OSTRAKON

The Setting Gospel of the Cicadas

2005-02-25T04:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday came again. The voices fell silent. They hang together like hibernating bats from the dome of my head. Time's preserved chaos. Their leathery, glistening dark skin turns my cranium into a pulsating palimpsest. Strange tongues without grammar erase and write over the intimate and the familiar. They will awake, in time, and conspire, as always, to convert the known me, to disembowel, once and for all, the settled wisdom of memory. Do these voices speak to my language or does my language speak to them? Where is the possible I? Which lernaean name should I choose to drive out this gathering enigma? I strike mortal blows. I swallow volumes of pills. Other names spring forth. My mind is a tomb with many heads. They seem to know the foremost way to seal a tomb is from the inside.

Sleep no longer succumbs to chemical usurpations. It's now rare, always damaged. Before dawn the same interrogation. Will the kindness of the doorman from, as he says, Petrograd, again outmanouvre the rules of the property owners this coming day? I draft a thousand strategies to get me through the door. I list what is to be done on the outside. I return well before the next shift brings a new doorman. The inertia of eviction is finally closing its gap. A last chance, one full day, to pretend I am not homeless. I pack the drying pommegranates strewn on the floor. I throw in the cans of tuna still out. It's still dark. I wait for Charybdis to throw up the broken ship of Odysseus to begin gathering the day anew.

We belong to history before we belong to ourselves. We become who we are through others. We struggle through all our days to turn this sacred law, this iron necessity, into free will. We learn to love beyond our blood but the origin of the world lies elsewhere. From all the human perpetuitities that live in us, from all our natural and acquired faculties, nothing grinds the threshing floor of history like the fear of being alone. Behind the fine grammar of words, behind the passions and aversions for powers and possessions, for glory and for friendship, an ancient fear of being alone fuels our hunger for an upright carriage, a hunger that turns all human conversation into a struggle for recognition. We belabour nature. We appropriate the labour of others. We seek freedom through words and deeds and things. We seek redemption in gods or art or laws. We seek refuge in relations or other bonds. We rebel and we resist, we betray and we surrender, we murder and we create. Whatever we do, we either add or take away from human dignity, we advance or retard the dream to walk and live upright. All life's fortune plays out on the butcherblock of this simple arithmetic. A perpetual agon to avoid the ultimate cataclysm: a solitary existence, the return to a state of subtraction, to the state of nature of one.

I can speak only of what has no history now. I can speak only of the mad who, without knowing, take flight inward. We live chained in a cave of shadows. Unanswered questions steal the light from our eyes. Memories hollow and human ties sever. I live this enigma of forgetting in rage and resignation. It's an estrangement that brings you close to exile, near the edge of the void, where no one can hear the cries beneath the wheels of the world. Many years ago in a psychiatric ward with faint okra walls and green carpets, I overheard a nurse tell a student that eventually all families, all of them, abandon the mad. Days later, members of my family reached the front lobby of the hospital. They stayed there with me for more than half an hour. I accepted their admonitions. They left. The years have not loosened my grip. I hold onto their awkward gestures the way believers hold the beads in their rosary.

The Armageddon in my head has set fire to jobs, homes, money and dignity. This creeping madness has robbed me of everything built over years of toil in libraries, exam rooms, courts and airport terminals. Not a cry, a sigh or solitary tear from the many brothers or sister I was born into. Messengers take word to the family again. They are told, once more, of the affliction, the hospital rituals, the despair. They want more details. The great abyss remains great and remains silent. They see no wounds. All they see is my own hand on the blade.

They stay far away. I learn of their exploits in distant Troy. I wait for their watchmen to light great beacons of fire to be seen on Lemnos and sent forward to Mount Athos and, then, south to Mount Pelion, where the centaur Chiron sleeps, having surrendered immortality to escape the pain of his wounds. Torches of night watchmen pass the great blaze across their high towers. Fires leap and light the night over streams and cliffs to Megara, across the saronic waters and down to the Argives, before they finally reach King Nestor's grounds. Blind seers consider whether they tell of Troy's sacking, or the death of Achilles, or, perhaps, that my own still remember me and will, one day, leave food and water, or maybe figs or raisins, near my labyrinth. I let my tears drop to the floor. The flames die out. I continue their imaginary leap. There we are, swimming in the Aegean. Once more we climb the same sycamore trees and drink the last of the water, on our way back to our summer thatch tent, next to green stretches of growing beans and arthritic olive trees. I wait for years for the coming of such moments of recognition, whatever the bargain, for any particles of time that permanently attach and become indistinguishable from the self. I long to hear the setting gospel of the cicadas, the way we used to listen, together, leaning against the ancient olive tree, just before the starry summer nights vested over the sun. Do they not hear Antigone? Beneath her tomb of stones she still warns us across time to defy man's law and suffer our blood, to bear the burden of our ties, to bury our brother's corpse. Do I write for them, too? They see no corpse. They hear no maurauding dogs tearing flesh. They see no rats gnawing at ankles and fingers that have turned blue. They disbelieve the black birds that swiftly pluck at the eyes. No one comes to burn or bury, to pile home ground, to cover me from the sun. My crucified mind is a fugitive on the run but they remain the deepest wound. They are too afraid to tumble the stones, to face the horror of the doom in their own blood, so they leave the mortal cost of the unspoken and the absent to me. Stigma and denial are frail contenders to pierce the veil that falls on our stage. No. This strange predicament is the result of an involuntary muscle, a family made up of frozen fragments of time grafted on silence.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

