NAMI: "You Are NOT alone"

from the blog "How to Juggle Glass"

       On Livernois, the old "Avenue of Fashion" in Detroit, she was known as Robbie. A short, vibrant dumpling of a woman who managed Belle Jacobs, an upscale boutique. There she was, narrating a fashion show fundraiser, and there she was, marching before her troop of saleswomen like a general before the invasion, preparing them for the line waiting outside the door on Sale Day. (Where the hell did she find the four star general’s hat smartly cocked on her dark hair?)

        To her husband, she was Pearle, a slightly outrageous woman prone to the unexpected. There he was, exclaiming at the line of Miss America contestants parading across the TV screen, and there she was, slinking into the den in a silk nightgown, exclaiming, « Take me! »

        To friends and relatives suffering from anything from depression to lost charge cards, or the friends of her kids with ‹ parents-who-don’t understand-me ›, she was a warm, available listener.

        For my brother and me, she was Mom.
 
        And to her psychiatrist she was a woman with a deep inexplicable wound, given to weeping. When she remembered the terrible beating she received as a child our saga began.

by Kevin Caffrey  Alexandra College, Dublin, Ireland

        
    In the 1950s, a Weeping Woman was thrown in the hospital and given insulin and electroconvulsive shock treatments, which terrified her, made little difference, and insured that she would neither forget nor heal. She was stuck fast in trauma like an insect in amber. Later treatments in later hospitals involved massive dosages of Stelazine and Thorazine, still experimental, which resulted in premature dementia. 

        I was 16 when it all began, my brother 10.   The psychiatrist gave my father all the information he could. Some members of our extended family tried to give support. My father left a 10 hour work day to visit her every night during the 90 day hospitalizations Blue Cross allowed. Later, I would leave Wayne State University after my classes and take a bus to a hospital, or Lafayette Clinic, or wherever she had been taken, and hear her pleas to come home.

        Her need and her pain were not containable. When she was home the knives were hidden in my sweater drawer, the key to the upstairs back porch next to them so she wouldn’t harm herself.  Our Pearle became she-who-lost-herself, and we - we were alone, trying to maintain each other.

from the website "How to Juggle Glass"

          Support groups? Unavailable. (Did they even exist?) Education classes for families? Unknown. We were powerless and overwhelmed, and what I find so moving is that now so much is available for families. (And don’t kid yourself - mental illness can happen to anyone.)

        My husband & I  know people with family members who suffer from mental illness. We empathize and grieve with them. What is it like to live with someone who is suddenly exhibiting incomprehensible and/or frightening behaviors? Imagine all the phone calls, internet sessions, and the trips from one professional to another, trying to find out what’s wrong. Imagine the helplessness and worry, the struggle, and families possibly divided over the right course of action.  

Arizona Capitol Times

The fortunate ones find NAMI, the National Alliance for Mental Illness, which has offices everywhere. The support our friends have received is inestimable.  Call an office and you will immediately be given resources.  There are classes -  NAMI Basics, for parents with children or adolescents exhibiting symptoms. NAMI Family-to-Family is a class for families, partners and friends of individuals with mental illness.  

        There are courses on growth, healing and recovery for the individual with mental problems, and courses for the families of the psychically stricken veterans of our current wars - and I’ve only mentioned a small part of NAMI’s services. For families, the ability to share stories with others in the same situation, to compare symptoms, treatments, fears -  share what is still considered dark and shameful by many in our society.
 
        NAMI handles national problems as well. The fight for better coverage for mental health, and the disparity between funding for physical and mental health is one that NAMI is actively involved in on the Congressional level. 

        If you know someone who has suffered alone with mental health problems, or a struggling family, you only need suggest their local NAMI office. You can find that info at https://www.nami.org/Find-Support/Family-Members-and-Caregivers/Supporting-Recovery.

        And if you are looking for a worthwhile charity, a great place to put your dollars, where money is not eaten up by Administration, I recommend NAMI.  Bill & I enjoy the marches and fundraisers for the wholehearted energy of all who participate - and I find it so healing to know that no one today has to go through the isolated misery my family experienced.
Thank you NAMI.

"My art, my mental illness" Johnny Beaver

                                                  




 




                                               

As Butch Cassidy said, "Who Are Those Guys"?

                              

University of Leeds, Dept. of Cultural and Media Studies

      
        Not only am I hopelessly out of date in cultural studies, but I don’t even remember the date. However, this is not one of those dirges by an old-lady-who-once-was-cool-looking-back nostalgically-at-her-radical-past-saying-in-my-day-we-did-it-better. I don’t use the phrase « in my day », because I’m still here. I am often very still, but I am here. And please remember that the linguistic root of radical is root.

       I’m reading Maggie Nelson’s brilliant The Argonaut, and I fell in love with this phrase: »if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness...". I will come back to this later, I promise. But meanwhile I have been absorbed in Nelson’s world of contemporary cultural studies and gender preoccupations.

