2009

Furrows

2012-02-06T16:22:00.003-05:00

Found circa 1962, by my grandfather, in a furrow on his wheat farm outside Boharm, Saskatchewan. He mailed it to me in a small cardboard box, swaddled in layers of cotton batting. No writer usually (no time!), he took the time, the year before he died, to pen a story to his seven-year-old grandson, conjecturing about the Indian who might have shot a buffalo on the open plain, who knew how many hundreds or thousands of years before.

It was the treasure of my childhood, never more than an arm’s length from my bed, where I could retrieve and study it. A perfect arrowhead, with a gracile point, and a notched base so cleanly made it was impossible not to imagine it secured (by hide strips soaked and shrunk, I’d read somewhere) to the shaft. Strangely two-toned in colour: whitish as though frosted on top, but an almost translucent amber underneath.

Lost one day, it must be forty years ago. No warning or clue. Just gone. Both the arrowhead in its box and the note with the story under it. Missing it bitterly, I sensed the actions of the perfect thief, as perfect in his or her way as the arrowhead. The thief that, knowing what you value most, goes straight past your wallet or your passport to a faded cardboard box with yellowing cotton. An intimate thief. The secret thief.

Found the other day, as I was cleaning out my parents’ house prior to putting it up for sale. The tiny box, its cotton nest now beige, at the bottom of a bigger box at the rear of the lowest shelf in storage—the remotest corner of the house. Intact, the arrowhead, but with its tip snapped off along with one side of its base. Still no note.

Postrscript to the Girl with Long Black Hair

2012-01-28T13:12:00.003-05:00

To live outside the law you must be honest. —Dylan

And that, too, might help to answer your objection that an ogre can’t be reasonable. For perhaps the smaller ogres can’t, the regular random hustlers after flesh, obeying the usual and well-known laws of predation.

But for the largest ogres, the true monarchs of the dark: these have need of codes for their feeding. These will not, cannot, deprive without rightful ceremony and strict adherence to a rule.

The Reasonable Ogre

2012-01-26T11:05:00.002-05:00

www.reasonableogre.com

“How can an ogre be reasonable?” asked the girl with long black hair. “They’re not like that. It’s simply impossible.”

I tried to explain my point of view on ogres, but couldn’t come up with the right words at the moment. Not anything that would let her see things as I saw them, anyway.

“It just depends on what kinds of ogres you mean, or maybe which ones you’ve met,” I said finally. “Obviously, we haven’t met the same ogres.”

www.reasonableogre.com

Ogre Sequence

2012-01-08T22:48:00.018-05:00

shard

counterclock

The Reasonable Ogre

2011-12-31T17:50:00.005-05:00

The Reasonable Ogre

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

31 December 2011

Apparition

2011-12-27T14:18:00.003-05:00

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

Nothing Else (a poem by Charles Simic)

2011-08-21T12:25:00.003-04:00

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

2011-08-21T12:15:00.003-04:00

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...

2011-06-29T14:31:00.004-04:00

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

The Meditations come through once again

2011-05-04T23:46:00.004-04:00

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

Kultur Kalt*

2011-04-24T14:42:00.001-04:00

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

2011-04-22T00:31:00.004-04:00

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

2011-04-22T00:03:00.004-04:00

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

2011-04-12T13:51:00.005-04:00

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

2011-04-10T11:48:00.002-04:00

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

2011-04-02T20:10:00.007-04:00

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)

2011-02-15T19:55:00.003-05:00

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)

2011-02-11T21:54:00.049-05:00

Klee Machine

2011-01-14T00:27:00.003-05:00

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

2011-01-08T22:27:00.003-05:00

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

2011-01-02T21:13:00.003-05:00

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.

December haiku

2010-12-19T23:35:00.005-05:00

where leaves were now hangs

pendulous the hornet’s nest

great and globed and gray

The Tale of Good Enough

2010-12-06T13:14:00.004-05:00

The Tale of Good Enough

The Betterthans were a large and vigorous clan, known to all in the village. Each member of the family was superior in one way or another, and sometimes in several ways. It was no wonder that every villager looked first to the Betterthans to find a husband or wife, an employee, or a friend.

Choosing the right Betterthan was no simple matter, however. It wasn’t like picking out one of the Bests (who, if they had ever really lived in the village, had left long ago). For every Betterthan had, along with undisputed fine points, one or more flaws. Sometimes obvious, sometimes hard to spot. Sometimes trivial, sometimes serious indeed. Over time they would emerge. Eventually you might find yourself with someone whose outstanding qualities more than made up for a few minor defects. Or you could wind up with someone whose superficial virtues paled beside egregious faults.

Knowing this, some people jumped in with their first instincts, made their choice of Betterthan and hoped it would pan out. Others conducted long and anxious deliberations, which somewhat improved their ability to predict, but also, not infrequently, wore them out.

Sometimes, to one worn down in just this way, there appeared a member of another clan: the Goodenoughs. They made no promise larger than their name.

And the one seeking a spouse might conclude, “Leave Betterthan for later. For now, this Goodenough will do.”

And the one seeking a worker, “Goodenough will do.”

And the one in need of a friend, “Goodenough will do.”

And, sure enough, the marriage, factory, friendship was built with Goodenough as the ground floor. And seeing that it could be done, others followed suit. And soon none, or very few, bothered with the risky spin of Betterthans. And none, or very few, perceived a loss.

And almost no one would undo the intricate expanding architecture—kids, houses, factories, relationships, whole movements and histories—predicated on the once-provisional choice of Goodenough.

Only once in a great while would one, remembering the shine of the Betterthans, round with vehemence upon a mate or tradesman or friend, and exclaim, “You’re not Goodenough. You’re not even Good. You’re Horrible. You’re a Disaster.”

Only to receive the mild retort: “I’m none of those. And never claimed to be.”

“You said you would be Goodenough.”

“I never did. I said I was Goodenough on the day we met. And so I was, then. Goodenough.”

Before there was PhotoShop...

2010-11-14T12:27:00.006-05:00

...there was Window Glass.

Highland Train

Return Ferry

Not

2010-10-28T23:57:00.002-04:00

Three times today the radio (different channels) announced the murders of “three prostitutes.” Not women; not persons—it struck me that it is commonplace to refer to sex trade workers by their livelihood, deferring, or omitting entirely, any mention of their humanity. One station mentioned that the victims were women a few sentences later; the other two never bothered.

When did you last hear a crime story lead paragraph about the murder of three mechanics, or administrative assistants, or genetic researchers, or claims adjusters?

Bill Had

2010-09-05T13:31:00.003-04:00

Bill Had

Two deaf parents who taught him sign language
which he forgot after they died.
Next to mine, the best beat-up old denim jacket
in the crew.
Small hands for such a big man.
Thick dark hair, greenish-brown eyes, and one of the handsomest
faces I’ve seen outside of movies.
A talent for mimicry.
An irritating habit of taking things too far.
An endearing one of apologizing when he did.
Small learning and large curiosity.
A pretty short attention span.
An unshakeable belief that women ejaculated
when they came.
Many girlfriends.
Dozens of friends, including ex-girlfriends.
A part-time DJing job where he met many of his friends
and girlfriends and scored high-quality drugs.
Inoperable colon cancer at age 28.
A cop costume so good it almost got him beaten up
by Halloween partyers who had flushed their dope
until he shared out his own which was better.
A filthy apartment piled with pizza boxes.
A grin no one could resist.
Nimble feet, with which he performed amusing untrained
tap, soft shoe, and jig.
Zero ambition.
Occasional mean moods but no cruel bone in his body.
A Jimmy Cagney routine in which while singing “Yankee
Doodle Dandy” he ran at a wall and up it and back-
flipped off of it, landing on his feet,
which never should have worked because Cagney
was a shrimp and Bill was linebacker-sized
but I saw it, many times, from 1981 to 1985,
during the long afternoons when the galleries
were empty.

Old Master Memo

2010-09-05T13:11:00.004-04:00

Old Master Memo

Not how it happens,
old friend, not how it starts:

The choir doesn’t erupt in full throat
off the bat. They fidget and scrape,
murmur and stir, sing scales
and snatches of old tunes;

they’ve been known to bellow stale limericks
or hum a kazoo
before launching into
what they really intend.

It’s an indispensable rite
which gives a foretaste
of precisely nothing.

How could you of the icy
blue caves forget that?

How much

2010-09-05T13:05:00.003-04:00

How much might change if you just started admitting, to yourself and to others, what does and does not interest you? How much might follow from just that start?

Limits of a Holiday

2010-09-04T11:52:00.003-04:00

Limits of a Holiday

Nine
days
home
and
already
I’m
shouting.

A Gain

2010-08-28T17:30:00.003-04:00

The riches are not where you thought.
And though you canʼt say where they are,
whether Tantalus-close or Hubble-shift-far,
they are not, or not all, where your care/fears
had placed them. At least youʼve found that.

The Sole Question

2010-07-31T21:27:00.001-04:00

How may the heart be closed
and then reopened,
the seal in miser’s blood
stamped, cooled–broken?

PC death with tomatoes

2010-07-26T17:36:00.010-04:00

Fits

2010-07-14T21:39:00.002-04:00

So many, many, many misfits
hanging barely on just this side of quit
and fall;
half-fits, ex-fits, never-to-be-ever fits
knocking beyond the banquet hall–

If no Great Tailor or conspiracy of shits,
what stint of heart or intellect fashioned the fit
so small?

My Television Appearance

2010-07-10T12:30:00.006-04:00

The Throw

In late January of 2006, my novel Catalogue Raisonné was nearing the end of its short run. Since publication in October, it had sold 150 copies and received one lukewarm review in Books in Canada. I’d read at the launch, at a literary festival, and at a library book club. All well before Christmas. No other venues had panned out and I’d had no communication about the book from anyone in several weeks. Time was almost up.

Television might be my last best shot, I thought. I had no idea how one got on it but I thought I had an angle.

I looked up the local station for my hometown and found the online contact for the director of the noon program, a half hour talk show with a male and female host. I crafted an e-mail pitching me as a guest on Mac’n Mo.

I’d grown up in the city, I explained, which had figured in all five of my books. More importantly, my current novel was a mystery set in the city’s art gallery circa 1984 and featuring many well-known neighbourhoods, restaurants and nightspots.

The show was light, I remembered. Short badminton rallies between the quipping hosts. To be considered as their birdie, I played up the local colour and mystery angles. While working in prizes, shortlists and reviews as entry credentials. It was a more delicate writing job than I expected. At one point I deleted the phrases “I’d be pleased” and “available anytime.” Then reinserted them. It was harder than a job application, since I could form no firm picture of the person at the other end. Who he was, what might impress him.

I read it over a few more times and pushed Send. You never know, I thought.

Five minutes later the phone rang in the other room. The director.

As soon as he’d confirmed that I was the e-mail writer, he asked:

“Why haven’t I heard of you?”

Surprised by the question, I mumbled awkwardly.

“Why haven’t I heard of you?” A hard voice, hurried. It got my back up.

How many small-press Canadian authors have you heard of? I wondered. Or large-press?

But I got out some jocular platitudes about small-press invisibility, “flying under the radar,” that seemed to reassure him. Perhaps mainly that I could quip under pressure.

“We can fit you in Monday,” he said. “But I need to see the book.”

It was Thursday. I looked at my watch. “I can ExpressPost it today. You’ll have it by tomorrow.”

“Fine. If you don’t hear from me, we need you in the Green Room by 10:30.”

He was gone. I sat by the phone, thinking: How is this possible? This haste. Whatever I thought of most of its shows, I thought of TV, the medium, as a big, sought-after deal. Then I thought a bit longer. Two other guests, he’d said. Five days a week. 15 X 52. Say, 700 bodies a year, allowing for some regulars and repeats.

A lot of content.

I bubble-packed the book and got it to the post office two minutes before it closed. Heard nothing further. I was on.
______________________________

The old station was gone, or perhaps just covered. A dull silver cube occupied exactly the same square of ground, leaving the strip of grass and parking lot I remembered. It looked as if a huge box–wrapped in aluminum foil, shiny side in–had been lowered over the previous building.

Low-budget sci-fi, I thought, looking at the gray sheen from beside my car. The colony outpost. Or Silverfinger’s lair. I recalled the shining cubes of Woody Allen’s Sleeper, including the quaking, closet-sized “Orgasmatron” he’d stumbled blissfully out of.

You don’t know, I reminded myself sternly.

You don’t know was a kind of mantra I’d hit on, the sum of the self-coaching I’d given myself before my first TV appearance. You don’t know anything about TV (true). Don’t default to easy cynicism. Stay open. Remember what you’re there to do: talk about the book.

Inside, a security guard reading a magazine didn’t look up as I passed. The corridor hadn’t been cleaned recently. The elevator at its end was ancient, confirming my sense of a sheath-like facade. When the doors opened, I was taken aback by the amount of grime on the walls. A crumpled chip bag lay in one corner.

Off-camera, I thought. The exterior, which could be hosed down, might be needed for some establishing shots. Or a new intro sequence. Not this, though.

You don’t know.

The Green Room was dirty. My housekeeping eye isn’t stringent, but a glance showed me dustballs, more crumpled snack bags, styrofoam cups with dried dark sediments, dust everywhere. As I perched on the edge of the ratty couch, I thought of Saturday’s dry cleaning bill for my suit.

Another guest arrived. A woman with two little dogs. She was wearing slacks and a T-shirt. I felt stiff in my suit and tie. She asked why I was there. Said she did a pet spot two or three times a year. Looked at ease, a takeout bag in her hand.

Rick, the director, came in.

We shook hands. “Hey, Judy!” he said. As he ran through procedures with me, he kept glancing at his watch. A large wall clock was right beside us.

I felt You don’t know losing ground to sleaze and haste. Like a sand castle eaten by dirty little waves.

“Ed’s late,” he said, to Judy. “Mike, you’ll go first. Judy, you’ll be our sandwich filling.” A grim smile. Did he have another kind? Then he left.

The lead dog lunged forward, got stubby legs around my calf. Its companion followed. The dry cleaner’s courteous old face came into my mind. I looked at Judy. She pulled back mildly on the leash, then let them go at it.
______________________________

The makeup woman was overweight and sloppily dressed, badly made-up herself. Thick orange lipstick. Bright rouge circles. (No one will believe this, I thought. How could every cliché be true?)

In the hallway Rick and another man passed us, muttering.

“They haven’t heard from Ed,” said the makeup lady.

“Who’s Ed?”

Her eyes popped in surprise. “Our political analyst? The main guest?”

I’d forgotten completely about the federal election. It was today. And they were still short a guest on Thursday?

“Can I see where I’m going?” I asked.

Another eye-pop. “The studio?”

“Yes.”

We went through the door beyond makeup. Two brown plaid couches, of the faded recroom quality we used to call fart-catchers, made an L on a square of blue. White light. The setup small. Just enough to furnish a lens. Beyond it, a dimness with machinery, a man on a stool eating a candy bar. He dropped the wrapper on the floor.

The set looked like what a family of modest means, forced to move in a hurry, had decided to leave with Goodwill.

You don’t know was gone. Dissolved.

Get through this had replaced it.
______________________________

I sat in a high swivel chair, like a barber’s chair. The makeup woman swabbed orangey-brown onto my face.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

When I opened them, two well-dressed people with orange faces were looking at me. The man was grinning.

“Bryan,” he said. We shook hands. “And this is Sherry.” She smiled at me. “So you’re our author.”

I nodded, caught myself gaping in the mirror. Closed my mouth. TV was making me mute. The one thing I’d told myself must not happen.

The hosts exchanged a look. Bryan punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Just be ready when we throw to you, okay, Mike?”

Then asked me how to pronounce the title of my novel. I told him. Friends had warned me I’d regret using a French art term. That had come true.

“We’ll introduce you, then throw to you here. Then you come on. That’s it!”

They were gone. Except for the makeup woman, now slouched in a chair sipping a Coke, everyone here just popped in and out. Nothing lasted longer than thirty seconds.

The throw. Outside of sports–where you could throw a ball or a game–my only association with the phrase came from Holden Caulfield’s elevator pimp: “Five bucks a throw, fifteen bucks till noon.”

But I could gather the meaning here. A batter-on-deck shot of me in the dressing room.

Judy came in for her makeup. The makeup woman warned her to stay out of my throw line.

“How many times, Bev?” said Judy. She had a chilly smile. Where were her dogs?

I fell into another of the dazes I’d warned myself against. The place had a lulling effect, or I lulled myself defensively against it. Dissipating all the adrenaline and sense of mission I’d felt coming in.

Mac’n Mo the last names, I thought idly. First of the last....Mac-something, Mo-something. Speculations like little clouds drifted through my mind.

“CAT-A-LOGUE R-R-R-AI-SON-ÉE!” boomed suddenly through the air. Bryan’s drawn-out roar sounded uncannily like fight announcer Michael Buffer bellowing the name of an unknown challenger.

And then a camera of unseemly size was jostling into position below me in the cramped space. Pointing up.

“Don’t watch the monitor,” Bev hissed quietly.

Too late. My eyes darted around, taking in slivers of herself and Judy, then found myself, my face, orange and elongated, open-mouthed. I closed my lips on a vapid smile.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t write in a couple more victims, eh, Sherry?” I heard, even louder. Closer yet nowhere.

The smile in the monitor tightened. The eyes stared.

The camera swivelled abruptly away, the cameraman scrambling after it.

“Go!” Judy’s hiss and shove between my shoulders.
______________________________

At home in the bathroom, I wiped at the crusted makeup with a damp cloth. It had got on my shirt collar and my suit lapels–more dry cleaning. I washed my face. Then stripped and showered.

So now you know.

Did I know? TV must have degrees, like everything else. Mac’n Mo wasn’t Charlie Rose. But something told me they would share essentials. The worst fast food franchise still preps you for the best.

About my time under the lights I remembered little. What I’d done or said was a blank. Afterwards, I stayed on for the dog lady and the election analyst. The dogs molested my legs at intervals, creating a running gag. The cameraman dropped another wrapper. I could see litter everywhere beyond the lights. Crumples of crap and heaped junk, all of it under the mildly shining, shawl-like dust.

The makeup marred some people more than others, I noticed (it helped no one). It most nearly suited Bryan's booming bonhomie, like a jock’s painted-on tan. But it made the quieter Sherry look older. Drying, it gave her fine wrinkles, so that I was surprised to see, close-up, an unlined, youthful face within it.

(I had only lurid clues of what it had done to me. Despite a wipe-off that had felt thorough, Bev left me with warpaint smears on my cheeks and forehead. I didn’t see the orange slashes until I got home. Yet no one had given me a second glance when, on my way back, I cast my ballot at the elementary school near my apartment. Truly, a universal franchise.)

A few days later, two friends dropped by with a tape they’d made of the show.

“You watch it,” I said. “I’ll make the drinks.”

But their barely suppressed barks of laughter brought me back out of the kitchen. What the hell, I thought.

The elongated leer of the throw, in merciless close-up, couldn’t help but summon Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Boulevard. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

But the face was middle-aged male, shot from way below (why?), with the already large forehead made bigger by the thin, swab-slicked hair. A very long, bulbed effect. The black hole of mouth. Familiar, somehow.

