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This Will Make You Happy!

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Art and artwork, Uncategorized

ArtShow (mini)

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14 pictures
View Album at Shutterfly

You can see most of what I am exhibiting this weekend at the above site. I have displayed most of it here before, though perhaps not all of it. In any event, it might be nice to see most of it collected in one space. I hope it is not all distorted as this “cover picture” is…

At the moment, I have the Trudy child, Dr Jumoke and Decorated Betsy all sitting in my one room staring at me, not to mention the tortoise standing on its shellside glaring and looking most uncomfortable. The Muu’muu Mama is the only one who seems cheerful, enjoying her new youth with her black hair and big smile.

Ah, this is silly I suppose, but it is gettting crowded in here. Still I enjoy it, all these humans staying the night for the week!

Global Warming, Uncategorized, Violence

Up All Night…

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 I was up all last night and most of the night before, checking out various places around the state and their relative, which is to say their absolute elevations above sea level and comparing them, hoping to find a suitable place to relocate. I need to move soon — within the next year or so — as the Antarctic ice cap could slide off at any time, not to mention the possibility of Greenland producing such a profusion of freshwater that sea levels would rise precipitously and catastrophically…

 

What am I talking about? Global warming and one of the most predictable consequences of climate change…. The scenario, as I foresee it, is this (and keep in mind that I am being utterly selfish, thinking of no one but myself here, no one but me and my own small circle of family and friends…): I live in the Connecticut Valley, inland it is true, but at sea level with nothing between us, nothing literally between my building  and the ocean  but the valley floor. If and when the ocean level rises there is nothing that will stop the water from simply flowing right on up the valley. It will not even need to climb a slope as, according to Google Earth, this building is literally only 10 meters above sea level. Even if there is some ground higher than that in between, the water will simply find a route around the high points, making islands of it, and continue flooding wherever else it reaches.

 

Why am I making such a big deal of this? After all, I’m 56, I’m practically elderly. I should think of the younger ones who…But I admit it, my biggest fear in the world is drowning, and I cannot / will not sit around and wait for that to happen, no, I must do something to prevent such a fate now, while I still can. According to Google Earth, even my twin sister is on relatively high ground  – 600 feet – compared to me, even though she is closer to the shore and further south. Nevertheless, she has not put out an invitation, even when I pointed out the disparities of  our elevations. My younger sister, too, resides in the Valley, but she is farther north, in Massachusetts, and at 66 feet is somewhat higher in elevation. However, just a couple of miles out of town, the area not far from her is 300 meters above sea level, so she can get out of Dodge easily when the floods come. I wish she  would move so she wouldn’t be in harm’s way at all. I simply know that she will not listen to me if I bring it up so it is useless to try to get her to prepare. In the meantime, since I cannot count on my twin or any family member or friend to take me in, I must try to find an apartment on my own. I must  get myself to a new town — which one?– somewhere in the northwest hills, where the elevations are the highest and pray that the worst of the worst scenarios does not happen. 

 

Yet I know it will, and I cannot bear to think of the hundreds of millions, possible a billion people who live along the world’s coastlines who will also be in danger when the flooding starts. My concerns are neither more nor less serious than any of theirs, only more conscious. It could be better not to be so aware of what is to come: ignorance of the inevitable  must surely be less painful than the agony of knowing a devastating future without any ability to change it.

 

When I contemplate the certainty of mass panic, the evacuation and stampede inland, the fruitlessness of it all, my heart pounds with a horrible anxiety, being unable to bear thinking about so many people suffering…It is then that I wish to be dead myself, wish to have it all be over. I  myself have nothing to offer those suffering millions upon millions, though god knows I would if I could. If I myself cannot save them or help them, I cannot bear to witness the end of the world either. No, I would rather not be there for it. If a billion are going to die, then let me die before they do! I do not want to be left behind in such a world–

 

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Someone ought to do a film on American prisons and the making of a “violent criminal”– from his/her start in the State system of juvenile care (foster, psychiatric and otherwise) to juvy to the vicious cycle of imprisonment and abuse in the so-called “correctional system” until institutionalization and/or brutal three strikes laws make it permanent…Those who somehow think that most violent convicts freely choose to become violent are fooling themselves or are willfully ignorant: the prison system creates violent criminals, period.

 

 Abu Ghraib did not arise de novo, out of some new bizarre impulse from “rogue military elements”. No, we exported U.S. prison guards to Iraq who knew the tricks of the trade because they already used them in American prisons. Yes, the hoods, the dog leashes, the humiliating nakedness and don’t forget the torture — all are regularly practiced, with impunity, in American prisons. Yes, even President Barack Obama still exempts as legal and reasonable, the use of torture in prisons and during the punishment of prisoners.  

