Valentine’s Day. One of the stories Julia O’Malley included in her Anchorage Daily News Valentine’s Day piece about love stories was that of a woman at a florist shop, who purchased $200 worth of flowers. When the shop clerk asked who she wanted to write the accompanying card out to, the woman replied, “To me. With love, from me.”

In 1984, during my troubled early twenties, I fell in love with a friend of mine.  This poem was written to her.   But it’s especially a poem about how I came to love myself, & to give up my former self-hatred.

Alaska Love Poem

For L.

If I thought I had let go, I did not.
It was hidden only, riding low,
deep in the labyrinth of my soul.
But now I play the waiting game:
the labyrinth dissolves — soon my heart
will have courage to speak to you –

I practice here now.

I

Just past the longest day last year –
but the nights were still bright with the light of the sun
until very late.
And we met on the dancefloor where the music played loudly,
we danced where the fan blew our sweat down to coolness,
we danced when the others fell off the floor
in exhaustion.

Then another told me your words of me –
that I could hold my place in the song
as long as could you.
And when next in the noisy rhythm,
the loudness of the soap opera bar,
we moved our bodies to the beat –
I opened my eyes to your movement and knew
that my heart could open in such a way still,
and the protest of my mind and fear
could not dampen the joy that rose above
the smoke from so many nostrils.
Still alive! — I could feel this
for one, for you, the love, the hope
I thought had forsaken me –
dropped dead in the post with the letter
that at last said goodbye to one far away.

The woman can hurt me as no man can,
so far all that time in this country
I counted only men friends, too afraid
to end the pain of my long loneliness.
I clung like a fool to she who was past,
who I could not touch, not in my dreams.
I let go of her, at last, to find
myself face to face with you.

But our eyes were all drawn to the woman who died
a month later.
We gathered and mourned, and her loss sealed us all
in a friendship blessed by remembrance, then more.

In those days my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth
like thick peanut butter.
I sought like one possessed, obsessed,
in the bar, in the smoke, the music, the dance,
the hope of you there within it.

But my tongue now cut out — I bought you a rose,
cut the thorns off — I
would give you no bitterness, no — just the rose –
clean-stemmed — its thorns
cast away, like my voice.

In my silence I uttered no protest when
I saw how you spent time with her.
My friend also she was, and is, and I
said nothing when she told us that
you loved one another,
that you were together — I
said nothing.

But deep inside I screamed as though
my life were being taken from me.

I knew I’d survive.
This I’ve gone through before.
And I heard her say it with some relief.
I taught myself that it was due
to my leaving, how I did not want to be
tied down when another place called me.
But the deeper truth I well knew, that my
relief in spite of the pain was due
to the knowledge of how now I need not dare
to be brave, to tell what I felt to you.

For I know quite well how to hide.
This game is mine, conceived of shame,
the shame I somehow grew up with.
To hide, and to no one show what’s inside,
this deep confusion and maze of myself,
disbelief at my right to exist — or to
love a woman — such as you.

II

A year passed.  I was doing a dance with death.
I can’t count the times, the times, the times
you both rescued me from that fixation.
Just someone to talk with, just someone to hear,
just someone to witness the tears, the tears
that had drowned me for so many years.

You both were important to me.
I did not know always why.
I left but came back because I knew
that something awaited me here.
As if by merest accident,
I came upon some faith –
I felt I was on the brink
of some vast realization
that would make life bearable for me.

She told me the way from my troubles
was to find the right woman for me.
But I knew that the warm old wool
of my anguish could not be unraveled
by pulling another under my blanket,
a lover to suffocate with me.

I wanted to breathe — not stale old air,
not the air of my bell-jar depression, not
the smoky air of the soap-opera bar –
but to breathe, fresh and clear and new,
to inhale the mountains, the sky, and the sea,
and to know that someone shared in this breathing,
someone who wanted to explore
what it means to have life — with me.

But the noose around my neck was tight.
I was my own hangman, adjudged guilty by
the interrogator inside, who did not
recognize the existence of innocence.

III

Do I believe I am to die,
my last words to be spoken to you? — or is this
an instinctive necessary step,
one step closer to liberation
from this lonely cell on death row?

You are tired, but you sit with the patience
that only my friends can muster.
I am afraid, I cannot meet your eyes.
Each word is an effort of all of my body.
This one sentence takes whole minutes to say,
whole hours, it takes my whole lifetime:

I am . . . in love . . . with you.

When I have said it you ask me
how long I have held this hidden.
Its history I repeat to you,
puncuated with tears, aeons of fear,
despair so much older than only a year.

It is only a year that I tell you…
but in lifetimes past I have ever been
ashamed of my desire,
ashamed of my lust for life,
convicted by the illusion that
I was not worthy of it.

I sentenced myself to whole lifetimes
of wandering lost in the labyrinth,
suffocating on stale smoky air
I had breathed countless times before.
And for what crime?  The simple fact
that I was afraid to love.

IV

Some nights later we went to the soap opera bar.
There, without warning, the fear came upon me.
I stood unmoved by the noise of the dancefloor –
all its rhythm was but a dull thumping –
I stared, transfixed, at the terror within
and deeper and deeper the maze sucked me in,
it swallowed me whole with a terrible grin.

When we went home my body moved to the car,
but my mind and my soul were locked into the hellhole.
The butcher knife beckoned, its sharp gleaming called.
I wanted to cut the hole in my belly,
the empty chunk of unreasonable pain –
to slice through skin and muscle and tissue,
to kill the demon, even if
my murder would be accomplished with it.

