Monthly Archives: December 2009

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Global Warming: Poem for Vigil

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FRIDAY NIGHT VIGIL

Shivering, we struggle to keep our candles’ thin
flames alive as we gather, nineteen of us together
in the darkness of an approaching storm,
hoping the small flakes will not turn to ice
beneath our tires on the drive home.
But an icy wind keeps snuffing out each flicker
so we just stand, our signs alone aloft to passing traffic,
standing for the stand we take: for the changing world,
for a last chance at change. We stand for photos,
taken from across the streaming street –
and we smile into the night and show our signs.
One car beeps, a driver gives the V-sign in support,
but most drive on without a word or sign
that they have heard or seen a thing, or even recognized
we’re standing here for anything but hopeless causes.
My hands, frozen, release their glass and candle with a crash,
sending shatters glinting across the sidewalk. Someone
with safer gloves, stoops to sweep the shards away…
How lovely is the world today, even dying.
Though it’s all we have (and lord knows, it’s more
than we can handle) we stand here in this freezing dark
against the darkness and light one candle.

That is about all of the true story of the vigil, and about all that happened…We stood there and the traffic passed, and photos were taken and my frozen fingers dropped the glass holding my candle oh so greenly..Period. It was not without feeling or meaning for the individuals who stood there even though it felt utterly useless to me, and I was only there because a dear friend suggested it as an antidote to hopelessness. As she sees it, the only way to defeat despair is to take action, which is, I suppose, to paraphrase Hamlet’s soliloquy.  Now Hamlet goes on to talk about  death, and eventually to abjure suicide. But taking action did not help me much. Or if it did, the very loss of the glass in my hand, that crash to the sidewalk in the freezing dark, seemed to me the last straw, though none could tell it then. Indeed I  would never dream of showing it. But to me it was emblematic of the hopelessness of the endeavor, how it was all coming crashing down upon our heads, the great environmental movement, and nothing, nothing! would be saved on our grand sweet planet but sulfur-eating bacteria, black smokers, and undersea tubeworms. Nothing to be done now but to move inland and try to survive the cataclysm.

Except of course that not even that could be done, because nowhere is one safe, not really.  Tell me, where would you run to when tornados of category 5 tear up the heartland and when they do not, floods of epic proportion alternate with devastatng dust-bowl droughts?  When inland migration would put such a stress on cropland that famine results, and the slow, agonizing death that comes from it. The southwest? Where there is little water and temperatures already  soar past 115° in summer and sometimes higher? What happens when they hit 130°F? Would you  try the California west coast, with its record breaking wildfires and its ditto mudslides? And what exactly happens to rock that has been too quickly  affected by acidification  — does it really remain stable? What about in a region affected by vulcanism like the Northwest? Do we know for certain that  human forces do not change volcanic activity and purely geologic forces on and in the earth? Do not be so certain…But the east coast, surely you would not escape there, what with its sinking coastlines and/or rising sea levels from Florida to Maine…I do not mean to be a doom-monger, but I am indeed despairing, because I see a future of  chaos in the streets and madness and  fear on the faces of people wild to save themselves or at least their children and knowing in their hearts that they can do nothing…

STOP. Why am I going on like this…I do not wish to scare people who believe in hope and optimism. I do not wish to infect everyone else with MY despair. That is not my desire or intent. If I am hopeless, why make others feel it too? There is no point, even if I am right in my knowledge and/or my predictions. I cannot change anything, so why force  anyone to feel as bad as I already do? Perhaps Hamlet was right to suggest that “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them” is not necessarily a bad course. It may be nobler than giving up, even if the action is useless in the end.

Do you know that I have scarcely followed the doings at Copenhagen, except cursorily, because I pretty much know that whatever happens it will be too little, too late…and that no matter what, the agreements reached will never, never! even approach the deep cuts in emissions needed to reduce present CO2 levels to the 350 parts per million that we need to regain sustainability on the planet. No, what I’ve heard is that the best of agreements settle for reaching and maintaining 550 ppm. let whatever happens to us at that level, happen.

