Disbelief

So, I go to group therapy. In the last session, one of the members described an unfortunate experience in which someone in a church group (I'll call him the Christian) asked her on the spot to explain why someone would want to kill herself, given God's grace.

(The purpose of the church meeting was to figure out whether killing oneself is a mortal sin. The members of the church group decided that it was not. How kind of them.)

Having heard this anecdote, I was angry on the therapy-group member's behalf because of the circumstances in which she was asked to explain. But maybe, I thought, the question of the offending Christian was a good one. If you believe in God, why would you want to kill yourself? Unlike the Christian who asked what it meant to want to kill oneself, I wonder about the belief side of the question. If you have wanted to kill yourself (as my fellow therapy-group member has wanted to do in the past) or even if you have been severely depressed, how can you believe in God?

These two questions are different only in the viewpoint of the questioner. The Christian didn't understand suicidal ideation. I don't understand belief. Or, rather, I think I get it but don't respect it. This puts me in a predicament because bringing it up in group might reactivate her feelings of shame, which is not my intention. But I really am curious. But one of the group members is a paster, and I don't want a lecture. But I'd like to know how it is possible to believe in the grace of God and still want to die.

My experience of trying to commit suicide clarified my position on belief. Before, I was an agnostic. Afterwards, I became an atheist. I realized that I believe in the everlasting darkness of death, with no concern for any afterlife or judgement. So the question remains: how can someone maintain two such contradictory thoughts, overwhelming despair and true belief? I mean, I know that people believe in contradictory things all the time. So, is it a question worth exploring?

The birthday

Thank you all for the birthday wishes. Sam, your eloquence in love always fills my heart to its bated brim.

&

This week has been a little chaotic. So I have a few updates of varying interest:

• Dave is probably gone for good. Janer seems much happier--relaxed, affectionate, and less likely to attack the dog.
• I've called several of you in a panic recently. The calling is a good thing for me because it means I'm leaning a little on friends during a rough patch. Don't expect it to stop any time soon.
• I'm not sleeping at night and am having some racing and divided thoughts. Like having an intense conversation while contemplating a movie I watched recently and trying to figure out how one would go about replicating the table and chairs. It's not that I'm distracted, particularly, from conversations: I can contribute meaningfully and pay attention to the line of conversation. It's just that my mind seems to need more input to function adequately.
• My diagnosis has officially changed, by which I mean that the doctor I'm currently seeing as my primary doctor (not someone who has seen me a few times in the hospital) has changed my diagnosis to bipolar disorder I. I'm actually a little relieved by this change because 1) it's more in line with what I think the diagnosis should be; 2) in my opinion, it's not as bleak as bipolar II; and 3) I have a better sense of why my personal course of action should be. I've been counting deep breathes while visualizing each number: its size, color, and font type. Ones are small and yellow; fours are big, blue, and sans serif. The exercise actually is calming when I make myself focus only on the numbers. 
• Sam and I are struggling right now. We're at the beginning of a difficult, probably long process, but I'm trying to work, with Sam, on not allowing every argument to lead to catastrophe. Smaller, sober arguments are better than the loud, passionate, drunk arguments we often have.
  
• I still need to ask you, my friends, to help me with reality checks, an infelicitous phrase but I can't think of a better way to put it. To say it longer, though, I have trouble with distinguishing between my true feelings and my disordered feelings. It's like the difference between temperature and climate. If I am to be vigilant about my mood disorder, I have to know what's healthy first. I'm working on it in therapy, but you can do much to help me by letting me know what seems unreal or out of control.

That's the sum of it today. Sorry for the fragmented nature of the post, but there's a lot happening that must be expressed.

More journal entries

On February 7, I promised pieces of my journal entries for three reasons:

1. I want to remember how punishing my stay in the VITA unit was.
2. I want to remember the insights I had during my stay.
3. I want to convey to you what it was like in there.

During the long night of January 24, I had trouble sleeping in part because of a huge medication change. To pass the time, I started a short story, "The Designated Hitler." Here are the first few sentences: "She had a bulge, tender and hot, on the inside of right elbow. And she cried because she could cry because she was not dead. '"Am I the monster or the miracle?' she asked herself."

