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

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

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

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

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.

Best of: In the Hospital; My first ECT Treatment

From 2/7/08, where hope was premature. In retrospect what surprises me is the persistent humor of this post while beginning ECT. Guess it's just my personality, but it has sort of a detective-voice detachment from the proceedings going on.


I was just rudely awakened at 5 AM from a pleasant dream where I was laughing in a bar with my brother. The dream also involved, without carnal coupling, a lovely young woman whom I knew was to replace my first wife. The nightmares of my first marriage recur from time to time, though my nightmares of being a doctor and medical student are more frequent when depressed—if I dream at all. I can't remember when I laughed in a dream.

The nurse took my pulse and her face registered displeasure because my pulse was only 48. She asked me if this was normal for me and I told her yes, that bradycardia was normal. It's funny that when I use medical terms with staff they are never curious about how I know them. I assume my slow pulse may be in part from my aerobic exercise, though I have fallen off of late. Still, swimming a mile within the last two weeks might have some lingering benefits. Else I am unlike the grandfather clock, and instead of keeping good time and coming to an abrupt end, I am slowly winding down. If only life were that gradual! Mine has always been composed of starts and stops; I've been either ahead or behind. What would it be like to have a life of gradual transitions, say get married at 30 instead of 19 and not already be a doctor and father times two at 25? I've always felt pushed by some invisible hand, propelled to excel, whether from anxiety and inferiority (most likely) or some innate property of my disease—I've always been in a hurry to get to the next step, even if the next step is undesirable. I have been the proverbial hare to the tortoise, and let me tell you, the tortoise, though slower, does a much better job at life, though not as well at E-Harmony.

After my vitals the nurse gave me a shot of Rubinol in my left upper ass. It didn't burn much but began to itch afterwards, slightly. She explained the drug was to dry my secretions and prevent nausea for the procedure. I'm sure that's what they told Soviet dissidents.

Afterwards came the hospital gown, a puzzle I'd never solved before. But in remembering how my wife puts on her bra, I tied it in front then took it off and reversed it. I was proud of myself for such a neat solution. Too bad the gown is designed for someone much smaller. If I don't get another one, more than my crack will be out in the breeze; the moon will likely be half full.

I didn't wake up crying today. One change, even before the procedure, is that glimmer of hope. I know I'm getting what I need and I hope never to find myself in a position again where I need ECT but cannot obtain it. Depression is a a severe brownout and full power needs to be restored.

Last night I watched a video for patients on ECT. Patients kept repeating how their memory was fine. I thought they'd never stop.

Actually the memory loss of ECT is consistent with the “post-ictal” phase of naturally occurring seizures. Memory of the procedure itself remains fuzzy not just because of the seizure but but because of the anesthesia. Long-term memory is not affected, but please don't ask me my date of birth.

My roommate, who had ECT in September of 2006 and is here for it again, is a pleasant fellow who resembles Jon Stewart. He was admitted after turning the gas on in his apartment at night. The only problem was that he had roommates, but no one was hurt. He now regrets that oversight. The ghost of Sylvia Plath must have been watching over him. Unlike her, he didn't stick his head in the oven but just let the gas run. That's certainly a sign of depression--the laziness in carrying out a procedure. When depressed, no matter how well you do, it is never right, so you often end up doing a shitty job out of despair. But that tendency can apply in general to a life like mine, always taking things too far in overcorrection. In second grade, for instance, I pushed the crayons so hard against the paper that they broke and the picture smeared. I marveled at he girls who colored so lightly and neatly. Maximum intensity of color was what I sought, maximum effect. The result was sloppy, I admit in retrospect, but it reflected my nature, just as my love of purple and red reflect my romance with the far limits of the spectrum, just as I was born manic-depressive.

Oh, and my MRI was “normal” except that I have sinusitis. Since I don't have any symptoms, I assume that is the effect of weeping too much and too frequently. Maybe the Rubinol will dry my sinuses out. It's certainly drying my tongue out as I write.

Dressed in one hospital gown but with the advantage of a pair of underwear to civilize the view of my posterior—(that's periphrasis, btw—“to cover my ass” would be better English), my escort arrived with the obligatory wheelchair to take me down to the dungeons, as most surgical theaters are located in the basement of hospitals. Why, I don't know. In case of war? Because you can't get any lower? For ease of a sterile environment? To best protect all the expensive equipment? One thing I do know. As we descended on the elevator to lowest floor the air became at least ten degrees cooler. The only thing colder is the morgue, and that's convenient since one can easily lead to the other.

The ECT staff was quite solicitous. They wrapped me in heated blankets. (I asked for a facial but there wasn't time.) They hooked me up to the monitors and I got to follow my pulse, oxygen saturation and blood pressure at my leisure. It wasn't Katie Couric in the morning but I don't much go for cuteness anyway. They also stuck oxygen prongs in my nose, which I found slightly uncomfortable, like snot freezing inside your nostrils on a very cold day.

The anesthesiologist and treating psychiatrist came by my bedside briefly to explain the procedure. The shrink was surprised, like all have been here, at the answer to “How long has it been since you had ECT?” “24 years.” The general consensus is that I had a good run, but the truth is that there were three times I could have used it since the initial treatment instead of fooling around with expensive pills. An ounce of electricity is worth a pound of medicine.

After my roommate emerged from the treatment room I was wheeled in on the bed. The ECT nurse put an oxygen mask to my face over the prongs, the usual hospital redundancy, just as I have been asked at least ten times since admission if I am diabetic. The anesthesiologist started an IV in my left arm while the psychiatrist fastened the rubber strap with large, steel electrodes around my head. Afterwards he took over holding the oxygen mask to my face, which he did so tightly I couldn't breathe (likely why he became a psychiatrist). I asked him to loosen it and he moved it so far away I don't know if it was doing any good. The idea is, I'm sure, that extra oxygen might prevent the death of brain cells. I know of no study to prove this but it seems like a nice precaution.

“Breathe deep four times,” the anesthesiologist said. I was hoping he'd say, “I'm going to inject you now and you will go to sleep in one... two... three... four seconds.” I like to know when my drugs are having their effects so I don't lose out on a new experience, but it was not to be. The next thing I knew I was recumbent and awake inside the recovery room, and the nurse said to me “It's over.” There are better words to utter to a depressive but I knew her intent. I couldn't count the times I've wished it were really “over!”

