Last night I realized that I intended to give short shrift to the unconscious as I continued writing, as it has been overblown, I think, by personality theorists, especially Freud, despite the fact that I used it in my analogy as the roots of the tree of consciousness. After touching upon forgiveness, I later prayed to be able to forgive my first wife wholly for all the damage she'd done me.
When I finally left her I was depressed, but that was not the reason for leaving. Our marriage had been over for years. My leaving was only a punctuation mark, but to do so I had to stuff a wealth of feelings down; I couldn't deal with them, I felt as if I had failed God and myself and my children not to stick it out. But it was a matter of survival; I feared that if I stayed with her any longer I would be in danger of suicide, truly.
We went to marriage counseling three times, and the last two times were a joke, as it was clear that she either had no desire to change or was incapable of it. Our therapist agreed with me (in a private session) that she was "blind," not necessarily malign, simply incapable of the kind of insight required for change.
Why do I bring this up? Because in my desire to forgive I underestimated the unconscious, for this very morning I had a dream about living with my first wife. It was my first day of psychiatric residency and there were lectures and orientation. I had my eye on Lara Flynn Boyle, playing a fellow psychiatric resident in my dream, and felt that she returned my feelings. The two of us decided to go get a cup of coffee and skip an hour of class, but in the dream I had to return home first. I felt hollow and ambivalent about starting my residency; it seemed as if there were no foundation beneath me, I had severe doubts about my choice that first day of residency--in my dream only, of course.
When I stopped by my house it became clear that my first wife was not with me on my journey. It was unspoken that she rather objected to my not being a "real doctor," and wished I'd become a surgeon or something more generally admired. This is likely my own projection on her. Yet I felt the acute absence of her support; she was only tagging along with my career because she hoped to receive the benefits of being "a doctor's wife," not because she was invested in my growth as a partner. I realized this with a sense of emptiness and despair. She subsequently became suspicious of my date for coffee and recalled instances when I had paid the other resident too much attention; we got in a verbal fight and I stormed off to secure the car keys to our two vehicles, thinking I would not let her take the Mercedes, when I finally gave up and decided to simply let her have it; I would keep the old convertible, a nice symbol of freedom in the dream. Meanwhile I was irritated by missing the coffee date with Lara Flynn, while my first wife was filled with wrath about my affections, unconsummated, toward this other resident.
In the dream, or rather nightmare, I knew that the marriage had blown up, but what really frightened me was the feeling of being lost in my residency, that I had made a bad choice--a poor fit for my gut, though I couldn't really know my gut in my emotional state. I woke up disturbed and sought out Kathleen, who was busy and leaving for work, though I got to tell her an abbreviated version of the nightmare.
Isn't it like the self to play a trick on us in this way? In consciously seeking an attitude of forgiveness toward my first wife, my dreams plunged me into a situation where the unconscious had to be re-enacted, where my buried feelings of hopelessness toward the situation had to be remembered if I was to truly forgive her. I will not list her sins against me; I know I broke her heart and disappointed her future expectations of being a doctor's wife, but we were never on the same page spiritually or intellectually, only sexually. And the unexpected child, and the planned child that soon followed in two years, bound us further in parenting, although she was little use as a parent after the children were out of diapers, unsure of how to train them, taking a laissez-faire attitude towards child rearing.
To return to history, before marriage I was infatuated with my first wife for six months. The infatuation died. I plunged into an extended depression and married her out of guilt. Why a woman would go through with a marriage to a man who could not express love due to his undiagnosed depression, I don't know. She was likely in love with the idea of marriage to a doctor more than with me. But I can't judge her on this, as I don't truly know her feelings for me. I was marrying her because in a manic high I thought God had spoken to me to marry her, long before I was diagnosed, so I willed myself while depressed to follow through with it because I feared to buck "God's will" but more feared, I suppose, facing my true self and real feelings, which were nevertheless not available to me at that stage of personal development.
Say that the marriage was doomed from the start, though it teetered on for thirteen years.
Although she came along with me to Los Angeles, Texas and Michigan in my educational journey, she did not do it as a true partner but because it was convenient to be supported, in addition to hoping for the future as a doctor's wife. When I did fall in love with a phlebotomist, also married, in my internship year, somehow it came out, though I never even kissed the woman except to say good-bye when I broke off the affaire de couer. After that my first wife never forgave me for a straying heart; it would have been no worse if my body had strayed. And of course, I got no strokes for avoiding physical entanglement; the disloyalty of the heart was unforgivable, even though we both should have seen it as a symptom of a failed marriage, which we did not.
In hindsight I liked to say that my first wife was not a "helpmate" but a "lead weight." I should have left her long before I did, but I couldn't bear to be separated from my daughters. If I had left earlier I would have spared myself a world of pain. When you don't want to come home from work because the house is a mess and all you can look forward to is an earful of complaints, something is definitely wrong with your marriage. (And did I mention she never worked after her first pregnancy?)
After I finally left her on December 4th, 1988, we had a discussion on the beach, where she said to me with frozen calculation: "You ARE my Social Security." She was determined to squeeze her golden goose as hard as she could, and squeeze she did, until ultimately, while I was living in Mexico, she took all my savings and left me penniless and homeless through legal finagling in my absence and showed not the least regret.
Such things are hard to forgive, especially when the party that injured you shows no repentance. In my previous post I talked about the psychic richness that forgiveness entails, as opposed to lucky avoidance of hurt. And now I am faced with the prospect of a very difficult forgiveness, one that goes deep to the root of my unconscious, one that is unresolved at its core twenty years later. I know it is unresolved because on occasion I will make an offhand remark to one of my daughters about their white trash bitch of a mother, full well knowing I shouldn't for their sake. Besides, who she is today I don't know; I only know her as she was to me. If I am ever to forgive her I must let go of the past and approach her with a clean slate, no matter how she treats me, to be free of this burden I now feel in the wake of my prayer for forgiveness and the dream that emotional memory spurred in me.
How is this to be done? It makes for a good example of synthesis. How can emotional memory be healed? How can you forgive someone who neither asks for forgiveness nor understands her part in your sorrow? How do you forgive the blind? It's not as if she's said to me, "I'm sorry for being a bitch and taking all your money under false legal pretenses, I'm sorry for being a poor housekeeper and mother, I'm sorry I didn't support your quest to be a Christian psychiatrist, I didn't do the best I could, please forgive me." No, it's more likely that whatever she got out of me after the separation and divorce she endorses with gleeful, petty triumph. This is the woman I have known, in any case.
As for the biblical standard, Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother if he repents, 70? "If he repents," Jesus replied, "70 times seven." Yet for the benefit of psychic economy, for the health of its unconscious roots, it is best to forgive even those who do not repent, else they maintain a hold on us at a deep level. Thus unilateral forgiveness is part of a healthy mental toilette. Otherwise you cannot forget, as my dream proves.
In beginning this exploration of the mind, forgiving my ex-wife was not on my agenda at all. But in attempting a psychic change, namely true forgiveness, I find everything in play, and my will cannot simply will the fact of forgiveness without some working through of the psyche, the synthesizer of the self. So where do I begin?
In this regard there are two approaches, one I already alluded to, namely "working through." But working through requires a vivid re-hashing of the painful past until acceptance is reached, which forgiveness can use as a launching pad. The other approach (not that there are only two) is to commit an auto de fe: Commit oneself to forgiveness in the conscious mind without benefit of a feeling of forgiveness, and watch the suggestion flow from the branches down to the root, so that the root is no longer infected. So instead of coaxing the root to yield, so to speak, use a top-down "pesticide"--in this case a conscious commitment--to direct the unconscious to fill out the measure of forgiveness.
Nevertheless, before a commitment of the will can have a salutary effect, confession must take place. At some level I hate my former wife. I despise her. I have no respect for her on earth or in heaven. Although we had some good times early in our marriage, I soon realized she would never be a true partner but a dependent impediment. Everything to do with the externals of a life seemed to fall on me, from insurance policies and doctor's visits to the preference my daughters had for me shampooing their hair because I carefully avoided getting any soap in their eyes. She was happy to leave most responsibilities to me and avoid all that she could. Her excuse? "I'm just not good at that"--"that" being anything I could and would do for the sake of the family.
A metaphor I used for our failed relationship was of two people in a canoe in which only one rowed, and only on one side. Obviously the canoe would then go in circles.
Right now the memory of my first wife, the mother of my children, feels like a toothache. Forgive the pun, but do I really need a root canal to fix it? In my schema of the human mind the will is central, though the considerations that lead to an act of will are legion. Will listing my ex-wife's good qualities help prepare me for feelings of forgiveness? I can list them. When young I thought her beautiful and sexy. She was a good mother to children under three, after which the lack of discipline in her family of origin ill-prepared her to guide the children, for which she can hardly be blamed. She liked to laugh and party; she had a good singing voice; she loved our children despite her very limited capacity to instruct them. Other good qualities include her tolerance for deviance; she made a wide range of friends because she could engage others without any initial judgment. And my infatuation with her began because she was the first person in my young adulthood who was comfortable with emotion, and in confessing hers freely (she wore her soul on her sleeve), I was liberated to tell mine for the first time, including some things I had been loathe to share as a young Christian. In relations she was always willing and I should be thankful for that, especially considering I was married at the age of 19, the peak of sexual drive. And marriage was not of no advantage to me; I desperately wanted to move out of the house where my belligerent father held court in his cups while never attending to his bipolar disease. Why I didn't think about moving out alone, I don't know. I didn't need a woman at that point in my life. I absolutely blame myself for not having had the courage to be myself, but how could I know that my internal processes and major decisions, even the decision to become a doctor, were rooted in manic psychosis?
Ah, the twists of the mind. After entertaining the auto de fe of the will I find myself working through instead.
We were two young, idealistic Christians, both virgins, who believed in our union at an idealistic level, thinking faith would solve all, lacking sufficient knowledge of ourselves to walk away from what I wrongly believed God had ordained. If God exists and he is good, he would never have endorsed the marriage. But since we have free will, and I suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness, we were helpless to avoid our plans for the future, while I was under the mistaken impression that she could change. And as for the untimely birth of our first child just before we moved to Texas for medical school, that was my fault. It's a long story, but briefly, on the weekend before she was to have a laparoscopy for endometriosis, I told her she didn't need the diaphragm since her uterus would be scraped clean on Monday in any case. But no one told Rachel that, and she must have hid out in a fallopian tube and found a scrap of endometrium in which to implant. She was truly our miracle baby, the same baby we lost last year at the age of 29.
So where am I in this exploration of the unconscious, brought on by a desire to forgive while musing last night, followed by a nightmare from the roots of my unpropitiated unconscious? How far must I go to initiate forgiveness as a process?
I can accept the fear and loathing my ex eventually produced in me, feelings I buried even while married in order to survive. Near the end I could no longer compartmentalize; even being around my ex-wife was torture, because she was living proof of my failure to myself, my inability to recognize who I was and act accordingly. I had to leave her for my mental health, as I said. Now the true test that I have forgiven her is if I can act in a genuinely humane and friendly fashion toward her, never bad-mouthing her in front of my kids or others. I can do that, by force of will, but I can only do it genuinely if I have attended to my roots, which made such an impression in my nightmare. Thus it is a three-pronged approach: I must accept my painful emotional memories of living with her; I must consciously will myself to forgive; and I must trust my will to act accordingly, and grant permission to my buried feelings to do as they wish, knowing they cannot ultimately harm me, only contribute to my healing. As I and my ex have a mutual interest in gaining visitation rights to our grandson, Jacob, perhaps a telephone call about strategies for grandparents' rights would be just the thing to float as a trial balloon. And this is the final fruit of synthesis and forgiveness: action in the real world.
To be continued...
Monday, July 14, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
New Theory of the Mind III
In my last post I began to use "syn" for synthesizer, but it is awkward and its sound reminds us of conventional morality. So I prefer the "self," to avoid jargon.
How can we conceptualize this complicated process of the self? Most intriguing, how does the will decide and act? And what precedes the will? The will is the final arbiter of human consciousness, except in cases of mental distress, as in the indecision of depression, or by injury or congenital deficiency of the brain. Even in such cases the will must usually be engaged, if the person can care for himself at all and is not entirely disabled in mind, which is rare and most complete in cases of holoprosenchephaly.
The unconscious, literally that part of the mind of which we are not currently conscious, extends in rootlets from the tap root of the will into the earth below, while the bole branches above ground into the conscious self. The will is influenced by both conscious and unconscious factors, but we can only see the branches, not the roots. The roots feed the tree water and necessary nutrients, just as the leaves produce sugar for fuel by photosynthesis, the former invisible, the latter, visible.
Much has been made of unconscious motivation, and it can affect the will for ill or good. A phobia of spiders has roots in primal terror but efficiently limits the extension of fear to one object, thereby obeying a principle of the psychological parsimony of containment. What the self labors for is not limited to the unconscious, however. The conscious mind may buy spider-killing spray to assuage its fears as a consequence of the ultimate influence of a deep root where the spider was associated with more fear than a spider merits. To contain the primal fear in one example prevents the self from becoming entirely dysfunctional. This is no less than the famous formulation of Freudian ego defenses, where the abject terror of free-floating anxiety saps the self of energy to a greater degree than a directed fear or phobia.
The information that flows through the will usually goes through unobstructed; if a practiced surgeon must make an adjustment in the midst of a procedure due to an anatomic anomaly, for instance, his brain doesn't freeze. He consults intellectual memory to plan a new approach to the surgical field, and by projecting known techniques and principles on a previously unknown happenstance, he smoothly solves the problem. A younger or more neurotic surgeon might pause for a moment of anxiety to gather himself, but will overcome his fears and quiet his soul to deduce the right move, else avail himself of a more experienced surgeon's advice, a step that requires not only contemplation of the difficulty but recognition of one's limitations, a mature function of the self's ability to distance itself from its center and analyze and identify a shortcoming in knowledge.
But the emotions attending the call to a colleague can also be fraught with fear, fear of appearing incompetent, a great fear with doctors; fear of disturbing the other surgeon; fear that other staff might lose faith in him if he must resort to help. A worse doctor would plow ahead without consultation, perhaps out of confidence or overconfidence--confidence in his past performance and problem-solving, from the benefit of intellectual and emotional memory, or overconfidence--a need to risk appearing competent for the sake of his inner sense of status or well-being.
When the junior surgeon picks up the phone and dials, he has come from emotional memory, intellectual memory, thought (visual, tactile and verbal), analysis, and emotion in a complicated risk vs. benefit ratio to risking his self-esteem. Emotional memory might serve him if he remembers a botched procedure where he didn't ask for help, so that it becomes a warning. As for the role of the unconscious in either asking or not asking for help, memories and associations can include the emotional palette of parent-child and master-pupil interactions of past relationships, as distant or more distant than the success or failure in trying to tie a new knot in the Cub Scouts.
There may also be intrusions before the call is made or not made, the image of a new sports car the surgeon would like to buy; the prospect of a drink when the operation is over, or a girlfriend waiting to welcome him at home. Or conversely, a desire not to go home may prevail and extend the operation needlessly because the doctor lives alone and has no social life, such that the operating room and the practice of medicine are his emotional sustenance which he naturally likes to extend for pleasure.
To return to my analogy, light on the leaves of the tree speak to the receptive faculties of the conscious. The more information we pursue, the better directions the will can incarnate. Above all, the quickest way to bring light to a subject is to ask the opinion of another human being, who can use their synthesizer to offer (one hopes) an objective opinion, free of the twists and turns of one's own particular tree.
We live for new information. It is part of the lifelong effort of mastery over the world, begun in the crib when reaching for mobiles, increased with walking and bowel control, and exponentially increased with the acquisition of language.
And here is another observation: easy decisions bypass consciousness and go straight through the will to the body, as in whether I should have another sip of my drink, which I don't usually think about unless I have drunk too much. In the latter case, before the decision is made and the will engaged, I may experience an internal debate inside the synthesizer prior to being able to engage my will, and even the act of drinking may be attended by negative emotion like guilt--which can paradoxically increase how fast I sip as it re-enacts parent-child struggle of limits internally: "Now Johnny, don't stay out too late." If Johnny does he will be tracked down by the parent and usually made to feel bad for his transgression; thus running, as in fight or flight, can become intoxicating, especially to escape punishment. Likewise, if someone threatens to take your power to drink away, you will easily overcompensate and drink more to assert your right, hence the failure of Prohibition. All of this goes by in a split second, of course. Simply by observing my own thought, I cannot anywhere near describe the entire chain of how the will is engaged and what permutations can transpire that cause the will to act erratically in view of reason, as in guiltily drinking faster because my internal mother is telling me I have drunk too much.
If I think I have had enough to drink, I should be able to stop with my reason, noting the physical memory of hangovers and the intellectual memory of fogginess. But pleasure is powerful, and desire often proves stronger than the influence of the conscious mind on the will.
Take dieting, for instance, which under the best clinical circumstances has no more than a 5% success rate, much worse than smoking cessation. The mind decides that the mass of the body has become uncomfortable, or looks unattractive, or should better conform to television norms. A diet is considered. If entertained long enough, a diet may be adopted. And after its adoption comes at first a feeling of satisfaction at one's self-control, quickly followed by a persistent feeling of deprivation, as in the ice cream in the freezer one can't taste.
Pleasure and pain have a great deal to do with decisions, in fact may be the primary motivators of human behavior beyond survival, though even survival might be subsumed under them because it is painful to die of starvation. The conflict in weight loss is complicated by a "good," namely food, being proscribed as bad. It goes against all our evolutionary development to think that an abundance of food should be limited for no other reason than our waistline; it should be instantly gobbled for that eventual rainy day of insufficient stores. Thus the pain of deprivation, accompanied by many rationalizations (insufficient but reasonably sounding excuses), plus the looming pleasure of forbidden fruit cause the self to give up its reason-imposed diet and give in to the pain and pleasure principle.
