The Edge of a Storm

I am not a particularly heavy sleeper. You could say I sleep like a dog, or a wolf; that is, with one ear nearly always awake, ready to pull the rest of me to alertness should the need arise. That came in handy, of course, during the years Mom was sick. We had a baby monitor in her room so I could hear her calls (or falls) in the night. But even before I became her caregiver, I would wake frequently in the night to turn over or occasionally pee (the curse of middle age), usually falling back to sleep quickly.

But this habit also means I tend to remember my dreams more easily than other people, because I, like others whose brains are similarly hardwired, go through life with a brain wave pattern significantly slower than most people (Alpha rather than the normal Beta); I’m closer to the dream state when I’m waking, and I slip into the trance or deeply meditative state (Theta) more easily. I assume that I sleep closer to Theta, whereas most people go from Delta (complete unconsciousness) to Beta (which is found in both normal REM sleep, when dreaming usually occurs, and states of extreme alertness) and back again, making dream recollection a bit more problematic.

Two nights ago I went through a rather bad patch. I encountered some familial stressors—something to do with Mom’s will and probate—and I was suddenly a young boy unable to cope. It was not so much the specter of death, or the anxiety and sadness over loss, but rather that all the months and years of exhaustion came rushing back. I found myself, once I had gotten off the phone, weeping uncontrollably, making animal noises and wailing like a professional mourner in the Middle East. When there were words, it was “Leave me ’lone!” and “Go ’way!” as if I were a battered child afraid of more abuse. It was the strangest bit of grieving I have ever experienced. I went to bed utterly spent, and woke up much saner.

Then last night, a very odd little dream. In it I was hearing this pattern of music, except that it wasn’t music so much as mathematical intervals, as if I were seeing (or feeling!) the piano keys but not hearing anything. With my right hand I tried to play the invisible piano, getting the fingering just right so that I could duplicate the pattern, and when I did, I could hear the music in my head. It was a phrase from a song I never particularly liked because of its over-sentimentality, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. The phrase in question, with its odd musical intervals, goes like this: “At the end of the storm / There’s a golden sky / And the sweet silver song of the lark.”

It was, I felt strongly, a message from Mom. Though I can’t tell if she was talking about the golden sky at the end of her storm, or mine. Probably both. Was my strange little breakdown two nights ago just an aftershock, the odd rumble after a psychological earthquake? Was it the beginning of a more intensive grieving period, now that I’ve gotten through all the technicalia of the funeral process? My current sense is that I had buried a lot of emotional stuff in order to cope, and as I begin the “digging out” period, I’ll be coming across un-looked-at (and previously unprocessed) pockets of strong and strange stuff. It will be therapeutic, but I can’t imagine it will be all that pleasant.

There was one other dream, a tiny one that feels like a non sequitur, in which a curmudgeonly professor rather angrily insisted I use the right glasses when I read and work on the computer. I tried to explain that I have two pairs of glasses, one for computer work and the other for normal everyday use—that I was aware of the need, and had already taken the appropriate action—which appeared to mollify him, though I’m not sure he entirely believed me. I have NO idea what that one’s about. I know I need different tools to perceive different information sources. I think I’m properly equipped. But am I?

Notes from . . . well, not necessarily the Dreamtime

I’ve been waking up lately with my head crammed with a bunch of disjointed thoughts. That in itself is not unusual; my head is a confusing place to navigate through. But they don’t fit neatly into a single blog post, and there’s not enough in any one of to make a post on its own, so I hope you’ll pardon the disjointedness.

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I lost fourteen pounds last week.

I’m not, it turns out, a big proponent of weighing oneself religiously as a gauge to determine dietary success or loss. I’ve seen myself gain weight even when being scrupulously faithful to my plan, and lose weight when I’ve cheated. And gaining weight, or losing little or nothing, when I’ve struggled so hard, does nasty things to my emotional state. So I weigh once a week at most. When the weight loss slows down (it’s always fastest at the beginning of a diet, and always fastest with very heavy people), I may drop back to once a fortnight or once a month.

