Shifts aren’t always eventful, even night shifts. During the lulls, it’s easy to grow bored and hope for a call to break my isolation, something novel and dramatic. I watch the phone, alert for the first sounds of unrest. Then I feel guilty, because it means, in effect, wishing someone to be in trouble. “Have a good shift,” a departing counselor usually says to the next person on duty, and I think we mean May the telephone ring often and may you rise to every occasion, so that you feel your time here was worthwhile. But we keep it vague, because what we should mean is May no one suffer today and need you. Unlike a big-city crisis center, which might receive hundreds of calls a day (as San Francisco’s does), at SP it’s a bustling and busy day if thirty people call. And yet I’ve often been on shift when five or six people phoned per hour.
To pass the time, I read through past Hot Sheets, some of which have news clippings attached. Three events recently required SP’s involvement, two suicides and a murder. The murder was also a self-destructive act, because a twenty-four-year-old killed the new boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend, dooming himself to a lifetime of imprisonment. One suicide, a sixteen-year-old boy, shot himself in a car. The teenage father of a handicapped baby, he had felt unable to support his family and handle the sudden spate of responsibilities. This was the second suicide in his high school in the past year, and part of SP’s ongoing job is to find ways to handle the subject in the school, which his brother still attends. We want the students aware enough that they can call SP, but not cause so much commotion that the surviving brother might be stigmatized. SP’s postvention crew has gathered the family together and talked with them, because after a suicide family members often blame themselves, and think they should have gone to thus and such an event that the boy wanted, or not said something or other, or have given him something he asked for, or listened better when he spoke. They get snagged at an “if only” stage, and can’t get on with the necessary ordeal of grieving. On this occasion, the family was in denial, and couldn’t fathom why the boy killed himself. But an investigation turned up clear motives: he was a teenager burdened by marriage and fatherhood, finishing school, trying to support his new family, and he was abusing alcohol and drugs. A psychological autopsy, it’s called. When I first began to work for SP, a new friend of mine confided that he had been a counselor at the Los Angeles branch of Suicide Prevention when Marilyn Monroe died, and became part of the psychological autopsy team in that controversial case. Imagine attending the mysterious death of a naked icon. Although the circumstances of her death were confusing, and rumors circulated that she had perhaps been murdered, my friend felt convinced that she had indeed taken her own life.
More clippings. Only a few months ago, a twenty-two-year-old woman shot herself in the driveway of her boyfriend’s house after he broke up with her. As young as she was, the future seemed intolerable without him. Her family was beside itself with shock and loss. A few months before that, a thirty-year-old man had a fight with his girlfriend, went out to his truck, took a hunting rifle and shot himself. She ran after him, but got there too late. Finding the body horrified her, as it would anyone, and she needed considerable counseling.
Postvention counselors, working with the survivors, try to elicit memories of the physical facts rather than the emotions, draw out the sensory details that make an event unforgettable, because that’s how traumatic memories are stored in the brain—evocatively. Incidental things may become obstacles. For example, if a woman cooking pasta received a call about her sister’s suicide, making pasta might always tinge her with sadness, though she may not understand why. There’s a technical term for this phenomenon—state dependency. If something is learned in a specific setting, then it will be remembered when a similar setting occurs. Especially trauma. If a similar state isn’t encountered for a long while, the memory may lie dormant, an unexploded landmine.
Still the phone sits quietly on the desk. Don’t want it to ring, I caution myself, as I consider a pile of magazines. Paging through an issue of New Scientist, I stumble across an article that makes me smile. Researchers gave women T-shirts worn by men for two nights, then asked the women to choose which appealed to them. The women consistently chose shirts from males with immune systems different from their own. There was one exception—women on the birth control pill chose men with similar immune systems. Why would we evolve to be attracted to mates by unconscious cues such as smell? Because if you marry someone with a different immune system, your offspring have a better chance of inheriting strengths from both parents and surviving. But pregnant women have special needs—rather than a new mate, help from related males who will care for and protect the baby. Of course. One more piece of the jigsaw puzzle. One more snapshot for the human family album. If I put together enough shards of behavior, will I at last be able to see the panoramic whole? Turning down the corner of the page, I lay the magazine on the couch, so that I won’t forget to copy the article before leaving. Now what?
Ring, I command the telephone. Nothing mortal. Something solvable. Silence, yards and yards of silence.
A glass jar on the desk shimmers with silver foil. Reaching into it, I remove a handful of Hershey’s chocolate kisses, each one perfectly breast-shaped, the ultimate essence of suck. I bet it took a committee of post-Freudian marketeers to design.
From my knapsack, I pull a yellowing, dog-eared copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and browse among familiar passages, stopping at some favorite lines:
“Of life immense in passion, pulse and power” … “We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun” … “A tenor large and fresh as Creation fills me” … “Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou” … “Stretch’d and still lies the midnight” … “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven” … “Long have you timidly waded holding a plank to the shore” … “Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes” … “Through me many long dumb voices” … “the drench of my passions” … “Life … the leavings of many deaths” …
Leaning back in the chair, glancing at the cracks in the ceiling, I remember visiting the house where Whitman was born, surprised to find it loafing on a quiet street in Huntington, Long Island, like an oasis tucked into the desert of suburban sprawl. It must have been a large rambling farmhouse in 1810, covered with natural cedar shakes that undulated and swelled and cracked as they dried to the color of stale blood. Whitman’s father, a carpenter, had built the house himself, and it bears many of his stylistic quirks, like the Dutch doors, corbeled chimneys, and especially the battalion of extravagant windows, recklessly uneconomical, through which sunlight gushes.
