Well Bottom Blues

so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

— T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

Not death but that fine madness, though so many ended their own lives: John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz. I have lied about suicidal ideation to psych although that has mostly been a creative excersise. Have you ever thought: stop the world. I want to get off?

An example:

Sudden Shakespearean Despair 

the strange things they give
to little boys from the hands
of the Dead—the bright nickel
ladies' derringer and the dark

stiletto still sharp in its antiquity
with that ornate guard and handle
as if to punctuate the irony
of some called maiden aunts

when you imagine plunging
that tapering tip two-fisted
into your chest you understand
Hamlet—the call of darkness

toward swift violence—just
as in spite of castle comfort
under the inherited stones 
everything crumbles into dust 

Shall we continue with a list from Ms. Reddield Jameson?

• George Gordon Lord Byron
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Herman Melville
• William and Henry James
• Robert Schumann (composer)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
• Vincent van Gogh (painter)
• Ernest Hemingway
• Virginia Woolf
• Robert Lowell
• John Berryman
• Theodore Roethke
• Delmore Schwartz
• Randall Jarrell
• Anne Sexton

Berryman is a favorite. I see my own struggles and the impact of the atypical antipsychotic I was prescribed as treatment, the lobotomization of  higher creative associate thought which was a complete writer’s block. I hear that in this verse.

—Hand me back my crawl, condign Heaven. 

Tighten into a ball 
longate & valved Henry. Tuck him peace. 
Render him sightless, 
or ruin at high rate his crampon focus, 
wipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us.

—Dream Song 39 John Berryman

Yeah, like that.

On my chart I am Bipolar II, in remission. I think I am in fact cyclothymic, not officially but typically referred to as BiPolar III. I have episodes of hypomania I mostly pour into writing, although I did re-dig and redo our small garden and hang all the art at last.  This is offset with periods of andhedonia for which I take a less onerous antidepressat but mostly treat with cool music in my fancy Bose noise-cancelling jeadphones. It’s also supposed to help with the anxiety attacks that go with hypomania.

I’ve had some triggers lately for anxiety but that also triggers hypomania as well. Amxiety,more what I call the Heebie-Jeebies, is often the edge of oncoming hypomania, like that bad amphetamine edge of low quality acid. The good part of this is that I’m writing and revising like mad. I just have to remember to shut up once the short-circuit fire in my mind starts talking constantly, especially at home where I tend to let my filters down,