I cried in the dark for someone to save me,
to come to my aid.  But I knew that you could not.
Not you, not her — you both had tried
too many times before.
We all knew that.  What I must face
here, in this last confrontation,
I must face alone.

Never before would I have believed
there existed such utter loneliness.
All that there was in the universe
was me, alone, agony, me –
no care, no hope, no love, no reprieve…
no reprieve but the butcher knife.

My hands tight on each other, they thrusted
my thoughts through my belly.  Had they
held not just thoughts, but violent steel
reality, stabbing — had they held the knife…
then the rug I had countless times soaked with my weeping,
this my bed between couch and coffee table,
would have been my final bed, my deathbed,
brown shag stained dark with my red blood.

But the butcher knife was in the kitchen.
That alone saved me — the distance to me
from the right-hand drawer, the second one down –
only that distance prevented the living
blade from sheathing itself in my guts…
in a tangle on your living room floor,
I fell to a drunken slumber.

V

I woke numb, glad to find that you both still slept.
I could bear to see no one, too full of remorse
and shame at what I had put my friends through,
how I had tortured myself.
Too certain that it would happen again.
It always had before.

I escaped to the grey day,
the dull routine of a mundane life,
hopeless resignation.

I’m not sure what it was I waited for.
Some escape, some release,
a saviour to cart me away
the next time, the ambulance, DOA….

VI    (Arctic Valley)

Remember the day we hiked Arctic Valley?
You, me, and two dogs –
one which you lost and found over the hill –

so did freedom find me.

How we climbed, our legs straining, over the city.
We sat at the summit, the world at our feet.
We ate in the high place where ancients saw god….

The way back down was more difficult yet:
it was steep, we used muscles we normally didn’t.
Our legs shook like the legs of delirium tremens…
but peace found them again when they found flat ground –

so did peace find me.

Slowly as the slow dawn
of the sun on an autumn morning
I awoke from my delirium.
Nine years to recognize my healer –

so did life find me.

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change –
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun –
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow –
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses –
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change –

so did change find me.

VII

Things about me have changed.
Not in what I feel for you –
I find that I still do love you.
I also find that where there has been
occasion to speak of it to you
I can meet your eyes.
Across a table, in the light,
I can meet your eyes.
I can love you without shame.
And of all joys, surely this is the greatest –
that I, at last, consider myself
worthy to love and to be loved.

But in awe I hold the power of this
feeling — how it takes hold of me –
when I am so at a loss to know
how with this strength and depth of care,
I do not hold you.

At times I am plainly satisfied
to enjoy your company –
to visit your home, you and your lover,
to drop by for lunch and sit over coffee,
to go to the malls and watch women together,
to drink dark beer, to talk, to dance…

but then as we wait at Baskin & Robbins
for our scoops of Jamocha Almond Fudge
a rich and vibrant chord of you
plays itself upon my intestines
and echoes and echoes and echoes, fading….
My whole body rings of you
and groans at the lack of your touch,
groans at the wanting to touch you,
to show you all the ways,
the infinite ways that I love you.

I am at a loss to understand
how the great power that freed me from my living death
can imprison me yet in this unfulfilled love.
As the days pass in my wanting you
I begin to wonder if I have returned
to my folly of loving, as a lover would,
a woman who I cannot reach.

VIII

I still feel sorrow.  Each time I’m afraid
the old dank despair will possess me again.
But I know too much now for that.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

The staleness that turns to a petrified stink –
no longer can it envelop me.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

In my deepest sadness there is yet joy.
I know I won’t die alone in the wallow.
I know I’ll come out on the other side.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

On my arm, tattooed, is the large wave, the boats,
the mountain — my life, crisis on crisis:
opportunity rides on the dangerous wind.

You’re my friend, and in that way I’ll never forsake you –
just as you, my friend, never have forsaken me.
But I find myself caught in the hurts you are going through.
I find them likewise hurting me
in the old pattern — to place expectations on love.
When I expect things of you, am I really a friend?
Is love to enslave, or is it to free?

This love, my love and desire for you,
is a dangerous wind, destructive and mean,
and though in the past it has helped sweep me clean,
given me breath and a hope to cling onto –
my only hope now — opportunity –
is to let go at last, all the way to my bones –
to my soul, no longer a labyrinth.

Understand me — I am not angry,
not depressed — that is past history.
I am grieving this death, the death of a dream.
A hard death, a cruel death, to fall like a leaf
from the thrill of riding a dangerous wind.

To fall like a leaf, to fall to the ground.
I come to a leaf and, turning it over,
I find myself, a woman, and stand.

Alive without protest, I’ll be on my way.

[Jul 8-Nov 17, 1984]

Related posts:

1. Distance
2. Theodicy (poem)
3. Ode to Alcohol (poem)

I created this photomosaic & posted it to my Flickr photostream on November 9, 2007 under the title It’s all just an act.

This is another story about how depression & its close relative despair work their way in my life.

But first I will explain what occasions this topic over any other today. For reassurance to my friends, if nothing else.  Today I’m in the grey, & something of a light grey at that, which is all to the good.  I’m not in the state that most of this post is about: what I call the pit. I’m just a little low in mood from having had to go through some boxes yesterday that allowed an egress to some of the grief that I need mostly to have shuttered away right now.  (It’s time will come.)

So I feel crummy. But not dangerously crummy.  Not even as crummy today as yesterday.  In short, I’m okay; tomorrow I should be even okay-er: I’m doing the necessaries to take care of myself.

