I just wrote what I think is a thoughtful, coherent political think piece of 691 words. It is the longest thing I have written in the last several years. And I have a lot more to say. The secret to returning to a life of writing is to start writing. So I am going to move beyond the original intent of this space, my experience with psychopharmacology and its deleterious effect my on writing life

And just write what I have to say.

It has been four months since I stopped Risperidone, the drug which lobotomized the creative part of my brain which danced hand in hand with Bipolar Disorder. And I have not kept this blog up, which is not a good sign. And I still struggle to read serious poetry, which was at the center of my life–reading and writing–ten years ago.

Perhaps I set the bar too high by diving into John Berryman’s The Dream Songs as my acid test, poems as much sculpture as language, incantatory magic of a sort which I once sought to model my own writing after and to which I have lost the underlying text or language. Today I decided to read Timothy Donnelly’s poem “The Cloud Corporation”, which spawned a prairie fire in my brain when I first read it in the last decade, and raved about it being “The Wasteland” of our generation.

And today I began to see a glimmer behind the clouds. Somewhere the fires of inspiration are banked behind the clouds, and my largest goal in life is to find them I still hope to find them.

I am also heartened that I wrote a brief, political think piece about the Trumplican hysteria over inflation, and I think I will share it here. This will generalize the blog beyond its original intent, but I once again feel compelled to write at length Even if it is not poetry, it is a start.

I am sharing the poem below without prior permission of the author, although I plan to go ask forgiveness. Found at The Poetry Foundation.

The Cloud Corporation

BY TIMOTHY DONNELLY

1

The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds

assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary

text over water over time, and that without which

the clouds part revealing an apology for clouds

implicit in the air where the clouds had been

recently witnessed rehearsing departure, a heartfelt phrase

in the push of the airborne drops and crystals

over water over time—how being made to think

oneself an obstruction between the observer

and the object or objects under surveillance or even

desired—or if I am felt to be beside the point

then I have wanted that, but to block a path is like

not being immaterial enough, or being too much

when all they want from you now is your station

cleared of its personal effects please and vanish—

not that they’d ever just come out and say it when

all that darting around of the eyes, all that shaky

camouflage of paper could only portend the beginning of the

end of your tenure at this organization, and remember

a capacity to draw meaning out of such seeming

accidence landed one here to begin with, didn’t it.

2

The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds

viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business

project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain

control of the formation and movement of clouds.

As late afternoons I have witnessed the distant

towers borrow luster from a bourbon sun, in-box

empty, surround sound on, all my money made

in lieu of conversation—where conversation indicates

the presence of desire in the parties to embark on

exchange of spirit, hours forzando with heartfelt phrase—

made metaphor for it, the face on the clock tower

bright as a meteor, as if a torch were held against

likelihood to illuminate the time so I could watch

the calm silent progress of its hands from the luxury

appointments of my office suite, the tumult below

or behind me out of mind, had not my whole attention

been riveted by the human figure stood upon

the tower’s topmost pinnacle, himself surveying

the clouds of the future parting in antiquity, a figure

not to be mistaken, tranquilly pacing a platform

with authority: the chief executive officer of clouds.

3

The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds

built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces

which, prior to the factories’ recent construction,

provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons,

a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants

of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement.

Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts

can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on

air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence

of any competing sound, its origin and its character.

It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s

full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism

than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture

provoke in an audience more positive, lasting

response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature.

Even those who consider natural clouds products

of conscious manufacture seem to prefer that a merely

human mind lie behind the products they admire.

This development may be a form of self-exalting

or else another adaptation in order that we find

the hum of machinery comforting through darkness.

4

The clouds part revealing there’s no place left to sit

myself down except for a single wingback chair

backed into a corner to face the window in which

the clouds part revealing the insouciance of clouds

cavorting over the backs of the people in the field

who cut the ripened barley, who gather it in sheaves,

who beat grain from the sheaves with wooden flails,

who shake it loose from the scaly husk around it,

who throw the now threshed grain up into the gently

palm-fanned air whose steady current carries off

the chaff as the grain falls to the floor, who collect

the grain from the floor painstakingly to grind it

into flour, who bake the flour into loaves the priest will offer

in the sanctuary, its walls washed white like milk.

To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time

as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that

the conference it leads to might change everything,

to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment,

of moving above, with effort, the condition into which

one has been born, to whom do I owe the pleasure

of the hum to which I have been listening too long.

5

The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds,

believers in people, ideas and things, the workers

of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars

to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase

and belief you can change with water over time.

