Gratitudes Thanksgiving 2015

I made it a practice to write Gratitudes instead of New Year's resolutions beginning several years ago. I find this practice very challenging this year, after a year in which I pretty much lost everything. Literally. I won't bore you with a list; the highlights include losing my home and most of what I used to own; leave it at that for now. Suffice to say, I feel challenged this year to be grateful. Writing Gratitudes cannot be easy: while it's easy to be grateful when you're at a feast, it's far more difficult to find gratitude when you have nothing. But that's when it really counts.

So.

The list of my circle of close friends who have helped me immensely in this past year—in multiple ways on multiple fronts, some big, some small, every little piece adding up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts—is a long list full of wonderful people. I'm challenged to make a full list, because I don't want to leave any names off accidentally. So please, all of you, accept my profound and eternal thanks. Thank you. THANK YOU.

I'm grateful to have what I have left, for what I have now, every little piece of it. I have a vardo, a nomad's wagon to live in, and destinations to go and visit, and a road to travel. If the folk in one town start to be a problem, there's always another town own the road.

I had a really good Thanksgiving here in CA with best friend and best friend's family and circle of friends. Not merely a great food feast, but good conviviality and lots of excellent moments of laughter and music. Thank you.

There are people I think of as family. My family-of-choice. Most of them know who they are. I'm grateful you're in my life. Thank you.

I'm grateful simply to be alive. There have been several occasions in recent years when that was no sure thing. There have been a few times in this past, difficult year, when I've come close to that edge. My mental and physical health have been fragile, or, to be blunt, on some occasions this past summer, outright broken. I've spent time these past few weeks on the road rebuilding the equilibrium and stamina lost to several months of trauma that, to be blunt, not everyone I know could have survived. Nor could I have, without immense support from my closest friends. Thank you.

I'm still here. I want to be here. The future is no more certain now that it has been. I have no answers. Life is lived very much day to day. Don't ask for more than that. And thank you.

Nothing is resolved. The road is not closed. I will have no truck with false or toxic hope. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, and I've become a hardcore realist. I wait and see what develops. I will not pretend to embrace optimistic resolutions I do not feel, or believe, or have any faith in. Neither will I close myself to grace. I am always open to grace, and I have received many, many gifts. I am still here.

Thank you.

Launch

There's a level of commitment that no one understands who hasn't sacrificed
to make real change. This morning I was rudely awoken by the doorbell only
when I dragged myself up no one was there, still the event left me paranoid
and haunted, which is not helped by today's overcast gloom and cold damp wind,
especially after a summery yesterday bright with light and warm breezes. I want to go back
into some cave. There's nothing here this morning that doesn't create visions
of the metaphorical rope, only of course for me it's never hanging that tempts, it's that launch
into open air off a cliff or highway bypass, wheels whining at high speed
till you leave the road and float flying in silent air till the inevitable pancake
at the end of any ballistic arc. I'd go ballistic for a good death. That I've always seen
my own end involving Death's black car is what makes me a committed driver.
Everybody loves you when you're dead. This ghastly morn not even tea
can wake me from this nightmare of rude daybreak. At some point you stop asking
for help because you don't feel heard. That's all I ever needed, to just feel listened to,
like I've been heard and seen. But how many have given up their jobs and lives
and daily round to pop in the car and drive a state or two away to help a friend?
I have. Most will not. It's a form of acceptable inadequacy to say I wish I could help
but circumstances prevent me. In my worst moments of self-drowning I scathe excuses.
Heaven is a place where everyone does however they can for each other. Hell is where
you have to do it all on your own, which means tasks never end. Although it's true
that doing things alone when the sky is bright makes solitude a balm. It depends
what you're doing. Fly-fishing is better than sorting through the detritus of mildewed family
snapshot albums where half the people are dead and nothing is labeled clearly.
When's the last time I wrote you a letter out of desperation?
It must have been recently, although the days have soaked together. Every day seems
like every other and none of them are tolerable, so it becomes an endless hell
with no relief in the wrong kind of solitude. Does anybody hear? Is anybody there?
Does anybody care? I'm resorting to quotations now. Depression seems callow
when it's yours while in a song or a Russian novel it's profound and universal.
That's because a million people have listened to Yesenin and Doestoevsky and Cohen
while your own less spectacular plaints generate not even an echo. The knock on the door
of a stranger is more meaningful when it's fiction. Your own life will mean more to others
when you're dead. Comparisons are inevitable. That's just the human thirst for lust and memory
again overruling the impulse towards commitment. Few can be bothered.
It feels unfair, which is probably just hubris. When I gave up my own life to care
day to day for my ailing parents till they died it was never quite sensible to most.
In theory it's praiseworthy but bedpans and ostomy bags don't empty themselves.
Life is kept at a distance to make it more seemly and less severe. But life is messy.
Deep waters don't exist till your diving pushes the river bottom away and down.
Or you smack up against the physical laws. Whoever designed this place made no
account for dreams. Responding to nightmare with absurdity is self-defense.
See how I fly. Look, there's the guardrail. It breaks imperceptibly, tissue paper in the wind,
and for awhile all you can see is sky.