Inside, the house erupts with motion, from the oak stairs on which knots are carefully arranged right at the lip, to the blueberry stain trimming the whitewashed walls as well as the mantels and doorways and the doors themselves. A house that outside wears the twisted wood of trees inside breathes with sunlight and the colors of the nearby ocean—a froth of white walls and the pounded, gunmetal blue of the sea. The oak-plank floors are studded with blacksmithed nails, but the attic beams are pegged. In Whitman’s day, settlers sometimes went so far as to burn down their homes and collect the nails when they moved. Timber was plentiful, handwrought metal rare as radium.
I discovered that most rooms have two or three tall windows, with twelve handblown panes of glass over eight, each pane quarto-size, as was Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass. The original panes are delicately flawed and lenslike; they gave off a visual vapor when I peered through them, imagining how he had cooled his head there in summer.
When I stood outside, looking into the soul of the house through its windows, all was blackness. There was no Whitman anywhere, not the fresh lonely boy who collected eels and gull eggs by the shore, not the sensitive lonely man who, in his notebooks, kept a tally of his lovers, noting their facial features, ages, and interests, as if he feared there might come a time in his life when he would forget that he had loved and been loved. Not the free-thinking hothead who held dozens of jobs as teacher, printer, and reporter, and who founded newspapers himself. Not the omnivorous reader and poet blessed with passion who, years before Darwin’s Origin of Species, wrote about evolution, as well as “the ancestor-continents away group’d together.” Not the health fanatic, who took cold-water plunges everyday. Not the Civil War nurse, who traveled among battlefield hospitals and became one of the finest war correspondents who ever lived, while caring for the sick and dying with a saint’s conviction. But when I looked out through the same windows, the world quivered into focus, became a pageant of color, vitality, and detail, as it was for Whitman. It was much easier to look out of the house than into it, knowing so little about the man, but caring deeply for his vision.
America had many poets before Walt Whitman, but there was never an American poet before he held the country in the sea-to-sea embrace of his imagination, named its wonders like a latter-day Adam, proclaimed its common men and women to have lives of beauty and dignity, blessed it as good, and then revealed it to itself in all its bustling, fidgeting, trailblazing, huckstering, big, booming, melting-pot panorama. He especially loved America’s social “turbulence,” which was its lifeblood and the perfect parallel to its wild unbridled landscapes. Whitman’s portrait of America was rich with sensations and unnervingly complex, but he also saw it whole, as one democratic fabric, where a great personal deed had room to grow.
Because there was a new breed of American surfacing in the fast waters of the nineteenth century, Whitman decided to invent a radically new poetic language, translating the revved-up mosaic of the daily newspaper into a poetry full of street talk and everyday events, a poetry so plural it sought to sum up America, a poetry aggressively intimate that buttonholes the reader, cries with the reader, woos the reader, a poetry written in a breathless, ecstatic style, through which flows the electric of his vast athletic vision, a poetry that celebrates the human body in frank sexual detail, a poetry of catalogues and parading images, a poetry that drastically changed the idiom of poetry by bringing into it all sorts of untraditional things like astronomy, Egyptology, carpentry, opera, Hindu epics, census reports: the whole big buzzing confusion of life.
Whitman was the first American poet that the Universe didn’t scare. He took it literally—as one verse—and wanted to touch and be touched by and leave his mark on all of it. Voluptuously in love with life, his mind was unquenchable and nomadic, always pitching the tent of its curiosity someplace new. He believed the poet’s duty was to change people’s lives by teaching them how to see, by throwing a bucketful of light onto the commonest things. And he believed that perfecting his own life was essential to perfecting his art. Indeed, he became the embodiment of the nineteenth century’s ideal, the “self-made man,” and was self-reliant, robust, obsessed with the physical; Leaves of Grass is, among other things, a journey of self-discovery whose message is that you can change your personality, change your fate, invent the self you want.
The central event in Whitman’s life was the Civil War. In 1863, he visited his wounded brother in a makeshift hospital, and the first sight he saw was a heap of amputated limbs. Rigid with horror but boldly compassionate, he began his work of visiting war hospitals every day, to tend the young soldiers as they died. “I have never before had my feelings so thoroughly and permanently absorbed,” he once wrote, “as by these huge swarms of dear, wounded, sick, dying boys.” At night, he would migrate from bed to bed, writing letters for them, or giving them spoonfuls of stewed fruit or jam. But most of all he brought his extraordinary presence: a large, healthy, magnetic man charged with energy, white-bearded like the God of the Old Testament. He held their hands and kissed them. Sometimes he told a dying boy that he, Walt, was Death incarnate, and not to be afraid. What an extraordinary act of mercy, to make death physical and kind for the dying. Yes, I think, letting my eyes follow the ceiling cracks to where they gather like lines in a palm, waiting to be read, that’s where he really got to know the America that figured in his poems, through the mainly adolescent boys torn out of their hometowns to fight one another. For a while, he was a hospice worker, a death’s-door counselor.