Yes.

Munch’s O-mouthed screamer on the bridge.

But that was only awful and, yes, hilarious. Not surprising. What surprised was my five minutes of talk. Given the state I’d been in, I expected awkward silence broken by prompted blurts. But I was lucid. Animated. Cogently summarizing my novel. Leaning forward into questions. Engaged. What I’d wanted after all: talking, really talking, about my book.

And totally wrong. As wrong as my throw-scream.

We turned it off and, drinking, analyzed why. Genuine interest and enthusiasm, unless coolly muted, came out as geekish caricature on camera. Those film actor interviews where they talked about scaling down from the stage. Minimalism.

Either that or strongly over-the-top. Bryan’s braying gags right on. Right for the noonday box. They shot, somehow, clean over the moon to land safe in clownish fraternity.

The box had its laws and skewed by them. Judy’s chill warmed up a degree in the lens, suggesting sophistication. Sherry’s flitting anxiety became solicitude, the mother to Bryan’s goofy teen.

Only ardency, earthbound eagerness, went badly wide.

Bryan and Sherry were too experienced to look concerned. And maybe they weren’t; I was talking at least. But they kept trying to lighten it up, tossing me lines to quip with (“Er, Hannibal Lector doesn’t make an appearance, does he?”). I tapped these back (“Saving him for the sequel”) and continued talking. Not manically, but with obvious engagement. But next to Bryan, engagement looked like obsession. The long, fat wink he gave me at commercial, after Sherry had thrown to Judy (who caught it smartly), looked like the visual equivalent of a gasp of relief. Over and out.

Like Holden, I’d fumbled the throw and what came after, undone by a more pressing need for conversation.

A review of my novel Catalogue Raisonné

2010-07-03T11:44:00.003-04:00

The Antigonish Review
161. (Spring 2010): 99-101.
Review by Darryl Whetter

Catalogue Raisonné
Mike Barnes
238 pp.
$24.95
ISBN 0-9735971-9-4

With its keen, imaginative attention to the varied operations of a mid-sized Canadian art gallery, Mike Barnes’s novel Catalogue Raisonné invites an obvious architectural metaphor. Quite simply, Catalogue Raisonné has a superb blueprint, and its many successes follow from its enabling design. From its inception, the novel triangulates art, careerism and society. Barnes shrewdly augments those triangulated inquiries in choosing a gallery security guard as his protagonist. Paul and the other guards are steadily reminded of their low status in the gallery’s repeatedly articulated pecking order. Circling the gallery’s many rooms and deepening scandals, Paul generally enjoys his view from the margins, at least until events turn deadly.

With the foundation of a gallery setting and its marginal protagonist, Catalogue Raisonné manages to avoid Can Lit’s two most common mistakes in writing about work. Generally, too much of our fiction falls into the Hollywood trap of ignoring the workaday necessities of earning a living. Paul and Angela, his romantic cohabitant, both work at the gallery in low-paying jobs. Refreshingly, we see characters who worry about rent increases and can only afford cocaine for really special occasions (the novel is set in 1984). Barnes can and does write illuminatingly and rewardingly about the intricacies of brushstrokes and shading, but never gratuitously fills pages with a homework-heavy techno-porn devoted to the chemistry of oil on canvass. He’s confident and reader-friendly enough to show his own eye for art without ever losing his story, as when he refers to the “suicidal stasis” in an Alex Coville painting. Unlike Michael Ondaatje, Jane Urquhart or Carol Shields, Barnes knows he’s writing a story, not a how-to manual. Refreshingly, this novel includes normal, clock-punching citizens who happen to paint, not an arts aristocracy or speculation about some past European master.

Plot has become an endangered species in Canadian fiction, yet Catalogue Raisonné cradles its varied strengths of characterization, lively prose and a keen social and psychological eye within a steadily evolving plot. Paul, a former punk musician, is not the only misfit working security. Sean, or Mumbles as the others call him, prefers to police the most remote and empty rooms of the gallery to better work on his epic poetry. Another attendant, Robert, works endlessly on a symphony and cohabits with his sister Claudia, a neurotic painter. Paul and Robert discuss the gallery, art, and life during their regular chess games. When these idle speculations turn to how a painting could be stolen from the gallery, Robert’s mental instability is only the first shocking discovery.

As a genuine novel, Catalogue Raisonné is less concerned with the what and how of art than with its why. Barnes, the author of five books of fiction and a memoir, writes knowingly about “the self-doubt and self-pity and rivalry and envious gossip that were the artist’s lot.” In his perpetual place on the sidelines, Paul notices that the gallery’s “Outreach” coordinator made it impossible “to distinguish the genuine from the artificial in a true ‘people person.’ That was what being a people person meant.” Romantically, Paul is the kind of guy who privately admits he likes the relationship he’s in for now, and yet doesn’t exclude that relationship from his (under-stimulated) intelligence. As the art theft plot turns deadly and the stress rises, Paul sees both the strengths and the weaknesses of his relationship: “Angela had begun to use words like ‘supportive’ and ‘nurturing’ far too often, but she actually was those things. It was partly why I loved her. It was also why I hated to hear her talk that way. And if it was true that her tenderest sympathies usually found their way back round to herself, was she any different from the rest of us in that? From me? At least her feelings made the outward journey first.” The novel is fuelled by a dynamic plot but also draws interesting material for both the head and the heart in its wake.

The commitment to plot, however, also produces the novel’s only shortcoming. Near the end, Barnes sprints too quickly for the finish line and strains credulity, interest and sympathy. Inexplicably, worry doesn’t rise when the body count does. Major ethical and legal considerations are brushed aside in a race for the finish. A late romantic development is prepared on only one front when it should have been prepared on several.

Catalogue Raisonné is much, much more than a novel with an interesting setting and subject. As a mid-career writer, Barnes writes knowingly and intriguingly about one art world while working in another. With the multiple strengths in prose, character and plot he shows here, Barnes deserves a good, long run.
_________________________________

Darryl Whetter is a creative writing prof at Dalhousie. His latest book is The Push & the Pull, a novel of love, death and bicycling. See www.darrylwhetter.ca for details.

Highway Song

2010-06-23T10:17:00.000-04:00

The roads, the roads are mad
and I am mad to use them–
my mind is metal, my soul is tar
my heart is a pit of hi-beams

Shouldering

2010-06-22T13:50:00.001-04:00

I wanted to walk without anything in my hands

I wanted to walk without anything

I wanted to walk without

I wanted to walk

I wanted

I

Hurricane Chimes

2010-06-19T12:35:00.002-04:00

This Says

Some write a thousand poems
Others cry a million tears
I do both and that is how
I navigate these hurricane years

But what about the Laughing Way
The balms of friendship, song, and wine?
I help myself to that help too
No way’s untried, they all are mine

And when I sink beneath the storm
And wear the face I cannot hide
If someone says, He lost who strove
This says I lived and, living, died

Follow

How do you get from here to there?
Climb down the river and swim up the stairs
How do you journey back again?
Follow Time’s ghost whistling “Now and Then”

One

Heart is a muscle
So is brain
Together they squeeze
Brute rock into rain

Dance with who’s pretty
Dance with who’s not
Go home with yourself
If that’s where it stops

One wind to batter
One wind to cool
One wind in the vane
Of Ruler and Fool

The Adversary’s Grapes

2010-06-19T12:11:00.002-04:00

My dustpan is dusty

And when I pass
the vacuum brush
over my electronic keyboard

It sings
The Adversary’s Grapes
in a key too high

For me to follow

Benefice

2010-06-14T11:34:00.003-04:00

In the dream I stand
in the first room we lived in
together nearly twenty years ago
the light strong and shining
on the bare white walls
and old flecked carpet
so that they glow as if
illuminated from within

and it is by that glow
(too strong and even for the small
west facing window) that I know
–with gratitude like a spring
rising through dry leaves in my chest–
that I am seeing not just
the room but what it meant
and means I am standing in it

and I realize too (another marvelling
mystery) that all these years
we have gone on renting here
paying the landlord $450/month
which we could not afford
yet though we never visited
even for the possibility of
this light it was a bargain

And then the dream in slow
stages like a ship turning awkwardly
undoes itself or a part of itself
and I see there are no pictures
on the walls no row of paperbacks
around the room no cushions no kitchen table
it is not the room we sparely
furnished but the pure space we

unlocking found or locking left behind
and the mystery of the $450
withdrawals we never saw
on any bank statement becomes clear
why would we pay in that
way for the room we live in
what is ours this light this
space we carry with us waking—

Happy I say more...solid
when you ask me over coffee
how the dream (or this poor cousin
I can tell) makes me feel
but really it is a smaller and deeper
change I am aware of
an almost shy adjustment
to the scope and grounds of here

like someone leaning toward
a fogged window
and rubbing a small patch
bare with his sleeve

Sentence

2010-06-13T22:08:00.002-04:00

“Has the prisoner
anything to add?”
said
Judge Doom.

“Give me Life
and a capo
for
Dust My Broom.”

Hero

2010-06-11T09:28:00.002-04:00

Three days, one man
guiding us through
the snarling zones,
first on York Mills
near Yonge, then
on Bayview
south of York Mills,

finally on Leslie
where it snags
by the Toyota dealership
just north
of Eglinton.

Portly, peaked cap,
whistle and
fluorescent green vest
he commands we
leave off eating
talking drinking dreaming
and attend

he stops us
dead, straightening
four lanes
with straightarm jabs
the way I
just stabbed dead

The Pet Shop Boys
Stairway to Heaven
and Michael Ignatieff
on my radio

and whistles through
three buses
a dozen Metro shoppers
and a shocking number
of car salesmen
trying to
get home.

He makes us stop
he lets us go
his jerking thumb
is our rainbow

For precious minutes
he is all we know:
one fritter-heavy
footsoldier
keeping the gridlock
oiled.

A New Basketball

2010-06-09T11:41:00.003-04:00

Of the eight possible limbs
an octopus or married couple
might bring to this
we have between us
maybe three

a left arm (mine)
to hook vague shots
at the netless rim
that clanks and wobbles
with a racket
somehow more encouraging
than swish

and your two legs
dance-trained, still strong
to shag my misses
and your own
loping toward a father
and two sons playing
round the schoolyard’s other basket

who smile good-naturedly
at a face
I can’t see (though I can)

as the gravestones
in the old Jewish cemetery
just beyond the
wrought iron fence
lean to catch
the tremor
of the drum of ball on asphalt

It was a good idea
buying this
a good idea whether or not
it loosens up the five
absentee limbs or brings blood
to the eroding cordilleras of bone
between them, they have

all been
all our years
together, a good idea–

It is not yet night
or quite dusk
though long past day
as we walk home
down the empty street
bouncing the ball
by turn between us
your hand mine
“So loud” you say
the people all inside

Light rain starts
and I see (so clearly now)
dark splotches
on the headstones clustering
and the father and his sons
packing up quickly

Short Cry While Driving

2010-06-07T11:56:00.002-04:00

Rosemount, Roseview, Rosehill, Rosedale–
How many ways they got to tell themselves
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXit’s wonderful?
_______________________

(Note: Xs to be read as spaces. I’m screaming in a Blogger straitjacket. See previous post.)

Lines from a Book on Famine

2010-06-07T11:09:00.003-04:00

(found in Famine: A Short History, by Cormac Ó Gráda)

During the Leningrad blockade
of 1941-43
an emaciated mother whose breast milk
had run out
XXXXXXXXXopened
a vein in her arm
and put her baby’s mouth
to the wound

which it sucked eagerly.

Both
mother and baby
survived.
______________________

(Note: Xs to be read as spaces. Whenever I try to deviate from the left margin, Blogger, like a demented pedagogue, slams me back to it. A similar thing happens when I try to put an extra space under the post title: Blogger eradicates it. If anyone reading knows a way around this, permitting more flexible spacing, could you advise me care of Biblioasis.publicity@gmail.com? I would appreciate it greatly. These primitive expedients take me back to my mimeo days. A not entirely unwelcome regression, but still....)

Disenthrall

2010-06-05T17:51:00.005-04:00

Enspelled but trying to awaken

peering peering with eyes closed

till castle, kingdom, Evil One

secede. Forest. Owl-roost. Road.

Firepit

2010-06-03T12:38:00.002-04:00

(for absent friends)

warm slabs ringing
char manifest the
endless wheel our
sparks surging into
black its infinite
white hot braille
in no human
tongue though some
return whizzing back
in avid smears
shooting alive this
nearer air they
crash down mimicking
mere stones famished
for shared heat
they join another
circle around flame

Edge Scene

2010-06-02T14:15:00.002-04:00

Opposite a footbridge
over a narrow chasm
a lone green-headed
mallard stands at the lip
of a rushing fall
of water, distant

from the chuckling
platoon of other waterfowl
paddling the sunlit
pond this pine-draped
cascade descends from,
around which children
chase and jostling
wedding groups assemble;

right-angled to the
current, not
on a judicious rock
but planted full
in the surging stream,
mere inches from the verge,

he keeps a motionless
vigil or a trance,
his webbed unlikely feet
anchoring a lone observer.

The Hummingbird

2010-06-01T11:01:00.006-04:00

Smashed in flight
against the window glass,
it has fallen to this most
unlikely perch, a
seated man’s shoulder.

In the photograph
his profile, Rushmore huge,
gapes across three inches
at the iridescent head
and pipe bowl body
anchored on thread feet
stitched to denim.

First miracle batted
to the ground
brings down the lot,
and well may these small
wings folded flat
resume their blur
and lift him
to his feet again.

Slohand 1 (27 April 2010)

2010-04-28T14:02:00.007-04:00

Translation, not travel.

It’s warmer to walk than wait.

The larva does not survive the butterfly.

Talking the Walk (26)

2010-01-16T20:10:00.004-05:00

On Doctors (Very Briefly)

I would think that for someone with your experience, it would be a very short leap to an anti-doctor position?

Agreed. And it’s a short leap I’ve taken often. But the trouble with short leaps is that they often lead off cliffs, or into swamps, or other places you don’t want to be. As sure as I am that the battery of phenothiazines and electroshocks I received did me substantial harm, I’m equally sure that the decades I spent shunning professional help, fearing the mental health system but also unable to help myself adequately, also harmed me significantly. For twenty or twenty-five years, I got by, barely...but I didn’t thrive.

That’s a long time not to thrive.

Often, when I read statements by anti-doctor, specifically anti-psychiatry groups, I find my reactions following a Yes...Yes...Huh? progression.

Yes to the horror stories (I’ve seen and lived them). Yes to the dismay at, the doubt and criticism of what psychiatry too often is. The Huh? comes when I get to the end of the article or website and there is no mention of an alternative person or organization I should contact when I am about to cut or kill myself, or am disabled by depression or hallucinations...or when someone I know is in these dire straits.

That is one thing that complicates the doctor picture.

Here is another: I have a wonderful psychiatrist at the moment. I trust her completely. Strange, yes, and sad, that it took me thirty-five years and perhaps a dozen psychiatrists before I could say that. But I’m saying it now. Better late than never.

Here’s another complication: Most of the people who harm you don’t mean to. May mean, in fact, to help you. But harm you nonetheless, because they make mistakes, don’t know enough...or because nobody, currently, knows enough. It’s hard to be robbed of a villain. It leaves you with no one to blame outright for your suffering. A doctor performed an unnecessary surgery on my knee when I was eighteen, removing a part of the joint that I needed. With each limping, progressively arthritic step since then, I’ve wondered: Did he know? Though at times it’s simplified things to think so, I don’t really believe it. He was doing his best as he saw it...and I happened to be there.

That is one of the hardest kinds of accidents to accept. And one of the most common.

Only the platooning system of medicine interests me now. Meaning: myself as my chief doctor, consulting other doctors as need be.

The more you learn about yourself, a subject that is endless because it is always changing, the better able you will be to become your own doctor. Not a replacement for the doctor you have, but a colleague, a partner for her or him. After all, you are the world’s foremost expert on your condition. What treatment could possibly succeed without your input? Assuming, of course, your doctor will welcome a colleague. And assuming, equally, that you are willing to shoulder some of the responsibility for your own treatment.

Become–and keep becoming–your own doctor. Since no one has all the answers, look carefully and critically for the best colleagues you can find. Consider what they have to say, and decide each case–all cases being your case–as best you can. Evaluate the results, and learn from your mistakes. Even the best doctors make them. So will you.

Talking the Walk (25)

2010-01-16T20:04:00.004-05:00

...It Exacts a Full Look at the Worst

“Where's the hope?” That question again. And I have to go to my lifeline, Thomas Hardy: “...if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

All right, then, here is a little two-item inventory of the Worst.

1) As I’ve realized, this past year especially, there isn’t a corner of my life that hasn’t been affected, and to some degree disabled, by mental illness. Romantic relationships, friendships, family ties. Ability to work productively and consistently, even to hold a job. Ability to learn (it was mental illness, I now realize, that caused me to take 13 years to get my B.A., not, as I often told myself, boredom or stupidity or the need to focus on creative writing). And the most fundamentally disabling aspect of losing self-definition, self-identity, because the narrative of life keeps getting blown apart. Today is October 27. Will I be able to read and understand these thoughts on November 27? I hope so. I am on a new combination of drugs that shows promise; I really hope to avoid hitting those depths. I want so badly to keep working and living more consistently. I want to stop living part-time, and try it full-time. I’m ready.

2) I’ve been told that I am an unusually high-functioning example of someone with a severe bipolar condition. Despite the crippling depressions, the equally dangerous manias, the suicidal spells; despite all this and more, I’ve managed to keep my self-employment as a tutor for the past fourteen years, I’ve published seven books, I’m happily married, I’m blessed with rich friendships. “You’re a success story,” my doctor tells me...and I believe her.

But...what is wrong with this picture?

If I am the success story, the fortunate exception, what about the rule? What about all the others? You hear people say, “He or she has a mental illness, but it is well-controlled.” Or: “They’re all right as long as they take their medication.” But: What does well-controlled mean? What is all right? What is functioning? Functioning how? By whose standards?

It is only a personal sample, but listen to this: In my year and a half living on a psychiatric ward, I met many seriously ill patients: schizophrenics, manic-depressives, suicide survivors. Over the years, I’ve run into many of these people–perhaps two dozen of them. Not one of them–not one–has ever returned fully to the life they were living before they became so drastically ill. I don’t pretend that’s a scientific, or exhaustive, study. But doesn’t it give you pause? Doesn’t it make you think?

While I was writing The Lily Pond, I met two people I went to high school with. James and Callie, I’ll call them. Both wrote poetry, were bright and vivacious–magnetic people with a risky lustre in their eyes. Both were carried, literally kicking and screaming, into Emergency wards in their twenties, and from there admitted to psychiatric wards. This happened many times, throughout their twenties and thirties. Our paths crossed on wards and in outpatient services. Once I was the one who wrestled Callie to the floor and frog-marched her to ER–one of the most horrible things I’ve ever had to do, and one of the most necessary. I lost touch with them. When I met them again, two years ago, at a conference our doctors had pressed us to attend, they both told me they were doing well on their drug regimens. They hadn’t been hospitalized in years. That was the good news. The bad news, from my persepective, was: glassy-eyed, slow-moving people, whose lined faces and missing teeth made them look ten years older than they were; their poverty, working at subsidized part-time jobs and living in group homes; their obvious cognitive impairment, speaking in simple, gappy sentences and utterly disengaged from their previous passion for literature and art.

