a wasteland, a desert devoid of succor or employment, a vast blank canvas on which he leaves no mark. But he's better than when he first finished his ECT treatments. Marginally, at least.
How does one get stuck in an emotional hell for two years? And does the very use of the word “hell” mitigate against healing? Perhaps I should call my feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness and all the rest just a “persistent dysphoria,” instead of tagging the experience with a negative value judgment.
This is always a conundrum in depression; you must accept it as your present condition but not as your permanent condition, because you have known better. Thus you cannot accept your present mood as normal, though you must accept it as your present mood in order to take the sting out of the condition.
I know my mood isn't normal. How? Because I've had a life. And because I've recovered from previous depressions, though I'll admit each one takes a big chunk out of me and leaves a large scar behind.
The great fear is that I will be like this until I die. I couldn't face that. But if it turns out that way, I will have to face it, just not yet—there's always something else to try (like Kromart, an herb from Southeast Asia one reader recommended).
3/13 For four days I have been unable to blog beyond the desultory remarks above. I sat in front of my screen yesterday and had virtually nothing to say, so I posted nothing, having written the last part when I got home. I'm looking forward to getting a new laptop, possibly this week, as this Acer bottom-of-the-line model is always gobbling text, and the screen is so dim I fear I shall go blind if I continue to stare at it. I have to play with the angle of the display screen to read the writing for many programs on my desktop. I got this machine as a hand-me-down, and trust me, it ought to be handed further down. Most irritating is the wandering cursor effect, where I am typing text and suddenly, without warning, the cursor pops up in another part of the text and starts inscribing there. Also, at times, large blocks of text have been lost that were irrecoverable for reasons unknown.
I think I said something important last night to Kathleen, and although not the cause of my depression, it does form a nice backdrop. I have not worked as a doctor since late 1995 other than some brief volunteer work in Mexico which my back could not endure. The reason for my not working was bipolar disease and chronic spinal pain. I took advantage of my enforced sabbatical from medicine as an opportunity to pursue my dream of being a poet and writer. I can't say how hard I've worked at my dream; of course I could always have worked harder. But since 1996, when I recovered enough to begin writing, I have written two book-length manuscripts of short stories, one mystery novel, two books of opinion columns, a book on the major poems of T. S. Eliot and another book on general literary criticism and a book of theology on the Holy Spirit. So much for the prose, not my main feature. As for the poetry, my chief ambition, I had one book published by Mellen Press but have failed to interest any publisher in a second book. Yet I have certainly written enough poetry for three additional collections, in order: Sine Wave, Unexpected Light, and Wear Me Like a River. And in paging through my files, my records indicate that I have published over 600 poems since 1996. That's prolific. To give you a touchstone for comparison, Yeats' collected poems number less than 500. So for twelve years, pretty consistently, I have averaged 50 published poems a year, and this does not include the many columns and essays I published, along with some short fiction. (Fiction is my most difficult genre.) The most I've been paid for an individual poem during this time was $100; the most I was paid for a group of poems was $250. I used to be on the LA reading circuit but despaired of the quality at the open mic venues and quit that scene years ago.
It's been said that if you can pay for your postage as a poet, you are successful indeed. I've done much better than that. Yet I have not done well enough to be a “name,” to be a somebody in the literary universe, somebody an editor will consider closely before rejecting simply on the basis of his name.
It's time to take a good, hard look in the mirror. My thriller, The Abomination, I've been re-reading and I don't think it is of marketable quality. The book on Eliot ought to be published, it's well-done, but I haven't promoted it adequately. My unpublished books of poems I consider better than my only published one; each book gets better, IMHO, and the book of love poems could really achieve some success if someone would publish it. But I'm getting into too much detail here.
Simply said, if I look in the mirror, in pursuing my dream of being a poet, I have not succeeded. I have not succeeded to the extent I wanted to succeed, namely to be fairly well-known and desired at conferences and readings and so forth, and published in the leading journals.
Poetry is not the kind of work you can measure in hours. Inspiration comes when it comes; the mind must be ready to receive it. You cannot compare the work of a poet to the work of a doctor. They differ in kind, not just degree.