 

In fact, the Geneva conventions read as follows: Article 1

 

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

 

So even the Geneva Conventions agrees that while torture consists of inflicting severe pain on a person by official instigation or consent,  it seems to be allowed in the case of prisoners….EXCUSE ME? Prison guards can beat a manacled naked prisoner senseless and leave him in the “hole” for weeks, even months, no one saying a word about it, and it is fine with President Obama and fine with the Geneva Conventions? Well, I don’t think it is FINE at all. Especially not when the so-called resistant prisoner happens to have mental illness and is in “seg” because of it. Especially not when the prisoner is an 18 year old who just graduated from juvy, where he was sent after having spent years being shunted from one abusive “home” to another, molested in one and raped in another…and where he was not, beaten until he ran away and was sent to reform school. Now, in the Big House for armed robbery, is it any wonder he is both scared out of his wits and violent?

 

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Paranoia and Hallucination

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Argh… An incident of paranoia and, hallucination unrecognized by any of us, including me, caused certain people close to me unnecessary distress this week.  I won’t go into the details of that particular incident, except to say that I had absolutely no appreciation for the fact that I was both paranoid and under the influence of false perceptions and so took what I hallucinated as solid reality, with predictable consequences. Since I felt attacked and “heard” corroborating evidence, when I accused the responsible parties, as I felt certain they were, you can imagine how people reacted…Anyhow, I don’t really know how to make things right now, since the accusations themselves seems to reveal a fundamental lack of trust, however paranoid and generated out of the whole cloth that is my imagination going full tilt…I don’t imagine it would  help anyone much to say that this has happened many many times before, and that I have accused so many people of so many outlandish things that it embarrasses me even in the remembering…Nor that some, no, most of the accusations have had utterly NO basis in fact other than the predisposition of my brain at that precise instant in time. They didn’t even reflect any longstanding attitude, so much as a temporary, very fleeting feeling that burst out as full-blown paranoia-of-the-moment.

 

Be that as it may, instead of dissecting this particular incident, I want to discuss paranoia of the rather prosaic sort that afflicts me these days, rather than the grandiose and global kind — involving the usual suspects like the CIA plus certain shadowy figures known as The Five People — which used to. These days, paranoia — which I’ve been taught to recognize and deal with by my psychiatrist, though success at either task remains elusive as best — reveals itself most often at the grocery store or the post office or the lobby of my “elderly-disabled” apartment complex. Or it might pop up in my suddenly suspecting  theft by someone near and dear, or accusations of malfeasance or betrayal by someone who would have no possible reason or motive for such an act, if an act of that sort were even in the realm of being contemplated. But usually the accusation is so outrageous as to be laughable if it weren’t so insulting or potentially dangerous to reputation or livelihood.

 

What happens in general is something like this: (and Dr O has broken it down for me, knowing the neurology of paranoia) my brain generates a feeling, that is the amygdala spontaneously, chemically, spurts out neurotransmitters of some sort that spell “fear” or “threat” coupled with a sense of absolute certainty. I don’t know if there has to be a trigger for this amygdala burst or not, but it seems to me that stress does induce it more often than calm does, and that certain stresses bring it on more often than others. But that is not to say that I can ever predict when or if my amygdala will produce an outburst at any given time; it is definitely unpredictable to the max! So imagine that I am, say, visiting someone in the hospital with another friend, and in that stressful situation — crowded hospital, stress of strange place and sick friend and not knowing what to do — my amygdala pours out the fear neurotransmitter. I’m suddenly on alert and feeling threatened. Someone is attacking me, my brain decides, and he or she is right there in the room with me! In fact, I just heard them both conspire against me, the sick friend and the well friend visiting him…They are both in on it and against me! I hate them both, they got me here on false pretenses and now are plotting against me, they want to hurt me, to do something to me, they…And so it goes.

 

Anyhow, after the primary flood of “threat” feeling (“the feeling is primary” and that feeling is almost always fear in some form or another) the brain’s longer pathway — as I understand it — kicks in and generates an explanation, a storyline to go along with the “threat feeling.” The important thing to know is that the storyline need not make any sense whatsoever. The brain doesn’t give a damn whether there is any evidence outside of it to explain the threat feeling, because the threat feeling is already inside and felt…So anything can explain it, literally anything can seem or feel reasonable, and does. So wherever the mind goes, or tends to go at that moment, will be the form of the storyline that explains the threat-feeling. If one’s brain travels along the line of (I should only be so reasonable) “why do I feel so threatened?  Did they just say something bad about me? Maybe I’d better ASK them! then one is in good shape, because at least then one can check out what is going on, and short circuit any tendency to mistake false perception for reality. But for me, while I do not, often, these days go so far as to opine that cosmic forces are behind my threat-feeling, I do find other less than reasonable sources than reality to explain it: voila paranoia. 