Working on the crisis line sometimes feels like a battlefield, too, with callers caught up in their own civil wars. They often create a kind of poetry in their calls, dramatic monologues spoken heart to heart. They do not mean to be poetic, do not try to be exquisitely, heartbreakingly human. They cannot help themselves. What they’ve taught me is bound to influence the poems I will write, even the poems not about them, and has already widened my sense of suffering, courage, and nobility.
Whitman really only wrote one poem, although he added to it lifelong, and sometimes made separate books of it. It was a great poem of being, a great epic of life in America in the nineteenth century, in the solar system, in the Milky Way, in the infinite reaches of space. He began with an eye like a microscope, focused on the beauty of the lowliest miracle, say a leaf of grass, and then stretched his eye out to the beauty of the farthest nebulae. He was not a churchgoer, but deeply religious. If there is no choired Heaven in his poems, there is also no death: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” He taught his contemporaries, and latter-day children such as Loren Eiseley and me, a new way of prayer.
A shocker in his day, when Victorian prudery gagged at his evangelism of the body and his sensuous relationship with the Universe, he electrified the country’s notion of its humdrum self. Not long after his death, schoolchildren were given Leaves of Grass to read as a sacred American text about the essential goodness of people, the dignity of the common person, the holiness of the human body viewed naked and up close, the need to forge one’s own destiny, and the duty of all to discover the world anew, by living in a state of rampant amazement at the endless pocket-sized miracles one encounters every day. He reminded us that “A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” Even now, Whitman’s vision is one children are taught in schools, one we cherish as a great opera of American life. Taking the coastlines and canyons and mountain ranges and farmlands and cities, he stitched them together into one sweeping vista that begins and ends with the self. What must it be like, I wonder, to create a mental landscape in which your neighbors, fellow countrymen, and even future generations feel expressed and at home?
How sad that he felt obliged to change the sex of his lovers when he wrote about them in his diaries, writing “he” only to erase it and replace it with “she,” erasing that, reinstating “he,” then “she,” and so on. If he lived here in town, he might well be one of our callers, many of whom grapple with sexual identity issues. Married men afraid to reveal that they’re bisexual, single men afraid they might lose their jobs if people knew they were gay, men and women confused about the first stirrings of homosexuality, or how best to deal with their families, and a long list of relationship problems of miscellaneous sorts. If he called with the problem of his diaries, which clearly worried him, feeling ambivalent or unsafe about his homosexuality, how would I regard him? If I recognized his voice or his story, would I need to keep in mind that he was Walt Whitman, because you can’t disentangle an artist from his life? Or would being his admirer make it harder for me to help him? How could he feel understood, appreciated, taken seriously, if I didn’t convey my powerful faith in his unique talent and vision? Or would that be a mistake, because the heart wears no label or costume, and a lonely banker is just as lonely as a lonely poet? Should I think of his creativity as a job like any other job, important to the journeyman but, during a call, irrelevant to his grief? If I ignored his creativity, would he at last be the Everyman he personified and loved? An artist hides much of his private self beneath his public self by trade, which can lead to a sense of fakery, a self-doubting, “if-only-they-knew-the-truth-about-me” feeling, a belief that he’s composed of disjointed selves, one public and admirable, one private and deplorable. So, shouldn’t I regard the whole man, the creative core and the knotted bundle of turmoil, as a single, authentic, troubled yet triumphant, thickly woven universe of mind and matter?
In a town filled with artists, artisans, and performers, we often hear from creative people, and those callers sometimes pose special problems for me. I can’t reveal how intimately I understand their struggles, or how fascinating I might find their minds. When writers call, it’s tempting to advise them, though of course I mustn’t. For example, a college freshman phoned whose parents were hounding him to go into medicine, but he loved writing and wanted somehow to work in the arts and sciences simultaneously, but wasn’t sure if that was even possible. A frustrating call, that. Of course, I wanted to say, I believe Diane Ackerman lives in town. Why don’t you phone her and ask her advice? After all, I could share my own experiences with him, make suggestions for courses to take and interdisciplinary paths to explore. It was hard to resist guiding him. But he wasn’t calling for my professional advice, he was calling because he felt dread, shame, and anxiety, among other emotions. He was calling to vent his frustrations, sadness, and fears, and so we talked about how it felt letting his parents down, and the best way to handle their upcoming visit and the inevitable confrontation. Although I did finally steer him gently toward an interdisciplinary department at his college, when we hung up I felt thwarted. All the knowledge and experience I couldn’t share with him! It’s astonishing how solidly one’s ego can get in the way. I remember Nina Miller (first director of the agency, and also a fiction-writer) advising counselors in training that “There are times when you talk to somebody, and the connection is so pure that it’s hard not to feel, Oh, is this person lucky I happen to be on shift now, because look how we’re connecting. I once was in the middle of that kind of call,” she admitted, “being terribly self-congratulacory with this very articulate, literary type, and he quoted a line of poetry and before I could censor myself, I said, ‘Oh, that’s Keats,’ or something like that. And I lost the call. He stopped talking about what he called for, what he painfully needed to talk about, because of my own ego need. That’s why you have to be very leery about sharing any kind of personal information. A caller is not calling to find out about the counselor.”