Here's the thought I'm trying to work myself up to: Craig, you have not succeeded as a poet despite ample time and a workmanlike effort, of which your publications speak. Maybe it's time to pack in this ambition and take up work “by the sweat of the brow” once more. There was a time writing did occupy you sufficiently to say you were working, but here in this two-year depression you can, perhaps, see the writing on the wall. It would be better for you to be engaged in an outside, worldly endeavor than to continue on your interior journey, which is bankrupt at present in any case. You're only 53. Do you want to go on not earning money until you're 65? Wouldn't involvement in the world benefit you biochemically? You've had a good run as a minor net poet, why not be happy with that? But is this the right thing to do, to shut down the full-time pursuit of my dream in the interest of participating in “reality?” Remember, before I became depressed, I used to take my writing work seriously. Now I've lost faith in my work as a writer. Now I suffer from the summer syndrome, “What's there to do, Mom?”
When I'm healthy there is usually no shortage of things for me to do, gainfully employed or not.
And here, again, we have the question of what's good for Craig and what Craig is good for. There are many fine family doctors equal to or better than I. Practicing medicine would not be a special calling for me. It's not that I want to return to medicine per se as that I want to do whatever I need to do to get out of the clutches of my depression. Perhaps I can scare up enough volunteer work, provided my back can endure it, to keep me involved in the world, without having to desert my artist's world entirely for Mammon's arena. I do not claim the following is a good poem, only reflective of this meditation:
The Poet Bids His Muse Farewell
With the grace of a cat
you have patrolled my shoulders,
clawing me when I failed to see
the nimbus around
the blue-faced turkey
or the pink algae
spread like a holy blanket
on the brown stream.
If only I could see
what you see!
But that would be surfeit,
as in a Van Gogh painting.
There can be too much light;
a man can only take so much.
You also inspire by connections
that make all exceptional!
Hurrah for our interconnectedness!
That last bird that sang, what was it?
A meadowlark! I knew you'd know
I never tire of his song
but you can tire of mine,
yes, you can tire of mine.
To sum up: I am depressed. I don't have enough to do and I don't have a car during the week, which limits my options. I don't believe in my writing anymore as a viable pursuit beyond a hobby, so the main thing that had justified my continued existence and slaked my Protestant thirst for productivity feels as if it has been disqualified. Obviously no one should feel sorry for me, if I have the time to do what I want but fail to believe in the thing I was doing. Most would consider that an extreme luxury. The irony is, it is my bipolar disease that makes such freedom possible (through my disability), while at the same time rendering me incapable of enjoying such freedom. What good is freedom if you are too depressed to take advantage of it?
When they handed out the happiness glow sticks there must have been a hole in my bag. It's getting hard for me to remember ever being happy, but I know I have been, most memorably when Kathleen and I fell in love. And I'm always “happy” to be published. And I'm “happy” to see my close friends, but now I am using “happy” as the cliche' it's become. What would it be like to have an unshakable self-love and self-acceptance? In that case it wouldn't matter if you watched TV all day, you'd still feel good about yourself. You would not be haunted by the specter of self-justification, of Protestant productivity What you did would be acceptable because of who you are, not what you have done. And that includes doing nothing.
All this is making my head hurt.
But are you one of the blessed who accepts yourself regardless of situation or performance, one who embraces and loves the inimitable you through all its incarnations? If you are there, write me, or better, direct me to your blog.
A point about religion: When I get desperate I want to imagine some divine healing from God, so I go to churches in a near psychotically expectant state. This naturally makes my mental illness worse, though even today I'm tempted to go to some healing service. What could it hurt?
When I don't get well, then I can add God to the list of things I have failed or have failed me, and I don't want to do that. I must hold on to something apart from my illness, and my intellectual faith in Christianity, however battered, remains. If you have joy in your type of faith, consider yourself blessed.
5 kilorats,
CE
3/12 How am I doing? I was tearful when I spoke with my shrink today; he added another medicine to my collection of wonder drugs that aren't working. He also encouraged me to seize any activity I can, which I'm already doing. In blogging right now, for instance, I'm hanging out at a mini-mall with wireless service, because it's better to be around people than to be alone.
Craig cries when trying to explain how he feels. Even the smallest task or decision can burden Craig with anxiety, which often requires relief through tears. Craig feels that life is a wasteland, a desert devoid of succor or employment, a vast blank canvas on which he leaves no mark. But he's better than when he first finished his ECT treatments. Marginally, at least.
How does one get stuck in an emotional hell for two years? And does the very use of the word “hell” mitigate against healing? Perhaps I should call my feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness and all the rest just a “persistent dysphoria,” instead of tagging the experience with a negative value judgment.
