Well Bottom Blues

mania(n.)

late 14c., “mental derangement characterized by excitement and delusion,” from Late Latin mania “insanity, madness,” from Greek mania “madness, frenzy; enthusiasm, inspired frenzy; mad passion, fury,” related to mainesthai “to rage, go mad,” mantis “seer,” menos “passion, spirit,” all of uncertain origin, perhaps from PIE *mnyo-, suffixed form of root *men- (1) “to think,” with derivatives referring to qualities and states of mind or thought.

Mental derangement perhaps, when bi-polar goes to 11 (BP1) and you are a danger to yourself and others. Been there; done that, at least as a full on 2 running hard to get to the inside to the rail.

In my bi-polar “in remission” (says so right there on my chart, per the Big Indifferent Clinic pill nurse) I am still cyclothymic. This is how poetry enters into it. This is where we go back to the original Greek before this sort of behavior frightened the master’s livestock and so entered the DSM and required sedstion. “Inspired frenzy, mad passion”  related to “seer” is the fire that drives my wheel.

The frenzy, the mad passion of writing, was triggered when I started a blog to collect news in the immediate aftermath of parking Katrina and the Federal Flood because the national media were clearly out of their depth. They didn’t realize they had entered a culturally alien land and needed a translator/driver to work with.

Over 100,000 words later I mostly write poetry although I post here and have created a Substack that nobody reads anymore than they read this blog. I still feel a compunction to explain myself, so that some day people understand how people thought and behaved under these insane circumstances.

I don’t have a muse. I have a daemon, a spirit something like Duende, that mounts me like a loa and then I begin to vomit forth poetry like afire-tongued apostle. Yes I reconsider what comes out and revise and revise again but the initial impulse is no more under my control than my respiration or heartbeat.

Being a conduit for lightning is difficult for those around me when it spills over into incesssnt chatter or abrupt irritability so I try to keep it locked in this office like Frankenstein’s monster, venting mostly on the page.

I might not be a frequent flyer to where ever the new public hospital keeps the former denizens of the second floor of Charity Hospital for observation by the current Nurse Ratchet. Any resemblence to a true Poéte Maudite like Thaddeus Conti is over a decade behind me. Still, here I am at 5:30 a.m. finishing this post.