It has taken me a long while to appreciate what Nina meant. A natural urge to connect, to prove that you understand, can tempt you to reveal experiences you’ve had that are similar to a caller’s. Then the identity you’ve managed so successfully to shelve starts to slide off the shelf like the slippery fabric it is. Let go for an instant and it tumbles all over the floor—an untidy and distracting heap of color and folds. Best to resist and keep your own life in the margins. But it’s tough when you touch voices with a kindred spirit.
One morning a young poet called who was depressed, desperate, and lamenting that she couldn’t bear the intensity which she also craved. I understood exactly what she meant by that paradox. I felt the same way in my twenties, when the sun was always at noon. Useful creatively, but impossible emotionally, it was a renegade state both glorious and hellish. Here is a journal entry written when I was twenty-four:
These days I’m like a nettle under my own skin. If only I could pull a sheet up over my life and lie quietly, let go. The yard is infinitely distracting. A troupe of fat crows is picnicking in a bush, dragging the limbs down like shiny black fruits. I’ve begun to feel alien again, go through long spells of control, then these shorter ones of such helplessness, paralysis, unworth. My hallucinatory sensibility I adore, feast on, but cannot live with … I hear the whistle of some bird, like a rusty gate closing, see the separate leaves flickering like coins in the sunlight, the sky white as paper. Two blue jays have taken to the sycamore. There are huge shadows in the trees, made angular by vagaries of light and relief. The air fills with the toots, crackles, and songs of a kindergarten band: sandblock, kazoo, chime, sticks, recorder. Heat shimmers on the window pane … I’ve let everything slide: letters, work, house. Life seems intractable, like sludge. Surely there’s a trick of perspective, a coping mode, a callousness, a remove, a way of holding oneself within the fire but without the burning. I have not found it. Today I will not die like a fly or a swallow. There is so much light in the woods the yellowgreen leaves look painfully raw. I cannot seem to live in half-doses, to shake my heart calm enough to work. The treetops look like African masks, burning bushes, weather balloons. Birds carry the motion of the leaves across the frame like an electronic signal. Sunlight in the woods gives an air of lucidity, as if, could I but squint harder, the far side of the teeming leafage would appear. I squint hard, but nothing budges, comes forth, silently opens to view. What is life that it should include this torment, as well as that parley of birds in the evergreen?… I have not the wherewithal to do my chores, eat, phone the electrician, renew my library book, get dressed, even sleep. I am losing weight recklessly. I read somewhere that solar deprivation makes one ail, so I’ve stripped down and gone out back to bask in the sun. The rays feel like liquid vitamins I took once when little. Mother tilted my head back like a baby bird’s and poured the syrupy gold straight down … My filing cabinet is woefully backlogged and chaotic. I’ve let it all slide, all slide.… The trees now are dark as Goyas. An occasional spore floats across the sky. I’m growing seasick from watching a leaf twist on its tender petiole, turn and turn about. I can hear the urgent weathering of the paint. A handsome red dragonfly, whose slim body pikes like a diver in midair, has been sitting on the chaise for long minutes now. He spreads his double wings like a biplane and, as I pray my dirged spirit will, soars.
I don’t recall writing that paragraph, whose unbroken cascade of images and soul-ache, tumbling out with no shift in mood or gears, alarms me a little even in retrospect. But, oh Lord, do I remember how exhausting those days felt, when the same emotional charge applied to everything. I also hear in that passage a persistent and, though I didn’t know it then, healthy effort to ground myself in the real world, to steady myself with the familiar handholds of leaf, bird, and sky, desperate to anchor them in words. Dragging myself back to dramas fascinating and external, I must have instinctively understood the redemptive power of bathing in nature at its most radiant, an act that excites the mind while it cools the blood. Only oxymorons begin to describe how nature stirs me: an alert and stimulating calm, a sedative thrill.
Fortunately, that stage of sublimely unlivable intensity sometimes passes as young poets get to know and control their creativity better, and also as the chemistry of their growing bodies levels out. Today I perceive the world much the same as I did in my teens and twenties. Looking upon nature, I’m just as likely to record some of those images now. But I process the world differently. The steep sensations don’t frighten me. The intensity hasn’t changed, but it has become familiar and manageable, I don’t feel so much in its thrall, and at times I can summon or ignore it. But there’s no doubt the teens and twenties test your mettle. If you can survive the first rapids of discovering you have a terrifyingly intimate relationship with the world, then you’ll get used to it, treasure it, and life may eventually calm down. Unfortunately, for some artists that tempestuous stage lasts until an early death. Such was the case of Sylvia Plath, an immensely gifted and subversively angry poet addicted to ritualized resurrection. Throughout a tumultous marriage, and despite her two young children, she kept trying to kill herself until she finally succeeded. But what an adorer of the world she was, one of life’s keenest observers and celebrants. Her precise, surprising imagery takes my breath away. When I was in graduate school at Cornell, women poets obsessed about her. If life could overwhelm someone with that gift and passion, what hope had they? Many wrote her epistolary poems. Some romanticized her because she killed herself, finding something enviable in a passion so intense it led to death. I was visiting the Rare Books Room of Penn State Library one day when the curator walked up with a book in his hand. “Here’s something you might find interesting,” he said casually. It was a translation of Goethe’s Faust, a standard college edition. When I opened the front cover, my heart leapt. It had been Sylvia Plath’s copy. I quickly discovered with a smile that she had gone through, daring to improve the language, tightening up images, turning woolly lines into memorable phrases. She also underlined sections dealing with death, destruction, and torment—a theme that visibly obsessed her. It gave me a chill to see warning signs of her suicide, so clear in retrospect. Later I wrote her the following poem:
ON LOOKING INTO SYLVIA PLATH’S
COPY OF GOETHE’S FAUST
You underlined the “jugglery of flame”
with ink sinewy and black as an ocelot.
