The Fallen Kingdom of Ozymandias (from Upon Waking)

Lena was angry with her mother for buying a beaten down cape in New Jersey, half a mile from an overpass, three quarters of a mile from a beach littered with abandoned cars, old tires, and discarded clothing. It was ugly and Lena hated ugly. She lamented her mother leaving the well preserved beauty of the New England landscape, but her mother could no longer afford it. She told her daughter if she had to move, she'd go south, to the mid-Atlantic states where she could be closer to extended family. So she did, and Lena begrudgingly went to visit her and walk the coarse sand of the polluted beach where someone had dumped cabinets and suitcases. Her mother said it may have been the mob. Lena regarded the tall smoke stacks as they belched fumes into the gray sky and felt ill.

Afterward, they took a ride east. It was sunny and they drove with the windows down, the songs from the radio hampered by the din of the wind. The land, with its enclaves of reaching blue water, was buzzing with summer activity; people were out jogging, riding bicycles. They passed a carnival with a Ferris wheel and games of chance. Tickets littered the streets; people waited in lines for rides and concession stands where food associated with fun-- cotton candy, ice cream, fried dough-- was sold. They passed this place and came to a bridge, a contemporary slender and elegant structure in decks, towers, and fanning cables that spanned the inlets of blue, connecting the polluted modern world with the eroded ancient ruins of the old world. It was a fine summer day now, was it not, her mother asked. Indeed, the water is blue, Lena thought. On the other side of the bridge was the abandoned land of Ozymandias, its once enchanting sandstone structures still in place. Here people wandered through the ruins and pocketed ancient gold coins embossed with the King of Kings.

Lena pulled up to the gate and realized she was alone in the car; her mother had become only a memory. Or had she evaporated? She got out and squeezed through an opening in the giant gate. There were people carrying stacks of books in the ancient streets, looters with scraps of fool's gold in their hands. Vendors were selling trinkets of the once-great kingdom; you could buy a t-shirt with Ozymandias's eroded face on it. She thought of the pope they dug out of the Catacombs, his casket within a nether casket made of cypress wood within a marble crypt. And that top shelf embalming fluid? It was no miracle his body was preserved; that's what the Church said, so let's not be too hasty about divine intervention. Suddenly the earth shuddered. Did I imagine that? thought Lena. The great gate creaked and leaned forward, spreading its arms out to the forgotten world. She imagined the tower in front of her falling to her feet, and then it did. The people carrying books dropped them and started running. Chaos and mayhem ensued as each of the ancient sandstone structures started to crumble. Why now? Lena wondered. After thousand of years of being upright, why now? Then she saw an old friend on her cell phone just outside the gate. She was calling her high school sweetheart. Lena knew he would come for her, just as he did every other time she called him in distress. And with that, she drove away, alone, as the land turned to dust behind her.

Gardener's Poem

Lust begets a feverish mind
switching from this to that to this
configuring beauty with blossom
or the lack thereof.

Quick, knock out those lethal specks
on the zucchini flowers
buds collapsing on themselves,
like delicate yellow laundry
wrung by invisible hands.

Pull the lettuce forming a stalk
crack it open and it bleeds a bitter milk
a bitter lie to the tongue.

Quick, dig up the small rose aside
the blind peony
caress every unearthed root.
Switch her for the corner rose
that sends out a ray
when the solstice turns.

Defy the image in your mind--a banquet
Come to terms with how it is
Just like everything else--
a thing trying to get by.

Acknowledge the need for ripeness and bloom
grace from the god
who delegates 1000 angels to one body

who at any one moment can exalt himself
above the banal
but chooses not to
most of the time.

A Weekend Away (from Upon Waking)

There were important feminist texts to read, texts by ancient women in the time of a ruling mother. I had marked them for research and brought the books with me on my weekend away to an island where I was staying with some women at a friend's cottage. The cottage was a wise investment; my friend had good business sense and I was envious of her. It was decorated as one would see in a catalog with hardwood furniture painted white, colorful textiles, abstract art, acutely placed votives, and bouquets of flowers. We all commended her on her taste.

