Rereading Jamison’s Classic on Art and Madness

It’s no secret that many of the artists and writers in history are prone to depression, madness, lunatic asylums, and suicide. From Van Gogh to Virginia Woolf, the most creative of our predecessors are loony tunes. Upon examination, even those who are not so firmly entrenched in the public imagination as mad were mad indeed. Or were they? I’ve long perceived my own temperament as truly reflective of nature, of humanity. The ‘normal’ are the insane- they exist with the delusion that life is even-keel, feeling nothing of the storms and darkness, nor of the miraculous, while my wild mood swings reflect the tempestuous polarities of life here on earth: at turns vivid and gorgeous, at turns torturous grief. The human condition spans barbaric war and torture to astonishing achievement, base compulsive atrocity to stunning, miraculous creativity. My mind spans these heights and lows, naturally.

I take my rightful place among a long lineage of artists and writers who felt such extremes, and whose creativity could not have manifest without. Yes, there are many creative people who don’t experience depression or the bizarre and exhilarating impulsivity and joy they call mania- you know, as in ‘maniacal.’ I don’t know those people, however, and the more I research history, the more I am convinced that the ‘bipolar mind’ is synonymous with creativity.

Thomas Chatterton, already a prolific and influential poet by age 17, committed suicide with arsenic before his 18th birthday

While this phenomenon has long been researched in relation to schizophrenia, with its trademark racing thoughts, the delusions and hallucinations, there is another madness called manic depression that explains the lucid periods of our artistic predecessors. Bipolars can range from fully functioning humans who are a ‘little offbeat’ or a little ‘moody’ or sensitive to those who swing between bedridden depression and speedometer busting psychoses. Those who go completely mad during mania can reach full-on psychotic breaks with delusions and bizarre behaviour, sometimes requiring hospitalization. It’s not always so extreme, however, and may simply manifest as rapidly spinning thoughts, heightened joy, extreme enthusiasm and productivity, speed talking, and radical impulsivity. Manic episodes that don’t necessarily interfere with functioning or ruin a person’s life are called ‘hypomanic,’ meaning ‘not quite as manic.’ The depressed phase can range from abject suicidal torment to listless functionality. Dispersed between these poles of experience are periods of complete normality. Creative people who experience this fluctuating range of sensitivities can produce work at all stages, most rapidly during mania.

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s classic seminal study, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, is a must-read for any bipolar person, and for anyone remotely interested in the link between creativity and ‘eccentricity.’ Students of art history and of literature do themselves a disservice to miss this valuable and fascinating scholarship. Jamison, one of the world’s experts on bipolar ‘disease,’ is herself manic-depressive. In this incredible exploration, she surveys a full range of artistic biography, from Coleridge to Schumann to Poe to Byron, documenting the mercurial temperaments and the creative productivity, and mapping the diagnoses of family relationships to show hereditary links.

Jamison eloquently maps patterns historically in the creative temperament, from drug and alcohol abuse to suicide, both traits extremely common to the bipolar person. She quotes thinkers and philosophers throughout history on the tempestuous minds of those possessed by the muse. While she points out clearly that not all bipolar people are talented writers or artists, the connection between creativity and manic depression is frequently occurring.

Intriguingly, I am not alone in feeling that my nature reflects nature, and Jamison, in a decidedly more scientific fashion, outlines the circadian rhythms of light, seasons, and weather and compares them to the biology of mania and depression. “The rhythms and cycles of manic depressive illness, a singularly cyclic disease, are strikingly similar to those of the natural world, as well as to the death-and-regeneration and dark-and-light cycles so often captured in poetry, music, and painting.”

Finally, after an incredibly vibrant journey through history, biography, music, painting, and writing, Jamison considers some volatile questions about our nature, about culture, and about the ethics or desirability of treatment. Will treatment, not available in the past, stop great art and music? Is it desirable to modify nature’s mood swings? “Clearly, a close association between the artistic temperament and manic-depressive illness has many implications- for artists, medicine, and society. Modern psychopharmacology and genetic research raise almost endless possibilities, both liberating and disturbing, but the ethical waters remain disconcertingly uncharted,” Jamison writes.

Touched by Fire, 1993, is by now a classic of bipolar literature, but I read it fresh and anew for the fourth time. This time, what I drew most from it was a sense of confidence. I commit to stop retreating from my temperament, hoping to appear more moderate and appease those peers who expect me to be anything buy my wild and creative self, prone to melancholy, prone to chaos, prone to joy. From now on, I will refuse to conform to a mold into which I do not fit; into from which nature herself recoils. Thank-you, Kay: I will celebrate the vividness of the highs, and see the truth in my depressions. It is upon these fluctuations that creativity flourishes.

Lord Byron

If you enjoy fascinating, creative, unusual biographies, you may enjoy writer Lorette C. Luzajic’s other blog, www.fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com.

You may also enjoy her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, available online through indigo or amazon.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

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The Cure for Depression: a melodrama of depression, madness, and the writing life

The tidal wave of darkness that totally floored me a few months back shows no sign of lifting. It lets up for a moment or two, and then floods in with a vengeance. I cannot take the weight of the sorrow. I did my best to accept my burdens with dignity and thought I’d made it. But now I’m facing something I can’t fully explain. All the years I spent ‘dealing’ like a good little girl have come undone. The depth of where I am is so incredibly far from light and hope that at some moments I wonder if I even exist, if I have finally unraveled.

Eight of Swords by L.C. Luzajic

I feel unhinged when I’m unable to pull it together and find my familiar toolkit- brash, sassy confidence, in small and sporadic but useful doses. None to be seen. I roll with the punches, more or less, I like to think, and though I seem to attract a great deal of chaos, I’ve always been kind of Tao about the whole of it, accepting my fate to bear witness to the wilderness of the human heart. I’m a rollercoaster of bipolar emotions- this is no secret so don’t call the paper! My friend Dimitri and I used to kvetch about the baggage fleet we had with us on our journey- bags, lots of ‘em, pink, frilly, cherry-scented Louis Vuitton. Garcon!

