May 11: Dreaming About the Lions, Sonya Sones, Tools for Hope

Santiago rests . . . 

Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.

That is the end.  Santiago caught the fish and lost the fish.  He fought sharks, and the sharks won.  Now, he's back in his own bed.  Sleeping.  Dreaming about lions.  The old man is safe and on his way to becoming legend in his village.

I am home after a long day.  I've been working and writing and planning for the past 13 hours.  The last thing I did at the library was host a virtual reading by poet/novelist Sonya Sones.  I booked her a couple months ago for National Mental Health Awareness Month.  Her book, Stop Pretending:  What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy, is a novel in verse about the experience of her 13-year-old self watching her older sister have a nervous breakdown and all the family trauma that results.

It's a book that I read many years ago, around the time that my wife was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  Later, I shared the book with my young daughter, to help her sort out her feelings about her mother's illness.  It's a book that's profoundly heartbreaking and profoundly hopeful, as well.  It was one of my life's greatest thrills to be able to speak with Sonya tonight.  To ask her questions.  Tell her how much of an impact she has had on my life.

That is the end of my long day at sea.  Soon, I will put my head down on a pillow, close my eyes.  Maybe I'll dream about lions.  I doubt it.  But maybe.  More than likely, however, I will dream about my son, who heads back to school tomorrow morning.  I'll dream my worries for him.

Sonya Sones gave me hope in a dark time of my life.  

Over the past week, Saint Marty has tried to give his son the tools for hope, as well.

July 12: "This Land is Your Land," Bipolar Disorder, Skyway

Sorry for not posting yesterday, and sorry for not including a passage from Hitchhiker's this evening.  I don't have a whole lot of time before I go to have a late dinner with my family at a local microbrewery.

Yesterday, after work, I went out for a beer with one of my best friends.  She has recently moved to Wisconsin, so we're not going to be seeing much of each other any more.  We sat out on a sunny patio, drank, solved the world's problems, and ate some bread sticks and French fries.  It was lovely and put me in a wonderful mood.

Last night, I led a poetry workshop at the Joy Center in my home town.  It's a little artists' retreat in the middle of the woods, and it is a place that fills me with peace even at the most chaotic times of my life.  The focus of the workshop was Woody Guthrie and his music.  We listened to various singers covering Woody's songs, and then I gave the writers prompts based on the songs.  I was again with people I love--writer friends I've known for many years.  It was heart-opening, honest, and inspiring.  It filled my cup to the brim.

When I got home, my wife was out with friends.  As many of the devoted disciples of this blog know, my wife struggles with bipolar disorder.  Recently, she has been teetering on the brink of a manic episode.  She hasn't been sleeping well and has been impulsive and irritable.  At around midnight, when my wife got home, I knew it was going to be a long night.  Midnight rolled into one o'clock, and she was still up, unable to quiet her mind.  Around 1:30 a.m., she hopped into my car and went for a drive.  She came back a little after 2 a.m.

She told me that she'd been sitting by a lake close to our house, praying and talking to her mother, who died of ovarian cancer when my wife was in her first years of college.  As she was relating the story, I could sense that she was calmer, ready to come to bed, and I sent up a little thank you to God and Saint Anthony (who is my saint of choice--he's worked some miracles in my life).

It was a long and exhausting night.  Yet, through it all, I kept on coming back to Woody Guthrie, and his most famous song.  "This Land is Your Land."  I kept singing one lyric over and over:  "As I was walking that ribbon of highway, / I saw above me that endless skyway; / I saw below me that golden valley; / This land was made for you and me."

I don't know why that was stuck in my head, but it made me feel a little hopeful.  Like I was going to make it through.  That someone was watching over my wife.

She isn't out of the woods yet.  There still has to be medication adjustments and sleep.  Lots of sleep.  She's still spinning (a little less stridently), and I don't know what tonight is going to bring for us.

But, because of Woody Guthrie's song, which is still playing on repeat in my head, I think I may be able to fall asleep tonight as the moon crosses the endless skyway.

