autobiographical fragment #2

Whenever I’m asked whether I had a religious upbringing, I joke that my parents were non-practicing Unitarians, the joke being that most Christian churches don’t consider Unitarians “practicing” in the first place. But it’s true, nevertheless, that my parents did consider themselves Unitarians and that they almost never went to church. In fact, I have only one memory of the three of us attending a service. It was on Christmas eve. All the lights had been turned off in what seemed to me an enormous, vacuous building. Each one of us held a thin white candle, our hands positioned under a white paper collar that I’d soon realize was intended to keep the wax from dripping onto one’s fingers. My dad held me up high so I could watch the flame pass from candle to candle. Eventually the dark walls turned a dim, flickering gold. My mother remarked that it was beautiful, and even though I was very young, I think I that I recall agreeing with her, in silence.

Whenever I asked where I came from, my mom said I came from inside of her belly. How? She and my dad wanted me so much that they asked God to provide me. And there I was, in her belly. And when I asked about the stars, my mom told me they just went on forever. How did they get here? Only God knew. As far as we could tell, they’d been there forever and they always would be. Before falling asleep, I used to imagine seeing all the way to the end of the space. Then I’d imagine more space beyond it. Then when I’d get to the edge of that space, I’d imagine more space again. And so on, until I eventually fell asleep.

Marx in the lead

with Wittgenstein close behind . . .

Karl Marx takes lead in BBC poll of philosophers - Sunday Times - Times Online

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autobiographical fragment #1

Remember, this is pretty raw & unedited. I make no claim that it qualifies as good writing . . .

The allergy shots weren’t working, but my mom took me once a week anyway. Most of the kids in the waiting room were younger than me. I was in fourth grade. I’d recently figured out how to use vanishing points to draw cubes and conglomerations of cube-like shapes that receded toward a lightly-sketched horizon line. My favorite thing to draw was the entrance, seen from slightly above, to what I imagined as an infinite labyrinth of colorless stone walls. I always scribbled in an anonymous little stick figure standing at the entrance. He looked symbolic of something, official, like the figures on restroom doors. I drew so many of these labyrinths that doing so became fairly automatic; yet I offered one to each friendly adult in my life, hoping that the adults would believe I’d drawn it up on the spur of the moment, with no forethought, just for him or her. I loved the praise.

But when I gave one of these drawings to the bee-hived nurse who’d poked my arm every week for the past year or so, she didn’t praise me. Instead she asked what it was. Duh, I thought. “It’s a labyrinth”.

“And what’s that thing?”

“A guy who’s going through the labyrinth.”

“Oh.” Then, “that’s interesting.” She chuckled nervously, set down the drawing, pulled some serum from the bottle with my last name on it into the needle. “Here it comes.” I watched the needle disappear into the backside of my upper arm. As her thumb pushed down the plunger, I wondered why I never felt the liquid rushing inside. She pulled the needle out and had me hold an alcohol-soaked cotton swab over the point of injection.

“So I hear he’s going to camp,” she said to my mother. Why hadn’t she asked me?

“Yeah,” I interjected. “New Life Ranch.”

“That’s a wonderful camp,” she said to my mom. “You made a great choice.”

My mom looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. I could tell from her half-smile and arched eyebrows that she’d rather not have been interrupted.

“That’s what we hear. His friends love it.”

The nurse told me I could sit down. Twenty minutes later, the place I’d been given the injection had become red, hot, and swollen, like a huge mosquito bite. The nurse sighed. “Maybe better next time. Don’t itch it.”

moving on, community, self-indulgence, autobiography

Once again, for everyone who has wished me well recently, I can't thank you enough. Nor can I describe how much it's helped. With the medication I don't expect the attacks to come back full force any time soon, but knowing that I'm not alone makes the whole thing seem so much less scary and so much more manageable. (I just read an article, by the way -- don't have a link, sorry -- pointing out that schizophrenics have a higher chance of genuine recovery in less developed nations, where, generally speaking, they're kept engaged in family life and some form of economic production. Community's a pain the ass sometimes, but times like this make me realize it's a godsend and infinitely worth the price of the in-fighting and drama and stepping-on-toeing that goes into building it).

I can't think of a graceful way to transition off of the subject of panic attacks. And, being OCD, I could easily spend so much effort trying to come up with the perfect transition that I'd never get around to posting what I actually intended, so I'll just transition abrupty and ask: what could more self-indulgent than a blogger posting bits and pieces of his autobiography? How about a blogger posting bits and pieces of his raw, unedited, unworkshopped autobiograpy that he's writing for his first MFA class?

Well, yeah, that's what I'm thinking of doing. As far as the class is concerned, I've got six weeks to come up with forty doubled-spaced 12-point font pages. But I seem to be writing it blog-size pieces and I have no idea where it's going, so it actually seems well-suited for blogging. And I won't have time to write much of anything else for awhile (though I'll try to post some other stuff as well). If it gets to be too much, though, please don't hesitate to tell me to stop!

So, for your reading pleasure (because this isn't all about me, no way), the first thrilling slice from my life story will follow shortly.