I’m unraveling these days, found myself crying on a stoop on Davenport Road today, and looking back at my impulsive seesaw life, and at myself sobbing in the street, I saw that I had more than a few things in common with Britney Spears- everything except her thighs and her money.

There was a brief light in this embarrassing public display of affliction- a woman on a bicycle stopped by, discreetly and without obtrusiveness, and asked if everything was all right. I was touched. But right after that, the tide took me in deeper, as I wondered how it is that a total stranger could see that I was hurting, but my closest friends have failed to notice? And that some of them never gave a damn about anyone but themselves and have betrayed me? And then I went right on feeling sorry for myself, wondering how it is that the dead friends call more often than the living.

Oh, trust me, I know: I analyze too much, stay awake puzzling together what went wrong. Often I come up with a big fat blank, and the truth looms impossible and stark: people just suck, really suck, even the very best of them, and in the long run, no matter how much you might care, it’s every man for himself. If I croak tonight, how long would it be before anyone noticed? How long would it be before anybody comes to feed the cats?

Good Lord, is this the mid-life crisis already? Hmm, I don’t know. Whether it’s a particularly bad flare-up of the umpteen mental diagnoses I share with my family members, unresolved grief, a brand new kind of madness, or simply defeat and despair after too many sorrows to bear, the situation is…critical.

It’s manifesting in the most irritating ways- poorly timed crying jags, temper tantrums, entire buckets of triple chocolate ice cream. Worse, “I see dead people.” I see them all the time. The other day I saw a dozen or more Zoes crossing the street all at once. I even waved. It was nicer to see her like that than to find her when I’m home alone, opening my closet to look for a shirt, and there she is, hanging among my peach-knit shawls. That’s the thing about losing someone to suicide. You can make as much damn peace as you want with it. But you can never get the macabre ending out of your head.

heading to the wake for zoe

When I was a kid, my dad used to drive for miles to avoid any passing trains. We were kids, we liked to see trains. But Dad would turn the car around and drive in the other direction, and Mom would start crying and crying. Later, I was old enough to understand why. Uncle J. jumped in front of one when he couldn’t take it anymore. Mom didn’t want to spend her whole day thinking about her brother. There were things to do. You can’t always just walk around sobbing. You have to occasionally make room for joy instead of just hurting. So you avoid the big triggers. You manage your life around them, and for the most part, you’re okay.

Thing is, lately I’m not okay, and though I know I will be- I’m a strong girl- right now I’m walking around like an open wound. More than two thirds of my support team is six feet under, and the dirt is still fresh. And practically everything I look at or see is a fucking trigger.

Regardless of how this horrible darkness happened- circumstance, or genetics, or both, I’m a person who feels everything. I could feel the pain of complete strangers. My therapist called it ‘empathic.’ Less kindly observers would call it overly sensitive. Sitting on a bus, I could feel the next person’s emotions and their life story would suddenly reveal itself. People came to me with their problems, as if I could do fat lot about it. But come they did, heaping their sorrows and crimes and chaos upon me. And I was s thin-skinned, as Mom would always say, “Toughen up, you thin-skinned ninny!” Indeed, I was practically transparent. You could see through the skin and watch my beating heart. I’m nothing but a bundle of raw nerves. Everything hurts. The only thing I could do to keep the pain at a dull roar was to write it down.

Marko, the crazy sailor I married, was one of the biggest believers I’ve ever had in my writing. I’m grateful to have a few believers, both my parents, and my childhood soul-mate Japey, who, yes, is also fucking dead. I know my dear friend Sal is out there somewhere overseas, reading this and anything else he can find, and trusting more than I do that I’ll “make it.”  And then there’s the crazy Canadian eccentric, Crad Kilodney, and we’ll get to him later.

Marko’s infamous comment- “Girl, you are a good fucking writer,” – spurred me to the name The Girl Can Write. And losing him made me certain I never wanted to waste another day working in a mall, working anywhere at all but at my desk, writing. And though I worked hard at my writing since I was five, I have never worked so hard as I have in the past three years since I found his dead body on the kitchen floor. Stephen King, one of the most prolific and amazing storytellers of all time, who also writes about ghosts, said writing is a lonely business, and you need to have support. I’m grateful that I had someone who hung on to my every word.

happy times

King also said a writer should write for four hours a day and read for four hours a day. So I’ve been pretty much writing for eight and reading for six, trying to make up for lost time, trying to stay focused, trying to cheat death by doing everything I can to keep my spirit alive. I’ve been producing like a fiend, fine-tuning, branching out, trying new things, reworking, working, playing. There are several novels on tap, another collection of poetry under way, several full-length nonfiction treatises on the backburner, and umpteen projects that think outside the book. I’ve got short stories on the go, and dozens of these inspirational, personal experiences with literature or pop culture that my fans seem to want the most. I’m writing, writing, writing.

Despite the productivity and creativity I’ve proudly embraced in recent years, learning important tasks like how to write when you don’t feel like it (and hoping one day to learn other important tasks like how to focus on one project at a time and how to alleviate stress by finishing things way before the deadline), well, for all that, I admit that a big part of my current episode of depression is fear of flying.

You see, in the beginning, it was enough. I was a league ahead of the many, many ‘writers’ around me. There was nothing to fear. So many called themselves writers. They were going to write a book some day. One day when they had time. I never had this embarrassment. Whether I was stuck in kindergarten class, or stuck in an affordable rental crack house, or stuck in retail hell, or stuck on the side of the street begging your spare change, I was writing. I never had to be shy about calling myself a writer. You could argue whether or not it was good writing, but from my first seahorse poem, age five, to my first co-produced zine in second grade, The Sunshine Peanut, to age 12, when I began publishing, I was writing. I was doing a lot of other things, too, that I should not have been doing, or that I should have been more focused on… but when Margaret Atwood was autographing my copy of The Blind Assassin, and gave me that seething, freezing look she’s famous for giving- I’d been rude enough to thank her for her inspiration on my writing- I did not have to wither away because I was ‘posing’ as a writer. I was a writer. A published one, too. Sure, not many had heard of zines like Canned Phlegm or Minus Tides. But whatever- I’d appeared alongside frigging Burroughs and Bukowski- how’s that for chick lit? Eat my shorts, you boring bastards!