Which is higher functioning? A fast–too fast–living poet, whose dangerous mental states put her or him as well as others at risk, and lead to hospitalization..or the “walking shadow” of that person, who is never hospitalized, but lives within vastly truncated horizons? I don’t have an answer to that terribly complicated question. But I hope you’ll agree with me that it’s a question worth asking.

One more note on this very thorny subject. Health care workers, and others close to the patient, will often call mental fogging or memory loss “an acceptable cost.” But acceptable to whom? Let’s reverse the roles. A doctor comes to me in severe psychological crisis. I say: here’s a pill that will alleviate your distress, at the acceptable cost of memory and thinking difficulties, attention deficit, sexual dysfunction, and a certain numbness and disengagement emotionally. Still acceptable? Let’s say the doctor tries the drug, and finding herself unable to practice as a doctor on it, unable to tolerate the disconnect with others, elects to stop taking the drug and accept the risk of further disabling episodes. Is she irrational? Is she “non-compliant”?

This is why I’ve chosen–to the frustration of some who know me–to err on the side of risk, opting for a mild regimen that stabilizes a little while risking bad episodes...if I can still be me. I have to keep pushing the envelope, because a life in which I cannot write, cannot think clearly or deeply, cannot feel passionately, cannot connect with others emotionally or physically...this is not my life as I ever want to define or live it.

People say: What if you have to accept it? Well, if I have to, I’ll try to. Like anyone backed into an ultimate corner, I’ll try my damndest to make my peace with it. But I’ll fight to the last second before it comes to that.

Talking the Walk (24)

2010-01-16T19:52:00.006-05:00

If Way to the Better There Be...

“...if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.” Thomas Hardy wrote that, in 1895. If you want to build a foundation for anything, including hope, you need first to take rock and soil samples from the place where you plan to dig. You need to know the ground.

In the service of trying to build such a foundation–a platform for hope–I’m going to share some soil samples with you tonight.

I felt apprehensive as the publication of The Lily Pond approached, in ways I never had with a book before. After writing and reflecting on the matters in the book for a couple of years, I felt I had made my peace with them; but I worried about what others would think and feel, especially others close to me. The anxiety became very bad; I had terrible nightmares. My fears were well-founded, but I had their direction backwards. Most of the people around me were supportive; I felt that some of my relationships took on new meaning and solidity by having this intimate subject now more in the open. What staggered me, however–I’m still reeling from it–was the realization of the extent to which manic-depressive illness has deranged, and continues to derange, my life. It was as if the book, along with talking about it afterwards, showed me the true dimensions of an adversary that, for my own protection, I’d only been able to see partially, in glimpses. I thought that, after decades, I knew all about it...but I didn’t. I know much more now. What I’ve learned has frightened and dispirited me...but also, through those blocks of black asphalt, sent a few new shoots of hope.

Here is an entry I wrote in my journal before the book was published: Bad dreams nightly. In the day without warning, smacked feelings of airlessness, of choking or being strangled. Hands to neck, chest. Dr. George [she’s my psychiatrist] says: “What you wrote may have unearthed a box. It may have been sealed for a reason...so you could keep functioning. Now it may be time to open it, or at least peek into it. Cautiously.” I still feel, often, that I’m strangling, or sinking and drowning. But I’m still peeking into that unsealed box. Staring at its contents. Looking, looking, looking.

Where’s the hope? A woman asked me that after one talk. I’d been discussing the ongoing process of recovery, how it involved successes but also fall-backs, downturns, slides; and she said: You say you’re better, but you also say you still go through terrible periods. Where’s the hope?

I answered her as best I could, but she still wasn’t satisfied. Where’s the hope? is a good question, and one that I’m trying to answer more fully tonight. It’s in the background of everything I say.

My first answer to her was: I’m here. I’m talking to you. You’re talking to me. Considering that it could have been otherwise, many times, for me–and maybe for you–that is no small thing. In fact, it’s everything.

But an answer like that won’t begin to equate with hope, or even the beginnings of it, if what you’re looking for is a cure, a final end to troubles. To some people, only that means hope. But I can’t conceive of any part of life being finally resolved; I don’t think I even want to. I can only think of hope in terms of continuous, evolving process: an ongoing experiment, struggle, dance...in which success is measured not by once-and-for-all victory but by incremental gains in understanding, strength, courage, grace.

I’m trying to learn to be a better dancer. My partner is the black bear of chronic, recurring illness. Its steps are savage and crude; it leads thoughtlessly. I really wish I’d drawn a better partner–but when the music started, there we were. My wife Heather has a similar partner, which makes for a crowded dance floor, the four of us waltzing awkwardly in our apartment. Thankfully, sometimes the the ugly and ungainly others take a break, and Heather and I have a slow dance by ourselves.

Where’s the hope? (She is insistent. And why shouldn’t she be?)

I’ve written a book, a memoir of mental illness. Starting four years ago, I sat down every day, before and after my paying job of tutoring, and tried to sort out my thoughts about a part of my life I’d never written down before. Not directly, though I’d touched on it in my six previous books of poetry, short stories, novels. All books are fundamentally hopeful, whatever their subject matter; without hope, no one would try to wrestle raw, chaotic experience into the coherent patterns of art.

Where’s the hope? Again I hear her question.

And again: I’m here. No one would grapple for nearly 40 years with an illness pulling him down, pulling him apart, unless he had equally strong allies (internal and external) pulling him up, pulling him together. Those allies include love, joy in life, and a strong and resilient spirit. They are not unique to me. Any survivor has them. And they are rightly to be cherished, as wellsprings of pride and constant renewal.

Where’s the hope, where’s the hope, where’s the hope?

All right, then. It’s in the process, hidden behind catastrophe. In going out...and coming back in. In falling down..and getting up. It’s in disaster’s classroom...if you’re able to attend.

It’s in yourself. And in other people. When you’re ready and able to meet them.

It’s nowhere if you’re looking for a cure.

It’s everywhere if you’re searching for a way.

When and where is it?

When it goes, nowhere. When it returns, everywhere.

But surely there must be some way to court it, encourage it?

There is. Stop looking for hopeful signs, and do one hopeful thing.

Talking the Walk (23)

2010-01-14T22:09:00.004-05:00

Through the Lens of a Mood

People have asked me what role spirituality, what role God, has in living with mental illness? It is a fair question. If the mosaic of mental management has room for a SAD light, omega-3 pills, almonds, “the truth of and”...and umpteen other interventions... might not a Supreme Being be slotted in?

It might well. For a believer, I don’t see how it couldn’t be. But I don’t believe in a God. Not as “God” has ever been defined for me, and perhaps not at all, by any name.

(Perhaps “belief” is the problem. I’ve never believed in anything. I know things or I don’t know them. Take Santa Claus. I knew he existed, and then I knew he didn’t. Knowledge doesn’t require a leap of faith. I suspect the problem comes from knowing something that is difficult to put into words, or knowing something you expect others to doubt or disparage. Trusting that kind of knowledge may well require a leap of faith, or at least a credo that includes good manners: I believe my knowledge is valid, though I can’t prove it and can’t convince you of it.)

Still, I am no “just this-just here” dogmatist (that faith has never snared me either). I have my spiritual yearnings and intuitions, my cosmic or oceanic glimpses that will not fit under the rubric of the everyday explainable. And it is curious how they dovetail with the question “Now what?” as if to answer that imponderable with a commensurate vastness–or vagueness, some will say. Fair enough. Except that there is nothing vague about the comfort I have found in contemplating those vistas–like the inviting fogs in a Turner painting–where hard lines blend into permitting light and space.

And if this is mysticism, why would I deny myself the solace of the mystical (a solace tested true for decades) when I am willing to submit myself to a molecule turned on a chemist’s lathe? What the science of help must exclude–inscrutable aid; remediation by agents not yet, and perhaps not ever to be, explained–the art of help can welcome with a fine carelessness.

Squinting through the lens of that mood–

Now what? can't be less that the sum total of moments in a life, beautiful and hideous, extraordinary and humdrum...all that vast array of small, glittering tiles that make up the mosaic of a life. Amor fati, counselled Jung. And so did Nietzsche, who defined the Latin phrase this way: amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—...but love it. Love your fate. Embrace it, however awkwardly or reluctantly. Clasp the actual, the torrent of lived particulars you swim in and that swim in you. That sounds like clutching at water–but what other choice is there for the omni-amphibian that is a human being? Sometimes it will mean grabbing mere air, other times it will mean contact with the earth: mud, sand, clean stone, fertile ground. And if we’re using the four elements of antiquity, including fire, sometimes it will mean being burned alive. And...hopping out again. As I have seen toads do from campfires built unthinkingly over the stone they were sheltering under.

Only this kind of openness–the curiosity and courage that lets you live in, and learn from, all the times of your life–permits you, as the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., advised, to “Bargain in good faith with destiny.”

What does that mean? I don’t know exactly. But I like the sound of it. I like the hope, and the sense (even if it is illusory) of cosmic comradery, parleying and wrangling with the unfathomable forces of the universe. It’s not something I can think about too long without my head swimming. But, of course, as you realize by now, I like to let my head swim. Even still...even after everything. It’s a proclivity that has led me into deep waters...and will again. Still, I can’t help marvelling at those little threads of destiny, pattern if not purpose you can tease out and examine sometimes, the only fractions of a great unseen tapestry we are permitted to glimpse.

Like the thread that connects me sitting down at a table three and a half years ago to try and write a story I’d never written before...which somehow, in some deeply mysterious way, led me to this room, to talking with you for the past 45 minutes. Writing brought me here, writing about mental illness. Which must mean, in some way, that that disturbed and bleeding young man in the emergency ward in 1977...brought me here.

I call that a miracle. Without overt religious connotation, but also without embarrassment, since I don’t know what else to call it.

And when I try to imagine, which is all I can do, the multiple branching paths that led each of you through the mazes, gardens and forests of your own lives to arrive here in this room–

Well, I know that also is uncanny. A strange and wonderful set of convergences lies behind every meeting. And though I can’t call it an end without contradicting everything I’ve said here today, I am happy to accept as a point of pause that genuine miracle.

Talking the Walk (22)

2010-01-14T21:54:00.003-05:00

Now What?

“Now what?” is a question you hear often in discussions of mental illness. (You hear it in discussions of any difficult problem.) Now what?, or its inversion, What now? I understand the impulse to ask it. A life has come unglued, fallen apart–your own life or that of someone close to you–and emerging from the hospital ward or the doctor’s office, you would very much like to have all the helpless looming uncertainties resolved into definite causes and cures.

I understand where the question comes from, but as a question, it either makes perfect sense or no sense to me.

As a question about what to do now, i.e. of the best next step, it makes perfect sense. In that form it is the necessary question the car mechanic or cook or surgeon asks many times every day. I’ve done steps 1, 2, and 3...Now what? This is one of the best mental health questions to ask, since no matter how bad a crisis is, there is always something–an action to take, a circumstance to adjust–that will make the situation better or worse. Often, the patient knows exactly what this is (turn on/turn off a light, eat a favourite food, take a walk, take a nap, talk with someone, talk with no one and lock the door...). Curiously, though, this first form of Now what? gets asked too seldom. In the frantic search for Cure, we bypass help. Peering into the distance for Help, we overlook the many small helps at hand.

Now what? in its second form is partly to blame. Like all ultimate questions, it refuses to divide the Grail of the big answer into smaller, more local quests. Now what? in the large sense means: How do we solve this problem once and for all? (i.e. Make it go away.) This is understandable. A trunk of horrors has appeared in the living room, troubles spilling out from its gaping lid. Now what?! Now what?! Yes. But the least effective way to unpack a trunk, or close its lid (even temporarily), is to wish the trunk would vanish.

Second form Now what?–ultimate Now what?–makes no sense to me. Which doesn’t mean I don’t waste time on it. But I give it less time than I used to. In fact I have been helped precisely to the extent I have been able to take What now? angst (Where is all this leading to? What will become of me? What does it all mean?) and break it down to What now? approachables (What might I change? What helped the last time this happened?). It is transferring the dread of fog to the search for road signs, landmarks, and places to pull over.

The Lily Pond supplies many details about both kinds of Now what?–details horrible at times, hopeful at others–but it can’t supply a beginning and an end that are not in sight. (Beginnings and ends are typical second form imponderables.) In “Hunters in the Snow,” the second section of the book, I track back from my fiftieth birthday party through childhood memories, finding evidence that things were going awry for me psychologically–“sliding out of focus” as I said in one interview–many years before I officially began my psychiatric career at age seventeen. But no matter how much attention I train on it, eventually the trail peters out, becomes invisible in the forest. As I write at one point: These things begin with such branching subtlety, twining tendrils of the new around old roots and branches, that there is no way to pinpoint their origins–not at the time, and not even in retrospect. Not until the process is sufficiently underway do you spot an outgrowth, a flower–a symptom. And deepening the confusion is the fact that what is new seems like a thing–not me, not my life–and yet it is a thing that can only grow and express itself through a life, mingling inextricably with it. You may feel that something is subverting your will, betraying it–and something may in fact be doing so, if what you mean by your self is your self-in-health–but if so, the invader can only work by annexing your will, working through your will. It is a stealth attack, to which most of the incestuous terminology of modern warfare applies: diplomatic maneuverings, pressure points, secret cells, covert agents, sleeper agents, terror tactics, propaganda, appeasement; most importantly, resistance and collaboration.

Causes are hard, at this point impossible, to pinpoint.

Is it in the genes? It must be, partly. Which puts the beginning where? Some day or night in November, 1954, when I was conceived? The day William Barnes and Mary Green first set eyes on each other? A mutation long ago, on the savannahs, that allowed for too much mobility of mood, too much permeability of perception–the proverbial “loose wires...loose screws”–but which somehow compensated its possessor for these perils with...with what? With a survival advantage of some kind, however slight? Or with a disadvantage that, while trying, wasn’t fatal? As I said, the trail, though fascinating, grows fainter and fainter, and peters out.

So, in true bipolar fashion, I’ll switch abruptly to the end, which I’m afraid isn't definitive either. In fact the first comment my publisher Dan Wells made after reading the manuscript was, “It doesn’t end.” His tone of voice told me he wasn’t voicing a criticism, but rather an essential truth about the story. An ailing mind is not something like a broken car, which can be either fixed or scrapped decisively. Or even a physical problem like a toothache, which again can, and will, be resolved one way or the other. Mental illness, like life itself, is a whole complex of intertwined challenges, which can only be met and managed, grappled with, more or less successfully, with success being measured not by absolute or even continuous victory, but by small, incremental gains in understanding, workable strategies, and a certain grace, hard to define but certainly including humour, about dancing awkwardly with the black bear of chronic and recurring illness. That is not everyone's idea of hope. But to me it is hope real and tangible. Light visible, to invert John Milton’s and then William Styron’s phrase.

Writing The Lily Pond, I felt frightened as I neared the end. Frightened because I was writing, in the last section, of my wife Heather’s mental illness as well as my own. Now we were, officically, two mentally ill people struggling together, which at its best feels like two old pros who know how to prop each other up, and at its worst like two drowning swimmers flailing towards the bottom. All of these things were in my mind, forty years of illness as I wrote, and who knows how many more to come, and I thought, fearfully: How will this end? Because I knew I would write down honestly what I felt, not fudging. So I was greatly relieved to find my way to a moment of hope, which I recorded as the book’s last sentence. I was glad, though not, on reflection, surprised. No one could go to the bottom as often as I have, and return, without a strong and resilient love of life. No swimmer would kick that hard against the tide unless he loved the land and wanted, desperately, to stand on it again.

But to hope, in flood times, to stand on land perpetually? Isn’t it much–isn’t it enough–to say: I swim much better than I used to. I find my way to shore more often.

Talking the Walk (21)

2010-01-12T14:20:00.005-05:00

Zero and Back

Which brings me back to my United States of Self, the Continuity Clause I started with...and to why the frog, that symbol of a resilient traveller between elements, is such an important image in The Lily Pond’s last section. Multiple and often conflicting selves are a reality for anyone, not just someone with a diagnosed mental illness. For anybody, on any path, it is true: Parts of you are leaping ahead, parts are lagging behind, parts are stuck in the mud, parts are fleeing in the opposite direction. Ignorance of all these different momentums or, worse, denial that they are occurring, will only hinder your ability to find the direction you need and are capable of taking now.

Only by granting legitimacy to the very different states, purposes and abilities that are known collectively as “I,” can a united self–a republic, if you will, of recognized selves, each with its rights and limitations–be made possible...and a pace be found, variable and humane, permitting that manifold self to move and act in the world.

The smoothness of that phrase may make it sound easy. That is the peril of rhetoric. It is not smooth or easy. It is the hardest, most necessary, thing I know.

I’d like to close by reading two passages from The Lily Pond that illustrate what I’ve been saying here today. The first is short and is quoted on the back cover. I have been there and come back. Come back partly, at least. Return is possible; the door swings both ways. This gets at a paradox I’m learning more about each day. If your view of yourself is elastic enough to allow for downtimes, backslides, failures, even breakdowns–not only are you more likely to get back on your feet after these setbacks, but–and this is the truly magical part of the paradox–you are even less likely to get knocked down in the first place. “The door swings both ways.” You can more easily go out a swinging door, but also more easily come back in. Knowing there is such a door may even mean you don’t need to use it.

Another, longer passage from near the end of the book uses the example of the wood frog to explore this tolerant truth of out...and in. Down...and back up again. The passage is from the book’s last section, called “The Lily Pond,” where the main focus shifts to Heather, as she survives a mental health crisis and is diagnosed herself with bipolar disorder. After a siege of several months, exhausted, we took a cautious week’s vacation in a rented cabin on Lake Temagami.

The television, which we spurned at first, comes in handy after all. Scrolling through its channels, which number into the hundreds, is a good antidote when Heather becomes jittery and tired in the evening, a pattern from home that now resumes despite our lengthy sleeps. There is a lot of channel-scrolling to find a few interesting, and a couple of absorbing, programs. The most absorbing is a documentary on the wood frog’s hibernation. Heather calls me from making dinner to watch it with her. We know, from our book at home, of the astonishing ability these northern frogs have to manufacture glycogen in their livers, turning their blood to a kind of sugary antifreeze that allows their bodies to freeze solid through the winter and then unfreeze safely in the spring. It is one thing to know this; it is another to watch it happen. A scientist in a white coat puts several wood frogs on a tray and places the tray in a freezer. [I recoil from this a little,] but despite his clinical procedures the scientist seems a true and kindly enthusiast about the frogs. There is a video camera in the freezer. As we watch, the frogs’ breathing slows, and slows, then finally stops. Frost crystals cluster, coating them all over, including their eyes, which stay open. The scientist brings them out of the freezer, picks one up and flicks it (again that aversive prickle), then bobbles it in his hand: hard as rock. But in the tray left out on the table, the process has begun to reverse itself; in time-lapse photography, compressing several hours into minutes, we see the ice crystals melt and slide off; the skin soften in appearance, becoming less brittle and more rubbery-looking; one frog, the fastest thawer, draws a breath, a twitch in his small side; after long moments, another breath; then other frogs are breathing, small sides lifting and falling; finally, one makes a small hop. Alive.