In our model, one rational part of the tree's branches, call it the limb of reason, feeds information to the synthesizer that it hopes will alter the self's behavior. But the self is ultimately overwhelmed by other factors that do not obey reason: bodily craving, belief that food is good, a feeling of unfairness due to deprivation. As the Apostle Paul said about trying to obey the Jewish law in Romans 7, "I do what I do not want to do." He blames the sin inside his mortal flesh for the inability to yield to rational self-control, but the situation is much more complicated, though his biblical treatment is truly advanced psychology, as he tries to trump the conflict of bodily desire with a higher pleasure, the experience of the Holy Spirit, one of whose "fruits" in the book of Galatians is "self-control."
In the example of a diet, you can see how the self is split, not into only competing ideas and desires, but into internal images of the good boy and the bad, the fat self and the lean, the satisfied self and the deprived, the future and the past. If past experience includes neglect in childhood where food became the primary comfort, or threatening experiences of hunger have been endured, the emotional memory is more likely to ensure failure at a diet. If emotional memory has fewer bonds with struggles over food and fear of not being fed, the self is more likely to adhere to a diet and accomplish its goal for the body. Still, the evolutionary drive to eat as much good-tasting stuff as possible is hard to control even in a person without emotional food issues, and here the prospect of group enforcement or a "higher power" has great advantages in managing the self by social and spiritual means.
Let us return to the will. When the will is engaged and action ensues, the center of the self is in control and all the preceding information and conjecture have been compressed into a choice. Once made, a choice can never be undone, though it can be revised and repaired. Once the angry word leaves your mouth and your friend breaks into tears, your words cannot be taken back. Forgiveness is never as reliable as the good will that comes from never having hurt another. Forgiveness must be generated from emotion, thought, and memory, both conscious and unconscious, to succeed. It does have a certain richness that the non-occurrence of a hurtful act does not; by forgiveness the mind engages in an act of love which produces maturation and perspective that avoidance of hurt cannot match in terms of personal education.
Here's another way of thinking about the self and the will. Imagine a quill pen with a thousand quills, like a feather duster, where each quill contributes to the flow of ink. The tip of the pen then becomes the will, what the influence of all the quills, both visible and invisible (unconscious), have amounted to. It is who we are. "By their fruits shall ye know them," Christ said. "Withhold judgment of a person until you see their actions," wise men advise us.
The Existentialists have known this for a long time, though they put too little value on what precedes the will, and indeed if life is random and morality only a device for herd survival, they would be right. But as Kant showed, morality is inescapable as part and parcel of the self, excepting, of course, the true sociopath whose brain lacks this function. (It has been shown that sons of convicts often receive 10% less frontal lobe matter, just as their fathers did, by PET scan measure, and this is precisely the area of the brain that most entertains morals.)
This brings up another question: Is there such a thing as a normal brain? Perhaps not; but even when I say "typical" brain I do not mean that of the true sociopath. In any case, true sociopaths can be taught to observe morality even if they don't quite get it internally, by the limits society naturally places on their desires, including prison, injury, loss of status, and death. Yet one must admit that the prospect of making a decision must be easier if it is not accompanied by a moral weighing. Perhaps this simplicity allows the sociopath to be clever, else by being fundamentally amoral, he can surprise the unwitting and thus appear smarter than he is.
In general, sociopaths tend to be of average or less-than-average intelligence, but such statistics are garnered from those who have been caught. For every two-bit burglar on the street there is probably an upper class equivalent like Kenneth Lay of Enron, as sociopathic tendencies can be suppressed at many levels in order to achieve a goal--say of corporate leadership--that might not have been obtained if the person had not learned how to behave in society. Perhaps sociopathy is spread across all intelligences equally, but we lack proof of it at this time.
In the retarded and children, decisions are also much easier. A two-year old who sees an ice cream cone may simply reach for it without concern, even if he's been told "no," since his language acquisition is by no means complete and oppositional behavior of the young child is a test by which the self individuates as opposed to non-self. The parent, in putting down limits, thinks the child ought to understand the reasons, but the child cannot. At that point of development it is the repeated response of the parent in limiting freedom that communicates to the child that the pleasure is not worth the deprivation or punishment that follows. To those who say, "Isn't that cute?", what is cute at two is not at ten, thus the need for education in limits early on, though preferably through denial of the opportunity rather than punishment, if the house can be child-proofed and the parents are attentive to the level of language development and social comprehension of the child.
We have seen how the synthesizer is an umbrella term to denote the self, from its unconscious roots to its conscious branches, and how the bole of the tree where it meets the roots can signify the will, or final arbiter of the synthesizing process. To accomplish a choice many damping filters must also be employed, and homeostasis can be hard to maintain.
To be continued...
How can we conceptualize this complicated process of the self? Most intriguing, how does the will decide and act? And what precedes the will? The will is the final arbiter of human consciousness, except in cases of mental distress, as in the indecision of depression, or by injury or congenital deficiency of the brain. Even in such cases the will must usually be engaged, if the person can care for himself at all and is not entirely disabled in mind, which is rare and most complete in cases of holoprosenchephaly.
The unconscious, literally that part of the mind of which we are not currently conscious, extends in rootlets from the tap root of the will into the earth below, while the bole branches above ground into the conscious self. The will is influenced by both conscious and unconscious factors, but we can only see the branches, not the roots. The roots feed the tree water and necessary nutrients, just as the leaves produce sugar for fuel by photosynthesis, the former invisible, the latter, visible.
Much has been made of unconscious motivation, and it can affect the will for ill or good. A phobia of spiders has roots in primal terror but efficiently limits the extension of fear to one object, thereby obeying a principle of the psychological parsimony of containment. What the self labors for is not limited to the unconscious, however. The conscious mind may buy spider-killing spray to assuage its fears as a consequence of the ultimate influence of a deep root where the spider was associated with more fear than a spider merits. To contain the primal fear in one example prevents the self from becoming entirely dysfunctional. This is no less than the famous formulation of Freudian ego defenses, where the abject terror of free-floating anxiety saps the self of energy to a greater degree than a directed fear or phobia.
The information that flows through the will usually goes through unobstructed; if a practiced surgeon must make an adjustment in the midst of a procedure due to an anatomic anomaly, for instance, his brain doesn't freeze. He consults intellectual memory to plan a new approach to the surgical field, and by projecting known techniques and principles on a previously unknown happenstance, he smoothly solves the problem. A younger or more neurotic surgeon might pause for a moment of anxiety to gather himself, but will overcome his fears and quiet his soul to deduce the right move, else avail himself of a more experienced surgeon's advice, a step that requires not only contemplation of the difficulty but recognition of one's limitations, a mature function of the self's ability to distance itself from its center and analyze and identify a shortcoming in knowledge.
But the emotions attending the call to a colleague can also be fraught with fear, fear of appearing incompetent, a great fear with doctors; fear of disturbing the other surgeon; fear that other staff might lose faith in him if he must resort to help. A worse doctor would plow ahead without consultation, perhaps out of confidence or overconfidence--confidence in his past performance and problem-solving, from the benefit of intellectual and emotional memory, or overconfidence--a need to risk appearing competent for the sake of his inner sense of status or well-being.
When the junior surgeon picks up the phone and dials, he has come from emotional memory, intellectual memory, thought (visual, tactile and verbal), analysis, and emotion in a complicated risk vs. benefit ratio to risking his self-esteem. Emotional memory might serve him if he remembers a botched procedure where he didn't ask for help, so that it becomes a warning. As for the role of the unconscious in either asking or not asking for help, memories and associations can include the emotional palette of parent-child and master-pupil interactions of past relationships, as distant or more distant than the success or failure in trying to tie a new knot in the Cub Scouts.
There may also be intrusions before the call is made or not made, the image of a new sports car the surgeon would like to buy; the prospect of a drink when the operation is over, or a girlfriend waiting to welcome him at home. Or conversely, a desire not to go home may prevail and extend the operation needlessly because the doctor lives alone and has no social life, such that the operating room and the practice of medicine are his emotional sustenance which he naturally likes to extend for pleasure.
To return to my analogy, light on the leaves of the tree speak to the receptive faculties of the conscious. The more information we pursue, the better directions the will can incarnate. Above all, the quickest way to bring light to a subject is to ask the opinion of another human being, who can use their synthesizer to offer (one hopes) an objective opinion, free of the twists and turns of one's own particular tree.
We live for new information. It is part of the lifelong effort of mastery over the world, begun in the crib when reaching for mobiles, increased with walking and bowel control, and exponentially increased with the acquisition of language.
And here is another observation: easy decisions bypass consciousness and go straight through the will to the body, as in whether I should have another sip of my drink, which I don't usually think about unless I have drunk too much. In the latter case, before the decision is made and the will engaged, I may experience an internal debate inside the synthesizer prior to being able to engage my will, and even the act of drinking may be attended by negative emotion like guilt--which can paradoxically increase how fast I sip as it re-enacts parent-child struggle of limits internally: "Now Johnny, don't stay out too late." If Johnny does he will be tracked down by the parent and usually made to feel bad for his transgression; thus running, as in fight or flight, can become intoxicating, especially to escape punishment. Likewise, if someone threatens to take your power to drink away, you will easily overcompensate and drink more to assert your right, hence the failure of Prohibition. All of this goes by in a split second, of course. Simply by observing my own thought, I cannot anywhere near describe the entire chain of how the will is engaged and what permutations can transpire that cause the will to act erratically in view of reason, as in guiltily drinking faster because my internal mother is telling me I have drunk too much.
If I think I have had enough to drink, I should be able to stop with my reason, noting the physical memory of hangovers and the intellectual memory of fogginess. But pleasure is powerful, and desire often proves stronger than the influence of the conscious mind on the will.
Take dieting, for instance, which under the best clinical circumstances has no more than a 5% success rate, much worse than smoking cessation. The mind decides that the mass of the body has become uncomfortable, or looks unattractive, or should better conform to television norms. A diet is considered. If entertained long enough, a diet may be adopted. And after its adoption comes at first a feeling of satisfaction at one's self-control, quickly followed by a persistent feeling of deprivation, as in the ice cream in the freezer one can't taste.
Pleasure and pain have a great deal to do with decisions, in fact may be the primary motivators of human behavior beyond survival, though even survival might be subsumed under them because it is painful to die of starvation. The conflict in weight loss is complicated by a "good," namely food, being proscribed as bad. It goes against all our evolutionary development to think that an abundance of food should be limited for no other reason than our waistline; it should be instantly gobbled for that eventual rainy day of insufficient stores. Thus the pain of deprivation, accompanied by many rationalizations (insufficient but reasonably sounding excuses), plus the looming pleasure of forbidden fruit cause the self to give up its reason-imposed diet and give in to the pain and pleasure principle.
In our model, one rational part of the tree's branches, call it the limb of reason, feeds information to the synthesizer that it hopes will alter the self's behavior. But the self is ultimately overwhelmed by other factors that do not obey reason: bodily craving, belief that food is good, a feeling of unfairness due to deprivation. As the Apostle Paul said about trying to obey the Jewish law in Romans 7, "I do what I do not want to do." He blames the sin inside his mortal flesh for the inability to yield to rational self-control, but the situation is much more complicated, though his biblical treatment is truly advanced psychology, as he tries to trump the conflict of bodily desire with a higher pleasure, the experience of the Holy Spirit, one of whose "fruits" in the book of Galatians is "self-control."
In the example of a diet, you can see how the self is split, not into only competing ideas and desires, but into internal images of the good boy and the bad, the fat self and the lean, the satisfied self and the deprived, the future and the past. If past experience includes neglect in childhood where food became the primary comfort, or threatening experiences of hunger have been endured, the emotional memory is more likely to ensure failure at a diet. If emotional memory has fewer bonds with struggles over food and fear of not being fed, the self is more likely to adhere to a diet and accomplish its goal for the body. Still, the evolutionary drive to eat as much good-tasting stuff as possible is hard to control even in a person without emotional food issues, and here the prospect of group enforcement or a "higher power" has great advantages in managing the self by social and spiritual means.
Let us return to the will. When the will is engaged and action ensues, the center of the self is in control and all the preceding information and conjecture have been compressed into a choice. Once made, a choice can never be undone, though it can be revised and repaired. Once the angry word leaves your mouth and your friend breaks into tears, your words cannot be taken back. Forgiveness is never as reliable as the good will that comes from never having hurt another. Forgiveness must be generated from emotion, thought, and memory, both conscious and unconscious, to succeed. It does have a certain richness that the non-occurrence of a hurtful act does not; by forgiveness the mind engages in an act of love which produces maturation and perspective that avoidance of hurt cannot match in terms of personal education.
Here's another way of thinking about the self and the will. Imagine a quill pen with a thousand quills, like a feather duster, where each quill contributes to the flow of ink. The tip of the pen then becomes the will, what the influence of all the quills, both visible and invisible (unconscious), have amounted to. It is who we are. "By their fruits shall ye know them," Christ said. "Withhold judgment of a person until you see their actions," wise men advise us.
The Existentialists have known this for a long time, though they put too little value on what precedes the will, and indeed if life is random and morality only a device for herd survival, they would be right. But as Kant showed, morality is inescapable as part and parcel of the self, excepting, of course, the true sociopath whose brain lacks this function. (It has been shown that sons of convicts often receive 10% less frontal lobe matter, just as their fathers did, by PET scan measure, and this is precisely the area of the brain that most entertains morals.)
This brings up another question: Is there such a thing as a normal brain? Perhaps not; but even when I say "typical" brain I do not mean that of the true sociopath. In any case, true sociopaths can be taught to observe morality even if they don't quite get it internally, by the limits society naturally places on their desires, including prison, injury, loss of status, and death. Yet one must admit that the prospect of making a decision must be easier if it is not accompanied by a moral weighing. Perhaps this simplicity allows the sociopath to be clever, else by being fundamentally amoral, he can surprise the unwitting and thus appear smarter than he is.
In general, sociopaths tend to be of average or less-than-average intelligence, but such statistics are garnered from those who have been caught. For every two-bit burglar on the street there is probably an upper class equivalent like Kenneth Lay of Enron, as sociopathic tendencies can be suppressed at many levels in order to achieve a goal--say of corporate leadership--that might not have been obtained if the person had not learned how to behave in society. Perhaps sociopathy is spread across all intelligences equally, but we lack proof of it at this time.
In the retarded and children, decisions are also much easier. A two-year old who sees an ice cream cone may simply reach for it without concern, even if he's been told "no," since his language acquisition is by no means complete and oppositional behavior of the young child is a test by which the self individuates as opposed to non-self. The parent, in putting down limits, thinks the child ought to understand the reasons, but the child cannot. At that point of development it is the repeated response of the parent in limiting freedom that communicates to the child that the pleasure is not worth the deprivation or punishment that follows. To those who say, "Isn't that cute?", what is cute at two is not at ten, thus the need for education in limits early on, though preferably through denial of the opportunity rather than punishment, if the house can be child-proofed and the parents are attentive to the level of language development and social comprehension of the child.
We have seen how the synthesizer is an umbrella term to denote the self, from its unconscious roots to its conscious branches, and how the bole of the tree where it meets the roots can signify the will, or final arbiter of the synthesizing process. To accomplish a choice many damping filters must also be employed, and homeostasis can be hard to maintain.
To be continued...
A New Theory of Mind II
I was not going to write about this tonight, as it is past 2:30 AM, but by writing now I give that notion the lie.
Interesting how memory and future projection can actually collide in a human mind, and who is the arbiter? The synthesizer, also known by Freudian terms as the “ego” and in Jungian psychology as the “personality,” though Jung's personality is a much more elegant and complex construct than the ego.
Let us simply say, for operational purposes in this thought experiment, that whatever cannot be accounted for by memory, thought, or emotion, must be created in the synthesizer. This is a definition by exclusion.
Let us attend to some qualities left by default to the synthesizer: will, intention, dialogue, inner argument, data selection, data filtering, conception, imagination, foresight, aftersight, in a word, everything that has to do with judgment or sorting of other things to produce a new singularity.
I am rubbing my face now and reaching for a way to impart the idea of the synthesizer. Obviously this verbal narrative is the result of synthesizing, involving not only my will but the obedience of my fingers on the keyboard. It is an orchestrated effort. Certainly memory supplies the skill and the vocabulary, but what initiates the action? How do I decide how to proceed?
Honestly, most of the time we decide little about our actions, we simply find ourselves doing them with intention as if it were nature. For those of us lucky to be so integrated, our immediate ambitions (or desires) are never far from fulfillment through our initiating act of will. But do I think, “I will take the Triscuits out of the cupboard and munch now?” No, it's more like “My stomach feels a slight pang, I throw open the cupboard and start eating.” My hunger initiates an action, and it is non-verbal, the preceding statement only an approximation of how reality unfolds as you initiate.
In this case the synthesizer yields to the body naturally, although the body ultimately requires permission from whatever part of the synthesizer corresponds to the will, which may be the most inexplicable portion of the mind. But I digress.
The case of immediate hunger shows that the body-monitoring function of the synthesizer is essential. The body puts the mind in time and space where the mind can find expression through movement and activity. And often there is no division between the mind and body, but often it arises, as in holding in one's pee on a drive, that the mind must assert control over the body or yield.
Part of the intellectual memory is body memory, how we remember keyboards and cars and how to work them.
The synthesizer amalgamates all the psychic imprints into a changing whole, at times as if one voice were speaking, though that voice is composed of many impressions and decisions at a less conscious level. .
The capacity to talk with oneself in the mind is proof that the synthesizer uses dialogue to advance its direction. At the same time the self knows that the dialogue is artificial, contrived, and can easily shut off the conversation if wished. Sometimes the mind is lazy and merely observes the different voices of the synthesizer having a conversation. The synthesizer allows us a variety of contiguous selves, both participants and observers. This ability to see oneself from a psychic distance is essential to the synthesizer, or syn.