The next day, on the 25th, I wrote: "Having a really hard time." On the 26th, a doctor lent me a book by Kay Redfielf Jamison, called An Unquiet Mind. Jamison quoted someone named Hugo Woolf: 

 "To be sure, I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how, well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds."

The quotation still reverberates for me because--and this one is funny--I want to avoid intellectualizing my feelings. It's easy to hold feelings back by thinking about them instead of experiencing them. I am a woman of extremes, we now all know, and trying to cry a little is scary to me still. I was afraid I would never stop crying, and I'm working really hard on realizing that I can stop when I let it out a little at a time, when I feel sad about something specific, rather than about my lot in life. You'll see me cry, which is also scary but I'm trying to work on letting people in. I'll write more about my hospital experiences, but also about my triumphs of heart and hand. Stay tuned to this station.

Insurance

Is scary. They list everything they might cover, what they plan to cover, but I want them to be a little more definitive. Okay, a lot more definitive. 

In other news, I'm loving Kimya Dawson. And I'm remembering that accessaries aren't so bad. 

I'm still trying to figure out a lot of things and to recall more things about my recent experiences. I want to learn how to express more love. Oddly, I don't myself have a lexicon for love, for which flaw I blame my parents. It's the only dependable use they have. 

This blog has several different kinds of posts, and to my mind, right now, the current trend is toward edited, thought-out entries and sprawling posts, with little oversight and lots of digression and spilling-over sentiments. Sometimes the later kind transform their ideas and emotions so that a more carefully crafted post can contain them. Sometimes it's all just raw.

To Sam

Sam, I have never better broken a rule. Here's a golden oldie from Phillip Sidney as a tribute:

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange one for another given;

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:

There never was a bargain better driven.

His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

I cherish his because in me it bides.

His heart his would received from my sight;

My heart was wounded with his wounded heart; 

For as from me on him his hurt did light,

So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:

Both equal hurt, in this changed sought our bliss,

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his.

My true love hath my heart and I have his.

Hiatus broken

I tried to kill myself. It's a senseless act, and the only one responsible for it is me. Now that I've figured some things out, I'm going to spill them on this blog. 

The first (and most important) issue is horrifying to me and to my friends: If a person wants to kill herself and thinks about death constantly, she's not going to let on how awful she's feeling. Otherwise someone could stop her. So, please don't think that anyone's at fault except for me. I struggled with bipolar disorder, thought I was don't all the right things (therapy + meds), and I still felt miserable. I'll always struggle with my illness on some level. But I must never again fall for the illusion of suicide as an answer to the constant questions that plague me. I'm making my promise here: I will not do it again. I plan to learn how to come up with solutions and how not to dwell on death as though it were a sweet exit from an otherwise terrible life. 

The second insight: I should have called someone first and I should have been emotionally open enough so that I could figure out who I should have called. I isolated myself. It's no one's fault but my own. I tend to deflect my feelings by intellectualizing them, like researching the best ways to killing myself. (It's actually quite difficult to do, apparently.) Too often have I tried to keep up my emotions at bay, until it's too much to bear. So I need to let my guard down. It'll hurt but not nearly as much as I have hurt in the past.

Third, suicide leaves no notes. It silently embraces the abyss. The abject punctures the myth of self-knowledge. As Kristeva puts it (and yes, I'm doing this even here), "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life." She believes that we trail our abjection through life, like the shadow one wants to flee but is always attached to us. 

Again, with a little less drama: each person carries her own corpse around, hurrying away from death as much as she fastens herself to it. I guess that is still a little too poetic, and I'll try to say it better next time. The long and the short of it is that my mistakes will dog me for life. My regret, my shame, my despair. 

S., I'm so sorry that I did this wrong to myself and to my friends and to you. I cannot say it enough. 

A reply to J-P's comment on the previous post

My response was getting so long that it made more sense to put it into a comment of its own. The Kindle (and devices like it) probably are boons to inveterate travelers. Books are heavy!

J-P, the questions you ask regarding paper books generally provoke tons of (let's say) vigorous discourse in my field. I could definitely imagine a future in which owning paper books becomes a luxury, a electronic books and their attendant devices drop in price. Just as it is now a luxury to own a horse for now good reason. (Also heavy.)