Following all that was the sheer high of quitting ‘the real world’ and pounding the keyboard in real time, not stolen time. It was twin terror that forced me to quit my ten year plus reign as one of Canada’s best booksellers- yes, I have a ‘certificate’ -that’s not something I would make up! While I had to occasionally use food banks though I was working full time, I loved the bookstore. I am so grateful for all that reading. But my physical health was very bad and I had to take a medical leave of absence, and at that same time my husband passed away. Needless to say, I had a nervous breakdown and it was absolutely impossible to go back to work full-time. And so I began to work at home, harder than I’ve ever worked before, in between shitty odd jobs. My heart got a bit better, but that takes forever. My body bloomed from the rest and the retreat from stress and from finally some real and treatable diagnoses. In three years, I’ve written more than I have my whole life before.

Somewhere in the schemata, tragic though it might be, I can even fit the quatruple-duple-zuple whammy of all the close friends dying these past few years. Oh, it hurts, believe me, everywhere I look it hurts. Not just trains, but, well, everything. Every thing I look at might remind me. Hospitals. Sofas. Closets. Baby toys. Love’s Baby Soft Spray Cologne. Abba. No matter where I look, something reminds me of AIDS, of cancer, of addiction, of suicide. Cars are okay, though. So far, miraculously, I have not lost anyone to a car crash! Statistically, I’m going to, and I wonder who will be next?

And while it’s true that I mourn, I never for a second take for granted those I love left living. Every single day I pray for you, think about you, thank God for you. And I spend a great deal of time in abject fear that you will die. Morbid? Maybe. But there aren’t enough candles in my chapel to go around each week when I go in. If you die, too, I will have to start bringing my own. (I could make my own film, “Sixteen Candles,” very different from the original.)

But yeah, you see, even in this tragic deathtrap that I seem to walk about in- my first published story by the way was Meet Me at the River, a story about death by a 12 year old girl- oh, and my first literary award in grade eight was for a poem called Marching to the Grave- I’m not making this shit up-you see, my theory is that everyone dies, so it’s actually not that unusual if it happens. And for whatever reason, total strangers write to me and tell me that I give them comfort with my crazy blend of morbid yet rapier wit when I talk about grief and loss. I have long believed that writers to some extent are channelers of the worlds we cannot see. I am a scribe, an instrument, one who gives the spirits their two cents worth. I freeze in time what has happened today by making a permanent record. One day, I will be dead, and this rambling piece about my mid-life crisis will still be floating around on cyberspace. Even my dad, who does not like such vague ghostly poetry talk about spirits (unless it is securely grounded in the poetry of the King James Bible) told me that my biography will be called A Life of Death. Awww, thaaaaaaaaaaanks, Dad.

But I digress….as usual. The crisis that’s materializing now is that hellish one that every writer must go through. For some, it underlies the whole of the writer’s life. Usually it comes in chewable doses that I can masticate and move on from. Lately it’s been a tidal wave. It’s hard to explain exactly what the crisis is, but if you read the following paragraph very quickly, and let it run around in your head over and over on high speed and high volume, you’ll get the general idea:

Is this any good? Why is it even important? Does anybody really read this stuff, and if so, why does it matter? Who says your thoughts are worth the trees? Shouldn’t you be out helping people? Why didn’t you study plumbing? Will the computer bill get paid this month? Next month? How will I work if it’s unplugged? What about the rent? You can’t stand anything you wrote before 2002- who says you’ll think this is worth the while in four years today? What if carpal tunnel cripples me? Do you really have anything original to say? Does it matter? Do I matter?

Yep, for all that brazen confidence I occasionally exude, I’m truly an existential worrywart. That little tape above, the one that zooms along on fast-forward and repeat, well that’s just part of a crippling terror that grips me in the night. And it goes something like this: WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT?

Sure, I’m blessed to have a voice all over the Internet, and in so many journals and magazines you open. Whatever. SHOW ME THE MONEY. I’m thrilled that Quarry Magazine listed me as part of a stellar lineage of Canadian writers topped by Atwood and Ondaatje, a torch I’m apparently carrying forth. They featured me on the cover and never sent the cheque. And I am incredibly honoured to be lauded by my spiritual teacher, Thomas Moore.

But I’m still scared that they might cut off my cable, and I need it to work online. I’m really scared I’ll have to get this tooth pulled if I can’t come up with the reconstruction fee. I’m not sure I can even come up with the extraction fee! I’m scared of running out of cat food.

It’s all very terrifying. WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT AS A WRITER? It’s the only damn thing I’m good at…and while I thank God for my gift without false modestly, let’s face it, I’m good, but not THAT good. I’m not BLOWING the rich publishers away, evidently. What will become of me if I don’t hold out for the long haul? Reading and writing are the only skills I have!

Crad Kilodney’s book, Putrid Scum, is quite possibly the most brilliant account of these fears. His entire life was the slow-track of the writer’s crisis. Early in the book, he sagely states that the very worst thing that can happen to a writer is early publication in a national magazine. This gives that poor sod false hope, and instead of moving on to a more sensible fate- say, becoming the cable guy, or a chiropractic assistant- the writer will believe in himself. Yeah, why the hell did I have to win that damn contest for Meet Me at the River, for crying out loud?

and sometimes a scar is just a scar by L.C. Luzajic

Then Crad goes on to say that every writer has a crippling philosophical struggle he must contend with. His, as is mine, is over the negligible importance of his perspective. You see, I’m flattered, trust me, that a few of you are amused or even touched, but in the scheme of things, are my comments on the literary life or why I love Johnny Cash really of any tangible importance in a world where children are dying of starvation and war? The most important job in the world is growing, serving, and selling food or water, in my mind. That shit job at Food Basics is, well, back to basics. The real stuff. Fuck me and my fucking intellect. (Yes, yes, for the most part, I know the word is what made civilization. That the word is spirit. In the beginning was the word and all that. I’m describing to you THE CRISIS, not the whole meaning of my life.)

