69 Mental health poems

I am angry with X, with Y, with Z, for not being you. Enthusiasms jump at me, wagging and barking. Go away. Go home. I am angry with my eyes for not seeing you, they smart and ache and see the snow, an insistent brilliance. If I were Psyche how could I not bring the lamp to our bedside? I would have known in advance all the travails my gazing would bring, more than Psyche ever imagined, and even so, how could I not have raised the amber flame to see the human person I knew was to be revealed. She did not even know! She dreaded a beast and discovered a god. But I know, and hunger to witness again the form of mortal love itself. I am angry with everything that is filling the space of your absence, breathing your air. Psyche, how blessed you were in the dark, knowing him in your flesh: I was wrong! If I were Psyche I would live on in darkness, and endure the foolish voices, barking of aeolian dogs, the desert glitter of days full of boring treasures, walking on precious stones till my feet hurt, to hold you each night and be held close in your warmth in a pitchblack cave of a room and not have to wait for Mercury, dressed in the sad gray coat of a mailman and no wings on his feet, to bring me your words.

To peer into the obverse into smoking cane field erratums as if haunted with the steamy colitis of whirling iridium cancellations as in the saliva of newts one sees the intestinal raging of deltas of blackened sea giraffes osmotically split into simultaneous alums above a judgemental sea glistening with Richters like a weakened neutron egg its fissioning petrol mirages like spirals of irregular hunting geese flying through flames of ulcerated smoke & gargantua hissing a blank imperial greenness rising above dense jetties of cobras the shocking demise of the sea the unlivingness of its winds scorched by irradiations of shaking brine incisions the burning gulfs of sun with a glint of explosive Mandean utopias* shocks against Old Testament linear prophetics of Jeremiah or Ezekiel or the bony frozen finger shaking stunted alchemical missives from a moon burned Judea no more than a mechanically burning moat focused on smoky spellbinder’s disruptives where the motion of the soul is delayed reduced to flattened agnostic secular smoke to a terrestrial rage which eliminates its sensuous heavenly fires its stunning unreplicated angers its sudden selenium spirals its fire which staggers across the pseudo-faultlines of pre-replicated judgement its flirtation with spirits of enriched Draconian plankton so that the soul with its amber of flashing microbe drachmas with its wounded tourmaline divisibilities flaming within a light of smeared tornado weathers within a shower of black fish scales & spleen is entombed within a blank thirstless psycho-motion falling from a furnace of stars which both flares up and freezes which inculcates a flawed microbial botany as in hypnotic grammatical emulsions within a hollowed elliptical opening where we witness old Egyptian surgeries where the dead magically rise up from mazes & stare in a language of scorching totemic anomaly spawned in heretical miniature their phantoms seeping from quadrilateral sutures from brief violent renunciatory squalls uprooted armed with the weaponry of ghouls & broken birch tree lizards seasoned by the light of psychotropic angles blazing in the middle of a green Venusian interior God singing as if in the fumaroles of anguish with an inclement bleeding with a littered corona of unstable altimeter reverses

1 We like to think that the mind controls the body. We send the body on a mission. We don’t feel the body, but we receive conflicting reports. The body is catching flak or flies. The body is sprouting grapefruit. The body is under- performing in heavy trading. 2 Reception is spotty. Someone “just like me” is born in the future and I don’t feel a thing? Like only goes so far.

Silence is the sound the knife makes slitting the skin. Can you identify my weakness, a pricking sensation and numbness in one limb? Can you hold this tongue? Tell me, what is the function of meticulous courage. You are the most yourself when you are in the motion. One can be quick and too quick. I have a stomach too. It gets hungry. If I be of necessity opportunity, if there be the slightest chance of success, why have a mind, if? Does that scream in the night across the alley beg an answer? Are we crowning into the sludge of an injury and its repair? An elephant is larger and stronger than a horse; but it is not preferred as a beast of burden. Strength is a wee umbrella in the storm. This the friction sound heard in inspiration, expiration, or both. For convenience of description, blood is bright red and frothy. Have you earned the privilege of making mistakes? There really is no sex in science. The nomenclature lifts delicate subjects up from the plane in which language places them. Man has more strength, woman, more endurance. The hands and the instruments are the chief sources of danger. This fever. There is no subject on which so much has been written and so little known.