God forbid we should radically alter the flow of the world’s economic thinking and activity, or even just the purposes towards which entrenched capitalism directs its self-interest! God forbid that Americans NOT be urged to buy buy buy “new carbon” in order to re-set a gobal capitalism and ever surging standard of living. God forbid that Americans should be told that their diamond standards — of living, of buying, of — well, everything, should actually be reduced…that they cannot in fact buy everything shiny and new, that used items are good items and trading between those that want to throw away goods and those that need them is a terrific idea, and much better than flying new carbon, and expending huge amounts of hydrocarbons in the process, from halfway around the world; that lawns are a terrible thing and vegetable gardens are beautiful, even postage stamp size or on the roof. There is so much we could do, if we are hopeful, if we are optimistic, if we believe that doing something is worthwhile and that we can in fact save the world.

Let’s try, let’s do something now. Maybe it is too late. Maybe it is useless. But we cannot sit around doing nothing, can we? That way lies madness and despair. We all die. It’s a given. Why not live now, knowing that something — even if it is only  the proverbial drop in the leaky bucket — can be accomplished, and  knowing that as long as we breathe there is always hope.

Dum spiro spero.

depth perception, Uncategorized, Vision therapy, Writing

Stereopsis or 3-D Vision: The Pure Experience

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SPACE, MATTER, LOVE

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Gerard Manley Hopkins

December, first snow, 2009

Who hasn’t said, “You don’t know what you are missing,” when speaking of something she believes another ought to experience– sky-diving, say, or a certain exotic brand of coffee or the pleasures of her favorite restaurant. Because I was unaware for years that I lacked depth perception this was literally true: I did not know what I was missing because I no longer remembered what I had lost. I had in fact no idea there was anything to lose. But with prisms in my glasses, and after months of vision therapy and eye exercises, experiencing 3-D, or stereopsis as it is properly called, was as spectacular as it was elusive of description. Nevertheless, I am nothing if not a writer and so I do my best to put it into words and show you.

Early this morning I went to move my car from the snowed-in parking area and found myself at 5 a.m. alone outside. The street lamps next to the building were on. I could clearly see snow falling against the dark sky as I headed towards the lot. Suddenly there was a nearly audible click in my brain and everything changed. I felt as if I were in a snow globe, inside the snow, separate flakes plummeting around me, each on a different plane, riding a separate moving point in space as it fell.

I looked at a bush with its bare twigs, the ends of which were mounded with snow.  The contrasts in it were heightened, with the boundary between the blackness of twigs and the white snow crisper than I’d ever seen it. Everything was silent. Along with the exquisite clarity and precision of detail, a rush of affection for the universe knocked me breathless.  I stood there smiling. Had I ever seen anything more beautiful than what space had done to this bush with its twigs of snow?  This was not the negative emptiness of which some art critics spoke so passionately, but something positive like an embrace. It is difficult to convey what I mean by this: when we speak of space we usually mean the empty gap between masses, between physical entities or things that matter –after all, isn’t that why we call them matter? But in this instance, I meant space as sculptor of reality, and as artist and sculpture both. Space was the loveliest thing I had ever perceived. It had mass and, by virtue of its own volume, gave substance to the objects surrounding it.

But I could not yet put all this into words. At the time I just smiled, and gazed at the bush and twigs and sidewalk and streetlamp in a kind of dazed wonder.

I went back inside to write at my computer. Just as I sat down and put my hands out — out! how lovely that my hands went out into space, I thought –  the keys on the keyboard drew my eyes to them. My heart ached at the sight of the fraction of an inch between each key and the computer. The space that was their height above the computer took on a numinous quality that would not let me withdraw my gaze. My typing fingers too. Not only that, but the sheer fact that they were above the keys, the space between fingers and keyboard, then the way embodied space gave form and substance to the small squares –indented just slightly to fit the pad of a fingertip – all this made me laugh with tenderness and delight. I was full of bubbles. Why, the entire world was friendly!

I circled my rooms, hypnotized by space, by how space made everything important. How profoundly dishtowels spoke to me, saying, Towel, Towel. The threads stood up, cupped and defined by emptiness, each one loved into being by the artistry of space. Terrycloth folds were utterly different from a fold in paper and yet that folded paper, bent on an angle around a “shapely void,” struck me as infinitely loving. The sculpted space on each side of the fold was so exquisite it brought tears to my eyes. On I went. Doorknobs yearned, reaching out from doors into space. Bookshelves provided a welcoming recess, intimate and implicit with corners, as if saying, Come in, we will protect you. What a delicious concavity each spoon was, a miracle!  My circuit of the room would have been ridiculous, had not everything been so lovely, and so thoroughly devastating.