Pensive about ash, you ran to detail,
you ran the mad sweetshop of the soul,
keen for Faust’s appetite, not Helen’s beauty.
No stranger to scalpel or garden,
you collected bees, knew how to cook,
dressed simply, and undressed the flesh
in word mirrors. Armed and dangerous
with the nightstick of desire,
you became the doll of insight we knew
to whom nearly all lady poets write,
a morbid Santa Claus who could die on cue.
You had the gift of rage, and a savage wistfulness.
You wanted life to derange you,
to sample its real muscle, you wanted
to be a word on the lips of the abyss.
You wanted to unlock the weathersystem
in your cells, and one day you did.
I never loved the pain you wore as a shroud,
but your keen naturalist’s eye,
avid and roaming, your nomad curiosity,
and the cautionless ease with which your mind
slid into the soft flesh of an idea.
I thought you found serenity in the plunge
of a hot image into cool words.
I thought you took the pledge
that sunlight makes to living things,
and could be startled to joy
by the green epaulets of a lily.
But you were your own demonology,
balancing terror’s knife on one finger,
until you numbed, and the edge fell free.
Still later, on shift at SP when the young poet called, I knew only too well the danger she faced. How my maternal side longed to take her under my wing, reassure and comfort her. Alas, I could only listen and empathize; together we tried to plumb her resources. But, as an SP counselor, I couldn’t confide or teach. Revealing myself might be temporarily more helpful to her, but how about in the short hours before dawn, when the ingots of dread start weighing heavily, or when an inevitable rejection punches her down? An artist’s life is always acceptance or rejection, surfeit or famine. What then? My job was to help her find solace whenever she phoned the agency, to allow the agency to become her lifeline, not me. She needed to be able to spill emotion, somewhere to someone, anonymously, whenever the demons struck, regardless of who was on shift.
Suppose someone breathtakingly talented calls when I’m on shift, someone like Plath or Whitman? For all I know, he or she may be one of our callers. The thing about Whitman is that, for all his gift, success, and competence in the world, he was troubled by relationships of usual sorts; exposed to much war trauma; and, at times, some would say in flights of hallucination or megalomania, became delusional enough to depict himself as Death incarnate. Though inseparable, his bright and dark sides were rarely viewable together. For the most part, his ecstasy was public and his tumult private. I must try to keep that in mind when furiously depressed people call. The part of their selves I don’t hear from may be the scintillating, resilient, and powerful part that will write Leaves of Grass. This is so hard to remember when someone calls in despair, especially if it’s a long, lingering death-bound despair. Hard to remember that part of them may be indomitable, self-glorifying, pure acrobat. It’s a therapist’s job to help them come clean, and integrate their bleak, agile, and dynamic sides. In that sense, I suppose therapy is related to the ancient religious cleansing and purgation that was part of a “soul journey.” Our job, on the other hand, is far simpler, though it can feel elaborate. We strive to bind a caller to the present for a short while, a very short while, one more hour, one more day It may seem a long cool drink in the wilderness of their suffering, or a breather only a few heartbeats long. “What will you do today?” I once asked Louise as we were ending an agonizing call. “It’s not the days that worry me,” she had said. “It’s the hours.”
The phone rings and I’m so startled I flinch. My heart sprints a moment. I collect myself, clear my throat, answer on the third ring. “Suicide Prevention and Crisis Service,” I say. “May I help you?” A loud click. Reaching for the logbook, I jot down: Hang-Up. “Rats,” I say to no one in particular, and tap my fingers on the desk. Maybe they’ll call back. My heart returns to idle.
Waiting for the phone to ring—a familiar discomfort, something humans do. How often I have anxiously waited for a loved one to call. I laugh when I think of teenage girls and their telekinesis vision, staring at a quiet phone, trying to whammy it into action. Then there are those late-night calls, when you lie in bed, the phone’s cool cheek cradled against yours, as you drowsily talk with a sweetheart. It is not surprising that several clergymen should be among the founders of SR With its tiny perforations, the mouthpiece of a telephone looks like the screen in a confessional. In church, people enter a telephone-booth-shaped place and anonymously call upon the priest for help. Many of SP’s clients are calling from phone booths. In both anonymous acts, where life and death may be at stake, and sometimes heaven and hell, two people touch voices through a thin screen. The telephone’s is smaller, that’s all. The voices pass through those tiny holes as if they were wisps of nothing, and yet they carry large dramas. We pour our hearts out into the small confessionals of telephones. But where are all the aching hearts tonight?