—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is morning even though the iron cell is in a basement with no windows. In the center of the painting the devil blows a whistle and his pitchfork drips blood. Above in the night a man has taken off in a Buck Rogers spaceship heading for a yellow one-eyed moon. He grips the steering wheel in the open cockpit and doesn’t look back. In a lower corner under a naked tree a satyr sits and plays his pan-flute. The notes weave all around the painting, twist around a girl dancing in veils. The man who dreams all this pulls at his covers, drowses at the bottom of the painting. The man who painted this died in his dreams.

Have you seen, have you seen magic shadows? — Fleetwood Mac, “Nightwatch” My fugues have no apparent relation to past trauma of any kind. When it came time to rehearse we decided to get glamorous. We get all done-up for rehearsal. Gradually, imperceptibly, things begin slipping back into their normal place. My body is slowly rotating into its proper north-south orientation. My playing is flawless as it turns out. The audience goes nuts but what was it all about? Had I longer to see the aspects and facets of the family, which as we know are not always tickety-boo but I have drifted away like a wide-winged bird over many things that are meaningless, yet my mind is clicking away quite properly on other levels. I was never in it for the money, but I see where it goes without ever touching it. It was like a honeymoon — nothing made sense, sounding utterly convincing to my own ears — selfness in training, needing a month of good sleep. When I woke I saw the sunlight streaming in across the ceiling and thought oh boy, we were awful yesterday, the obvious response being to phone the boss and tell him you’re sick and go to bed until it’s passed, except Boss is in bed too. Don’t let the lack of his spirit blind your life. You would expect me to tell you, wouldn’t you, if our positions were reversed, while I look for a suitable shirt, but you don’t have any more to accomplish, nothing at all. Did you ever love me? Could I grit my teeth and carry it all off without anyone being the wiser? Any words that have concrete meanings are fine and completely friendly. The whole history of the human race is somewhat sad, wouldn’t you say, if you look at it in a certain way? But then, if you squint a bit differently it isn’t sad at all. There were times we were all hurting really bad, thinking the bed will win. Maybe it was the beginnings of trademark — if we stayed telepathic we couldn’t do that — surprise, surprise, and that’s how we decided to do the dance and that’s how The Dance came about. There was a large, grassy clearing in the forest, the trees around it thick and tall and there was sunlight on the grass. We knew that people were worshipping and the way they did it was to gather around a place like this and allow themselves to become a part of it, greeting it and letting it greet them feeding their bodies to their souls, the pity of the tribe was how we imagined it, seeing behind closed eyelids a lovely scene, looking down from an open balcony into a central courtyard. We were in a place that appeared to consist of baskets of flowers. I could see only the top of his brown hair and his moving hands. There’s a lot of color. It’s more noticeable than usual — I mean there are little prisms, rainbows everywhere but whether it was guitar or piano I couldn’t tell you — this is pre-Lindsey. The back room was vicious, everyone on a different drug. If you turned your back you’d better keep on walking. We did this every night, playing country rock at the height of glitter, mixed-bag material. We needed theoretical problems! My back to him, I said, “You mean us poor, sad little cast-offs, wouldn’t it be nice if we could cheer each other up so our miser wouldn’t cast a pall on the happiness of the Prince and Princess?” Only I’m foreshadowing with picky surfaces. The morals are contemporary — argument of sounds, accomodation, implosion, but still the ineffable grace of seeming perishable — the ordinariness of making love and hearing music. I’m okay by myself, believe me. It’s a thought that gives rise to immense self-compassion. Okay, I’ll deal with this. I kind of went on the skids. It was just the four of us finally starting to crank it out, faster and faster, until it was too fast. Then one day, it was a Friday, always payday and I was in the bedroom beginning to sort out what I thought of as my shitpile, a collection of such things as dresses, belts, stockings, photographs, and old magazines all waiting to be put where they belong.