The Fire Sermon: a commentary

The Fire Sermon is an older poem, dating from the mid-80s. I wrote this poem partially during my Fulbright year in Indonesia, and finished it when back home in the Midwest. It’s an early example of a poem written at white heat. I hesitated to share it here, but when I was making the artwork that accompanies the poem, I realized that the art was meant to go with the poem, and it seemed essential to show them together. I have revised the poem slightly for this post, mostly trimming along the lines of my worst habit as a poet, too many “the”s and “and”s.

•

Why did I post/publish this poem now? It's more than 25 years old in its original form, written in that period in the mid-80s when I was very convinced of the necessity to write out my philosophy and mystical experiences as poetry. More accurately, I was convinced that there was no better way to record those experiences for myself. I’ve practiced this mode of visionary poetry writing at several periods in my life, when it seemed most natural and appropriate, in part because I could find no better method. The flatness of even the most poetic of prose seemed to take the life out of the experience, to somehow denature it, to take away its power. It seems to me that poetry can capture or enhance the telling of these kinds of experiences of otherness and transcendence, because poetry is enhanced and powerful language itself: heightened speech, words taken to their edges.

When I lived in Indonesia for a year on a Fulbright, studying music, a whole chapbook or two came out of that year, as well as a lot of music. I was living in Java officially to study music, true, but really I was studying everything, thinking about everything. Nothing was insignificant. Everything mattered. I was involved in all the arts, not just music. I went looking for experience, and I found lots of it. Call it a wanderjahr, the classic time of walkabout. I look back on the poems I wrote back then, including the Fire Sermon, and I recognize the person who wrote them as someone who was trying to figure himself out, although I'm not that person anymore. I have a lot more experience now, although overall I believe I'm younger at heart.

This poem, although inspired by the Buddha’s famous “Fire Sermon,” a central doctrine of Buddhism, isn't canonically Buddhist. It actually rather turns the original message of the Fire Sermon upside down. The original sermon by the Buddha, as recorded by his disciples, was about how all of the senses are on fire, all of life is on fire, and how those flames need to be cooled and put out, by following the eight-fold path of dharma towards nirvana. I found, when I was writing the poem, that what I believed was that immolation, the refiner’s fire, the burning of the self in the fire of life, was the other path to enlightenment. The flames rather than the cooling. The immersion in existence in order to transcend it. Nowadays I recognize that as the Tantric path, although I did not formulate it as such back then. Still, I've had many visionary experiences involving light and fire and uplift, experiences I still encounter even now. So as a proper mystic, I suppose I would end up taking the path of fire anyway.

•

Why did I post this older poem now? Partly it was because I made the accompanying artwork. Not knowing where the artwork was going, I was just playing with the images and processing. Fooling around. Improvising. As usual. People think that finished art is made with intention, but in my case as with some other artists it rarely is. I don't write an outline, I don't do sketches, I don’t plan everything out in advance. I just dive in.

The truth is, I've been having a real hard time lately. Call it depression, PTSD, feeling stuck, or worse, I lost most of today to feeling like crap and doing nothing. I’ve been feeling that way even on days when I can look back and tell you what I did accomplish. It didn't help that the day I made these images was cold and dreary and wet outside, which after weeks of unseasonably hot weather was doubly hard to take. Lots of people keep telling me that they think I'm doing well, on this current phase of my journey, and I'm starting to wonder if we're living in parallel universes. I do try to "think positive!" but sometimes you just want to punch the next overly cheerful New Ager when they chirp up about the power of positive thinking. I guess I've been good about hiding what I'm really feeling; I guess I have everyone snowed. The truth is, I feel like crap more often than not. More precisely, if not bad, then not good either. Quality of life has been lost under quantity of life, and quantity has been oppressive.

