Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (7)

Orange Light

Propped up on high white pillows
in the bed, he said:

I remember visiting her studio
that first time. Four floors up,
cold water down the hall.
I had to climb up the fire escape
because of another painter.
Dusty beams and ducts
criss-crossed the high brickwork,
and orange light seemed
always to be roaring
through the grimy, fretted windows.
Her fingers were always caked
with pigments–chrome yellows, whites–
and I remember thinking fleetingly,
I'll die of lead poisoning.

But you didn't, I remarked.
One of his daughters had come in
and asked if he needed anything
and when he said no
had kissed him on the forehead.

Well it wasn't for lack of trying,
he said smiling to himself.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (6)

His Surprise*

“It was incredible,” he said.
“As soon as I stopped trying
so hard things started looking up.
A woman I'd given up on
called me one night. Then she
and another woman I'd been chasing
in vain started feuding–over me.
Something straight out of my daydreams.
Business picked up a bit, then boomed.
Friends not only forgave me my lapses
but even seemed to love me for them.
I found a ten-dollar bill,
purple John A. Macdonald eyeing me from asphalt.
All these gifts, things I'd wanted for years,
started drifing down out of the sky
like snowflakes or apple blossoms
–like those elusive blessings we ran
and jumped for as children–but,
just like then, I couldn't grab hold
and catch one. You see, it wasn't
a ploy or pretence. It wasn't a tactic.
I really had stopped trying.”

[*Published in The New Quarterly, Summer 2005]

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (5)

The Check-Out King*

He died in his mid-twenties
(typically, nobody seemed to know what of).
Got himself safely underground
before the rest of us had had our first cancer scare.
But he was always slipping past the lens,
way over at the cropped edge of the class picture
or dead in the centre in an egg of glare.
He might be at the vortex of a scrum or rumble
or flopped down in the field beyond the goal posts,
oblivious to calls to return, watching
(perhaps) an ant traverse a blade of grass.
In those days no work meant you failed.
“Have you finished, Earl?” the teacher
asked when his head sank onto his arms.
“No.” “Have you started?” “No.”
Everyone, even she, laughed. Everyone
except Earl. He rode out humour
the way a pine tree rides out rain.
A cipher makes a tricky victim:
he may become a black hole or a mirror.
Our bully picked him out only when
he'd run through everyone else repeatedly.
Earl didn't confront, didn't retreat.
He stood there and one punch knocked him flat.
He lay for a while with his face to the sky
(so long that some of us
looked up too–just blue and fluffy clouds)
and then he got up and walked away
toward wherever he lived, getting
smaller slowly, with every few steps
bringing a hand to his face and
flinging a ribbon of blood down at the dust.

[*Published in The New Quarterly, Spring 2006. It was largely thanks to the interest and encouragement shown my work by TNQ's editors, beginning in 1995, that I believed I could, and then did, publish fiction over the next few years. Kim Jernigan, TNQ's editor, is my and probably most every other writer's dream editor: open to Experiment, Old Reliable and all Points In Between; somehow combining maxima of tact and sensitivity with critical hardheadedness. When Peter Hinchcliffe, now retired, was editing alongside her, you knew you were sending your work to a tag team of acute, relentless readers. They read masses, but they still read by the word. And, miraculously, they reacted, in generous handwritten notes, even to your failures. How they did it, how Kim still does it, I can't imagine. I can only be grateful for so many civilized doors opened so casually.]

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (4)

Remedies

For mosquitoes, repellent. For chest
colds, steam. For anger, time. For robbers, locks.
Against self-pity, strongest of pests?
Nothing for that but the final box.


In Dismay to a Recent Laureate

Chatty and breezy, all right, but gassy makes me swear.
A comfortable poem should be at least a well-made armchair:
Yielding to the bottom while still keeping it in the air.

Brain Blanket Bingo

You know you've been a psych patient too long when...

1. Your former psychiatrist (not your first) dies of old age.

2. Drinking red wine before dinner, you catch yourself saying, “It's not a mood stabilizer so much as a brain blanket.”

3. “How's your libido on the new dosage?” sounds as normal (and as interesting) as “How about those Leafs?”

4. Somebody talking about an 80's band stops and says, “Oh, that's the decade you missed, right?” (You haven't told her yet about the 70's.)

5. Mental states are classed as Friendly, Hostile and Non-aligned.

6. Your hands flutter and your eyelids seize.

7. Your pill-cutter needs a new blade.

Help in Small Doses

(excerpt from a talk given in Waterloo, Ontario, February 26 2009)

About drugs I have only 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 dosage 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. I cut the pills in half, then into quarters; though better, it still knocked me too far under. So I dropped the trial. But my doctor happened to mention that she knew a couple of people who were helped by extremely small doses of this drug. And then my wife'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 my doctor 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 1 mg 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.

“Alle Ding sind Gift und nichts ohn Gift; alein die Dosis macht das ein Ding kein Gift ist” [all things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison]. Paracelsus's famous dictum usually receives a negative stress, i.e. Many things are poisonous except in small amounts. I have been reminded lately of its more positive face: Some things are beneficial precisely in small, even minuscule, amounts.

The Lily Pond - Talks

Here is the link to a combined talk and slide show on my memoir The Lily Pond: http://lilypond.adventmedia.net/

I first prepared this talk for the book's launch on October 9, 2008 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Various aspects of living with and recovering from 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; we took hundreds of pictures of the stages of growth, including some of wild water lilies for comparison. 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.

I thank Heather for greatly improving the look of the pairs of images, and Andrew Macrae for making the entire presentation Web-ready.

A shorter, 23-minute talk (audio only) that I gave at St. Clement's Church, Toronto on November 2, 2008 is also posted. It is called "A Slice of Water" and is available here: http://lilypond.adventmedia.net/slice.html