Mere words hardly serve to describe how I perceived. I felt seized by joy, by delight and yes, by an overwhelming love for all that my eyes alighted on – snow-covered bush, computer keyboard, a friend’s hand extended  in comfort. I know that most people understand the first and last, but few are mesmerized by spoon or towel or indentation of computer key. This troubles me. It is easy to love nature or one’s friends. But I suspect overpowering love for every literal thing is not prosaic. Space sculpts the world, and I was abruptly and unexpectedly given the gift to love all of it. Surely such a gift is available to everyone, yet it seems inaccessible, except largely to those crazed by either drugs or illness. Or to others who have regained, even temporarily, long-lost depth perception. Perhaps because so many have always seen space, they have lost the ability to perceive how beautiful it is and to feel how it embodies.

Later these visions, these perceptions faded along with my new but brief ability to perceive depth at all. But I remember near the end looking into a certain receptacle and being bowled over to see that it had a rounded interior. The sheer “interiority” of it, as well as the fact that it implied roundedness so matter-of-factly that I didn’t have to feel it to know it: why hadn’t I understood before? It struck me as sad and yet the most transcendent discovery of my life. If the world was charged with the grandeur of anything, then that something was the positive, optimistic Shaper of things, their Creator, which we instead call, as if it were nothing, “empty space.”

This is a tragedy and not merely for the individual of normal vision, but for humanity, most of whom will never experience a love for spoons and doorknobs or computer keys or hands above the paper or, by extension, love of every object and every nose and every creature in this world, of every thing and all matter, which is shaped by the Space that loves us. This may be the reason we have done what we have done to the environment, the precious matter in the Creative Space around us.

Because we could not see and therefore could not feel how space is the Creator and loves the matter of the world, we have destroyed it, and ourselves in the process. How could we have done otherwise? We did not know.  We did not see. And we could not feel the truth: that Space is Love and loves the world and makes us, and all matter, beautiful.

Narcolepsy, Sleep, Uncategorized, Zyprex

Narcolepsy and Sleepiness: I wake and sleep and sleep and sleep

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I am always sleepy. I am always sleepy.  I am always sleepy.

That said, my best time, if I have had enough sleep the day/night before, is after midnight. Dr O — whom if you recall I now refer to as Mary in most other contexts, since she is no longer my doctor and has temporarily retired from the “business” or is “on sabbatical” as she calls it — told me once that the notion of some people being “night owls” and some being “early birds” is a real phenomenon and not just a myth, that in fact there are reasons why certain people like me prefer the hours post-midnight and feel most alert and alive then, and why I claim that it is then that I get my best work done. As I understand it, there are actual “chemicals” — I hate that generic term for more specific biological substances! — which impel a person towards sleep and that these are at their lowest in the morning and constantly building up during the day until for most people, or at least for those whose drive to sleep peaks at around 10 or 11pm or so, the sleep pressure is such that they feel the urge to sleep and usually do so easily around that time. (I think this is modified somewhat by the fact of artificial light and that in fact were we bound by (some would say limited to) the natural cycle of daylight, our “sleep chemicals” might take on another pattern, pushing us to sleep whenever it got dark enough that sleep was our only recourse. Of course, we still don’t really know why we sleep at all, but the fact that there is nighttime, that it is too dark to see in and do anything in, or was before we acquired artificial means to light up the darkness, and that there is nothing to do then except sleep seems to me to be reason enough. Better sleep than fidget! And better sleep than try to venture outside of your warm cave and get yourself killed in the dark…

But as I was saying, I am always sleepy. Or almost always. Sometimes, when my medication is actually helping me, and when I have added to it a strong cup of coffee (often it seems that the coffee is a more effective alerting agent than the methylphenidate, oddly enough, since I can easily sleep through 40mg of the latter but not through the 150mg of caffeine in a cup of coffee …) I feel somewhat able to get things done. No, I can’t read, or not very often. Reading more than a few pages is usually beyond my concentrating abilities. This is partly because my eyes, with their strange tendency to conflate inability with lack of desire, reject it and partly because reading simply overwhelms all the powers of any alerting agent to keep me awake: To sit down and read and stay awake seems literally impossible. However, years back, in the 1990s and early 2000s, when I took Zyprexa 35mg, reading was massively important to me, more important to me than any other activity I could imagine (due to the Zyprexa having wakened me to the world…). Dr O, who became my sleep specialist as well as my psychiatrist in 2000 and so was able to monitor both my schizophrenia as well as my narcolepsy, was aware of this and treated it with both methyphenidate SR and ER and Provigil and sometimes Adderall as well. These in varying combinations plus the Zyprexa were at least helpful. I remained sleepy, and continued to suffer from hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucinations — that is, REM intrusions into waking states, or dreaming while awake, and not just when getting up or falling asleep but in the middle of the day — but I was alert enough to read as much as I wanted to, at least during part of the day.