Was I looking for a reason to cheer myself up? Mostly art-making does that for me, or at least can often do that. Not lately, though. It's hard to feel like doing anything when you don't even want to get up in the morning. Depression. Whatever. Actually, depression can feel like The Big Whatever, an existential condition of anaesthesia and acedia. It's a fact that it can be hard to care. Sometimes I have to convince myself to care.

Fact is, I'm still under a lot of stress these days, Lots of people tell me I’m handling it well. I usually don’t feel like I am, so the external validation has been welcome. I don’t feel like I'm handling life very well at all. I feel overwhelmed and out of sorts most of the time. I can't always cope. I lose days to depression. I'm doing my best, and most days it’s an effort, feeling like an uphill battle, feeling like I have to force myself sometimes, feeling like even I don’t believe myself. I did make art today, out of this mood, as I've done before, but if it’s any good I can’t always tell. Nonetheless, a document of the moment, of the day, of the times. Life is difficult and complex enough right now, for many. There are several artistic projects and marketing and future career planning tasks on my To Do list, and having that list is good, because it gives me a reason to even bother trying to get moving up that hill yet again. I crossed a couple more items off the list today, yet as the witching hour approaches I don’t feel accomplished, I just feel tired.

•

This poem, my Fire Sermon, spoken out of a very Kazantzakis-like or Elytis-like mode of theology and mystical experience, inundated by sunlight and drenched with heat, a theology of Light and fire spoken in this poem through the mouthpiece of the Great Awakened One, falls into a category of poems that is perhaps limited artistically but fundamentally important personally: poems I have written for myself, to express truths I needed to write down, not caring if the poems themselves were good or not, along the axes of art-for-art’s-sake, purely because I must write about what is in the poems. They may not be good Art, or good Poems; in fact I'm certain that some poets would say they're not.

I’m well aware that this kind of poem is hugely unfashionable, no matter what the current fashion might be. They’re not hip or ironic, they’re not intentionally obscure or deliberately vague, they don’t require a decoder ring or secret insider information to get inside of. They’re not technically amorphous or brilliantly original. They’re neither metrically traditional nor neo-formalist. Each poem has a unique poetic form that emerged from the poem itself, and from its contents. (Form follows function.) They use mostly plain speech, albeit compressed and heightened and focused towards white heat. (I do get comments, about some of these poems, that they do ignite some readers, that they do catch Light, that they do break down the walls around heart and soma. That’s all I could ask for, and more.)

They are poems many poets would reject purely because of the subject matter, my personal experience of the sacred and sacramental, while other poets would reject them because they’re personal but not emotionally or psychologically confessional. There’s no psychological pathology in these poems beyond what a reader might project onto them. (Shamanic experience has frequently been misperceived as pathology.) There’s nothing pathological about having sex with God unless you believe that God is dead and passion is a necrophiliac aberration that must be suppressed. Freud would condemn Rumi as schizophrenic, entirely missing the point. (Freud was remarkably wrongheaded about so much that is natural to transcendence and contemplative spirituality. Maslow by contrast gets it right, in his studies of peak experience, of oceanic experience. The poets of ekstasis get it right more often than anybody else.)

These poems would not satisfy the criteria of many creative writing workshops, because they’re not personal small-scale lyric poems in the approved workshop mode, nor are they abstract and philosophical or opaque, in the approved language-mannerist modes. These poems are too sincere on the one hand, and not awkwardly self-conscious enough on the other. There is almost nothing in them about human love relationships, except as such relationships are avenues of grace and fire and what we can call Tantra.

The poems in this category have almost universally been rejected, or over-praised, often for the same reasons. It's rare to hear a response to this kind of poem that is just so, just right on target. I don’t know if they’re Great Art. I’ve ceased caring either way. I do know that they are letters written from myself to myself, and to Whoever or Whatever else is listening. They are what is transcendentally universal that I can find in what is personally mine. Some of them are stories, and others are deep descriptions of instantaneous non-narrative moments. The Fire Sermon is perhaps the only poem I’ve ever written consciously as a sermon, as a speech written to be delivered to the gathered congregation. It's not even a didactic poem; it's a poem of praise.