It’s a bit of a tragedy that Putrid Scum got panned, but Crad Kilodney was pretty used to his books getting panned. Still, this one is so brilliant that no one should call oneself a writer until they’ve read it. So that they know what they are in for, all of it’s possibilities. Not everyone writes earth-shattering, world-changing literature that makes them rich. It’s more likely going to be something like Crad describes throughout this marvel.

For example: “In any case, happy or not, we are most of us destined to go to our deathbeds stupid and bewildered about life. Each generation repeats this proves: it has learned nothing from the previous generation and will have nothing to impart to the next.”

Or this: “It’s a great mystery how a life can divagate all over the map of possibilities, and it may be my bane as well as my consolation to believe that everything in my life is meant to be.”

“Books gathering dust. Me turning to dust. A whole life destined to become dust. And I thought of tall the book warehouses I’d worked in, with stacks and stacks of books gathering dust,” Crad muses. Continuing, he really gets to the heart of the crisis I’m trying to describe. “It must be a tremendous advantage to have such control over one’s emotions, but how could I become like that without becoming an entirely different person? It seemed to me that people were ruled primarily either by their hearts or by their heads, that this trait was fixed early in life, and that one could only alter the heart/head ration a little bit, if at all, as one got older. I envied people whose intellects were in control of their emotions, because they weathered the storms of life more easily; yet at the same time I often felt annoyed or repelled by them. They seemed unnatural somehow. I put out the light and got under the blanket. What is the correct way to be? How do you change what you are? What will become of me?”

Yep, I’m definitely one of those emotional ones, though I like to think my intellect has some fortitude here and there. I laugh now to think that when Crad drifted by fate into my life- as my mentor, but I didn’t know it then- that I told him in no uncertain terms that his bitter attitude had no place at my dinner table. His jaded comments about people from other genders, orientations, countries, and age brackets were all fine and dandy within his literature, but at a time in my life where I was learning to change that heart/head ratio, that little bit, I had to surround myself with people who didn’t mumble “burn your feminist books” or “what have the poor ever done for you?”

No mumbling, I told him. I’d impressed Mr. Kilodney in a story I did about his work because, as he said, there were no typos. In a world where most Canadian writers, publishers, and editors were lowlife idiots, my article had been refreshingly free of error.

I do not want to point out, looking back, that the little Idea Factory story actually DID appear with one (not very noticeable) typo. Oops. But it’s too late. It is nothing less than ‘meant to be’ that the most eccentric writer in Canadian history is my mentor. He hates this word, bristling at it, a man who doesn’t even think he’s a good writer. His work “is what it is,” he said when I asked if he thought it was good. He says my work is at least his equal if not superior, but ….well, I can’t agree. Crad’s already weathered the storms, and he’s also written over thirty books, whether or not you or I or he thinks they are good. And in some small way, a smiling light goes off inside his bitter head when I use the word, but I only use the word ‘mentor’ because it is true. I am not one to flatter.

I postponed an intellectual dinner hobnobbing with Mr. Kilodney this week because I was critically depressed. (You see, the story does all tie together despite my digressive habits.) I confessed to him that I’m in treatment at the loony bin, that I’m crying all the time, that I see dead people, that some people have hurt me so much I can’t believe they can live with themselves, and that no one ever bloody well rescued me when I needed help. That I had to figure shit out all by myself, that I’m in pain, that I’m not sure who to trust, and also that I’m not at all certain that a current project, which is moving painfully slowly, will ever see fruition, and I just can’t face it anymore. I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

The Valium wasn’t working, needless to say, and there was nothing ‘the professionals’ or anybody out there could say to the, well, the skeletons in my closet, eating me alive. No one, that is except for my dear Crad.

His email was not very wordy. When he’s not mumbling bitter expletives, he is a man of few words. He told me that I could read the entire Bible in a year at a rate of only four pages a day. This was very practical advice to someone drenched in creative and emotional chaos. I knew right then and there that the cure for this project’s incompletion was continuing consistency, and so I was already on the right path.

As for the rest of it all, no one has a way with truth quite like Mr. Kilodney. “The cure for depression is television,” he stated frankly. And he’s expecting me for dinner and sitcoms on Wednesday.

Lorette C. Luzajic’s poetry book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, reflects on the weight of love and grief. Visit her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net, for more cheerful selections.

The Astronaut

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Inside the Sick World of Anorexia: Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted-a memoir of anorexia and bulimia

Marya Hornbacher’s biography Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia did little to make me more understanding of the sick souls on hunger strike. The whole way through, as my spirit grew more and more disturbed by what I read, I somehow understood that people with eating disorders were reading it for tips and tricks, not to be changed and transformed. I’d already seen online write-ups about Marya as if she were some kind of heroine, one of the few who made it back from 51 pounds and survived the deepest anorexia. But she was a traitor, too, for living, one who wasn’t willing to disappear completely.

With millions starving, it seems endlessly petty to me to worry about extra body fat, never mind a normal issuance. Food, the stuff of family and culture and health is something we are supposed to deny? All the mantras that run through the heads of these self-absorbed, vain little girls is probably about self-loathing and organic mental illness, so I admit I should be more sympathetic and compassionate, and I’m trying, but I was infuriated by the strains of me me me that rose shrilly above the vomit.

How much can a girl hate herself to believe she doesn’t deserve food, especially fat- the most condensed nutrient source? This is not simply about hating the emerging female form, the sexual self developing, or a hunger strike to get mom’s attention. It’s a massive disgust and hatred for human beings- other humans, not just the self. If drinking a glass of orange juice is insane to the anorexic- do we not know that’s LIQUID SUGAR, PURE CALORIES?- it’s obvious the normal natural needs of human beings are disgusting because humans are disgusting. If we are willing to lie to ourselves and to our doctors and parents, it is because we hate them, not just ourselves. The obsession over the body shows not fashion’s tyrannical influence, but our refusal to see the human soul- our own, or anyone else’s. Beauty matters, but great admirers of beauty through all of time have known it is the spirit and life behind the beauty that set it on fire. Beauty matters, but starvation is not beautiful, and nor is barfing all the time.