But sometimes on such a day it’s good to remind myself where things can go if I don’t stay mindful.

A self-portrait I took on October 23, 2007 -- my mom's birthday. I didn't realize until after looking at it that I was feeling pretty low. It's there in my eyes. It was just short of two years since her death.

Two years ago, when I made that photomosaic: I was feeling pretty bad, from a combination of things. We’d entered the dark of the year, which also means the cold of the year, plus there was the approaching anniversary of my mom’s death on November 29, and it was also very shortly after her birthday (October 23). Add in some relationship stuff, & probably I was a bit run down.  Nor did I know about 5-HTP then.

And, as is common for me, I had a hard time just coming out & saying I felt bad.  Even in in how I created & posted the photomosaic: I used Photo Booth (a Mac program), which has one setting that allows for particularly lurid colors which give a sense of melodramatic overkill.  I gave the mosaic tags like Mel o’drama which lent further credibility to the idea that, hey, I was just screwing around, this wasn’t serious (even though it was). I was a little more honest with another tag: the actor sometimes becomes the character played — though even that was sufficiently obscure that unless someone knew me really well, they would be unlikely to interpret it to know its relation to me.

So what was going on with me?  I was in the pit. The black hole.  The well.  Those are names I have for the worst form of depression/despair that I get — when I’m just hanging on by threads, & the threads are unraveling.  My thinking unravels, too: it’s a form of craziness, what my partner Rozz called at the time warped in mel darkspace. Yep. Rozz has seen it many a time. When I’m in that place, I no longer know things that I know when I’m sane, & I can cycle into the crazy pretty damn fast.

I actually pulled out of it that November — can’t remember quite how.  Maybe I just did my basic self-care stuff.  I was in the midst of NaNoWriMo 2007, & in looking back, I see that I wasn’t turning out much writing for a few days around that episode in the pit.  I wouldn’t have finished NaNoWriMo that year if I hadn’t come out of it.  But once NaNoWriMo ended, I started descending into it again in December.  Still, I was just enough sane that on December 2, 2007, three weeks after posting the photo, I wrote a long explanation of what the photo signified.

Written Dec 2, 2007, 3 weeks after posting this picture:

Thing about these pics is that I really felt that way: the mood I was attempting to depict in the photos. Despairing, fucked-up, in the black hole — ridden by my own personal demon that I’ve had most all my life. Over the years I’ve learned to deal with it, what to do when I start falling into the pit, & normally my time there isn’t that long anymore. Two or three days, maybe, instead of weeks or months, & the really horrible intense parts complete with suicidal ideation or at least the desire to disappear last maybe a few hours, instead of as a near constant. When I feel that way, I look to myself: I pull back from obligations, I make sure to get more sleep, I eat healthily, I don’t require things of myself except to take care of myself. Mostly, I try to get horizontal.

Although I have thoughts about suicide or of other self-destructive things at some times, I have never in my life made a suicide attempt. To the extent in my past that I’ve engaged in self-harm, it’s been of the nature of hitting my head against a wall, or hitting it with my fists, or tearing up writing (though that’s a form of suicide), or throwing something of mine. I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Lately, my thoughts frequently will run towards cutting myself off — say, removing all my profiles from sites like Flickr, kicking off all the mail lists I’m on, destroying my files… disappearing. It would be hard to do. Pieces of me are scattered all over the place. When I feel like that, I want to find each & every such piece & extinguish it, & then myself. I don’t do it, I have never come close to doing it but it’s incredibly painful to feel like that.

I have always been held back from trying by thinking about my family, friends, people who love me. I couldn’t do that to them. One time when I hurt that way, I told my friend Scott, who at that time was my roommate, that I almost wished that everyone who loved me would turn their back on me, because then I would be free to off myself. Though it was painful to contemplate such a possibility, too: everyone I loved, betraying me at once? Anyway, Scott just kinda smiled at me wryly & said, Sorry Mel, you’re just going to have to put up with us loving you.

But dammit, when it happens, it hurts like all buggery. (Thank you, Sian, for teaching me that Aussie phrase, which captures the pain of it perfectly.)

So. Why then, the title of this photo? Why the tags that make it seem this is a joke? Why the lurid colors, which also melodramatize it?

Because some of how this demon came to take such tenacious residence in my soul was through an invitation of sorts, back when I was in high school, & I used to “pretend” I was in such a bad place. At that time it was — or so I though — all just an act. I didn’t have the maturity at the time to consider that maybe there really was something wrong inside of me, that I felt need to manipulate people’s behavior toward me with such an act. I only thought of that when I decided to try to put the act aside, & discovered that it wasn’t an act anymore. Act as if for a long enough time, & you become the character you play.

So I’m caught, ever since, between the rock & the hard place. Even though it’s real, & I really feel this way, I’m also very conscious of how people around me are reacting to my behavior, & I feel that I’m being manipulative, & I feel wrong about that because manipulation is wrong. So nothing I can do is the right thing. If I show myself in this state to people, then I’m manipulating them. If I go into hiding, that may in one part be another way of manipulating, but even more importantly, I cut myself off from the people who care about me, who I often need, to help me climb back out of the pit.

Pretty screwed up thinking, really. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have come a far long way since I was 16 or 17 in high school, & I’m usually pretty good about asking for help nowadays when I need it. But this screwed-up thinking still occurs sometimes, & it’s been occurring a few times over the past couple of months, for reasons that I’m only starting to figure out.