So that’s what it is. The other reason I present it now is because intuition says it’s necessary. The timing must somehow be right. I must be brave enough, right now, to be naked and vulnerable. Opening the heart is also a Tantric practice. Who is the Beloved to whom I send my song? He alone who knows my heart.

States of Disunion

I have started three or four different new essays on various topics this past week, but have been unable to finish any of them. I wrote a single poem a week or so ago, but am sure if it's any good. It felt scattered, unfocused, raw.

I have a lot on my mind, a lot of worries about my future, my health, my finances, my personal state of being. I am continuously angry and resentful, day in, day out, and have no outlet for it. I'm feeling stuck, on multiple levels. Right now, unless I finish a piece of writing in one sitting, it gets set aside unfinished, and not returned to. Maybe I'll be able to come back to those other essays soon—they are on topics important to me—but not today.

I am mentally at odds with life, and don't find art-making soothing enough right now to be either curative or distracting enough. I have rarely felt this stuck in my life, and it bothers me more now than it ever has before. I can feel my shoulder and neck muscles aching more and more as I sit and type this. Will I even finish this, which is likely to be a rant that no one wants to hear? No guesses either way.

Everything that has been going on that's been good and fun has been overshadowed in recent weeks, and it's been hard to "think positive." (Actually, I'm going to slap the next person who gives that advice to me.) There have been good and fun moments, yet the overall baseline has been unhappy, frustrated, discontent, irritable, resentful, angry. Circumstances have prevented me from venting this backlog easily, yet I need to. So consider this a rant, if you wish, if I finish it, if you're reading it. If you don't want to read it, kindly soar off.

I don't actually enjoy feeling angry and resentful all the time. I don't take pleasure in it. It's just there, like the weather. It would be a lie to deny it, a lie to try to conceal it or dismiss it as unimportant. A lot of friends have lately been telling me how well they think I'm doing, how good I look—compared to how I used to look when I was dying, I surmise—and I listen, but I feel like I'm lying if I pretend that I feel as good as they think I do, or should.

Sometimes in more cynical moments I am convinced that the main reason people want you to be doing well is so that it doesn't upset them. In my more cynical moments, I am quite sure that the reason we medicate people out of their mental difficulties is not for their own benefit, but for our ours: because we find them disturbing. I suppose that's a step up from institutionalizing them in a mental hospital, in Bedlam, but it's still a kind of prison. I feel like I've been lying to people who feel I'm doing well, albeit it's mostly lies of omission: I just haven't been saying what I'm thinking and feeling to most people. There's a disconnect, a disunity, between what I feel and what people seem to want me to be feeling. It can be impossible to reconcile.

All of this is exacerbated by the current social environment, the ridiculously fouled political climate of rhetoric going on around me as my nation continues to fragment rather than cohere. I guess these are after all the end times: the end-of-something-or-other times. Kali Yuga, or the last days of extreme, violent turbulence, before the Sixth World begins. I do my best to avoid most political horsecrap, but if one is going to be an engaged, active citizen-participant in the civil contract, in the social fabric of one's own country, one cannot avoid everything. Some toxins slip through.

I haven't been in a good place mentally for several weeks. Some days I'd like nothing more than to get in the truck and disappear on another roadtrip for awhile, but you can't really run away from your problems. You can only avoid them for so long. Wherever you go, you take your troubles with you. You might be able to ignore them for awhile, in a new setting, but they'll eventually re-emerge.

I'm experiencing a lot of delayed grief, a lot of PTSD, a lot of strong emotion right now. Much of it is from the very invasive surgery performed on my flesh last summer, a lot of feelings I didn't have time to deal with back then. So some old stuff is coming home to roost. This is all made worse by the fact that a big part of my daily life is spent focusing on preparing for the next, even more violating surgery, which becomes existential angst because I still can't get any clear answers about a timeline, or about what's expected of me. "Lose weight and exercise" is all I'm given. It makes me furious, because it keeps me in emotional limbo for the convenience of others. I'm about to explode at whichever medical professional next tries to condescend to me, or keep me in the dark, or whatever. What they think is supportive isn't. I'm on the verge of firing all of them. Even the one or two who are not totally clueless have pissed me off one too many times.

