lycanthropia

Days like today when I wish I could be a real faery godmother, and not just a kind of limp ineffectual long-distance one. When I wish I could transplant 7+ years of insight-oriented psychotherapy and 6+ years of fairly intense Zen practice and especially 4+ years of DBT and a kickass 2 years of Al-Anon, inject it right straight into the body-minds of my beloved almost-daughters suffering so hard, so blazingly, so purely. When I wish I could just roll up the dialectic into a tight sweet little pearl-bolus of wisdom and place it gently between their lips so they could swallow it and wake up tomorrow free of all the snarl-ball tangle of self-loathing which underpins all the mocking destructive thoughts that always end in what seems like a perfectly logical conclusion: “and so the answer to ending the pain is, hurt/kill yourself.”

Not that I don’t know that you have to learn for yourself how to track out and trace that thought—because it is wily, that thought, it comes perfectly camouflaged, and you’re sitting there in bright disgust thinking with what seems to you like great clarity: “The problem isn’t that I hate myself, that’s ridiculous! The problem actually is that I SUCK and why don’t I do the right things for myself and what’s my DAMAGE, I am a broken defective person, terminally deficient, I can never do anything I’m supposed to do, I will never be better, this is unbearable, it goes on and on and it never ends and I can’t stand it,” and other such totalizing permissive thoughts, every single one an understandable cognitive distortion, heftily sponsored by a steep dip in serotonin and dopamine, all of which is the trickiest of all because it’s your MIND, and you think you know your own mind—you think you know your own mind! how hilarious! but we do, because we have this deeply persistent, fixed illusion that we’re actually the ones in there running it—so you take these thoughts as being real, and personal, and factual, and informative.

But as the Professoressa said to me in my wracked twenties, so many years ago, her sharpness always cutting through my extremely fancy and well-scaffolded self-deluded twisted-inward rage, my perfectly architectured Clever Girl double-binds, built solidly but on completely false premises (life as it is being lived is unbearable; I can’t do anything better/smarter than I’m already doing it)—as she said to me then, plainly, simply, in a way even I was able to hear: “That thought is not offering you any information.” Just like that. The thought is empty. It pretends to be important, it pretends to bear meaning, to tell me something I don’t know, to tell me something useful,—but it is devoid of information, it is the mock orange, the styrofoam food in the shop window. Empty. Meaningless. Just inner raving that sounds like real thinking but actually is just me slashing at myself in blind lacerating pain, I don’t know where else to put this, I’m having a feeling and it must be someone’s fault, so I’m going to say it’s mine, because that’s the easiest way to think about it and that’s the way I’ve always thought about it, so—

Not seeing that if I keep allowing these thoughts traction and weight, keep feeding them and making them little nests in my mind, keep uttering them aloud viciously and reinscribing them with my sentences and my words and my actions and above all my brilliant brilliant mind—that I am slowly and surely killing myself. Stoning myself to death. Death by a thousand cuts. That I will inevitably TALK myself into psych units and emergency rooms and eventually a small urn which holds my ashes and over which my friends pray and disavow what is happening and scream-weep. And I know that side of it now. Standing in the desert, swaying back and forth with a dozen people, all of us streaked with tears and sweat and ashes, those sticky gray ashes, stabbing my index finger angrily down into the little brass bowl and howling at J., just raging at his remains, if he were standing there I would have unhesitatingly slapped him hard across the face, Do you see what you’ve done to these people, everyone here loves you, do you see what you’ve done—

Nietzsche said a man must find his own father. I sought out three faery godmothers and four therapists who were able to hold my hand as I flailed and thrashed and twisted every which way to avoid what had to happen, to avoid the Rilkean truth of you must change your life. I was dead set on blaming someone—them, me, the men, me, someone, it sometimes didn’t matter whom—and I felt completely unequal to the task of setting myself on any kind of course of recovery. I still feel unequal to it. And my feet are on it because I realized I do it in the smallest ways, increment by increment, tiny action by tiny action. I can’t put comments on 54 papers and when I think I have to, I want to feed myself through a wood chipper. But I can put comments on one paper, when a friend is there to make dinner and give me a little shove. And I no longer feel like that’s cheating—I know that’s part of being a human, and being in community. We evolved to help each other, we did not evolve to do things all alone, in some kind of weird myth of Yankee exceptionalism that insists we should, I don’t know, vault out of bed at 5 am and have all the day’s work done by 11 am. I guess there are people like that. Those people don’t have the predispositions we have. They’re attorneys or doctors or something, I’m sure they’re wonderful people and many of them are my friends and I adore them too. And that’s not what I am. I’m something else. And whatever I am is a fine thing to be.

And I will leave you with this, which I read when I was a troubled 20-year-old college dropout, locking myself in my grandmother’s bathroom (my grandmother! the person who loved me hardest, with the fewest strings attached!) to will myself to drop that ridiculous old rusty razor blade on the inside of my thigh, and cursing myself when I couldn’t—I read this in some Plath scholarship, because of course I was obsessed with Plath and was reading through all ten books available at the time, in 1990—I read it and I thought, this is a thread. This is a strand to hold onto. This is hope. And it’s a paraphrase of what F. said to me on the phone a week ago, in fact, and this is how faery godmothering works, that sometimes your charges say it right back to you, and you hear what you say to them in your own bones, and it carries you all. The truth (not the stupid shrilling “thoughts”)—the truth carries you all. You can rest in it, when you’re too tired to even think about taking the next step, making yourself the cup of tea, sitting down and taking a deep breath—to think instead, as my mother used to tell me when I was wrestling with myself, even as a little girl, smoothing back my hair with a worried look in her eyes because she could already tell how hard I was going to be on myself, for the rest of my life: You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

Nemerov shares with Stevens and Plath certain basic assumptions: that poems are “not the point” in the natural universe, and that the poet, therefore, is not in the same field of experience as the swallows. Poetry, coming from the mind of man, not from the objects of mind’s perception, is somehow a self-conscious, uneasy activity that must apologize for itself. […] This is a tragic assumption in that it certainly banishes the poet himself from the world: only if he will give up poetry and “find again the world” has he a chance of being saved. It is a paradox that the poet believes he will honor the objects of his perception—whether swallows, trees, sheep, bees, infants—only by withdrawing from them. Why does it never occur to romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function?—that the adult imagination is superior to the imagination of birds and infants?

In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide.

(Joyce Carol Oates, “The Death Throes of Romanticism“)