Taken by Saint Marty a little while ago . . .

June 30: Dentarthurdent, Mystery and Myth, All the Wonder Things

Arthur is trying to unravel the mystery of the old man he has just met on the surface of Magrathea, which itself, up until a couple chapters ago, was a myth--like the Golden Fleece or the city of Troy . . .

Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.

"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn't it?"

"Is it?" asked the old man mildly.  "I'm sorry, I'm a bit out of touch."

He pointed down into the crater.

"Is that robot yours?" he said.

"No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater.  "I'm mine."

"If you'd call it a robot," muttered Arthur.  "It's more a sort of electronic sulking machine."

"Bring it," said the old ma.  Arthur was quite surprised to hear a note of decision suddenly present in the old man's voice.  He called to Marvin, who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which he wasn't.

"On second thought," said the old man, "leave it here.  You must come with me.  Great things are afoot."  He turned toward his craft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly toward them through the dark.

Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater again, muttering sour nothings to himself.

"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late."

"Late/" said Arthur.  "What for?"

"What is your name, human?"

"Dent.  Arthur Dent," said Arthur.

"Late, is in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly.  "It's a sort of threat, you see."  Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes.  "I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."

Arthur blinked at him.

"What an extraordinary person," he muttered to himself.

"I beg your pardon?" said the old man.

"Oh, nothing, I'm sorry," said Arthur in embarrassment.  "All right, where do we go?"

"In my aircar," said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them.  "We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber.  Magrathea awakes."

Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the old man.  The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky, quite unsettled him.

He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow of tiny lights on the instrument panel.

"Excuse me," he said to him, "what is your name, by the way?"

"My name?" said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again.  He paused.  "My name," he said, "is Slartibartfast."

Arthur practically choked.

"I beg your pardon?" he spluttered.

"Slartibartfast," repeated the old man quietly.

"Slartibartfast?"

The old man looked at him gravely.

"I said it wasn't important," he said.

The aircar sailed through the night.

The old man could be the last survivor of Magrathea or Atlantis.  He could be Methuselah or Noah.  A resident of Shangri-La or Brigadoon.  He may be a man or a god or a demon or a robot.  At this point, Arthur isn't sure who or what he is dealing with.  It's all mystery and myth.

As I've said before in this blog, I'm fine living with negative capability, to borrow from John Keats.  Living with uncertainty is part of the human condition.  That pretty much describes my whole life.  Especially these last couple months, I'm never sure when I wake up what the day will bring me.  Ever.

Now, I would be happier living in certainty, but that's not a realistic goal.  Benjamin Franklin said, "In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes."  However, even that quote is draped in mystery, for it may have been Daniel Defoe or Christopher Bullock who first uttered it more than 60 years before Franklin, making one of the Founding Fathers of the United States a plagiarist.

We all live in negative capability.  There are no guarantees when you wake up in the morning that you will come home at night.  No guarantees that you will keep your job or your wife or your children.   I think that everyone has to fool themselves every day in order to face life.  For instance, when I got out of bed today, it was with the understanding that I would be going to church and then spending the afternoon mowing the lawn at my mother's house.  Those were my plans.

Now, those plans kind of panned out.  I did worship with my wife, and then I did spend a couple hours pushing the lawnmower at my mother's.  However, it could have easily gone in another direction.  My car could have been sideswiped in the parking lot at McDonald's as I was picking up breakfast.  The lawnmower could have refused to start.  It could have rained.  None of those things happened.

Today, my wife is struggling with her bipolar disorder.  She hasn't been sleeping well recently.  That, in itself, is not cause for major concern.  However, she's also been unable to be restful at home, suffers from racing thoughts.  (She told me this afternoon, "I feel like I'm jumping out of my skin.")  She also had a pretty bad episode of depression on Thursday evening.