This is always a conundrum in depression; you must accept it as your present condition but not as your permanent condition, because you have known better. Thus you cannot accept your present mood as normal, though you must accept it as your present mood in order to take the sting out of the condition.
I know my mood isn't normal. How? Because I've had a life. And because I've recovered from previous depressions, though I'll admit each one takes a big chunk out of me and leaves a large scar behind.
The great fear is that I will be like this until I die. I couldn't face that. But if it turns out that way, I will have to face it, just not yet—there's always something else to try (like Kromart, an herb from Southeast Asia one reader recommended).
3/13 For four days I have been unable to blog beyond the desultory remarks above. I sat in front of my screen yesterday and had virtually nothing to say, so I posted nothing, having written the last part when I got home. I'm looking forward to getting a new laptop, possibly this week, as this Acer bottom-of-the-line model is always gobbling text, and the screen is so dim I fear I shall go blind if I continue to stare at it. I have to play with the angle of the display screen to read the writing for many programs on my desktop. I got this machine as a hand-me-down, and trust me, it ought to be handed further down. Most irritating is the wandering cursor effect, where I am typing text and suddenly, without warning, the cursor pops up in another part of the text and starts inscribing there. Also, at times, large blocks of text have been lost that were irrecoverable for reasons unknown.
I think I said something important last night to Kathleen, and although not the cause of my depression, it does form a nice backdrop. I have not worked as a doctor since late 1995 other than some brief volunteer work in Mexico which my back could not endure. The reason for my not working was bipolar disease and chronic spinal pain. I took advantage of my enforced sabbatical from medicine as an opportunity to pursue my dream of being a poet and writer. I can't say how hard I've worked at my dream; of course I could always have worked harder. But since 1996, when I recovered enough to begin writing, I have written two book-length manuscripts of short stories, one mystery novel, two books of opinion columns, a book on the major poems of T. S. Eliot and another book on general literary criticism and a book of theology on the Holy Spirit. So much for the prose, not my main feature. As for the poetry, my chief ambition, I had one book published by Mellen Press but have failed to interest any publisher in a second book. Yet I have certainly written enough poetry for three additional collections, in order: Sine Wave, Unexpected Light, and Wear Me Like a River. And in paging through my files, my records indicate that I have published over 600 poems since 1996. That's prolific. To give you a touchstone for comparison, Yeats' collected poems number less than 500. So for twelve years, pretty consistently, I have averaged 50 published poems a year, and this does not include the many columns and essays I published, along with some short fiction. (Fiction is my most difficult genre.) The most I've been paid for an individual poem during this time was $100; the most I was paid for a group of poems was $250. I used to be on the LA reading circuit but despaired of the quality at the open mic venues and quit that scene years ago.
It's been said that if you can pay for your postage as a poet, you are successful indeed. I've done much better than that. Yet I have not done well enough to be a “name,” to be a somebody in the literary universe, somebody an editor will consider closely before rejecting simply on the basis of his name.
It's time to take a good, hard look in the mirror. My thriller, The Abomination, I've been re-reading and I don't think it is of marketable quality. The book on Eliot ought to be published, it's well-done, but I haven't promoted it adequately. My unpublished books of poems I consider better than my only published one; each book gets better, IMHO, and the book of love poems could really achieve some success if someone would publish it. But I'm getting into too much detail here.
Simply said, if I look in the mirror, in pursuing my dream of being a poet, I have not succeeded. I have not succeeded to the extent I wanted to succeed, namely to be fairly well-known and desired at conferences and readings and so forth, and published in the leading journals.
Poetry is not the kind of work you can measure in hours. Inspiration comes when it comes; the mind must be ready to receive it. You cannot compare the work of a poet to the work of a doctor. They differ in kind, not just degree.
Here's the thought I'm trying to work myself up to: Craig, you have not succeeded as a poet despite ample time and a workmanlike effort, of which your publications speak. Maybe it's time to pack in this ambition and take up work “by the sweat of the brow” once more. There was a time writing did occupy you sufficiently to say you were working, but here in this two-year depression you can, perhaps, see the writing on the wall. It would be better for you to be engaged in an outside, worldly endeavor than to continue on your interior journey, which is bankrupt at present in any case. You're only 53. Do you want to go on not earning money until you're 65? Wouldn't involvement in the world benefit you biochemically? You've had a good run as a minor net poet, why not be happy with that? But is this the right thing to do, to shut down the full-time pursuit of my dream in the interest of participating in “reality?” Remember, before I became depressed, I used to take my writing work seriously. Now I've lost faith in my work as a writer. Now I suffer from the summer syndrome, “What's there to do, Mom?”