It seemed as if little or no time had passed when I awoke, though the return to consciousness was not as alacritous as from Diprivan, or “milk of amnesia,” which I recommend to all depressed persons as an excellent treatment (yet to be approved). After staying in recovery for a brief time I was wheeled back in the bed up to the ward on the third floor, I left the bed under my own power while a nurse hurriedly added a second gown to hide my posterior, despite the underwear. Then I was positioned in a large, blue vinyl chair facing the nursing station, along with my roommate, and served breakfast, though not the one I ordered, naturally. I turned in my choices yesterday but the hamburger of efficiency is sometimes slowly ground at a hospital. The nurses then observed us, presumably to make sure that we didn't choke on our food. I was in more danger of choking from the psychiatrist's heavy hand with the oxygen mask.

I felt tired and groggy but not mentally impaired--I remembered my new landlord's phone number to call him and my sister's as well. The retrieval of my sister's number, which I know so well, did take a little longer in my internal Googling, but I snagged it.

Supposedly I'll be discharged tomorrow and ECT will be continued next Tuesday, February 12. How I will stay amused between now and then will be my biggest challenge. The writing helps. Oh, and there's basketball to watch!

Unrated,

CE

Best of, cont'd: 7 Kilorats and a Temporary Reprieve

In tracking stats from this blog I've noticed that my "Best of" posts are more popular than the current ones I intersperse in this ongoing review. Perhaps they are more interesting, or better written, I don't know. One thing is certain, however: Depression has a large audience, however terrible it may be, and in my writing about the experience I have granted relief to some, many who have written me privately. Also, we've now broached 2008, where I am finally delivered from a two-year depression. It doesn't get that good yet. Nevertheless, here are past testaments to the struggle.


From 1/2/08: 7 Kilorats

My mind is blank from crying. Crying empties the mind and exhausts the body; it is a blessing under normal circumstances but in my case more of a reflexive seizure. I cried through most of my appointment with my shrink today; I think I conveyed the sense of utter hopelessness I experience. I have withdrawn from my pain medication and am not drinking, the former at my suggestion and the latter at his insistence. Whether his insistence is enough for my resistance is another matter. I fear not drinking; how else can I numb my mind at night in order to watch basketball on television, literally the only time in my day when I feel almost neutral?

In my present state it is hard to stay on one task for any amount of time. I try to read but find myself reading the same paragraph over and over. I am blank. The pressure will heat up again, however, after my brain begins to castigate me for all my failures and derelictions until a lump rises in my throat and the faucets come on again.

I did manage to throw out the Christmas tree last night. Being just a local redwood sapling it was rather sparse, but it never shed a single needle while it was up. I threw it out from the deck out back, and we (stepson Derek and daughter Sarah) put our hands on it to transfer the past year's sins onto its innocent bark as a convenient scapegoat. Afterwords I launched it like a spear out into the woods where it will feed the nitrogen cycle.

I ran across a curious article today in which it was shown that men who cease religious activities are actually at lower risk for anxiety and depression, while women who cease religious activities are more likely to suffer from them. They think it might have to do with different social networking styles. I thought it funny in light of my discussion with friend Eric about Christianity and my depression. Religion is toxic for me in this state, something he has difficulty understanding.

Wait--that little possessive adjective ("my") is part of my problem --I want this to be your depression, too! I should not hog all its glory for myself; you, too, can help carry the burden. So if any of you wish to undertake this, please write me and I'll instruct you in the fine art of breakdowns. Chemistry aside, there are some ways to achieve depression without being born into the disease, but it takes a big commitment.

When you get as bad as I am now, the main survival tool is to accept your depression. Like a winter tree, think of yourself as dormant, not dead. Oh, you feel dead, you feel worse than dead. It's a living hell. No one has described it better than Jesus, who said of hell "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth," except that he left out the anxiety part. Simply put, the emotion of despair includes sadness, fear and anger, the anger usually self-directed. In psychiatric terms this constitutes dysphoria.

What surprises me about this depression has been its gradations; at times I can laugh, at other times not. Twice I had temporary responses to medications. In the past when the worm turned it was sudden and for a long time; I can remember distinctly noticing the beauty of a fern while hiking during another depression, and afterwards realizing that in that moment of aesthetic appreciation I had flipped out of my depression. Nothing had been beautiful up to that moment for the longest time. Suddenly I was well. This is why I don't get psychotherapy--it just makes the disease worse, since the complaints I bring to the therapist are mainly biological in nature. I wrote a poem about this once, below:

Glass Giraffe

When my soul was sanded so raw
the capillaries couldn't even seep,
I questioned the value of pain.
"You must experience your feelings of abandonment
until you are comfortable with them," you said.

When my suicidal doppelganger
turned me inside out, pulling my anus
through my mouth, you said,
"Now that you are stripped of defenses
you have a better chance of changing them."

When I called you up one weekend
to say I was terrified of inanimate objects
like doorknobs and tea kettles, you said,
"Stay with it. Globalized fear indicates
a necessary therapeutic regression."

Finally the antidepressants kicked in
and I felt like myself.
When I left you gave me another card
since therapy was “unfinished”
and I might be back
on your couch or another’s.

I gazed at your office figurines,
crystal leopards and pewter trolls,
porcelain ballerinas and kachina dolls,
and imagined the souls of all your patients
trapped inside them-- those, who like me,
sought relief through words
when only medicines would do.
I could have been the glass giraffe.

7 Kilorats,

CE

From 1/7/08: A Temporary Reversal


A Pacific storm (note the oxymoron) has caused a power outage at our place for five days, typical for the Mendocino coast in winter. Thus I have not had an opportunity to blog since I last saw my doctor. And lo and behold! From the depths of darkness a medication adjustment has raised me back to the world of normality for five days now. I quit drinking any alcohol and insisted going off of my long-acting oral morphine for my chronic disk pain, as either of these could possibly be contributing factors to my unresponsiveness. And in tears, telling my doctor what method of suicide I'd prefer while promising no intent, I said, "Can't we try a stimulant?" So, the doctor put me back on Abilify, which had stopped working, and added Adderall, a mixture of amphetamine salts. I took them the same day and felt better immediately. But what do I mean by better?