I taught Women’s Studies beginning in 1974. The door of rediscovered female accomplishment in the arts opened for me at the same time as my students: We learned of Artemisia Gentileschi, first woman admitted to the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. We were outraged that all of the artist Judith Leyster’s work had been attributed to Frans Hals, and it turned out that the unfamiliar artist and sculptor Rosa Bonheur had been famous in the nineteenth century. None of these artists had appeared in the art history books I’d been assigned in college. Our new knowledge was the result of exciting research by J. J. Wilson and Karen Petersen.  

Judith Leyster, Self-portrait, c. 1630

      If I were still teaching, would it be Cultural Studies? I would need to learn a new language. For example, I would have to admit that my life with a husband and a house and a garden was heteronormative. Could I create a sentence with the word performativity in it? Could I avoid telling my students that performativity is not post-poststructuralist, but the work of J. L. Austin in the 50s, a white male who looked like a woodpecker and told us that words perform acts? 

                                   
As a teenager I consumed 50's French cool. The flavors of choice were Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, so we said that life was absurde, wore berets, and argued over whether Sartre’s turn toward Communism was a defection from Camus’ early indifference. What was more profound than « Mother died yesterday »? That this period in our lives was a transition between the conformity of high school and the courage of individuation was not even known, let alone expressed.  
(photo from Progressive Thinking)

Sartre & de Beauvoir, The Guardian

Full disclosure - I miss my students. But teach now? Cultural Studies?  Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Peter Sloterdijk: Who are those guys? I only got as far as Irigeray, Kristova and Deleuze before my attention turned elsewhere.
 
      So back to »if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness... » Ah, the dangers of maenads and Orphic hymns, and wild sex and the seance of their calling! 
      But this is where that phrase led me: When the wild song that wilderness sings ceased to repeat in our brains like the lyrics of pop songs, did we turn to prose? Is the deep green and root-ridden forest the natural home of poetry - along with the riverbank and the wave-struck beach and the red dunes, and, and….all of it? When I heard the trees in the last patch of old forest in Chiapas call on me to speak for them, could I have written essays instead of poems? Published an anthology of prose rather than poetry?
                             

from PBS website

Ficus Andronicus, 
The Queen of Trees. Walking Palm. Hoatzin bird. Bowerbird. Desert Paintbrush.  Not my only, but my new vocabulary, married to rhythm, and rhyme and alliteration and imagery. I could teach that biopoetic language. But then there would be syllabi to create, and media presentations, and papers to grade, and grades to give, and……..

I wouldn’t be free anymore, and I’d have to remember the date.

       
 





                                                             

Talking to the Leaves of Nasturtium

       
        I have never written prose about my garden. It seemed to me too slight - too Better Homes and Gardens. How silly, I realized, (with the help of my friend Dan). Time to honor both my garden and the season after spending the morning planting.

      Two things laced me to the cycle of the seasons: The first was the ceremonial calendar of my childhood, that begins with the High Holy days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in the fall. The second cycle belonged to nature, and the intense seasonal changes of the Midwest.

     With the exception of the harvest holiday called Sukkot in autumn, and an egg, lamb bone and greens on the Passover ritual seder plate to commemorate Spring, the two cycles, one of the Earth Mother, the other of the Sky Father, seemed unconnected. It is in the myths of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest that Earth Mother and Sky Father connect and work together, and those myths had a profound effect on me.  The two cycles also come together in the rituals I have practiced with women over the years - and now in fact, spirit and nature are inseparable to me, in the wilderness, but especially, in the garden - and in the photo.

Atlanta Botanical Garden

Every year my garden delivers its spring offering: the flowering plum and pear and apple, rhododendron, tall pale yellow iris, and 20 rose bushes, and every year it is one of the best gifts life offers me - the gift of petals.
 
       In Elizabeth Alexander’s heartbreaking memoir, The Light of the World, she describes a peony that her husband planted for her. It bloomed for her birthday every year on May 30th. Never mind that the peony’s season of blooming corresponds to that date. Never mind that the opening of those buds at that time is a normal event. For Alexander, it was a magical, deliberate gift - the gift of petals
. 

My garden

      My husband fondly remembers the food of his childhood, and recreates the meals for us that his mother made. Those dinners were his first imprint of flavor, as my mother’s and grandmother’s gardens were my first imprint of petals. Peonies, lily of the valley & lilac, zinnias & phlox, the rose they called American Beauty, and tulips. 

      It is not cold enough in California for tulips to repeat in my garden. I treat them as annuals, spend an extravagant round number every fall to dig bulbs into the cold, (and now no longer wet), soil of December, assuring bloom as though without my labors Spring would not happen.  I'm planting hope as the year darkens.