This conversation is not psychosis but a property of the infinite regression of selves of which humans are capable. The synthesizer is not so much the God of the mind's terrain as its prophet. The ultimate god is the will, the central hub of the syn. It is in willing that we are most actively the essence of syn, though the will is also subject to a monitoring and cautionary function that compares its direction with the imagined possible.
To be continued...
Interesting how memory and future projection can actually collide in a human mind, and who is the arbiter? The synthesizer, also known by Freudian terms as the “ego” and in Jungian psychology as the “personality,” though Jung's personality is a much more elegant and complex construct than the ego.
Let us simply say, for operational purposes in this thought experiment, that whatever cannot be accounted for by memory, thought, or emotion, must be created in the synthesizer. This is a definition by exclusion.
Let us attend to some qualities left by default to the synthesizer: will, intention, dialogue, inner argument, data selection, data filtering, conception, imagination, foresight, aftersight, in a word, everything that has to do with judgment or sorting of other things to produce a new singularity.
I am rubbing my face now and reaching for a way to impart the idea of the synthesizer. Obviously this verbal narrative is the result of synthesizing, involving not only my will but the obedience of my fingers on the keyboard. It is an orchestrated effort. Certainly memory supplies the skill and the vocabulary, but what initiates the action? How do I decide how to proceed?
Honestly, most of the time we decide little about our actions, we simply find ourselves doing them with intention as if it were nature. For those of us lucky to be so integrated, our immediate ambitions (or desires) are never far from fulfillment through our initiating act of will. But do I think, “I will take the Triscuits out of the cupboard and munch now?” No, it's more like “My stomach feels a slight pang, I throw open the cupboard and start eating.” My hunger initiates an action, and it is non-verbal, the preceding statement only an approximation of how reality unfolds as you initiate.
In this case the synthesizer yields to the body naturally, although the body ultimately requires permission from whatever part of the synthesizer corresponds to the will, which may be the most inexplicable portion of the mind. But I digress.
The case of immediate hunger shows that the body-monitoring function of the synthesizer is essential. The body puts the mind in time and space where the mind can find expression through movement and activity. And often there is no division between the mind and body, but often it arises, as in holding in one's pee on a drive, that the mind must assert control over the body or yield.
Part of the intellectual memory is body memory, how we remember keyboards and cars and how to work them.
The synthesizer amalgamates all the psychic imprints into a changing whole, at times as if one voice were speaking, though that voice is composed of many impressions and decisions at a less conscious level. .
The capacity to talk with oneself in the mind is proof that the synthesizer uses dialogue to advance its direction. At the same time the self knows that the dialogue is artificial, contrived, and can easily shut off the conversation if wished. Sometimes the mind is lazy and merely observes the different voices of the synthesizer having a conversation. The synthesizer allows us a variety of contiguous selves, both participants and observers. This ability to see oneself from a psychic distance is essential to the synthesizer, or syn.
This conversation is not psychosis but a property of the infinite regression of selves of which humans are capable. The synthesizer is not so much the God of the mind's terrain as its prophet. The ultimate god is the will, the central hub of the syn. It is in willing that we are most actively the essence of syn, though the will is also subject to a monitoring and cautionary function that compares its direction with the imagined possible.
To be continued...
Saturday, July 12, 2008
A New Theory of the Mind Part I
I was musing on the porch tonight when I thought of what it must be like to create a theory of the mind without modern discoveries, as Freud and Jung did. And my thoughts took this shape:
Thought. As soon as you say the word in your mind, thought has begun. But what generates thought? And how is thought integrated with emotion and memory, and how does it generate future projection or re-imagining past events?
First, in my most parsimonious construction, consider five parts of the mind: thought (verbal and non-verbal) , emotion (expressed or contained), emotional memory, intellectual memory, and the synthesizer.
You can make a mandala of this:
Thought. As soon as you say the word in your mind, thought has begun. But what generates thought? And how is thought integrated with emotion and memory, and how does it generate future projection or re-imagining past events?
First, in my most parsimonious construction, consider five parts of the mind: thought (verbal and non-verbal) , emotion (expressed or contained), emotional memory, intellectual memory, and the synthesizer.
You can make a mandala of this:
EMOTIONAL MEMORY
EMOTION SYNTHESIZER THOUGHT
INTELLECTUAL MEMORY
Where does thought come from? A variety of stimuli can spark thought, but when thought appears in its most easily translatable form, it appears in words. You look at a tree and think “tree.” After the image of the tree is recognized by memory, there follows a distinctly human urge to name it, to mark it with a word as if marking intellectual territory, the constant, silent narration of the mind's word generator.
One can have thought without words, but only when the mind comments in words does recordable thought really begin, unless we resort to gestures and pictures.
Here the role of emotion can be causative or reactive; a bad feeling can trigger a bad thought as easily as a bad thought can trigger a bad feeling. More often than we suspect, emotion precedes thought, especially in extreme emotional states where we “get angry with everyone and everything.” In consciousness, however, thought prefers to think that it dominates as the initiator, when often it is only the verbal midwife for emotion.
There is also a body quotient for emotion. How much physical expression will we yield to emotion and in what environment? Will we laugh at a bad joke to make our boss feel better? Will we make a disgusted face when someone farts although we really think it's funny? This is complex but belongs to the emotions, which are much more firmly welded to the body than thought.
Memory functions both intellectually and emotionally; emotions can ignite memories that recall those emotions, and intellectual memories—images and words and sounds and other storage methods—can recall emotions, which can provoke other memories, and so on. Clearly there is an interplay between intellectual and emotional memories, and clearly both can be incarnated into words, or conscious thought, by another part of the mind, its central hub, so to speak, the synthesizer, of which the “I” is only one voice.
Thought is, in fact, in so far at it is verbal or symbolic, as in mathematics, rather divorced from the body. But thought can also be automatic. Every day I wake up with a different song playing in my head. Today it was Peter, Paul, and Mary with “I Dig Rock and Roll Music.” Many other automatic thoughts occur, like birds flying through our heads.
What is particularly impressive is the power of the synthesizer to take intellectual and emotional memories and imagine the future, as I did when I visualized approaching my desk to write this down while staring at the ocean। I don't know if I ever translated it into thought; I didn't say, “I will go write this down.” I actually visualized the future in a non-verbal way, imagining the visual path to my desk and computer.
We construct our futures piece by piece through the imagination of the synthesizer, the ability to take present data and push it forward in time to imagine an action. We take this foresight for granted, when indeed it is not reality but the synthesizer imagining it.
What or who is the synthesizer? Any attempt at explanation would be oversimplification. It contains the will, desire, prejudice, stock reactions, measured reactions, associative bird walks, everything except thought—the reification or output of the synthesizer in words or other defined symbols—though thought can include spatial images just as easily, as non-verbal thought is possible, yet inevitably the synthesizer will initiate verbal thought at some point--”Wow! That's an awesome equation you just thought up!” Or, “What a boat that would be! But could I afford it?”
So to confine thought to words is premature. Still, when words appear, they take on an entirely different quality, somehow outside the synthesizer. They take on an objective quality, why I equate thought in my system with verbal assignment, and with visualization and other forms of thought to a lesser degree, as visualization is more dependent on drawing from intellectual memory.
If this model is a useful, I should be able to use it to describe my actions। First I felt anxiety about risking this description; then a thrill about the attempt occurred. Now I am eager to go outside and smoke a cigarette and re-process my thoughts. In doing so I imagine the white wooden porch, the chair I will sit in, the porch light, the path through the living room, all without thinking. “Here I go,” I verbalized when I noticed the pain in my lumbosacral spine protest about rising from this chair. Then I wondered whether to go on writing about the ache in my back, the slightly uncomfortable rub of the desk against my forearms, the ache in my feet and other bodily sensations. These sensations sparked no emotions, however, they were simply flat inputs from the body, perhaps necessitating an intellectual body sense as well, a body monitoring. So the monitoring of the body is another intellectual function of the intellect.
In looking for an analogy in nature for the human mind, everything I can imagine falls short. If a computer had emotions, self-consciousness, body-consciousness and functional movement, along with the ability to relate to other computers so gifted, it might approach the human mind, save for the role of the will. Would enough memory and processing power ever be able to summon self-consciousness and initiative? At this point it is doubtful. But I digress.
To be continued...
CE
Monday, July 07, 2008
Why Sleep?
Why do I resist sleep so intransigently?
For instance, last night I was tired at 1 AM, playing on the computer, but I didn't want to go to bed. You can't do anything when you're asleep. You might be missing out on the second coming, who knows? And my long practice as a doctor and father made the alone time late at night a tradition, a time for myself.
So what did I do from 2 AM to 4 AM? I lit a cigar and read Martin Rees's "Six Numbers." I came back to the computer and listened to a new album by Fleet Foxes. In bed by 4 AM, I read some of a John Lescroat crime novel. And finally I slept.
I could have slept earlier, I should have slept earlier, as I awoke feeling as if I'd started my sleep cycle too late so that quality sleep escaped me. I got up at noon, have my coffee and medications going now, but it was not pleasant to wake up. My body was lead, my head molasses. I wasn't hungover, just sleep-deprived. Why? Because I didn't listen to my body. My body wanted sleep at 1 AM. I forced it to stay up until 4 AM. Oh how I mistreat "Brother Ass!"
Sleep means the fun is over. Sleep means the end of consciousness. Sleep means immobility, vulnerability, insensibility. It is a form of death, though a living death. I do not look forward to bed the way my wife does, who enjoys her sleep, who prizes her sleep, who needs at least ten hours of sleep a day while I can get by on six. To her sleep is a welcome envelopment; to me it is a thief. A thief of time and action. A thief of activity, desire and thought.
Yes, I dream. And I remember quite a few. My latest dream was of deer prancing through my broccoli patch. Must get chicken wire on the ground of the border so their little cloved feet will avoid my new fall/winter vegetable garden. But you can't chase real deer in your sleep. And you can't guard your broccoli, kale, swiss chard, cabbage and brussel sprouts.
Sleep? Sleep is for pussies. Sleep must be resisted. Sleep steals our lives away.
Did you know biologists have never come up with a purely scientific reason for a need to sleep?
Yesterday the cats brought a shrew in to play. It managed to crawl inside the bathroom scale. For hours they watched the scale, waiting for it to come out. When it did I rescued it from their claws, and amazingly it wasn't hurt.
Have you ever held a shrew in your hand? It is the hummingbird of mammals, with the highest metabolic rate. Though tiny, you can feel its intense body heat. And the shrew was very tractable; it didn't squirm or try to escape. It struck me as a sluggish creature, a creature that might enjoy sleep--except that it has to eat two or three times its body weight each day just to keep the engine running.
That's what animals do all day, if you didn't know. Eat, eat, eat. Watch a deer or a cow sometime. Oh wait--many cats just sleep, sleep! And dogs, too. But they have been ruined by domestication. They ought to be out hunting until they're sleep deprived.
Tell me, are you one who welcomes sleep or resists it? Is it a comfort and relief or a threat to your existence? Do you resent sleep as I do or welcome it as Kathleen does? All I can say is that it strikes me as a colossal waste of time, but I guess it's unavoidable, so I should take a healthier attitude towards it and jump under the covers--no, lie down lazily--when my body signals it's time.
But what about one more drink? Half a muffin for dessert? That Simon and Garfunkel song you haven't heard in so long? The value "omega" in cosmology? Whether mini-black holes are part of dark matter, or is it just brown dwarves, or more likely something else? Maybe an old, mediocre poem to revise like a cat playing with a shrew? You see my point since I've made my point pointedly, though I hope it doesn't interfere with your sleep.
Will I ever make peace with sleep? For my health's sake I hope I do. But I feel so gypped by its existence! Thief, thief!
Kiloneutral,
CE
For instance, last night I was tired at 1 AM, playing on the computer, but I didn't want to go to bed. You can't do anything when you're asleep. You might be missing out on the second coming, who knows? And my long practice as a doctor and father made the alone time late at night a tradition, a time for myself.
So what did I do from 2 AM to 4 AM? I lit a cigar and read Martin Rees's "Six Numbers." I came back to the computer and listened to a new album by Fleet Foxes. In bed by 4 AM, I read some of a John Lescroat crime novel. And finally I slept.
I could have slept earlier, I should have slept earlier, as I awoke feeling as if I'd started my sleep cycle too late so that quality sleep escaped me. I got up at noon, have my coffee and medications going now, but it was not pleasant to wake up. My body was lead, my head molasses. I wasn't hungover, just sleep-deprived. Why? Because I didn't listen to my body. My body wanted sleep at 1 AM. I forced it to stay up until 4 AM. Oh how I mistreat "Brother Ass!"
Sleep means the fun is over. Sleep means the end of consciousness. Sleep means immobility, vulnerability, insensibility. It is a form of death, though a living death. I do not look forward to bed the way my wife does, who enjoys her sleep, who prizes her sleep, who needs at least ten hours of sleep a day while I can get by on six. To her sleep is a welcome envelopment; to me it is a thief. A thief of time and action. A thief of activity, desire and thought.
Yes, I dream. And I remember quite a few. My latest dream was of deer prancing through my broccoli patch. Must get chicken wire on the ground of the border so their little cloved feet will avoid my new fall/winter vegetable garden. But you can't chase real deer in your sleep. And you can't guard your broccoli, kale, swiss chard, cabbage and brussel sprouts.
Sleep? Sleep is for pussies. Sleep must be resisted. Sleep steals our lives away.
Did you know biologists have never come up with a purely scientific reason for a need to sleep?
Yesterday the cats brought a shrew in to play. It managed to crawl inside the bathroom scale. For hours they watched the scale, waiting for it to come out. When it did I rescued it from their claws, and amazingly it wasn't hurt.
Have you ever held a shrew in your hand? It is the hummingbird of mammals, with the highest metabolic rate. Though tiny, you can feel its intense body heat. And the shrew was very tractable; it didn't squirm or try to escape. It struck me as a sluggish creature, a creature that might enjoy sleep--except that it has to eat two or three times its body weight each day just to keep the engine running.
That's what animals do all day, if you didn't know. Eat, eat, eat. Watch a deer or a cow sometime. Oh wait--many cats just sleep, sleep! And dogs, too. But they have been ruined by domestication. They ought to be out hunting until they're sleep deprived.
Tell me, are you one who welcomes sleep or resists it? Is it a comfort and relief or a threat to your existence? Do you resent sleep as I do or welcome it as Kathleen does? All I can say is that it strikes me as a colossal waste of time, but I guess it's unavoidable, so I should take a healthier attitude towards it and jump under the covers--no, lie down lazily--when my body signals it's time.
But what about one more drink? Half a muffin for dessert? That Simon and Garfunkel song you haven't heard in so long? The value "omega" in cosmology? Whether mini-black holes are part of dark matter, or is it just brown dwarves, or more likely something else? Maybe an old, mediocre poem to revise like a cat playing with a shrew? You see my point since I've made my point pointedly, though I hope it doesn't interfere with your sleep.
Will I ever make peace with sleep? For my health's sake I hope I do. But I feel so gypped by its existence! Thief, thief!
Kiloneutral,
CE
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Flogging My Blogging (and Serena)
I'm flogging my blogging, my audience is halved, the vultures' red faces are circling my sentences, I'm whirling and swirling down into the dell, the dell of the unfashionability of being well.
When I was sick I blogged more, and the interest in aberrations always exceeds interest in normalstances, so I quit blogging so often and jackdawed into health, nay, brayed into being my being again, and now I'm busy with real life, such as it is, with volunteering, writing, gardening, playing music, dealing with lawyers, landlords, disability, making friends, capturing feral cats in traps, going for hikes, rarely watching TV, reading good books, from Shakespeare to Martin Rees on cosmology and Paul Tournier on personhood, planning a men's retreat, trying to find a way to visit my grandson in view of his recalcitrant and immature father, living in pain, hanging upside down in an anti-gravity machine to ease my pain, though I still take meds for it.
I'm taking meds for my bipolar illness as well, of course, four of them, and two for pain and one for blood pressure, though my doctor wants me to consider a cholesterol-lowering agent to which he just had a reaction that almost crippled him, causing muscle destruction, myonecrosis.
Lipitor, Superstar, do you really think you're who they say you are?
Like I need another medication with my liver already overloaded with seven not to mention what I might smoke or imbibe on occasion if occasion calls for it, though not fessing up to any recreational proclivities necessarily, only reserving the possibility on occasion should occasion warrant it, and I'll warrant that won't be a bench warrant from a warrant officer who lives in a warren and wars with other warrens.
Haven't seen a good butt shot of Serena Williams at Wimbledon yet, waiting for it still. That woman is such an Amazon, I want a whip and a leopardskin loin cloth. My dear wife actually sent me a picture of Serena once, knowing my preferences, and here it is:
In June nine magazines took my poetry, two for features. I'll post some links when they're up, so I always say, though I sometimes forget.
I got rejections, too.
Getting ready to rototill my lawn for next year's larger garden; may still be able to grow a cold crop or two, like broccoli, before this year is out. Cabbage works, maybe not to late for peas or brussel sprouts.
My flower garden is doing well, unfortunately no pictures. Need to borrow Kathleen's camera.
How I do blather on!
I sincerely apologize if I have said nothing of merit or interest in today's post. Right now I'm rehearsing in my mind a poem to encompass my visit to my friend's property, where we assessed wildfire risk and sat in the RV parked on the property. My friend offered me a five-year-old can of Olympia beer he found in the forest and had left in the fridge. Naturally I drank it. "It's the water."
How to put that in a poem with the wildfires and the shotgun and the coffee we forgot and the ancient tractor half restored and the beautiful Derringer he showed me with four shots, I dunno. Usually starts with a first line:
"Inside an old RV"
Gotta put some beer out in pans to drown the snails. Just saw my first one last night but their evidence is in the big bites in the leaves of my dahlia.
Gotta stop sitting and typing, my back hurts too much.