And I’m not even crowing about these fourteen pounds: it’s mostly water, which my body accumulated in response to the inflammation caused by the reaction to bread, and in response to the high levels of salt and sugar I consumed during the funeral trip.

I haven’t done badly this week, though I’ve eaten breadstuffs twice. Each time, the day afterward, my hands itched like crazy, and were noticeably inflamed. A stronger reaction than I had when wheat was a regular part of my diet. Which is good: it will be an instant barometer of what I can tolerate and what I can’t. I’ll keep you posted on my progress, even when I . . . I was going to write “fail” or “stumble and fall,” but failure is an impossibility, remember? The goal is not to lose weight or lose fat, or even be faithful to a diet, but to build new habits. And I have to say, if that was the goal, then I made happy progress toward it.

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Lots of dreams these days. Or nights, rather. Interesting, confusing dreams that fade too quickly. I’m going to put a mini-tape recorder by my bed, because writing my recollections, even the moment I wake up, is too “left brain,” and the dreams fade quickly, while mumbling a rambling narrative in the dark seems to catch more of the imagery. In the morning I’ll transfer them into a dream journal, and I’ll share interesting dreams with you all.

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Two nights ago I felt melancholic. The house felt empty; Mom’s absence felt more acute. I had a couple more episodes of “Did I do enough?” to help Mom (yes, I did everything I knew to do or could physically do, but I recognize it’s natural for survivors to question themselves this way).

I’m still doing well, very well. I fully expected to fall into Crazyland for a while when Mom died, but now I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Acupuncture has played a huge part in my chronic depression not just going into remission (or whatever the appropriate term might be), but being no longer accessible. I can get sad, but that level of dark despair I wrote about in yesterday’s post just isn’t part of my constitution anymore. And while there will almost undoubtedly be more emotional upheavals to traverse in my life, I don’t think it will ever debilitate me the way it used to before acupuncture.

So I felt melancholic. It’s appropriate. I can feel it, breathe through it, embrace it, and move on. And I did.

Poetry’s Power

I mentioned on Facebook that poetry saved my life. Adam and I were discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins (Adam had written a few lines of poetry that I thought played with language, particularly in describing Nature, the way Hopkins did, particularly in his famous “Pied Beauty“).

I was a somewhat moody child, but it wasn’t until college that I had my first major depressive episode. It’s the time schizophrenia starts manifesting in some people; I guess the brain goes through changes in chemistry at that point in life. At any rate, I had never experienced the sort of smothering bleakness which William Styron would later write about so articulately in his powerful memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness,

and in the winter of my junior year, I had a full mental and emotional breakdown. Most days found me hiding from friends in my dorm room, crying in a fetal position on my bed, sneaking out only after dark to get some food.

About a month in, I started reading a collection of Hopkins’s writings

. Two poems in particular became my sustenance, my lifeline. Both were written by a man who was manic depressive and whose periods of despair were translated into words with astounding clarity.

First I found “No Worst,” and I realized that someone else has understood my experience precisely. To realize you’re not alone, amid all that pain, is an incalculable blessing:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. . . . My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing— Then lull, then leave off. . . . O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there. . . .

Then I found “Carrion Comfort,” and it was the tool I used to dig myself out of the abyss. It quite literally pulled me back from the brink of suicide. Here it is in full:

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

I memorized “Carrion Comfort.” I repeated it, chanted it, over and over, day after day. It helped me come back into the sunlight.

And that, I think, is why I love poetry so much. It has a power we take for granted. What are magic spells but poetry invested with great emotional energy and repetition? What is a mantra but a poetic phrase repeated until it begins to speak itself? What are ancient, sacred plainsong chants but the place where the human heart and the mind of God touch?

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Adam has a workshop he presents called “Poetry as Power: From Spellcraft to Statecraft,” and he kindly posted the notes on his blog, Adamus at Large. It’s a fascinating discussion of the power (often quite literal power) of words in general and poetry in particular.