Down to zero–close to it–and back again. Neither of us says a word. There is nothing to be said; we saw it.

On our last day, we take the last sections of our watermelon in a plastic bag and paddle to a quiet bay we visited before. Heather turns around in her seat to face me and we drift in the deep green shadows of the pines and cedars, eating pink watermelon and dropping the gnawed rinds into the bag. It is a moment of perfect restfulness, and it ends with a perfect, miraculous discovery. We have seen only one frog up here, a large leopard frog that hopped away once as we landed the canoe. The nights have been cold for late August, a few aspens already tinged with yellow. But today, when we stop on shore to stretch our legs, I see movement in the pine needles at my feet. I am a few moments spotting the small frog, his browns are blended so perfectly with the needles and rock and lichen. I put down my hand and trap him easily; he barely squirms inside my fingers. When I show him to Heather, parting my fingers to let his upper half pop out, then pinning him gently by the legs, we are amazed to see that it is the wood frog from the TV documentary. His black, robber-mask eye markings cinch it. It seems providential somehow, a sign, and standing on the rock admiring then releasing him–he hops away unhurriedly–we are both too moved to speak.

Heather, who has paddled in the bow all week, suggests that she try paddling us home herself. She stays facing me and begins moving us homeward, awkwardly at first, unsure of her steering, having to switch from side to side, but then strongly and more steadily, smiling with shy disbelief as her J-stroke returns to her. It is wonderful to watch; and hard in a way, too. Mental illness–meaning, here, the diagnosis and treatment of it, especially–is working against her confidence, implanting radical doubts in her about her basic capability. It is one of the reasons I feel so strongly that hospitalization should be avoided except as a last resort. If diagnosis means that one is being considered seriously for a position, then hospitalization is confirmation that one has got the job. And it can be a hard position to leave; it can easily become a career leading to retirement, and beyond.

Heather, after a break of many years, has gone back to school this year. This school: U of T. She is picking her own way along the learning curve, as everyone must. She doesn’t need to be reminded of what I’m saying here today as much as I do. In fact, though I said before I had no wish to advise my younger self, it’s not really true. I do in fact sometimes travel back in time to counsel him. He isn’t very inclined to listen–that hasn’t changed–but that no longer deters me from sharing with him what I’ve learned. What I tell him is a sort of footnote to Polonius, that off-and-on pedagogue ironically prone to forgetting himself. His admonition to Laertes as he returns to school, runs, in my amended version, like this: To thine own selves be true. Honour the people you were and will be, not just the person you are today.

Talking the Walk (20)

2010-01-12T14:08:00.003-05:00

Know Thy Selves

“Know thyself.” Everyone has heard the ancient Greek injunction, inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. For all its wisdom, though, I still think it could be improved. It presumes, in its singular pronoun, a stable and consistent identity, when in fact identity is malleable and multiple, a condition of flux which must be constantly updated, even renegotiated. “Know thy selves,” I humbly suggest, would be a more humane and practical credo.

Something I remained ignorant about for a long time, for example, was the fact that my periodic inability to read–words, these things I loved, going dead and blank, their sequences fuzzy and meaningless–is a common symptom of depression, and doesn’t at all betoken apathy or lack of intelligence. Or at least not permanent forms of those things. What it may mean, though, is a temporary impairment of interest and cognitive ability. And there are far better ways to deal with that than simply dropping out of the life one wants.

Like what? you may be thinking. What are you supposed to do if you find yourself bottoming out just when you need yourself most? Unable to read–but an exam coming up? Unable to write–but an essay due? I can think of some practical approaches to these problems, but outlining them would take us too far astray in a short talk. And I would be the last person to say that these are not serious problems, serious threats. Fluctations in mental health still threaten my job and my personal life; they’re a minefield I am always trying to pick my way through. I have no wish to travel back in time to advise my younger self: he did the best he could, what he had to do, then. But I know a couple of things he didn’t. One is that hiding a problem–from yourself and from others–usually takes more energy than trying to manage it. Coming out is almost always a good idea. What I hope I would do now, when I felt myself slipping, is to approach someone I trust with the facts: I want to do this (finish my course, write my exam, hang on till tomorrow), but for some reason I’m unable to. I need help, something to get me through this. That would be a start. Not a solution yet, but the only sure step I know towards finding one. I don’t say it is an easy step to take.

It seems strange that my eighteen months on a psychiatric ward in my early twenties had not begun my education in these matters. That tumultuous passage had schooled me in many miseries, fears and self-doubts of every kind, but it had not taken me very far at all in developing a practical awareness of myself, how I had changed, and how I might get on with my life, given the fluctuating and rather fragile (though at the same time newly toughened and robust) creature I now seemed to be.

Strange...or not so strange. Many medical mishaps–including a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, zombiefying tranquilizers, many electroshock treatments and a near-fatal overdose–had given me good reasons to drop out of the standard curriculum of mental health. Again, though, I was an extremist: I shunned the mental health system completely for the next decade, which included some of the lowest and most pointless wandering in my life. Some kinds of learning occur only slowly, in tiny increments. No matter how successfully it is managed, trauma takes time. Time to occur (since it occurs in waves, even if one event precipitates it)...and a long time to come back from. Long, slow time is usually not on offer in an age that idolizes speed and a narrowly defined functioning. These idols of quick-time get stamped out crudely and worshipped thoughtlessly. And is it perhaps yourself–your image and expectations of yourself–that have helped to mold this unforgiving deity? Just because what you need isn’t on offer–or doesn’t appear to be–doesn’t mean you can’t ask for it, claim it. A system may function badly–many do–but it can’t function better than we ask it to. Demand it to. And: permit it to. “Time heals,” we say, but do we act as if we believe it? It takes courage to trust time–the courage to wait and see.

After that, of course, comes the challenge of admitting what you see, and finding room to accept it. Several times each year I still experience what I call my “shut-downs.” These are the periods that have taught me how far beyond sadness depression really goes. In these dead zones my brain and body and spirit–my whole self, really–become, in stages, unable to comprehend or respond to the world. It is a lot like that famous scene in 2001, when Dave Bowman unplugs HAL, and the computer disappears circuit by circuit–busted right down to his programmed origins of “Dai-sy...Dai-sy”–though by that time I have long since lost the urge to sing. At such times I’ve learned to apply what I call the small-circle cure. This means reducing activity and stimulation to a bare minimum. Dimming the lights, unplugging the phone, cancelling social engagements. And, as I feel my ability to think in sequence ebbing away, scaling my reading down from the love life of Anna Karenina to the love life of Britney Spears...and then further down, to just flipping through books of pictures or watching reruns of The Sopranos. To return to the idea of functioning: Someone seeing me lying on my side for hours beside a single lamp, flipping pages of Rolling Stone or People, might see a very low order of functioning...and it is, in a way...but it is a much higher order of functioning than I showed in the years when I tried to keep reading and writing through these spells, which can last six weeks or more, and added terrible frustration to depression when I could understand nothing, produce nothing. Self-acceptance, I’ve come to see, involves a better understanding of one of the simplest words: and. I am a person who reads, and writes, challenging books...and I am a person who, at times, cannot read or write the simplest sentence. The two facts are not mutually exclusive; they mustn’t be, since I’m living both of them.

But that little word and can be a terribly hard word to remember. A major part of my ongoing recovery, including the therapy I do with the excellent psychiatrist I have now, involves trying to remember the truth of and. As I said earlier, there is a degree of amnesia to my condition, so that every time I lurch upward into mania or downward into depression, it feels like the first time, and I lose all memory that I have been here before and gotten through it. Retaining a thin thread of memory, enough that I can say, “I know this place; I was here before, and I left again,” is one of the most important gains I’ve made in recent years. It’s a lifeline to cling to, a thread to guide me out of the labyrinth.

I learned all this again just last fall. Ironically, after my book launch in October, and at the talks I gave subsequently, some listeners said to me, “You seem well now,” as if all the troubles I was describing were safely behind me. “I do feel well,” I said, “...now.” But I could tell they didn’t believe me when I said I knew bad times would return, times they, and even I, could scarcely imagine. Sure enough, within a month, I was floundering, slipping into a netherworld of sleeplessness and incoherent thoughts and depression and even hallucinations. I could barely understand the book I myself had written or the talks I had given about it. But while I felt myself slipping, while I still had time, I did a useful, practical thing. Using what few verbal resources I had left, I wrote myself a letter, a sort of “message in a bottle” from my still-hanging-on self to the unwell self I felt gaining on him. I taped the letter to the wall beside my desk, it is still there, and read it often in the next two months, feeling disbelief but also comfort at its assurances that I had gone to this black place before and had returned from it. I wanted to read it as part of this talk, but it is a little too long. “Letter to Thursday” is a frank and simple statement from one self to another, saying in essence: I know you, even if you don’t remember me. We are in this together.

“In this together” is a sentiment alien to the depressed person, since a feeling of utter desertion is at the core of the predicament. One is abandoned by joy, by purpose, by energy...by others, by the world, by life...by oneself. The last is the harshest turning in the lock. Losing this first advisor, ally, friend–this best angel, truly–confirms that the ship has indeed been abandoned and must inevitably go down. Without this “other” there is no self–only a cave where someone used to live. Heaing no word is having no word. Getting a letter, a postcard, a murmur, on the other hand, is evidence that desertion may not be absolute, or at least not final, since somewhere your self-in-health is still speaking.

Talking the Walk (19)

2010-01-12T13:54:00.005-05:00

The Continuity Clause

(This passage and the two that follow it are taken from “On and Off the Learning Curve: Notes by a Bipolar Student,” a talk originally given at the University of Toronto on March 11, 2009. To preserve a closely woven argument, it has been necessary in places to repeat material from previous talks. I have shortened or reworked these sections where possible.)

Seven weeks ago, I, along with millions of others suffering a long-term malaise, was given a strong antidepressant. The treatment included watching chopper blades lift George Bush out of sight, and watching and hearing Barack Obama sworn in as the U.S. president. Many of you will remember this vividly, I’m sure, especially if you were a fellow sufferer. Like all treatments, though, this one had its unwanted side effects, one of which was exposure to potentially toxic levels of rhetoric. That same day, I heard a commentator gush: “It’s a brand new country!” Immediately, this was contradicted by a colleague’s more sour view: “It’s the same old place.” Which was true? I wondered. And I decided they both could be. It’s the same old, brand new place.

And within a few days, influenced no doubt by the ceremony to the south, I wrote the following, applied to a person instead of a country. I call it “The Continuity Clause: Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of Self”:

“I” shall still be considered “I” in spite of lapses or contradictions in the behaviour of myself or the partial or complete disappearance of myself for whatever duration and for whatever reason.

So help me...anyone.

What does this have to do with a book on mental illness called The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis? Everything, really. A core theme in the book–addressed both explicitly and implicitly–is the existential conundrum of how to maintain a self and a life, when that self and life are subject to regular and radical disruption. How does chaos become continuity? The answers to that very big question, which I can only begin to suggest, have, I think, a special relevance to education.

The Lily Pond has four sections, which are like concentric rings. I imagine them sometimes as the ripples set up by a frog jumping into a still pond. They might also be seen as a series of lenses, with each lens offering a wider view of the subject. The first view is a close-up of a patient in crisis, me; the second, of the patient’s family, companions and fellow sufferers; then, moving further outward, a view of living in the wider community as a writer and a participant in psychotherapy; and finally, to caring–trying to care–for my wife Heather as she survives her own mental health crisis. The last view, though it involves many close-ups of each of us and of our marriage, is the widest view because its focus is on trying to make use of illness, trying to turn its hard lessons to some positive and outward-facing account.

The book’s four rings, then, move gradually outward from isolation and passivity–lying motionless on a hospital bed–to a life shared with others, including shared illness. They chronicle the journey (as the back cover says) “from the darkness of unconscious suffering to the daylight of mindful recovery.” What I mean by mindful recovery is not a cure–nothing so final or triumphant-sounding. It is more like tugging recurrent problems into better light so they can be worked on, coped with, managed. This is a long, indeed endless process. Ongoing active awareness is what I mean.

I also think of these concentric rings in another way: as my own story of mental illness, inside the larger story of mental health, which in turn fits inside the much larger story of existence and its challenges, for some of which we use the shorthand “mental health.” The story in The Lily Pond spans four decades. There are mentions in it of my stop-and-start university career, but that’s not described in detail. I’d like to look at it a little more closely now.

I got my Honours B.A. on the 13-year plan. I started in 1973 and graduated in 1986. While I have nothing against gradualism, it’s not a schedule I would recommend to anyone. You see, I was never a part-time student, but rather a full-time student who kept being forced to drop out. Interruptions to my course of study included those eighteen months on a psychiatric ward, working (after my discharge) as a dishwasher for two years, stints of unemployment and short-term jobs, all of this in a series of rented rooms–a “tumbleweed life,” I called it once–before I decided, at age 30, to complete the last year of my degree which had stalled at the three-year mark.

Why did it take me so long? And what, since I call the interruptions “forced,” was forcing me?

There’s more than one answer to that question. But the main reason, I think, is one that eluded me for many years; in fact, it was not until fairly recently that I fully acknowledged it.

Mental illness. Plunges into listless or agitated depressions, followed by equally destabilizing flights into rushing manias. And–far more damaging than these swings themselves–my bewilderment about what was happening to me, which led me to ascribe my swings to other, misleading causes.

Here is what kept happening. I’d start a school year with energy and enthusiasm–attending lectures, doing the readings, getting good marks...learning–and then at some point–usually in the late fall or spring, though it was not strictly seasonal–I would simply bottom out. Lose interest in the classes and the readings, start falling asleep over books, have trouble following a line of argument or even a sentence...and I would think: Why am I here? I’m not interested in this stuff. Or: I’m not smart enough, I can’t do this. (Forgetting–for depression has its characteristic amnesia as well as other forms of inattention–that only weeks or days before I had been smart enough, interested enough.) My reading and attendance became spotty, my work and marks trailed off...I dropped out. Usually vowing never to return.

Looking back, I see that what I was mainly lacking, to pursue my education, was not intelligence or desire or diligence, but self-knowledge. I was not well enough acquainted with myself, and not forgiving or understanding enough of those parts with which I was acquainted, to succeed in school. I needed to educate myself about myself before I could educate myself about anything else. Or at least–since the processes should occur in tandem–I needed to be learning about myself while I was trying to learn about Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton.

Like generations of bad students before me, I aspired to speak passably well about lives and minds and relations in worlds remote from my own, and to do so I turned exclusively to textbooks and experts, disdaining the materials nearest to hand: my life, mind, and relations in this world, now.

Talking the Walk (18)

2010-01-11T21:44:00.005-05:00

My Medic-Alert Bracelet

Dear Mental Health Professional:

If you are reading this, I assume it is because I am not in my right mind and someone has directed you to this page. Unless you believe that my long history of mental illness renders my advice useless, I hope you will take a minute or two to read these instructions which I have set down while of sound mind. They are too long to put on a bracelet, but brief nonetheless. They could save us both a lot of time, and grief.

Sedation is likely a good idea. I am sure that before I landed in your emergency ward, my sleep had been dwindling to three, two, one, zero hours a night–possibly for a long time–so that my most pressing health problem is extreme exhaustion. It might even be the principal cause of many of the symptoms confronting you. Let me sleep as much as possible for two or three days. Make no attempt, or as little as possible, to hurry me back into a “normal” routine. I don’t need normalization as much as I need sleep.

When my brain and body have rested a little, ease off on all drugs to take a look at my baseline condition. I have come back spontaneously many times from where you see me; try to get a read on my ability to do so now. If my frame of mind is even halfway reasonable, give me some time–a few days perhaps–to see if I can restabilize on my own. Allow me to spend the time quietly, doing little or nothing, with as little contact with others as your facility will permit. Resist the urge to intervene. It is tough, I know, to feel that “standing by” is legitimate treatment, but it is sometimes the only legitimate treatment.

If you feel you need to begin a course of drugs, do so extremely cautiously. I am a slow metabolizer of drugs, so it is best to start me at a half, a quarter, an eighth of what you are used to thinking of as the normal therapeutic range. Trust me: if the drug you prescribe can benefit me, it will do so at a far lower level than its manufacturer recommends; and if it can harm me, it will do so rapidly even at low doses. I have thirty-five years of drug disasters to attest to this. Start small, and advance in minuscule increments. Continue mild sedation so that my sleep schedule is maintained.

As soon as I am even halfway stabilized, ask me what further course I would recommend. I realize this may be difficult in front of your colleagues; do it in private if it helps. I have been through this many times, and have a wealth of suggestions about what could help and what will definitely not. Seek my advice, and I will be more likely to seek yours. Each of us has information the other needs.

Do not panic. Try especially to avoid the type of panic that calls itself “aggressive treatment.” Remember that the patient in your interview room (or on your examining table if I have hurt myself physically) is the same person who wrote these notes. The note-writer will return faster if you follow the steps above, and the faster he returns, the better the chance that he will remain. He is the best colleague you can hope for.

Trust yourself. Try to trust me. And good luck, for both our sakes.

Talking the Walk (17)

2010-01-08T22:42:00.004-05:00

The Truth (and Trouble) of and

Again and again I come back to it: the truth of and. It is such an important truth that sometimes I think I will be well precisely to the extent that I understand it. Meaning know and live it...down to my bones.

I once won a literary prize, and part of the judges’ citation stuck with me: “acceptance of puzzlement as a natural state of mind.” With a couple of adjustments it could stand as the truth of and: “acceptance of contradiction as a natural state of life.”

Substituting and for but, though, either...or, or any of the binary exclusions that occlude our daily language, works wonders. Try it. I am a hopeful, happy person and (not but) I am often sad and listless. I am energetic and ambitious, and (not though) quite lazy. I am loyal and disloyal (not either/or).

Why force a great, wandering river into canals?

But that little word and can be a terribly hard word to remember. I learn it and forget, practice and neglect. Over and over, I slide from inclusion and acknowledgement (not blanket acceptance: I can acknowledge a part of my nature and work actively to change it) to exclusion and denial. I try and convict myself in the Court of Either-Or, and hear Judge One-Way (me again) pronounce sentence: You must be one thing or the other; you cannot be both.