My depressive thoughts quit circling like sharks in the aquarium of my mind; my body felt normal, with normal energy; I had hope, I began to think of future plans; my crying spells stopped--just like that! Amazing. My fear is, of course, that this new cocktail, like the two others that worked then ceased working, will cease working as well, or that I'll develop tolerance. Or something. But maybe, just maybe, the third time is a charm.

It's a strange sensation, however, for one's body and brain to feel normal while the memory of the last nineteen months of horror remains in the center of my chest like a rubble-lined pit from a nuclear blast, my heart being ground zero.

My last post was signed with seven kilorats. That's the highest I've recorded in this blog, though I've been lower than that in previous depressions. I feel almost plastic in a way, the mood switch being so sudden and my heart still dragging behind me like an anchor. I am aware of the former emptiness in my chest but do not acutely experience it; my unutterable sadness suddenly feels like a phantom limb.

Suddenly the idea of a God of love seems imaginable to me. My religious torment has lifted. And in thinking of my correspondence with my Christian friend, I have to confess before God and man: My disease is more important to me than my religion. I can't help it. If my disease is not controlled I can't do faith except in a hollow intellectual sense. I can't pretend to be more virtuous than this.

As a man dying of thirst thinks only of water, so the severely depressed thinks only of annihilation, of an end; he is beyond hope of getting better but determined, at least in my case, not to kill himself because he remembers, as through a fog, recovering from previous depressions.

One thing I did to mark this miracle was to reverse my garuda. A garuda is an Indonesian mask carved in the form of an eagle-faced gargoyle, said to be the eagle who is the mount of the god, Vishnu, in the Hindu pantheon. It is meant to keep evil spirits out of a household. But I had hung it above my front door facing inwards when we moved into our new place on April 1, 2006, the day my depression began. As a visible sign of improvement, as an incarnation of hope, I have now hung the garuda on the wall facing the door. Now he looks out at the world and protects me and mine.

What was best about this change is that my daughter, Sarah, was visiting from LA and near the end of her stay she got her Papa back! And Kathleen got her Craig back. And I have myself back, though it will take time for me to trust the sensation of being me.

For those interested in a longer meditation on brain chemistry and personality, I recommend Listening to Prozac. We are all much more chemical than otherwise. If you were spared the gene for this devastating illness, you could never give proper thanks for not having it--and I am glad for you. If you suffer, all I can say is: hold on and keep seeking help. That's all I've done.

I'm tempted to sign this "kiloneutral" but am afraid to make such a claim for so short a period of recovery. Let us hold today's labeling in abeyance.

Gratefully,

CE

Will as the Central Human Cogwheel

Some time back I posted a string of seminal thoughts on a new theory of the mind. I went on a Descartian journey that I never completed. But in musing upon those posts I will here assert that will is the central fact of human existence.

Think of thought as a funnel. Much of it swirls like napkins in the wind. Some lodges in the cabal of cogitation. Some becomes focused, and when it does, it must be filtered through the will--a sort of binary yes-no circuit, and when the will is engaged, that narrow field of deciding, action follows, a new funnel that with one choice can set a course where other decisions follow naturally in support.

Will is incarnation, the incarnation of thought, both cerebral and automatic. Once in a basketball game someone pushed me from behind and I pivoted and threw a right jab right to his jaw without thinking. This is bodily will, the natural instinct of self-preservation, the deepest law of the body, hard-wired.

As for cerebral thought, where, for instance, a man mulls over the purchase of a house or the prospect of divorce, much analysis obtains, but only when that analysis is funneled through the will can incarnation result.

God spoke and the world came to be. What is inevitable speech but the pronouncement of incarnation? When the All-Powerful speaks a word, thought is not divided from will or action, thus a word is sufficient for creation, but only because that word was willed.

Are you seated? Be still for a moment and contemplate raising your right arm. You must have the consent of your arm to lift it. A bodily response is required for incarnation. Will enacts the transfer of thought into reality.

I forget which 19th century German philosopher emphasized the will, but I am in agreement. "I will, therefore I am." (Here is no Adlerian intent because the will to power is another matter altogether.)

Of what practical value is this, then? Of great practical value.

"By your deeds you shall be judged" saith the prophets, from Egypt to Hammurabi to Islam. Deeds are proof of thought. Until then thought may be forgiven.

Christ takes it further: "If a man hates another in his heart he is guilty of murder." Just so. A festering thought can incarnate through the will into the action of murder, and the more the will aligns with the thought, the closer one comes to the deed. Stop evil before it is realized, in the chambers of the heart and the labyrinths of the mind. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

"As a man thinketh, so is he."

Why am I telling you this? Because I was sitting on the porch and these thoughts came to me. Then the choice of reading in bed or sitting down to blog was presented. I willed my body from the porch to the living room, turned the television off and sat down. And surprise, my computer opened up to the "new post" option, a blank screen. I had previously indicated to myself that I might want to blog, apparently.

Nevertheless, until I put my fingers to the keyboard it was all a fantasy. And briefly, before typing, I thought about reviewing my series on a new theory of the mind, but ultimately I decided that the reader would not be interested except for excerpts, and I had no desire to plow through old posts to retrieve a chestnut or two.

Meanwhile my thought tells me that I am fairly certain about my next post: Litnet Archaeology. In researching magazines in which I have been published, I noticed their eventual fates and found a pattern in e-zines which has probably not been noted before.

Until then,

At 1 Kilobunny,

CE

New Poem: Why I Never Bring a Camera on Vacation

I am busy querying editors for book reviews and waiting for my copies to arrive so I can negotiate with local bookstores and start some readings. The long arc of promotion begins with exposure, then interaction, finally (one hopes) purchase. The longest journey begins with a single step; we do not know what fruit our actions will bear. What is important is to stay in the process, detached from results. The only way to travel.

Below, the last two posts of '07, first on the morality of feeling good, then a few New Year's sayings.

But first, in this extra-long triple post, a new poem:



Why I Never Bring a Camera on Vacation

Beached jellyfish:
saucers on gravel, translucent
as silicon gel, see through to shingle.
In the tuft of globules on top
I imagine a man-in-the-moon
with a gaping mouth.

The pathetic fallacy:
corpuscular indignation of blistering kelp.

Bull kelp bobbing on the pink-blue sea--
sometimes you think a seal.

Wind-quilted hollows of wavelets
exhaling susurrations of hissing foam.