I believe that the codex (even if not made with paper) will and should endure, but that we'll use it differently, perhaps with more respect or shared ownership within a community. Codices resist change and censorship more easily than electronic documents do. The paper book signifies a drain to our environment, but how does that compare to the environmental impact of producing, distributing, and recycling electronic devices and the infrastructure that they require? (That might be an unanswerable question at this point.)

What I do know is that many codices are beautiful in themselves. As are those luxury horses. (But with less poop.)

---

And now a question regarding my own crappy paperback codices: Does anyone know how to get one's paperbacks re-covered to make them hardbacks? Most of our books are paperbacks, and I like to imagine them as cloth-covered hardbacks, in a range of colors. As a child, I lusted after the huge library of leather-bound books that belonged to one of my father's colleagues. They had a pleasing uniformity of size and color, with exotic names on their spines, like "Seneca" (an Indian chief?) and "Cato the Elder." Now I know I don't want any leather books or the authors in their canon. But it's really cool to think of a cloth-covered canon of our own. So if any of you people know where I could get this done, or anyone on Etsy who would do it, please let me know.

On the apparent multiplication of things I don't know

Lately, I've been feeling a little dull. Here is an instantiation meant to reproduce this feeling:  

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a little story called "The Garden of the Forking Paths." (You can probably find it online.) The key mystery, if you can call it a mystery, surrounds Dr. Yu Tsun's ancestor, Ts'ui Pen, who undertook a double task: to write an intricate novel and to construct an equally intricate labyrinth. In both, everyone would lose his way. Someone murdered Ts'ui Pen before he completed the novel, and the labyrinth was never found. Other stuff happens in the story, which is quite good, but my chief interest is in this kernel of narrative uncertainty. 

Conventional narrative depicts a character making a decision that eliminates all previously available options. Borges presents the possibility of a world in which every option continues to exist simultaneously, each leading to unlimited future possibilities, some of which converge but for different reasons.

I've been waiting for feedback from my committee on material I gave them a month ago. As days pass, I imagine increasingly elaborate reasons for their silence. I also increasingly think of the things I should have addressed in the draft I gave them: race and slapstick, the myth of the persistence of vision, and sources that my sources referred to, and their sources, and so forth.

"The Garden of the Forking Paths" helps me think about the internal and textual problems I'm encountering. My mind attempts to contain all courses and recourses, while I struggle with the ongoing textual impossibility of tracking down all sources connected to any given bibliography. (Each source I trace contains within it its own bibliography, which I feel compelled to track down as well.)

All things stem from this philosophical dilemma. Clearly, no one can get it all. But it still makes me feel dull. 

According to wired.com, Banksy, the infamous yet anonymous British graffitist, has hit NYC, and it sounds like his biggest statement yet. Wednesday marked the opening of The Village Pet Story and Charcoal Grill, an installment featuring anamatronic creatures that directly cross the line between animals and prepared food, among other boundaries. I'm talking hot dog hamsters here, people.

The Wooster Collective published a statement attributed to Banksy. I can't vouch for its provenance, but it's funny, so here's some of it:

I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and the sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing.

I think we all knows what that feels like.

The pleasure of being anonymous

First: the eulogy of the world was written last Friday. Rest well, DFW. 

---

One of the aspects of living in a small town (that I hated) is that everyone knows you. Or your dad or mom. Or your mom and dad's car. At least, they think they know you.

One of the things I loved about moving away from Arkadelphia was that I could leave that misremembered history that others associated with me. I apparently was a mud-flinger in kindergarten. Another girl (who I graduated with) bit someone once, which earned her a 15-year nickname. She might still have it—she never left.

When I left town, adults no longer said to me, "Oh, you're Dr. Murphy's daughter. I've heard about you." Which they had because my dad liked to tell "funny" stories about his daughters, in almost every situation, including his classroom. More than a couple of my teachers had been in one of his classes, and some of them had seen at least one "Murphy girl" demonstration of Piaget's developmental experiments. (It wasn't until I was in college that I realized that the psychologist Piaget was the same person as P-I-J.) I hate to say it, but it's embarrassing for someone to tell a story about how you ran out of a classroom when you were five because you were confused by a test you weren't supposed to pass anyway, and wasn't it so adorable.