I learned all this again just last fall. Ironically, after my book launch in October, and at the talks I gave subsequently, some listeners said to me, “You seem well now,” as if all the troubles I was describing were safely behind me. “I do feel well,” I said, “...now.” But I could tell they didn’t believe me when I said I knew bad times would return, times they, and even I, could scarcely imagine. Sure enough, within a month, I was floundering, slipping into a netherworld of sleeplessness and incoherent thoughts and depression and even hallucinations. I could barely understand the book I myself had written or the talks I had given about it. But while I felt myself slipping, while I still had time, I did a useful, practical thing. Using what few verbal resources I had left, I wrote myself a letter, a sort of “message in a bottle” from my still-hanging-on self to the unwell self I felt gaining on him. I taped the letter to the wall beside my desk, and read it often in the next two months, feeling disbelief but also comfort at its assurances that I had gone to this black place before, and had returned from it. I wanted to read it as part of this talk, but it is a little too long. “Letter to Thursday” is still taped to my wall, waiting for when I need it again. It is a frank and simple statement from one self to another, saying in essence: I know you, even if you don’t remember me. We are in this together.
______________________________

Still, a real and practical difficulty posed by “the truth of and” is planning. Planning requires a committment based on some assurance about who you will be in the future, so it relates to that difficulty of maintaining a reliable storyline of self and life. I think all of you will know what I mean. When I was asked to come here today, I was just emerging from a bad depression. I had to perform a familiar calculation, a kind of guesswork, i.e. if I’m a little better now, will I be better enough by then? What if I’m not? Future planning is really tough with a mood disorder. How do I plan for an event 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years from now–when I don’t know who, what version of myself, will be present then? In practice, this is not an easy problem to solve, but in theory at least I have developed a simple approach: Say yes to whatever seems reasonable now, but allow yourself the option of backing out if necessary when the day arrives. When and if that happens, telling the truth is preferable–overall, I’ve been greatly helped by being more open about my condition–but don’t be too hard on yourself if, in an imperfect world, where intolerance and misunderstanding and stigma are all alive and well, circumstances force you to lie, and instead of “I can't make it; I’m in bad shape mentally,” you say “I’ve got the flu,” or “I have to work,” or “My car broke down.” Metaphorically, they’re all true, after all: you are sick, you do have to work (on yourself), and your vehicle (you) needs maintenance in the shop.

I tell the truth when I can, and lie when I must. (Unless it is it the other way around...)

Talking the Walk (16)

2010-01-08T22:18:00.007-05:00

Needles and Haystacks

About drugs I only have one thing to say. It is a very recent insight, but it offers a glimpse into a wealth of possibilities. It’s not about drugs per se, but about dosage. Over the years, I’ve tried a huge spectrum of drugs–from phenothiazine tranquilizers to antidepressants to various mood stabilizers–but all of them, even the ones that seemed to help, had side effects I couldn’t tolerate. So I’ve become very wary of drugs. My psychiatrist doesn’t push them–“I’m here to advise; the decisions are yours,” she says, which is one of the reasons I trust her–but she does sometimes suggest, especially when I get backed into a particularly bad corner, that there might be a drug that could help. Last fall, I got backed into such a corner and she suggested quetiapine (or Seroquel, its brand name). But when I tried it, at the lowest standard dose of 25 mg, it zonked me out so thoroughly and for so long–the familiar “zombie” effect–that I realized I could not possibly function in any normal way on it. An hour after taking it, I was drooling (literally) in front of the computer screen. I lurched down the hall and collapsed into bed, coming to hours later with a brain like wet burlap.

I cut the pills in half, then into quarters; though better, it still knocked me too far under. So I dropped the trial. But Dr. George happened to mention that she knew a couple of people who were helped by extremely small doses of this drug. And then Heather’s doctor said the same thing, that she’d heard of people who were aided by a mere “whiff,” as she put it, of quetiapine. So Dr. George wrote me a prescription for 1 mg–we would start from that baseline. The trouble came when I tried to fill the prescription at Shopper’s, only to be told by the pharmacist, very insistently, that the lowest dose sold was the 25 mg tablet and it was unobtainable in 1mg strength. “But that's the prescription my doctor wrote,” I said, pointing at the slip. “You might try a compounding pharmacy,” he muttered, then looked past me and said, “Next?” To make a long story short, in all of Toronto I found only two old-fashioned compounding pharmacies who could make up the prescription in the lower strength. I have been trying it for a few weeks now...it shows promise. But my point is (or rather, my two points are): 1) Cui bono? Who stands to gain if drugs are only sold in higher-strength amounts? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that drug companies would not want it widely advertised that minute portions of their brands might help some people. Would any drug seller want it known that some buyers got by on a “whiff” of his product? Would he want to pay for the tests to discover such a possibility? 2) Which of my many failed drug trials over the years might have stood a chance of success at a dosage of one half, one quarter...one sixteenth...of the normal range? A “tincture of this, a tincture of that,” as the old saying went.

A bit of this...a bit of that. Even tiny pieces can have an important place in the mosaic.
___________________________________________________

Dr. George tells me that one thing that has changed for the better about psychiatry–at least with good psychiatrists–is the understanding of how variable the optimal drug dosage is for different people, and how some patients may be helped by very small doses. Naturally this is not something the drug companies are eager to admit, and you often have to dig out the information yourself and insist on it. Also, more is now known about the very different rates at which people metabolize drugs. It is clear now that I am what is known as a slow metabolizer. Despite my large size, I absorb the psychiatric drugs very, very slowly, so that a little goes a long way with me. For instance, Heather is only two thirds of my weight, yet she easily tolerates, and needs, more than twice the dose of one drug that we are both on. This helps to explain some of the drug disasters I experienced on and off wards, when the “normal therapeutic range” was administered to me and it knocked me flat or sent me reeling. And it is why I combine very small doses of things–pieces of “the shifting mosaic”–to try to find the right overall treatment program.
__________________________________________________

Now it is a year and half later, and that 1 mg of quetiapine has inched in tiny stages up to 5 mg, which seems to be the dose that helps without hampering me. Still one-fifth of the recommended starting dose. For the moment, that piece of the mosaic is in place. But another that showed promise has fallen out. Last July I started on 5 mg of celexa–one quarter of the standard therapeutic dose–to address the intractable depressions which have become ever more frequent and severe. We proceeded cautiously because of the danger that any antidepressant will kick a bipolar patient up into mania. The 5 mg gave me a helpful nudge, but soon I needed more. Upwards...slowly. 7.5 mg, 10, 12.5, 15, 17.5...all this over a three-month period...and finally to 20 mg. Good. For a few stable, productive weeks. Along the way there were side effects, but these were manageable and lessened with time. But then the serious side effect of akathisia developed, and worsened rapidly. Akathisia tormented me so relentlessly on the psychiatric ward that the very word is horrid to me. Its agony is indescribable except by metaphors: imagine a brush fire along your nerves and muscles, which can’t be relieved by scratching, clenching, kneading, pulling, tearing, squeezing, or pummelling (all of which you’ll try; along, perhaps, with throwing yourself at walls or floors; I was one of many on the ward stitched and bandaged for that); only vigorous activity lessens the inner burning, for a few seconds; then it catches again. Sufferers go vacuum-eyed fighting it day and night.

Tapering off celexa...quickly. Still feeling the burning-tingling-needling-itching. Fear that celexa is not the cause, or it has started something which now cannot be stopped. I have a new prescription for escitalopram. A cousin of celexa (citalopram), but one with slightly less potential for akathisia. It frightens me...but so do the depressions.

If I can get clear of the akathisia, I will probably give it a try.

Like looking for a needle in a haystack. Yes, but what else can you do if you need the needle?

Talking the Walk (15)

2010-01-05T13:37:00.004-05:00

Here

Last October, in Hamilton, I was walking up the street with Holly, a woman who was helping me organize the book launch for The Lily Pond. I remember it was a cool but sunny day.

“Can I ask you something?” Holly said out of the blue.

“Sure,” I said.

“Is your book hopeful?” she asked. “Because I found hope in it.”

She sounded a bit perplexed, even a bit apologetic, as if she might have found something in the book the author hadn’t intended to put there.

“Yes!” I said. “Of course!” All books are fundamentally hopeful, whatever their subject matter; without hope, no one would try to wrestle raw, chaotic experience into the coherent patterns of art. But also: I’m here. No one would grapple for nearly 40 years with an illness pulling him down, pulling him apart, unless he had equally strong allies (internal and external) pulling him up, pulling him together. Those allies include love, joy in life, and a strong and resilient spirit. They are not unique to me. Any survivor has them. And they are rightly to be cherished, as wellsprings of pride and constant renewal.

To underline the reality of hope, and to remind myself of it, I’d like to read a passage from the book. A paradox of autobiographical writing is that, as it becomes more vivid and convincing, it tends to obscure–make dubious, even–the real life it purports to record. To suggest totality it must extract, and to convey immediacy must freeze the past, sculpting in ice what was once flowing water. Picture supplants pictor. This is especially true of descriptions of low points: if they live at all, they make ghostly the survivor who has won, at the least, the leisure and the will to recollect.

In May of 1979, the water level of French River reached its highest point in living memory. On a vertical rock just east of Dry Pine Bay, someone chalked and dated a line marking the water’s furthest climb. Just as someone doubtless will note–on paper this time, for a rock would be submerged–the record low water mark attained in the summer of 2005. In 1979, I came north with my parents to open the cottage; I remember loading the boat as it floated beside the gas pumps at the marina, three or more feet above the usual docks even at high water. I remember little else about that springtime trip; probably there was little of me left to remember with. I had only recently been discharged from a psychiatric ward after a year-and-a-half siege. It was really a siege of seven years, beginning with my first serious depression and psychiatric treatment at age seventeen, which cut short my last year of high school and inaugurated a long, chaotic slide away from active and communal life, culminating in the self-mutilation that earned me a diagnosis of schizophrenia and embarked me on the hospitalized ordeal of neuroleptic drugs, electroshock treatments and hydra-headed symptoms that came close to killing me, and, in the sense of obliterating all vestiges of my former life, in a way did kill me. My amnesia of that springtime trip north with my parents seems fitting; I could not have accompanied them except as a dazed and depleted survivor, a convalescent with tremors and scars and a battered brain, a broken and wide-eyed child though nominally a man of twenty-four, gaping at the debris left by the flood.

That is where I was almost exactly thirty years ago. And today I’m standing here in this room. In some ways still the same, in some ways greatly altered.

But here.

Talking the Walk (14)

2009-12-28T21:42:00.004-05:00

Crusoe and the Swinging Door

Another figure that recurs in my book is not a shadowy stalker but an amazed, and dazed, wanderer on a beach. Robinson Crusoe. At one point I talk about the frequent sense I have of “stepping out from [a mist] to stare, alert and surprised, at the present I find myself in. Crusoe mode, as Heather and I call this islanding in the present, has its positive aspect. Washed up on a new beach, you focus intently on the things about you: grains of sand, a shell, the leaves of a new tree, a footprint. You are alive to the life about you in a way you scarcely could have been during the routine and tedium of the voyage.” This sense of witnessing an ongoing miracle–and a newborn baby, if we knew how it thought, must also live in Crusoe mode–was one of the most striking results after I finally got out of the hospital. I hitchhiked across Canada with my friend that summer. It must have been a somewhat harrowing trip for him–I would only sleep an hour or two at night, and often saw strange things, such as the giant, 2-metre-long crow that swooped repeatedly at one ride’s window–but luckily, my friend was a good sport, and even more luckily, a sound sleeper. I remember one day we were in a diner, I think it was in Kamloops, having breakfast, and I was sitting there after my scrambled eggs, watching my spoon glitter in a pool of sunlight, and my friend said, sounding surprised, “You feel good now, don’t you?” Yes, I told him. And more than good: wealthy. He asked me about that and I tried to explain. I was warm and comfortable, I’d been fed, I was free to sit on a vinyl chair and look about, listening to my friend, gazing at a spoon, watching other people...what more than these riches did I need?

To a large extent I’ve never lost that perspective. It’s a permanent gift I received.(1) A legacy of madness. Or, perhaps, a grateful ebullience that was always there, but that madness, or just hitting bottom, heightened. I’m aware of it standing here now. Inside–out of the November elements–invited to talk to people...pretty confident I’ll get a good lunch somewhere. I don’t really need anything more. Except–I need to say something... or else you’ll begin shifting uncomfortably in your seats. And then we’ll all feel bad.

And there’s the rub. How to live in the moment, but move to the next moment. A practical problem for all of us: how to live now, but still be living tomorrow. Which I must have solved somehow, or I would be a skeleton grinning at a dusty spoon in a boarded-over diner in Kamloops.

How did I solve it? I wonder. How do I? I think perhaps, at my best, I solve it by becoming, by living as, a moving now, a moving readiness. A newborn on the move...as newborns always are (even when they're sleeping). A Crusoe with a plan...as Crusoe soon developed.

Continued life does involve forward-thinking. Future-thinking. But...I have trouble with future-thought. For a good and healthful reason–my tendency to marvel at the miracle of the present–but also for a more destructive one, which is a simple inability to believe I can have a future. That it won’t be swept away by another trip through the swinging door of madness.

My current psychiatrist, an excellent doctor, has given me much counsel on this problem, but a lot of it boils down to two of those simple words that call out for attention: “as if.” Live for today, but also “as if” tomorrow will come. Prepare “as if” you will be granted a future as well as a present. A tall order, but a sensible and necessary one.

Doors are another metaphor that run through my book. I think of the altered states of madness as a door that, for someone of good mental health, should properly be a little sticky and resistant. But if it bangs open once, it will open more easily again. It it swings open many times, as it has with me, it starts to resemble one of those screen doors with worn-out hinges that flap at the slightest breeze. You have to learn to live with a door with loose hinges, which means the possibility of something coming in...or something, maybe you, going out. You have to learn to live with a door that is ajar.

There are worse things. Permanently locked doors, for example. Being sealed out...or in.
___________________________________________________
(1) A blessing and a curse, actually. “Live for the moment,” runs the advice we are always getting–and often, most of us, giving. But it is a counsel of ruin for so many of the important moments we find ourselves in. Moments during a job interview, a consultation about health or finances, a pledge of romance or friendship–when success, when fulfillment, depends precisely on the degree to which we can offer ourselves as a person capable of deferment, someone who can be reliably counted on to bank a portion of every moment’s potential for future spending. Someone prudent enough to have opened, long ago, an RRSP of vital energies and to be committed to making regular, incremental contributions.

Talking the Walk (13)

2009-12-27T12:40:00.005-05:00

It’s true. It’s true.

Soon after my first admission to hospital, I entered a state of complete catatonia, either as a result of psychosis or the powerful tranquilizers I was put on, or most likely a combination of both. But before that, I have fragmented but clear memories of an exchange that kept recurring during my first intake interviews. It involved the doctors telling me, with regard to the wound I had given myself–what I called my “self-Caesarean”–and my beliefs about it, that it was a delusion, a hallucination, part of the psychosis. And I kept saying, with the monosyllabic stubbornness of a trapped person, “No...it’s true.” I think I kept repeating this until it was just a whisper, and then it became an internal voice: It’s true. It’s true. You see, I had been guided by a vision that a rebirth was coming. That the person I had been was dying, and had to die, so that a new person might be born. “You’re sick,” they kept saying. “No, it’s true,” I kept saying. We were speaking from different vantage points–they from sickness, symptoms, and treatment; and I from existence, metaphor and what I saw as salvation–so we couldn’t understand one another. What I might say to them now, if I could travel back in time, is, “I’m sick...and it’s true.” What I’d done was violent and horrible and terribly distorted–with more violence and distortion to come–but it was also true. Twistedly true. Or, if you prefer, truly twisted. And true in the most literal way. A straight-A high school student, a good and likeable boy whose future seemed promising–now lay bandaged and mute, drugged and shocked, on a psychiatric ward, with, after a while, very little hope held out, even by the doctors, for his recovery. Clearly, someone had died. And then, two years later, working as a part-time dishwasher and living in a rented room, tramping about the city all day and night scribbling poems on scraps of paper, restaurant napkins and placemats, even the margins of dollar bills...hand-stitching little books, making collages out of curb-found objects...and feeling exultant, jubilant that at last I’d found the life in art I was meant for. Just as clearly, someone had been born.

Un-making

It is terrible, of course, to be un-made as a person. And exhilarating. And terrible to be exhilarated by your own un-making. As I thought about this the other day, what flew into my mind, like a flaming arrow, was the famous war cry attributed to Crazy Horse: “It is a good day to die.” Which means, as I understand it, that it is also a good day to live. (Especially if you couple it with the first sentence Crazy Horse is supposed to have said: “It is a good day to fight. It is a good day to die.”) If it is a good day to die, it is a good day to live. And...if it is not a good day to die, then probably it has not been a very good day to live. This, by the way, is not related by any neat corollary to suicide, which stalks through my book like a shadowy hunter. I won’t generalize about suicide, which I think is talked about too glibly, when in fact it must be as various and complex as the people and moods that turn to it. I only want to say that I have known the impulse to exit life not as a good day to die, but rather as a day so bad to live that dying seemed the only way to end it. That is very different.

Talking the Walk (12)

2009-12-23T13:03:00.005-05:00

Catching Up to Yourself (Part 2)

How did your wife’s diagnosis effect you?

Well, the long answer to that is the fourth section of the book: “The Lily Pond,” which became the title for the whole. The manuscript was originally just the first three sections. But after Heather got sick, was diagnosed...and came through a very rough time...after that, we agreed that I should try to write about it. Heather encouraged me to do so. In fact, earlier she had said she felt there was “something missing...another piece” from the story. That may have been partly her own premonition of illness. Which usually gives an advance aura of itself, and seldom, if ever, comes truly out of the blue. The short answer is that I was affected much as I imagine anyone else would be. I felt sadness, worry, fear, exhaustion. Bewilderment. Helplessness. My own history of mental illness gave me a general purchase on what was happening, but still...it takes different forms, poses new perils, in each person...even someone you know very well. No amount of preparation can make it predictable or fully understandable. You can’t tame it. You can learn a bit to manage the terror and bafflement, but you can’t erase them.

Was writing this book a catharsis?

I don’t know. I started writing it three years ago, and it was published three months ago, yet I still feel I’m coming to grips with it. Catching up to it, maybe. I think that might be true for a long time to come. Publishing froze the text at a certain point, but the processes it describes are still unfolding. One thing I’ve noticed, a mixed blessing: writing down the past gave more of it back to me, recalling things I’d thought were lost, making connections I hadn’t seen before...but that strengthened past now seems to crowd into the present more, bullying it at times. There have been moments of catharsis. It still feels like early days.

What is your advice to writers with bipolar disorder?

I don’t know that I have any general advice that would be helpful. Every writer is up against the same challenge (though the challenge may be more extreme in the bipolar writer): how to find the rhythms and processes that work for you. We're handed so many fantasy templates of what it means to be an artist–and we hand ourselves so many–that it’s an arduous task to keep recalibrating back to the basics: Yes, but what works for me? What tools and procedures actuate my talent, my vision? Experiments can be useful. I talk about one in the “Leavetaking” section. My psychiatrist noted that over the years I’d become resigned to my own productivity being geared to the cycles of illness: sleepless non-stop writing in the energized phases, wordless inactivity in the lows. And she encouraged me to question both assumptions: that quality work came only from the highs, and that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished in the lows. And numerically, empirically, she and I proved that the poles weren’t so clear-cut. That there was middle ground where much could be done...and done more surely, clear-headedly, than during a lurching, veering high. Still, I doubt I could ever be a steady, year-round producer. Mild depression is a workable state for a writer–even a favourable one for some parts of the writing process–but serious depression, which still lays claim to me regularly, is a destructive state to attempt work in. Depletion falls to even lower ebb if it’s not acknowledged. It’s a time to minimize, conserve...convalesce. In a fight where you’re being pummelled, there’s a time for the defensive crouch, to protect the vitals.