The rich wood floors of my brother's house,
a blond fire warming your feet.

On his deck the burnished aluminum chairs
are patterned with holes, holes that won't make
a cross at right angles in my mind,
only a broken kite, a parallelogram's skeleton.
Were we and God saved both?

I'm playing the game, 'Go'
with my abacus of empty nightmares,
trying to put it all in code
like XHTML, like this--
why I never bring a camera on vacation.

Jasmine climbs the wooden trellis,
crosses of slats at angles.

The neighbor's live oak:
trunks bigger than the biggest
python swallowing a pig.

A raven on a far fir's top
caws me awake.
Hand-rolled and coffee.
Take your pills.

My land is likewise crossed
by northwest winds cutting latitudes
in parallelograms.
Who knows how well
the Roman carpenters did?
A good carpenter
would get the joint right.

Slightly irregular or not,
a cross can only meet in its center.
Its tips are alone,
sterile branches, stubs of nothingness.
Only the vital center matters.

My brother said he once
abandoned himself to God,
or rather “surrendered.”
“It was a good feeling,” he said,
“I felt like a child without responsibilities.
When I finally gave it up my friends said,
'Good to have you back.'”
But was he really gone?


Thine,

CE


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


From 12/30, The Morality of Feeling Good:


Yesterday's post (12/29/07) was, I admit, discouraging to say the least. To compound my sins I described to my daughter the method I would use if I were to commit suicide while of course promising not to do it. Such a sick mixed message. If my children weren't legally adults I shouldn't be allowed to be around them.

Happiness is contagious to a degree and so is gloom. Why they should matter to us so much is what I don't understand. Why do we all want to "feel good?" Isn't this the most basic of hedonisms? And why does an organism even harbor the expectation of feeling good? And if feelings are amoral, why do we judge our morality so much on the feeling outcome?

And yet bad feelings are the most painful of experiences, one reason why cutting is popular. The distraction of the physical pain is more pleasurable, or less uncomfortable, than an awareness of painful feelings. When badly depressed I rejoice in my back pain because it distracts from the holocaust of my heart.

I have had a couple of thoughts: First, if you're as sick as I am, and I mean really sick, it's very important to accept yourself as such instead of walloping your pride with the bludgeon of failure. My brain is sick; it is therefore unreliable and I ought not to listen to it.

And here: Why not pursue whatever beauty and truth has traditionally given you joy, even if you are at present incapable of experiencing joy? Surely it must prime the pump to some extent. I should try reading Eliot and Shakespeare and listening to Jimi Hendrix.

As for Christmas, I had a thought as well. What if I was not put here for myself, to pursue my art and interests, but for the sake of others? Christ was not sent here for himself. A healthy tenet of a Christian faith is the belief that this is true: we are gifts to others, not ourselves. The less we concern ourselves with our own gifts and the more we concentrate on being gifts to others the sooner we forget our misery.

In my philosophy, happiness and "feeling good" are not the purpose of life. They can be by-products of living a good life. Still, my actions don't confirm my beliefs--unless you admit I am only trying to feel "normal," not "happy," which is how I understand it.

The first mark of goodness is honesty, inseparable from humility. To have "a sober assessment of oneself" is the prerequisite reality check for consciously doing good. But how black our hearts are! As soon as we see ourselves in our place we begin, Walter Mitty-like, to imagine ourselves in a more exalted position. As a manic-depressive blogging for my own sanity I should have no illusions that what I do is noble; I do it to distract myself, to keep my brain from feeding on itself.
Madness can be made into art and art into madness. To think we are all driven by a desire for good feelings, how very simple! Too bad that for some, good feelings only come at the expense of others.

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

12/31/07 A Few New Year's Sayings


If your beliefs conflict with the truth, open your eyes and tame your heart.

I felt sorry for a man without feet until I saw a man with no knees, but when I met a man with no hips my compassion tanked.

If science can duplicate nature, why is "natural" still used as a promotional quality?

To train the young mind: music, math and essays.

Aging is not for cowards.

The more critical a person, the more sensitive.

We labor under the illusion that life makes sense. All our fantasies, religious and otherwise, are directed toward supporting that illusion. If we have such a need to make sense, does it make sense that it really does make sense?

The traits you least like in others are your own.

The key to happiness is to be born with a sunny temperament.

God is not on your side. His is the only side.

The Internet is the virtual end of privacy. Either live by subsistence in the woods or drop your pants.

Does anyone today really want privacy? Only after celebrity has been achieved.


CE

Best of: At Six Kilorats

From 12/29/07

It's hard to write. Since discontinuing the expensive wonder drugs, Lamictal and Abilify (they had stopped working despite increased doses), I've gotten worse. If I wake up at night I start crying. I can hardly speak to my visiting daughter without the necessity of strangling sobs. I feel so inestimably sad, it's as if all the sorrow of the universe could be poured in me and I would not overflow. I don't know what sadness and crying are for anymore. To me they are just an incapacitating signal I cannot turn off. Sure, I experience the feeling—a feeling like being left in the dark hungry with a dirty diaper by your mother when you're nine months old, something like that—but the feeling has no cause.

Sadness should be provoked by loss; free-floating sadness seeks an object for its own justification. So if I weep while thinking about my recently deceased daughter, Rachel, some dark part of me agrees, “Well, you're not just weeping for nothing.” But that's a lie. I am weeping for nothing and no one and everything and everyone; I'm just stuck, I'm a skipping record, the proverbial tape loop, the Mobius strip always condemned to be on one side of the equation: “I have seen the universe and it is dark. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Do I feel guilty about my illness? You bet. How about helpless? Worthless? Selfish? Self-centered? Of course. Then there are inner accusations that I'm faking it, I'm not trying hard enough, I'm trying to get out of life, I'm a coward--but willfulness has nothing to with it.

I think back to similar times in my illness and how I tried to cope. Once while taking a full load at UCLA I took on three jobs so that not a minute could be devoted to my thinking about myself. Later, after I graduated, I took a job in a fabric warehouse for the mindlessness of it. Even there they tried to promote me but I refused. I can't seem to do a job badly except the job of being myself, but that has gone way beyond being a job into some supernatural burden.