Kilobunnies to all,
CE
When I was sick I blogged more, and the interest in aberrations always exceeds interest in normalstances, so I quit blogging so often and jackdawed into health, nay, brayed into being my being again, and now I'm busy with real life, such as it is, with volunteering, writing, gardening, playing music, dealing with lawyers, landlords, disability, making friends, capturing feral cats in traps, going for hikes, rarely watching TV, reading good books, from Shakespeare to Martin Rees on cosmology and Paul Tournier on personhood, planning a men's retreat, trying to find a way to visit my grandson in view of his recalcitrant and immature father, living in pain, hanging upside down in an anti-gravity machine to ease my pain, though I still take meds for it.
I'm taking meds for my bipolar illness as well, of course, four of them, and two for pain and one for blood pressure, though my doctor wants me to consider a cholesterol-lowering agent to which he just had a reaction that almost crippled him, causing muscle destruction, myonecrosis.
Lipitor, Superstar, do you really think you're who they say you are?
Like I need another medication with my liver already overloaded with seven not to mention what I might smoke or imbibe on occasion if occasion calls for it, though not fessing up to any recreational proclivities necessarily, only reserving the possibility on occasion should occasion warrant it, and I'll warrant that won't be a bench warrant from a warrant officer who lives in a warren and wars with other warrens.
Haven't seen a good butt shot of Serena Williams at Wimbledon yet, waiting for it still. That woman is such an Amazon, I want a whip and a leopardskin loin cloth. My dear wife actually sent me a picture of Serena once, knowing my preferences, and here it is:
In June nine magazines took my poetry, two for features. I'll post some links when they're up, so I always say, though I sometimes forget.
I got rejections, too.
Getting ready to rototill my lawn for next year's larger garden; may still be able to grow a cold crop or two, like broccoli, before this year is out. Cabbage works, maybe not to late for peas or brussel sprouts.
My flower garden is doing well, unfortunately no pictures. Need to borrow Kathleen's camera.
How I do blather on!
I sincerely apologize if I have said nothing of merit or interest in today's post. Right now I'm rehearsing in my mind a poem to encompass my visit to my friend's property, where we assessed wildfire risk and sat in the RV parked on the property. My friend offered me a five-year-old can of Olympia beer he found in the forest and had left in the fridge. Naturally I drank it. "It's the water."
How to put that in a poem with the wildfires and the shotgun and the coffee we forgot and the ancient tractor half restored and the beautiful Derringer he showed me with four shots, I dunno. Usually starts with a first line:
"Inside an old RV"
Gotta put some beer out in pans to drown the snails. Just saw my first one last night but their evidence is in the big bites in the leaves of my dahlia.
Gotta stop sitting and typing, my back hurts too much.
Kilobunnies to all,
CE
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Pitching a Publisher
Today I spent seven hours preparing a new poetry manuscript for a publisher I was to meet at a talk tonight. To cherry-pick your work for a California theme (he's a regional publisher), re-format each poem, revise a little as you go (I can never resist), format a manuscript, research acknowledgments, put in a full bio, and be happy with it--
Normally this takes me weeks, even months.
They say luck is where preparation meets opportunity. I worked hard to prepare for the opportunity, and got to pitch both my "49 from California" book of poems and my book-length collection of stories about growing up in the 60s in suburban LA to a real publisher who would read them.
Malcom seemed surprised and pleased.
I do not expect him to publish me, and I'm not saying this to defend myself against disappointment--I really don't expect him to be the one, but I reorganized my art around his publishing interests, which I think is smart and fair to art. Besides, the poems are good! I'll paste one in below.
I've been given a new nickname by a Mendo brother, "Ravensbear" because I'm of the Raven Clan, as in the Tlingit Indians, and I'm also a large and slightly immovable omniverous object like a bear. In my travel I've also been initiated into the Crow Nation. Black birds and yo, I don't know why. Wherever I go I see Ravens. They are my spirit guides. Sometimes it seems as if I can talk to them; I'm a fair mimic.
I just appeared on the cover and back cover of The Sigurd Journal, a print journal you have to order, as well as in another print journal, Hawk and Whipporwill, whose website mentions my poem but doesn't provide a copy online, you have to order.
I've been accepted as featured poet for Quill and Parchment in September, will be in an anthology with some famous dead poets in "Crazed by the Sun," due out in July, and I've had poems accepted by A Capella Zoo, Shakespeare's Monkeys, Blue Fifth Review, and Autumn Sky. I'll post what links I have later when everything is up.
It is nice to be published. It makes me feel good, like I'm wanted. Everybody wants to be wanted, but many writers are social retards who have to have their work wanted to feel wanted themselves. I know I have people in my life that love me for myself and that's enough, more than enough, a luxury on earth. To get some recognition for your work as well is frosting on the cake, truly.
My life's work is to be a good man.
I saw my first river otter today in a small pond outside the restaurant where Malcom Margolin spoke to us about his Heyday press--great guy and raconteur, writer, publisher, editor, having survived Berkeley in the 70s and sustained a publishing business through it. I thought that impressive. He was also, obviously, a happy man. "You can create your own universe around you as a life; for me it happend in publishing"
His press has some fascinating books, as in the history of the black utopia village, Allenstown, founded in central California in 1908, or a Japanese artist's drawing of the mountains from an internment camp. Classy stuff.
He talked about beauty a lot, and how the superfluity of beauty made him happy, how he, as a publisher, got to dip his cup in the beauty of literature laid at his doorstep. Thin and bald with glasses and a great beard, very Ginsbergian in appearance, he still seemed a New York transplant.
I did wonder about his mustache; I'm always suspicious that men with mustaches hanging way over their teeth must have bad teeth else good-tasting hair..
Here I am, talking bad teeth. Kathleen recently went through an abscess formation in her gum after a root canal. No, I don't want to go there.
All in a day's work.
Poem below.
1 Kilobunny,
CE
(This poem is set in LA in "49 Poems for California"):
Pawn
My head is beaten like a sunflower,
bowed and haggard, brown petals hanging
like loose, carnivorous teeth, my face
a pale mosaic of shell-ends.
It wasn't the sun that did this, I tell myself,
whose radiation feeds each mouth, root, and field,
whose random electromagnetic signals
form a proper background noise
as in a waterfall.
It must be satellites and cell phones
leaving these trails in my cloud chamber.
Does anything stop neutrinos?
At some basal level like the sodium-
potassium pump, isn't my brain affected?
Schizophrenics believe monolithic transmitters
speak to receivers in their heads,
but I never gave their stories credence before.
I feel bombarded, beaten down
by the sun like a sagging sunflower
awaiting the arrival of birds
to pick my cortex clean.
The brain floats in water like the great turtle
on which the world was built,
but bone is not casing enough
to shield me from the swarm of signals.
Who can prove to me that I am not
controlled by secret hieroglyphics carved
on the tiniest neuron like a microchip?
Normally this takes me weeks, even months.
They say luck is where preparation meets opportunity. I worked hard to prepare for the opportunity, and got to pitch both my "49 from California" book of poems and my book-length collection of stories about growing up in the 60s in suburban LA to a real publisher who would read them.
Malcom seemed surprised and pleased.
I do not expect him to publish me, and I'm not saying this to defend myself against disappointment--I really don't expect him to be the one, but I reorganized my art around his publishing interests, which I think is smart and fair to art. Besides, the poems are good! I'll paste one in below.
I've been given a new nickname by a Mendo brother, "Ravensbear" because I'm of the Raven Clan, as in the Tlingit Indians, and I'm also a large and slightly immovable omniverous object like a bear. In my travel I've also been initiated into the Crow Nation. Black birds and yo, I don't know why. Wherever I go I see Ravens. They are my spirit guides. Sometimes it seems as if I can talk to them; I'm a fair mimic.
I just appeared on the cover and back cover of The Sigurd Journal, a print journal you have to order, as well as in another print journal, Hawk and Whipporwill, whose website mentions my poem but doesn't provide a copy online, you have to order.
I've been accepted as featured poet for Quill and Parchment in September, will be in an anthology with some famous dead poets in "Crazed by the Sun," due out in July, and I've had poems accepted by A Capella Zoo, Shakespeare's Monkeys, Blue Fifth Review, and Autumn Sky. I'll post what links I have later when everything is up.
It is nice to be published. It makes me feel good, like I'm wanted. Everybody wants to be wanted, but many writers are social retards who have to have their work wanted to feel wanted themselves. I know I have people in my life that love me for myself and that's enough, more than enough, a luxury on earth. To get some recognition for your work as well is frosting on the cake, truly.
My life's work is to be a good man.
I saw my first river otter today in a small pond outside the restaurant where Malcom Margolin spoke to us about his Heyday press--great guy and raconteur, writer, publisher, editor, having survived Berkeley in the 70s and sustained a publishing business through it. I thought that impressive. He was also, obviously, a happy man. "You can create your own universe around you as a life; for me it happend in publishing"
His press has some fascinating books, as in the history of the black utopia village, Allenstown, founded in central California in 1908, or a Japanese artist's drawing of the mountains from an internment camp. Classy stuff.
He talked about beauty a lot, and how the superfluity of beauty made him happy, how he, as a publisher, got to dip his cup in the beauty of literature laid at his doorstep. Thin and bald with glasses and a great beard, very Ginsbergian in appearance, he still seemed a New York transplant.
I did wonder about his mustache; I'm always suspicious that men with mustaches hanging way over their teeth must have bad teeth else good-tasting hair..
Here I am, talking bad teeth. Kathleen recently went through an abscess formation in her gum after a root canal. No, I don't want to go there.
All in a day's work.
Poem below.
1 Kilobunny,
CE
(This poem is set in LA in "49 Poems for California"):
Pawn
My head is beaten like a sunflower,
bowed and haggard, brown petals hanging
like loose, carnivorous teeth, my face
a pale mosaic of shell-ends.
It wasn't the sun that did this, I tell myself,
whose radiation feeds each mouth, root, and field,
whose random electromagnetic signals
form a proper background noise
as in a waterfall.
It must be satellites and cell phones
leaving these trails in my cloud chamber.
Does anything stop neutrinos?
At some basal level like the sodium-
potassium pump, isn't my brain affected?
Schizophrenics believe monolithic transmitters
speak to receivers in their heads,
but I never gave their stories credence before.
I feel bombarded, beaten down
by the sun like a sagging sunflower
awaiting the arrival of birds
to pick my cortex clean.
The brain floats in water like the great turtle
on which the world was built,
but bone is not casing enough
to shield me from the swarm of signals.
Who can prove to me that I am not
controlled by secret hieroglyphics carved
on the tiniest neuron like a microchip?
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Not Dead Yet!
I realize that my last post could have been dispiriting to readers, so I just wanted to say that this blog ain't dead yet. I will be inspired, I will return.
It's that I don't have the need to blog the way I did when I was depressed. I needed it for survival then; now it's more of an option. Then I needed to give a sense of definition to myself through the construct of words when I was losing all definition.
Funny how when you're healthy you don't need to attempt to assure yourself that you might exist through an engagement of words.
It's the disconnection from everything that makes the depressed writer seek objectification through words, though the hope of feeling myself could never be realized, just a verbal record of the stranger inhabiting it.
I don't know where this blog is going but I haven't abandoned it.
Here's a revision of my poem, "Reflection:"
Reflection
Someday when you were only
meaning to look out the window,
your face will appear suspended in glass.
See mine, beard quilled in white?
Above, a vast forehead like a desert
as if the skull were pushing through?
Right, a scar from cop's batons
extends my eyebrow and my mustache
is split by a brass knuckle's kiss.
The right eye's green, the left is blue
with crow's feet spread out
like shatter-proof glass shattered.
then all the luggage below, harvest
of late nights drinking.
Nose? Flat and aboriginal,
strong even teeth but yellowed
by smoke and coffee,
wide smile, full equal lips
upcurling at the corners.
Laugh lines outnumber other furrows
though puzzlement grooves much
(I don't surprise that easily now).
Not a rich man's face, it lacks
a certain earthly satisfaction
though I pray it's free of envy.
II
The poor you have with you always,
the rich man can't help but rub it in,
his mere existence fathers envy
which powers ambition
which feeds achievement
which seeks comparisons
which breed dissatisfaction
giving birth to envy.
It's not the thorn against the rose
but both against the deer;
the deer make them equals
and the sun, confederates.
III
On and on the human engine runs
toward the swimming pool
purchased on credit
from a second mortgage
to the notion
that having all
might cure not having all.
On we fly like wasps
disturbed by a lawnmower,
no furies needed
but our lust.
The ouroboros of desire
is sadly predictable.
How much is that
Buddha in the window?
2 Kilobunnies,
CE
It's that I don't have the need to blog the way I did when I was depressed. I needed it for survival then; now it's more of an option. Then I needed to give a sense of definition to myself through the construct of words when I was losing all definition.
Funny how when you're healthy you don't need to attempt to assure yourself that you might exist through an engagement of words.
It's the disconnection from everything that makes the depressed writer seek objectification through words, though the hope of feeling myself could never be realized, just a verbal record of the stranger inhabiting it.
I don't know where this blog is going but I haven't abandoned it.
Here's a revision of my poem, "Reflection:"
Reflection
Someday when you were only
meaning to look out the window,
your face will appear suspended in glass.
See mine, beard quilled in white?
Above, a vast forehead like a desert
as if the skull were pushing through?
Right, a scar from cop's batons
extends my eyebrow and my mustache
is split by a brass knuckle's kiss.
The right eye's green, the left is blue
with crow's feet spread out
like shatter-proof glass shattered.
then all the luggage below, harvest
of late nights drinking.
Nose? Flat and aboriginal,
strong even teeth but yellowed
by smoke and coffee,
wide smile, full equal lips
upcurling at the corners.
Laugh lines outnumber other furrows
though puzzlement grooves much
(I don't surprise that easily now).
Not a rich man's face, it lacks
a certain earthly satisfaction
though I pray it's free of envy.
II
The poor you have with you always,
the rich man can't help but rub it in,
his mere existence fathers envy
which powers ambition
which feeds achievement
which seeks comparisons
which breed dissatisfaction
giving birth to envy.
It's not the thorn against the rose
but both against the deer;
the deer make them equals
and the sun, confederates.
III
On and on the human engine runs
toward the swimming pool
purchased on credit
from a second mortgage
to the notion
that having all
might cure not having all.
On we fly like wasps
disturbed by a lawnmower,
no furies needed
but our lust.
The ouroboros of desire
is sadly predictable.
How much is that
Buddha in the window?
2 Kilobunnies,
CE
Year of the Rat
Feeling cowardly? This from a recent 13 million dollar study of chicken DNA, funded by the federal government;
"About 60 percent of chicken genes correspond to a similar human gene."
And surprise, surprise! They have genes that code for claws and feathers, we for hair. They lack genes for milk production but have them for shell construction.
Why was I not consulted? I could have used the money.
We are thought to have diverged from birds some 310 million years ago. And look who's flying higher! Or haven't you heard about the Mars probe discovering ice? I'll be so glad to know that when I hit the bars there.
Chickens and other birds occupy a space between fish and mammals, presumably shared with dinosaurs and reptiles. A rat shares 88% of our DNA. Let me guess: they can code for greater smell and larger litters, for a greater omnivorous spread of foodstuffs, and for fast-twitch muscles and fur.
My, that was hard. 2008 is the Year of the Rat. My best advice on relationships is not to marry a weasel if you were born in 1996, 1984, 1972 or 1960. Me, I'm a horse, and we don't like rats. Why not believe in the arbitrary astrology of a foreign culture? People will believe anything.
Other tidbits? I recently saw a deer shit for the first time, and it didn't stand like a horse, it squatted like a dog. It could have been one constipated deer that I observed, but it didn't seem to be straining, and the other deer made no movement to show they thought its behavior unusual.
Bet you didn't know that.
Bet you didn't know that most birds are considered to have very little sense of smell or taste, though chickens have oodles of olfactory genes. The turkey vulture and albatross are reputed to have the most acute sense of smell; condors and black vultures follow turkey vultures to a kill. Birds won't replace bloodhounds any time soon, it appears. "Use it or lose it"--
Which means, given modern conveniences, humankind should continue to lose muscle mass and gain fat. Styles have already changed; Hip-Hop wear can shelter an epidemic of black and Hispanic obesity. Whites ain't far behind. I just discovered the joy of suspenders and no underwear. Free as a bird and let my belly be!
Been reading Shakespeare again, always a sign of health. "The Two Gentleman of Verona" I recommend to all dog lovers, since the fool/servant Launce has a love/hate relationship with his cur throughout the play, complete with Will's signature canine puns.
I was sorry that "The Love Guru," Mike Meyer's new movie, was panned in the regional paper. I always thought he was funny. The reviewer's contention is that his humor is so self-referential that he has become an institution unto his own ego. Can someone who's seen the movie disabuse me of this bad impression?
This blog began on July 27, 2005, when we were living in National City, just south of San Diego, waiting on the courts. In the time since I have authored over 400 posts, more than one every three days. But alas, since my life has become good again, I have had less interest in blogging. Just as I shut down my journal, Melic, when it seemed time, perhaps I should put the furniture covers on this chapter as well.
I am happy, busy and hopeful though realistic. I am closer to kilobunnies than kilorats but strangely, in my present state of euthymia, I don't trouble myself much about ratings. I'm beginning to expect things to be good, always a dangerous position, but more supportive of life than not. I can't say what the future of my blogging will be. I'm too busy writing other stuff now. In my depression of two years (along with watching basketball), blogging was one discipline I used to escape myself--and confront myself--an action that took more than melancholy self-involvement to complete.
Now I don't look to my blog for a task to objectify myself. The more I am involved with other human beings, the more I don't think about blogging.
Should my mood return to its former nadir, I will no doubt take blogging up in earnest again as a safety valve. For now it is of no pressing interest, and in infrequent checking of stats, my readership has fallen accordingly.
Until the next post,
CE
"About 60 percent of chicken genes correspond to a similar human gene."
And surprise, surprise! They have genes that code for claws and feathers, we for hair. They lack genes for milk production but have them for shell construction.
Why was I not consulted? I could have used the money.