Anonymity is glorious. It means you can be no one's daughter, no one's test subject, no one's cute story. It means you don't have to wave at every passing car because one in five people knows your parents or was your nursery-school teacher or some shit like that.

Anonymity on the web is a little harder to achieve. But it is still glorious. You belong to no one, not even yourself because it's not your name. It's a different name, and the difference doesn't matter because you're speaking to strangers anyway. You finally write your worst memories, your worst parts of yourself even, to the world. Who writes back. Because who doesn't like to watch a train wreck? Who never is one?

The weight of 750.5 mg

A little over 3/4 of a gram. 11.58 grains. About 2% of an ounce. If you're talking Newtons (force, not figs) .007 359 890 846 5 units, or roughly 736 dynes.

I like the idea of weight as measured in units of force, as gravity pinning something down to the earth. According to Newton's third law--all forces occur in pairs, each opposite and equal in magnitude--when a person falls, the earth falls in the opposite direction. Or, I suppose, each leaps to meet the other. 

When you fall and you feel the earth is rising rapidly toward you, you're right. It is. 

And (to misappropriate Flannery O'Connor's use of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's phrase) everything that rises must converge.

As my meds and I converge every morning and evening. 750.5 milligrams is the amount of medication I take in the morning. When I take the 5 pills that weigh so little, they pin me down to an inescapable truth: taking psychotropic (qu'est-ce que c'est?), psychiatric medications will be a lifelong ritual, part of my and Sam's management of my incurable, major mental illness.

When a person is depressed, she can fend off bad decisions by deciding to wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow might be better. When I take my meds, I remember that, at some unpredictable time, tomorrow will be much, much worse.  

I remember that the same is true for you, dear reader.

So, to lift our moods, let's hear something from Ms. Dickinson, from her posthumous Complete Poems 1924):

Today or this noon

She dwelt so close, 

I almost touched her;

Tonight she lies

Past neighborhood--

And bough and steeple--

Now past surmise.

A risk

Below appears the first poem I've seriously worked on in 10 years. I don't want praise (or disapproval, I suppose). The thing gazes at my navel hard-core and may make no sense. Posting it here feels risky and unwise. That's why I'm doing it. I can always take it down, right?

The Lot

Our moon buzzes orange.

Other moons nearby, moth-tinged,

cast a local light, 

filling the moist air.

They multiply the shadows

of hatchbacks and mid-size sedans.

Leaning against our car, we perform the drama

of who has the lighter

and where to go for beers:

You decide. No, you.

We've snuck away from the film of my illness.

Between the sadness

and the irredeemable joy,

I'm in remission. I am remiss.

Jumping into the pool

 Sam and I had a great time together. Mussels, Natty, crab cake, Resurrections, very fresh old-water oysters, some things coated in Old Bay. I meant to pick up a couple of growlers of local beer, but with the joy over finding one of my favorite table wines at Beltway liquors, I forgot. We bootlegged a lot of Natty and quite a bit of cheap, good French wine, which is difficult to find in Nashville, comparatively. (I will buy anything with the words "flinty" or "mineral" or "slate" in the wine guy's description. If I can find something inexpensive with "a barnyard bouquet" in the nose, that's also going in my cart.) Sam had to prod me out the door.

I'm going back during Vanderbilt's fall break to revive some old academic connections, and I expect to go to a few of the places we missed this past week. 

-----

Being polite's an easy social habit to pick up in the South, and it smoothes life among strangers. In contrast, people in Baltimore don't expect to like you and don't feel the need to be polite, unless you're paying them to do something. Consequently, if you find yourself drinking on the same side of the bar with a bartender you just met—getting bartender drink prices and a royal drunk on—you have made a friend. 

In Baltimore, an exception to the politeness complex occurs at the pool table. Being cordial helps everyone control any aggro; otherwise, it can get ugly fast.