All of these things point toward a problem that needs to be addressed with her doctor.  My wife has already called her doctor's office once.  She's going to call again tomorrow.  In the mean time, she didn't go to work today.  Instead, she stayed home and slept.  (She only got three hours of sleep, if that, last night.)

Bipolar is a mysterious disorder.  It can be completely controlled for years with a certain medication, and then, one day, that medication can stop working properly, with serious results.  My wife and I have been through some difficult times with her mental illness.  I remember nights where my wife would jump in our car and disappear to Walmart to go grocery shopping at 3 a.m.  She would start home improvement projects that went unfinished.  One weekend, we drove to Wisconsin and bought a brand new minivan.  (Several months later, we had to trade in the minivan for a car we could actually afford.)

So, you see, I have some experience with myth, mystery, and negative capability.  I know that a day can turn from mundane to insane very quickly.  I also know that I can't do anything to control the negative capabilities of my life.  This may sound very twelve-steppish, but I have come to accept very recently that I am powerless.  I can't control the weather.  I can't control my wife's mental illness.  I can't control what happens in the Star Wars franchise.  (If I could have, Han Solo would still be alive.)

What can I do in the face of mystery?  I can confront it when it happens.  Deal with it.  Move on.  I certainly can't live my life trying to avoid it.  If I did that, I wouldn't ever get out of bed.  I'd just live my life in fear of the unknown.  And I would miss all the wonderful things God sends my way.  A daughter graduating from high school  A son winning a poetry contest.  A dinner of lobster ravioli.  A evening walk with my wife, holding her hand, talking about tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Yes, the future is full of myth and mystery and unknowns. 

But it also contains hope, and that (along with a little bit of chocolate and a good book) makes Marty a happy saint.

May 31: Mental Illness, Les Murray, "Panic Attack"

My life has been touched by mental illness in many ways.  Depressions.  Bipolar disorder.  Panic attacks.  Anxiety.  You name it, it has been a part of my life in some way.

It's really easy to stigmatize people who suffer from mental illness.  Someone walking down the street, talking to himself.  That someone will draw stares, laughter, finger points.  In most cases, not a single person will stop to help.  Because mental illness is scary.

When your mind turns against you, there's not a whole lot you can do.  Stay in bed all day, covers over your head.  Deep breathing.  Medication.  Therapy.  The problem is that most people with mental illness do not have the capacity to realize they need help.

My wife has bipolar.  Her uncle had bipolar.  Several years ago, he committed suicide.  My wife takes her medication faithfully because she has seen the cost of not taking her medication.

Saint Marty prays every night for people who suffer from mental illness.

Panic Attack

by:  Les Murray

The body had a nightmare.
Awake. No need of the movie.

No need of light, to keep hips
and shoulders rotating in bed
on the gimbals of wet eyes.

Pounding heart, chest pains -
should it be the right arm hurting?

The brain was a void
or a blasted-out chamber -
shreds of speech in there,
shatters of lust and prayer.

No one can face their heart
or turn their back on it.

Bowel stumbled to bowl,
emptied, and emptied again
till the gut was a train
crawling in its own tunnel,

slowly dragging the nightmare
down with it, below heart level.
You would not have died

the fear had been too great
but: to miss the ambulance moment -

Relax. In time, your hourglass
will be reversed again.

January 7: Mild Nervous Collapse, Normal Life, Sausage McMuffin

Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber there.  He was a funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth--tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola.  He graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class, and attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in the Second World War.  His father died in a hunting accident during the war.  So it goes.

Billy saw service with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans.  After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy again enrolled in the Ilium School of Optometry.  During his senior year there, he became engaged to the daughter of the founder and owner of the school, and then suffered a mild nervous collapse.

This is the beginning of Billy Pilgrim's story in Slaughterhouse.  Inauspicious.  He's nothing special.  Just one of those normal young guys who became a normal young soldier during World War II, went to Europe and saw normal human atrocities, and then came back home and tried to settle into a normal American life.  The only problem is that the normal human brain doesn't really settle after experiencing normal trauma.  Hence Billy's normal mild nervous collapse.