We are thought to have diverged from birds some 310 million years ago. And look who's flying higher! Or haven't you heard about the Mars probe discovering ice? I'll be so glad to know that when I hit the bars there.
Chickens and other birds occupy a space between fish and mammals, presumably shared with dinosaurs and reptiles. A rat shares 88% of our DNA. Let me guess: they can code for greater smell and larger litters, for a greater omnivorous spread of foodstuffs, and for fast-twitch muscles and fur.
My, that was hard. 2008 is the Year of the Rat. My best advice on relationships is not to marry a weasel if you were born in 1996, 1984, 1972 or 1960. Me, I'm a horse, and we don't like rats. Why not believe in the arbitrary astrology of a foreign culture? People will believe anything.
Other tidbits? I recently saw a deer shit for the first time, and it didn't stand like a horse, it squatted like a dog. It could have been one constipated deer that I observed, but it didn't seem to be straining, and the other deer made no movement to show they thought its behavior unusual.
Bet you didn't know that.
Bet you didn't know that most birds are considered to have very little sense of smell or taste, though chickens have oodles of olfactory genes. The turkey vulture and albatross are reputed to have the most acute sense of smell; condors and black vultures follow turkey vultures to a kill. Birds won't replace bloodhounds any time soon, it appears. "Use it or lose it"--
Which means, given modern conveniences, humankind should continue to lose muscle mass and gain fat. Styles have already changed; Hip-Hop wear can shelter an epidemic of black and Hispanic obesity. Whites ain't far behind. I just discovered the joy of suspenders and no underwear. Free as a bird and let my belly be!
Been reading Shakespeare again, always a sign of health. "The Two Gentleman of Verona" I recommend to all dog lovers, since the fool/servant Launce has a love/hate relationship with his cur throughout the play, complete with Will's signature canine puns.
I was sorry that "The Love Guru," Mike Meyer's new movie, was panned in the regional paper. I always thought he was funny. The reviewer's contention is that his humor is so self-referential that he has become an institution unto his own ego. Can someone who's seen the movie disabuse me of this bad impression?
This blog began on July 27, 2005, when we were living in National City, just south of San Diego, waiting on the courts. In the time since I have authored over 400 posts, more than one every three days. But alas, since my life has become good again, I have had less interest in blogging. Just as I shut down my journal, Melic, when it seemed time, perhaps I should put the furniture covers on this chapter as well.
I am happy, busy and hopeful though realistic. I am closer to kilobunnies than kilorats but strangely, in my present state of euthymia, I don't trouble myself much about ratings. I'm beginning to expect things to be good, always a dangerous position, but more supportive of life than not. I can't say what the future of my blogging will be. I'm too busy writing other stuff now. In my depression of two years (along with watching basketball), blogging was one discipline I used to escape myself--and confront myself--an action that took more than melancholy self-involvement to complete.
Now I don't look to my blog for a task to objectify myself. The more I am involved with other human beings, the more I don't think about blogging.
Should my mood return to its former nadir, I will no doubt take blogging up in earnest again as a safety valve. For now it is of no pressing interest, and in infrequent checking of stats, my readership has fallen accordingly.
Until the next post,
CE
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
What the Gypsies Told my Grandmother while She was Still a Young Girl
It seems that my desire to blog is inversely proportional to my psychological health. Again, I thank all who walked through the darkness with me, and as it were, held me up. Just the contact of comments could sometimes momentarily convince me I was human at my worst. It meant much.
I shall have to return to a different subject to keep writing, and the other main subject of my blog has been poetry. Yet in numerous published essays I have expressed myself to my own satisfaction on this subject, though even now I am involved in discussions/debates at various boards, most notably The Gazebo: Theory and Practice. In short, I am not inspired to write about poetry so much as to resume writing it.
I have been reading Charles Simic and e. e. cummings of late. Simic is a poet of substance, unable to attain the lyrical, as he did not emigrate to the U.S. until the age of 16 from Yugoslavia, in 1954 (under Tito's rule, I believe). Though a little choppy, his substance can be terrific.
Cummings is an amazing technician, a perfectionist. He wants an epiphany more than he wants to be understood, which I think admirable in its way. Some forget he was quite a master of the sonnet and think him indelibly Post-Modern. He was actually, by history and inclination, a Modern and compares favorably with Marianne Moore.
Here is the best poem, IMHO, from Poet Laureate Simic's selected volume of “Sixty Poems”:
What the Gypsies Told my Grandmother while She was Still a Young Girl
War, illness and famine will make you their favorite
grandchild.
You'll be like a blind person watching a silent movie.
You'll chop onions and pieces of your heart
into the same hot skillet.
Your children will sleep in a suitcase tied with a rope.
Your husband will kiss your breasts every night
as if they were two gravestones.
Already the crows are grooming themselves
for you and your people.
Your oldest son will lie with flies on his hips
without smiling or lifting his hand.
You'll envy every ant you meet in your life
and every roadside weed.
Your body and soul will sit on separate stoops
chewing the same piece of gum.
Little cutie, are you for sale? the devil will say.
The undertaker will buy a toy for your grandson.
Your mind will be a hornet's nest even on your
deathbed.
You will pray to God but God will hang a sign
that He's not to be disturbed.
Question no further, that's all I know.
Charles Simic, "Walking the Black Cat," copyright 1996 by Charles Simic. Harcourt Brace & Company. Used with permission.
I would be happy to write a poem this good once every two years. Or maybe once.
Simic's pre- and post-war childhood should be remembered as a historical context for this work, but it speaks for itself even without such knowledge.
Thine in Truth and Art,
C. E. Chaffin
I shall have to return to a different subject to keep writing, and the other main subject of my blog has been poetry. Yet in numerous published essays I have expressed myself to my own satisfaction on this subject, though even now I am involved in discussions/debates at various boards, most notably The Gazebo: Theory and Practice. In short, I am not inspired to write about poetry so much as to resume writing it.
I have been reading Charles Simic and e. e. cummings of late. Simic is a poet of substance, unable to attain the lyrical, as he did not emigrate to the U.S. until the age of 16 from Yugoslavia, in 1954 (under Tito's rule, I believe). Though a little choppy, his substance can be terrific.
Cummings is an amazing technician, a perfectionist. He wants an epiphany more than he wants to be understood, which I think admirable in its way. Some forget he was quite a master of the sonnet and think him indelibly Post-Modern. He was actually, by history and inclination, a Modern and compares favorably with Marianne Moore.
Here is the best poem, IMHO, from Poet Laureate Simic's selected volume of “Sixty Poems”:
What the Gypsies Told my Grandmother while She was Still a Young Girl
War, illness and famine will make you their favorite
grandchild.
You'll be like a blind person watching a silent movie.
You'll chop onions and pieces of your heart
into the same hot skillet.
Your children will sleep in a suitcase tied with a rope.
Your husband will kiss your breasts every night
as if they were two gravestones.
Already the crows are grooming themselves
for you and your people.
Your oldest son will lie with flies on his hips
without smiling or lifting his hand.
You'll envy every ant you meet in your life
and every roadside weed.
Your body and soul will sit on separate stoops
chewing the same piece of gum.
Little cutie, are you for sale? the devil will say.
The undertaker will buy a toy for your grandson.
Your mind will be a hornet's nest even on your
deathbed.
You will pray to God but God will hang a sign
that He's not to be disturbed.
Question no further, that's all I know.
Charles Simic, "Walking the Black Cat," copyright 1996 by Charles Simic. Harcourt Brace & Company. Used with permission.
I would be happy to write a poem this good once every two years. Or maybe once.
Simic's pre- and post-war childhood should be remembered as a historical context for this work, but it speaks for itself even without such knowledge.
Thine in Truth and Art,
C. E. Chaffin
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
More Boring than Shit!
I wrote my last post mainly about my diminutive Okinawan-American friend, Ralph, because otherwise he said he wouldn't read my blog. Readership immediately plummeted and he has yet to acknowledge the great honor I have done him.
However, all is not lost. I want to prove to Ralph that a poem about bowel care is more interesting than he. Below, a first draft on helping regularity.
Knowing that he is less than shit will likely not discourage Ralph in the least from his monumental narcissism, but if readers cooperate it might give him pause—just enough pause to consider pausing for that special moment.
Kiloneutral,
CE
Loosening Up (or "How to Prevent Hemorrhoids")
Lugubriousness, despite its sound,
can lead to constipation.
Douse it with Hoison sauce
and Louisiana assonance,
sublime your glossary
with fresh oysters and okra,
habaneros, jalapenos
and dragon claws.
Add roughage of indigestible
poems replete with fillers
culled from second-rate sonnets,
needless modifiers and articles,
superfluous conjunctions.
Swallow hackneyed emotion
as you would an oil puddle
with rainbow slime
(don't swallow the sun, it burns).
Absorption, irritation, bulk:
these are the trinity of flow.
Grind up a broom handle
and make a sawdust patty,
fry in bacon grease, coat with Tabasco,
follow with heaps of water.
Hail irritants and bulk as friends--
senna to flex your colon,
psyllium to mulch your stomach,
grasshoppers dipped in chocolate
for the chitin, try not to vomit
(use bisacodyl in a pinch).
The more you eat what can't be used
(absorbent without being absorbed)
the happier you'll be.
Done right, you'll hardly need to push
(Your anus thanks you heartily!).
However, all is not lost. I want to prove to Ralph that a poem about bowel care is more interesting than he. Below, a first draft on helping regularity.
Knowing that he is less than shit will likely not discourage Ralph in the least from his monumental narcissism, but if readers cooperate it might give him pause—just enough pause to consider pausing for that special moment.
Kiloneutral,
CE
Loosening Up (or "How to Prevent Hemorrhoids")
Lugubriousness, despite its sound,
can lead to constipation.
Douse it with Hoison sauce
and Louisiana assonance,
sublime your glossary
with fresh oysters and okra,
habaneros, jalapenos
and dragon claws.
Add roughage of indigestible
poems replete with fillers
culled from second-rate sonnets,
needless modifiers and articles,
superfluous conjunctions.
Swallow hackneyed emotion
as you would an oil puddle
with rainbow slime
(don't swallow the sun, it burns).
Absorption, irritation, bulk:
these are the trinity of flow.
Grind up a broom handle
and make a sawdust patty,
fry in bacon grease, coat with Tabasco,
follow with heaps of water.
Hail irritants and bulk as friends--
senna to flex your colon,
psyllium to mulch your stomach,
grasshoppers dipped in chocolate
for the chitin, try not to vomit
(use bisacodyl in a pinch).
The more you eat what can't be used
(absorbent without being absorbed)
the happier you'll be.
Done right, you'll hardly need to push
(Your anus thanks you heartily!).
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Ralph and the Lakers' Loss; A New Poem
The Lakers lost the first game to Boston in the finals tonight, which was not unexpected, though I still predict the Lakers in six. Kobe had a lousy game, 9/26 from the floor with only 24 points and missed defensive assignments on Paul Pierce which really was the difference.
To deal with my sorrow I called my two daughters; the first had her mailbox full, the second didn't answer, so I decided to call my good friend, Ralph, who hadn't even watched the game. He was more interested in discussing crawdads from his recent visit to Louisiana.
I put him in the position of comforter and he adapted. He told me it was a long series and made me repeat “The Lakers suck, the Lakers suck,” to free me from the bondage of grief. But when he told me to repeat “Root for the Celtics” my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth and I could not pronounce his shibboleth.
Ralph, perhaps the most dependable of all my friends, weighs about 105 lbs and is five feet tall. I'm 6'6” and weigh 270. When we go out together he likes to order me around, as if I were Lenny in “Of Mice and Men.” I don't mind it; it's nice to take a vacation from alpha maleness so long as you have another to boss you around.
Although third-generation Japanese-American, Ralph has retained little of the old country. Indeed, he announced to me tonight that he “had no shame,” and Japan is a shame culture. So I replied, “I'm Protestant and have no guilt”--which is a lie, of course, for which I beg forgiveness.
Ralph has amazing hands. He fixes musical instruments and builds stereos that will blow you out of the room with just five watts of power. Lately he's taken to photography and fixing old cameras he buys off the Net. What ever he puts his hand to is gold. He is a very fine craftsman with the soul of an artist. He's also an excellent fisherman; one of my nicknames for him is “Fishmeister.” The other is “Le Pig.” The latter nickname I created because it's the complete opposite of Ralph; he is moderate, temperate, cautious, neat and careful; still, when it comes to hogging the spotlight, he is indeed a pig!
Unfortunately he is not an artist, as one listen to his attempts on the saxophone will prove. But because of his big cajones, he's not afraid to jump on stage, because despite his lack of skill he expects everyone to worship him if he has the feeling.
He's more American than I am in this. I think he should be appointed to the famous self-esteem council that our wacky state actually funded as he has no lack of it, and perhaps this is what makes him still Japanese, his sense of superiority.
The Japanese traditionally look upon “round eyes” and others as useless barbarians; Ralph, in his pygmy narcissism, has gone a step further: he considers everyone but himself a useless barbarian. I am not so much his friend as his Samurai bodyguard, and he lets me know that I am expendable.
On the downside, he is a little bit anal, a turd hoarder, sometimes miserly with his wallet. He keeps track of everything to make sure it's fair, though he likes to spend my money.
In any case he comforted me after the Lakers' loss by calling me a tit-sucking weasel and letting me know my real place in the cosmos. I was grateful for his time, much better than dial-a-prayer. He's also a great cook and a knowledgeable bartender, though he always complains that when I visit I drink too much of his booze. He can't wrap his brain around my great size and alcohol tolerance; he drinks like a pygmy because he is a pygmy.
I wrote a poem yesterday, here it is:
Sunset on the Mendocino Coast
A single bat flew
in and out of the pine grove
like a confused swift,
diving and jerking
against the pastel horizon's
merging of violet to red.
It returned, a dark
dab against orange
like a defect in a movie
passing over the screen.
I made a small fire
of newspaper and twigs.
Smoke swirled as randomly
as a bat's flight. Sticks glowed
orange and disintegrated
into white ash. The bat
flew out, dipped
down to the high grass
and disappeared again.
Above the sussuration of the ocean,
thin and white against the high violet,
a sickle of moon shone,
too weak to be reflected--
and I feared shrinking
into something less than bat,
lint on a projector maybe,
maybe as random.
All for tonight. We'll win on Sunday. Go Lakers! Lakers in six!
2 kilobunnies,
CE
To deal with my sorrow I called my two daughters; the first had her mailbox full, the second didn't answer, so I decided to call my good friend, Ralph, who hadn't even watched the game. He was more interested in discussing crawdads from his recent visit to Louisiana.
I put him in the position of comforter and he adapted. He told me it was a long series and made me repeat “The Lakers suck, the Lakers suck,” to free me from the bondage of grief. But when he told me to repeat “Root for the Celtics” my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth and I could not pronounce his shibboleth.
Ralph, perhaps the most dependable of all my friends, weighs about 105 lbs and is five feet tall. I'm 6'6” and weigh 270. When we go out together he likes to order me around, as if I were Lenny in “Of Mice and Men.” I don't mind it; it's nice to take a vacation from alpha maleness so long as you have another to boss you around.
Although third-generation Japanese-American, Ralph has retained little of the old country. Indeed, he announced to me tonight that he “had no shame,” and Japan is a shame culture. So I replied, “I'm Protestant and have no guilt”--which is a lie, of course, for which I beg forgiveness.
Ralph has amazing hands. He fixes musical instruments and builds stereos that will blow you out of the room with just five watts of power. Lately he's taken to photography and fixing old cameras he buys off the Net. What ever he puts his hand to is gold. He is a very fine craftsman with the soul of an artist. He's also an excellent fisherman; one of my nicknames for him is “Fishmeister.” The other is “Le Pig.” The latter nickname I created because it's the complete opposite of Ralph; he is moderate, temperate, cautious, neat and careful; still, when it comes to hogging the spotlight, he is indeed a pig!
Unfortunately he is not an artist, as one listen to his attempts on the saxophone will prove. But because of his big cajones, he's not afraid to jump on stage, because despite his lack of skill he expects everyone to worship him if he has the feeling.
He's more American than I am in this. I think he should be appointed to the famous self-esteem council that our wacky state actually funded as he has no lack of it, and perhaps this is what makes him still Japanese, his sense of superiority.
The Japanese traditionally look upon “round eyes” and others as useless barbarians; Ralph, in his pygmy narcissism, has gone a step further: he considers everyone but himself a useless barbarian. I am not so much his friend as his Samurai bodyguard, and he lets me know that I am expendable.
On the downside, he is a little bit anal, a turd hoarder, sometimes miserly with his wallet. He keeps track of everything to make sure it's fair, though he likes to spend my money.
In any case he comforted me after the Lakers' loss by calling me a tit-sucking weasel and letting me know my real place in the cosmos. I was grateful for his time, much better than dial-a-prayer. He's also a great cook and a knowledgeable bartender, though he always complains that when I visit I drink too much of his booze. He can't wrap his brain around my great size and alcohol tolerance; he drinks like a pygmy because he is a pygmy.
I wrote a poem yesterday, here it is:
Sunset on the Mendocino Coast
A single bat flew
in and out of the pine grove
like a confused swift,
diving and jerking
against the pastel horizon's
merging of violet to red.
It returned, a dark
dab against orange
like a defect in a movie
passing over the screen.
I made a small fire
of newspaper and twigs.
Smoke swirled as randomly
as a bat's flight. Sticks glowed
orange and disintegrated
into white ash. The bat
flew out, dipped
down to the high grass
and disappeared again.
Above the sussuration of the ocean,
thin and white against the high violet,
a sickle of moon shone,
too weak to be reflected--
and I feared shrinking
into something less than bat,
lint on a projector maybe,
maybe as random.
All for tonight. We'll win on Sunday. Go Lakers! Lakers in six!
2 kilobunnies,
CE
Sunday, June 01, 2008
HOT OFF THE NET PRESS
"Net Poets," "Happy Alcoholic" in Bumbershoot.