2005-02-15T11:39:00.000-08:00

We enter labyrinths to find ourselves. I write to follow time's burn, to track life's invisible ground. I scavenge the mind's remainders and trace the curves and bends that bring remembrance. There are no origins. So I amend the imprint of the past and let the light reach the shores of darkness. Failed heroes reverse fatal errors. Justice returns home to the defeated. Abandoned shields find their warriors and factories return to workers. Love's body mends the mind's estrangement. To this end I invoke the elegies and laments of poets, the charred flesh of history, who warn about its great purposes and overlooked betrayals. I walk around these half-empty sandbags not knowing how to stem the rising tide of forgetting. I consign verbs to struggle against the coming nothingness. I draw on the sacred and the profane. Metaphors and contrarieties contain the springs and impulses of thoughts in siege. I imagine sacrifices and libations, rituals and scapegoats. Scaffolds and ramparts of straw and grammar hold back oblivion in the name of the actual and the I. The days pass through my fingers like sea water. I bow to the whispers and visions of the shamans, the high priests entrusted with my care. I take their magic potions. I swallow all their pills but the burn in the veins spreads outward like falling shards of glass. Voice bearers overrun and maul my fragmenting mind at will. All senses eventually bend to their beguiling persuasions. Understanding melts and twists into a star chamber of strange carnage and transgressions. Despite all the pharmacopoeia in the apothecary, these voices from nowhere reign in untrammelled freedom. They scorn like a chorus of satyrs. They wail like furies. A fountain of tainted words drowns my nights. Their feud for hegemony corrodes common sense. Intention and purpose turns to salt. Life's negation on the march. Madness is a solitary walk into darkness. I surrender all ambition. I seek no redemption. I forego the best of all possible worlds. I strive to exhaust the shrinking limits of the only possible world worth fighting for: to know for more than tomorrow the few faces dear to the heart, paintings and verses long attached to the soul, faint memories of a gleaming summer Aegean sea stained the colour of pomegranates by a silent red hot setting sun.

Sense and Persuasion

2005-02-09T23:42:00.000-08:00

A day of retrieval. Tell us what happened fifteen years ago? Who took you to the hospital? When did the voices start? Are they speaking to you now? Back then you were admitted severely psychotic and depressed, what can you remember? Can you recount earlier episodes of mania? I am sure you know this already but the mistaken diagnosis and the drugs compounded your troubles. By the way, why so many flights to Europe and back? Do you want some water or juice? Any thoughts of harming yourself today? Anyone else? Any anger in general? Blurred vision? Any luck finding a place to live? I cast the net wide in search of sense and persuasion. I search for origins in the pathways of the cortex and in the errors of the soul. I reflect on flaws of character and the corrosive sediment of passions spent. I trace the exodus of fleeing neurons and transmitters out of my frontal lobes in search of solace elsewhere. I imagine them alighting on strange twigs and wires far from the conflagration of their natural habitat. The closer I get to these origins and causes the more they eclipse and imitate each other, leaving me with the vertigo of doubt and the footprints of a contrivance. Yet, somehow, in all this, the contingent has petrified into the necessary, reducing life, as it were, to an eternal recurrence of the flight of Icarus.

Powers and Possessions

2005-02-08T01:17:00.000-08:00

My sessions last longer today. Psychiatrists, residents, crisis nurses and students take their turn. Each makes copious notes, smiles and exits. I am alone next to the secure waiting room. I hear but can't see crisis workers confirming identities and appointments. Admittance into the inner sanctum is obviously reserved for the privileged few. I imagine patients taking quiet possession of the green plastic chairs arranged far from each other. A nurse comes and takes the doctor away. He reassures me of his return. I keep looking at the camera impaled above the door where the walls meet the ceiling. It's barely visible inside its dark spherical glass cocoon. We resume. What is to be done? I realize the doctor disconcerts. Inevitably there are more specialists to see; more consultations to be done; more support and monitoring; and more plans for long term critical care to, as he put it, deal with the nuance and complexity of what ails me.

I leave with a flourish of unexamined humility. These architectonics of care share common means to deliver their vision: higher dosages and more drugs. Why do I surrender to this embarrassment of riches? Powers and possessions, I tell myself, fear of loosing my powers to my mind's strange possessions. I exit down the ramp reserved for ambulance stretchers and wheelchairs. I head for a store with magazines. Maybe this week's New York Review of Books is here. There is an article about Susan Sontag.

What Exists, Is.

