On Defensiveness and Forgiveness

The first thing I want to say is, thank God for true friends. I received a response (privately) to my blog today which made my day and threw light on what's really at stake--why I do what I do in my art and in my life.

Perhaps it would have been a good idea to keep a low profile, given the nature of my reality. In what sense would it have been a good idea? There have always been people who have become incensed with poetry about mental illness because some of it seems to romanticize conditions which can be very painful for the relatives and friends of those who are mentally ill. I began writing poetry after reading Robert Lowell. I had not felt, prior to the discovery of Lowell, that poetry was a venue for me; I didn't think I could use it to say anything I wanted or needed to say. Lowell has been roasted for half a century for his indiscretions.

I realize today more than usual that this revealing I have been doing is not and cannot be geared toward finding acceptance among people who simply cannot relate, and most people cannot. There are also those who can relate to some of it but don't want to. If I were the kind of person who always accentuates the positive, wouldn't I sweep all this stuff under the rug and try hard to fit in with those who are healthier and more productive???

Mental illness is dark and shameful, right? And if we want to be of the Light, we should wear a figurative fig leaf over any part of us that looks like--

what does it look like??? What does a person with mental illness do and say and think about???
I'm going to paste in a poem that is part of my worksheet for the May residency. Four poems in my worksheet are not about mental illness, one is. Can I spend 20% of my writing time dealing with something that conventional wisdom (among the mentally ill) says affects 100% of my life?

Drawing Crosses

It’s so much better not to be delusional,
better not to think
life goes on forever,
that there will be
money enough, so
you can throw it away
on all the little colored things that catch your eye.
You shouldn’t buy a long-stemmed rose
for nobody, or three bottles
of daiquiri mixer, when it’s not good to drink
on the medication.
And all those legal pads ---
God knows you’ve got enough stuff
to fill them
but it’s better not to think that creativity is meant to gush
like a broken water main.

It’s so much better not
to think that you have saved the world with love
when in fact you’re drawing crosses on your forehead
with cigarette ash, stirring up the nurses
who will ban you from the smoking room.
You think you’re the Messiah,
so when people call you narcissistic
it makes you want to cry, or when the TV anchorwoman
you place a call to from the patient phone
won’t send the cameras and the crew
to film your holy face and the Styrofoam box
in which you’re holding
Bin Laden in captivity
you sob and curse, invoke God’s wrath.
Then you wonder why Iraq is on TV.

It’s just a whole lot better not to be delusional,
not to think the psychiatric nurse you like has gone
to your apartment when her shift is over,
so you call, the phone rings and rings
and you feel so betrayed.
They say mania feels good, you feel powerful, strong ---
you sit on your mattress in the day room
clinging to things that seem to matter ---
the girlish mental health technicians
twirling their index fingers in their curly hair
snidely tell you
the test was negative ---
but you insist you are, there are indicators like
the fetus whispering
the very day that sperm met egg,
sending you to the store
to spend fifty bucks out of your bottomless resources
on pick threes with his due date, which to you seems
like the eleventh commandment;
the whole store waited while the lottery computer
printed out those tickets, and you felt
like God was working through the blonde cashier,
but inexplicably you didn’t win.
Well, as part of your ministry there were other tasks
like staging a reconciliation between God and Satan ---
beer and cigars and Pink Floyd by
candlelight in your decadent
living room ---

It’s better not to be delusional,
better not to think one dollar
can be one million if you take a ball point pen
and add some zeros.
You can hear the voice of God
and this will make you feel you can
have anything you want, and so
delusion feeds upon itself and grows.
You think as loud as thinking gets:
well if it’s not God talking, then
who the fuck is it and who
loves me, who the hell is gonna
love me?

---Harriet.