"Good Fridays" in Astropoetica:
"After Reading the Latter Half of the Fourth Edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry" in Barefoot Muse.
******************************************
In print I'll have a poem on the front cover and an interview on the back cover of the new Sigurd Journal. Their website doesn't yet feature content but it does accept submissions:
Two of the journals paid! Hoo hoo!
Enough for two big bottles of cheap vodka--it's the principal that counts. I'll invest it in my brain, like the happy alcoholic above.
Lazy Sunday. Golden fields of early summer-sudden-spent grass, exploding darts of dandelions, the wild radishes in patches, lavender and white, the bark of sea lions and the ocean's engine running in the background. And I have nothing to say.
Which is also the title of a poem of mine (published I forget where) but written in Long Beach, CA:
Nothing to Say
I have nothing needful to say,
no comment on the glittering bay
or the dark, snow-topped wall
of the San Gabriels.
Things used to be pulled from me,
uprooted like weeds from a garden.
I let the weeds bloom now.
The red-throated bird
that lives in my chipped balcony light
sings for a mate I have never seen.
I let my words run like watercolors.
Time runs only forward.
Why should art be different?
Here is the last line.
I may have posted this before but I could think of nothing else to do except, perhaps, to look up “abulia” again, no sure thing.
Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon,
2 Kilobunnies,
Craig Erick
"Good Fridays" in Astropoetica:
"After Reading the Latter Half of the Fourth Edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry" in Barefoot Muse.
******************************************
In print I'll have a poem on the front cover and an interview on the back cover of the new Sigurd Journal. Their website doesn't yet feature content but it does accept submissions:
Two of the journals paid! Hoo hoo!
Enough for two big bottles of cheap vodka--it's the principal that counts. I'll invest it in my brain, like the happy alcoholic above.
Lazy Sunday. Golden fields of early summer-sudden-spent grass, exploding darts of dandelions, the wild radishes in patches, lavender and white, the bark of sea lions and the ocean's engine running in the background. And I have nothing to say.
Which is also the title of a poem of mine (published I forget where) but written in Long Beach, CA:
Nothing to Say
I have nothing needful to say,
no comment on the glittering bay
or the dark, snow-topped wall
of the San Gabriels.
Things used to be pulled from me,
uprooted like weeds from a garden.
I let the weeds bloom now.
The red-throated bird
that lives in my chipped balcony light
sings for a mate I have never seen.
I let my words run like watercolors.
Time runs only forward.
Why should art be different?
Here is the last line.
I may have posted this before but I could think of nothing else to do except, perhaps, to look up “abulia” again, no sure thing.
Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon,
2 Kilobunnies,
Craig Erick
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Good News! And Two Poems....
I was just notified by Lynn Strongin, editor of the upcoming anthology, “Crazed by the Sun,” that I will be appearing along with...many well-known contemporary poets...a former student of mine...a poet acquaintance from LA... and Theodore Roethke, Marianne Moore and e. e. cummings!
I had just gotten a letter from someone about my essay, “My Struggle with Literary Narcissism,” which she enjoyed, especially my musings on how much luck had to do with any success. Then the news of my inclusion with the immortals!
Irony is not dead! Kairos still concentrates experience! Here's to Jungian synchronicity!
I also received a letter from a new paying print venue, The Sigurd Journal, notifying me that my poem, “Dare,” will be featured on the cover and my interview on the back cover.
When it rains it pours! But I'm waiting for #3, since these things usually come in threes. I can't think of what it might be but I won't hold my breath.
*****************************************************
I really need to get on the ball and start submitting my book on Eliot to academic presses on a regular basis. Since coming out of my depression I've been doing what my shrink advised: “Enjoy yourself.” And so I have, posting at various boards, entering debates, spilling my mind and guts where they might prove of interest. But my long-term publishing ambitions always seem to come last, likely for several reasons: First, the bother of print submissions, cover letters, research of markets, yada. Second, the sinking feeling that it is all in vain. Lastly the distraction of whatever my latest project is, whether a poem, and essay, or participation in a discussion at a forum or blog.
I'm alive! I'm alive!” --Baron Harkonnen in David Lynch's “Dune”
*********************************************************
I have remedied the cats' decimation of my flower garden with an ingenious device known as “The Scarecrow,” which by photoelectric activation sprays any moving object within twenty feet of the flowers. Now my flowers are doing much better. Some may remember the poem I scribbled about it, I'll put the latest version below:
Drugstore Flowers
My cats kink and snurl together,
slink effortlessly up the windowsill
and pose, contemptuous of their grace,
as if it were expected,
as if the world held nothing else--
meanwhile destroy my garden,
a two-foot strip around my porch
I dared to punctuate with flowers.
They claw out plugs of hothouse blooms
and leave them baking in the sun;
mainly they trash the marigolds.
Still I re-plant, water and wait,
hoping the roots regenerate
while fearing the trauma's too severe
for drugstore flowers to persevere.
Here's a poem I've been working on, still sort of a draft, one a friend has tried to help me with (I won't mention his name lest he be associated with a bad result).
Reflection
Someday when you were meaning
to look out the window
you will notice your face instead,
a map to the Holy Land
contained in the luggage
of your eyes, spread in lines
from their corners
like shatter-proof glass
resisting shatter.
See mine, beard quilled in white?
The scar of a cop's baton
juts out from my eyebrow
and my mustache was divided
by a brass knuckle's kiss,
a face more public than I wish
though it doesn't take a gypsy
to divine a face; it screams itself.
Mine's not a rich man's face but I hope
rich in love and free of envy.
The rich man rubs it in
whether he wants to or not.
His mere existence powers envy
which powers ambition
which powers achievement
which powers comparison
which powers dissatisfaction
which powers envy again.
It's not the thorn against the rose
but both against the deer--
the deer make them equals
and the sun, confederates.
Still on the blind horde runs
urged on like wasps
disturbed by a lawnmower,
pockets stuffed with lottery tickets.
On the human engine runs
toward the swimming pool
purchased on credit
from a second mortgage
toward the notion
that having all
might cure not having all.
The Buddha smiles
at the ouroboros of desire:
cyclical, predictable.
I smile back at the window.
That's all the good news for today—so far.
2 Kilobunnies,
C. E. Chaffin
I had just gotten a letter from someone about my essay, “My Struggle with Literary Narcissism,” which she enjoyed, especially my musings on how much luck had to do with any success. Then the news of my inclusion with the immortals!
Irony is not dead! Kairos still concentrates experience! Here's to Jungian synchronicity!
I also received a letter from a new paying print venue, The Sigurd Journal, notifying me that my poem, “Dare,” will be featured on the cover and my interview on the back cover.
When it rains it pours! But I'm waiting for #3, since these things usually come in threes. I can't think of what it might be but I won't hold my breath.
*****************************************************
I really need to get on the ball and start submitting my book on Eliot to academic presses on a regular basis. Since coming out of my depression I've been doing what my shrink advised: “Enjoy yourself.” And so I have, posting at various boards, entering debates, spilling my mind and guts where they might prove of interest. But my long-term publishing ambitions always seem to come last, likely for several reasons: First, the bother of print submissions, cover letters, research of markets, yada. Second, the sinking feeling that it is all in vain. Lastly the distraction of whatever my latest project is, whether a poem, and essay, or participation in a discussion at a forum or blog.
I'm alive! I'm alive!” --Baron Harkonnen in David Lynch's “Dune”
*********************************************************
I have remedied the cats' decimation of my flower garden with an ingenious device known as “The Scarecrow,” which by photoelectric activation sprays any moving object within twenty feet of the flowers. Now my flowers are doing much better. Some may remember the poem I scribbled about it, I'll put the latest version below:
Drugstore Flowers
My cats kink and snurl together,
slink effortlessly up the windowsill
and pose, contemptuous of their grace,
as if it were expected,
as if the world held nothing else--
meanwhile destroy my garden,
a two-foot strip around my porch
I dared to punctuate with flowers.
They claw out plugs of hothouse blooms
and leave them baking in the sun;
mainly they trash the marigolds.
Still I re-plant, water and wait,
hoping the roots regenerate
while fearing the trauma's too severe
for drugstore flowers to persevere.
Here's a poem I've been working on, still sort of a draft, one a friend has tried to help me with (I won't mention his name lest he be associated with a bad result).
Reflection
Someday when you were meaning
to look out the window
you will notice your face instead,
a map to the Holy Land
contained in the luggage
of your eyes, spread in lines
from their corners
like shatter-proof glass
resisting shatter.
See mine, beard quilled in white?
The scar of a cop's baton
juts out from my eyebrow
and my mustache was divided
by a brass knuckle's kiss,
a face more public than I wish
though it doesn't take a gypsy
to divine a face; it screams itself.
Mine's not a rich man's face but I hope
rich in love and free of envy.
The rich man rubs it in
whether he wants to or not.
His mere existence powers envy
which powers ambition
which powers achievement
which powers comparison
which powers dissatisfaction
which powers envy again.
It's not the thorn against the rose
but both against the deer--
the deer make them equals
and the sun, confederates.
Still on the blind horde runs
urged on like wasps
disturbed by a lawnmower,
pockets stuffed with lottery tickets.
On the human engine runs
toward the swimming pool
purchased on credit
from a second mortgage
toward the notion
that having all
might cure not having all.
The Buddha smiles
at the ouroboros of desire:
cyclical, predictable.
I smile back at the window.
That's all the good news for today—so far.
2 Kilobunnies,
C. E. Chaffin
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Why I have not blogged...
I have not blogged in some time for two reasons:
1) I have not felt the need to blog since my depression went into remission। Remember, I started the blog in Mexico as a way of enduring my trials, having white space in which to order my thoughts about my experience. Later, it became a therapeutic aid to enduring depression, to such a an extent that Kathleen and close friends questioned whether it was actually extending my depression by reinforcement; that, happily, was not true. In writing about my chemical distress I was able to objectify my diseased feelings during the act of writing and thus obtain some temporary relief by means of my blog. The comments were helpful, too. The contact. The affirmation. It was a discipline I practiced in order to hang onto some sort of stated reality, which you suffered with me when I wrote well.
2) I have run into discouraging technical problems and don't know how to fix them. When I post at my blog now, any change at the posting itself results in a translation into an unknown language whose script reminds me of Cambodian, though it is not Cambodian. How such a glitch developed is beyond me.
It has never been about numbers, but since I stopped blogging, visitors have dropped only 25% because of the long tail of references I left behind in former posts, so that searchers looking for a quote from Churchill or details on Freud's vasectomy unwittingly enter my blog space.
Only two close friends questioned why I wasn't blogging; I told them I no longer felt the need. I have contemplated a new blog to rid myself of the present glitches in this one, a blog dedicated to joy as in my last post, a place of hope where there was darkness. If you want to see such a blog, please comment.
Meanwhile I have been gardening, performing music, writing poetry, volunteering as a docent at The Botanical Gardens, leading music therapy at a ministry for the homeless and mentally ill, attending men's groups and debating poetry at various forums, where I defend Eliot again among other things। I've also been nursing Kathleen, who has suffered a gum infection from a botched root canal that also plunged her into a depression. She is a unipolar, I'm a bipolar. That doesn't mean her depression doesn't scare me, but I keep whistling through the graveyard of life. I'm confident enough to support her, as she did me for two years. As for bloviating online, here are links to recent discussions in which I play a primary role: �
Lost in the Shallows,� a discussion of contemporary verse
Defending Eliot at Babilu Forum
Critique thread at Alsop's Gazebo
Recent publications, including YouTube (posted before):
http://web.mac.com/tomkoontz/Site_18/Chaffin.html
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=282
http://www.umbrellajournal.com/spring2008/how_divine/C.E.Chaffin.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozymixtdcfs
http://www.angelfire.com/zine/bluefifth/Winter2008/poems2W08.html
All for now, I fear the quasi-Cambodian interpreting ghost at my typing fingers' heels.
Two Kilobunnies,
CE
1) I have not felt the need to blog since my depression went into remission। Remember, I started the blog in Mexico as a way of enduring my trials, having white space in which to order my thoughts about my experience. Later, it became a therapeutic aid to enduring depression, to such a an extent that Kathleen and close friends questioned whether it was actually extending my depression by reinforcement; that, happily, was not true. In writing about my chemical distress I was able to objectify my diseased feelings during the act of writing and thus obtain some temporary relief by means of my blog. The comments were helpful, too. The contact. The affirmation. It was a discipline I practiced in order to hang onto some sort of stated reality, which you suffered with me when I wrote well.
2) I have run into discouraging technical problems and don't know how to fix them. When I post at my blog now, any change at the posting itself results in a translation into an unknown language whose script reminds me of Cambodian, though it is not Cambodian. How such a glitch developed is beyond me.
It has never been about numbers, but since I stopped blogging, visitors have dropped only 25% because of the long tail of references I left behind in former posts, so that searchers looking for a quote from Churchill or details on Freud's vasectomy unwittingly enter my blog space.
Only two close friends questioned why I wasn't blogging; I told them I no longer felt the need. I have contemplated a new blog to rid myself of the present glitches in this one, a blog dedicated to joy as in my last post, a place of hope where there was darkness. If you want to see such a blog, please comment.
Meanwhile I have been gardening, performing music, writing poetry, volunteering as a docent at The Botanical Gardens, leading music therapy at a ministry for the homeless and mentally ill, attending men's groups and debating poetry at various forums, where I defend Eliot again among other things। I've also been nursing Kathleen, who has suffered a gum infection from a botched root canal that also plunged her into a depression. She is a unipolar, I'm a bipolar. That doesn't mean her depression doesn't scare me, but I keep whistling through the graveyard of life. I'm confident enough to support her, as she did me for two years. As for bloviating online, here are links to recent discussions in which I play a primary role: �
Lost in the Shallows,� a discussion of contemporary verse
Defending Eliot at Babilu Forum
Critique thread at Alsop's Gazebo
Recent publications, including YouTube (posted before):
http://web.mac.com/tomkoontz/Site_18/Chaffin.html
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=282
http://www.umbrellajournal.com/spring2008/how_divine/C.E.Chaffin.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozymixtdcfs
http://www.angelfire.com/zine/bluefifth/Winter2008/poems2W08.html
All for now, I fear the quasi-Cambodian interpreting ghost at my typing fingers' heels.
Two Kilobunnies,
CE
Monday, May 12, 2008
Joy
Joy is much harder to capture in words than fear or sorrow। And by joy I do not mean contentment or happiness, but a deeper feeling, echoed in passages like Romans 8:
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time, waiting in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, for the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God। For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord।” (NIV version, 8:19 ff.)
What is the Kingdom of Heaven but the indescribable joy of inseparable, insuperable eternal love, the very thing we craved from our first banishment from the dumb joy of the womb?
Keats comes closest, in of all places, his “Ode on Melancholy,” where the sorrow-tinged exaltation of which he speaks approaches Joy:
“But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud...
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes।
“She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine।”
Schiller's Ode to Joy, made famous by Beethoven's 9th, falls short of this standard:
Let the cosmos embrace you, you millions!
This kiss goes to the entire world!...
Whoever has had the great fortune
To know true friendship
Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife,
Add his to our jubilation!
(My translation, excerpted from the second stanza।)
This ode, written on the cusp when the Augustan age gave over to the Romantic, still contains more subject-object distance from joy than Keats। As such it may be that only my anachronistic eye fails to feel the joy of this piece, though the music certainly conveys it—music based on a German beer song, incidentally.
Yesterday I was sitting on an old redwood log facing a pasturer where wild turkeys flocked and deer feasted on the long grass। Stellar's Jays, supernaturally blue, hopped and pecked in the grass beside a robin। I listened to the bird song and wind and nothing else। I took my shirt off and lit a hand-rolled cigarette and guiltlessly enjoyed the smoke and the scene, experiencing a richness beyond words। In the distance small whitecaps erupted on the royal blue Pacific। There was nothing I wanted or didn't want, and to illustrate the paucity of words, I can only say I felt like I was in a Disney movieमूवी
This is in part what Eliot meant by “the timeless moment,” that out-of-self experience of all- encompassing joy. When my cigarette was done I wandered out into the pasture, staring at blue-eyed grass and yellow-eyed grass and the lavender and white profusion of wild radishes. A six-point buck pranced away at my approach, his body leaping, his neck proudly erect like a war horse. Joy in his motion, joy in his freedom, joy in his perfection.
It is in our most extreme states that our hearts turns toward the numinous. If we think of God at all, we are most apt to think of him in our deepest sorrow or greatest joy.
There is a great moment in “The Screw Tape Letters” where the protagonist is being oppressed by a demon with a mild depression, and he decides to go for a walk in the country. The beauty of nature transports him out of himself and back into awareness of God.
Afterwards the demon is scolded by his superior: “How could you possibly let the subject do something he enjoyed? You risked him getting out of himself. We want his pleasures circumscribed—the club, television, liquor, not something so dangerous as nature. You fool!”
Exactly. Extreme joy and sorrow are two paths to the same place, another point made in Eliot's “Four Quartets,” though not so directly; in its famous conclusion, sorrow and joy, earthly suffering and isolated moments of transport are fused:
“All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
**************************************************
An old friend from the LitNet, Seth Abramson, gave me joy by getting three poems into the top print journal, Poetry, something most poets would give their eye teeth for. After all, we don't need them to see।
There's a new thread where I defend Eliot again, a sign of my improved mood, that you might find entertaining, as it begins with the usual charge of anti-Semitism and ends with a बर्डwalk into psychiatry.
I do enjoy comments but it seems that comments are inversely proportional to the length of my posts, so today's is shorter।In destroying my deer netting overnight, the cats' trampling of my little flower garden actually increased. Back to square one.
Although the Lakers lost yesterday they took it to overtime in hostile Utah, so I am still upbeat about their chances।
Next Saturday we plan a housewarming party not only to celebrate our new digs with the expansive ocean view, but to honor Kathleen's birthday, although her beauty is ageless।
Thine in Joy,
CE
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time, waiting in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, for the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God। For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord।” (NIV version, 8:19 ff.)