Upon entering the place, I had the distinct feeling I had been there sometime before with my mother. I asked my friend about the fence that abutted the road. Was it always there? It was. I opened the front door and the yard was marked with Puritan tombstones with small white flowers growing between them. In the backyard there was a queen size bed with a sapling canopy. Another fence separated the cottage from a larger house with a picture window. You could see the modern decor of the neighbors' kitchen and the state-of-the-art appliances. You could also glimpse the neighbors themselves who painted themselves metallic blue for something to do. I saw them moving around the kitchen, making a big batch of paella, their bald metallic blue heads gleaming.

I opted to sleep under the sapling canopy under the stars; I sought to be slightly distanced from the rest. While out there, I read my ancient feminist texts, the beam of a flashlight lighting up the words. I was worried I wouldn't fall asleep in a strange place, but I did. I awoke the next morning to a commotion down the street. The paramedics were trying to save a German shepherd from heart failure. The guy at the gas station where the dog worked as a watchdog said that they used the defibrillators on him. He was up and around now, but we were all worried about his heart. I didn't want to go near the dog: I was afraid of his suffering. But I persevered to touch him and patted him between the ears. A woman came then, to take him home. She wasn't his owner, but she knew her. She was compassionate, and I felt relieved that she had come to take care of him. I went back to the cottage to feed my own dog, but I knew I didn't bring enough food for her. That was just like me, not to pack enough of something; I was always ill-prepared because a part of me was afraid to go. Being away from home always brought anxiety and that was the big secret I didn't share with anyone.

Doppelganger (Upon Waking)

She was dressed like the young maid in Girl with a Pearl Earring wearing a plain brown muslin dress and a blue sash over a white veil. She sat on the other side of the door in the pantry as one of the guests played the piano, his fingers trickling like water between a crevice and then pouring down, drenching everyone in sound. When it was over, there was a smattering of clapping, then silence, then an abrupt knock at the backdoor. It was the butler. He said that her lover had come to see her. Here? Now? she asked him. The butler touched his fine black hat and stepped back out into the night. When she saw her lover he was standing in front of his master's automobile reading the paper under the gaslight. She ducked back inside. She was impelled to rush out, but she hesitated; her fear got the best of her. She returned to the table flushed; the other servants were still eating their dinner, suspecting nothing. Her own plate was there with its dash of potatoes and slice of beef. She had excused herself once to the confines of the pantry to take full advantage of the music on the other side of the wall, but now to leave entirely? She went back to the table unsure of what to do. Then, a second knock at the door. The way the face looked in the glass...it could have been her lover's wife. She took a step back. The visitor knocked harder and one of the servants, Lizzie, asked who was doing all that wretched knocking. She waved her away and opened the door. Her father was there with the woman who resembled her lover's wife. The woman, without any hesitation, told her that this really wasn't her father; he was just someone who looked exactly like him, right down to the gold crowns in his teeth. (At this point she had forgotten all about her lover). "It's not him," the woman repeated. "Then there must have been some manipulation!" she cried. There was a scuffle at the table in the other room, the scrape of chairs. Outside one of the hounds was loose and jumped all over the two visitors, knocking them down. "You died!" she cried out. "It's not him!" The woman yelled. When the dog was properly retrieved, the two visitors--the woman who looked like her lover's wife and the man who looked like her dead father--crossed the threshold. Just before the entire scene blew up in her face, she said the words under her breath. "Doppelganger. I'll call this one doppelganger."

Est Deus in Nobis (Upon Waking)

What are you reaching for?

What are you yearning for?
You, craving this beauty or that truth
stirring like the vixen at three
in the morning her haunt wailing
under a hollowed out moon.
I cracked open the door
and cold early May stepped inside
while two stars sat like birds on
the horizon.

I went back to sleep.


In a dream, I walked to a shrine
in the woods where men
were learning to genuflect
and women ceremoniously disrobed
displaying each middle-aged body,
each forgotten hip and lacy breast.
In a vestibule, Asian scholars
translated texts that had recently been
unearthed; young people
with wide brows
reached out their hands to me.