When I'm healthy there is usually no shortage of things for me to do, gainfully employed or not.
And here, again, we have the question of what's good for Craig and what Craig is good for. There are many fine family doctors equal to or better than I. Practicing medicine would not be a special calling for me. It's not that I want to return to medicine per se as that I want to do whatever I need to do to get out of the clutches of my depression. Perhaps I can scare up enough volunteer work, provided my back can endure it, to keep me involved in the world, without having to desert my artist's world entirely for Mammon's arena. I do not claim the following is a good poem, only reflective of this meditation:
The Poet Bids His Muse Farewell
With the grace of a cat
you have patrolled my shoulders,
clawing me when I failed to see
the nimbus around
the blue-faced turkey
or the pink algae
spread like a holy blanket
on the brown stream.
If only I could see
what you see!
But that would be surfeit,
as in a Van Gogh painting.
There can be too much light;
a man can only take so much.
You also inspire by connections
that make all exceptional!
Hurrah for our interconnectedness!
That last bird that sang, what was it?
A meadowlark! I knew you'd know
I never tire of his song
but you can tire of mine,
yes, you can tire of mine.
To sum up: I am depressed. I don't have enough to do and I don't have a car during the week, which limits my options. I don't believe in my writing anymore as a viable pursuit beyond a hobby, so the main thing that had justified my continued existence and slaked my Protestant thirst for productivity feels as if it has been disqualified. Obviously no one should feel sorry for me, if I have the time to do what I want but fail to believe in the thing I was doing. Most would consider that an extreme luxury. The irony is, it is my bipolar disease that makes such freedom possible (through my disability), while at the same time rendering me incapable of enjoying such freedom. What good is freedom if you are too depressed to take advantage of it?
When they handed out the happiness glow sticks there must have been a hole in my bag. It's getting hard for me to remember ever being happy, but I know I have been, most memorably when Kathleen and I fell in love. And I'm always “happy” to be published. And I'm “happy” to see my close friends, but now I am using “happy” as the cliche' it's become. What would it be like to have an unshakable self-love and self-acceptance? In that case it wouldn't matter if you watched TV all day, you'd still feel good about yourself. You would not be haunted by the specter of self-justification, of Protestant productivity What you did would be acceptable because of who you are, not what you have done. And that includes doing nothing.
All this is making my head hurt.
But are you one of the blessed who accepts yourself regardless of situation or performance, one who embraces and loves the inimitable you through all its incarnations? If you are there, write me, or better, direct me to your blog.
A point about religion: When I get desperate I want to imagine some divine healing from God, so I go to churches in a near psychotically expectant state. This naturally makes my mental illness worse, though even today I'm tempted to go to some healing service. What could it hurt?
When I don't get well, then I can add God to the list of things I have failed or have failed me, and I don't want to do that. I must hold on to something apart from my illness, and my intellectual faith in Christianity, however battered, remains. If you have joy in your type of faith, consider yourself blessed.
5 kilorats,
CE
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Best of: After Ten Courses of ECT
Tuesday, March 4, my first full day back home from treatment in the Bay Area, my last ECT treatment having been performed on 2/29. Kathleen and I arrived on the Mendocino Coast yesterday in the early afternoon, whereupon I was confronted with our new rental, as yet in shambles. The disorder was challenging to say the least. Kathleen, God bless her, had tidied up the kitchen and the bathroom as well as put her own wardrobe away in the new guest bedroom, but working full-time and being burdened, even long distance, by a sick husband, she hadn't had time to really straighten out the house. Besides, there are some things she'd rather leave for me, like where to hang which pictures.
If I were in any other state I would have tolerated the disorder fine, but in my present state of near dissociation, after ECT therapy, I found the state of our belongings daunting. Annie Lamott wrote a book called “Bird by Bird” in which the chief metaphor is an overdue school report on birds. Near the last day of the family vacation, her brother bemoans the fact that he'll never get all the birds he wants into his report, now that the time is short. “How can I ever do it?” he asks his family, holding the huge bird book in desperation. “Why, bird by bird,” his father says, simplifying the problem. And indeed, if I look at the disorganization of our new rental and don't know where to begin, if I look around and can't tell which boxes to open and what possessions to discard or donate to Goodwill, I will be overwhelmed and paralyzed, unable to act. But if I take one small thing at a time, I can make steady progress until the whole enchilada is cooked.