Now, however, my eyes refuse to let me read, even when it might be possible. And when I do  at least try to read, that is, when other activities such as writing are possible and so reading ought to be as well, I find myself falling asleep because of eye strain and fatigue. Talk about a vicious circle. Yet I will work around both of those in order to write! Weird…Even now I can barely see what I am writing, have to contort myself to “get around” the confusion of dancing and shimmering letters, but I continue to write nonetheless, as my eyes do not refuse to do that. Yet they do and would refuse to read someone else’s blog, especially anything longer than a short paragraph, if that.

Sleep sleep sleep and that well known “ravell’d sleeve of care” as in Shakespeare’s MACBETH:

“…Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast….”

Balm of hurt minds…Indeed, yet I did not sleep well last night. I was both too upset and riled, and too raveled or would we say, unraveled by the things that I felt I had to do to please too many people. I didn’t, I thought, have the right, or the wherewithal to say No to anyone,  I didn’t know how, I didn’t feel, after I had said “Yes, I will, I would, I can, I should,” to then say, essentially, “F—K off,” and “No, I won’t after all.” Well, of course, to say, “No, I can’t,” is not necessarily to say, “F—k off!” to any one, but I was feeling that way. I felt so angry but also so terribly tired and so overwhelmed and crazed by people demanding of me more than I could cope with and then just that one inch more that I thought I would die…and then, and then…it was basically “F—k you, everyone! I cannot take it anymore. I quit!”

Luckily I didn’t tell anyone that, not exactly, and not in the middle of the night.  I didn’t even call Lee and tell him that I felt overwhelmed and unable to take it any longer.  I cried, yes,. And I wrote emails to people I could scream to, in  despair without jeopardizing our friendships or my freedom…I always have to worry about that! (*Nor did I admit to anyone  — except one pen-friend — that I also feel, frankly, obese, so obese that I want to —but I won’t say it, won’t say it, won’t say it…All I will say is that I hate myself and that I will never again take either the Zyprexa or 30mg of Abilify. If I had known that the additional 15mg of Abilify would make me gain 20 pounds in 6 months I never would have agreed to stay on it after the hospital stay last spring. If I hadn’t taken it after I got out, I would not be in this horrible situation now. No one, least of all the visiting nurse who presses both drugs on me in the name of keeping me sane (hah), seems to understand  how insane it makes me) But I have digressed yet again…

I was speaking of how tired and over-committed I was,  and how I felt that I could not say, “No, I cannot do this, that or the other” to anyone, most especially after I had made a commitment, however unwilling– or even unwittingly. That is not to say that I did not want to do all of what I had to do, only that  I had signed up for too much and now had to draw back and decide what my priorities were. Even those I wanted to do, I had to choose among as well. But I wasn’t calm enough to think this last night, let alone to do such choosing.

Instead, though I had taken my Xyrem, the sleep medicine for narcolepsy that usually zonks me right out, and had taken it early, I tossed and struggled with the green microfiber cushions of my recliner for about an hour, trying to find  a tunnel into sleep, so that I could forget my woes for a while. But it was, as you can imagine, useless, even with the Xyrem. So instead of fighting the green any longer, and tearing holes in it, I turned the lights back on and pulled the lever and sat up again. To my small satisfaction, I discovered that I had in fact slept a  little in my tossing, and that it was 3 a.m. and not just midnight. Good, so I was not going to be up the entire night. At least I could say that I’d slept a few hours…But I was wide awake now. So instead of brooding the more, I decided to…well, there were some poetry contests with December 31 deadlines, so I started the long process of finding poems and making duplicate copies and such to enter those…and it was in doing that, and cleaning the apartment, that the night finally came to an end…

Today, of course, I suffered from extreme sleepiness, until now, when it is nearly midnight, and I am awake again. Go figger.