Any given pool player may choose a couple of play-for-pay tables to frequent. He learns the lay of a table, the bounce of the rail, the speed of the felt, and which cue is best. Newcomers discover their disadvantage quickly. Even if you can control the ball and understand the lay, you can still lose miserably.  

After Jamie and Bill's wedding, in full fancy-dress get-up, I played a game at an unfamiliar table, seeing that the players knew the table and expecting to lose. After the break, I used a subtle stroke to sink a ball in the side, and my competitor, Derrick, remarked, "Oh, look now, she's a shark." Typical pool banter, trying to slow a run. I replied, "Just because I'm in a dress and heels don't mean I'm a shark." Then I banked a ball into the corner, and we all laughed.

I lost by two balls, and I suspect he was being nice to me by letting me lose with a little dignity. But I got a couple of shots in that I was proud of, and we shook hands at the end of the game.  

Baltimore

Mobtown. Charm City. Rat City. The Greatest City in the World. The Murder Capital of the Country. The City that Reads. Get in on it. Believe. 

Eats

Some of my favorite dishes and meals are simple: real ice cream, which can have as few as four ingredients; an arugula salad with lemon vinaigrette, baguette, and wine; scrambled eggs; goat cheese and figs; crab cakes with remoulade; anything pommes; mussels with mignonette; steamed shrimp coated in Old Bay; a good, crusty NY strip. (It's a much longer list, but this time I'll exercise some restraint.)

Simplicity requires great technique and a good palate, however, and I've lost my touch a little after having cooked so little over the past several years. I don't think most of our friends in Nash know this, but I used to cook a lot, experimenting with new ingredients and approaches. The cookbook collection I cultivated in Baltimore began its slow transformation into mere theory during my first year at VU. No more time to prepare meals with courses or to host cocktail parties with several hors d'oeuvres. (Sometimes in the winter I crave bagna càuda, but who has the time?) The Pines' kitchen has little counter or storage space, so my favorite small appliances are out of reach and it's hard to keep all of the parts of, say, the ricer or the mandolin in the same place. 

Nostalgia wields a strong hand in any good memory, I realize. But thinking about our personal food microculture in B'more makes me conscious of how lucky we were: gas stove, space for the cuisinart, a Whole Foods a few blocks down and next door to the wine store, a selection of small specialty stores, like the Italian bakery up the street. (There was a bit of a language barrier between me and the couple who ran the bakery—they were recent emigrants—but it was always worth going and they usually threw in a couple of buttery, delicate, small cookies.) I look forward to going to Baltimore in August, and I hope we can hit some of these places or at least one of the markets. 

The inspiration for this post, as rangy as it seems, is the simple, delicious meal that Sam prepared for me last night: grilled steaks and vegetable kebabs; a green salad with olive oil, white wine vinegar, and flakes of parmesan; and a great Côtes du Rhône. Prosecco before dinner and GM after. I loved every minute of it. 

Because a birthday can be a personal New Year's Day, I'm resolving to give a greater effort to cooking and enjoying it during our last years in Nashville. Let's see how that goes.

"A birthday is the annual anniversary of the day on which a person was born."

Of the dozen or so composition classes I've taught so far, that's my favorite terrible first sentence. It seems à propos. 

If you imagine the course of a life as shaped like a bell curve, birthdays become less and less remarkable the closer to the middle you get. 

But not for being less happy. Sam. What can I say? You always kno

w what to tell a girl. And it's always heartwarming to get birthday wishes from friends and family. It usually rains on my birthday (maybe about 70% of the time), but this year, the rain is holding off until tomorrow. So, my baby and I are dining al fresco, with the puppy under the table and four inscrutable kitty eyes staring at us through the window. (Dave is currently to my right, draped over a stack of papers and books, as only a cat can be.)

Today's been lazy, which is great. Time for thinking is essential to me, and it can feel luxurious. Over the past hour or so, I've been thinking about a story I'm going to write called "The Designated Hitler" and a movie concept based on that Michael Pollan book everyone talks about. Really, what if all our corn crops failed, forever? Might it not yield a slow apocalypse? I'm imagining a Michael Bay–style blockbuster. Now I just have to figure out a few things, like the resolution of the conflict, the cinematic time of the story, and what everyone says and does.