This isn't even about my own impatience anymore. This is about the frustration I am having to deal with on a continuous basis, because no one will give me the straight story. I know that life has no guarantees, I don't need to be told that. I'm at the point where I need at least partial guarantees, not prevarication. Is it so hard to say what you mean and keep your word to me? I have weight-loss goals to achieve, yet no one seems willing to help me get there. I'm completely on my own, with a proven track record of not being able to do this on my own. I ask for help, and I get evasiveness. I ask for answers, and I get none. I do not feel listened to.

Of course I'm hardly the first patient to feel this way. But it's a new feeling for me, because never before have I needed and asked for this much assistance, with no response. Of course I must do it all on my own: the veiled implication being, if you don't succeed it's your own fault. Yes, let's blame the victim. Let's put all the pressure on the patient and not provide any resources to lighten the burden. Yes, let's do that.

When this all began, I was sold a medical narrative of surgery to cure my chronic illness, of wounding and recovery and healing, that has yet to be delivered. I just want the story I was originally told. I want what I was told would happen to actually happen. I want the story I was told to be the story for real, without these endless avoidances, delays, and misdirections. I feel lied to, when the narrative that was originally promised me for various reasons seems to be infinitely put off. Was I sold a bill of goods? Was I lied to? At the moment, I certainly feel that way. Meanwhile I am left in limbo, with this ostomy bag that makes my life pretty much a living hell.

The truth is, I'm still in the midst of this medical journey. I'm not "all better now." I have a long way to go.

I may in some ways be physically stronger and healthier than I have been in years, but that's only half the story. The other half is that I'm not done yet, it's not going to be over and done with till the next surgery and recovery. The single advantage that I have going into the second surgery is that I'm stronger and healthier overall, now, since the first surgery, than I have been a very long time. So I'm going in with better chances than I had with the first surgery. But that doesn't mean it will be easy, or simple, or a quick recovery. There are no guarantees, not even many promises. I'm nowhere near finished with any of this. Any idea that I'm "all better now" exists in contradiction to and denial of the actual facts. Lots of people nonetheless want to cling to that idea about me; I suppose it's less upsetting to them to believe that I'm all better now rather than that I still have a very long way to go. I understand that; nonetheless it doesn't help me get through, it doesn't help me at all.

So be it.

I'm pissed off enough right now that it might be getting in my way at times, but my rage also fuels my determination. Despite everything, despite everyone who claims to be on my side but isn't, at least not in any helpful way, I intend to survive, to get through, to move on with my life. Somehow. I don't know how.

I am well aware, however, that determination and intention are not enough. There has to be more. There has to be real, genuine, pragmatic support. If I'm supposed to lose weight, fine, help me with that. Don't just brush me off with a command to do better.

•

So this is what I did today: I went looking for a fight. I found a few. I went looking, mind on fire, for stupidity, judgmentalism, and the like, and I found them in spades. They're actually very easy to find, since even smart people often trip over their own blind spots. As Frank Zappa once said, Stupidity is actually most prevalent element in the universe, since stupidity is more prevalent than hydrogen. I spent a big part of my day commenting on threads on two or three websites wherein I thought people were using incredibly sloppy logic to bolster their arguments (usually ending up undermining them), and I pointed that out.

I got into an argument with a smart yet occasionally reactionary academic about how hate speech is something real and tangible, not merely a semantic trope that needs to stop being used—but maybe you had to be there. I stand by my point that calling people on their hate and on their bullying isn't hating in return, it's shedding a light in dark places. Changing the rhetoric alone isn't enough to cancel out the hate. Calling bullies on their bullying isn't "hating back," it's turning over rocks to air out the slime underneath.

I got into a couple of discussions regarding gays (equal rights) vs. the Bible (as quoted by the religious right), pointing out quite rationally and calmly how most anti-gay sentiments expressed by the religious right use verses from the Bible that are known mistranslations and misreadings. Even Biblical scholars who don't like gays will agree that the King James Version of the Bible is one of the most inaccurate translations ever made, and the source of many misinterpretations.

I got into a long argument about people being judgmental of other people being judgmental of other people, at the end of which I pointed out that, yes, I too was being judgmental of those who being judgmental, etc., to make a point by example: where do you stop? At the end of the day, no one looked particularly good in that discussion. Everybody judged everybody else, and only one person had the guts to step back, look at his own rushes to judgment, think better of them, and apologize.