I went out the side door

and worried I would not get back in.
Outside the shrine, beyond
the wing-backed stones,
beyond the fat, loose vines
and rusted gate were artists
peddling their wares.
I wanted to stop, I could have stopped

but this wayward beggar of thoughts--
yours, his, hers--this wayward beggar
of thoughts that I am,
I rambled on.

Up, Up (from Upon Waking)

They went up, up over the menagerie of hippos, lions, tigers. A giraffe licked her foot as the plane dipped and wavered and Lena thought of how delightfully treacherous it all was, the ferocious animals, the slender beasts with mile-long necks. If the plane went down in the middle of the savanna, both she and Derek would be eaten. She put her hand to her throat--this is where it begins, she thought-- the eating. They scaled another giraffe, up, up and she forgot about the neck and felt the glory of flight. Lena had thought she had seen a gate then, the same kind of wooden gate that existed in back of her yard that led to the woods. Could it be that the animals were that close when she walked the dog? Could it be that she would meet a lion or tiger on the trail? There were lions everywhere.

She and Derek were a bi-coastal couple. She lived on the East Coast and he on the West. They were returning from his place where she had recently threatened his ex-girlfriends with a bat. Lena laughed at the scenario now that she was safely on her way home. When they were taunting her from the lawn, she had asked him for a gun--it would be simpler with a gun--but he said no. He grabbed the wooden bat that he kept under the bed for intruders and shoved it at her. "Take it," he said. She took it. She went out and wielded the bat like a rapier. "Don't make me use this," she yelled, "because I will." The bunch of them in high hair and silver spandex and bangles flipped her the bird then drove off in a convertible. It may have been red. Afterward she went in, pleased with herself.

Derek watched the whole thing from the window and when she appeared in the bedroom, he went to her and kissed her neck with excruciating gentleness. He started to undress her. His hair was cut short now and she had the distinct memory of it when it was long and sensual, a river of curls. Lena, while being kissed here and there, tried to discern whether she still loved him now that he had short hair. She took his chin in her hands and looked directly at his face; he still had that pale skin of boy innocence. Then he said, "You know how I like it" and pulled her pelvis to him. "I want to slam you into the headboard hard." 

She looked at him now with his eyes closed as the plane climbed in altitude away from the West and toward the East. She was no longer laughing; she did not tell him how much it hurt. She wondered if  it was all worth it.

Naming the Snake: How to Recognize the Signs of a Creativity Perverse (Depression) and What Meditation and Compassion Can Do About It

I don't think anybody who hasn't been through depression knows what it's like to be frightened out of your mind every day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep...terrified that something is happening to you and not knowing what to do. You are in a dark wood; there isn't a path.  Nobody is saying 'Go that way.'  Nobody is saying anything.

This is a quote from Lord Melvyn Bragg, a veteran broadcaster of the former South Bank television show (UK) who suffered several bouts of clinical depression, the first one occurring at 14 years old. I have also been in that dark wood as a child and an adult, and I have known this obstinate grip of fear. 

It was as if someone re-coded the software of my thoughts, infecting me with a cognitive virus that brought on a diatribe of angst. I literally tried joyous thoughts on for size; they perched a moment like a sparrow on a pine branch then flitted away. Ultimately, I became curled up in the corner of my mind—my thoughts on one side, me on the other—as a person would be if a snake slithered into the room. I knew it was depression when I couldn't wave the snake out of the house and into the garden.

With every new depressive episode, however, I began to understand the key components. Stress, rejection, ennui were prominent, as were hormonal and seasonal changes. I had eventually realized that the driving force behind my depressions was my refusal to recognize myself as an artist and my insistence on remaining in a meaningless career that did not engage my creative prowess the way I needed it to be engaged. Woolf writes in A Room of One's Own:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

The gift, in this case, is creativity. When a creative person is not following her bliss and is continuously put in a situation hostile to creativity, the creativity becomes perverse. So, instead of being a constructive force, creativity becomes destructive; this perverse creativity can translate into a form of mental illness like depression, anxiety, or addiction.