That’s what this picture is. It’s a visual demonstration of that screwed up thinking. Which I put together even as I was struggling with it. Because yes, I took these photos when I was in the deep in the pit, trying to communicate to any who would see them that I was in pain, that I needed some kind of help, if only that my state of mind would be recognized. But see — I believe, I truly believed in the midst of my pain that if I just showed the photos straight on, or even just said outright, “I’m hurting bad right now,” that I’d be manipulating. So I undercut it. Use the “glow” effect in Photo Booth to get those lurid, melodramatic colors. Use tags & a title that make it seem just pretend. Though it wasn’t.

It’s hard to communicate honestly when I’m like that. Because when I’m like that, I’m crazy. It’s a form of delusion, of madness. I literally do not understand that it is okay to simply say, “I’m in pain right now.”

Remote. Photo taken Dec. 2, 2007, the same day I wrote this account.

But you know, lately I’ve been noticing a couple of friends/acquaintances on Flickr who have been going through tremendously painful situations themselves, who have reminded me of that. I’m writing this from a state that is near but not quite in the black hole (same date as the photo Remote), so I’m still near enough to sanity that I was able to check my descent into that screwed up thinking. I’m in a bad headspace today, but today (December 2, 2007) I’m just going to say that. Instead of putting on the act that isn’t an act.

So here it is. I’m in a bad headspace today. It isn’t quite the black hole, but it’s not okay either. It’ll right itself, but it hasn’t yet. Today, it rises out of some events that I’m not really prepared to talk with anyone about. So, I’m probably going to be a little remote for a bit, till I do work it out. But, better to be honest & say so, than to just kite off by myself without leaving a note.

And having written all this, I’m already feeling a bit better. I may not have to go remote for a very long period after all.

Thanks for listening.

As it turned out, the following day was the really bad one, when sanity absolutely fled midway through my day at work.  I was able to hold on to just enough sanity to put out a call for help, which took the form of a tweet, typo & all:

3:23 PM: Imploding. I guess that’s better than exploding & killing someone. But I’m fucked in the head, badlyl.

Wouldn’t you know it: Twitter (still a fairly new thing back in 2007) was updating slowly that day.  I don’t think anyone got my tweet until the next day.  I tried again over an hour later:

4:47 PM: Imploding. Better than exploding & killing someone I guess, but still pretty fucked up.

Twitter still malfunctioning: no response.  And when you’re already crazy, & don’t know the software is muckety-mucking, the paranoid portion of your mind goes, Nobody even gives a shit!

So I’m pretty amazed that I, working late & still in my office, tried again:

6:11 PM: Inside of my mind is getting worse & worse. Could someone pull me out of it please?

6:20 PM: Seriously. Usually I do okay fending for myself, but I’m not fending too well today.

Still no response.  But luckily, my Flickr friend Katie came online in Gmail — probably the very best person possible, because she was someone who knew from the inside the kind of crazy I was experiencing, & therefore knew exactly how to talk me down.  (She told me later her thinking was “hmm. now what would mel tell me when she was sane & i was going through a rough time?”) Here’s a portion of our conversation, a partial transcript, if you will, of the crazy:

me: hey

Katie: hey mel whats up

me: head’s been in a bad place for a couple of days now

Katie: oh dear, whats been going on

me: not sure really but it’s been getting worse today because i’m in a nobody gives a shit mode
& starting to engage in cut & run behaviors
like removing all my pics except one from [a Flickr group we were both in]

Katie: ah yes, i’ve gone through that …

me: & feeling like just removing myself from groups & shit altogether b/c i feel like nobody gives a shit

Katie: dont do that – people do … it’s just the frame of mind you’re in that’s fooling you into thiking so

me: yeah i know i’m just barely remembering that
but it’s on the edge at the moment

Katie: hmm, well i’ll remember for you … don’t do it !

me: some guy here killed his dad with a machete yesterday & then came in to anchorage & shot some innocent grad student in his car & killed him & badly wounded a couple of other people during his rampage
he got caught after a car jacking this morning
& i’m like, well, that’s the way i feel
except i take it into myself
instead of runnign around fucking other people’s lives over
but it’s kinda like today
oh let me not mention how badly i’m feeling, lest i ruin your day

The rampage mentioned was that of Christopher Erin Rogers, Jr. on December 2–3, 2007. Rogers was ultimately convicted in two separate trials of two murders and four attempted murders in Palmer and Anchorage, plus animal cruelty for his attack on the dog that saved the life of his father’s fiance. And I would say that Rogers, whose confession was heard by the jury in his second trial in Anchorage, very much had a similar kind of craziness going on his mind which prompted his crimes. Read the details for yourself. [Ref #1] Something, who knows what exactly, set him off, & he went explosive, harming & even killing other people. And, as is so often the case, refusing to accept that he was responsible: not aliens, not other people with their perceived mistreatment of him.

Well, if I’m going to sometimes go crazy, I’m sure glad I don’t do it that way.  My tendency is to implode: I don’t harm others (usually), I harm myself.  And I suppose another difference between me & Rogers is that I do my best to take responsibility for my craziness.

Not, to be sure, when I’m actively crazy: then I’m just as likely to blame other people.

Katie: you can never ruin someone elses day by tell them you’re having a bad day

me: no i can just tell ‘em i’m having a bad day & they can go “oh shit, mel’s having a bad day, better avoid her so i don’t ruin myown”
that’s the way my thinking’s giong today
because i’m all fucked up

But at least I recognized I wasn’t thinking sanely.  And had taken enough responsibility for my craziness over the long haul of my life that by that point in time, I had at least a few clues of what to do to help myself, by getting help — especially from someone like Katie who had (1) some knowledge of the kind of stuff I was going through from the inside, & (2) had the patience to listen.