I'm not quite sure what normal is.  I used to think that I had a normal life--married, wife, two kids (a daughter and a son), two cars, mortgaged home, two jobs.  That sounds pretty normal, doesn't it?  Yet, normal is relative.  There are millions of men and women like Billy Pilgrim who went off to war, but is war ever normal?  My wife has bipolar disorder, like millions of other people, but is bipolar ever normal?  My life has been touched by addictions, like millions of other people's lives, but is addiction ever normal?

I think that, when things like war and mental illness and addiction become normal, there's something really wrong with the world.  I'm not getting on a soapbox, and I have no answers to this conundrum.  War has been around since Cain picked up that rock and bashed in Abel's skull.  I'm sure mental illness and addiction have been slithering along since the Book of Genesis, too.  Maybe Adam had a thing for certain mushrooms in the Garden of Eden.

Whether you believe Genesis is literal or metaphorical, one of the points of that book is that humankind's history is flawed.  Full of violence and weakness and illness and jealousy.  That was normal back at the beginning of the universe, and it's normal now.  Just ask Billy Pilgrim.

I am going to have my normal Saturday.  Maybe I'll play a game of Operation with my son.  I'll go to church.  Have pizza for dinner.  Clean my bathroom tonight.  Vacuum and sweep and mop.  In between all this, I'll say a few prayers for people in my life who are facing challenges.  Normal challenges:  illness, unemployment, depression, addiction. 

Saint Marty is grateful today for his normal Saturday breakfast:  a Sausage McMuffin.

September 10: Surface of Jupiter, Moment of Grace, Judith Minty, "Purple Finches," Adventures of Stickman

Not one to read books on spiritual subjects, on out-of-body experiences, reincarnation, spiritualism, or mysticism, witchcraft or voodoo, Ives was left confounded by the strangeness of his vision.  He sighed, wishing that he had seen the Virgin Mother floating over Forty-first Street and Madison Avenue instead.  Somehow, in his mind, it all related to his ideas of afterlife.  He would think of all the depictions of Christ on the Cross, his tortured eyes looking upward, heaven just beyond, and wonder, to his horror, just what Christ might have been seeing.  What if he had looked up and seen the whirling center of a chaotic universe swallowing him up?  He felt disappointed that he had neither the education nor intelligence to fathom what had happened to him.  On some of those nights, he had concluded that death would not be a joyous ramble with ethereal and eternally pleasant angelic beings, but a chaotic, mysterious, and dark experience, as if a soul, in leaving the body, would alight upon the surface of Jupiter or Mars or some other mysterious planet, such as he had read about in Astonishing Stories magazine, or in the science-fiction books whose covers he had upon occasion illustrated.

Both the above passage from Mr. Ives' Christmas and the poem below from Judith Minty are about moments of transport.  Ives' vision is other-worldly.  Swirling colored winds, as if out of some strange science fiction story.  Minty's vision is transformative, the speaker somehow becoming wing and wind and color.  Both are connected with something natural and something divine.

I am incredibly tired this evening.  It has been a difficult day.  At work, I found myself short-tempered, impatient with anyone and everyone.  My medical office job puts me in contact with people who are sometimes very sick and sometimes, literally, out of their minds with worry.  They have chest pain, shortness of breath.  Their hearts feel like they're running ultra-marathons in their chests.  They feel like they're dying.  I understand.  I empathize.

However, there are times when my well of compassion runs a little dry.  Today was one of those days.  I didn't feel like I was connected to anything transformative.  I experienced no moments of transport.  They only time I felt something extraordinary was when I sat on a pencil in my car.  I didn't feel God's presence a whole lot.

That doesn't mean that I didn't have a moment of grace.  After my good books class, I spoke with a student who thinks he has bipolar disorder.  I listened to him, offered him advice.  He needed someone to listen.  I listened.  He seemed to physically relax as we spoke.  Tonight, I said a prayer for him.