I was humbled when my boss mocked me for calling from vacation I’m broke again until Friday from my bed I see the lights, I see the party lights it’s torture a post-Fordist allegory? I appropriated a corporate apology and saved it in case something happened but my end date came and my vacation days paid out I bought pills from the intern I’d hired on my way out by the seaport I texted you we made plans to drink I like your poochie print workout clothes the credit card you keep for emergencies I bought a book from Strand Annex though the poetics weren’t to my taste later the author died I was nervous in those days always in need my dark heart, my secret poetry, my drug-filler cut into my life and love that it and I may last

I love sweets,— heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ... But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT ... cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.” But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife. .            .            . Why am I a girl? I ask my doctors, and they tell me they don’t know, that it is just “given.” But it has such implications—; and sometimes, I even feel like a girl. .            .            . Now, at the beginning of Ellen’s thirty-second year, her physical condition has deteriorated still further. Her use of laxatives increases beyond measure. Every evening she takes sixty to seventy tablets of a laxative, with the result that she suffers tortured vomiting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often accompanied by a weakness of the heart. She has thinned down to a skeleton, and weighs only 92 pounds. .            .            . About five years ago, I was in a restaurant, eating alone with a book. I was not married, and often did that ... —I’d turn down dinner invitations, so I could eat alone; I’d allow myself two pieces of bread, with butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of vanilla ice cream, at the end,— sitting there alone with a book, both in the book and out of it, waited on, idly watching people,— when an attractive young man and woman, both elegantly dressed, sat next to me. She was beautiful—; with sharp, clear features, a good bone structure—; if she took her make-up off in front of you, rubbing cold cream again and again across her skin, she still would be beautiful— more beautiful. And he,— I couldn’t remember when I had seen a man so attractive. I didn’t know why. He was almost a male version of her,— I had the sudden, mad notion that I wanted to be his lover ... —Were they married? were they lovers? They didn’t wear wedding rings. Their behavior was circumspect. They discussed politics. They didn’t touch ... —How could I discover? Then, when the first course arrived, I noticed the way each held his fork out for the other to taste what he had ordered ... They did this again and again, with pleased looks, indulgent smiles, for each course, more than once for each dish—; much too much for just friends ... —Their behavior somehow sickened me; the way each gladly put the food the other had offered into his mouth—; I knew what they were. I knew they slept together. An immense depression came over me ... —I knew I could never with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth: happily myself put food into another’s mouth—; I knew that to become a wife I would have to give up my ideal. .            .            . Even as a child, I saw that the “natural” process of aging is for one’s middle to thicken— one’s skin to blotch; as happened to my mother. And her mother. I loathed “Nature.” At twelve, pancakes became the most terrible thought there is ... I shall defeat“Nature.” In the hospital, when they weigh me, I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt. .            .            . January 16. The patient is allowed to eat in her room, but comes readily with her husband to afternoon coffee. Previously she had stoutly resisted this on the ground that she did not really eat but devoured like a wild animal. This she demonstrated with utmost realism.... Her physical examination showed nothing striking. Salivary glands are markedly enlarged on both sides. January 21. Has been reading Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the “mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit” Says that her own poems are “hospital poems ... weak—without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly.” February 8. Agitation, quickly subsided again. Has attached herself to an elegant, very thin female patient. Homo-erotic component strikingly evident. February 15. Vexation, and torment. Says that her mind forces her always to think of eating. Feels herself degraded by this. Has entirely, for the first time in years, stopped writing poetry. .            .            . Callas is my favorite singer, but I’ve only seen her once—; I’ve never forgotten that night ... —It was in Tosca, she had long before lost weight, her voice had been, for years, deteriorating, half itself ... When her career began, of course, she was fat, enormous—; in the early photographs, sometimes I almost don’t recognize her ... The voice too then was enormous— healthy; robust; subtle; but capable of crude effects, even vulgar, almost out of high spirits, too much health ... But soon she felt that she must lose weight,— that all she was trying to express was obliterated by her body, buried in flesh—; abruptly, within four months, she lost at least sixty pounds ... —The gossip in Milan was that Callas had swallowed a tapeworm. But of course she hadn’t. The tapeworm was her soul... —How her soul, uncompromising, insatiable, must have loved eating the flesh from her bones, revealing this extraordinarily mercurial; fragile; masterly creature ... —But irresistibly, nothing stopped there; the huge voice also began to change: at first, it simply diminished in volume, in size, then