The Reasonable Ogre

The Reasonable Ogre

The reasonable ogre
Shelters in the cave
Of a warm, hollow hand:
Smash, celebrate, remember him.

31 December 2011

Apparition

(Seen looking northwest from Eglinton Avenue, Toronto, 25 December 2011, 12:53 p.m. Not PhotoShopped.)

Nothing Else (a poem by Charles Simic)

Friends of the small hours of the night:
Stub of a pencil, small notebook,
Reading lamp on the table,
Making me welcome in your circle of light.

I care little the house is dark and cold
With you sharing my absorption
In this book in which now and then a sentence
Is worth repeating again in a whisper.

Without you, there'd be only my own pale face
Reflected in the black windowpane,
And the bare trees and deep snow
Waiting for me out there in the dark.

found without looking

God is only a name for our wonder. We know that supernaturalism is a lie, and therefore miss its truth as myth—as the theory of human correspondences.

I cannot live without the belief that there is a purposeful connection that I may yet understand which I can serve. I cannot be faithless to my own conviction of value.

Alfred Kazin, from Alfred Kazin’s Journals

Every seat has...

"Every seat has a full view of the universe."
(admission line announcement, Hayden Planetarium, NYC)

The Meditations come through once again

Love the discipline you know, and let it support you.
Marcus Aurelius

Kultur Kalt*

O Save Us
from the perfect
story (movie or
book) of lovers
who break up
or endure another
loss and learn
a little or
even a lot
in the affirming

process


*a message brought to you by
SPOTTEM
(The Society for the Prevention of Trauma as a Teachable Moment)

Adverbial

To have a good life? Get one? Obtain it?
No. To live well.

To give what I can to others? Share with them?
To help them live well.

And when claims clash, to resolve
by compromise? Submission? Force?

By uniting, to live well.
All in any, in every, to live well.

But “narrow the scope, focus, in order
to succeed”? Enlarge it, rather.

To attend to less than everything
is to elect successive oblivions.

My imperfections, my human limits, bar me
from these absolutes. From living well?

Hard Drive, Team Lift

Constantly revising definitions, believed-to-be definitive experiences, in the light of new information from further experience. Former limit positions—good, bad, other—expanded forcibly. I thought that was trouble. I didn’t know what trouble was. That passed for love then. What was it, really? And to think I once considered such work intolerably oppressive...who would welcome it as a “light day” now....

(A curious note is how typically such formulations demean the former self whose conceptions have now to be revised. A seemingly gratuitous act of temporal terrorism. After all, how could he/she have known differently?)

So far, perhaps, we behave no more blamefully than farmers who, as we clear a few feet further out into the wilderness, must put up a new fence marking the limit of land we claim as under cultivation, as ours. And the farmer cannot be very much faulted either for telling himself at each day’s end that the work is done, so that his sleep is not plagued by visions of an infinite wilderness, infinite fences.

But what sane farmer would tell himself that what is inside his current fence is all there is?

That there are not a million varieties of swamp and thicket he will never encounter, or a million ways to wrestle from them a livable space.

Ikebana

Artfully impaled
in a shallow, weighted bowl

by one who understands
and can balance

their purples, greens and creams
the iris and the lily

are not less beautifully
and consolingly

themselves, rooted
in a soil of needles

Apostrophe

Apostrophes of brazen light,
scintillant scimitars
flash out day’s contraction
from cobalt dusk
high above the fire two tend on a beach.

“Shooting stars? Satellites?” (Aliens
he will not venture)—says the boy, poking
driftwood splints under the pan of onions and potatoes.
The other’s pause is tolerant and brief.

“Jet planes,” he says, flipping their dinner
with one wide-wristed shake of the pan’s long handle.
“The setting sun catches their fuselage.
You see it most when they take off or land.”

Five decades on, the west-facing pane
at suppertime returns that molten oriflamme,
topaz bursts from the
cigar-shaped vessels ferrying men and women
between cities, singing a star’s descent.

Those flashes are long-lived because they take
no life nor bring it. Telling is their gorgeous limit.
It falls to one of short duration
to help the sun down—
but that spark, too, was kindled on that beach.

If a man arrives

If a man arrives
In the sickbed room
With care-fogged eyes
And chin unfirm

Embrace him first
For his evident plight
The way that worst
Has conquered his sight

And help him be calm
Till his namesake comes—
We travel as one
Though by different suns

The Lily Pond (online resources)

The following are updated links connected with my memoir The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (Biblioasis, 2008).

The Lily Pond - Talks

(These links are also available from the upper right of this blog page.)