Marya’s a very talented writer and her prose, though disturbing, is elegant and honest. She was also ballsy enough to say anorexia and bulimia are bullshit, sick self-centred lies the mind uses to betray the self. This is pretty much heresy in the anorexia cults of ‘thinspiration’ where those starving strive to support each other through to death, instead of telling it like it is. And it IS bullshit, ladies and gentlemen. Eating disorders kill more people than any other mental illness, including substance abuse! Because those with eating disorders tend to be unable to think rationally for themselves and prone to be highly competitive, I would not suggest this book to the sick. But if your friend or family member is suffering, it’s probably a good idea to read it because you are no doubt in denial. Most people, myself included, had no idea how consuming and obsessive eating disorders are. I assumed that on occasion a person may look in the mirror and think, “oh, gross” or that they might throw up after eating a Chinese buffet. No, they are thinking of nothing but, ever, anytime. This text is as naked and raw as you’ll get, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Still, I guess I wanted Marya to explain it all to me, make me like her as a person, and fix the problem that is destroying families and lives. Instead, I was left with a very intimate understanding of the mechanisms of hatred, the very un-glamourous and ugly rituals that feed people with this sickness when they are starving, and I didn’t like Marya at all. But I understand that there is not much to like. She is hardly human. Her entire life, since age 9, was spent planning binges and throwing up. Outside of these things, she had little identity. Her self-obsession was relentless, and her manipulations and lies of those who loved her gave her great thrills. What little there was of identity was spent high on drugs or obsessively planning her next starvation fraud.

That said, two revelations resonated deeply within me: one, none of the so-called theories so far are true. You can’t catch anorexia from a fashion magazine. If you get it from looking at the changing fashions, you already have it. Marya doesn’t agree with me on this- she says everywhere she looked, she saw women eating like birds. I don’t know about that. There are now more obese people in the world than there are starving people! As far as men’s approval, no man looks at Vogue and goes “yeah, wanna bone me a bone rack tonight!” No way. They head to the curvy hills of Penthouse where fleshy, buxom women reign, as they always have. “Normal’ is just the starting point- many men of many cultures prefer something meatier, right on up to what we might medically consider obese. So despite my recoiling from this dark hatred of the world and the self, this disease of living in excess instead of in Africa where we might just worry about survival, I have to conclude that it is at least in part a biological illness. There is no way in hell anyone would choose this disease. And there is no way anyone at age nine would begin counting food bites and throwing up daily over the day’s fashion. Soon, the insanity is amplified by lack of nutrients, which causes a whole wide range of psychiatric symptoms that stem simply from malnourishment of the brain and vital organs.

Second, I hated most of all how much I could relate to Marya’s madness. I am not anorexic, evidently. I am one of the women Marya and her hospital buddies would call a fat pig or a disgusting slob. Still, on my better days, I believe I am still worthy despite my size 16 curves: I am sexy, fun, gorgeous, and confident. I have much more than my body going on, but I’m pretty happy with my body. I accept it for what it is. I work out, I eat right, and I enjoy indulging occasionally, but even if I eat barely anything, I don’t lose weight. So I have to accept myself the way I am, and keep eating a range of vitamins and stay on my bicycle. The last time I threw up was because of the flu. The real flu, not a made up one that happened after I had two teaspoons of low-cal rice pudding. Sure, I wish I could be a size 12- still a disgusting, greedy cow to these bitter, twisted sisters- because I could do without the rolls on my stomach or the cankles, quite frankly. I accept what I have, but it would be nice if it were nicer. Still, I have other things going on in life- a career, pets, friendships, reading. I can’t spend all my time thinking about something as superficial and self-centred as my surface, not all the time.

But I’m not exactly well adjusted either, just because I didn’t draw this particular insanity out of the hat. Manic, obsessive, neurotic thought patterns and high anxieties have peppered my artist’s life through and through. A multitude of diagnoses came my way when I wanted to have labels to help define ‘what was wrong with me.’ I was prone to addictions, vices of every sort, including chaos. To say I have an impulsive personality is an understatement. And I’m a grateful recovering addict. Worse, I was a doormat for vampires of every type. After university, I threw away my meds and stayed in yoga. I gave up drugs but stayed a lush. I left my therapist and promised to spend the therapy money on good books and new lingerie. I drew boundaries, at least to have something to aim for.

We all find what works. I stopped trying to ‘fix’ the things that weren’t really the end of the world.

Still, some biological imbalance or emotional cue response went haywire disguised as self-preservation. Thing is, it does for everyone, and no one’s perfect, not even the people who may contribute to our neurotic perceptions. At one point, whether we’re afraid of fat or afraid of failure or afraid of men or afraid of monsters, we have to decide we’re going to live well anyway.

The problem? It’s a painstakingly slow process. Buddhism teaches that all disappointment and frustration is attached to expectation. Expecting an outcome or result leads to sorrow. But there’s no magic pill for learning to love others and ourselves just the way we are. I hope Marya and those similarly afflicted find that strength. I hope we can all stop letting our sicknesses define us, look outside our self-absorbed little world into the bigger picture.

Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Marya Hornbacher
Harper Collins, New York, 1998.

You can order Marya’s book, or others through:
chapters.indigo.ca

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You’ve seen her work in everything from Dog Fancy to Adbusters to Quarry to Grain to Xtra! and all over the internet. Her book The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos was praised by bestselling authors Tom Harpur and Thomas Moore. You can order it through her site, or online through indigo.ca.