What is the Kingdom of Heaven but the indescribable joy of inseparable, insuperable eternal love, the very thing we craved from our first banishment from the dumb joy of the womb?
Keats comes closest, in of all places, his “Ode on Melancholy,” where the sorrow-tinged exaltation of which he speaks approaches Joy:
“But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud...
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes।
“She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine।”
Schiller's Ode to Joy, made famous by Beethoven's 9th, falls short of this standard:
Let the cosmos embrace you, you millions!
This kiss goes to the entire world!...
Whoever has had the great fortune
To know true friendship
Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife,
Add his to our jubilation!
(My translation, excerpted from the second stanza।)
This ode, written on the cusp when the Augustan age gave over to the Romantic, still contains more subject-object distance from joy than Keats। As such it may be that only my anachronistic eye fails to feel the joy of this piece, though the music certainly conveys it—music based on a German beer song, incidentally.
Yesterday I was sitting on an old redwood log facing a pasturer where wild turkeys flocked and deer feasted on the long grass। Stellar's Jays, supernaturally blue, hopped and pecked in the grass beside a robin। I listened to the bird song and wind and nothing else। I took my shirt off and lit a hand-rolled cigarette and guiltlessly enjoyed the smoke and the scene, experiencing a richness beyond words। In the distance small whitecaps erupted on the royal blue Pacific। There was nothing I wanted or didn't want, and to illustrate the paucity of words, I can only say I felt like I was in a Disney movieमूवी
This is in part what Eliot meant by “the timeless moment,” that out-of-self experience of all- encompassing joy. When my cigarette was done I wandered out into the pasture, staring at blue-eyed grass and yellow-eyed grass and the lavender and white profusion of wild radishes. A six-point buck pranced away at my approach, his body leaping, his neck proudly erect like a war horse. Joy in his motion, joy in his freedom, joy in his perfection.
It is in our most extreme states that our hearts turns toward the numinous. If we think of God at all, we are most apt to think of him in our deepest sorrow or greatest joy.
There is a great moment in “The Screw Tape Letters” where the protagonist is being oppressed by a demon with a mild depression, and he decides to go for a walk in the country. The beauty of nature transports him out of himself and back into awareness of God.
Afterwards the demon is scolded by his superior: “How could you possibly let the subject do something he enjoyed? You risked him getting out of himself. We want his pleasures circumscribed—the club, television, liquor, not something so dangerous as nature. You fool!”
Exactly. Extreme joy and sorrow are two paths to the same place, another point made in Eliot's “Four Quartets,” though not so directly; in its famous conclusion, sorrow and joy, earthly suffering and isolated moments of transport are fused:
“All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
**************************************************
An old friend from the LitNet, Seth Abramson, gave me joy by getting three poems into the top print journal, Poetry, something most poets would give their eye teeth for. After all, we don't need them to see।
There's a new thread where I defend Eliot again, a sign of my improved mood, that you might find entertaining, as it begins with the usual charge of anti-Semitism and ends with a बर्डwalk into psychiatry.
I do enjoy comments but it seems that comments are inversely proportional to the length of my posts, so today's is shorter।In destroying my deer netting overnight, the cats' trampling of my little flower garden actually increased. Back to square one.
Although the Lakers lost yesterday they took it to overtime in hostile Utah, so I am still upbeat about their chances।
Next Saturday we plan a housewarming party not only to celebrate our new digs with the expansive ocean view, but to honor Kathleen's birthday, although her beauty is ageless।
Thine in Joy,
CE
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Mania, the NBA and Flowers
First I apologize for the inconsistent punctuation and spacing in these last posts, brought on by a need to battle instant translation of everything I type into some unidentifiable Asian script that reminds me of Cambodian। I can't find the glitch yet, but it prevents me from correcting anything on the post page as I go; I can only paste in corrections from elsewhere, and even then the infection puts in a vertical mark resembling '!' without the lower dot and takes a space away, as if to leave an Asian cyberturd behind, as above.
****************************************************************
I had a manic dream last night, something so rare I can't remember the last one। And it's the second night I've had one। I attribute it to taking my second dose of Effexor too late. I need to take it in the afternoon apparently. But just as depressive dreams often warn me of on oncoming depression and have prevented its clinical eruption by such caution, so likewise my body may be warning me of flipping past euthymia into hypomania if not careful.
In the first night's dream I battled an armored dwarf who came after me with a machete'; after I disarmed him, he picked up a battle-ax and assaulted me with increased vigor। Again I disarmed him easily and told him that if that sort of behavior turned him on, I might have to pay attention, but that his aggressions would be better served in some other way. He was crestfallen and felt diminished, though I didn't discount future attacks. I acted as if this sort of thing happened every day and that I was more than competent to deal with murderous dwarfs. Which reminds of the time when, while manic, I kept a police dog (German Shepherd) at bay with one hand, slapping him repeatedly when he tried to leap, keeping the other hand free to smoke, gesture, and reason with an arresting officer. The dog gave up; he realized that I was too quick for him and I don't know how hard I slap when I'm manic; very hard, I expect. I still have scars on my right hand from the occasional tooth.
In last night's dream we were in Mexico (Kathleen and I and her mother and Derek), where I would become enraged at the slightest deviation from my way, to the point of belittling my dear wife and shocking her mother while I ran around a beachside Mexican resort looking for conflict with with anyone from “the dark side।” I can't remember any physical altercations. It's pointless resisting me when in any case I'm manic, whether in a dream or reality. Either calm me down (which has been done by loved ones) or call the authorities.
At the supermarket yesterday late in the afternoon I snapped at Kathleen because I was “houchy” (so hungry I was grouchy), but luckily she didn't hear it। When my blood sugar dips too far I can get like that, in a mini-manic explosion of anger, but I got some Safeway sushi in time to quiet the demon.
This is the Scylla and Charybdis of my disease: in treating a depression you may overshoot into mania, and vice-versa। Yet as an informed consumer, the first logical step is to take my second dose of Effexor earlier; the second is to skip the second dose altogether. In addition I increased my mood-stabilizing agent, Klonopin, to 2 mg. last night, which made me sleep until noon, but I felt it a necessary precaution after two nights of manic dreams.
And yes, poetry has come back to me and I'm enjoying it। I have been posting at three boards and my poem, “Queen Melancholy,” was solicited by an editor. I also had two light verse pieces accepted. And I got a nice rejection from Poetry magazine, which, although a form letter, was one of the nicest form letters I've received. God bless you, Christian! (Unfortunately I had no record of my submitting there, so I can't tell what they rejected. Must have been one of my late at night brandy-drenched sorties into the world of publication that I failed to record.).
Today's question: Will Craig grow manic?
Today's answer: Not if he can help it। (It usually leads to an arrest, and he no like da police, though “he do the police in different voices.”)
I played at a rally Friday against Measure 'B' (to repeal liberal marijuana laws) in Fort Bragg and was well received, though I mistook their “Pot Luck” sign for food, afterward discovering they meant pooling alternative resources and burning them. I played at a Botanical Gardens soirée the week before and was well-received as well. (If I use “well” again in a sentence I shan't be feeling well.) I've been invited by a bass player to play Saturday Night at a local burger joint as well. (Now I'm
sick।)
This brings up another component of my recovery that I neglected to mention in my last post। Though ECT and Invega (an anti-psychotic whose effects on me were similar to the demonic Haldol) made me worse in Jan/Feb of this year, I requested an MRI of my brain while hospitalized and they discovered a bilateral, chronic maxillary sinus infection (everyone in my family seems to have allergies but I never paid them no mind). I remembered a case as a family practitioner where a depressive perked up after I treated her chronic sinus infection, so I went to our family doctor and requested treatment. After a month's antibiotics (the first two weeks spitting up a lot of schmegg), not only was my depression better but my voice had improved markedly. It's timbre and resonance had returned, I was no longer singing through pockets of mucous that robbed me of my natural timbre. So add this to my list of fortuitous concatenation of circumstances in recovery under “physiochemical.”
******************************************************************************
The Lakers won handily last night, another reason for me to rejoice। They are now 6-0 in the playoffs. Only one team that started with such a record in the playoffs has ever failed to win a championship. Yes I know there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, but my beloved Lakers are the best passing team in the league now, displaying oodles of patience to get the best shot while fast-breaking when appropriate. They have no supernatural point (passing, play-making) guard like the Hornets' Chris Paul, but the triangle offense they employ doesn't need one; in it, every player must act as a point guard, a passer, and we are blessed with a number of big men who can pass—Gasol, Odom, Turiaf and Walton (although Walton is really more of a tweener, a swing man). If only Radmonivich could pass we would have five starters who were gifted passers, and good passing has overcome poor rebounding against Utah so far, though I expect them to win a couple of games in predicting a six-game series which the Lakers should win 4-2. If the Lakers sweep I will be surprised.
Meanwhile ugly eastern basketball proceeds, with the wrestling matches of the Celtics vs। the Cavaliers, and the suffocating Detroit defense against the mad three-point shooting Magic। It will likely be Boston and Detroit in the East semifinals and the Lakers and the Hornets in the West, because right now San Antonio, defending champion, seems completely befuddled by Chris Paul, who finished second only to Kobe in the MVP balloting, and based solely on this year's statistics, probably deserved it more.
*******************************************************************
I tried bark in my garden to discourage the cats, as Laurel suggested, but it has been no use। Next I shall try deer netting, and though the aesthetic of draping my porch railing and and flower borders in nylon squares does little for me, my plants will otherwise remain small if at all while the cats keep tramping and the deer keep chomping. The only annual flowers to do well so far are alyssum, which is low to the ground, thus survives trampling, and is apparently not deer-licious. As for perennials, the jasmine and the mints (apple mint, cat mint, mint) and sages (sage and pineapple sage) are doing OK. And to be fair, more of my drugstore (hothouse) flowers have survived than I expected, some clinging to life like the marigolds and petunias, some testing life like the pansies, while some thrive like the alyssum, something I hope for my newly planted sea thrift and lobelia, since they are also essentially ground covers. I should mention that an evil neighborhood cat has torn down whole stems repeatedly from the calla lily just for the fun of it. I caught him in the act. Strange behavior for a cat. Maybe he thinks it's Easter.
On the coast it's cold and windy, so low-lying thick-leaved plants do best। Ice plant would be ideal but since I grew up with it everywhere (in SoCal) I have no intention of planting such a common thing. I'm not a botanical snob but I know what I like, just like Disney: Color! Color! Color! More color than foliage if I can help it. BTW, it's peak rhododendron season out here and a lovely time to visit the Mendocino Coast, just don't move here, please.
How quickly over a thousand words shoot from my fingertips!
Lastly, a new poem:
Fog
It's hard to say whether fog is addition or subtraction
as it leaches color from shore pines, pinus contortus,
painting them slate while the sea's horizon
is lost in indistinction like a chalk line blurred।
All is dulled, dunned, drabbed, sullied
or alternately whitewashed by the bright gray
Flimsier than a negligee, thick as a cataract,
softening all by spell of the sea's breath,
a brume grown opaque as a drop cloth,
it's a lie cast over reality, else a new one
Reach out, rub it between your fingers;
nothing remains but a lick of humidity.
(“brume” = haze)
Kiloneutral but cautious
Thine in Truth and Art
CE
****************************************************************
I had a manic dream last night, something so rare I can't remember the last one। And it's the second night I've had one। I attribute it to taking my second dose of Effexor too late. I need to take it in the afternoon apparently. But just as depressive dreams often warn me of on oncoming depression and have prevented its clinical eruption by such caution, so likewise my body may be warning me of flipping past euthymia into hypomania if not careful.
In the first night's dream I battled an armored dwarf who came after me with a machete'; after I disarmed him, he picked up a battle-ax and assaulted me with increased vigor। Again I disarmed him easily and told him that if that sort of behavior turned him on, I might have to pay attention, but that his aggressions would be better served in some other way. He was crestfallen and felt diminished, though I didn't discount future attacks. I acted as if this sort of thing happened every day and that I was more than competent to deal with murderous dwarfs. Which reminds of the time when, while manic, I kept a police dog (German Shepherd) at bay with one hand, slapping him repeatedly when he tried to leap, keeping the other hand free to smoke, gesture, and reason with an arresting officer. The dog gave up; he realized that I was too quick for him and I don't know how hard I slap when I'm manic; very hard, I expect. I still have scars on my right hand from the occasional tooth.
In last night's dream we were in Mexico (Kathleen and I and her mother and Derek), where I would become enraged at the slightest deviation from my way, to the point of belittling my dear wife and shocking her mother while I ran around a beachside Mexican resort looking for conflict with with anyone from “the dark side।” I can't remember any physical altercations. It's pointless resisting me when in any case I'm manic, whether in a dream or reality. Either calm me down (which has been done by loved ones) or call the authorities.
At the supermarket yesterday late in the afternoon I snapped at Kathleen because I was “houchy” (so hungry I was grouchy), but luckily she didn't hear it। When my blood sugar dips too far I can get like that, in a mini-manic explosion of anger, but I got some Safeway sushi in time to quiet the demon.
This is the Scylla and Charybdis of my disease: in treating a depression you may overshoot into mania, and vice-versa। Yet as an informed consumer, the first logical step is to take my second dose of Effexor earlier; the second is to skip the second dose altogether. In addition I increased my mood-stabilizing agent, Klonopin, to 2 mg. last night, which made me sleep until noon, but I felt it a necessary precaution after two nights of manic dreams.
And yes, poetry has come back to me and I'm enjoying it। I have been posting at three boards and my poem, “Queen Melancholy,” was solicited by an editor. I also had two light verse pieces accepted. And I got a nice rejection from Poetry magazine, which, although a form letter, was one of the nicest form letters I've received. God bless you, Christian! (Unfortunately I had no record of my submitting there, so I can't tell what they rejected. Must have been one of my late at night brandy-drenched sorties into the world of publication that I failed to record.).
Today's question: Will Craig grow manic?
Today's answer: Not if he can help it। (It usually leads to an arrest, and he no like da police, though “he do the police in different voices.”)
I played at a rally Friday against Measure 'B' (to repeal liberal marijuana laws) in Fort Bragg and was well received, though I mistook their “Pot Luck” sign for food, afterward discovering they meant pooling alternative resources and burning them. I played at a Botanical Gardens soirée the week before and was well-received as well. (If I use “well” again in a sentence I shan't be feeling well.) I've been invited by a bass player to play Saturday Night at a local burger joint as well. (Now I'm
sick।)
This brings up another component of my recovery that I neglected to mention in my last post। Though ECT and Invega (an anti-psychotic whose effects on me were similar to the demonic Haldol) made me worse in Jan/Feb of this year, I requested an MRI of my brain while hospitalized and they discovered a bilateral, chronic maxillary sinus infection (everyone in my family seems to have allergies but I never paid them no mind). I remembered a case as a family practitioner where a depressive perked up after I treated her chronic sinus infection, so I went to our family doctor and requested treatment. After a month's antibiotics (the first two weeks spitting up a lot of schmegg), not only was my depression better but my voice had improved markedly. It's timbre and resonance had returned, I was no longer singing through pockets of mucous that robbed me of my natural timbre. So add this to my list of fortuitous concatenation of circumstances in recovery under “physiochemical.”
******************************************************************************
The Lakers won handily last night, another reason for me to rejoice। They are now 6-0 in the playoffs. Only one team that started with such a record in the playoffs has ever failed to win a championship. Yes I know there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, but my beloved Lakers are the best passing team in the league now, displaying oodles of patience to get the best shot while fast-breaking when appropriate. They have no supernatural point (passing, play-making) guard like the Hornets' Chris Paul, but the triangle offense they employ doesn't need one; in it, every player must act as a point guard, a passer, and we are blessed with a number of big men who can pass—Gasol, Odom, Turiaf and Walton (although Walton is really more of a tweener, a swing man). If only Radmonivich could pass we would have five starters who were gifted passers, and good passing has overcome poor rebounding against Utah so far, though I expect them to win a couple of games in predicting a six-game series which the Lakers should win 4-2. If the Lakers sweep I will be surprised.
Meanwhile ugly eastern basketball proceeds, with the wrestling matches of the Celtics vs। the Cavaliers, and the suffocating Detroit defense against the mad three-point shooting Magic। It will likely be Boston and Detroit in the East semifinals and the Lakers and the Hornets in the West, because right now San Antonio, defending champion, seems completely befuddled by Chris Paul, who finished second only to Kobe in the MVP balloting, and based solely on this year's statistics, probably deserved it more.
*******************************************************************
I tried bark in my garden to discourage the cats, as Laurel suggested, but it has been no use। Next I shall try deer netting, and though the aesthetic of draping my porch railing and and flower borders in nylon squares does little for me, my plants will otherwise remain small if at all while the cats keep tramping and the deer keep chomping. The only annual flowers to do well so far are alyssum, which is low to the ground, thus survives trampling, and is apparently not deer-licious. As for perennials, the jasmine and the mints (apple mint, cat mint, mint) and sages (sage and pineapple sage) are doing OK. And to be fair, more of my drugstore (hothouse) flowers have survived than I expected, some clinging to life like the marigolds and petunias, some testing life like the pansies, while some thrive like the alyssum, something I hope for my newly planted sea thrift and lobelia, since they are also essentially ground covers. I should mention that an evil neighborhood cat has torn down whole stems repeatedly from the calla lily just for the fun of it. I caught him in the act. Strange behavior for a cat. Maybe he thinks it's Easter.
On the coast it's cold and windy, so low-lying thick-leaved plants do best। Ice plant would be ideal but since I grew up with it everywhere (in SoCal) I have no intention of planting such a common thing. I'm not a botanical snob but I know what I like, just like Disney: Color! Color! Color! More color than foliage if I can help it. BTW, it's peak rhododendron season out here and a lovely time to visit the Mendocino Coast, just don't move here, please.