 

One example, when I am in the grocery store, particularly when alone, I almost always hear and as a result know that I am being followed, and instructed as to what I can and cannot buy. I generally race through the store in an effort to get out, and get away from my pursuers,  or if I do not, suffer from dreadful fear of imminent assault or at least dire consequences. At a minimum, in the best of times, I know that someone is following me and keeping track of what I put in my cart, and will be transmitting the “evidence” to a central authority, which will lead to later consequences that I will regret (which my mind spins into longer more detailed scenarios that change each time I am in the store but which vanish as soon as I am safely back in the car or walking down the hill a distance away…)

 

So that is both an explanation of how paranoia arises — from Dr O’s mantra, “the feeling is primary” , meaning the fear that is initially and instantly generated from that burst of neurotransmitters or neuroelectricity to the brain’s subsequent confabulation of a narrative, an explanation for that all-compassing feeling of threat and the certainty that the threat is real. And I hope I have given some examples of paranoia, specific examples, where the situation stimulates the content without the two being necessarily significant or significantly related. For example, in the instance of the two friends at the hospital, it is the fear and the feeling of threat and certainty that provides the stimulus for the paranoia, rather than any underlying distrust of the friends. The friends are simply the carriers of the fear and the certainty of the reality of the threat, which would have been borne by almost anyone stepping into the picture at that time…

Uncategorized, Vision therapy

Vision Therapy: Seeing Inside the Snow

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I stood inside the snow yesterday evening for the first time in memory. I stood inside the snow. Does that seem like a strange statement? Yes, I have been out in the snow before, though god knows it hasn’t snowed in southern New England much these past years so last night’s storm of whitefall was really something to behold. I was holding my breath at 2pm yesterday, because the forecast had predicted heavy snow starting by 11am and it still was only cloudy by mid-afternoon. Then a half hour later, I looked up from my computer, and lo the sky was white with skirling snow coming down so furiously you could barely see the horizon. Thrilled, though still convinced it would switch to rain mid-way through, I pulled on all the warm clothing I could find, plus two pairs of socks and a thick pair of clogs, mittens and my warmest coat: I meant to go outside in that weather. Danged if I was going to be anything but warm!

Well, I didn’t need to go very far from the door. No one else was in sight except for one elderly gentleman sitting inside the lobby near the Christmas tree, and someone already shoveling snow from the walkway. Neither paid me any mind, which was good because I was not there for attention. Actually, in a sense it was for attention, it was to pay attention to the snow, to really see it, that I had bundled up and gone out there. I thought there would be some need for effort or some, I dunno, some before, before I could see it, but in fact I was inside the snow, within the different levels, layers, depths of it before I knew it. I did know it, though. It was immediately and stunningly obvious to me that this was something I had “never” seen before, or not in any retrievable memory. What I remembered was that always before snow had fallen in a kind of whitish mass, a jumble of flakes more or less undistinguished from one another, because indisitnguishable from one another. I can’t emphasize this enough, how if you cannot perceive depth, you lose detail and even the ability to perceive certain structures because of it.

For instance, I now can easily see certain aspects of my palm plant that before were literally invisible to me, because I could not distinguish one leaf from another…and therefore could not see the details that defined these aspects. Just so the snow. Now, it is so clear to me that many many flakes were falling, and what size they were and even what texture they had. But I know that last year I might have had to guess as to all that, or judge it purely on the basis of the feel of flakes falling on my bare skin. Seeing the mass of white flakes falling would not have given me any more accurate information than that it was snowing a great deal. How many flakes fell per foot, or how big the flakes and what kind, I would have had no way of telling.

Yesterday all that changed. I saw that I was actually inside snow, not looking at a curtain of snow, but within an ocean of it, with snow all around me in every direction for many miles. It might sound strange, but the very act of looking through the spaces between the flakes, the sort of weird tunnels that space made as the flakes fell, was extraordinarily beautiful. It is not something I think that most people see, or perhaps can see, having gotten too used to stereopsis (depth perception) or never having lost it. If there were some way for me to lend others this experience, or have them learn to see it from my persepctive, I would share it, as the world is astonishingly beautiful, and everyone should have the opportunity to perceive it, though without having to lose stereopsis to do so. I suppose that is what the various 3-D movies and anaglysh photos of fantasy scenes offer (to view anaglyph pictures you utilize red/green or red/blue lenses for the 3-D experience). One goes to a 3-D sci-fi movie to be wow’ed by the special effects that are so stunning, and there one appreciates the beauty of that “world” — but does it rub off onto an appreciation of the beauty of this one? Alas, I doubt it. I doubt that viewers of the movie understand that this world is as 3-D as the movie is, and that what they see in the world is as wonderful as what is in the movie. No, this world is simply too prosaic to be seen. It truly is a matter of seeing with new eyes. Which is what I have. As I told Dr D, she changed my life with her Vision Therapy, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