There was nothing transcendent about the conversation I had with my student.  I didn't feel the Holy Spirit enter my body.  I didn't speak in tongues.  It was one human being talking to another human being about being broken, about finding help.  No swirling, colored winds.  No finch wings or birdsong.

Just Saint Marty being Saint Marty in all his imperfections and petty jealousies.

Purple Finches

by:  Judith Minty

They come in the morning.  Even before she is awake, she hears the tap-tap of their beaks, a scratching, faint whistles in the air.  When sun drifts along the bed, she floats to the surface.

They ripple over the feeder.  The males flame in the light, their pink and rose feathers.  The females are delicate, softer.  She wants to say, "Look, they are beautiful," but there is no one.  They fly up and wait in the pines, then sink back.

The window mutes their voices.  She circles the room slowly so they won't startle.  They bend to the seeds and crack them with their beaks.  They were not here yesterday or the day before.  They will not come tomorrow.  She puts her finger to the glass and enters their rhythm.  She steps inside their color.

Adventures of STICKMAN

March 7: Dickens House, God's Love Number Eighteen, Rita Dove, "Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem," New Cartoon

On the afternoon he received the first postcard, [Rameriz] read it to [his wife, Carmen].  In the first postcard Ives and Annie mentioned that London was a revelation, "nothing like Harlem . . . or Brooklyn."  The black men spoke like English lords and everything was storybook tidy.  And they had gone to the Dickens House museum, 48 Doughty Street, to see where Charles Dickens had once lived and worked, and Carmen, coming around momentarily, said "Ay que nice?"  But then she said, perhaps remembering one of the lectures Annie had taken her to, "Ah, Charles Dickens, el gran escritor."

The reason I chose this passage particular passage from Mr. Ives' Christmas is because it's about Charles Dickens and the Dickens House, a place I have always wanted to visit.  Ives and Annie go there on their trip to the British Isles, Annie because she's always loved Dickens and Ives because he loves Annie.  It's a new beginning for them, a rekindling of their passion for each other.  And it's freakin' Charles Dickens' house, where he wrote A Christmas Carol.

It has been a very busy day.  Cleaning.  Shuttling my daughter back and forth to a party.  Going to church.  Making some phones calls I'd put off for a while.  I'm pretty beat.  After I'm done with this post, I plan on putting on my pajamas and maybe working on a new poem.

Charles Dickens always kept himself busy.  I've read Peter Ackroyd's one-thousand-plus-page biography of Dickens, and the one thing that struck me was how Dickens was in a constant state of movement.  He'd write all morning and afternoon, go out to dinner with friends (or go to the theater), and then sometimes walk all night long (twenty or more miles).  A few people have postulated that Dickens may have had bipolar disorder.  Certainly, I had that impression as I was reading Ackroyd's book.  And Dickens, at times, was a very difficult man to live with.  Quicksilver in temper and disposition.

I am lucky when it comes to my wife's bipolar disorder.  My wife takes her medications, goes to her doctor's appointments, and experiences very little of the normal mental illness roller coaster.  That's God's love number eighteen.  My wife controls her mental illness.  Her mental illness doesn't control her.

I have a final Rita Dove poem tonight.  A poem of love and longing and loss.

Pretty much a standard Saturday night for Saint Marty

Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem

by:  Rita Dove

for Harry Timar

Evening, the bees fled, the honeysuckle

in its golden dotage, all the sickrooms ajar.

Law of the Innocents:  What doesn't end, sloshes over . . .

even here, where destiny girds the cucumber.

So you wrote a few poems.  The horned

thumbnail hooked into an ear doesn't care.

The gray underwear wadded over a belt says So what.

The night air is minimalist,

a needlepoint with raw moon as signature.

In this desert the question's not

Can you see? but How far off?

Valley settlements put on their lights

like armor; there's finch chit and my sandal's

inconsequential crunch.

Everyone waiting here was once in love.

Confessions of Saint Marty