Katie: I don’t think telling people you’re in a bad space will put them in a bad mood, at least it wouldn’t to me … i’d just like to help you no longer be there … hmm, do people actually say that? oh right. okay … well, know that people definitely don’t feel that way, they just get awkward in dealing with depression …
what can we talk about that would help you?

me: i dunno, this is probably helping just to say the kinds of thoughts that have been going through me all day

Katie: okay, keep them coming

me: y’know, i wrote a really long thing to that “it’s all an act” photo to about 4 or 5 am satnight/sunday morning explaining how it all works
laura saw it, rozz saw it, they commented
dunno who else saw it
but this morning i privated it
that’s kinda part of what set me off feeling like well basically most people don’t give a shit
they don’t mind you saying you’ve got the flu
but say anything about the really hard shit, then too fucking bad
well that’s not completely true
[some people have lots of people batting for them]
but me, no, i should be over all the kind of shit that i’ve got in my soul
me, i should just take drugs
me, i should just shit or get off the pot

Katie: you feel like that’s how people feel towards you?
that you should just take drugs or shit or get off the pot?

me: wehn i get like this, meds is one of the first topics to come up

Katie: i don’t think meds are a good idea

me: neither do i
mostly i think people just want to have fun & not be bogged down by someone’s shit

Katie: that might be true – but for the most part, i think people geerally just don’t kow how to handle deep things – because it ends up shining a light inwards to their oen stuff – which they defiitely dont want to deal with

me: though for some reason they get along with some people’s shit better than mine
yeah you’re right about that i think

Katie: it’s not that they don’t get along with your shit mel, i think maybe it’s the fact that you seem strong? i think people might think that when you get down – you just want to isolate and you don’t want to talk about things .. maybe? i’m not really sure

me: this is the worst i’ve gotten into the whole rock & a hard place stuff about feeling like anyting i do is manipulating people in a reaaaaaaaallly long time
which is the very worst kind of thinking i have, i get so confused, i don’t feel like anything i do is right w/ regard to other people

Katie: i think that maybe because you feel like you’re manipulating people, you don’t ask for help … so people don’t really know that you want people to surround you in these times
catch 22
perhaps

me: yeah very big catch 22 gods it hurts

Katie: Hmm … well … i’m going to tell you that … you aren’t manipulating people when you want attention. None of us are. We all want help, we all want attention and there is nothing wrong with it, honestly. But i don’t knowif me telling you that will make that belief real for you or not

me: so i have all these destructive urges giong on
i know that stuff when i’m sane but i’m not sane right now

Be that as it may: the conversation helped to restore me to sanity. It’s also because of Katie that I reset the permissions on the “It’s all an act” photo back to public, & left them there. She went on to “babysit” me for the next bit of time while I finished the task I was working overtime to complete, & by the time I left my office I was able to tweet:

8:16 PM: Better now, thanks to Katie.

I reckon it took another couple of days for me to get completely away from the edge of the pit, doing the things I know to do: plenty or rest, good food, keeping the demands on myself low, & — importantly — not isolating myself.  Nobody got killed, including me.  (At the height of the crazy I did indulge in some “virtual suicide” — deleting files & so on — but somehow restrained myself from destroying anything really important to me.)

That was my last trip into the pit.  (Knock on wood.)  Even over the past year, during which I’ve experienced considerable loss — I’ve gone into the grey a number of times, but never into the pit.  When I feel myself at its edge, I’m lots more ready to follow the advice that Katie gave me, same advice I have given others when I was sane & they were not: ask for help from the people I know care about me.

It also helps that I now know about 5-HTP.  And use it.

References

1. 4/2/09. “Accused murderer Rogers blamed aliens for 2007 attacks — ROGERS: Jurors hear taped confession of deadly events in Palmer and Anchorage” by Debra McKinney (Anchorage Daily News).

Related posts:

1. About "Cold"
2. Cold, the blog
3. Pausing under the clouds: A how-to guide for getting out of the grey

Dream [excerpt]

It was bedtime.  Tonight Will was the storyteller.  He didn’t need the book.  He couldn’t read yet, and besides, he knew this bedtime story by heart.

“Get the knife!” it began.  They’d locked the knives and scissors away several nights ago, all except a Swiss army knife and a Buck knife brought out from hiding from time to time to slice carrots or peel potatoes.

“Get it now!” his story went on.  “Get the knife!  Do it!”

His arms were crossed over his chest.  His hands and fingers, tucked under his arms, were met by Rachel’s hands reaching forth from under his armpits.  She held his wrists firmly in the hold Charlotte had taught her the morning after his terrible first rampage, three weeks after his arrival in Alaska.

“Get it!” he said.  “Get it now!”  He strained against her hold on his wrists.  His legs strained against Megan’s hands holding his ankles pressed to the bed.  Constrained by their strength, he turned his anger inward.  “Kill me!” he demanded.  “Get the knife!  Do it!”

Suddenly he bucked up from his heels, twisting violently in an attempt to free his legs.  But Megan held on.  He gave up and his body went slack in Rachel’s embrace.  She didn’t like this story, but she didn’t let go.  Her eyes met Megan’s.  They said nothing.  The first few nights they’d tried to soothe or reason away his violence, but there were no words to ease him where he lay.  So now they simply held on — one hour, two hours — and rode it out, night after night.