the top notes became shrill, unreliable—at last, usually not there at all ... —No one knows why. Perhaps her mind, ravenous, still insatiable, sensed that to struggle with the shreds of a voice must make her artistry subtler, more refined, more capable of expressing humiliation, rage, betrayal ... —Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit loathed the unending struggle to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose mechanics, and suffocating customs, seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit ... —I know that in Tosca, in the second act, when, humiliated, hounded by Scarpia, she sang Vissi d’arte —“I lived for art”— and in torment, bewilderment, at the end she asks, with a voice reaching harrowingly for the notes, “Art has repaid me LIKE THIS?” I felt I was watching autobiography— an art; skill; virtuosity miles distant from the usual soprano’s athleticism,— the usual musician’s dream of virtuosity without content ... —I wonder what she feels, now, listening to her recordings. For they have already, within a few years, begun to date ... Whatever they express they express through the style of a decade and a half—; a style she helped create ... —She must know that now she probably would not do a trill in exactly that way,— that the whole sound, atmosphere, dramaturgy of her recordings have just slightly become those of the past ... —Is it bitter? Does her soul tell her that she was an idiot ever to think anything material wholly could satisfy? ... —Perhaps it says:The only way to escape the History of Styles is not to have a body. .            .            . When I open my eyes in the morning, my great mystery stands before me ... —I know that I am intelligent; therefore the inability not to fear food day-and-night; this unending hunger ten minutes after I have eaten ... a childish dread of eating; hunger which can have no cause,— half my mind says that all this is demeaning... Bread for days on end drives all real thought from my brain ... —Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin conceals the ideal not to have a body—; which is NOT trivial ... This wish seems now as much a “given” of my existence as the intolerable fact that I am dark-complexioned; big-boned; and once weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds ... —But then I think,No. That’s too simple,— without a body, who can know himself at all? Only by acting; choosing; rejecting; have I made myself— discovered who and what Ellen can be ... —But then again I think,NO. This I is anterior to name; gender; action; fashion; MATTER ITSELF,— ... trying to stop my hunger with FOOD is like trying to appease thirst with ink. .            .            . March 30. Result of the consultation: Both gentlemen agree completely with my prognosis and doubt any therapeutic usefulness of commitment even more emphatically than I. All three of us are agreed that it is not a case of obsessional neurosis and not one of manic-depressive psychosis, and that no definitely reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s demand for discharge. .            .            . The train-ride yesterday was far worse than I expected ... In our compartment were ordinary people: a student; a woman; her child;— they had ordinary bodies, pleasant faces; but I thought I was surrounded by creatures with the pathetic, desperate desire to be not what they were:— the student was short, and carried his body as if forcing it to be taller—; the woman showed her gums when she smiled, and often held her hand up to hide them—; the child seemed to cry simply because it was small; a dwarf, and helpless ... —I was hungry. I had insisted that my husband not bring food ... After about thirty minutes, the woman peeled an orange to quiet the child. She put a section into its mouth—; immediately it spit it out. The piece fell to the floor. —She pushed it with her foot through the dirt toward me several inches. My husband saw me staring down at the piece ... —I didn’t move; how I wanted to reach out, and as if invisible shove it in my mouth—; my body became rigid. As I stared at him, I could see him staring at me,— then he looked at the student—; at the woman—; then back to me ... I didn’t move. —At last, he bent down, and casually threw it out the window. He looked away. —I got up to leave the compartment, then saw his face,— his eyes were red; and I saw —I’m sure I saw— disappointment. .            .            . On the third day of being home she is as if transformed. At breakfast she eats butter and sugar, at noon she eats so much that—for the first time in thirteen years!—she is satisfied by her food and gets really full. At afternoon coffee she eats chocolate creams and Easter eggs. She takes a walk with her husband, reads poems, listens to recordings, is in a positively festive mood, and all heaviness seems to have fallen away from her. She writes letters, the last one a letter to the fellow patient here to whom she had become so attached. In the evening she takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morning she is dead. “She looked as she had never looked in life—calm and happy and peaceful.” .            .            . Dearest.—I remember how at eighteen, on hikes with friends, when they rested, sitting down to joke or talk, I circled around them, afraid to hike ahead alone, yet afraid to rest when I was not yet truly thin. You and, yes, my husband,— you and he have by degrees drawn me within the circle; forced me to sit down at last on the ground. I am grateful. But something in me refuses it. —How eager I have been to compromise, to kill this refuser,— but each compromise, each attempt to poison an ideal which often seemed to me sterile and unreal, heightens my hunger. I am crippled. I disappoint you. Will you greet with anger, or happiness, the news which might well reach you before this letter? Your Ellen.