As I push back the chair and grab my walker, a sharp pain stabs my left little toe and I wince. Three days ago was a real scorcher, so I took off my shoes and socks for a short spell while I worked in my study. Reaching for a book, swiveling the wheelchair with my good foot, I somehow managed to roll a front wheel over my little toe, breaking it. Now I have a broken fifth metatarsal on the right foot and a broken little toe on the left foot. If it weren’t so painful, my predicament would be laughable, a carnival of disasters. The human foot has twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, a hundred ligaments. That’s a lot of scaffolding. Break a few of its girders or lashings, and the whole contraption collapses. All my weight now has to rest on the center and heel of my left foot, and that makes even hopping a trial, the wheelchair and scooter harder than ever to mount, the stairs at SP a military exercise. Nonetheless, I’ve been swimming on my back for half an hour each day, held afloat by a Styrofoam vest, while I kick gently (though only in the vertical plane). If I’m lucky, both injuries will mend at about the same time.
Most mornings, I sling a net marketing bag across my body, stash a plastic vase and shears in it, hobble outside using my walker, and cut flowers to arrange. Sometimes I feel melancholy, looking up at a vase on a shelf I can’t reach, but sober up fast when I remind myself that children, the elderly, and many handicapped people live with countless such frustrations every day. Thank heavens my limits are temporary. I no longer fret over how long simple tasks take; I’ve recalibrated my mental scales and clocks, as well as my physical goals. Now that I’ve discovered how to override the governor on the electric scooter, I can dash to the grocery at 2.5 mph instead of 1.6, which translates into twelve minutes instead of eighteen. I’ve developed a comfortable boldness in asking strangers to help me open doors or cross streets. Amazing how many people offer help, unbidden. Complicated thoughts fill their faces when they do, and it’s clear that they’re trying to assess my handicap (people with broken bones usually use crutches, not scooters or wheelchairs). They never ask about the injury. Making an effort to be cheerful, they try not to be condescending, but rather to strike a delicate balance between sympathy and pity. I find that touching. Some of SP’s callers are disabled, too, and live with all the frustrations and dependency of wheelchair life. Many of them have been the object of ridicule and scorn, not compassion. On outings with friends, I’ve been appalled to discover how few shops, restaurants, movie theaters, public buildings, and even doctors’ offices are truly wheelchair accessible. Some have ramps that are too steep to maneuver solo, others have ramps into the building but steps to the bathrooms. My injuries have given me a clearer understanding of what the handicapped face. Of course, some callers are stricken with invisible disabilities that restrict them, often without anyone noticing, and that must be tougher still.
In the Center’s kitchen, I add water to a cup of corn chowder soup and pop it into the microwave. Someone has taped a panoramashaped poster on the wall, containing a list of names set in many elegant and stylish typefaces: Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, Lionel Aldridge, Eugene O’Neill, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gaetano Donizetti, Robert Schumann, Leo Tolstoy, Vaslav Nijinsky, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh, Isaac Newton, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Michelangelo, Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh, Emperor Norton I, Jimmy Piersall, Patty Duke, Michael Faraday. Beneath that rollcall runs a banner in red:
PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS ENRICH OUR LIVES
Below that, a long red line, then a footnote:
These people have experienced one of the major mental illnesses of Schizophrenia and/or Manic-Depressive Disorders. For more information: 1-800-950-FACT. Alliance for the Mentally Ill of New York State.
An eyecatching poster, it’s remarkable for all the equally afflicted and brilliantly creative artists and scientists it doesn’t include: Hieronymus Bosch, Wassily Kandinsky, Albrecht Dürer, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Hugo Wolf, Camille Saint-Saëns, August Strindberg, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Lamb, Guy de Maupassant, Theodore Roethke, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Jonathan Swift, Serge Rachmaninoff, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), William Blake, Martin Luther, Rod Steiger, Dick Cavett, Joni Mitchell, Beatrix Potter, Charles Baudelaire, Edvard Grieg, Arthur Schopenhauer, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Styron, Tennessee Williams, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to name only a few Indeed, it’s hard to think of many artists whose lives weren’t troubled by alcoholism and/or mental illness. Can it be, as Aristotle insisted, “No great genius was without a mixture of insanity”? Plagued by suicidal lows and stratospheric highs, did nineteenth-century composer Robert Schumann require his emotionally gruelling bouts of manic-depression to produce masterpieces? Schumannolgists have discovered from his letters and medical records that he wrote most of his music in his manic periods. For example, in 1839, a time of deep depression, he created four works; the next year, riding a freshet of mania, he created twenty-five. An important aspect to his genius is that it produced equally triumphant music in both states. Although he composed more during his manic years, he wrote much ordinary work and some brilliant work in pretty much the same ratio as he did when depressed. The only difference was output. The mania gave him more energy—not more insight, passion, or sensitivity.
Artistic genius requires heightened sensitivity, risk-taking, impulsiveness, a belief that the world waits for you to add your vision to the sum of Creation, the faith that you can stain the willows with a glance. Not all creative people struggle with depression, manic-depression, or psychosis. But studies of artists conducted in three countries show a much higher incidence of alcoholism, schizophrenia, and depression. What would be the evolutionary point of that? Why on earth would an artist such as Van Gogh find creativity and mental illness in his genetic suit? Surely it has no survival value if it leads to suicide at an early age. Moderate doses of creativity may be fine for finding new ways to hunt and gather, organize people, attract mates, anticipate and revise in the face of danger. To our ancestors it would have been a useful, even life-saving, quality. Intense creativity, though it may produce magnificent art, wouldn’t be as useful. So the tendency toward alcoholism and psychic distress may be just an unfortunate side effect of the gene for creativity, not a worry in people who are moderately creative, but intensified in those people for whom the creativity is intensified. Even so, the large majority of artists don’t suffer from these ills. If you look closely at a family, you can often see creativity expressing itself in different doses. In my family, for instance, my mother’s side includes her immigrant father, who was a spare-time inventor (of the backless vest and other items), taught himself five languages, and acted as a translator for the gypsies for many years; two uncles who are extremely clever electronics inventors; an aunt who writes songs and, at eighty-five, continues to be a performing belly dancer; my mother, who always wanted to be an architect and has spent her life crafting and designing things. I know little about her grandmother except that, in Europe, she made a living by embroidering vests (only the fronts), and selling sugar cubes to men who drank coffee as they played dominoes. My father’s side of the family is altogether more practical, good at numbers, and less artistic. I turned out a poet, my brother a businessman.