Was there anything you couldn't put in the book that you wanted to for various reasons?

No, I can’t think of anything. I felt free to say what I had to say.

Follow-up

You wrote “this is the first time for me as a writer that the period after writing has proved far more difficult than the writing itself.” Can you expand on this?

Full expansion might need a therapist and lots of hours, but here are a couple of ways I’ve found it difficult. Unlike other books, which have receded after being written, this one has remained “right here.” Because I’m “still living it,” as I’ve been reminded. But also, I think on some level, not consciously, I expected some resolution–maybe the catharsis you spoke of–from writing. Yet mentally I’ve taken some frightening tumbles this fall...episodes so bad, I’ve felt that no time has passed and I’m right back where I began. Despair, mental anarchy: these are timeless states; in a sense, they occur outside biography. All that I’ve learned gives me more means to manage psychological upheaval, but doesn’t prevent it. That’s sobering to realize. “There’s no cure” is an easy thing to say, to understand intellectually...but tougher to come to grips with as a lived reality. And there’s another difficulty. Giving talks this fall, reading from and reflecting on the book–I realize as never before how much of my life has been spent on the rat’s wheel of mental illness. Along with a strengthening sense of my own resilience, for hitting bottom so often and reinventing myself, there’s a corresponding sense of waste, of sheer destruction. So much time and energy–and how much else?–have been chewed up by that wheel. Time and energy that might have gone toward other things. These are autumnal thoughts, wintry thoughts. But it snowed last night, and it’s near the end of the year.

How do the poles affect productivity? You said they are not always so clear-cut.

Well, the simple fact I’m finally getting straight is that the mood in which you work is no accurate measure of the work’s quality. Euphoria colours things brightly; depression colours them darkly. But some of the glittering things lose their lustre if you wait a while, and some of the drab things gain. Of course, waiting doesn’t come easily if you’re on fire...and if you’re ashes, there’s nothing but waiting. Realizing there’s more middle ground than you thought is not the same as knowing how to utilize it. Rather than the two poles, here, very crudely, is the 5-zone range that I think I operate in: low...heading down/up...baseline...heading up/down...high. Good work is done in the stable middle and the transitional zones on either side. At the highest extreme, vast quantities are produced, little of it worthwhile; at the lowest, nothing can occur, it’s a dead zone. It helps to have things lying around at different stages of development, since the different zones have their characteristic energies. For example, the energized loose associations of the upper end are ideal for generating ideas and possibilities...but not so good for evaluating them. Mild depression, as I said before, may be sluggish at generating new stuff, but good at evaluating and revising. A degree of disillusionment and irritability could amount to sober second thought. Of course, there’s a world of subtlety and discrimination in that “degree.” That’s what makes this a living issue, which is to say endless, and not a science project. (Though rational experiment has its place. I describe an experiment my doctor prescribed for me in the book. In a manic burst one January, I’d written several dozen poems in several weeks. When that sputtered down, my psychiatrist suggested I try writing some more. I didn’t see any point to it, but gave it a go. And did manage to write a few more poems, though they seemed rather dull and workmanlike. Yet when it came time to finalize the contents of my collection A Thaw Foretold, the editor and I picked 6 from the frenzied burst and 5 from the assigned work. Considering the size of the starting pools, “a better hit rate” from “mild depression” than from “wild euphoria.” The conclusion seemed obvious: my perception of my ability swings more wildly than my actual ability. There’s a real oscillation of faculties, to be sure, but the pendulum swing of self-assessment is even wider and more erratic.)

Talking the Walk (11)

2009-12-22T15:47:00.009-05:00

Catching Up to Yourself (Part 1)

I sometimes wonder whether interviews wouldn’t be a good therapeutic tool. The several I have done, whether in person or in writing, have proved almost disorientingly informative (to me, at least); I left them with a wildly buzzing brain, as if I had been hooked up to one of those sci-fi learning machines, which transferred information into my head that I must have known before, but hadn’t known I knew.

For days afterward, I wandered around remembering some of my answers, thinking: Do I really believe that? Think that? Feel that? Yes. For how long?

You have a sense of catching up to yourself. Becoming aware of things you already think and feel, but have never clearly articulated before.

How do you know you’re not spinning a line–putting across the image you want the other, or yourself, to believe?

Same way you always do. Revisit the statements, examine them from different angles. (You’ll need to keep a transcript to do this.) Give it time. If they still sit right, and keep sitting right, they probably are.

What are the conditions necessary for a good interview?

Two people who want to find out something.

After The Lily Pond had been out for about three months, I did an e-mail interview with the Danforth Review which helped to clarify for me some aspects of what I’d learned, and hadn’t learned, about mental illness.

When did you begin outlining this book?

I plunged into writing it, without an outline, in November 2005. I describe the initial impulse in the third section of the book, “Leavetaking.” The first words of the first section, “Two Rooms,” came into my head, then joined to other sentences. The writing came steadily and quickly...but calmly, too. That last part surprised me, given the often harrowing nature of what I was describing. I was already well into the writing when I saw how the different sections might fit together. In some ways, it seemed to come pre-formatted...which might mean it had been taking shape in my mind a long time before I was aware of it. I find that’s often true. What you focus on at any point is what’s in front of you on the work bench, but all around the shop are pieces at various stages, from half-finished to mere raw materials...and you sometimes catch glimpses of these, too.

When did you first notice a cohesive (if that was the case) pattern to your mood swings?

It was only about 5 years ago (I’m 53 now) that I fully accepted the diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder, or manic-depression in the old terminology. And that’s after psychiatric treatment starting at age 17, eighteen months in hospital at age 22, multiple “breaks” and breakdowns...throughout all this turbulence, I still resisted a label, fearing it was somehow destructive, reductive. I’m still wary of it; I think of it mainly as a working hypothesis. But finally it seemed even more destructive to keep turning over rocks in my own life, looking for “exogenous” factors, problems in my life or relationships ... when it was obvious, and had been for a long time, that I roared up or crashed down regardless of what was happening in my life. When did it start? By my late teens I knew that something was awry internally. I had no language to use about it then, so I just thought of it as something “off,” “wrong,” “alien.” At that stage, the worst periods were notably seasonal: speed-ups in early fall and spring, followed by depressive crashes. But the pattern still wasn’t clear to me, I think partly because my states are so often what they call “mixed,” e.g. high, driven energy combined with very black mood. Is that high? Low? It’s elements of both. That’s why “mood” is such a crude term. Energy, both psychic and physical, and in terms of both quantity and quality, would be more accurate. And although I’m wary of the current eagerness to identify “the bipolar child,” I do see signs that my own swings began early in my life, certainly by the time of adolescence. I talk about that in the book’s second section, “Hunters in the Snow.” But it takes–or it took me at least–a long time to see any coherent pattern in something that seems so chaotic. For instance, it’s clear to me now that the main reason I kept bombing out of school–it took me 13 years to complete my B.A.–was the neatly horrible overlap between my worst times and the crunch-times of the university year: late fall, spring. My mind would be failing on me–the words I was reading going dead and senseless–and I kept assuming that I simply had no interest in what I was studying...and then quitting, or just scraping by on past performance. Yet the words I couldn’t understand in late November were the same words I was excited by, charged up by, in September. This is something I’ve learned to accept, but with difficulty: going through “spells” of six weeks or more where not only do I have no desire to read my favourite books, but on the most basic level, I can’t even understand them. Can’t track a sentence to its end and know what it said. With all the multiple strategies I’ve learned, the awareness I’ve developed...I’m able to manage these periods better, perhaps level them off slightly...but not change them fundamentally. Could there be a better proof of a biochemical disorder than that? Unfortunately, in some ways the cycles are becoming more random and faster, something I’m told is typical with aging. I’m sorry, I thought this was going to be a very short answer. It’s complicated. It’s taken decades to sort out even these basics.

Did you ever feel while writing this that the simple barebones “non-fiction” element was too close to home. Did you fear it would trigger a negative outcome?

Actually, it felt more like relief to concentrate on just my own story, understanding and telling it as well as I could, without the need to create characters and invent things for them to say and do. At the same time, it felt, if anything, more deeply imagined (as opposed to invented) than fiction: there was a need to find the underlying patterns and structures that could link true events. But I guess you’re asking more about personal risk. That was something I was not so aware of at the time–when I felt mostly exhilarated to be recovering the past–but have become very aware of since. More aware every day. I think there have been, and will be, many negative outcomes for me from writing this book. They’re hard to name and harder to quantify, but I feel them, certainly. Writing names things, which can sound like taming them; but in another sense it gives them new substance and power: it bodies them forth. It’s daunting as well as strengthening to take the true dimensions of an enemy you’ve been battling...especially when there's no sign of an end to the battle. At one point, when we were discussing the manuscript, my psychiatrist advised me to be cautious in dealing with what I had recalled. I quoted her for a piece I wrote about dealing with what I had written: “What you wrote may have unearthed a box. It may have been sealed for a reason...so you could keep functioning. Now it may be time to open it, or at least peek into it. Cautiously.” This is the first time for me as a writer that the period after writing has proved far more difficult than the writing itself.

Talking the Walk (10)

2009-12-19T16:12:00.008-05:00

Retrieval

I was fortunate to find Dan Wells, the publisher of my last three books. In Dan I found a true bibliophile (who are not so common, even in the literary world); a publisher whose almost alarming energies are fast building, in Biblioasis, the best small press in the country; and a friend. Dan and I are both slaves to our love of books and our love of conversation, and the mood swings of those masters colour our exchanges, often by email at hours when more temperate passions would be sleeping.

One day Dan sent me a list of questions for an interview that he later posted on the Biblioasis blog.

The title of your memoir is The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis. I wonder if you could start by explaining this a bit, with perhaps particular emphasis paid to your rather interesting subtitle?

For a few months the manuscript had another title, and only three sections instead of four. I thought it was finished. When I was surprised by the events, and then the writing, of the last section, I realized that its title, “The Lily Pond,” had to be the title of the whole book, since it encapsulates so many of the themes and images explored throughout. But a book just called The Lily Pond could be mistaken for a manual on aquatic gardening or a study of Monet—hence the subtitle. It came from me asking myself a simple question: What is the book about? What are its main and recurrent elements? It’s about madness, an oldfashioned term which I prefer to the more modern “bipolar disorder.” Madness covers a huge range of extreme states: from craziness to fiery creative passion to overmastering love and obsession. I think this scope makes it a more humane term, but also a more accurate one. The book is also about memory. This might be considered redundant: isn’t a memoir by definition about memory? No. All memoirs draw on memory, but this one actively explores how memory may be lost or damaged (through illness and its treatments), how and to what extent it may be recovered, and how a coherent life story may be maintained even in the absence of reliable memory. The book is also about myth. It draws on world mythologies to make some of its points, but in a broader sense, it questions the daily myths of illness and wellness by which we know ourselves and others. How do these myths damage, limit, nourish, reveal? Can they be changed? Lastly, it is a story of metamorphosis: of altered states wrought by illness and confusion, but also by recovery and understanding. It is about the paradox of accepting radical ongoing transformation as the foundation of life and sanity.

Plus, I like the alliteration of all those M’s. They sound like murmuring.

It seems to me that this is a book you have been working toward for quite a while. Your other books–some of your stories, your poetry, perhaps most especially your first novel, The Syllabus–have grappled with the subjects of madness, of memory (and forgetting), of metamorphosis. Especially M., the hero of The Syllabus. You describe memory in The Lily Pond as a Turner fogscape. Can you briefly explain?

Well, that comparison comes specifically from “Two Rooms,” the first section of the book, where the period I am trying to remember is the eighteen months I spent on and off (mostly on) a psychiatric ward...when accurate recall was swamped by a perfect storm of memory disruptors: dozens of electroshock treatments, phenothiazines and other powerful drugs, and the confusions and distortions of psychosis itself. So the snippets that come back to me are often like those tantalizing gleams in Turner’s veils of fog. Sometimes, if I concentrate, more details will come and the object or face, a scene, will solidify and make more sense. And this also happens looking at Turner’s paintings. This doesn’t mean, though, that the glimpses of things could be anything, are random. I have a sense—a memory trace, I assume—of what is really there, and it has weight, a “rightness” on those occasions when I find it. For example, a year ago, my sister told me of visiting me in the hospital at a time when I was catatonic, just lying on my bed unmoving day after day. And fleeting images of her then came back to me, bits of her face, hands, the hospital wall behind her...and I trusted these. Partly because they had that weight I’m speaking of...pieces actually dredged up from something sunken...but also because they stayed as bits, fleeting fragments. I think a wish-fulfillment fantasy would have bloomed more completely. This was one of the worst times, memory-wise. Nearly obliterative of those years, but also of much of my life up till then, as if a retroactive fog had swallowed much of the past. And the memory troubles continued forward too, with fog and “gap-outs,” as I call them, especially during times of illness. In recent years I have felt more able to retrieve the past. Relatively speaking–when I compare notes with other people, they express surprise at how much of my life has simply vanished. But I’ve learned a lot of tricks that help: checks and double-checks, ways of reinforcement, and also habits of concentration and reflection to lay down and maintain a stronger memory track. And I’ve learned to live with the holes. Turner’s fog can be unsettling...but it also has its gentle and allusive aspect, a richness of suggestion. Easy-to-see can also mean easy-to-dismiss, which is another kind of forgetting. I’m sorry: you asked for “briefly” and this hasn’t been. Memory is a raw nerve.

Can you say a few words about the writing of the book?

The story of the book’s genesis is told in the book’s third section,“Leavetaking.” There, with the help of my psychiatrist, I follow, in an almost detective-like fashion, a number of mysterious clues and events that lead me to an answer which is also a course of action: telling my own story, this memoir, for the first time. One of the precipitating events was being asked to speak about my life as a writer for a university group. In preparing that talk, I realized that I had never really told, even to myself, my own story—or not this important aspect of it. In my poems and fiction I had alluded to it often and tried to illuminate it from various angles. But I had never consciously explored at length, in writing, the meaning for me of my decades of mental illness. This preliminary thinking led me into areas that were unusable for a talk to strangers but which proved to be the beginnings of this manuscript. After writing the first three-quarters of it, I sent it to four friends, less to get their judgement on its literary merits than to see if it spoke to them as a human story. Their encouraging responses led me to continue the project, eventually writing the last section about Heather’s recently-diagnosed illness, and, in slow steps, to consider and finally say yes to your offer to publish the book.

Talking the Walk (9)

2009-12-18T12:50:00.007-05:00

Title and Total

The Lily Pond has a lengthy subtitle: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis. Back in the summer, Chapters-Indigo told my publisher, Dan Wells, that it would place the book on one of its coveted “power tables”–a coup for a small press–if we changed the subtitle to feature “bipolar disorder” prominently. I was loath to cost Dan possible sales, but I argued strenuously against this, outlining many reasons in a marathon midnight email, which I’ll shorten drastically here. Besides liking the alliteration of all those murmuring “M’s,” I had reasons for each word. Madness, for example. While “bipolar disorder” may be a workable shorthand for a medical condition, or conditions, in general I prefer the old-fashioned word “madness,” which can mean craziness, illness, but also wildness, fiery creative passion, overmastering love or obsession. It has more scope, more texture...more humanity. In its wider allusiveness it is more accurate. Memory, myth, metamorphosis–I have my own rationale for each of them. And I convinced Dan. But not Chapters-Indigo. I doubt if you win many battles with a large chain. At best, you state your case and then the line goes dead. They still ordered a small number of copies. These can be found, thin spines out, in Health and Wellness, under Mood Disorders or Depression.

These questions about the book’s title are related to the questions I have been asked by readers and interviewers about the book’s reflections, at points, about such things as great paintings, star constellations, ancient myths, and common animals like frogs. The questioners have sometimes seemed to regard these as poetic digressions, depatures from the book’s core of mental breakdowns, psychiatric treatment, poverty and other turmoil, and slow recovery. I have two things to say in answer, answers that haven’t always come readily on the telephone or in a radio studio, in response to questions that have sometimes sounded sympathetically curious, but sometimes impatient or hostile: 1) I wrote this book, first, long before I thought of publishing it, to better understand events that had been dogging me for most of my life. The stakes, for me, couldn’t have been higher. So I had no time, no room, for any line that didn’t help to illuminate for me some corner of the subject. 2) Second, why is it that people think you’re talking straight when you talk of shock treatments or tears in a psychiatrist’s office–as I also do in the book–but raise their eyebrows when you speak of how you perceive the world, how your mind, in illness and in health, processes it? It demeans the mentally ill, as it demeans anyone, to say: Tell us about your heart, but not about your mind. It not only dumbs down the person, and the problem, but it makes plain a paradox that still bedevils our understanding of mental illness. We will allow in the heart–How do you feel? is heard routinely; but we still prefer to leave the mind out of mental illness–How do you think? is a rare question. And that is strange. Because if you go crazy with your whole self–mind, heart, body, all of you–then arriving at any sort of understanding of that going crazy must involve your whole self also. You go mad with who and what you are, and aren’t; you recover, if you do and to the extent that you do, with the same totality.

Talking the Walk (8)

2009-12-12T13:03:00.004-05:00

A Pair of Us

Question from a sceptical professional: Do you really think you and your wife can take good care of each other when you’re both so sick?

Short answer: I don’t know. Do you?

Longer version:

“There's a pair of us,” Heather says to me, a bit breathlessly, after we have left the psychiatrist’s office and are sitting in our car. It is early June. She has turned in her seat to face me, and her eyes are wide and lambent, glittering with that desperate euphoria, or euphoric desperation, that has lit them–except when they have gone overcast, shrouded in cancelling gloom–for these last few burning, tumultuous weeks.

She seems relieved for the moment. To have a diagnosis, an illness with a name? (She had feared having a name, but then feared more being something unnamable.) To be sharing, as we have shared so much, a diagnosis with me? “It always amazes me how often you people find each other,” the psychiatrist remarked, when I had joined them in the office for the last ten minutes of Heather's interview. He spoke of the number of “bipolar couples” he had met, who had been drawn irresistibly together (often despite existing marriages or other serious obstacles) and who had established unusual but sustaining ways of coping with their cycles of illness, often long before either of them had been diagnosed. Heather and I exchange a look. His bemused, somewhat clinical reflections make it sound as if he is describing a species of exotic animals, creatures that emit a special mating call, inaudible or registered as noise outside their kind, and then embark on bizarre and esoteric mating rites. Yet the gist of his remarks rings true. From the start, Heather and I have been able to speak in shorthand, with intuitive understanding, of steeply swinging moods and strange mental states, and we quickly developed ways of gearing together discordant swings and of warily surviving the most dangerous times, when the swings coincide and amplify each other. We have even joked of a day like today, when Heather’s distrust of doctors would relent (gently, in our fantasy, not under the duress of crisis) and we would “make it official.”

But the day foreseen is not the day that arrives. I look through the windshield up the street, which is lined with parked cars and empty of people. The leaves of the overhanging shade trees are a bright, incongruous green; we have been keeping such wildly irregular hours lately that it has been a long time since I have paid attention to such basics as the weather or the changing season.