2005-02-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

From the crack in the curtain I see dawn breaking. I close my eyes. I feel the fish swimming in my bloodstream. They flow quietly against the current and for some reason forego their habit of gorging on my blood as they scuttle along. I move my arm on the pillow and rest my head. I search my thoughts for certitude. Maybe I'll find a place to rent today. For how long will I need it, I conjecture, resigned to the mind's inevitable break into fragments. I worry about leaving my books in storage. Where to take them. Their fate is a burden I can never renounce. I have nothing left to pass to my son than my fountain pen and these poets and thinkers. Maybe someday their libations and ancient paths will help him find and know Love's Body.

The rest of the day brings neither friends nor omens. I only leave home to come back. After the rites and rituals at St.Michael's I buy oranges and return to what remains of home. I am stricken with dread but I peel and eat them. The indivisible voices have broken their quiet. For hours their cacophonous plague strains my moorings and blurs my bounds. They insinuate themselves closer and shrink my sense of things. I talk on the telephone. I talk again. I search for ways to talk about the state of siege inside. Words strain to rescue their meanings. My head is a sarcophagus of sycophants.

The Bells In Their Silence

2005-02-06T18:43:00.000-08:00

The archangel Michael inexplicably lifts his wing. I leave his psychiatric ward with a plastic bag and terms and conditions. I think only of my son and long to feel his embrace. He longs for answers to questions he cannot ask. It's obvious the visual grammar of my affliction has been confounding him for some time. I must speak. Otherwise perpetual silence will turn into a frozen sea of fear. I search for plain and soft words to blunt the truth and shield his tender heart. I struggle to bring solace to his perplexity. We retrieve memories, while the bird in the back of the room chirps ceaselessly with intent. He asks to learn ways to write poems. We speak about Modigliani's caryatides and other paintings he recently saw. He tells me again what he remembers about his hospital visits to me years ago. We find refuge in our friendship.

I sink into sleep. I think of myself as a young boy again announcing the resurrection by ringing the many bells of St. Dimitri on Easter Sunday. The brilliance of our firmament makes us forget we see only the light of stars long dead.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

2005-02-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

St. Michael's Hospital, Emergency Psychiatric Ward, 5:40 a.m. - The furries pursue me still across the mind's great divide. The sun beyond the iron clad window burns the dark to leave the night behind. Nurses and residents and guards watch over the crooked timber of humanity, the hollow and the damaged who stagger and struggle and scream. Sleep fails to pull me in its oblivion. From their panopticon perch the guards cast a constant gaze into the room, empty but for the dried stains on the walls resembling the colour of broken pommegranates. Can this be the House of Oedipus? Has the doom in the blood come back to manifest its law? Only the blind Tiresias can portend how many long years of stone fate will draw from us to build its ends.

I read from the Form signed by the Chief Staff Psychiatrist:

Ministry of Health, Form 42, Mental Health Act - Notice to Person under Subsection 38.1 of the Act of Application for Psychiatric Assessment under Section 15 or an Order under Section 32 of the Act:

This is to inform you that Dr. (...) examined you on 03-Feb-2005 and has made an application for you to have a psychiatric assessment. ...That physician has certified that he/she has reasonable cause to believe that you have shown or are showing a lack of competence to care for yourself and that you are suffering from a mental disorder of a nature or quality that will likely result in serious physical impairment of you. ... The application is sufficient authority to hold you in custody in this hospital for up to 72 hours. You have the right to retain and instruct a lawyer without delay.

SPHYNX WITHOUT A RIDDLE

2005-02-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

I feel the inertia of the hours. I wait amidst boxes full of books. I step on torn and solitary pages on the ground, remainders of arguments now cast adrift, love's labour lost. Will I sleep in a psychiatric ward tonight? I must travel to the local Sphynx and behold its riddles. It so happens I can walk to the hospital in less than half an hour from where I now wait with Arrian, Sophocles, Borges and Seferis. Why take the long and dangerous journey to Delphi, what enigma can any oracle whisper that cannot be solved by any local pharmacy? Years ago they pronounced: severe clinical depression with psychotic features. Then came mania and then mixed bipolar disorder. Now: psychosis. Deliverance awaits. Psychiatry has answers but to what questions? A Sphynx without a riddle? No matter, I think of my only son and my heart becomes larger. I think of those I am separated from by distance, by time, by error, by silence and by life.

The Sea, The Sea, The Wine Dark Sea!

2005-02-02T06:36:00.000-08:00

I have seven days left to create the world. The voices swirl and the fish scour. I bear their cacophony. I stand their ravenous scouring. In seven days I will be evicted. I have seven days to create a home out of being and nothingness. I return often to the only home still standing, words, gestures, language. I find my way home through a glass darkly, I create the world again by returning to a child's dream and the sea, the sea, the wine dark sea!

The Return of The Leviathan

2005-02-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

I write from the edge of the void. My mind has been a cauldron of fire for days. Voices in my cranium blight my thoughts and make the nights last forever. Every so often fish invade my bloostream. Small, tiny creatures, amber in colour, course through my veins and tear them at will. These fish, these voices, they have no history. They always appear from nowhere. Where do they come from? What do they want? They confuse me with their painful noises and their burning denticles and tiny spines. Doctors insist I voluntarily enter hospital again. I sense the inevitable - I am days away from being certifiable.