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Schizophrenia and Trust

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Today I want to discuss the issue of trust, a specific kind of trust in my case, which is intimately tied to my sense of personal evil and a resultant paranoia that persists to this day. (Note: while I discuss this in the context of schizophrenia, the etiology of my schizophrenic symptoms remains Lyme disease.) Because I am evil, I must assume that people are out to get me, to kill me, to get rid of me by any and all means. This is a logical conclusion even as it leads me to a state of more or less constant fear and suspicion. I worry about where the next attack is going to emanate from. This puts me in a difficult position with most people, who do not like to contemplate the fact that I do not trust them. I must reassure each and every one that they are the exception to the rule, when by and large no one truly is, because I assume that everyone in their heart of hearts despises me! Deep down, deep down, no one really feels for me anything but the purest antipathy and revulsion, and perhaps unconscious to them even, wishes me ill (at a minimum) or like my twin, wants me dead.

That said, I am able to put this awareness aside and deal with people on the as if level, as if they were not my enemies, as if they did not wish me mortal ill, as if I were not somehow a source of scorn and disgust to them. I am aware of it nonetheless, and aware of the double entendres being exchanged, or being sent one way to me. But I do not allow any expression of comprehension to show on my face. That would be breaking the compact of civility. No, I pretend that I didnt “get it” and act insensible to everything but what is said on the surface. but I do get it, and I know what is really being said in the subtext…

Sessions with Dr O are an island of relief for me in all this. I don’t know why talk therapy is so frowned upon for people with schizophrenia. It has been nothing but a blessing for me, despite the many bad experiences I have had with certain incompetent shrinks over the years. Dr O has taught me so much about my symptoms, how to recognize them, what they are and how to handle them, both emotionally and intellectually, how to wrestle them and overcome them, that I cannot but be grateful…And I would never want to have gone the “meds only” route all this time. No, I think that is a terrible mishandling of schizophrenia, and deprives most people with the illness of what might have helped them recover to the best level possible.

But one thing about trust and Dr O is that I need to trust her to take care of herself vis a vis me. I need to know that she will not let me burden her or wear her down. For example, and this is really painful to report, two years ago when I was in the hospital with what turned out to be relapsing CNS Lyme disease, I must have seemed impossible to deal with. I was out of control, on one-to-one almost the entire 4 weeks I was there. I attempted suicide, refused half my medications an hour after agreeing to take all of them…BUT still I knew that when she said she would see me even during her August vacation that it was a poor decision, and I did not want her to do it. I just didn’t know how to tell her, nor if anyone would see me in her place. Well, she made some rotten decisions and got furious with me over things that she ordinarily would have handled better and differently…and finally, to my great relief, took her vacation and got another doc to see me in her stead. But I felt terrible, because she left abruptly and in anger, and it needn’t have happened in the first place if she had taken care of herself and gone on vacation the way any other doctor would have. So I spent the next week and a half in her absence thinking I would not continue to see her. I was too dangerous to her. Because I had not taken proper care to NOT be “too much” even for her…so it was time to leave.

Finally, I was discharged by my demand, no longer committed on the 14 day paper I’d been signed in on in the middle of my stay, not wanting to be still there when she got back. I’d see her in 6 days and for 6 days I deliberated whether or not I would return or find someone new. It wasn’t rancor on my part at all, it was purely fear that I could so misjudge a situation and my effect on things that I’d accidentally allowed myself to over-burden someone before walking away, before saying, Never mind, I’m okay, relieving them of any responsibility or worries. I hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t meant anything by refusing the meds except that I’d wanted to take only one pill of each category, not two or three of each category, and I figured that if I did so while she was away on a long weekend, and was fine when she returned, then I’d have proved it was okay to do so. My memory is SO bad that I simply did not remember that just an hour before that I had agreed to take ALL the meds, including 3 Haldol. This sort of crazy lapse happens to me all the time. The memory simply wasn’t there to hold onto.