I can't be myself. Yet here I am with myself. My whole life seems a travesty. For the last ten years I have had the privilege of being able to write what I wanted, but I have nothing to show for it except hundreds of publications, mainly in obscure and non-paying journals. My new ambition to write only for money has been sincere, but even if I were to receive a six-figure advance for a book I would feel no better. I am a laughingstock to myself.

It's true in the last year and a half that I've had two brief remissions from my underlying condition, one with Cymbalta and one with Abilify plus the other meds. But in both cases the meds quit working, even when they were increased. It felt so good to be normal--I had begun to make plans, to look forward to the future—normal meaning the usual checkered existence of light and dark, not one or the other, which to me feels like heaven—and then cruelly, for reasons I don't understand, it was taken from me. The entire episode has now lasted 19 mos; if I subtract the three months of normal mood, it leaves me with a depression of 16 mos, which matches the worst spell in my life, at age 29, when I had to drop out of the last year of psychiatric residency. Don't worry, the irony is free.

There are new treatments available I'd like to try, but unfortunately my insurance won't kick in for another several months and locally there is no mechanism for me to pursue intravenous ketamine or Diprivan (the latter snapped me out of a minor depression some seven years ago during an endoscopy; there is great promise in these short-acting anesthetics). I've heard of a street drug called DMTT, a powder that you smoke, that has a similar effect as Diprivan but am afraid to try it, naturally. But I'm close to it. If I had more gumption I might go looking for it.

It is a joy to have my baby, Sarah (18), visiting. It is also a strain since I don't want to load her down with my leaden affect. “Suck it up, Craig. You gotta suck it up, at least until she leaves.” So I tell myself.

I am sick with a physical illness. I do not want people telling me how a model of “learned helplessness” or Freudian “anger turned inward” have anything to do with my condition. I've been through this many times before. One day the chemicals straighten out and I am fine. Then it turns out there was nothing psychologically wrong with me besides an artist's dose of too much narcissism, I suppose, but nothing requiring therapy. I just get well. EOS.

As for suicide, I won't do it. My father did it at 62; as I like to say, “Why let him win?” Maybe when I'm 63 I'll re-evaluate the idea. My main fantasy for a method of suicide is to plunge a butcher knife directly under my sternum into my heart and have a little consciousness before I go. In driving to pick Sarah up at the airport Thursday, I did have visions of driving off of the road into the river, but the drop was not precipitous enough to guarantee my demise. These are fantasies and tempting ones at that, but no one should assume I'm at risk for them. I'm tougher than that.

I wonder if incurable depression will ever be a justification for euthanasia?

I have always gotten better in the past, eventually, even miraculously, but how much damage is done to me and my loved ones and this organ called the brain in the meanwhile cannot be calculated.

If there's anything you can do for me today, cheer up a friend, lighten the day up a little for someone who is able to receive it. You will be happy you did and so will they--provided the brain chemistry is normal.


6 Kilorats,


CE

Best of: Christianity and Nature

From 12/13/07:

I've been having a long correspondence with an old friend about Christianity, both personal and philosophical. As some readers may know, I call myself a Christian because I believe it historically true that Christ rose from the dead. I have confessed him as "Lord," but I don't feel it. In truth I get more spiritual nourishment from Nature and loved ones. To be fair, theologically, that is also God acting, though I think Nature too often spared criticism.

"Red in tooth and claw" wrote Tennyson. Why must nature be so filled with violence, from the praying mantis to the great white shark? The Christian explanation is that nature fell along with man, and man did not become a carnivore until after the flood. But given the fossil record, it is obvious that nature was red in tooth and claw long before man appeared. Just look at T. Rex! And there are thorns and thistles before man's appearance. Thus linking fallen Nature to man's fall is anachronistic, though some believers like to think of the Jurassic period as a time of monsters, of nature gone awry. Nonsense. So when did Nature fall? When man appeared? Rubbish.

If in paradise "the lion shall lay down with the lamb" (my, what big teeth you have, Grandmother, for grinding grain)-- the lion would have to be completely re-designed to become a vegetarian. Then one could argue all these animals we cherish will be resurrected like us, not needing material sustenance. But here: When the resurrected Christ re-appeared to the disciples near the end of The Book of John, he cooks fish for them. That involves killing; the finny tribe bleeds red just like the furry one. So the resurrected Christ blessed the killing of animals, did he not? Not surprising since the practice of Old Testament Judaism is all about slaughtering animals, and Christ was the ultimate sacrifice. All very neat. The example of the resurrected Christ shows no change in man's attitude toward nature. One can make an argument that he practiced the norm while in this world, but he could have as easily toasted some bread for his disciples.

You can't argue anything from Nature except beauty. Justice? Love? Goodness? A good lion kills.

Robinson Jeffers is the one poet I know who looks at nature realistically, without any contaminating anthropomorphism. His God finds war as beautiful as peace, the glow of an atom bomb as pleasing as a sunset. If we are honest with ourselves we will dispense with the illusion that Nature is some kind of soft landing, some example of kindness and goodness. We will see that sea otters are predators, however "cute" they appear. (BTW, "cuteness" means anything that resembles a human infant. I have established this to my satisfaction. Note that those kindly disposed to aliens give them big heads and big eyes and small noses, just like the human infant.)

So if one cannot derive the nature of God from Nature, it must come from revelation. Then revelation must arrive through the fallen beings who record it, and where does that leave us? With a spotty record of the truth, surely. One thing that makes me believe the New Testament is all the unflattering things included, like Christ cursing the poor fig tree. Still, if we object to that action, a good Christian would likely reply, "Who are you to judge God?" To which I say, "Sorry, I can't help it, I was born with this prickly thing called a conscience."

Back to my original discussion. I am a Christian philosophically but not emotionally. In other words, I believe in forgiveness but I don't feel forgiven. This is the perplexity that tortures me when I attend church, which is rarely, because I weep for loss--partly the loss of my early concepts of God, as I was converted to the "Jesus Movement" when I was 16. With my mind and mood disorder, a simple faith doesn't seem to be an option, but I envy those who have it, like my friend. He not only believes in forgiveness, he feels it. He experiences God. Since most of my experiences can be questioned experientially on the basis of my mental illness, how would I know if I really felt forgiven anyway? Maybe it would only reflect a leap in serotonin levels, though the two (feeling and brain chemistry) are by no means mutually exclusive.

