There’s just one particular form of mental illness that’s been found to be shared by a significant number of spree killers. It’s depression. At least a tenth of people in the U.S. have it, or have had it, myself among them. And there’s no conclusive causal link between the depression and spree killing.
You are not normal.
There is no normal. You may well be happy and well adjusted. I hope you are. I often am as well. But every single person is neurologically distinct. Normal is semantic, an arbitrary boundary on the bell curve between peak and long tail. Mentally ill, if it means anything at all, just means landing on the wrong side of that arbitrary line.
Mourning dead blogs on Twitter
Like people, more blogs are now dead than alive.
The spirits of dead blogs. The necromancy of the Wayback Machine.
Transgression
mole:
Soon there was no way to hide the fact that I had mangled it. I kept going back and crunching it, craving the sensation, wondering what it was, wondering if it was poison, wondering if my secret transgression would end up killing me. “I had no idea he was going into the closet for that,” my tearful mother would say. Everyone would say there was no way she could have expected it, why would any boy do such a thing? And behind her back they’d note that I had always been a queer boy, no accounting for me. This at least was quick. Perhaps it was a blessing.
You could lodge things in it: paperclips, toothpicks, straws. It would take the imprint of a key, of a coin, of a knuckle, though not very finely.
Singing the blues at 52 Hertz
For decades now, scientists at the NOAA have been tracking a mysterious whale song that sounds like the ghostly howls of a drowned tuba player. The sounds have been identified as belonging to a single whale, who sings at a frequency unlike any other whale in the world.
Dubbed “52 Hertz” after the frequency range in which he typically sings, the animal has been called the loneliest whale in the world, since his love songs seem destined to go unanswered. Most other species of baleen whale, such as blue whales and humpbacks, sing at frequencies much lower, between the 15-25 Hertz range.
Two years of a poem a day
The Official Website of Poet Luisa A. Igloria:
As these things usually go, I hadn’t intended to do a daily poem “project” when I first wrote this poem in response to Dave Bonta’s Morning Porch post on November 20, 2010. But the experience of making a clearing, right then, right there, and dropping everything in order to sharply focus on nothing else but the immediate goal of writing a poem within a brief window of time, proved to be exhilarating. I kept coming back, and the rest, as they say, is history.
[…]
Two of most important things I’ve learned from my daily writing practice over the last two years have included the following (and the learning, if I might stress, continues): letting go (of the fear of the blank page, of the ego, of opinion, of criticism— Who do you think you are and why are you writing? Who do you think you’re writing to or for? Why do you think others will want to read your crap?); and just using that brief, blessed time to find a way to tune out whatever noise there is, outside or inside, so you can drop quickly down into that part where the you might find the poem and the poem might find you.
Two years of writing (at least) one poem every single day is a remarkable achievement. Congratulations are very much in order… as well as my heartfelt thanks. Via Negativa is much the better blog for Luisa’s daily contributions, and I’m honored to have been able to supply so many useful writing prompts over the past two years.
Where great teachers come from
mole:
The afternoon I found myself drawing a fine reproduction, in scarlet pencil, of a small splatter of ketchup: easier than facing the shrieks of desolation that would have met an attempt to wipe it up & leave no record of its beauty. Or the dread of walking out on a rainy morning, and knowing that six blocks would take half an hour, because every drowning worm on the way must be rescued. There might be twenty such, and each must be lifted tenderly: they are easily injured, especially when waterlogged. At two years of age, she suddenly comprehended that all the dinosaurs had died. She grieved for a year.
Squirrel mind
Consider ecstasy: standing beside oneself. There are things that seem to pull us out of ourselves and our ruminations — or, perhaps I should say “our” ruminations — for there is an autonomous and almost impersonal life to the currents of thought that stream through our consciousness. The weather — the darkening skies, the leaves blown sideways, the ping of rain on glass — attracts and holds our attention and displaces (for a time) whatever tape-loop of anxiety currently seems to be at the top of one’s playlist.
It’s the same thing with taking pictures of weeds, I realized yesterday: looking about with squirrel mind, waiting for the frisson of attraction (red leaf, acorn, berry) to animate the arm that holds the camera and the eye that peers through the lens. I am storing up caches of images against an instinctually anticipated great hunger and long winter night.
Hansel and Gretel revisited
Gretel is careful to take the Witch’s cat with them when they leave the gingerbread house, explaining to Hansel that they must be responsible for it. Later, back at home, their parents aren’t exactly pleased to see them. It has been quieter without the children, and with more food to go around too. One day Hansel comes in from playing to find the parents missing, and the cat gone too. Gretel sits next to the stove, humming while waiting for the joints to roast.
“The ephemerality of every hard moment”
So now I know it’s not really going to get easier. But perhaps it can keep becoming more fluid. Perhaps I can feel my way into the ephemerality of every hard moment.
Somehow the ephemerality of the happy moments, the strong ones, the softly joyful ones, is always to the fore. But it’s not just the good bits, it’s all of it: here, blink, gone. Hard, but not fixed; never lengthy; a flickering, ever-changing string of moments.
I increasingly wonder if the enormity of confronting this is what lies behind so much of human madness, cruelty, masochism; behind our obsessive need to build boxes, lock our own cell doors as well as other people’s.
Living at peace
Yom Kippur is a rehearsal for the day of our deaths. Today we wear white, like our burial shrouds. (Some wear a white robe called a kittel, in which they will someday be buried.) Today we abstain from food and drink; the dead need neither. And today we say the vidui, the confessional prayers, as we will say on our deathbeds. As Rabbi Shef Gold has written, “For the whole day of Yom Kippur, we act as if it is our last day, our only day to face the Truth, forgive ourselves and each other, remember who we are and why we were born.”
Today is our chance to release all the karmic baggage we haven’t managed to let go in the last year. To set ourselves, and everyone we know, free. Not so that we can die at peace — but so that we can live at peace, with ourselves and with one another.