In Which the Author Goes on at Length About Greg Bottom’s Book The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

The more I see as I’m running up that hill is that pathology is everywhere you look. The word ‘normal’ has little meaning, beyond showing a societal and cultural construct of what it esteemed. That what may appear on the surface in any given setting is not really there becomes more and more clear. “Normal” possibly doesn’t exist, and certainly it is minority, within any given society and the mores therein. I mean, growing up, I thought I was absolutely neurotic, with my weird little rituals and a full cast melodrama at home, the little fantasies, the anxieties. In the 20s I spent a great deal of time in therapy working through the mire. I was gung-ho for the pills, too, curious as hell, if Prozac could make me better than well. Guess I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Paxil made me suicidal. Wellbrutrin was great, sort of, was it? It was hard to tell if it was placebo, or if my thoughts were really calmer. It could have been me starting to mellow out. I think truly it was probably the yoga that I began around then, also in search of balance.

Then, sometime around 30, I wondered what the hell I was struggling so hard to be sane for, when the entire damn world was a nut job. The only illness is in trying to make sense of the thing. I was prone to extreme analysis, as a writer, but I wanted to start thinking about other people’s madness and not mine.

You start to put pictures together. Whole pictures. You see various levels of shit. So you know you fit in here: not as balanced as some, not as bad off as others. You stop thinking of what it ‘should’ be like, lose the weight of unrealistic goals of capability and grandeur, start accepting the way things are, realistically, and work harder on the possible stuff, let up on the rest. You start being real grateful for how well you’ve managed- some blow their brains out, some have lost children, some see little flashing lights in the sky or cameras in the trees. You’re fully functional girl, come on now.

I’ve been drawn to outsider art since I stumbled on Margaret’s Grocery during my Kerouac trails in days of more bravado. Zappa For President! our humble pick up voted, rolling past all the blues into a topsy-turvy red and white lego-esque world where we bought warm Coca Colas from a dim little counter. Margaret told us that her husband, the ‘Reverend’ was the artist who had turned every surface in sight into a red and white painted tribute to the Lord. Bible verses, my mother tongue, were scrawled everywhere. My girlfriend and I were young hippies, visionaries who believed in the goddess and LSD. We were vegetarians. Luminaries. I was the bard; Julie Ann was the one who’d be able to make a fire in the woods and kill the bugs that came near me. Now THIS strange little market was something worth analyzing. But analyze it? I couldn’t even describe it.

Years and years later I chanced on a pricey art mag that was resplendent with colourful, juicy, crazy pictures and magical thinking. It was right up my alley- voodoo, mermaids, Bible stories, and schizophrenics. All that messy childhood and the New Orleans I’d taken in, mixed with a madwoman in a book shop who told me to paint my way through upcoming sorrows, had made me newly into something of an artist. I’d dabbled in art as a teen, but now I felt compelled to follow the orders of the lady in the yellow dress. She had told me that I simply had no idea how many friends I was going to lose, and if that I were to live through it, I’d better paint. I didn’t know, but a few days after the conversation, one of my best friends was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. I picked up my paintbrush.

I set store in fate. Now, fated again, I found a magazine that had ‘voodoo art’, something I found quaint because my very first art show was called “VOODOO- art can bend your mind.” And inside an issue of Raw Vision Magazine was where I saw that strange old Lego world of Margaret’s Grocery. Outsider art- the unschooled, message-driven, unrefined, multi-media, apocalyptic, rapture-pending, hallucination-spun work of insane visionaries.

Oh, fuck. How I hoped to be an Outsider Artist! At last I’d found the art world I fit into- not the established academia or art snobbery, where everyone knows no one knows. Not the world where a red square would sell for two billion dollars, but the world where a man would paint from the inside out, his truth and its changes, on anything he could find.

And yes, I was “unschooled”- at least in art- not even an artist, yet, really. I was raised on Baptist truths though I’m un-baptized- not even God wanted me back then. I painted on boards and glued magnetic alphabet pieces and doll parts into assemblages, too! But alas, I wasn’t really all that peculiar. Outsider artists are outsiders- they are former slaves who took up painting at 83 and made 15 thousand works. They are instititutionalized geniuses who drew intricate patterns out of everything from pencils to feces. They are people so poor that they practically painted crates to make Margaret’s Grocery. Sometimes God told them to do it, and sometimes it was the devil.

So began a fascinating passion for me- not so much the ‘study of’ but an experience of outsider art. I’ve read Raw Vision and other books. I’ve been to a few museums and plan to travel to Baltimore, always have, as soon as I have a dime to spare. Magical religious stuff and addictions are interesting to me, so the art of people with those experiences is something I take in. I always stop for ‘folk art’ signs and love learning about the expressions of the marginalized or the unusual. While I’ve questioned whether I’m being patronizing- oh, aren’t those poor little poor insane people nifty?

But the truth is, I’ve always been fascinated by the other artists too- you know, the other crazy poor little poor artists, like Van Gogh, and a whole host of other suicide ones whose paintings sell for millions. Once again, it’s that thing- crazy? Yeah, and so is everybody else…You know, like Britney, flipping her lid out loud. But then there was Berlioz, the French composer of Symphonie Fantastique, an obsessive love poem for his heart-throb, who planned to murder another of his fiancées out of jealousy and was found walking through Paris in a woman’s wig, carrying a bag of oranges. See what I mean?

Now if you are one of the very few ‘normal’ ones in ‘healthy’ relationships, with a ‘balanced’ lifestyle, relative ‘health,’ few ‘problems,’ a moderate but never fanatical spirituality, (sorry, atheism isn’t quite normal yet- it’s ALWAYS been fringe) and you have no relationship whatsoever to drugs, alcohol, or prescriptive medicines, you might be thinking “now, those are all artist nuts.”

Sure. Creative types tend to be highly visible. But today I saw a lady pushing a baby carriage at the store. Inside the carriage was a Pekinese dog in a bonnet and booties. A man called this morning but it was the wrong number. When I said, “no worries, have a nice day” he yelled, “Who do you think you are, Marilyn? I know he’s there with you!” And last week came the news- not of blow jobs in the white house, but of blow in the white house. When the Zero Tolerance old-timers are running a White White House on the cocaine-fueled Harvard days of yester-yore while blathering on about how God hates Muslims (and faggots), you might think you’re at the end of the world. But you’re not. This is just everyday life, and it always has been.