What am I getting at? I don't know; like Robert Burton I write as an escape from melancholy. In a nutshell I don't trust my feelings, thus I am prevented from having a religious experience. All through the Bible one is supposed to love God with all one's heart; that is no easy proposition for me. A leper cannot "feel" a doorknob, thus may break his wrist trying to open a locked door. In the same way my feeling sensors are diseased and I don't know whether I'm feeling God or not. (I don't care how long this blog entry is, I want to know the problem.)

Why is it I can't embrace God? Why is it that I can't feel as if I believe? Where is the joy of forgiveness? And if the Christian God is all powerful, why can't he break through my illness and give me the gift of feeling forgiven? My argument is that it is not just a lack of faith on my part, but a consequence of my disease. Before I was diagnosed manic-depressive I had many religious "highs" which in retrospect I realize were most likely manifestations of the disease. In a very real sense, this disease has robbed me of my former faith. What I end up with is what I call "beef jerky Christianity," a faith stripped of experience, a dried up philosophical commitment to truth.

Is this noble or foolish? I don't know. Ever since I had electroconvulsive therapy at the age of 30 I have not been able to re-connect with God. The closest I've come is taking the Eucharist at an Episcopal church I attended in Mexico. At that moment I feel as if I can believe; as soon as I leave the altar I begin to doubt my experience, though I confess there is a faint glow in that action.

Maybe I should convert to Catholicism and be done with it. I've tried Buddhism, but it was an inferior sect. I dabbled in spiritualism when very young. Hinduism is a great comfort but for me no guide to life. Judaism is Christianity unfulfilled. Sikhism and Zoroastrianism are attractive, especially the concept of asa (truth) vs. lies in the latter. Islam holds no attraction for me; it seems a step back from both Judaism and Christianitiy. We all know the dangers of its fundamentalist version.

In these speculations I have stopped crying. The cats play; it's a sunny day; Kathleen is reading upstairs, dizzy with her ear infection. I look forward to my youngest daughter's visit on the 27th. Life ain't half bad, no matter how bad I get.


2 Kilorats,

Craig Erick

Best of, cont'd: Dr. Chaffin Almost Dies!

From 12/2/07:


There is a lithograph hanging in my bedroom entitled "Nine Lives." It is a pyramid of stylized cats in shades of blue, with the cat at the top of the pile nearly white, presumably representing the ninth life. I have cheated death eight times, including twice in one summer while working on offshore oil rigs. Last night I used up my ninth, and I fear my guardian angel is back on Prozac.

Later, after my brush with death, we had a discussion about whether you got a tenth life after using up nine or whether nine was the limit. Derek (stepson) and I thought it meant you got a tenth while Kathleen said nine was the limit.

(She is more the "glass is half-empty" half of our marriage, or in other words, the outrigger of sanity who anticipates danger.)

Should I list my other eight brushes with death? No, in keeping with today's infotainment cycle I'll relate only last night's occurence.

I was cooking a tough steak and sampled it before serving. I got an especially grisly piece, or should I say fascia-laden (fascia is the tough, translucent-white covering over muscles; think of it as a cellular girdle. Without fascia our muscles would relax and we would be weak and uncoordinated, finding it difficult even to walk. Just imagine all the rubber bands holding the joints and skeleton together gone limp.).

"Gristle" ought to officially refer only to cartilage, that darkly translucent yet incredibly rubbery-tough stuff that lines joints. Lacking a good common word for fascia, I'll substitute gristle. (Forgive this bird walk of medical semantics.)

In sampling the steak I swallowed a gristly piece of elongated meat. I swear it was sliding toward the right pipe when my epiglottis failed me and it slimed like a slug in a U-turn down my trachea. my first thought was, "Is my trachea truly occluded?" That was confirmed by my inability to speak. Yet because of the shape of the piece of meat, if I am not mistaken, I was still able to take in a little air around it. Maybe I could breathe, maybe I couldn't; the point is my trachea was plugged.

I reached for the back of my throat but could not reach the meat. At this point Kathleen and Derek noticed I was in trouble. Kathleen bravely attempted the Heimlich maneuver, but as I am 6'6" and 270 lbs, she couldn't get her arms around me. I was trying to give Derek instructions in how to do it with hand gestures, but he hadn't been trained. Yet he could reach around me while Kathleen coached him. So I wrapped my hands over his in a combined fist and pushed hard under my sternum to force my diaphragm up and we made a little progress, as I reached back and briefly touched the edge of the meat before it dived back into its snake hole. Instinctively I bent over, tried to cough, and finally snagged the tip of the meat with my fingers and pulled the little alien out. I breathed freely; I was a little light-headed but nowhere near passing out. I remember Kathleen saying, "That was a long piece of meat!"

People often ask what you were thinking when you come near death. I wasn't thinking; I was instinctively seeking survival, prepared to ram my belly against the top of the spinet piano next. I didn't panic; I didnt think about anything except the meat in my throat and how to get it out.

Afterwards Kathleen and Derek went to pieces, literally, tears and all, not just because of my escape but because they had been discussing the death of her first husband, Derek's father, earlier.

The first thing I said to Derek, whose face had turned almost white with terror, was, "C'm here boy, let me give you a hug." I pulled him close. In his right ear I said, "Thanks for helping save my life." In his left ear I whispered "Damn you!" --as for many years I have longed to die, to free myself from depression and pain, though I think it better to stay and try to help. "Put on the apron of life!"

Back to the revelatory moment. After I had dislodged the meat and observed its sinewy nature stretched on the linoleum, my only thought was:

"What a tough piece of steak!"

Later I ate more but sliced it very thin. It wasn't the meat's fault, after all.

"Get back on the horse, get back in the plane, go chomp on the steak again."

It tasted good, though it was a little tough.


Kiloneutral,

CE

Prophecy and Earthly Paradise

Now to pre-empt the "Best of" again: I've been reading the Old Testament prophets for some reason and a friend asked me about my thoughts regarding the Christian Heaven and the earthly paradise predicted for the Jews. Here's my take:


One of the central questions of the Bible is how to reconcile the Christian heaven with the earthly paradise of the Jews.

There are three possibilities:

1. No earthly paradise.

2. An earthly paradise yet to come in history.

3. A spiritual interpretation of the earthly paradise that ignores actual fulfillment.

If the Bible is taken seriously, only the second option is probable, because the Jews are an earthly people with earthly expectations. Also, the prophecies of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and even the book of Revelation support an earthly temple in Jerusalem whose measurements and description already appear in Revelation and the last part of Ezekiel.