On the other hand, artists are people who tend to have two or three jobs, face rejection and indifference, often live in poverty, don’t keep the same hours or schedules most people do, don’t fit into the norms of a workaday life, are more introspective than their neighbors, entertain unusual ideas or points of view for a living, feel deeply as a profession, and usually find little understanding or respect unless they become famous, in which case they’re constantly being judged—every work has to be as good as the previous one, and good in the same way. That doesn’t sound like an inherently stable lifestyle. “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry,” Thomas Mann wrote in Death in Venice. Artists may require solitude to work, but where does solitude end and loneliness begin? Add to that the way artists sometimes romanticize extremes of consciousness. For some, creativity is a moody art, relying on a cynical outlook and many subtle rituals of despair. For me, it is most often a form of celebration, inquiry, and prayer, but I believe I am unusual in this. Many artists spring from troubled childhoods, and create art as an act of personal salvation. Georges Simenon swore that “Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.” There are few artists who haven’t been hurt into art. So I haven’t decided in favor of nature or nurture as being the great persuader in a creative person’s life. It may be a pas de deux, in which at times nature leads, at times nurture. I picture the two outer planets, Neptune and Pluto, whose orbits overlap in such a way that they trade places from time to time. At the moment, Pluto happens to be the farthest out, but not long ago Neptune was. Given the raw materials of personality and talent, who can say where they will lead? Given the gravity of family life, who can say what it will shape?
I am convinced, though, that the part of the artist that becomes depressed, schizophrenic, addicted, or mentally ill is separate from the part that creates. It waits through the drunkenness, sadness, mania, hallucination, narcosis, for a return to relative clarity and stability, a still point in which to create. It creates alongside the psychic distress. Others may disagree, but I believe even the most disturbed artists create out of health and strength. William Faulkner wrote novels despite his alcoholism, at times of partial or (occasionally) complete sobriety. Indeed, as his drinking grew heavier and heavier, he was rarely able to write at all, until alcohol finally replaced ink as the main fluid in his life. The same is true for Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, Dylan Thomas, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Malcolm Lowry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Crane, Jack London, O. Henry, Truman Capote, and so many other alcoholic writers whose gifts didn’t flow from the bottle but around it, and who would have written even more and better without it. Running away from the ghost of depression can also be a tonic. Frightened of being immobilized by despair, depressives often fling themselves into frantic activity. Hoping to keep gloom at bay, they work until they drop, seem to have inhuman stores of energy, and create art nonstop. They can’t afford to stop. If they slow down, the missile of depression might catch up with them.
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Stirring the hot, thick, corn-sweet soup, I hobble back into the counselor room and carefully arrange myself at the desk, one foot on the hassock, the other on a chair seat. Of all the names on that poster in; the kitchen, Churchill’s may be the biggest surprise. For most of his life, he crumbled under the repeat blows of a depression so familiar, loud, and unshakable, that he called it his “Black Dog”—I suppose because it hounded him. It had its own life and demands, was uncompromisingly brutal, and became a monstrous family member to be reckoned with. It seems to have been an affliction he shared with a number of his ancestors, including his father, who suffered from what was described as “melancholia.” A small, feeble boy, bullied at school and neglected by his remote, glamourous, high-society parents, Churchill grew into a dynamo of a man packed with energy, assertiveness, bravery to the point of recklessness, a tough attitude, extreme ambition, plentiful ideas, willfulness, aggression alternating with compassion, artistic tastes, egomania, and a yen for daring adventures. The deprivation he felt as a child may well have fueled his ambitions, but, having no innate sense of value, he was easy prey for the armies of depression that plagued him throughout his life.
Carrying a burden as heavy, unpredictable, and frightening as that, how on earth did Churchill raise children, rise in politics, paint beautifully, write with wit and confidence, and lead a nation through war? In psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s fascinating character study of Churchill, he argues that in 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, it took a bold conviction for Churchill to rally the British people, but “it was because all his life, he had conducted a battle with his own despair that he could convey to others that despair can be overcome.” Storr sees in Churchill’s story a classic relationship between depression and hostility, in which an emotionally deprived child resents his deprivers but can’t risk showing any anger or upset, since he desperately needs the very people who are torturing him. Depression results from turning that hostility against oneself. Sometimes such people aim at opponents in the outside world. As Storr observes, “It is a great relief to find an enemy on whom it is justifiable to lavish wrath.” In Churchill’s case, “fighting enemies had a strong emotional appeal for him … and when he was finally confronted by an enemy whom he felt to be wholly evil, it was a release which gave him enormous vitality.”