It is Sunday morning, early, before church even. It seems a strange time to be meeting with a psychiatrist outside of an emergency ward, but this psychiatrist has a quirky schedule and neither of Heather's other two doctors felt that it was safe to wait another day. The appointment was scheduled by telephone late last night. This recognition of the need for haste, of the peril Heather is in despite her equable demeanor, inclines me to trust these doctors, despite my own long history of damage by medical misadventure. Already they understand Heather well enough to know that she, like me, will understate rather than exaggerate a crisis, and understate with a more savage discretion as the crisis nears its climax.

Is it time yet? The question, sceptical but insistent–shadowing the mind at dawn, at noon, at 2:00 a.m.–has altered to a more drastic shape: Is there still time? Out of the myriad confusions of the last few harrowing weeks, Heather and I have arrived at one certainty: medical intervention is required. To wait, to hope for change, is no longer permissible; it is not safe. In this, at least, the doctors and we are in accord.

As we drive off toward the pharmacy where we will fill Heather's first prescription of lithium, she murmurs again, softly, as if to herself, “a pair of us.” Thinking of the Emily Dickinson poem she is quoting from, in which one frog discourses to another, I wonder if I am hearing, besides a mixed and quizzical expression of relief, a first sign of the controlling image of Heather’s sickness–or, could it be, the hopeful image of her health? For if you find yourself floundering between elemental extremes, might not the image of an amphibian be a comfort, a guide? As precarious as a frog’s survival may be, as it undoubtedly is, it has to afford more hope than the dominant image shaped by, and then shaping, my own first psychosis. Through the summer and fall of 1977, I kept seeing, faintly and intermittently at first, and then constantly and with bullying vividness, a seam of red glowing from within a brownish crust–like molten lava glowing under soil or rock, presaging volcanic eruption. The image was pregnant with violence, a fiery birth that I saw approaching and desired as a consummation, and it ended with blood spilling down my abdomen from the “self-Caesarean” I had performed on myself.

Twenty-nine years later, my thoughts are focused, as they have been for weeks, on how Heather might be spared such a moment, along with its lifelong ramifications, its endlessly rippling aftermath. Surely, I think, my own huge kit bag of mental illness must contain a few instruments to help another. Diet, daily habits, even lighting and room layouts–what might be changed? What might be tinkered with? The smallest adjustment could make a difference, tip the balance. And to that end, everything–even the grotesque, 4:00 a.m. arguments our sleepless, cross-wired selves inveigle us into–must be examined (in retrospect in those cases) for a possible clue.

As I drive down the surreally bright, surreally empty streets, I try to remember the exact wording of the Dickinson poem. Beside me, Heather is slumped in her seat; she is staring blankly ahead. I imagine the glum routines of drug therapy–on my way to fill my scrip–pressing in on her.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you–Nobody–Too?

Then there’s a pair of us?

Don’t tell! They’d advertise–you know!

The poet’s frog is all questions, exclamations, and commands. There’s not a single croak of reasoned calm amid the flurry of agitated queries and exhortations. It sounds familiar, which means it is not what I am looking for.

Dickinson’s question mark–Then there’s a pair of us?–isn’t helpful either. I am glad Heather forgot or ignored it. Sometimes I imagine a flint-eyed observer watching the two of us and thinking, The blind leading the blind. Someone with my record, trying to help someone in Heather’s situation–Who worse? I imagine them thinking.

On the other hand: Who better?

Talking the Walk (7)

2009-12-12T12:50:00.006-05:00

Unfinalizable

So far I’ve talked about the stages of crisis, aftermath, and recovery. I’d like to touch now on the question of what happens when recovery is completed. That one’s easy. Nothing happens. It’s never completed. That may sound dire, but only if you’re the kind of person who thinks people “get over” tough things that happen to them. I don’t think anybody gets over anything...and thank God. Getting over a part of life makes it sound like a fence rail in a horse race. A more human goal, I think, is to try to weave the experience into the fabric of one’s ongoing life, making the past part of the texture of the present and the future.

“Unfinalizable” is a word that Dr. George likes, and I’ve grown fond of it too. Recovery is unfinalizable because you’re still living it. Can a life be resolved? Would you even want it to be? In my case, there isn’t any cure for the difficulties I’ve had and continue to have. They’re chronic. I manage them...sometimes well, sometimes not so well.

This, by the way, is why we didn’t want to use a conventional image of a water lily bloom on the cover. The kind of image you might see on a meditation book or a collection of Zen sayings. Beautiful–the lotus blossom of enlightenment. But too perfect. Too finished. Too pristine and complete. So we bought our big plastic bucket from Hamilton Kitchen Supplies and tried, from June to September, to grow our own lily plant on the apartment balcony. And got leaves, lots of leaves...but no bloom. Not enough sun, said my gardening advisor; they need long, pure hours of it. Which, in the end, we decided was better after all. We rinsed off the plant when it looked like it was starting to wane and photographed the whole length of it, from root mass, with a new shoot poking out, to long stems, to leaves. Complete...in itself. But not perfect.

It should be clear by now that I don’t believe any of these processes are unique to mental illness and its treatment. In fact, I’m often struck, when thinking of these subjects, how when the phrase “mental illness” is left out, the issues are existential ones common to everyone. Perhaps many mental health problems, even the severest crises, and however they may be caused, are intensifications of everyday human concerns and challenges. These existential concerns–of encounter, of crisis, of recovery, of living with the unfinalizable–are only more obvious in episodes of trauma, which shines a harsh light on questions of existence that are always operative, always urgent.

Unfinalizable. It ain’t over till it’s over. And even then, there’s probably no conclusion to any story, but only the sense of a new chapter beginning, in which the events of the previous chapter are incorporated and enlarged...and the question becomes: have you learned anything from what came before, anything you can apply in your life, now?

Writing this book gave me an object lesson in the meaning of unfinalizable. In many ways...but in one way I would never have wished, but which couldn’t have been a more powerful demonstration. After I’d written what is now the third section of the book, I thought the manuscript was done. I showed it to a few people...cautiously, tentatively. Their reactions were encouraging, but I had a nagging sense that the matters I’d been writing about were still hanging overhead, left undone, developing. Why? I kept asking. What’s next? What’s coming? Part of what was coming, as Dr. George pointed out, was simply more life, living with it. Something doesn’t end because you write about it. But what also turned out to be developing–and I tell this with her permission, as she generously and courageously gave me her permission to write about it–was my wife, Heather’s, deepening mental health crisis, which spiralled into an acute episode and her own diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Along with all the emotions anyone would feel–worry, fear, sadness, exhaustion–I wondered: Had I learned anything from my own experience that could help her? Or, even more simply, could we find a way to be sick together...to perform the often awkward, but sometimes strangely graceful, dance of helping and being helped?

The answers, I’m afraid, are the usual trinity: Yes. No. Maybe.

Talking the Walk (6)

2009-11-23T15:12:00.005-05:00

Idiocy...and Beyond

Are you anti-psychiatry? I have been asked that many times since publishing The Lily Pond. The answer is a clear No. I don't think I would be standing here, and possibly not standing anywhere, if not for the excellent psychiatric care I have received for the past five years. The third section of The Lily Pond gives a view of that care, which includes managing a crisis as well as embarking on the writing of this book.

Lest this be mistaken for a ringing endorsement of the mental health system, let me add that those five years are the only time–in a psychiatric career stretching back more than thirty-five years–that I have felt myself to be in good hands. My previous shrinks ranged from passable (possibly) to lacklustre to frighteningly bad. To put good health care into perspective, I’d like to read a portrait of the kind of care I’d come to settle for. If you find it funny, be sure to listen for the punchline at the end, which comes at my expense.

Heather and I called my Toronto shrink The Idiot. I had been seeing him once a month for several years, whenever I needed my prescription refilled. He wouldn't phone it in to the pharmacy or write for more than one month: he wanted to bill for the office visit. The appointment lasted for half an hour. He spent at least half of that time, every time, finding my file folder, fixing his coffee and stirring it by the machine. Sometimes more time was wasted because he couldn’t remember my name. He would come back with a file for Barrens, or Burnez, or Marks, or Michaels. He never did learn my name in the several years I saw him, and he mispronounced it each time I told it to him again. When I showed up for one appointment and the nurses said, with nasty looks, that he had moved–only one had any idea where his new office might be–I guessed that his privileges at that hospital had been suspended. He worked now in a little brick building over a pharmacy; he seemed to have cut a deal with the pharmacist, since he urged me to fill my prescriptions downstairs and sulked and made difficulties if I wanted to go elsewhere. He had the insufferable bombast of the dullard still vested with authority. After the 9/11 attacks, he treated me to a thirty minute harangue on Egyptian politics; that was the price of pills that day. He raised the dosage as I requested–as I increasingly needed–but asserted his authority by lecturing me on my condition, making inane speculations, sometimes rationalizing his own laxness by flattering himself for having the sagacity to know when a patient was capable of self-monitoring. But eventually, if you have been seeing for years a doctor you call The Idiot, you have to ask yourself: Who is? Seeing a doctor you find contemptible is a position of the utmost precariousness. He broke most of the ethical rules of psychiatry, but that wasn’t what scared me most about him. What frightened me was that I could wind up in hospital under his care, and then he would have the power to do as he saw fit with me. I knew more than a little about what that could mean.

Yes, that’s how bad it can get. But the joke is really on me. I am the other fool and incompetent in the passage, someone whose sense of self-worth and personal horizons had shrunk to the dangerous point where he would accept that level of care and not look, not feel he could or should or must, look for better.

I think that good psychotherapy is necessary for every person suffering from mental illness. People tell me that resources are strained and this is not possible. Really? It might save on excuses if we agreed on this premise at the outset: There is enough money to do whatever we decide is worth doing. And its corollary: if we’re not doing something, it’s because we haven’t felt collectively that it’s worth doing.

Even the most effective drug treatment–and I know people whose lives have been literally saved by mood stabilizers and antidepressants, to name just two classes of drugs–still leaves unaddressed many issues of self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-forgiving that cannot be left out of mental health. In addition to being enormously helpful, psychotherapy is extremely interesting, mysterious and unpredictable. When it is fruitful, it is not only challenging but also suprising and even exciting.

Go to a physiotherapy clinic, a gym, a chiropractor’s office, a massage therapist, a medical supply store, a mattress shop or a furniture store, and you’ll meet people–all of us, sooner or later–willing to invest time and energy and dollars on ways to help weak and ailing body parts. Is the psyche worth caring for even half as well as we care for our ankles, knees, necks, and backs?

Talking the Walk (5)

2009-11-17T23:08:00.003-05:00

Don’t

Along with the personal Do’s I’ve discovered, there are also lots of Don’t’s. Here are a few.

Don’t panic...try not to. There is a degree of amnesia to my condition, so that every time I lurch upward into mania or downward into depression, it feels like the first time, and I lose all memory that I have been here before and gotten through it. Retaining a thin thread of memory, enough that I can say, “I know this place; I was here before, and I left again,” is one of most important results of my recent years of therapy. It’s a lifeline to cling to, a thread to guide me out of the labyrinth.

Don’t forget the past. And its flipside: Don’t enshrine the past as law.

Don’t overgeneralize, i.e. don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I meet patients who are virulently anti-psychiatry, and I meet others who are passively acquiescent in their treatment. I have been both and I know both to be self-destructive. I feel sympathy with the anger, fear, sadness and distrust of people who have had bad experiences, but recovery means not ruling out any possible resource, while judging each one’s benefits and costs rigorously. Ruling out a whole class of experiences on the basis of a few adverse encounters could cost you valuable allies. It cost me dearly, and I regard the fifteen years when I shunned the mental health system, drifting through a series of rented rooms, short-term jobs and very bad times, as some of the worst and most pointless years of my life...years when I despaired of finding any external help whatsoever and had to be pushed back into it.

People have wondered how I can talk about electroshock in the same breath as drinking too much in rented rooms. But noting certain similarities between experiences is not the same as equating them. Jolt and juice are both ways of battering the brain, though the juice usually happens in slower motion. And when staring at a ceiling lowered to about two inches above your face, it’s never a bad idea to ask what role you might have played in disappearing the horizon.

Don’t forget what they did to you.

Don’t forget what you did to yourself.

Talking the Walk (4)

2009-11-15T20:31:00.006-05:00

...and?

The phase after the aftermath is usually called recovery. It’s a word you hear a lot these days, often in connection with a specific trauma: in recovery from addiction, from abuse, from mental illness. But I think recovery, properly understood, is universal–something each person is, or should be, engaged in. If you think of recovery as learning how to make your wounds and losses part of your life–fully acknowledging them without allowing them to overwhelm or completely determine you–then I would ask: Who is not in recovery? Who has not suffered wounds and losses? Who is not trying to live with them? Who is not facing serious challenges in the present? Who is not trying to build, out of a heap of cracked and broken, along with beautifully solid, pieces, a whole life?

Clearly, recovery understood in these terms can never refer to a final or finished state. It can can only gesture toward a process, a continual set of reorientations that come from the willingness to tinker, like an amazed and persevering chemist, with the basic elements of your experience.

This means that every recovery is personal. Individual and changing, an ongoing negotiation. What works? It is intensely, even ruthlessly, practical: the person who wants to actively recover has to be as wily as a fox in sniffing out potential help, discarding harm, and bold enough to experiment to discover which is which. This is the search for what Pat Deegan calls “personal medicine”: the procedures and prescriptions that work for you.

My own personal medicine cabinet is stuffed, by now. Here are a few items from it, to give some idea of the range of idiosyncratic possibilities.

Diet. I'll spare you the details, but I eat a lot better now than I did in my twenties, and overall, I’m a little less crazy. I know there’s a connection.

Sleep. This remains one of my biggest problems. Especially since I know that accumulated insomnia is one of the surest triggers for my worst episodes. I’ve tried most of the mood stabilizers, but they’ve had side effects I couldn’t tolerate. I take clonazepam and lorazepam which help with sleep. I take another over-the-counter relaxant: alcohol. Naturally I worry about addiction, especially as I see my dosage climb with the years. But I’ve also wondered which would harm my liver faster: too much alcohol, or long stretches of 1-3 hours of sleep a night, which I suffer frequently. This isn’t an excuse or an apologia for booze. It’s a weighing. A balancing.

Light therapy during the winter, since there is still a seasonal component to my swings.

My biggest discovery of the last few years has been the benefit of large (very large) doses of the omega-3’s, along with other vitamins. I began this regimen four years ago and have no doubt that it’s given me more stability.

Hydrotherapy. The eternal solace of water. I seek it out wherever I can. Bathtubs. Showers. The overcrowded YMCA pool. Puddles, streams, rivers. Lake Ontario. I crave the ocean, but I am a two-day drive from the nearest one.

Longo’s supermarket. It almost never fails to pick me up. I like the bright lights, I like the vivid colours, I like the silver-haired produce manager who dispenses helpful advice (often with me lurking nearby to listen) on when a mango is ripe or why the asparagus lasted longer this year. No matter how dismal my day has been, I leave Longo’s with bagfuls of that most useful thing: food. In a hungry world this is no small achievement.

What I call the small-circle cure, which I take in small doses regularly, but in large doses a couple of times each year. This means reducing activity and stimulation to a bare minimum. Dimming the lights, unplugging the phone, cancelling social engagements. And, as I feel my ability to think in sequence ebbing away, scaling my reading down from the love life of Anna Karenina to the love life of Britney Spears...and then further, to just flipping through books of pictures or watching reruns of The Sopranos. To return to the idea of functioning: Someone seeing me lying on my side beside a single lamp, flipping pages of Rolling Stone or People, might see a low order of functioning...and it is, in a way...but it is a much higher order of functioning than I showed in the years when I tried to keep reading and writing through these spells, which can last six weeks or more, and added terrible frustration to depression when I could understand nothing, produce nothing. Self-acceptance, I’m coming to see, involves a better understanding of one of the simplest words: and. I am a person who reads, and writes, challenging texts...and I am a person who, at times, cannot read or write the simplest sentence. The two facts are not mutually exclusive; they mustn’t be, since I’m living both of them.

Understanding and. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the effort to include, and re-include, is central to both the word and the process of recovery.

Talking the Walk (3)

2009-11-13T13:11:00.005-05:00

Aftermaths

Before Came After was the title a poet I once knew gave to her first, self-published collection. It stayed with me as a truth about (at least) the psychic order of things: you have to be on the far side of something to catch more than a glimmer of its approach. Saying that, though, casts doubt on all the conventions of sequence and finality embedded in our language. The far side? The far side? Or just...another side? They are conventions we need, of course. The narrative of beginning-middle-end is one of the most profoundly practical of human inventions: the equivalent of fire or the wheel, in terms of helping us shape and use experience. Saying A led to B led to C–though we know better; know, as the best stories always imply, it could not be quite so simple–allows us to mingle timeless truths with the timed necessities of tigers and ticket-takers. But it never hurts, as a refinement of that fire-wheel, to remind ourselves of the inescapable circularity of all processes. Before comes after. After comes before. There is no such thing as a conclusion, but if there were, it would double as the ideal introduction.

I want to pick up my story on the other side of crisis, that first episode as it’s sometimes called, which in my case was very protracted. Whatever treatment is used, even if it’s old-fashioned time, the easing of crisis is not a return to health, but only the first step in such a return. It is that dazed mixture of relief, exhaustion and bewilderment commonly called the aftermath–a fragile condition, a thin soil in which hope may try to put down roots. A passage in the second section of The Lily Pond describes this state of aftermath. I’m not alone in the passage, appropriately, since the emotions of aftermath, like the emotions of crisis, ripple out to affect everyone close to the patient, especially family and friends. A feature of aftermath that I don’t think is talked about often enough is the intellectual challenge it poses. Most people can imagine the emotional blow that trauma inflicts, and that is what most accounts focus on. But what has also been damaged, perhaps even shattered, is the personal narrative of self and life we are all telling ourselves, which must now resume with drastically altered prospects and circumstances. Simply put, serious mental illness poses a constant question that is very hard to answer, but which must be answered in some fashion: Who am I now in the light of that? What can I now expect? What can I do?

In May of 1979, the water level of French River reached its highest point in living memory. ...I came north with my parents to open the cottage; I remember loading the boat as it floated beside the gas pumps at the marina, three or more feet above the usual docks even at high water. I remember little else about that springtime trip; probably there was little of me left to remember with. I had only recently been discharged from a psychiatric ward after a year-and-a-half siege. It was really a siege of seven years, beginning with my first serious depression and psychiatric treatment at age seventeen, which cut short my last year of high school and inaugurated a long, chaotic slide away from active and communal life, culminating in the self-mutilation that earned me a diagnosis of schizophrenia and embarked me on the hospitalized ordeal of neuroleptic drugs, electroshock treatments and hydra-headed symptoms that came close to killing me, and, in the sense of obliterating all vestiges of my former life, in a way did kill me. My amnesia of that springtime trip north with my parents seems fitting; I could not have accompanied them except as a dazed and depleted survivor, a convalescent with tremors and scars and a battered brain, a broken and wide-eyed child though nominally a man of twenty-four, gaping at the debris left by the flood.