Still, there are other impediments to my progress than procrastination. I feel a bit like Charlton Heston in “Planet of the Apes,” as it feels as if I have landed on a totally new planet. Because far from grounding me, as far as I can tell, the ECT treatments splintered my consciousness into even smaller quanta, so that I must gather my thoughts up like dust in a shaft of light and try to cup them in my palm before their relations to each other disappear. All my clothes look new and unfamiliar, although there is a strange familiarity about them, as if I had worn them in another life. Even Kathleen and my stepson, Derek, look slightly alien. The fact that I have “returned” to a place I have never lived before is unfortunate, as it only aggravates the feelings of unfamiliarity. The rental is indeed what we had been long seeking, a place of light with an ocean view, and now we have it and a flock of wild turkeys to boot. But having just been discharged from what I consider a failed course of 10 ECT treatments, I experience what are called “dissociative” symptoms, where familiar objects and persons seem strange, as in “derealization,” and I feel as an object acted upon, not a person with a will who can change his environment, as in “depersonalization.” I don't know what it's like for a brain-injured or stroke patient to go home, but it must be something similar. A whole movie has been based on this premise, “Regarding Henry,” with Harrison Ford.
What dissociative states mean to the patient is hard to say, but it is as if the observing ego has been sheared off from the experiencing ego, as happens in times of great stress as when a mother, for instance, lifts a car off of her trapped child (and afterwards needs treatment for vertebral fractures). It's as if someone else is doing, experiencing, acting in your stead and in some cases it can lead to multiple personalities, created to cope with specific stresses—as when a woman becomes seductive around her pastor to flex her sexual power but becomes a prude at home because of marital unrest, each personality critical of the other.
How badly did ECT damage my memory? I lost whole chunks of people, places and things. The most curious phenomenon was my loss of visual memory. Normally I have a rather eidetic or strong visual memory, so that when I think of a sock in my drawer, I see the drawer and the sock in my mind's eye, and where the dresser is located before I pick out the sock. But after ECT I couldn't see the dresser; I couldn't imagine many of the visual clues that help me approach life's details. The question, “Where is the sock?” no longer took me on a brief physical journey. I could imagine the sock itself and presume it to be in the drawer, but I couldn't actually follow my visual memory down the stairs to the dresser and the proper drawer. This is frightening at first, and is worst at the end of the treatments, but if the treatments did you no good, it is a steep price to pay.
No doubt the reader wonders whether the treatments are painful. They are not, as the anesthesiologist puts you under before the current is discharged. Afterwards there is the equivalent of a temporal headache bilaterally, like a bad tension headache. But there's also a larger feeling of having the furniture moved in the apartment of your mind. Songs began playing in my head that I hadn't heard in years, including a lot of Simon and Garfunkel, as in “Sounds of Silence,” eerily appropriate.
But the most aggravating side effect of treatment, in my case, was how my visual library of recollections had many of its connections cut. A familiar name would be mentioned, for instance, and I couldn't imagine the face. Someone might say, “Remember when we went to Yosemite?” and I couldn't picture Half Dome or Bridal Veil Falls--they were just terms without visual correlation in the slide show of my mind.
I didn't forget how to brush my teeth or other rudimentary habits, and I knew who my family is, even if I could not visualize them in my mind, and I could give consent to the treatment while it was going on. Some seven shocks into the treatment I complained that I was getting worse, I was now tearful before and after my induced convulsion. I mentioned that my previous treatment, in 1983, employed bilateral ECT, and the doctors seemed to panic and put me on bilateral ECT, as well as loading me down with so many meds at once it was hard to keep track. In one swell foop they added lithium at 1200 mg./day, another Wellbutrin 150 mg. at bedtime, an antipsychotic named Invega in the morning, a new antidepressant, Remeron, for bedtime, and another antidepressant of the sedating kind, Trazodone, as needed for sleep. These were in addition to the 80 mg. of Prozac and 300 mg. of Wellbutrin I was taking daily, along with the stimulant, Adderrall. Truly the doctors seemed to overreact to my criticism that the unilateral treatment wasn't working by switching me to bilateral and loading my gray matter down with all of these new drugs. It's as if they were throwing good drugs after bad, just to let it be said that they had left no stone unturned. Had they been treating a stone it might have been appropriate, but here I was, tearful before ECT and after ECT, and especially affected by the Invega, which dropped me into a severe trough. It was a soul-killing medication much like Haldol for me; I feel that both lower me into some demonic world where I was at the mercy of evil and could not think for myself. I have naturally stopped the Invega and Remeron as I plan to speak to my psychiatrist tomorrow.