She’d gone too lax: all at once he yanked his left arm free, jackknifed his body, and slammed his skull against her breastbone.  She cried out.  She waved her right hand about, trying to recapture his left wrist.  Megan dived forward to pin him against the bed, and Rachel caught his wrist, but not before he bent down to clamp his teeth into her forearm.  She cried out, but she had his wrist and yanked it hard, pulling him upright against her chest.  Goddamn little bastard!  Shit, that hurt!

A bruise suddenly appeared on her forearm, red darkening surrealistically to lurid purple and blueblack.  Green and yellow washed in until the bruise was a near twin to the one he’d chomped into her other forearm the week before.

“A matching pair!” her supervisor exclaimed from the doorway.  Dr. Riley, passing her office on his way to teach class, glanced in.  “You need a pair of those leather gauntlets attack dog trainers use.”

She didn’t have gauntlets, but she had a firm grasp on her wrist.  “Get the knife!” she said to Megan, but Megan wouldn’t get it.  Right hand on left wrist, Rachel plunged it in anyway, thrust the non-blade with force into her belly just below her navel: once, twice.  The hole remained, that chasm in her belly containing the Milky Way shorn of all of its stars, empty of everything but her loneliness and despair.  “Get it!” she said to Megan, wanting to saw the hole from her flesh, but Megan, eyes brimful with worry and fear, didn’t know where Sharon kept the butcher knife.  “It’s in the kitchen,” Rachel told her, “right of the sink, second drawer down,” but it would be nine years before she met Megan, and Rachel was too drunk to get the knife herself.  “Do it!” she cried out, but Lori and Sharon were asleep in the back of the trailer. She lay alone in the night between the couch and the coffee table.  She didn’t really want to die, she just wanted the hole (fists plunging down on her belly) gone.  Gone.  Gone.  Gone.

Related posts:

1. Alaska Love Poem
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3. "Cold" is published!

Last week after learning of the suicide a week before of Nicholas Hughes, son of the poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, I immediately snagged a copy of Plath’s poem “Nick and the Candlestick” & posted it here. Then, a few minutes later, I deleted the post.

I deleted it because I found myself bothered to be thinking about him merely as the infant celebrated in the poem, or as an adjunct to his mother’s famous life & death. He had his own life, after all, didn’t he? Damn betcha. And something told me that his family, friends, colleagues, & partner saw him as something far more than one the headlines over the past week have painted him as — the putative victim of his mother’s “suicide gene.” His death was a tragedy, yes: but a tragedy because it was a loss of him & for all who knew him. And for many of those, like me, who didn’t.

* * *

Sylvia Plath has been an important figure in my life for many years. As a poet, yeah, & also because when I was younger I had my own little romance with suicidal impulses. I still wrestle too damn often with bouts of the endless bleak grey or, worse, the pit. One of the marks of my growing maturity was, I think, when I finally came to understand that Plath herself was more than her own suicide — that even the three deaths marked out in “Lady Lazarus” — you know the ones —

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

— were none of them the death she died. Nor did she intend suicide when she wrote that poem in October 1962 — four months before her death. As I discovered & wrote in a piece I did in 1995 for a course I took towards my MFA degree at University of Alaska Anchorage, “Plath was not ready to give up and die at this point; on the contrary, she was intent upon continuing her life and her career as a poet.” Later in the piece I wrote:

We can only speculate on what her life and work would have been like today had she survived. But less and less do I believe her suicide in February 1963 was the inevitable result of a life-long death wish. No, I think now that she died because she was prevented from consolidating the gains she had made in October. In October she wrote “the best poems of [her] life,” the poems that, exactly as she predicted, would “make [her] name,” and in which she began to free herself of the dominating influences of her husband, her father, and her own illusions. In October she began to shape new meanings for herself out of her life’s central events. But that winter, her spirit sapped by miserable physical and emotional circumstances, the inner regeneration she began in October came to a halt and then reversed itself.

— “Sylvia Plath’s Resurrections” (1995)

Plath biographers mostly recognize that. But you sure wouldn’t know it from most of the newspapers stories since Nick Hughes’ death. Back to the doomed poet, back to the nonsense about the “artistic temperament” making poets more prone to suicide (how many poets haven’t killed themselves; how many people who aren’t poets or any kind of artist have killed themselves? did you know that Alaska had 419 deaths by suicide in 2003–2005 — one of the highest rates in the country — & most of the victims were not poets or artists?), back to a whole lotta other nonsense that attempts to encapsulate the complexity of life & death into neat little catchphrases & sound bites & fatalism thinly & fakily disguised as “psychology.” All that’s added here is to stick in an asterisk with a footnote to Nicholas Hughes’ name as victim either of Plath herself, or of whatever led her to her own tragic death.

What a load of bollocks. As crap-infested as the blame that dogged Ted Hughes for most of his post-Plath life. (Pardon me, but many people survive turbulent relationships without killing themselves. I do not blame him. And as a father — he was remarkable.)

So what caused her to take her own life? What caused her son to? In the final analysis: nobody knows. But as someone myself prone to suicidal ideation in my bleakest moments, I think Nick Hughes’ friend Joe Saxton has it exactly right:

Taking your own life isn’t rational except in the tiny narrow logic of one person’s brain…. His life had a thousand things to look forward to, yet the chemicals in his brain and his fear of another relapse just let him fall through the crack in one short moment. In a day, or a week, or a month, he might have felt entirely different.