I think after I finish this post, I'm going to go outside, lie in the hammock, and listen to the end of a crap post-apocalyptic novel. Maybe I'll take some iced tea with me. I'll just relax and think about the end of the world as we know it. It'll be fine.

Blew

This was the week of Blowing Things Out of Proportion. Maybe last week, too. I won't say more about almost getting into a mishap with the lady at the airport or that woman at the Kroger. Instead, I'll tell you a story. Many of you have heard this story, but it stays with me and I like to tell it and it's my blog.

Lo, many years ago, there was the last boyfriend. A Greek, he was dramatic, an Achilles in his own mind, complete with the unattractive pouting. We lived in different cities. I lived in the Republic of Tacoma Park, outside of DC. He lived in Bay Ridge, under the Verrazano Bridge. We fought over the phone a lot. 

One night, after a particularly vicious fight, I needed to feel more clean, on the inside. I went to the Giant (at about 4 am) and bought lots of citrus-y stuff—tangerines, lemon cookies, lemon gelato, lemon icing, lemonade, and a Cosmo. 

The check-out lady took one look at my assembled goods and said, "Oh, honey. Man problem?"

 I usually keep a pretty good game face, but when she said that, I started to sob again. "Y-yes."

 "How long you been together?"

"About nine months." I tried to snort back the snot.

"Do you have any babies with him?"

"No." I could hear my voice hitch.

"Hon, you need to toss him out and get you someone good. I'll put the cookies and the ice cream aside. Don't want to get fat now."

I don't think I ever saw her again (she worked the third shift), and I don't remember her name. But sometimes I still hear her voice. "Oh, honey."

She saw what was happening and intervened. More than the advice, what made a difference was the fact that she noticed and took care of me. She was a friend, mentor, mother for just that moment. Even though it was a brief exchange, she changed my life. 

I did get me someone good after that: Sam. And I kept the gelato. 

Not a rhetorical question

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with Sam and two good friends over drinks after a nice dinner out. One of the topics that I keep thinking about is the way in which a blog's structure determines its content. Blog anonymously, and you can say whatever you like. Blog under your real name, and you have to think about whose feelings you might hurt or who might disapprove of your opinion or behavior. For example, I wouldn't complain about Sam. Not that there's anything to complain about. I love you, baby!

So that leads me to ask myself why I write these entries to begin with. My stated purpose is to construct a place for all of the jumbled ideas in my head that don't find exit in other ways. But when those ideas overlap with (for example) questions or problems with family or friends (my main audience), I find myself resorting to coded language. When you come across an entry that doesn't make much sense, it's probably evidence that I'm concealing something. I edit these entries (as much as it might seem otherwise), and sometimes I edit them out of comprehension.

That somewhat undercuts my purpose for doing this. Writing helps me work things out. But I need some kind of audience—implied or otherwise—to write to. So diary or journal writing isn't that appealing. Writing about some thought, idea, or situation using clear language helps me clarify my thoughts. Wanting to write about something but having to obfuscate the true subject may only muddle it more. I'm never really going to write something very raw on this blog, like a sonnet I'm working on, but I'd like to be more direct than I have been. 

How?

So, here's the deal

I think I might have a defensible thesis statement for my dissertation. Now I have some tasks in front of me. I need to:

• Define slapstick, modernity, modernism, and their relationship
• Discuss how people's bodies were affected by modernity
• Develop some ideas about slapstick and what it requires of the spectator
• Figure out how to incorporate new information into an existing theory of how we watch movies
• Determine how spectators can distance themselves enough from the screen action to laugh at violence
• Trace the ways that chance affects slapstick and its responses to technology, pace, immediacy, and gender
• Cobble this all together to make an overarching argument for a counter-history of slapstick, and thus call into question how film theorists think about film history
• Make a list of example films

I have about a year to a year and a half. It'll be fun, in its way. But I'd rather watch Chaplin's The Rink (1916) over and over.

Thank god I have Sam. Without him, it would be a year of eating only ice cream sandwiches and other ice cream-based foods, apples and peanut butter, and Sonic milkshakes, which I guess should count more as an ice cream-based food than its own special category. At any rate, hurrah for Sam!