This temple and the city that surrounds it will dwarf all the edifices of history, and Christ will rule from it, and the River of Life will flow from it--the trees that line it will bear fruit monthly and the leaves will be "for the healing of the nations." Note: nations. These are earthly provinces.

The same prophecies that predicted the Babylonian captivity, the Persian overthrow of Babylon, the Egyptians being reduced to a minor people, the extinction of the Ammonites, Hittites and Philistines, also predict the earthly paradise. If, historically, the other prophecies came true, we cannot discount the unfulfilled prophecies.

Christians, on the other hand, "have no earthly habitation" (Paul) and our kingdom "is not of this world" (Jesus). Moreover, Christians are already "seated in the heavenlies in Christ" as Paul remarks in Ephesians.

The earthly temple will have twelve gates inscribed with the name of Israel's tribes, yet the foundations of the temple, according to Revelation, will be the twelve Jewish apostles of Christ, each one represented by another layer of pure gemstone.

When Christ rules the earth, therefore, he shall rule through the Jews, and indeed, as a Jew, in his second coming, he shall fulfill the prophecies of an earthly kingdom.

Where then will the Christians be? Subsumed in Christ? Waiting in heaven for the thousand year reign to end before the last judgment? It is not known, but certainly the Book of Revelation endorses the preeminence of the Jews in the time of tribulation and later reign over the earth. The Jews are thus the inheritors of earthly rule, the Christians relegated to heavenly rule. The details for the Jews are much better worked out in prophecy; the Christian destiny is, in comparison, a little hazy. The Church does not appear in the Book of Revelation after the first three chapters, leading some to believe in "The Rapture," when believers simply disappear from the earth. I don't subscribe to this doctrine because I don't believe God will necessarily spare believers when they have also suffered throughout history.

If the Jews are to inherit the earth, then the long arc of their impossible history may be seen as a training ground for future supremacy, when they must repent and recognize the Messiah as "him whom they pierced," also foretold in prophecy.

The Book of Revelation rightly belongs to the Old Testament, as does that dark little book before it, Jude. Thus the ouroboros comes to light; the Garden of Eden was an earthly paradise, the New Jerusalem will also come down from heaven to be an earthly paradise. Yet Christians, despite the haziness of our destiny re: paradise, have this promise: "Eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, what God hath prepared for those who love him." The reward for Christians, who are a spiritual tribe, will likely be spiritual, with this caveat--that we will again assume human form in perfect resurrected bodies, though perhaps in another realm, while the Jews have their earthly prophecies fulfilled.

One more thing: Some of the prophecies of the end of the diaspora applied to the remnant that returned from Babylon, but that prefillment does in no way diminish the ultimate material outcome in the future, because the descriptions of paradise and the re-building of Jerusalem in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. do not match it, just as the Jewish state today does not fulfill them beyond a gathering of the Jews--there is no spiritual revival there, only a rapacious dedication to survival against enemies who are greatly overmatched by Israel's firepower.

How then should Christians relate to the chosen people? With respect and neutrality; it is not our place but the place of the Jewish prophets to attempt reform from within. The punishment has and will fall heavily on the atheistic, socialistic Israel of today. Nevertheless they have the geography right: the true earthly kingdom must be established in Jerusalem, the geography is specified in the prophecies.

As for Jews in the world economy, where they are overrepresented, remember that usury is a big deal in the Old Testament, and punishment should be expected for such a departure from righteousness.

Christians are released from the ultimate demands of karma through Christ's sacrifice (though not from the law of karma in this world), but a people that holds to its concept of a God intervening in history on their behalf will also be judged in history in real time. This judgment Christians will escape, having opted for a spiritual outlook and reward.

If not for the miracle of the Jews still existing as a cohesive tribe over near four millennia, these predictions would be hard to swallow. Only the orthodox Jews still subscribe to them. But Jesus said (loose quote), "Not one jot or tittle of the law and the prophets will pass away before all is fulfilled."

Here endeth the epistle for the day.

CE

Best of: Plants, Sex and Creative Writing

From 10/22/07 (one of my lighter forays):

I saw a pick-up truck today with tropical plants in the bed traveling at 50 mph along the frigid coast. I thought of reporting it to the SPCP, “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants.” Then I realized there was no such organization and that it was up to me to found it. Ah, one more small responsibility for Dr. Yours Truly. (You’d think people would have wised up by now and simply elected me supreme potentate, since I know what’s best for everyone. Who else worries about the damn plants, hmm?)

Did you know that plants grow better to Mozart and that carrots, according to electric sensors, emit the equivalent of a scream when uprooted? Just because we believe plants don’t have sentience doesn’t mean they can’t experience pain just as animals do. Yes, Cain’s vegetable offering was rejected and Abel’s received, and we grieve about the fratricide, but what about the poor vegetables and the emotional wound of their rejection by the very God who created them? We’re talking years of therapy with manure and fish emulsion.

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

I just got news that Oysters and Chocolate, an online magazine of erotica, will pay me for a poem entitled “Her Steaming Love Tunnel.” The link should worek but I don’t feel comfortable posting the poem--my Junior Poets' Club members’ parents might sue me and then who would pay my freight? Ever since I exposed Big Bird as the extraterrestrial queer that he is, many parents have directed their children here. Why did I write this silly, sexy piece? Because to write for money means experimenting with every paying genre. If porno poems sell better than love poems I’ll just go there. Wait—not porno--the poem has socially redeeming value, if only to affirm the joy of intromission, ejaculation and afterglow in pursuit of the “golden fleece” of the simultaneous orgasm. Near the end the narrator yells, “I’m a horse not a man!” I like that and so would Catherine the Great.

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

Someone asked me to detail how I got booted from a creative writing class. First, I joined it during my depression as a discipline for continuing social involvement that I demand of myself when depressed. I also hoped to meet a circle of writers in my new stomping grounds. And the teacher came highly recommended from my neighbor who claims to be a writer but will always lack the chops.

At the last class I attended a woman read a treacly, maudlin poem that made my hair stand on end. Since everyone else chimed in, I added my two cents that it sounded like “A Blue Mountain Arts” card. The teacher interrupted me to say “that’s over the line, let’s stop there.” I assure you there was no malice in my comment and that the “poem” was abominable.