Just so.

* * *

It must’ve been around the time that I took my MFA in Creative Writing at UAA (December 1997) that I learned Nicholas Hughes had become a fisheries biologist at UAA’s sister institution University of Alaska Fairbanks. I thought that was pretty cool: he was making a name & life on his own terms. As people do. Shortly thereafter, his father came out with The Birthday Letters — the first time Ted Hughes revealed very much at all about his own life & feelings about Plath in the aftermath of her suicide. The next time I thought about the Plath/Hughes family was October 1998, as I walked down a street in Vancouver, BC with a friend & saw Ted Hughes’ death shouted out in bold headlines in the Canadian newspapers. I thought to myself, That’s why he came out with The Birthday Letters when he did — he knew he was dying.

It was my intent ever after to learn more about Ted Hughes’ life & poetry, feeling as I did that he’d been unfairly demonized by many of Plath’s admirers. (I can’t say how disgusted I am by Robin Morgan’s poem about him, or some of the other yucky behavior coming from the Plath-worship quarter. I admire Plath too, but please!) I never quite got around to learning about him then thanks to my own life events.

I didn’t stop to think how Ted Hughes’ death might affect his children. Joe Saxton says it was his father’s death that led to Nick Hughes’ battles with depression:

Until the death of his beloved father in 1998, Nick was a man in whom a zest for life and a thirst for learning welled over. Whether it was investigating Nile perch in Kenya for his undergraduate dissertation, working out how to make the perfect glaze for his pottery, discovering the ecology of grayling or trout, or “calibrating” (his term, not mine) how to only just lose at football in the garden against his godchild, my youngest son, his lust for learning was undimmed.

Nick’s father was his soulmate. He and Ted had a relationship of shared passion, shared pleasures and a deep love of fish. At the end of O-levels they went off to fish in Alaska together. Nick and I retraced some of their steps two years later. Alaska is beautiful in its own right but all Nick wanted to do, it was clear, was to relive their trip in the most excruciating detail. “Hey Sag,” he’d say, genuinely expecting me to light up with interest. “This is the branch where dad’s line snagged when he had a big salmon.”

. . . Ted’s death meant that the most important relationship in his life was gone. Worse still were the repercussions: disagreements of the sort that many grieving families have when the family linchpin dies. Nick was in his late thirties then and his mental health began to suffer.

* * *

And so, last week, news of Nicholas Hughes’ death. Which brings me back around to “Nick and the Candlestick” & wanting to honor his life & memory as he himself lived it in the company & witness of his family, friends, colleagues, students, & loves.

Plath’s poem is part of that — written October 29, 1962, on the same day she completed composition of “Lady Lazarus.” Now I can quote some of it: Nick Hughes, aged 10 months, as seen by his mother in love, a light of possibility even in her own darkness:

O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

As I’ve learned more of him over the past week, how much more he was a light in fact to his father, sister, stepmother, friends, loves, colleagues, & students. Just read Ted Hughes’ letters about visiting (& going fishing with) his son in Kenya, where Nick Hughes was studying Nile perch for his undergrad dissertation, or Alaska, where the younger Hughes took his Ph.D. as well as becoming an important researcher on salmon, grayling, & trout. Or the memories of him at the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. Or Dermot Coles’ article about him in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:

He made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie. Nick guided many people in the winter to spots along the Tanana to savor the art of burbot fishing through the ice.

He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena River, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current.

I read that, & I feel the cool breeze blow into me: the joy of life as profound as anything put to words in a poem — like his father’s poems, full of animal life.

In yesterday’s Times (of London), Joe Saxton recounts:

There was only one poem of Ted’s I ever saw Nick express interest in – not Birthday Letters, not Tales from Ovid, not Pike, nor any of the other dead rat plop poems. It was about woodpeckers.

When Woodpecker’s jack-hammer head
Starts up its dreadful din
Knocking the dead bough double dead
How do his eyes stay in?

Ted had hit on a biological conundrum and as a biologist Nick wanted to know the answer (which is, apparently, that it keeps its eyes shut and wraps its tongue around the base of its brain – a woodpecker’s beak is going at 1,300mph on impact).

I love that. I love the poem — the play of words & rhythm — & the biological conundrum both, & I love the scientific curiosity that led Nick to investigate the answer.

Though I’m not convinced that it was the only poem of Ted that Nick was interested in: surely the father’s love of animals & nature as expressed in his poems was an influence to the son, as well as something both shared side-by-side in the fishing trips they took together —

— & now I stop to think: why does this matter to me, who knew neither of them?

Because… because I’m a poet? (though I haven’t written much poetry lately….) Yeah, sure, partly. But mostly I guess that in the desperation of my despairing youth, I got caught up in a very screwed up & false romanticization of Plath’s death. The thing I wrote in 1995 about her, “Sylvia Plath’s Resurrections”, was me working my way out of that sick misunderstanding — partly for her sake, yeah, but also very much for my own: because John Donne had it right when he said “Death be not proud.” I think Plath loved life. I know damn well that so did her son. I know damn well from my own nasty times in the pit that it’s not a hatred of life or a love of death that leads to the act of suicide: it’s inexpressible pain that the suffering mind cannot foresee an end to.