According to Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins, artists are eight times more likely to suffer from depression than the general population. It’s in how we’re wired. Neuroscientist Nancy Andresan claims that depression is intertwined with "a cognitive style that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art." 

At the heart of this cognitive style are two things: persistence and the inner critic. Andresan conducted a study on 30 writers from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and discovered that "successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won't go down. They'll stick with it until it's right." The inner critic that constantly clamors that one’s work isn’t good enough is useful; as Jonah Lehrer says in his NY Time article "Depression's Upside." It's that belaboring inner critic that produces a more refined prose: "the sentences [are] polished by our angst." 

However, in creativity perverse mode, persistence fuels the circular patterns of woe, and the inner critic is amplified such that it looms larger than everything else. In my novel A Portal to Vibrancy, Jackie, my autobiographical protagonist, speaks of "the devil," a serpentine creature that embodies all of her negative impulses.  (If you're a Catholic, this isn't far-fetched). In the beginning of the novel, these impulses or thoughts consist mainly of temptation, like stealing a Reese's peanut butter cup from the drugstore, and sexual acts. Later in the novel, the devil matures along with Jackie and becomes so prominent "he" strikes her down at every turn and is like an oil slick moving into the rippling tides of her thoughts, destroying her clarity, forging guilt, and forcing her into alienation. 

In this way, Jackie's inner devil is a metaphor for clinical depression. At the point where the devil is most conspicuous, Jackie is not exercising her creativity, and the inner critic that would normally keep her focused on perfecting creative tasks has no immediate artistic vision, is out of control, and paving a path of destruction.
 
Like Jackie, depressed people closely adhere to the diatribes and fears of the inner critic-turn-reptile; they are in the dark wood. How can an artist reclaim her creativity? Well yes, first she could find a room of her own, and second, a room in her mind.

Meditation is a way of establishing that room. John D. Dunne, PhD, co-director of Emory University's Contemplative Practices and Studies program studies the effects of mindfulness and compassion on depressed patients. He exclaims that depressed people "hold onto (negative) thoughts very, very strongly" and "the goal of mindfulness meditation and compassion is to end this self-focus, this negative tone."

The first step to ending this self-focus/negative tone is to recognize it. It’s almost cliché to say that sitting with one’s feelings and identifying them helps; the reason it does is because one begins to realize the witness self. The witness self is the true self, the one who simply notices, making no judgments or analysis on negative thoughts. With enough meditation, space begins to develop around the witness self and it is in this space that compassion shows up. Compassion is the antithesis, the anecdote of the inner critic/reptile; it is a sort of balm that relaxes us and with this settling one might see the beginnings of a plan, an idea, the silhouette of the muse.

The physics of compassion-as-anti-depressant make sense, whether the compassion be received or given. Compassion requires empathy, the ability to see self in other; in this way it eradicates the isolation effect of depression and promotes a sense of connection. In A Portal to Vibrancy, Jackie begins to break the cycle of negative self-focus by first receiving compassion from an old friend, a fellow creative type who understands her despairs. This gives her enough space in her head to make a plan.

The plan is to move farther away from the inner reptile and commit a creative and compassionate act: Jackie proposes that she will heal her grandmother of her agoraphobia by planting a vibrant garden to lure her out of her house and into the world. Jackie's compassionate act is meaningful to her and not entirely unselfish: if she can help her grandmother with her mental illness, then she can help herself.  The fact that it is a meaningful act is key.

But Dunne's cohort Charles L. Raison, MD asserts that "many people with mood disorders find they can't do meditation when they're depressed. Their thoughts are too overwhelming. They are anxious, nervous, and can't sit –and likely they need antidepressants." 

While I have experienced this first hand, my conviction is that the use of an antidepressant is only the catalyst. Creative depressives need to not only right their brain chemistry through medication, they need to alter their belief systems with new practices and then reap the benefits of new artistic inspirations. In short, they need to redress their creativity from destructive to constructive and see that mindfulness/meditation/compassion/creativity is a valid way of life and positivity has a momentum as well.  Good begets good, eventually.