Yes, I was occasionally as insulting and judgmental in reply to those I saw being judgmental and insulting to me and to others. Yes, I was occasionally quite withering in my contempt.

And at the end of the day, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I'm tired, but I'm more cheerful than I've felt in days.

Now, I can hear a voice at the back of the auditorium already saying things like, "Aren't you supposed to be better than that? Was that the enlightened path to take?" Well, perhaps it was some sort of sin to take out my anger on others. In my defense, on those rare occasions that I indulge in this, I pick my targets very carefully. I harness my anger to do my best to make the world a finer place, by calling bullies what they are, by speaking truth to power, by doing my best to find light in the darkness. Just because I fight on the side of the light doesn't mean I don't contain darkness as well. You do too, don't pretend otherwise. It may not he the most enlightened thing to vent my anger and frustration on others—I agree—but what would you have me do? Suppress it, swallow it, till I make myself sick with it? No, better to get it out my of my body, for my own health and peace of mind. Better to harness anger to be used as fuel for other kinds of enlightenment. To wake up.

You see, that's Tantra in action: harnessing the power of "negative" or "corrosive" emotions, turning them into fuel for enlightenment. I try to at least do it consciously, using skillful means. I am by nature the Dragon, at core the Warrior, and I have more affinity for the Wrathful Deities than the peaceful ones. Perhaps that is a failing. Then again, I never claimed to have achieved enlightenment in this lifetime, or even to be likely to. I am as flawed as anyone else. My biggest vice is impatience, my biggest flaw is anger and judgmentalism. I recognize other people being judgmental because I don't like that tendency in myself. Nonetheless I will use judgment as a tool of discernment, if it serves to make the world a finer place. I struggle along, imperfect, failing often—the same as you, as everyone else.

Today I went looking for a fight, to get myself unstuck, and I found one, and I feel no need to apologize. I don't do this often, because in fact I don't really value it highly. I know very well that is an indulgence in raw negativity. At least i attempt to do it using skillful means, to do it consciously. Today I did it for reasons essentially of mental health, for medical reasons. Today I did it because the steam release valve needed to be uncocked. Tonight I am more energized and and clear-headed than I have felt in several days. I may not sleep any better than before, but I may be more rested nonetheless.

So mote it be.

Mental Illness

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
—Robert Musil

•

The thing to keep in mind is that "mental illness" is a label. It's a label we use to categorize and define certain behaviors. It should be clinical and neutral, nonetheless it stigmatizes people. A label like this makes you look at people with doubt, with paranoia, with questions. And sometimes not with compassion, not with understanding, and not with friendship.

I've been suffering from depression for awhile now. But let's see: Is it mental illness? is it "clinical depression," or "chronic depression"? or is it situational depression?

In fact, it's situational. Some of it can be traced to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). In the past five years, my life has been extremely stressful, challenging, and turbulent: I gave up my own career and income to move back in with my parents to be their live-in, full-time caregiver until they died. They died, and I immediately was diagnosed with a chronic illness, ulcerative colitis. That illness almost killed me last year, when I almost bled to death and had major anemia which I still am recovering from, and this past year I've gone through the first of three surgeries to cure and correct the problem. I'm still recovering from that first surgery—and even though physically my strength is better than it's been in years, and even though I have an immune system again and managed to not get the flu, bronchitis, or walking pneumonia this winter, for the first time in a dozen years—some days I'm really depressed. Just like I used to be.

It turns out I've had this chronic illness for a couple of decades, but it wasn't diagnosed till recently. Looking back, I can see how UC caused a lot of problems that, at the time, my family, many of my friends, and even myself thought were caused by a bad attitude (tired all the time), a lack of ambition (UC drains your energy, will, and life-force), and being unable to focus (having a wide range of career choices, but never knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up; in fact, there are mental and cognitive consequences to being anemic and exhausted all the time, one of which is being unable to focus some days). These were the favorites amongst other psychological explanations that it turns out were a smoke screen. In other words I was sick for twenty years with a physical illness that had consequences for my mental stability and cognitive resources. Was I mentally ill? No—but many people treated me as if I was. And I believed them.