How am I doing today? I'm fragile and sketchy and and tear up talking to Kathleen of Derek about minor things, particularly things that may demand some action on my part that I feel helpless to provide. Just because I burst into tears doesn't make me quit talking necessarily; we wait it out until I can catch my breath and then move on. But it is difficult to describe the extreme vulnerability you feel after a course of ECT; in many ways you feel like a newborn with a tabula rasa for a brain. There is a sense of caution about what you should allow into your mind and what you should studiously ignore. I would very much like a handbook for recovering from ECT, telling patients how their humanity can best be restored. For ECT is a blunt and cruel treatment, one that tosses the baby with the bathwater, at least as it's been practiced on me. I was desperate enough to seek the treatment this time but I would not seek it again, ever. It can reduce you to a quivering mass of jelly, an Alzheimer's patient desperately trying to make sense of his surroundings (in the acute phase). It ought to be reserved for desperate cases, like me. Too bad I have not responded to it, though its long term effects on me remain to be seen. But I am not sorry I did it; it was the old “Hail Mary” play of psychiatry. And though Mary may be full of grace, the treatment did not impart that grace to me. I am presently in recovery from treatment, my last one having been on Feb. 29 (also my sister's birthday, “Leap Day.”) Again, whether we will remember it as “The Great Leap Forward” or “The Great Leap Back” remains to be seen. Early reports are not encouraging.
If I were in any other state I would have tolerated the disorder fine, but in my present state of near dissociation, after ECT therapy, I found the state of our belongings daunting. Annie Lamott wrote a book called “Bird by Bird” in which the chief metaphor is an overdue school report on birds. Near the last day of the family vacation, her brother bemoans the fact that he'll never get all the birds he wants into his report, now that the time is short. “How can I ever do it?” he asks his family, holding the huge bird book in desperation. “Why, bird by bird,” his father says, simplifying the problem. And indeed, if I look at the disorganization of our new rental and don't know where to begin, if I look around and can't tell which boxes to open and what possessions to discard or donate to Goodwill, I will be overwhelmed and paralyzed, unable to act. But if I take one small thing at a time, I can make steady progress until the whole enchilada is cooked.
Still, there are other impediments to my progress than procrastination. I feel a bit like Charlton Heston in “Planet of the Apes,” as it feels as if I have landed on a totally new planet. Because far from grounding me, as far as I can tell, the ECT treatments splintered my consciousness into even smaller quanta, so that I must gather my thoughts up like dust in a shaft of light and try to cup them in my palm before their relations to each other disappear. All my clothes look new and unfamiliar, although there is a strange familiarity about them, as if I had worn them in another life. Even Kathleen and my stepson, Derek, look slightly alien. The fact that I have “returned” to a place I have never lived before is unfortunate, as it only aggravates the feelings of unfamiliarity. The rental is indeed what we had been long seeking, a place of light with an ocean view, and now we have it and a flock of wild turkeys to boot. But having just been discharged from what I consider a failed course of 10 ECT treatments, I experience what are called “dissociative” symptoms, where familiar objects and persons seem strange, as in “derealization,” and I feel as an object acted upon, not a person with a will who can change his environment, as in “depersonalization.” I don't know what it's like for a brain-injured or stroke patient to go home, but it must be something similar. A whole movie has been based on this premise, “Regarding Henry,” with Harrison Ford.
What dissociative states mean to the patient is hard to say, but it is as if the observing ego has been sheared off from the experiencing ego, as happens in times of great stress as when a mother, for instance, lifts a car off of her trapped child (and afterwards needs treatment for vertebral fractures). It's as if someone else is doing, experiencing, acting in your stead and in some cases it can lead to multiple personalities, created to cope with specific stresses—as when a woman becomes seductive around her pastor to flex her sexual power but becomes a prude at home because of marital unrest, each personality critical of the other.