1969 New York Daily News Report of the Stonewall Riots

On a more liberating note than that of panic attacks, a 1969 New York Daily News Report of the Stonewall Riots, which happened June 28-29.

support

First off, I've been really, deeply moved by all of the support I've received from friends and fellow writers and bloggers over these panic attacks. More than moved. Blown away. Like, I never expected so much support in a million years. My partner and mutual friends have patiently talked me down, I have friends who live hours away who've volunteered to come sit with me, others have offered to let me write if things get out of hand, and fellow bloggers have left me well-wishing comments. In a little over a week I've gone from feeling completely alone and hopeless to feeling . . . well, held. I don't know how else to say it. It's an incredibly beautiful feeling and it's a bit like discovering religion (in a good -- very good -- way).

Second, I've got to say . . . damn, writers sure are an anxious bunch! I learned that at least three of my writer friends have battled panic attacks like my own, often multiple times throughout their lives. I had no clue. They had no clue about me either. I'll remember this next time I obsess about whether or not poetry is right path for me.

Finally, I wanted to mention a couple of pieces of advice in which I found solace. Panicky poets, take note.

One kind soul wrote to me to point out that panic is "designed" to "short-circuit" calm, detached rationality. The purpose of panic is to move your body, as quickly as possible, to safety. Discursive internal dialogue would just get in the way (when fleeing from a real danger, that is). In other words, don't feel bad that you can't talk yourself down from a full-blown attack. You're not, in a very real sense, supposed to be able to.

And a good friend of mine had the following to say:

I know how debilitating panic attacks can be. It seems like there's no way out, that it's all so much stronger than you are. But here's what I came to realize -- and I believe it has helped me deal with the attacks, even as the antidepressants have helped take the edge off of them (I'm on a minimal dose now): it is a chemical imbalance and there is nothing shameful about taking medication, much like a diabetic, to keep it under control. Second, the only way out of an attack is to be enormously compassionate towards yourself and to ride it out. The more you are able to just sit and breath deeply and be with it the better. After years of therapy, I’ve learned to stop the catastrophic thinking, the little negative tapes that run as soon as the first stab of anxiety hits. It takes awhile, but you can replace those tapes with more positive ones. I know this sounds crunchy and hokey but it works. It will pass. You will be fine. That's the simple truth that our minds somehow cannot accept. Be good to yourself, listen to what you need and do it.

panic!

Well, I’ve recently learned that I may need to go back on anti-depressants. Though I’ve survived pretty well without them for the last five or so years, I’ve recently begun to experience the kind of full-blown panic attacks which are not only symptomatic of the sort of chemical imbalance that SSRI’s were invented to address but, more importantly, bring the activities of day-to-day living to an absolute standstill. The attacks reached a peak last weekend and I’m just now, on Friday, after having been sedated all week, able to return to work. Good god, what would I have done before modern medicine discovered a way to address anxiety disorders? Undoubtedly I would have become an opiate addict and/or a full-time drunk.

Anyhow, I say this not so much to whine (though that’s part of it), but, perhaps, to excuse the sleepiness of this blog of late. I imagine things will pick back up before long.

economics, oversimplification, greed

Many thanks to Thomas and Edison for bringing some critical perspectives to bear on economist Jeffrey Sach's account of how extreme poverty could be ended within our lifetimes.

Something a bit odd here - I usually find myself on the other side of discussions like this one. Meaning, I'm usually the one to object to arguments asserting that the market, somehow, will save us.

Thomas is quite right to point out that $3 billion per year won't magically turn into $7 mosquito bed nets for every poverty-stricken family in Africa. Some of that $3 billion will go toward inflated consultant fees, and some will fall through the inevitable cracks in a less-than-perfect system of production, transportation, and distribution. Assuming that, in real life, we're unable to "externalize" the costs that our neat theory overlooked, we'll inevitably wind up spending significantly more than we anticipated (assuming we're able to complete our task at all). Which certainly won't help us secure sufficient funding for next year's round of mosquito nets.

Edison takes an approach I've taken many times before in such discussions, namely that growth doesn't magically translate into less exploitative conditions for the working poor and, moreover, that we're not necessarily doing people a favor by bringing them into the "fold" of global capitalism.

I'm not sure how to address Thomas' concerns, other than to say Sachs, as a macro-economist, is most interested in providing a blueprint which has the capacity to motive us to action. Perhaps there is, indeed, an arrogance implicit in the whole macro-economic outlook, in the idea that it's even possible to summarize the (near-)infinite specificity of the world's details into a few graphs illustrating the output of a spreadsheet model. I'm not sure that Sachs' approach is quite so simplistic, however. He at least admits that a "one-size-fits-all" solution doesn't exist and he cautions us against reducing the symptoms of extreme poverty to a single, underlying illness. That said, I suspect Thomas is correct about Sach's underestimation of the true costs of alleviating extreme poverty within our lifetimes.

I think that Edison's concerns are also well-founded. And they raise the question of whether it even makes sense to talk about politics when we're literally talking about letting millions of people have a chance at surviving versus just letting them die, somewhere far beyond even the periphery of the media's gaze. I think Sachs is quite realistic in at least this distressing sense: the wealthy will help the poor only inasmuch as they believe they might receive a return on their "investment". I think that all Sachs is trying to do, ultimately, is convince those who refuse to invest without the possibility of a positive "return" that such a possibility exists. Why bother convincing them? Sadly, because they're the only ones who actually possess enough wealth to make a difference.