I. Invocation It's crazy to think one could describe them— Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears— As though they were all alike any more Than sweeps, opticians, poets or masseurs. Moreover, they are for more than one reason Difficult to speak of seriously and freely, And I have never (even this is difficult to say Plainly, without foolishness or irony) Consulted one for professional help, though it happens Many or most of my friends have—and that, Perhaps, is why it seems urgent to try to speak Sensibly about them, about the psychiatrists. II. Some Terms “Shrink” is a misnomer. The religious Analogy is all wrong, too, and the old, Half-forgotten jokes about Viennese accents And beards hardly apply to the good-looking woman In boots and a knit dress, or the man Seen buying the Sunday Times in mutton-chop Whiskers and expensive running shoes. In a way I suspect that even the terms “doctor” And “therapist” are misnomers; the patient Is not necessarily “sick.” And one assumes That no small part of the psychiatrist’s Role is just that: to point out misnomers. III. Proposition These are the first citizens of contingency. Far from the doctrinaire past of the old ones, They think in their prudent meditations Not about ecstasy (the soul leaving the body) Nor enthusiasm (the god entering one’s person) Nor even about sanity (which means Health, an impossible perfection) But ponder instead relative truth and the warm Dusk of amelioration. The cautious Young augurs with their family-life, good books And records and foreign cars believe In amelioration—in that, and in suffering. IV. A Lakeside Identification Yes, crazy to suppose one could describe them— And yet, there was this incident: at the local beach Clouds of professors and the husbands of professors Swam, dabbled, or stood to talk with arms folded Gazing at the lake ... and one of the few townsfolk there, With no faculty status—a matter-of-fact, competent, Catholic woman of twenty-seven with five children And a first-rate body—pointed her finger At the back of one certain man and asked me, “Is that guy a psychiatrist?” and by god he was! “Yes,” She said, “He looks like a psychiatrist.” Grown quiet, I looked at his pink back, and thought. V. Physical Comparison With Professors And Others Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me He looked from the back like one more professor. And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage Which foreigners always note in American men, combined As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical, Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon, Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there, Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely? Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something. VI. Their Seriousness, With Further Comparisons In a certain sense, they are not serious. That is, they are serious—useful, deeply helpful, Concerned—only in the way that the pilots of huge Planes, radiologists, and master mechanics can, At their best, be serious. But however profound The psychiatrists may be, they are not serious the way A painter may be serious beyond pictures, or a businessman May be serious beyond property and cash—or even The way scholars and surgeons are serious, each rapt In his work’s final cause, contingent upon nothing: Beyond work; persons; recoveries. And this is fitting: Who would want to fly with a pilot who was serious About getting to the destination safely? Terrifying idea— That a pilot could over-extend, perhaps try to fly Too well, or suffer from Pilot’s Block; of course, It may be that (just as they must not drink liquor Before a flight) they undergo regular, required check-ups With a psychiatrist, to prevent such things from happening. VII. Historical (The Bacchae) Madness itself, as an idea, leaves us confused— Incredulous that it exists, or cruelly facetious, Or stricken with a superstitious awe as if bound By the lost cults of Trebizond and Pergamum ... The most profound study of madness is found In the Bacchae of Euripides, so deeply disturbing That in Cambridge, Massachusetts the players Evaded some of the strongest unsettling material By portraying poor sincere, fuddled, decent Pentheus As a sort of fascistic bureaucrat—but it is Dionysus Who holds rallies, instills exaltations of violence, With his leopards and atavistic troops above law, Reason and the good sense and reflective dignity Of Pentheus—Pentheus, humiliated, addled, made to suffer Atrocity as a minor jest of the smirking God. When Bacchus’s Chorus (who call him “most gentle”!) observe: “Ten thousand men have ten thousand hopes; some fail, Some come to fruit, but the happiest man is he Who gathers the good of life day by day”—as though Life itself were enough—does that mean, to leave ambition? And is it a kind of therapy, or truth? Or both? VIII. A Question On the subject of madness the Bacchae seems, On the whole, more pro than contra. The Chorus Says of wine, “There is no other medicine for misery”; When the Queen in her ecstasy—or her enthusiasm?