1. Talk and slide show: "The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis"

I gave this talk at the book's launch on October 9, 2008 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, where, as I describe in the book, I was once hospitalized for eighteen months. Various aspects of living with mental illness are discussed during the 47-minute presentation, illustrated by readings from The Lily Pond. The paired slides have a story, or stories, of their own. The sequence of images on the left documents the attempt, which my wife Heather and I made over one summer, to grow a water lily on our apartment balcony in order to obtain a cover image. The right-hand images come from a 90-minute walk I took one spring day through the grounds of the old Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, a place to which I was nearly sent for long-term care.

2. A 23-minute talk (audio only) given at St. Clement's Church, Toronto on November 2, 2008: "A Slice of Water"

3. The text of a talk given at The University of Toronto on March 11, 2009: "On and Off the Learning Curve: Notes by a Bipolar Student"

4. Post on mental health topics can be found throughout this blog, especially the numbered series entitled "Talking the Walk".

Reviews

1. "The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis" review by Mark Callanan, Quill & Quire (October 2008).

2. "When madness rules your life" by Robyn Sarah, The Globe and Mail (October 4, 2008). This article discusses memoirs on mental illness by Kay Redfield Jamison, Mark Vonnegut, and Mike Barnes.

3. "The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis" review by Rachel Bravmann, bp (Fall 2008).

4. "Achieving self-definition" review by Shane Neilson, MD, Canadian Medical Association Journal (January 6 2009).

5. "Man challenges accepted wisdom. Man wins" review by R. Belkind, ShareCare AmiQuebec newsletter (Winter 2009, page 5).


Interviews

1. The Danforth Review interview by Nathaniel Moore.

2. Biblioasis interview by Dan Wells.

Book Excerpt

1. The Lily Pond

The Lily Pond (online resources)

The following are updated links connected with my memoir The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (Biblioasis, 2008).

The Lily Pond - Talks

(These links are also available from the upper right of this blog page.)

1. Talk and slide show: "The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis"

I gave this talk at the book's launch on October 9, 2008 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, where, as I describe in the book, I was once hospitalized for eighteen months. Various aspects of living with mental illness are discussed during the 47-minute presentation, illustrated by readings from The Lily Pond. The paired slides have a story, or stories, of their own. The sequence of images on the left documents the attempt, which my wife Heather and I made over one summer, to grow a water lily on our apartment balcony in order to obtain a cover image. The right-hand images come from a 90-minute walk I took one spring day through the grounds of the old Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, a place to which I was nearly sent for long-term care.

2. A 23-minute talk (audio only) given at St. Clement's Church, Toronto on November 2, 2008: "A Slice of Water"

3. The text of a talk given at The University of Toronto on March 11, 2009: "On and Off the Learning Curve: Notes by a Bipolar Student"

4. Post on mental health topics can be found throughout this blog, especially the numbered series entitled "Talking the Walk".

Reviews

1. "The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis" review by Mark Callanan, Quill & Quire (October 2008).

2. "When madness rules your life" by Robyn Sarah, The Globe and Mail (October 4, 2008). This article discusses memoirs on mental illness by Kay Redfield Jamison, Mark Vonnegut, and Mike Barnes.

3. "The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis" review by Rachel Bravmann, bp (Fall 2008).

4. "Achieving self-definition" review by Shane Neilson, MD, Canadian Medical Association Journal (January 6 2009).

5. "Man challenges accepted wisdom. Man wins" review by R. Belkind, ShareCare AmiQuebec newsletter (Winter 2009, page 5).


Interviews

1. The Danforth Review interview by Nathaniel Moore.

2. Biblioasis interview by Dan Wells.

Book Excerpt

1. The Lily Pond

Klee Machine

t w e e
t t w e
e t t w
e e t t
w e e t


t w e e~~~~~t

Pry Bars

I’m trying to learn to trust myself.
Why, are you trustworthy?

It lacks depth.
Worse, it lacks surface.

I control my destiny.
Is it that small?

Nothing can be done.
Everything may be tried.

Intimacy

Can I tell you a secret? There are two things I could tell you about myself. The first is just a single fact, but it is unforgettable. When you hear it, an aspect of my life will instantly become clear to you; I will seem to jump into sharper focus. It is like the lightning flash that gives an incandescent glimpse, and whenever you recall it, I will stand before you vividly. The other secret is much more important but also more elusive. It is harder to explain and harder to understand. As you listen to it (it will take a while to tell), you will feel simultaneously that you are understanding more and becoming more confused, drawing closer to a central truth even as it slips away. Soon after you hear it, or as you are hearing it, you will begin to forget it. The experience of having been told will endure, while the substance of what was told will evaporate. It will be in every respect the opposite of the first secret: essential but unmemorable. Like fog, it surrounds, envelops, clings to, and leaves. Which secret do you want to hear?

Tell me both, or neither.