It is the habit of a settled population to give ear to

whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing

confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out

by human experience, for most things people desire

have been desired ardently for thousands of years

and observe—they are no closer to realization today

than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe

they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow.

Attempts to speed them on have been undertaken

from the beginning; plans to force them overnight

are in copious, antagonistic operation today, and yet

they have thoroughly eluded us, and chances are

they will continue to elude us until the clouds part

in a flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork—

but when the clouds start to knit back together again,

we’ll dismiss the event as a glitch in transmission.

6

The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies

united into one immaterial body, a fictive person

around whom the air is blurred with money, force

from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare

matters nothing. I sense without turning the light

from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves

on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet

vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way.

If I turn around, the room might not be full of wings

capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being,

which is to say that I myself may be the source of

what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it.

Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them

and their love of money, everything I do without

thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be

beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart

from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep

itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs

and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point

I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it

it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable.

7

The clouds part revealing the distinction between

words without meaning and meaning without words,

a phenomenon of nature, the westbound field

of low air pressure developing over water over time

and warm, saturated air on the sea surface rising

steadily replaced by cold air from above, the cycle

repeating, the warm moving upward into massive

thunderclouds, the cold descending into the eye

around which bands of thunderclouds spiral, counter-

clockwise, often in the hundreds, the atmospheric

pressure dropping even further, making winds

accelerate, the clouds revolve, a confusion of energy,

an incomprehensible volume of rain—I remember

the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes

against an asphalt wall, my vision of it scrolling

left as the crowd thinned out to a spatter and then

just black until I fall asleep and then just black again,

past marketing, past focus groups, past human

resources, past management, past personal effects,

their insignificance evident in the eye of the dream

and through much of the debriefing I wake into next.

—Hand me back my crawl, condign Heaven. Tighten into a ball elongate & 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

John Berryman, Dream Song No. 25

In August 2005, not only the levees of New Orleans broke. A damn that had contained a wild side of my nature also burst and inundated my life. The two most obvious examples of the change were the precipitous decision to move my family to a disaster zone, and the place I chronicled that journey: a blog titled Wet Bank Guide. The name was a play on the newspaper where I once worked on the West Bank of New Orleans and an apt description of its purpose. It was at first a journalistic exercise in collecting information for the Katrina diaspora, but quickly morphed into a very person journal of my own experience of loss and disruption, the survivor guilt that led to our move to New Orleans, and a chronicle of the city’s woes and moments of triumph.

This sudden outburst of writing and action was itself one long moment of constant cycling triumph and woe, easily recognized from outside or in retrospect as a long period of cyclothymic if not outright manic-depressive behavior. At first it was manageable cyclothymic behavior, a tremendous outburst of creativity and activity. The group of fellow bloggers about Katrina organized an annual conference called Rising Tide on the future of New Orleans. I was elected housing chair of the Mid-City Neighborhood Recovery Group, an ad hoc assembly of a few score people that came together to participate in the city’s recovery planning process when the formal neighborhood organization declined to participate. I started keeping a list of every person murdered in New Orleans for several years.

And I wrote: constantly. In the early months of the blog I spent countless hours after work scouring the news for information to share and comment on, frequently forgoing more than a few hours sleep. I started for the first time in decades to write poetry, and was regarded good at it when I immersed myself in the local poetry scene. I sat in a audience of half a hundred people mostly poets and the state poet laurate pointed out the New Orleans poets in attendance, myself and another well-established and published writer. And I started a second blog: Toulouse Street, Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, a more personal and eccentric view of the city where one blog reviewer said I let my freak flag fly. When the local newspaper shut down its book page and laid off its editor, I started Odd Words, collecting all the literary activity in the city in a weekly column. I also covered and wrote about events such as the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. I started to review plays for a local on-line newspaper during the annual In—– Festival. I co-founded a publishing company to collect and publish the Katrina bloggers.

I was the whirlwind.

There were other symptoms. An ill-advised, mostly platonic affair with another blogger that broke my already floundering marriage. Later a period of excessive late nights (and some dawns) of drinking and random, one night stands even while I was in the early stages of a post-marriage relationship that has lasted these eleven years. Less destructive but instructive was spending on random things, like a small conga drum I never learned to play. At one point I was adding didgeridoos to my Amazon Wish List. When my job laid me off in 2010 (contemporaneous with my separation and divorce) with healthy severance package, I went back to school to finish the degree I abandoned in the late 1970s. And when I graduated in 2014 I took a memorable but ill-advised trip to a summer semester in Italy, from which I came back after forty days and nights exhausted and broke.