Floodscapes present ambiguous vistas–at least to those Noahs lucky enough to survive them.

There is destruction, obviously.

But, also, new shorelines.

Deep (fertile?) mud.

Talking the Walk (2)

2009-11-10T23:23:00.005-05:00

In Praise of Puzzlement

It’s time to sing of puzzlement as a desired, and desirable, state of mind. It’s time to paint in lush, layered grays. Living grays.

A friend wrote me the other day of G.E. Moore saying, of the young Wittgenstein, “I have a very good opinion of him. He is the only student who looks puzzled in my lectures.”

In brutish schools of thought (often among the most powerful and influential schools of thought), puzzlement is typically derided as a sign of the infirm or timid mind. It can be. Just as it can be sign of the strongest and bravest. Do you have what it takes to live with–live in–“maybe...maybe not”?

I see you’re critical of the mental health system. Yes...to a point.

You think you know a better way. Yes...to a point.

I don’t have a one-treatment-fits-all program to suggest. I’m left with–left in–puzzlement, but out of puzzlement I do have a couple of questions to pose.

1) Why has one of the oldest and most low-tech approaches to mental illness fallen so out of favour? I’m talking here of the “rest cure” as it used to be called, making use of the healing power of time and quiet as the wounded psyche sorts itself out. I think of this sometimes as I walk around the now-disused grounds of the old Ontario Hospital, a place I was almost sent to for the long-term care that we patients called “bagging.” I find those lawns and chestnut trees restful and restorative now...I suspect I would find them even more so in a time of acute illness. Not, certainly, as a “bagged” person, a warehoused shell of myself–but as a broken soul in need of sanctuary, of asylum, in need of the long, slow time necessary to reknit brokenness. No matter how successfully it is managed, trauma takes time. Time to occur (since it occurs in waves, even if one event precipitates it)...and a long time to come back from.

2) Now, I know that part of the answer to my first question is that we have other treatments now. More focused ones, usually pharmacological but also psychotherapeutic. The “rest cure” was partly because the ones prescribing it had nothing else to prescribe. But that’s only part of the answer. Another part has to do with our haste these days to restore a patient to functioning. “Time heals,” we say, but do we act as if we believe it? It takes courage to trust time–the courage to wait and see. And I have absolutely nothing against functioning. At my best, I juggle a full-time job with serious reading and writing, seeing family and friends, other hobbies and interests–I like being active and productive, as only someone who has spent months and even years out of commission, can. But I think we all fall into the trap of defining functioning too narrowly. And of making it a kind of idol. Functioning can’t really be understood in abstract or absolute or general terms, but only in individual terms, as part of a larger concept of overall mental health. It’s likely that, after the onset of illness, a person’s means of functioning will change, temporarily or permanently; it may also fluctuate, which is certainly true for me. I’ve had to develop–and this is something I’m still doing–a new model of functioning...one that fits the person I am now.

Can there be any person for whom this is not true? That is, anyone who, to answer the question What can I do today? must not first ask the question Who am I today?

“Who decides what functioning is?” I asked Dr. George in one of our first sessions.

She looked puzzled. At last! I’d seen psychiatrists furrow their brows in anger, in disbelief, in impatience...in any one of the rainbow hues of pique. When had I last seen a brow furrowed in honest perplexity?

“You do,” she said. “Who else?”

Talking the Walk (1)

2009-11-08T21:19:00.006-05:00

Encounter

Recently I came across a quotation that I’ve been turning over in my mind. It’s by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said: “You must always be puzzled by mental illness.” What did he mean? I wondered. I decided it was not a statement for confusion or against certainty, but rather for curiosity and respect for the mystery of others, and against a too-easy certainty. And I would broaden it; I would say: You must always be puzzled by other people. Not because puzzlement is a good in itself, but because if you aren’t puzzled, you aren’t paying attention, and if you aren’t paying attention...what can you discover that you don’t already know?

Every psychiatric history, no matter how long (and mine is over 35 years long now), begins with something very simple: an encounter. Typically, this encounter occurs between a doctor and a patient, maybe late at night, maybe in an emergency room. In one sense this is a unique situation, but it shares features with any other encounter between strangers: curiosity, fluctuating levels of trust and suspicion, needs (on both sides), hope...and fear, assumptions, and expectations. What it always contains is a large portion of the unknown. Whatever knowledge and experience both persons bring to the encounter–whatever inner stars they have learned to steer by–these can’t change the fundamental fact that the person facing you is unique, unlike anyone you have met before.

A passage early on in The Lily Pond describes such an encounter:

The emergency staff of North York General Hospital could not have had much more than questions on the morning of November 11, 1977, when a twenty-two-year-old white male, agreeably calm and strangely articulate, presented with a deep transverse incision in his belly and shorter slashes across his abdomen and above his left knee. The main wound was of the size and in the place that a later examiner would ask about the patient’s appendectomy, and the patient himself spoke wryly of his “self-Caesarean,” adding that he guessed it was “in the wrong direction.” He also produced a thick hardbound book with a pebbly red cover, which contained some two hundred pages of close-packed writing alternating with drawings and collages, the artwork garishly colored and badly smeared in places from the artist’s taste for thickly applied oil pastels. An interviewer, glancing from time to time up at the patient, riffled through the massed output, too quickly to take in more than an impression of frantic copiousness; the crucially telling point that the book had been new and empty a week before probably did not emerge. I sometimes wonder about those first examiners, whose faces I cannot remember. Where are they now? What are they doing? If still alive, the oldest would be long retired, in advanced old age; the very youngest, residents then, would be in the latter third of a career in medicine. It was twenty-eight years ago, longer than the life of Keats. But whoever they were, and whatever little they had to go on, one thing was certain: they had to do something. The stitching up must have been in some sense soothing to both patient and practitioner: here, at least, was an unquestioned good. An obvious need fitly addressed. Now what?

“Now what?” sets the stage for a new encounter.

Talking the Walk

2009-11-07T17:28:00.006-05:00

Introduction

One of the most rewarding aspects of publishing a memoir on mental illness has been the opportunity to speak to different groups of people about the many matters that fall under the umbrella term “mental health.” Doing this–in venues that have included a hospital (the one where I once spent a year and a half), a bookstore, an art gallery, a church, and various meeting centres and community halls–I’ve been struck by the sheer need of so many people to talk about these issues. A need, it’s very clear, that is mostly unmet. At times, the urge of unburdening that fills the room has felt almost overwhelming.

The talks have been an evolving process. Each time I’ve written something new for the occasion, while incorporating pieces of previous talks. So each talk represents a further stage in climbing a rock face–or descending into a rock pit, since the same muscles and equipment are needed to explore upward as downward–...reaching out from a line of pitons already secured, in order to hammer in one or two more.

Three of these talks–one audio-visual, one audio-only, and one text–are posted in their entirety online, and are accessible from the links on the upper righthand side of this blog.

Some listeners have asked me, however, for printouts of particular points made in the talks. To supply these, and to review the points myself, I will be entering portions here over the next few weeks. Where necessary, I will make slight adjustments so the passage stands better alone. I hope, too, that in the process new thoughts will occur to me, which I can include as additional entries.

Whenever, over the years, I heard the question: “Do you talk the talk, or walk the walk?”–I always had an unsatisfied sense of only two doors? I get to talk, or walk...that’s it? I would rather talk the walk and walk the talk...if I can.

Talking the Walk, Walking the Talk.

Or, since people tell me that in these Twitter Times no title should exceed three words: Talking the Walk.

Night and Day

2009-11-01T21:35:00.005-05:00

Gustav's Song

2009-10-27T13:58:00.004-04:00

“Strand after strand
of her unruly hair
descends to the floor, where they drift
into corners and clot around doors.

I tell her, I warn her,
‘You don’t keep the house.
Tidying’s my job, but fair is fair:
Think of me when you’re cutting or combing

Your hair.’ And she will
for a time, but slovenly ways
trump a kind heart; so year after year,
to immaculate floors,

Fall brown hairs, then gray hairs,
then glimmering white–these pepper-salt
mouse nests on shelves and on stairs.”
It was all long ago. Now my room is scrubbed bare.
____________________

(Note: This poem is supposed to be centered all the way down, the lines breathing around a central spine. But I haven't been able to figure out how to do anything with poem formats other than the straight align left. If anyone who reads this knows, could you let me know...either email me directly if you have my address, or ask my publisher–Dan Wells at Biblioasis–to forward the message? Once in a while, I might like to take a pinstep away from the Good Left Rock.)

Ing

2009-10-26T22:07:00.006-04:00

Some say He’s dead; a few say She’s sleeping;
Most need to reach for a Tissue when weeping;
Countless still count on a Sword to start reaping;
All must provide for an instinct’s safe-keeping.

Summer Suicides

2009-10-19T22:21:00.000-04:00

How many kids have you seen, little ones,
who didn’t like to swim? Expats from the womb,
unless held back by fear or mother's arms,
they gambol again in grace-giving fluid,
spin fast bubbling somersaults.
On chairs apart, safe from splashing’s range,
the amnio-amnesiac rest their spotted limbs,
watch heavy-liddedly, with fond thin smiles.
The middle is a slippery, stuff-strewn zone
of psychic halflings: beached uncertainly,
sun-struck, cold, lithe-torpid and fat-spry,
they take quick lurching plunges to cool off,
chase a better body, bob up goggle-eyed,
then kick once and glide down to weed-columned halls.

Arnie's Punch (a shred of drama)

2009-10-16T20:25:00.003-04:00

The tendency of psychiatric medications to cause sexual dysfunction seems, at best, a sick joke.

(A Big-Pharm boardroom, lattes. Arnie, celebrated celibate Chem-wiz, speaking)

“You have, er, very sad persons. Chronically low, lonely...people. We pick them up a bit, but fix it so they can’t get it on. Affect without effect. Heh heh. These, er, clients must catch the nearest bus to self-loathing. Recriminations...endless. Next stop is a higher dosage. They'll never get off the juice.”

(2 weeks later. Impromptu song at the company picnic, crooned falsetto by a kick line of naked and aroused revellers, high on Arnie's punch)

“If they can't get it on, get it on, get it on,
They'll never get off, get off, get off the...JUICE!”

Sociolectric

2009-10-11T23:11:00.003-04:00

God-wire arcs
In the brain.
Smother the sparks?
Fan into flame?
Or rejig the load
- up to what code?

The Old Woman Crossing The Street

2009-10-01T12:56:00.004-04:00

Is too slow and stiff
to hop clear
when the cars now honking
decide just to gun it

and too poor
not to stoop
and try to collect
every last coin she dropped

Boxers or Briefs

2009-09-19T19:28:00.003-04:00

1. Monogamy, monotheism, monomania. The concentration of wide energies to make a passion, or the inflation of slight energies to resemble one?

2. Chronic skepticism, like chronic credulity, takes root in a lack of experience. Inquiry into everything–or nothing–shows a lack of sophistication, a shrinking from the amplitude of the partial.

3. If writing brings me face to face with the mediocrity of my mind and the frequent coldness of my heart, it also reminds me of the agility of my spirit and the robustness of my appetites.

4. The landscaper makes his living, as do I, from people's disinclination to turn their own soil.

An Anti-Horror Story

2009-09-14T18:46:00.006-04:00

Dear Jenny,

Thanks for your email. You say that down in Florida you're hearing horror stories about Canada's socialized medicine, which have got you more worried than ever about Obama's proposed health care reforms. You ask if I can shed any light on the matter.

I'll try. We hear the horror stories up here, too. In fact, most of us have told a few. Stories about long waits, bad doctors, wrong treatments, no treatment–all the ways a system can let you down just where you feel it the most: your health. They're like stories of bad car crashes or miscarriages of justice, with this difference: no one claims that privatized roads or courtrooms would eliminate those ills.

Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I heard a Canadian suggest we abandon our public health care system in favour of a private one. Even those with a financial incentive usually advocate privatizing parts of the system; they want to tinker up their returns, not tear down the house. Everyone wants the system to work better, but they want it to work better, not be scrapped for another one that does not guarantee universal coverage.

Complaining is natural; everyone does it. When it comes to putting a bad spin on a good thing, Canadians take a back seat to nobody. Still, we need to balance the horror stories with other kinds of stories, just as true and happening every day. Call them anti-horror stories.

Here is one.

I used to go years without seeing a doctor–not smart. I still put it off too long sometimes. But this past month, a perfect storm of health problems caused me to seek medical attention from eight different doctors and at least a dozen nurses, in half a dozen clinics, offices, and hospitals. It was a very thorough, if involuntary, sampling of socialized medicine. What were the results?

Across the board I received competent, courteous, compassionate care. And surprisingly promptly, too, given that wait times are Monster A in horror stories on both sides of the border. But “across the board” is not a story; only details are. Here are a few of those. I've had several skin cancers. At this month's checkup, my dermatologist gave me some free ointment for a spot she didn't like the looks of. She asked about my latest book and gave me good advice on a public speaking possibility. A few days later, I developed an infection in my face that spread rapidly. It was Friday afternoon. My G.P. was gone till Monday, so his secretary located the walk-in clinic closest to me. I went there, was examined by a nurse and doctor, and within two hours was back home with my prescription for antibiotics filled. The next morning the infection was much worse. I called Tele-Health, and after a rapid but detailed phone interview, was advised to return to the clinic, where I would likely be referred to a hospital emergency room. I was.

On each of the next four days, I returned to Sunnybrook Hospital's ER to get IV antibiotics. I saw three different doctors; each had my thickening file to consult, and each examined me anew, listened and asked questions, and discussed the treatment. Staff remembered me and greeted me with a smile, despite the constant stream of patients they were dealing with. From triage nurse to treatment to parking lot cashier, I was through in about three hours each visit, which seems to me a very acceptable turnaround time in a busy urban hospital. A few days later, the infection coming around, I met my psychiatrist for our regular appointment; she helped me as sensibly and conscientiously as ever, asking me to update her by email every two days about the new drug we are trying. Finally, today I see my G.P. to follow up on the infection and to ask about new ear pain which may be related. He is a careful doctor, so I wouldn't be surprised if he sends me to an ear, nose and throat specialist.

Sorry for the litany, Jenny. But I had to show you how thoroughly I'd tested the system here. None of it cost me a cent; I simply showed my health card on each visit. If I'd had to pay for it all–well, that would have given you your horror story. And so, I fear, would my trying to find an insurer, assuming I could pay for one, that would accept me given my serious pre-existing conditions and my age (54).

It's just one person's story. But so is each horror story.

What is “socialized medicine” anyway? Public schools are run by governments, and so are public roads, but I don't hear people worrying about socialized education or socialized transportation. Comparing my Webster's and Canadian Oxford, I find that the bogeyman of socialism is third on the list of meanings of “socialize.” Before it come the senses of making social or sociable. Which means, my dictionaries tell me: fitting to organized society; concerned with the mutual relations of human beings; ready and willing to talk and act with others. That doesn't sound scary. It sounds more like the antidote to scary, as if the secret meaning of “social” might be “un-scary.”

What's the alternative? Health care that is, by design, un-social? Anti-social?

Against that possibility, we all need all the anti-horror stories we can tell.

Best wishes,
Mike

reset

2009-07-23T09:53:00.003-04:00

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (32)

2009-07-20T10:27:00.002-04:00

Nightfall

The two of us in a white boat,
casting contentedly and without hope
as dusk falls in the quiet bay.

In the mirror stillness
of the end of day, or beginning of night,
we hear the sound of water

moving, a faint trickling, somewhere near us.
Somewhere near us water is coming
into, or going out of, this great river.

Now it is dark. We have stopped
fishing and are just sitting, listening
to the sound, a little louder now,

of a great bathtub emptying, or filling, slowly.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (31)

2009-07-19T10:04:00.003-04:00

Spring at Owl's Head

Spring all we called it, as if no merely local
miracle was referred to. Water stoplessly

seeping upward from the invisible lake, some
unseen aqueous chasm hidden deep in earth.

Track back past the moss-lined tin trough someone never
seen maintains: the source conceals itself in bog. And

mouth is just cool rivulets in sand, a coolness
spreading out from shore and blending with the warmer

river. How could water ooze through stratified death,
the slime and soil of lives compacted down to rock,

only to emerge so clean and sweet, sun-sparkled
trickling down off the trough end into your cupped palms?

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (30)

2009-07-15T09:37:00.002-04:00

To Understand

Under the hours in cross black tunnels coil
Heart-worms, thought-rats, moles, minotaurs of night;
Above them bends this green, your grass of days,
Which in a swoop you scythe–to disprove light?

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (29)

2009-07-14T09:33:00.002-04:00

Absentia

You planted the bomb that made a fuse
of her otherwise ribboned, striving days;
and loosed strange worms to churn into sand
all her carefully cultivated land;
and blackened her memory with chars and twists
I have longed to revisit on you with fists–
except you absconded long ago
taking all that she knew, leaving all that she knows.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (28)

2009-07-10T11:37:00.004-04:00

Spring Cleaning

The letter arrives like a gush of warm air: How's old
Soandso and suchandsuch must have been fun–
Well, Soandso died and suchandsuch got sold.
Five years will do that–hell, five seconds can!

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (27)

2009-07-09T09:31:00.002-04:00

Never the Twain

The burghers look insane to me,
With their kids and pups, with their SUVs;
I'm sure I look the same to them–
Parked on a side street, chewing a pen.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (26)

2009-07-03T10:05:00.004-04:00

Tickets

So few ride the art train all the way there.
Most don't board at all, some try a few stops:
drama club at school, lip-syncing the Inkspots,
a divorce poem or a watercolour phase;
by noon you've got the club car to yourself as
you clickety-clack through the cooling green air,
just you and the brakeman whistling Scarborough Fair.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (25)

2009-07-02T08:09:00.002-04:00

On Hearing of Her Marriage

“She's married a wealthy man,”
they tell me, looking for my reaction,
but where's the news in combustion?
Fire, until it's out, finds oxygen.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (24)

2009-06-27T09:39:00.003-04:00

Snack

So many creeps and hustlers
had used her
she was ready for his
good, dull arms.

Dependable as waxed
paper he would
wrap her from the world.

(And eat her
in silent chews, of course,
while his mild
attention strayed elsewhere.

That was the part
she never
got or believed.)

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (23)

2009-06-26T09:49:00.002-04:00

Centrepoint Mall

Fountain geysers
backlit grey water

a tired, endless spurt
amid chrysanthemums
beneath a clock

At the lottery wicket
a woman tells
another “You must

have been pretty
when you were young”

Children follow the
man with a kitten

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (22)

2009-06-17T09:52:00.003-04:00

Periodic

To be taught by time
the completeness of rhyme,
from portent to birth
to recension in earth.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (21)

2009-06-16T11:39:00.016-04:00

“Pine trees are brushes”

Pine trees are brushes
while their own hair grows;
dead, they are combs
broken bald in the snow.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (20)

2009-06-15T14:48:00.005-04:00

On Stealth

Here's a good trick that I learned as a kid:
People won't look if they don't know you've hid.
Why flame like a sunset to tell them you've gone?
Just melt like a star behind sentries of dawn.