After class the teacher asked to speak with me. She told me she tried to provide a nurturing environment for writers, and that this class had been together a long time. I asked her if feeling good was more important than writing well, and she dodged the question, indicating both were important, but one shouldn’t call another’s work “Hallmark,” to which I vociferously objected:

“I didn’t call it ‘Hallmark,’ I called it ‘Blue Mountain Arts,’ and there’s a world of difference in that distinction. I choose my comments carefully, unlike what you think.” That was over her head. I then asked her, “How many people have complained about me?”

She said, “four.” That amazed me. “And they don’t have the balls to speak to me but have to hide under the teacher’s skirt?” She didn’t like that one at all.

“So, do you really want me to come back?” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said, “You’re a very good writer.” (How would she know if she’s more concerned with feelings?)

I asked her again if she really wanted me to return. “By all means,” she said, “just try to be more nurturing and less critical.”

I said, “If four people complained about you in a writing class, would you feel like coming back?”

“I can’t say,” she said, “and it’s not like that.”

“Like what?” I said.

She demurred. Depressed or not I wasn’t going to return to a class of wannabes who couldn’t stand constructive, yes, constructive criticism. The story of my life: unable to judge the social acceptability of my utterance of the truth as I perceive it. My tongue believes in “Leap before thou lookest.”


1 Kilobunny,

CE

New Poem and Video

I know the columns to the right of this post are messed up and don't show until the very bottom, but this is a result of my attempt to put the book and a new picture at the top. I'm so ham-handed at amateur webmastering, I'm in a pickle with pixels.

Some folks have ordered books already, thanks.

Wasn't the inauguration speech grand? Reagan played himself, which is why Obama is more convincing: he is himself.

A first generation African-American raised by a white mother in Kansas. No wonder Jesse Jackson felt cheated. Obama wasn't one of the real "bros."

I wrote an inauguration haiku that caused a bit of a furor at a poetry board, though I thought it was crystal clear:

Listen, slaves:
There's a black man in the white house
and he is your servant.

Now I feel as if I have to explain it. Slaves = all those Americans with the whisper of slavery still in their blood. The man in the white house is, of course, the president. And whereas blacks were only in the White House as servants heretofore, now the occupant is a servant in the highest sense. Someone accused me of racism based on this poem, another said I was unqualified to write it. Some people!

Although I have little energy to blog tonight, I have been seeing a UFO nightly. I think it might be space junk orbiting lower and lower. As it sinks into the sea, it becomes a glowing white disk that casts a silver reflection on the ocean while also pulsing red and green. The local stations and Coast Guard know nothing about it. If I didn't have two other witnesses I might question my eyes.

Here's another poem from the new book, one of my favorites:


In Your Hands

The desert two-lane flashes
its white segments so quickly
you forget the asphalt discontinuities
and think the dashes connected
toward some future rendezvous
where night and morning join
in a secret sunrise of stars
that explains all the causalities
that propelled you here–
but your eyes are sucked back
to this moment, furious and finite
as a fly seizuring against a screen.

The yellow smears on your windshield
are souls you’ve hurt without knowing.
The whistle through the window
is your suspicion of yourself.
The radio plays country
because you really are that simple.

When it’s time to pull over
you are no closer to but no farther
from your goal. In a waking sleep
you imagine topiaries of exhaust
in the shapes of visionaries:
Jesus, Blake, Jules Verne.
Were they as rooted to the moment?
Or did they veer off into the underbrush?
The wheel is in your hands.

(published in Eclectica)


I'm furiously networking to promote the book, a whole new learning experience. By the end of it I should be an expert on what not to do. One tip: Don't expect your Facebook "friends" to be helpful. Here's a wonderful link to a video about how Facebook friends would look in the real world: Facebook in Reality. It's a hoot!

The editor of the re-vamped Pif called me tonight, a swell guy named Derek Alger. He'll be doing a panel on the short story at the AWP conference in Chicago.

Not much more to say but "Congratulations, America!"

Let's hope our support for Obama does not waver in this time of tough decisions and uncertain futures. I think it's in to be patriotic again. Many will remind me that it never went out, but I beg to disagree. I lived in Mexico for three years while Bush was president, and let me tell you, it was downright embarrassing.

Over and out,

CE

New Poem: Unto Death....poetry book sales

I'm sitting here wondering if anyone has bought my book yet. Only my publisher knows. Should I write her or wait for her to write me?

A poetry book does not behave in an arc like a bestseller. It has a lower and longer trajectory and a longer shelf life. If you don't believe it, just visit the poetry section in the book store and compare dust levels. Orders, I expect, will dribble in slowly and hopefully pick up speed to a steady trickle. Is this pessimistic? I think it's realism. Besides, in this internet printing-on-demand age, a book can have a very long shelf life.

Writing a book is the easy part. Selling it is the hard part.

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

I often tire of Puritan America and perhaps that distaste helped fuel the poem I wrote tonight on this very blog (before speculating on book sales). Here goes:



Unto Death

When does pleasure turn to slavery?
When does bubble gum become
a tasteless mechanism of the mouth?
When do cigarettes take up the whip and chain?
When does alcohol require
denial for communion?

Tell all your blue-nose friends
addiction's rarely fatal.
Go shock them with your habits.
A house does not collapse from one bad timber.
A life does not collapse from one bad habit.
A crab can get by fine on seven legs.
There is little on this living earth
we can't make an obsession out of.

When does pleasure turn to slavery?
When does the staff become a crutch,
the crutch a knife? Because
denial is incremental
like crabgrass in the fescue
slowly transforming a lawn
until seeds are forgotten
and mowing, you settle for green.
Don't let the jealous judge you--
there are more important things.
It's adversity that makes a man,
not what's in his bloodstream.
How much whiskey does it take
to get through a war?
There's never enough.

In the angel of satisfaction
lurks the devil of enslavement.
In the house of stimulation
lurks the devil of increase.
When does pleasure turn to slavery?
When you cannot not do it unto death?


I got to MC an amateur show for our men's circle tonight. It went surprisingly well, no doubt because I was wearing my impresario's pink-and-yellow paisley sport coat from the 60s. It's my most righteous rag, a public eyesore, an assault on all good taste. For that reason it garners incredulous attention and ungrudging admiration.


1 Kilobunny,

CE