I was a mess.

It wasn’t the first time in my life. My twenties married to an alcoholic as a joyful enabler were probably symptoms of the same disorder in my life. I can think of examples going back to my teens when I discovered that alcohol and drugs could unlock the person inside my frighteningly shy shell. The worst of it came and went in cycles. I don’t remember periods of deep depression, but I remember the cycle of high-flying feeling and the behavior it engendered. That sort of behavior was finally quieted by my marriage and children, for fifteen mostly peaceful American-dream years of raising the kids, buying houses and increasingly practical cars. It all came undone in 2015, and I became the whirlwind once again.

I had sought psychiatric help and was prescribed a varying and colorful list of anti-depressants, and an anti-psychotic for mood disorder. I was taking 2 mg of Klonopin a day to control what was initially diagnosed as anxiety disorder. I had suffered from something like that for as long as I can remember. And I began to undergo another transformation. I began to withdraw from life and all of my activities. I was becoming reclusive and loosing what had come to be important parts of my life, particularly writing. I stopped publishing Odd Words, a third book for our press was abandoned after the initial printing and my circle of friends shrank. I kept up the Toulouse Street blog, and at one point wrote Confessions of a Pill Eater:

I can’t write. I am amazed I made it to 600 words without a syllabus and a deadline. The first draft of this was created at the end of June (2012). Two months to manage 3,800 words. I try write, to do the Work, just as I can get up and make my daily 7:30 a.m. conference call for Moloch. You set a time, you sit down and do it because writing is The Work, but now I find myself staring at my reflection in the blank page. It just doesn’t come. I started a long poem a while back and that is The Work, sitting down and filling in the plan, adjusting as you go along, finding the lines and fitting all the pieces together, but I can’t focus enough to make progress… Perhaps my writing was an ephemeral phenomenon, a temporary imbalance in the brain waiting to be set right… The blank page stares back at me, and I turn away.

This seemed as consequential as my earlier bouts of maniacal behavior. I felt neutered as a human being as my muse or whatever withdrew into pharmacology. I left the care person I called The Pill Doctor and sought out an M.D. Psychiatrist who happens to have a shelf of Poetry magazine in his waiting room. He helped me to kick Klonpin but also diagnosed me (correctly I believe) as Bipolar II, and started me an another anti-psychotic, Risperidone, and continued my on an anti-depressant. Over a period of time my life settled down, although I was employed only as an Uber Lyft driver, and moved in with my partner to make the finances of that work. My life stabilized. The late nights drinking and carousing went away. I found another professional job after a long search, and settled once again into a reasonably quiet life. I had my enthusiasms as I had my entire life, and my bouts of morose introspection, which some people casually attributed to being born a Gemini, but were in reality the expression of a psyche that had always been cyclothemic and had in the past erupted into bi-polar disorder .

My life as a person of action and writer had, however, come to an end. I had stopped publishing the literary listings a few years earlier, and abandoned the Toulouse Street blog to posterity. It no longer outranks the Doobie Brothers on Google. I gradually stopped writing poetry because it was too difficult to get into the headspace that requires. I gradually stopped reading poetry, as I found difficult works I had once treasured like the Dream Songs quoted at the top to be an alien language I could no longer decode. I took refuge in reading genre stuff, science fiction and fantasy, and became a devotee of Terry Pratchett.

Recently I stumbled into the Bipolar Creativity and Illness Group on Facebook, and promptly read Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. I think I was always drawn toward the manic ones, the Confessional poets, people who reflected back my own inner turmoil in works of great beauty and power. It is no accident this blog starts with a quote from John Berryman, or that my self-medicating self was intrigued by Charles Bukowski. The morose side of my personality deeply identified with the Bukowski who wrote “The Consummation of Grief.“

I don’t doubt my diagnosis; only my treatment. It is obvious that psychopharmacology has changed who I am in more ways that those intended by medicine. It crushed someone with clear creative potential as collateral damage. After reading Jamison’s book, I am determined to re-evaluate who I am and how I behave, to try to recover some of that without going off the rails. And in the course of this, to adjust or even forgo my current medication. A dose of 0.25 milligrams of Risperidone is apparently not enough to crush this resolve. This is more than I have written in years. I intend, however, to venture into the dark territory of discontinuing medication, as I kicked the Klonopin years ago, and venture to discover if I can recapture the creative impulse and — more importantly — the pathways in my mind that understood, could

decode and recreate the intricacies of creative writing.