— Tears her terrified son’s arm from his body, or bears His head on her spear, she remains happy so long As she remains crazy; the God himself (who bound fawnskin To the women’s flesh, armed them with ivy arrows And his orgies’ livery) debases poor Pentheus first, Then leads him to mince capering towards female Death And dismemberment: flushed, grinning, the grave young King of Thebes pulls at a slipping bra-strap, simpers Down at his turned ankle.Pentheus:“Should I lift up Mount Cithæron—Bacchae, mother and all?” Dionysus: “Do what you want to do. Your mind Was unstable once, but now you sound more sane, You are on your way to great things.” The question is, Which is the psychiatrist: Pentheus, or Dionysus? IX. Pentheus As Psychiatrist With his reasonable questions Pentheus tries To throw light on the old customs of savagery. Like a brave doctor, he asks about it all, He hears everything, “Weird, fantastic things” The Messenger calls them: with their breasts Swollen, their new babies abandoned, mothers Among the Bacchantes nestled gazelles And young wolves in their arms, and suckled them; You might see a single one of them tear a fat calf In two, still bellowing with fright, while others Clawed heifers to pieces; ribs and hooves Were strewn everywhere; blood-smeared scraps Hung from the fir trees; furious bulls Charged and then fell stumbling, pulled down To be stripped of skin and flesh by screaming women ... And Pentheus listened. Flames burned in their hair, Unnoticed; thick honey spurted from their wands; And the snakes they wore like ribbons licked Hot blood from their flushed necks: Pentheus Was the man the people told ... “weird things,” like A middle-class fantasy of release; and when even The old men—bent Cadmus and Tiresias—dress up In fawnskin and ivy, beating their wands on the ground, Trying to carouse, it is Pentheus—down-to-earth, Sober—who raises his voice in the name of dignity. Being a psychiatrist, how could he attend to the Chorus’s warning Against “those who aspire” and “a tongue without reins”? X. Dionysus As Psychiatrist In a more hostile view, the psychiatrists Are like Bacchus—the knowing smirk of his mask, His patients, his confident guidance of passion, And even his little jokes, as when the great palace Is hit by lightning which blazes and stays, Bouncing among the crumpled stone walls ... And through the burning rubble he comes, With his soft ways picking along lightly With a calm smile for the trembling Chorus Who have fallen to the ground, bowing In the un-Greek, Eastern way—What, Asian women, He asks, Were you disturbed just now when Bacchus Jostled the palace? He warns Pentheus to adjust, To learn the ordinary man’s humble sense of limits, Violent limits, to the rational world. He cures Pentheus of the grand delusion that the dark Urgencies can be governed simply by the mind, And the mind’s will. He teaches Queen Agave to look Up from her loom, up at the light, at her tall Son’s head impaled on the stiff spear clutched In her own hand soiled with dirt and blood. XI. Their Philistinism Considered “Greek Tragedy” of course is the sort of thing They like and like the idea of ... though not “tragedy” In the sense of newspapers. When a patient shot one of them, People phoned in, many upset as though a deep, Special rule had been abrogated, someone had gone too far. The poor doctor, as described by the evening Globe, Turned out to be a decent, conventional man (Doctors For Peace, B’Nai Brith, numerous articles), almost Carefully so, like Paul Valéry—or like Rex Morgan, M.D., who, In the same Globe, attends a concert with a longjawed woman. First Panel:“We’re a little early for the concert! There’s an art museum we can stroll through!” “I’d like

He slaughtered a six of Miller in thanks when his supposed schizophrenia turned out to be mere panic, fewer than half the syllables and “easily managed with the new medications.” Chanted that mantra when his piano teacher’s voice droned on like an undertow beneath Chopin hours after she herself had gone home to Queens and when stop signs seemed to say slightly more than stop, seemed in fact to convey highly specific messages to him and him alone suggesting he assume certain key responsibilities including twenty-four-hour telephone contact with his finacée “to make sure nothing bad happens to her” and the immediate emergency closure of the Holland Tunnel…Oh, come on, Doc! If this isn’t schizo what is? And after all it took so long to nose the rental car’s savage servility through New Jersey for Thanksgiving at her mother’s that by the time he arrived he can’t possibly have been the same person he had been when he left Brooklyn and is that not a kind of multiple person- ality? It took hours. And then it was awkward. Which could describe so many things. The gangly half-dismantled turkey splayed on its platter. Her stepfather's lecture on property taxes and tougher sentences. The seven-dollar jug of Chablis which would come up later while he held back her hair. Every good boy deserves fudge and he tried to be one and earn huge loamy slabs of it. He practiced his scales on the steering wheel as he breezed by stop sign after stop sign toward the tunnel, stopped to search for the exact change, then resumed rehearsal as she, deeply soused, snored wetly beside him smelling like something spilled on a rug. He keyed each étude over and over as though there would not be many more chances or changes which I typed first by accident but had the chance to change for which I am thankful. But what am I doing in here.