How quickly over a thousand words shoot from my fingertips!
Lastly, a new poem:
Fog
It's hard to say whether fog is addition or subtraction
as it leaches color from shore pines, pinus contortus,
painting them slate while the sea's horizon
is lost in indistinction like a chalk line blurred।
All is dulled, dunned, drabbed, sullied
or alternately whitewashed by the bright gray
Flimsier than a negligee, thick as a cataract,
softening all by spell of the sea's breath,
a brume grown opaque as a drop cloth,
it's a lie cast over reality, else a new one
Reach out, rub it between your fingers;
nothing remains but a lick of humidity.
(“brume” = haze)
Kiloneutral but cautious
Thine in Truth and Art
CE
Monday, May 05, 2008
Recovery
I am now in recovery from depression, neither cured not expecting to be It is a chronic disease in my case and it would be unrealistic not to expect another occurrence or two in my remaining lifetime. When I think back on my life, before my diagnosis I suffered 5 major depressions; since I have suffered 3 more. The longest was the recent one, two years, provided I remain in remission. The deepest one was at age 29 when I was finally ushered into treatment.
Thus through age 29 I suffered five major depressions, and since being diagnosed, through age 53, while under treatment, I have suffered three more. This is not statistically significant in terms of prevention, unfortunately, but who knows how much I would have suffered without treatment?Just as alcoholics are in recovery, think of me as a melancholic in in recovery, though this parallel cannot stand much scrutiny, as the latter is more difficult to treat, in my experience.
Now you may rightly ask what concatenation of fortuitous circumstances led to my current recovery. In no particular order:
Spiritual: My friend Eric had a dream about Christ weeping over my body and healing me। About two weeks later, before the new antidepressant had had any effect, I wept in prayer while trying to pray as honestly as I possibly could. For the first time in I don't know how long, I felt some brief, inexplicable connection with the Light, a momentary piercing of the veil, so it seemed.
Chemical: On March 24 my doctor changed my antidepressant again। Within a week we upped it to therapeutic levels. Two-and-a-half weeks later, the usual time frame for response to an antidepressant (2 – 6 weeks), I began to feel a little better. This was on Thursday, April 10, when I was stranded in Lost Hills, CA, with a cracked radiator. Being confronted with a minor crisis was a pleasure in my state, as it got me out of myself. Thanks to a tip about some mechanics who hung around their shop late, we were able to move on the same night. (FGI (for general information) a plastic radiator can't be fixed with “Insta-Weld.” It must be replaced.)
Behavioral and Social: In visiting my daughters and my oldest friend, though cruelly prevented from seeing my grandson, I had a chance to pretend to be myself, to pour myself into the mold of the upbeat, humorous, philosophizing, friendly, garrulous (and sometimes offensive) person I usually am. My second daughter, Keturah, invited me to Happy Hour the next day, April 11, and we had an exotic martini-drinking jamboree/competition at half-price. I was also able to see Sarah perform in a play for only the second time since middle school. And I sat for two hours in an old familiar bar, Joe Jost's, with Eric, talking while trying to avoid any mention of depression. I was so sick of talking about it.
When I returned home I continued to pretend to be myself with dogged courage. There were times when melancholy begged admission, but I refused to discuss my depression। I lied to Kathleen about how I was feeling as a matter of course. I even avoided seeing my psychiatrist because in nearing his office I burst into tears at the memory of all the times I had sat in his office depressed. I told him by e-mail and he understood। This Wednesday I will likely be well enough to see him.
Socially I should also mention that traveling 1200 miles with my stepson, Derek, was a tonic He's funny and upbeat Among other things he taught me the difference between Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap (through a plethora of too-loud examples).
In returning home my volunteer work began to pick up, obligating me to work with others while Iavoiding any mention of my condition. I am now involved with six different volunteer groups, including a musical gig for a group sing with the homeless and mentally ill every Friday.
To sum up, there was Eric's dream and my later prayer; a significant change in medication (I went off two meds and on two others); and the social/behavioral opportunity to be myself, a chance I clung to like a life raft in a flood! Without all three features I do not know if I would have improved, but I consider the change in antidepressants the most important, as without a slight elevation in mood I would not have thought of pretending to be myself. Antidepressants sometimes make you just well enough to get better with other help. And that help comes through doing, not being, as my shrink is fond of saying.
In my next post I hope to create a plan for preventing relapse. Meanwhile I'll re-post my most encouraging poem, many readers' favorite:
Tonic
I will love myself today।
Here are some fuzzy slippers
and a lollipop,
a warm hug and a wet kiss.
Let me tuck this
old familiar blanket
around my shoulders
and read this poem
before I nap.
Whatever I do today,
I’ll approve.
If I spill milk, I’ll clap.
If I button my shirt wrong
it’s a new style.
If I wet my pants
it was on purpose.
My, how well I walk!
How well I speak!
It’s so good to be
good to myself.
Where have I been
all these sad, long years?
Kiloneutral (though ever vigilant),
Craig Erick
Thus through age 29 I suffered five major depressions, and since being diagnosed, through age 53, while under treatment, I have suffered three more. This is not statistically significant in terms of prevention, unfortunately, but who knows how much I would have suffered without treatment?Just as alcoholics are in recovery, think of me as a melancholic in in recovery, though this parallel cannot stand much scrutiny, as the latter is more difficult to treat, in my experience.
Now you may rightly ask what concatenation of fortuitous circumstances led to my current recovery. In no particular order:
Spiritual: My friend Eric had a dream about Christ weeping over my body and healing me। About two weeks later, before the new antidepressant had had any effect, I wept in prayer while trying to pray as honestly as I possibly could. For the first time in I don't know how long, I felt some brief, inexplicable connection with the Light, a momentary piercing of the veil, so it seemed.
Chemical: On March 24 my doctor changed my antidepressant again। Within a week we upped it to therapeutic levels. Two-and-a-half weeks later, the usual time frame for response to an antidepressant (2 – 6 weeks), I began to feel a little better. This was on Thursday, April 10, when I was stranded in Lost Hills, CA, with a cracked radiator. Being confronted with a minor crisis was a pleasure in my state, as it got me out of myself. Thanks to a tip about some mechanics who hung around their shop late, we were able to move on the same night. (FGI (for general information) a plastic radiator can't be fixed with “Insta-Weld.” It must be replaced.)
Behavioral and Social: In visiting my daughters and my oldest friend, though cruelly prevented from seeing my grandson, I had a chance to pretend to be myself, to pour myself into the mold of the upbeat, humorous, philosophizing, friendly, garrulous (and sometimes offensive) person I usually am. My second daughter, Keturah, invited me to Happy Hour the next day, April 11, and we had an exotic martini-drinking jamboree/competition at half-price. I was also able to see Sarah perform in a play for only the second time since middle school. And I sat for two hours in an old familiar bar, Joe Jost's, with Eric, talking while trying to avoid any mention of depression. I was so sick of talking about it.
When I returned home I continued to pretend to be myself with dogged courage. There were times when melancholy begged admission, but I refused to discuss my depression। I lied to Kathleen about how I was feeling as a matter of course. I even avoided seeing my psychiatrist because in nearing his office I burst into tears at the memory of all the times I had sat in his office depressed. I told him by e-mail and he understood। This Wednesday I will likely be well enough to see him.
Socially I should also mention that traveling 1200 miles with my stepson, Derek, was a tonic He's funny and upbeat Among other things he taught me the difference between Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap (through a plethora of too-loud examples).
In returning home my volunteer work began to pick up, obligating me to work with others while Iavoiding any mention of my condition. I am now involved with six different volunteer groups, including a musical gig for a group sing with the homeless and mentally ill every Friday.
To sum up, there was Eric's dream and my later prayer; a significant change in medication (I went off two meds and on two others); and the social/behavioral opportunity to be myself, a chance I clung to like a life raft in a flood! Without all three features I do not know if I would have improved, but I consider the change in antidepressants the most important, as without a slight elevation in mood I would not have thought of pretending to be myself. Antidepressants sometimes make you just well enough to get better with other help. And that help comes through doing, not being, as my shrink is fond of saying.
In my next post I hope to create a plan for preventing relapse. Meanwhile I'll re-post my most encouraging poem, many readers' favorite:
Tonic
I will love myself today।
Here are some fuzzy slippers
and a lollipop,
a warm hug and a wet kiss.
Let me tuck this
old familiar blanket
around my shoulders
and read this poem
before I nap.
Whatever I do today,
I’ll approve.
If I spill milk, I’ll clap.
If I button my shirt wrong
it’s a new style.
If I wet my pants
it was on purpose.
My, how well I walk!
How well I speak!
It’s so good to be
good to myself.
Where have I been
all these sad, long years?
Kiloneutral (though ever vigilant),
Craig Erick
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Moderation
Due to posts either non-germaine or merely self-promoting, I have resorted to the moderation option on this blog। That's a kind noun for deleting interlopers.
I started this blog in the late summer of 2005 and continued it through our trials in Mexico and my subsequent two-year depression. That some would come here not in good faith but only to scribble graffiti saddens me.
At The Melic Review Roundtable poetry board we had about seven good years before the barbarians stormed the gates. I had a policy that adults should be able to ignore the posts of brigands bent on stealing the spirit of communal discourse without policing. Alas, at last, I was proved wrong--and as we switched to censorship the board simply collapsed, after which I put the whole enterprise on hold.
Right now I'm open to editing and publishing again, I'm even toying with the idea of starting a new magazine or resurrecting the old one. (Cyanide capsules may be mailed to my snail address.) Seriously, I know some untapped talent I suspect would make for a riveting magazine, my only impediment being the lack of a literary light also schooled in webmastering who might be willing to devote her gifts to the technical side. Any volunteers should e-mail me and I will try to provide some monetary reward as well, though likely not commensurate with the current commercial market.
Meanwhile my mood is holding, with a few dips, at least stable enough to write about melancholy not in the first person, a poem presently being workshopped at Gazebo and Wild Poetry Forum (at their Biofeedback thread), should you wish to visit the workshop process. I post the poem here for your convenience:
Queen Melancholy
Dressed in perpetual blue,
her smile a wound too wise
for ordinary martyrdom,
with the stealth of a blue-bottle fly
she moves, black-veined wings
pressed on an azure gown.
Though her kiss is bitter
as the almond pit, her name
flows over the tongue
like maple syrup.
“All happens for a reason”
she reassures us
in a smoky cocktail voice,
rendering unreasonable pain
immune to reason's solace.
She will choke you
with a noose of accusations
woven from strictest honesty.
Beware her lying bed.
Great minds have languished there
and dined upon themselves.
I started this blog in the late summer of 2005 and continued it through our trials in Mexico and my subsequent two-year depression. That some would come here not in good faith but only to scribble graffiti saddens me.
At The Melic Review Roundtable poetry board we had about seven good years before the barbarians stormed the gates. I had a policy that adults should be able to ignore the posts of brigands bent on stealing the spirit of communal discourse without policing. Alas, at last, I was proved wrong--and as we switched to censorship the board simply collapsed, after which I put the whole enterprise on hold.
Right now I'm open to editing and publishing again, I'm even toying with the idea of starting a new magazine or resurrecting the old one. (Cyanide capsules may be mailed to my snail address.) Seriously, I know some untapped talent I suspect would make for a riveting magazine, my only impediment being the lack of a literary light also schooled in webmastering who might be willing to devote her gifts to the technical side. Any volunteers should e-mail me and I will try to provide some monetary reward as well, though likely not commensurate with the current commercial market.
Meanwhile my mood is holding, with a few dips, at least stable enough to write about melancholy not in the first person, a poem presently being workshopped at Gazebo and Wild Poetry Forum (at their Biofeedback thread), should you wish to visit the workshop process. I post the poem here for your convenience:
Queen Melancholy
Dressed in perpetual blue,
her smile a wound too wise
for ordinary martyrdom,
with the stealth of a blue-bottle fly
she moves, black-veined wings
pressed on an azure gown.
Though her kiss is bitter
as the almond pit, her name
flows over the tongue
like maple syrup.
“All happens for a reason”
she reassures us
in a smoky cocktail voice,
rendering unreasonable pain
immune to reason's solace.
She will choke you
with a noose of accusations
woven from strictest honesty.
Beware her lying bed.
Great minds have languished there
and dined upon themselves.
My thanks to all who have followed my journey and apologies for delaying the publication of your comments. There is no other apt word for what I am being forced to do than censorship, which I detest. I hope the result will not be as discouraging as the downfall of the Melic poetry board.
Thine,
CE
Sunday, April 27, 2008
New Poems with Self-Critique!
I have not been blogging because my involvement in actual life has increased, aided by the NBA playoffs, in which my Lakers have gone up 3-0 against Denver. I hope there's no letdown for the fourth game.
Meanwhile I will not blog about my slightly improved mood without at least a month behind me.
I can't recall which of my recent poems I posted here and which I didn't and in what form. So consider this a redux of recent works in a more polished (though never finished) form.
*********************
Not much of a blog, was it? Today, April 28, is another day. And I'm hungover and bloated from gorging Thai food and drink for the first time in years.
My chief literary correspondent and critic (next to Kathleen) sent me some illuminating critique about my poetry, and to simplify, argued that I needed more passion, as if my intellect were a nail in the tire of emotion. I concur.
I had my poetry labeled "inhuman" long ago at a certain forum. Part of this defect is my deplorable tendency to over-revise many poems, squeezing the juice out of them on the way to "perfection." I've probably ruined more poems than I've helped.
I can't help it--it's searching for the Logos through logos--the ineluctably indomitable, the predictably unavoidable, the kairos moment when time stops and you hold experience in your hand like a baseball.
Squeeze the seams!
Just say "No" to Kilorats,
CE
****************
Dare
Because I doubt my being
I drape you in words
like papier mache'
that when you withdraw
I have a hollow to inhabit.
Everyone is Jesus to me,
everyone who leaves
a space to occupy.
Notice how many hollows
letters contain
and the spaces
between words:
Dare you to find me!
Too Many Voices
I've lost myself.
Some mad imposter
puts on airs,
practices smiles,
greets my mailman,
pages through
yearbooks and journals
seeking my erasure.
The angels, in particular
the obese ones
dedicated to pleasure,
laugh, it is their job.
If I could laugh
I might remember.
In my dream
I lead the sheep to safety
only to discover
at last, the joke:
They are all
wearing my face.
Each time I wake
I lose another piece of me.
Out of charity
I embrace what's left.
There was too much
of me anyway,
too many voices, a chorus
of purloined identities.
Valentine 2008
You are a granite waterfall, my love.
Your stone is slippery and sensuous.
I fall into a pool beneath your feet
And lie upon a thousand polished stones.
I look up at the alders overhead
And marvel at how you give yourself to them
Without diminishment, without attrition,
A steady miracle of sacrifice.
Downstream trout fingerlings mouth bits of algae
Because your pounding fed them oxygen.
The vines that weave the cliffs live off your spray.
Bright orange salamanders make their bed there.
A pale succulent grows in your cleft,
Its purple stalk a wand of yellow stars.
Inside the moss-lipped haven of your granite
I hide behind your thundering skirt of water.
Your clarity dissolves all self-deception.
I would not recognize myself without you.
The shelter of trees is never so generous
As your pouring and thinning of yourself
Into the forest air. I kneel and drink
And like the alder rise up satisfied.
Meanwhile I will not blog about my slightly improved mood without at least a month behind me.
I can't recall which of my recent poems I posted here and which I didn't and in what form. So consider this a redux of recent works in a more polished (though never finished) form.
*********************
Not much of a blog, was it? Today, April 28, is another day. And I'm hungover and bloated from gorging Thai food and drink for the first time in years.
My chief literary correspondent and critic (next to Kathleen) sent me some illuminating critique about my poetry, and to simplify, argued that I needed more passion, as if my intellect were a nail in the tire of emotion. I concur.
I had my poetry labeled "inhuman" long ago at a certain forum. Part of this defect is my deplorable tendency to over-revise many poems, squeezing the juice out of them on the way to "perfection." I've probably ruined more poems than I've helped.
I can't help it--it's searching for the Logos through logos--the ineluctably indomitable, the predictably unavoidable, the kairos moment when time stops and you hold experience in your hand like a baseball.
Squeeze the seams!
Just say "No" to Kilorats,
CE
****************
Dare
Because I doubt my being
I drape you in words
like papier mache'
that when you withdraw
I have a hollow to inhabit.
Everyone is Jesus to me,
everyone who leaves
a space to occupy.
Notice how many hollows
letters contain
and the spaces
between words:
Dare you to find me!
Too Many Voices
I've lost myself.
Some mad imposter
puts on airs,
practices smiles,
greets my mailman,
pages through
yearbooks and journals
seeking my erasure.
The angels, in particular
the obese ones
dedicated to pleasure,
laugh, it is their job.
If I could laugh
I might remember.
In my dream
I lead the sheep to safety
only to discover
at last, the joke:
They are all
wearing my face.
Each time I wake
I lose another piece of me.
Out of charity
I embrace what's left.
There was too much
of me anyway,
too many voices, a chorus
of purloined identities.
Valentine 2008
You are a granite waterfall, my love.
Your stone is slippery and sensuous.
I fall into a pool beneath your feet
And lie upon a thousand polished stones.
I look up at the alders overhead
And marvel at how you give yourself to them
Without diminishment, without attrition,
A steady miracle of sacrifice.
Downstream trout fingerlings mouth bits of algae
Because your pounding fed them oxygen.
The vines that weave the cliffs live off your spray.
Bright orange salamanders make their bed there.
A pale succulent grows in your cleft,
Its purple stalk a wand of yellow stars.
Inside the moss-lipped haven of your granite
I hide behind your thundering skirt of water.
Your clarity dissolves all self-deception.
I would not recognize myself without you.
The shelter of trees is never so generous
As your pouring and thinning of yourself
Into the forest air. I kneel and drink
And like the alder rise up satisfied.
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