In any event, much as I wish it didn’t, that incident haunts me even now. I want to talk about it with Dr O but am afraid to bring it up lest she get angry all over again or refuse to hear my side. And besides, it is not the incident itself that bothers me so much as the fact that I did not protect her from me! I did not protect her from me! And so she was harmed by me, worn out, wearied to the point of exhaustion. True also is that fact that I worry as well that I cannot trust her to protect herself from me! And if she can’t or won’t, and I must, then there’s no point in my seeing her. The only way I can protect anyone is by getting out of the way. Only if I know that someone will protect themselves, take care of themselves vis a vis me and not do things in any special way for me, can I trust them to help me. Otherwise, it always backfires to my detriment.

Art and artwork, Recovery, Uncategorized

Art and Recovery

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Art capital A saved my life. More than that. Art gave me a new life, new hope, and something to get up in the morning for. It’s not that I stopped writing. Clearly that is not the case. But I was writing in a vacuum and needed an outlet for my creative urges that involved more than just my brain. Oh sure, writing involves the hands, too. But not in the way I mean. What I needed was, well, what do I mean? I wanted to make things, create objects or works of art that could be seen and touched and even smelled and if scratched or thrown to the ground, heard. And if I were like van Gogh, I might even try to taste them! In short, I wanted to create something physical, not just an imaginary or remembered world.

I have always needed to work with my hands, making something or doing some sort of craft or artwork, though I gavitated towards the crafty side of arts and crafts, fearing that I could not “do real art”, that I was not the stuff of which true artists are made. (And pray tell, what stuff is that, Pamela?) So even when I – on a whim – dove into sculpture during a manic episode, creating that llama-in-a-day I have spoken of, the result was mostly folk art, which is to say, unsophisticated, rustic, and at best a craft-like work. Sure, I was pretty proud that I’d made a lifesize animal that actually stood up firmly on its own four legs. But with a deli container head (underneath the papier mache) and huge mailing tube body, scarcely concealed, big enough to have once held a large amateur telescope, it didn’t look much like a llama. In fact, the result was not much more than that tube covered with a few layers of paper and glue, and all of it painted red. Nevertheless, I was proud of “Dolly the llama,” though it took me a year after the mania was treated to finish her. Her saddle blanket fooled many into tugging at the finge to see if it was real or not. a trompe-l’oeil — eye fooling — success that pleased me no end.

But a year was much too much time to complete a sculpture, even a life-size llama. I was almost dreading the work by the time I got to applying the last few strokes of paint. I needed more drive than that to do art, but I didn’t seem to be able to sustain the energey or enthusiasm for much of anything. I wasn’t sure how I managed to write the book, even. Then, during my last hospitalization it seems this obstacle was overcome: on Abilify and Geodon I suddenly had both energy and stamina galore. Or perhaps it is simply that the medications enabled a well me to come out, someone who could sustain an artistic effort, even if it was for the very first time. Given a different life I would have been doing this sort of thing all along had I known it was possible, had I had that kind of stamina… But I didn’t think about this, no, for me there was no looking back.

Over the year and a half since then I have created several pieces, large and small, from a large tortoise to a “crazy fruit” bowl. From a large seated man, to a child detachable from her hassock (not quite finished). My female sculpture, the Decorated Betsy, has even won a NAMI national contest on creativity and mental illness. But why tell you about them. I want to see if I can upload a few photos instead here, but you’ll have to bear with me as I try out the “program”. First, I want to upload a picture of that llama, just so you can get a look at my very first attempt. She now resides in my parents’ bay window, a placement that I regard as an honor.

Looks mighty co-o-o-ld out there!
Looks mighty co-o-o-ld out there!

Here is the Dream Tortoise, otherwise known as Yurtle the Turtle, which is about 3 feet in diameter.

What you lookin' at?
What you lookin’ at?

There are two other large scale sculptures, each a person, plus a work in progress, but it is nearing my bedtime and there will be hell to pay if I do not get my 8 hours of essential-to-my-mental-health sleep. So I will stop here and get back to this tomorrow, posting at least two if not more photos of my artwork then.

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Aw hell, here are two more, but without comment or caption except to say that the prescription that the man holds in his hand reads: Dr John Jumoke Rx: art, poetry, music. But first the earliest human I have done, the Decorated Betsy (note that half her face is also decorated, and since Jumoke was supposed to be her doc, his face is decorated too. Does this perhaps indicate that perhaps he too is- infected?:

Decorated Betsy: Lifesize Papier Mache
Decorated Betsy: Life-Size papier mache sculpture 2008 January by Pamela Spiro Wagner

And now Dr John Jumoke

Life-size and attached to home-made papier mache chair
Life-size and attached to home-made papier mache chair