Greg Bottoms is an amazing writer. His unforgettable memoir Angelhead; My Brother’s Descent into Madness was one of the stories that made me look around at my life and think, honey, this ain’t nothin. Although drugs made two men I loved into paranoids, neither of them tried to kill my father or anything like that. Beyond the story itself is his poetic ability to convey the nuances, the terrors, the underlying currents of humour that occasionally tuck into the most devastating of circumstances.

After his brother’s death, Greg went looking at some art by a handful of religious outsider artists who seemed to have some experiences in common with his schizophrenic brother. He saw some parallels that merited deeper exploration, and so he went deeper.

“Each of the artists in the book experienced an extreme religious epiphany after a time of daunting anxiety and stress and intolerable pressure—this epiphany led to the outpouring of art, in exactly the same way that it did for the “schizophrenic artists” in Prinzhorn’s book. These epiphanies—in a secular, scientific light—would be diagnosed as mental breakdowns, of course. So perspective and semantics become an interesting part of the investigation, so to speak. The human mind must rationalize and relativize experience, keep reshaping it, naming it, making it useful—when it can’t there lies an abyss just ahead,” Greg said in an interview with the University of Chicago Press.

In his foreword, he writes: “That’s how these travels began: absurdly, one might say, or at least haphazardly; with a tinny radio voice, a notebook, and a sudden, unwieldy uprush of memories, the themes of my personal past-illness, breakdown, the myths and symbols of Christianity- flooding through me again like a great, gray wave. I set for myself, that day in the car, a few simple tasks: to travel and look and listen and record. I didn’t know what I would find.”

I went with Greg to visit Norbert Kox, an ex-biker who paints ‘apocalyptic parables’ and Myrtice West, who started painting her visions after her daughter was murdered.

Reading about the artists from the perspective of both the academic (but not ‘art critic’- Greg’s a writer and professor) and one with some proximity to madness personally is refreshing. Greg’s journey is not a volume of poetry, but it could be. The book is slim enough to digest even if you just want to wade into the colorful but macabre world of outsider art. But there’s enough depth to sustain even those who’ve read everything about madness, religion, or outsider art.

Greg says himself that he kind of fell into being a writer by mistake. “I remember feeling a jittery uneasiness, like an itch below the skin, about having been portrayed as some hero-survivor, a success story. I felt, in fact, after a couple of interviews about the book, that I had done nothing more than sell my tragedy in an au courant literary form, the trauma memoir, which courts, in this cultural moment, self-aggrandizement, even if that …is half-buried under iron or self-depreciation. What had I done for my brother, or for schizophrenics? Made a few bucks for myself, become a ‘writer’ and received some praise for my ‘bravery’-bravery?- and crisp prose style.”

That Greg lets run-on sentences like that fly is a relief to my wordy, digressive prose style that I always hope is strangely alluring but fear may simply lack succinctness. I’m aware of my wordiness, my use of commas to pause the flow, just for a lull of it, and to keep showing the flow with a new thought, one I hope is poetic, emotive, luminous and illuminating. It amounts to just loving words so much, and being so damn emotional, at the same time. When editing, I look for a period at least every other line, give or take, otherwise I’m in there, making the sentences shorter. They do not come out short, naturally!

Now, it’s true that Greg’s got a few books out, but still refers to himself as a ‘writer’ inside quotations. He’s hardly a renowned literary figure, though I suspect that will change due to the personal quality, the integrity, and the swiftness of his eye for peculiar and pertinent details. His writing is smart and lovely to read at the same time. That he is almost shy, almost reticent about imposing his observations on our psyches makes him all the more astonishing, for somehow he earns my trust in the foreword, where he talks about being an unbeatable REM-loving teenager. “We wanted to be bigger than life, bigger than tragedy,” he confesses. The way he talks about meaning, you know he’s really looking for it. And after what he’s been through, meaning isn’t something contrived from a first year psych of religion class.

As a writer, Greg may be just a few books in, and I’m not in any of his classes, but I say fully that he’s my teacher. He could say what he wanted to say- despite those commas and hyphen-sliced racing thoughts and introspections – in 175 pages. One can delve further, into many great writers and thinking that he mentions. But for what it is- something vast and yawning, still about the dead brother, the growing up with madness stuff many of us are still trying to sort out- chasing that in ourselves, but growing confidently as we relate to a world half absent through loss- well, so we find each other.

Now I’ll say that not everyone’s a big fan like I am. It seems two of the artists believe that Greg intentionally misrepresented them due a huge conspiracy on his part. A writer that never says anything bad about his subjects still got blasted for his woeful misinterpretation of their art. In fact, the Thompson and Kox number on the cover was conspiratorially reduced in print to evade some of the numeral additions that would lead up to 666. Greg had me feeling for you guys, you and your schizo world where the Masons, the Illuminati, the false church, and Mary the Whore of Babylon are everywhere. Now that you have recoiled from his intuitive and gentle gaze, I can only say, “nutters.’ Sorry, friends. I loved a man very much, but it ripped me to shreds, a man who thought there were fibre-optic cameras in my pet’s eyeballs, a man who thought I’d created a web portal called Spy on Bob, when the site was for a video game called SpyBot. He thought I worked for Mac Computers along with my father, taking swabs of his saliva and acne juice while he slept.

If these artists can’t see the gentleness, the tenderness of Greg’s interaction, if they can’t see outside themselves into his world of loss and paranoia and hell, they are missing out on an unusual and spiritual blessing- the one of being contemplated. When someone contemplates our creation, we must never take that for granted, even if the conclusion is different than was our intent. There are six billion voices out there. If someone listens to ours, say thank-you Lord, even when we are sure they’re not quite getting it.