How badly did ECT damage my memory? I lost whole chunks of people, places and things. The most curious phenomenon was my loss of visual memory. Normally I have a rather eidetic or strong visual memory, so that when I think of a sock in my drawer, I see the drawer and the sock in my mind's eye, and where the dresser is located before I pick out the sock. But after ECT I couldn't see the dresser; I couldn't imagine many of the visual clues that help me approach life's details. The question, “Where is the sock?” no longer took me on a brief physical journey. I could imagine the sock itself and presume it to be in the drawer, but I couldn't actually follow my visual memory down the stairs to the dresser and the proper drawer. This is frightening at first, and is worst at the end of the treatments, but if the treatments did you no good, it is a steep price to pay.
No doubt the reader wonders whether the treatments are painful. They are not, as the anesthesiologist puts you under before the current is discharged. Afterwards there is the equivalent of a temporal headache bilaterally, like a bad tension headache. But there's also a larger feeling of having the furniture moved in the apartment of your mind. Songs began playing in my head that I hadn't heard in years, including a lot of Simon and Garfunkel, as in “Sounds of Silence,” eerily appropriate.
But the most aggravating side effect of treatment, in my case, was how my visual library of recollections had many of its connections cut. A familiar name would be mentioned, for instance, and I couldn't imagine the face. Someone might say, “Remember when we went to Yosemite?” and I couldn't picture Half Dome or Bridal Veil Falls--they were just terms without visual correlation in the slide show of my mind.
I didn't forget how to brush my teeth or other rudimentary habits, and I knew who my family is, even if I could not visualize them in my mind, and I could give consent to the treatment while it was going on. Some seven shocks into the treatment I complained that I was getting worse, I was now tearful before and after my induced convulsion. I mentioned that my previous treatment, in 1983, employed bilateral ECT, and the doctors seemed to panic and put me on bilateral ECT, as well as loading me down with so many meds at once it was hard to keep track. In one swell foop they added lithium at 1200 mg./day, another Wellbutrin 150 mg. at bedtime, an antipsychotic named Invega in the morning, a new antidepressant, Remeron, for bedtime, and another antidepressant of the sedating kind, Trazodone, as needed for sleep. These were in addition to the 80 mg. of Prozac and 300 mg. of Wellbutrin I was taking daily, along with the stimulant, Adderrall. Truly the doctors seemed to overreact to my criticism that the unilateral treatment wasn't working by switching me to bilateral and loading my gray matter down with all of these new drugs. It's as if they were throwing good drugs after bad, just to let it be said that they had left no stone unturned. Had they been treating a stone it might have been appropriate, but here I was, tearful before ECT and after ECT, and especially affected by the Invega, which dropped me into a severe trough. It was a soul-killing medication much like Haldol for me; I feel that both lower me into some demonic world where I was at the mercy of evil and could not think for myself. I have naturally stopped the Invega and Remeron as I plan to speak to my psychiatrist tomorrow.
How am I doing today? I'm fragile and sketchy and and tear up talking to Kathleen of Derek about minor things, particularly things that may demand some action on my part that I feel helpless to provide. Just because I burst into tears doesn't make me quit talking necessarily; we wait it out until I can catch my breath and then move on. But it is difficult to describe the extreme vulnerability you feel after a course of ECT; in many ways you feel like a newborn with a tabula rasa for a brain. There is a sense of caution about what you should allow into your mind and what you should studiously ignore. I would very much like a handbook for recovering from ECT, telling patients how their humanity can best be restored. For ECT is a blunt and cruel treatment, one that tosses the baby with the bathwater, at least as it's been practiced on me. I was desperate enough to seek the treatment this time but I would not seek it again, ever. It can reduce you to a quivering mass of jelly, an Alzheimer's patient desperately trying to make sense of his surroundings (in the acute phase). It ought to be reserved for desperate cases, like me. Too bad I have not responded to it, though its long term effects on me remain to be seen. But I am not sorry I did it; it was the old “Hail Mary” play of psychiatry. And though Mary may be full of grace, the treatment did not impart that grace to me. I am presently in recovery from treatment, my last one having been on Feb. 29 (also my sister's birthday, “Leap Day.”) Again, whether we will remember it as “The Great Leap Forward” or “The Great Leap Back” remains to be seen. Early reports are not encouraging.
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