Reframing this experience now, I can see clearly how the last two decades of my life had been overshadowed by a physical illness that ruined me, but which everyone thought was a mental or psychological problem. Or even an attitude problem.

So if you want to leap to conclusions and label people you know as mentally ill, well, go ahead, that's your right. As Eric Frank Russell once remarked, "Every man has the basic right to go to hell in his own way." But just in case you might have leapt too quickly to a conclusion that's unwarranted, you might occasionally want to step back and take a look at your own assumptions about what "mental illness" means.

What most people actually mean, when they talk about mental health, is a social rather than psychological expectation that people conform to social norms and values and don't act weird. It means get a job, be a normal person, don't stand out, conform to the social normative ideas of what "success" means. Don't be different. Don't be of all things an artist.

Being an artist means being different. And being born gay means being different. It's no wonder so many gay men have mental health issues, when we're raised in a culture that hates and fears us, and still treats us a second-class citizens, and tries to deny us civil rights and social equality. The high incidence of gay men who support political candidates that would strip away their civil rights, given a chance, speaks to a high incidence of lingering and inarticulate internalized self-hatred. Whenever people vote against their own best interests or highest good, you can be sure there is, underneath their rhetoric, some lack of self-esteem, some insecurity.

"Mental health" is a normative concept; it usually means that you're supposed to think and act like everyone else, not be "eccentric" or "weird" or somehow not part of the usual narrative mythos of the American Dream of economic individualism at all costs, or the Dream of Technological Progress, or other sociopolitical myths that we're all supposed to believe and conform to. Individualism vs. collectivism are modern social myths that drive many people's unconscious self-destructive choices.

But every aspect of this is wrong. Socially normative "mental health" is a narrative of conformity and subjugation. The myth is that mental health is a stable steady state. The fragility of this self-image is evinced by the relentless social (tribal) peer pressure to conform to the norm.

Genuine self-esteem does not fear diversity or disagreement, and does not attempt to enforce conformity. Genuine, actual mental health is a state of flexibility and adaptability, being able to cope with change and hardship, being able to celebrate joy and love. Genuine mental health allows for eccentricity and individual variation. Mental balance and psychological/ecological dynamic health accepts the inclusion of dark days as well as happy ones, and celebrates both as authentic to the fully-nuanced, full-range human experience.

For myself, I've affirmed many times, and it's still true, that art-making is a positive force in my life that has kept me alive, that has kept me sane. For me music is medicine, music is sanity.

One of the only really useful definitions of insanity I've ever heard is a very simple, pragmatic one. It goes like this:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and each time expecting an outcome different than the last time.

This definition speaks to individual mental health, to common sense reasoning, and flexibility in the face of changing circumstances. It speaks to how people can get stuck in social and political ideologies that create a bubble of unreality that everyone but the person inside the bubble can see. And it speaks to the group pathology of socially-enforced normative conformity, ranging from peer pressure to fascism, revealing these to be inherently insecure and unstable.

It speaks to the truth that when you are a sane person living in an insane world, the rest of the world labels you as insane, when in fact the opposite is true. It speaks to the truth that lots of times you're right and the world is wrong. Nothing crushes self-esteem more readily than the social need for conformity to normative social expectations that the person cannot live up to (or down to), and is unable to follow.

And it is underlined by a bit of wisdom from everyone's favorite genius uncle, Albert Einstein: "You cannot solve a problem by using the same kind of thinking that created the problem."

So, go ahead. Judge others as "mentally ill." You might even be right, some of the time. No more than that, though. Because lots of folks who we judge as mentally ill are in fact just having a hard time living up to your expectations of who they're supposed to be, and how they're supposed to behave.

Some wise man named Yeshua bar Joseph once quipped, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." If all the people who claim to speak for Jesus, who claim to speak in his name, would just remind themselves of his actual words, "Judge not," imagine what kind of world we might actually be able to make for ourselves.

Glass Walls

Formless, incoherent, like seeing at a distance
through a glass wall the world ticks on, tides in, tides out,
flowing between ocean and lens, never at rest,
never tranquil, never ceasing. So go the waves.