I feel no particular virtue that I’ve each time somehow muddled my way to the other side of the pit, or the seemingly endless bleak grey landscapes I’ve staggered across (so far, at least) — it’s not easy to explain how I’ve come through, any more than it’s easy to explain why others have not. I sure as hell would never judge someone like Nick Hughes that he didn’t. I’m just sad he didn’t. But I’m glad also that he lived what he lived. I didn’t know him, but I hope that those who did know him have good & lasting memories of him, & that you are all comforted in the face of his premature death.

Joe Saxton’s Times article informed me that today at 1.30 PM Alaska time, there would be a tribute to Nick Hughes at UAF, & that “Nick’s colleagues in Alaska and New Zealand have requested that people take a moment and think of Nick and his life.”

That’s what this writing is for.

* * *

Addendum: Another article in The Mail which further fills out the picture on Nick Hughes’ life, including memories from friends & colleagues in Fairbanks.

I forgot to mention earlier how much it’s bugged me the numerous news stories that described him as “unmarried with no children” — most of them failing to mention his relationship with Christine Hunter, a UAF biologist with whom he lived, & who was the one to discover his body. I’m so sorry for your loss, Christine. News also that UAF plans to establish a scholarship in his name.

And indications that the cult of Plath (as much as Plath is important to me, do not count me as a member) was more a harm to his life than his mother’s death itself. Such an intrusive, destructive cult. Get a life, folks.

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3. My story of 2009

Last night I told Rozz, I’m not always at the edge of the pit, but I’m never far from it either.

She said, That thing you call the pit is there in you all the time, it’s part of you. She said this with that earnest look in her eyes, not cute earnest but bedrock earnest, the kind of earnest that is Rozz when she is conveying what to her is uttermost truth, something she really wants me to pay attention to. It’s part of you, she said, you’ve got to love it, you’ve got to shine a light on it. You’re afraid of it, but you’ve got to love it. You’ve got to go there. Find the cool breeze in it.

Cool breeze: that’s what I feel in me when I’m at ease in the world. There is, of course, no cool breeze in the pit.

I can’t remember what order she actually said these things, or even that these were the exact words she used. When I asked her today to repeat her exact words, she said, Sorry, I guess you should have written them down. I didn’t have a pen handy, it was bloody 3:00 in the morning when she said all that, and we should have been in bed, but we’d gotten detained by one of her late night questions. One of those questions so profound or difficult or just so confusing that she should never expect an answer from me, not with the late hour leeching all sensibility from behind my eyes. I can’t even remember with what question she started things with, just that somehow we ended up in the artificial bright of the bathroom, me sitting on the toilet lid, her on the sink counter, talking. Not idle stuff. Stuff about us, for us, vital. My pit was just one part of it.

When she said I had to go there, to the pit, I thought, fuck no, that’s the last place I want to go. If there’s a place I fear, and I do, that place is it. Shine a light into it — is that even possible? Love it? — this demon that’s dogged me all my life, sucked me into itself like my own portable mini black hole, devouring me alive from the inside? Shining a light into a black hole will not illumine it: a black hole is a voracious mouth, never satiated. Anything that falls into its gravity well is caught there forever. It never emerges. It becomes one with the black hole, its mass accruing to the black hole’s substance to become one with it — increasing, by the very fact of being consumed, the black hole’s monstrous hunger.

So how, then, having been trapped in that gravity well at least three times in my forty-seven years, and skirting its event horizon too often to count — how then am I still here to speak of it? I should have been extinguished long ago. I should have become single with the singularity, folded in upon myself, incapable of generating the speed of the sounds of my voice, much less the speed of the light in my eyes.

I can speak of it because every metaphor is, finally, inexact.

The pit. The black hole. The deep well. Drowning. Hell. The steaming whirlpool of Tuonelanjoki, the river of Death’s land. The void.

Any of those words or phrases, however inexact, are more apt than the clinical phraseology of shrinkdom: depression. Better is the other D-word, the existential term that makes no pretense of scientific objectivity: despair.

But Rozz is right, of course.

Despair, my dear traveling companion: I must shine a light upon you. I must love you. Embrace you. Oh despair, my beloved friend!

Why not? Because it has been with me all this time, duct-taping me to the walls of the whirl around its silent eye of destruction, carrying me unwilling as much as I have carried it. Its as much a household god as the others whose names I’ve been much readier to call upon. Mielikki, my dearest desire. Lemminkäinen, the wayward impetuous wanderluster. Väinämöinen, the steadfast, tietäjä, Eternal Singer. Meet, the three of you, my other long-time companion: Hiisi, the Demon. My demon, my despair, my dread.

It’s not easy to write about, this thing, this phenomenon at the root of my own personal phenomenology. That’s why the metaphors, the words and images I inadequately wield that never anyway become more than just markers pointing the way to the pit where I live, where none else may enter. None except the gods, when I ask them.

I can tell you the stories of the three times I lived inside the pit: my youth of distrustfulness and self-hatred; the Days of Terrorism when a nine-year-old boy brutalized by parental abuse and neglect unleashed his terror and anger on me who had never done him harm, and tore me to pieces; the months when I believed the one I love had betrayed me, flushing all the meanings of our relationship unceremoniously down the porcelain-lined whirlpool of the nearest toilet.

Or I could connect the dots as I did for myself, pulling together all my speculations of how this dread and fear and despair took roothold in the heart of who had once been a smiling and joyful little girl (what in hell happened, why was she taken from me?), that unselfconscious Self who has so long been lost to me, more mysterious and unreadable to me than god.

But if I embrace Hiisi the demon… maybe Hiisi’s mask will melt away, and behind it I will find her again, that little girl I once was, innocent and loved.

Related posts:

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