For the last five years of his long life, Churchill sat in a chair staring at a fire, partly paralyzed by a stroke, wholly demoralized by depression. He stopped reading, rarely spoke. The Black Dog finally caught up with him and pounced, flattening him under its rough weight. But what a dynamo he had been, so inventive, so courageous, so resilient. A history-making, difficult life. Yes, I think, that’s what we all lead, in smaller arenas perhaps, lives sometimes gleaming, sometimes difficult, that change history for many of the people with whom we come in contact. Isn’t it odd that one big-brained animal can change the course of another’s life, change what the other sees when it looks at its reflection in a mirror, or in the mind’s mirror? What sort of beings are we who set off on symbolic pilgrimages, pause at mental towns, encounter others who—sometimes without knowing it—can divert or redirect us for years? What unlikely and magical creatures. Who could know them in a lifetime? When I start thinking like this, wonder shoots its rivets into my bones, I feel lit by a sense of grace, and all my thoughts turn to praise.
Still no calls. The telephones look plastered to the desk. Maybe if I use one the other will get the idea.
Will Cathy be home tonight? This might be a good time to plan a future bike trip. While the weather holds, we could take a stab at the Sodus Point ride—forty miles along the shores of Lake Ontario. 20 Bike Rides in the Fingerlakes describes it as mainly level terrain strewn with fragrant orchards of plums, peaches, apples, and pears.
Dialing Cathy’s number, I get a busy signal.
Forty miles is more than we’ve ever tackled, but level miles float under you like steam. They’d be a snap. Well, maybe a long slow sweaty perfectly fatiguing snap. Could we drive there and back and bike forty miles in one day? I don’t think so. We’ll have to stay over at a bed and breakfast. A smile creeps across my face. The last time we overnighted with our bikes was last August, when we drove to Cooperstown, biked some that afternoon, slept at a bed and breakfast, and the next day biked twenty-two hilly miles through old forest, rich farmlands, lake resorts, and continuous natural beauty. Recalling the serene mysticism of that ride, I ease it through my memory as one luscious spill of sensations:
In the lavender hours after daybreak, before the sun leapt onto the blue stage of the sky to begin its light opera of soul-searing heat, we set out on our bikes to circumnavigate Otsego Lake, which, encircled by dense forest, lay flat as pounded metal, thickly gray-purple with a light mist rising, yet wavering clear like an ancient mirror—the lake the Indians named “Glimmer glass”—and pedaled hard up a long steep incline, as the temperature of our bodies and the day rose together, and within the aubergine drapery of the forest, twigs crackled, a confetti of light fell through the leaves, small quick beings darted among the tree trunks, and an occasional loud crunch or scuffling led our eyes back a million years through several tunnels of instinct to shadows we automatically interrogated for bear or mountain lion or highwayman or warrior, as a mixed chorus of insects and birds sang out, oblivious to our cycles, but mystified perhaps by our talk and laughter, or by the sight of a woman with blonde hair riding upon a teal bike, wearing black shorts with purple chevrons the color of a mallard duck’s underfeathers, and behind her the same thing but different—a woman with black hair riding upon a plum-colored bike—following a road dusted with loose gravel spread in winters past, weaving along undulating mountains that roll the way a dancer rolls her hips as she sprawls, while shadows staggered like eighth notes through the woods, the lake grew calm as cold wax, but the sun yellowed and swelled, and water began to seep from our faces, so we drank long gulps of clear warm water from bottles, not the lake water, deepening to black orchid whenever a castle-sized cloud drifted over, not the mirage of water shivering on baked macadam up ahead, not the salt water plumping up our cells that gives us shape and flow and spirits the mind through soul journeys, but water captured from a spring in Vermont we had never seen, filtered by rocks, as we are filtered by the sights we see, especially the majestic indigo of the lake, the lavender air, and the night-purple convalescing in the forest, as we pedaled into the open where rich growing fields surrender to the sky their perfectly ordered rows of corn, with leaves like ironed green collars and tassels shaking glitter in the uproaring sun—sights we sometimes savored with little comment and a few delicate sips of mind, while at other times wolfing down whole vistas—but we both knew the tonic value of the journey, which fell somewhere between pleasure and hardship, though we are not the sort of people who picnic on pain, or calibrate fun, but we reveled in working ourselves through the landscape, which we discovered tree by tree, farm mile by farm mile, with chicory and Queen Anne’s lace bunching in the culverts, pedaling hard though we were steeped in pure exhaustion, pure exhilaration, leading us through the hinterlands where all emotional battles meet and become one tenderness, knowing that faraway behind us in the village of Cooperstown, shops would soon be lifting their awnings, museum doors yawning wide, and the great ladle of enterprise slowly stirring, as the sun rose higher and the town thrummed with a million colorful intrigues, but we were panting and pushing and pedaling and steadily pulling the day up behind us, changing gears, as sunballs of blinding neon raced over the lake, more violet than wet, and we biked toward noon, not thinking of showers, or rest, or grilled orange roughy served on a lakeside veranda where we would later stare in amazement at the lake we’d circled, stretching bright as a spill of mercury under the steadfast sun, but happily lost in a long serenade of mauve water, and the what-will-be somewhere around the bend.