Pike Street Market, Seattle, April 2015

     And peonies? I once so craved those luxurious blooms that I hauled bags of ice out to the yard in January, and dumped cubes on a faltering plant, knowing they needed winter's freeze. The plant couldn't be fooled, and the treatment didn’t work. Once a year I treat myself to a bouquet of peonies, remembering that my mother never cut her abundance of peonies, or any other flower, to bring into the house. I’ve mentally gone through all the cupboards in my parent’s house and I can’t find a single vase. Why? Self-denial? Another one of her mysteries I will never solve, and a practice I  don't follow.

     My roses have begun blooming and there are arrangements of roses in every room. Each morning my first act is to bring all the vases into the kitchen, recut the stems and replace the water - even before my essential mug of coffee. I suppose this action falls between care, habit, and ritual - the obsessions of ceremony:

 The Key to the Pay Tree Ark

The high priest was always rushed
The holy ones were due any minute
The altar flowers in alternate rows
 of blue
    and white
must be picked immediately
in virginal bud
the bones must be scraped
of flesh before blood dries
table and sun set precisely
Since we could not see the face
of the clock that timed him
we assumed it was God's.
When we think of him now
that we've aged
and our language has changed
we try out words like compulsion
We wonders if the seeds
would have sprouted without him.

The gift of petals on the dining room table

    


 I didn’t begin that garden with confidence. I didn’t know when to expect flowering. I went around to each plant and spoke to it, and I begin my real service to the Muse with this poem:
 



Speaking To The Leaves of Nasturtium
 
"Flower" I hear myself say to the plant.
Flower. Sounding each syllable.
Speaking as you would speak to a mute.
Not a demand. Not teaching the flower to speak.
I am not the man in the tale who would teach
a stone to talk.  To break its stony silence
with a word, perhaps bird, b-i-r-r-r-d
so the word would emerge from the rock
like a fledgling pecking out its shell.

Nor would I teach a dolphin language,
not to discover why eons ago
it returned to the water,
not to pry into its secret signals,
not even to ask why it loves us.
Could the dolphin accept our word
for how it knows and know
to tell us how it guides?
could it state the impossible
demands of grammar:
Turn right at the next corner,
Don't forget...
Hold me.
The dolphin has its own purpose,
it is our fate to talk to ourselves.

As for the plants
I have no questions that watching could not answer.

At Findhorn they called on spirits
to learn the needs of the green ones.
They said that the spirits were pleased
to answer.  More water.  More sun.
A little more to the left.

I hear myself speaking to the leaves of nasturtium.
Clearly, sounding each syllable.  Flow-er.
As though the green cells could hear
and respond in buds. As though I could cause flowers
by teaching the word. As though I could cause
by teaching.  Flower.  Flow-er. Repeated to the leaves
whose learning only flows from the roots upward.
I cannot stop speaking but the silence
of leaves is training me to see.                                                         

Photo by Bill Fulton

                                                
 

Morning Walk With Bird Cries

      It has been months since I've written a blog, because whatever I’ve had to say the Muse has grabbed for poetry. In fairness to her, she always teases out ideas I haven’t thought of. 
 
      If I feed her the Muse will work for attention, but her diet, her cravings, can be mysterious. Generally, she feeds on culture, but sometimes I have to make imaginal  trips to specialty stores. For example, the prints of the Japanese printmakers Hiroshige and Hokusai are her sushi. She can make a main course out of a complex myth like The Crane Wife, or the rain forest. Sometimes it’s hot peppers and, on occasion, bitter herbs to remind me of those who are still enslaved. 

The Crane Wife    unknown Japanese artist

My curiosity shifts when the Muse is here. I explore images and myth and theater and nature and myself. It's not really research - more like a butterfly collecting nectar,  flitting flower to flower. When I find what the Muse wants, she gives me an opening line, or fills me with words.

       Where is the Muse when she's not here? On vacation, a religious retreat, maybe having an affair? When she arrives she gives Commandments: I am your Muse, the Nameless One. Thou shalt have no other interests before Me. Honor My Time and keep it Holy.  
                                                                        

Greek vase  5th Century B.C. E. 

      Today she made an appetizer out of a bird call, had a buffet of animals and gave me rhyme and rhythm.  I am grateful, and I’ll put the new poem here because I want it to be read. And now, after hours of work, I’m starved, so it's time for a late lunch.
                                                               

  Morning Walk with Bird Call

 ‹ Life ›  ‹ life ›   cry the crows
and when I pause 
the long-running performance 
that plays in my mind 
and listen    I am revived
I ask how to keep species alive
and the Muse speaks -
Tell those who don’t love 
the pawed and tailed  
finned and horned 
that it’s people who need animals 
Mention crows and lizards 
starfish and ocelots
because profusion startles 
the narcissist
Describe lark and lynx and lizard
since feather fur and scale
teach us the genius 
of shapeshifting cells
Finally, creatures remind us 
that innocence means 
not knowing
And we humans know too much
don’t we?