A month of driving, travel, seeing new places,
seeing old faces, seeing the dead walking through
the living, all of it seen through a glass wall.
You hoped for enlightenment, that fizzy detachment
in which the opened heart engages with suffering
by neither causing nor rejecting. Instead, so obvious,
it's depression, the remembered glass wall of uncaring,
not unknowing. Neither an embrace of mystery nor
a carapace of dejected self-analysis, it's just blah.
Where's the fizz of life? That snowstorm seems to have it,
gathering and drifting in high riverine canyon winds,
till they bite the road and block it, but you don't care.
Is a depression a distraction from worry? Is it a gift?
I don't know. I embrace the few moments where
the world embraced me. And they were few. Only now
realizing how distanced from the foam I've been,
another bleak morning, snowless, cold, bitter winded,
only now knowing what you hoped was satori was only sorrow.

There's a small buoy inside my inner sea, holding on
to anchorage while storm waves surge around.
There's a small boy inside whose horror resurges
unabating, groundswelled by the belly scar he doesn't
understand. A repeating chorus of what the hell happened
to me. A line of scar on his perfect belly, glowing white
where the angel slit him open with the burning fiery sword.
All these sensations surrounding surgical terror, shunted aside
for later; now later has become now. Horror, terror, grief, death,
loss, confusion, a welter of wounds flying thick into memory,
feelings you didn't have time for when all your effort went into
just daily survival, bubble around your feet, stinking of sea-wrack.
Perhaps these glass walls help you from feeling too much, too fast.

So the world howls when I cannot. Winds blow across
the headlands; one night in Nevada they howled like the dead
around the edges of my hotel room door, alkali, dessicant.
The dry bones of the tormented dead sifted ash
dry lake dust seeping in. That night sleep was on vacation.
Another hellride down the Sierras, road twisting away
from the headlights, you'd stop and sleep if it wasn't so cold,
but the two-lane winds away till late, leaving you vibrating
once again on valley floor. In the Basin and Range
there are no oases, just desert sojourns. Normally
that's welcome, a place to stop and listen to silence.
The glass wall between me and world, that I took for transparent,
was a parfait of silence, screams, and silence, layered between
my eyes and desert silence. Now I've nothing to show for it.

What a waste. Did I return refreshed, vacationed, relaxed,
recharged? I feel hollowed, edged far too close to the wind howl,
well aware that if I could only summon the caring I'd dissolve
into puddles of grief. But the glass wall. No shouting
in either cathedral or cemetery gloom, it's unseemly.
In Taos and Albuquerque we wandered through cathedral
gift shops, feeling for once at home. I bought some portable
saints to travel with, alongside the Ganesha statue with his club,
the bronze Buddha found at a new Mexico thrift store.
I'm not particular about my saints. I'll call eclectically on every
source of solace and protection, the thousand little gods,
those interfacial masks between us and silent godhead.
I'm a pragmatic witch, going with whatever works. No loyalty
to any path but the one I find my feet on. Glass walls keep me
from knowing what I was feeling till, spelunking, I write it all down.
Now shudders ripple through me, I cough for the first time all winter.

Lucite, perspex, indifferent vitrine, inches of plexiglass
holding out the sea from waterclap. This was no vacation,
despite desire, or desert silence, despite the wind at ocean's boom.
Instead, archaeology. The recovery of artifacts of dying,
implements of torture, a grid of bones amidst fossilized grain.
If I plant those archaic seeds, I'll fly apart. Is depression so bad,
if it keeps you from incessant weeping? If I had the will I'd break
these walls apart. Perhaps you excavate these petroglyphic bones
by starting with the sills, chipping away till the glass loosens.
Tilts out of its frame the way a painting falls at any museum,
shocked silence after whisper of archaic canvas reaches floor tiles.

Whatever. I need to come back to life. There were moments.
Afternoon light on canyon walls at Zion, dappled by clouds.
The hour around sunset at Pescadero, where waves swirled
around pelagic outcrops ancient in ancient light and incoming tide.
There was a lot of wind. End of the snowbound road at jackson Lake,
whitewalled by the plows, white snow mists cloaking the mountains,
lake frozen and drifted, white on white, every white, even these pines.
Tea and snacks by the adobe fireplace and heavy beams at the Taos Inn,
an hour after brushing by bighorn sheep running across the canyon rim.
Somewhere on a snowbound Wyoming fenceline, bald eagles and ravens
perched side by side, getting along. Sunlight converted into wine.
Frozen wild berries under naked aspen boughs. Scent of juniper and pine.
After all, despite dense inner weeds, I have come through, I have survived.