It seems the accusation is that they are portrayed as a bit off the rocker. That he was reading his books about mental health, looking for a diagnosis, because of his brother. Hello? Yes, that’s right, more or less. I mean, come on, I love it when the mad are functional enough with their systems of survival. But let’s not wear kid gloves here and pull around at semantics. Crazy? Hell, yes, my artist friends. As Greg says in one of his art-defending posts, this time his own, the Catholics and the Jews and the Masons could all be suing these artists for what they say about conspiracies. But they don’t want to waste their time, I surmise- with someone not fit to withstand trial.

Let me illustrate here that these wonderful artists evidently misunderstood that other artists also have perspective, legitimate perspective, that their universe of truth is nowhere near the only reality. One criticism they made was that Greg’s book was called “The Colorful Apocalypse” but that there were no colour illustrations inside the book! These are people with whom Greg never meant to engage in any kind of exchange except peaceful- but they are indeed people, like many fundamentalist Christians, who believe their perspective is the only true one, and that all the Catholics are going to hell, and so are the ‘heatherns.’

I live in that world Greg mentions, the world some people experience, full of magic rituals and special signs, and the world where every coincidence means something. I realized early on it was a little unusual to mention my peculiar beliefs in certain circles. The church folk thought Tarot and other symbolic fromage of the Old Age were devil rituals. The secular university colleagues thought both Tarot and Christian iconographies I was fond of were for weak-minded spiritualists. I got more religious than ever, but kept it to myself. Then the signs started leaping around so strongly- the lady in the yellow dress for example who told me I had no idea how many friends I would lose just before a string of events where about ten very close loved ones would die in a medley or tragic circumstances, seldom relating one to another, just random death coming my way from every angle. Given that the art she encouraged me to make is truly what has kept me from flipping out, I say loudly and clearly that I believe in signs. So what? Take me away? Like many other nutbars, I’m a contributing member of society, of no harm to anyone, and quite productive in work, in church, socially.

Things are nutty, tenuous, hysterical at times. But I’ve found the ways of ordering chaos that work for me, little ways, baby steps, but no going backwards. That’s a big deal. I’m moving forward.

Tonight there’s no way Greg could see into my home. But if he did, he’d conclude I’m fairly normal, on the Richter scale but…the art on my walls is making sense of a lot of things. Hopes to Escape, one says. I don’t look like a widow, says another. One, a gun to your head, a gun borrowed from Roy Lichtenstein the art crowd might notice. These are all about the crazy world of methamphetamine madness, one that nearly emptied me even though I was not on it. Three beloved are dead. There is one survivor. And the good wife, me. So fucking solid.

But I am. Just like that woman told me, I found strength through my art. The salvation is in creation, just like Greg observed so astutely in his journeys. Art is a place where nothing can hurt us, no one can stop us, nothing can enslave us. All of us, them, me, you.

And what about this Greg Bottoms character, who has now offended the insane whom he was showing reverence for?

He makes it all clear in closing his story. “As an amateur, I am never, not even on Halloween, an art scholar, art theorist, cultural anthropologist, sociologist, ethnographer. Many days I’m simply the guy cutting lawns or changing diapers. This book then, is my willfully subjective presentation of a sliver of a sliver of the world of outsider art….”

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She has written for dozens of magazines and web portals including Adbusters, Geez, Book Slut, Gremolata, Dog Fancy, Women Can Do Anything, The Fiddlehead, White Wall Review, and more.

There’s Something in the Meth

Ever hear a paranoid meth freak tell you that there’s something in the methamphetamine? I heard this time and time again. Dude, yes, there is. There’s meth in your meth.

Of course, there must be someone manipulating the stock for mind control purposes, for alien abductions, for attic laboratories. One roommate felt ‘violated’ by the recording devices hidden in stuffed animals. One user was sure that there was ‘something poisonous” in the meth he was using.

If you’ve watched a friend, roommate, parent, or child go mad from methamphetamine, you know there’s no hysteria in the meth hysteria today. It’s not reefer madness, it’s real. And help is hard to find once those neurons that let you hope and think and feel are destroyed. There’s a generation of human shells walking around. Dead men walking.

Sure, you can blame it all on people stupid enough to try the stuff, but cut some slack for those who made an impulsive choice. Have you tried alcohol? Good thing it’s not quite as lethal, at least not as quickly. I tried it twice, way back before Marko died, always up to try another good time. I didn’t have one, so I didn’t revisit it. I’m lucky.

Today another 25-year old girl was found dead, one of the few survivors from the old circle of friends ‘upstairs on Parliament Street.’ Five years of intensive psychiatric care, and a shrink stupid enough to prescribe Adderall for her addiction problem! Adderall, like Ritalin but worse, hardwires the mind to need speed. It’s nearly the same thing as methamphetamine, just not quite as strong or fast acting. The poor girl, once a vivacious, beautiful dreamer spent five years as a mere skeleton, checking the walls for bugs (both kinds), refusing to eat, scratching holes in her face. She died alone after one last hurrah. I’m speechless, but sadly, I’ve been in this place before. Marry, then bury. What can stop this? I’m not sure.

In all the recent press about poor little crazy girl Britney Spears, my heart has gone out for a pop icon I didn’t really care for before. With the immense pressures of fame, her impulsivity which I among many share, her disastrous marriage, and her serious postpartum depression, there’s only the money to assuage the emptiness. I always joked that I would like to ‘try’ and see if money could help my instabilities. All I am saying, is give cash a chance. Well, my dear Ms. Spears has illustrated its helplessness in restoring self-esteem or happiness. Her latest irrational incident holding her son hostage allegedly was a nightmare scenario of her losing her mind, muttering that K-Fed had planted the bugs in her home. DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? Not one person, including her medical spokespeople, has ever pointed out the paranoia and madness that comes from the Adderall. COULD HAVE BEEN THE METH IN THE METH. While her alcohol and Ecstasy use have been greatly examined, has anyone thought that the treatment might be the cause?

I researched so many treatments, police and psychiatric programs, medical and naturopathic care, and drew a big blank. Even the seasoned psychiatric staff at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and the judges in drug court, had no bleeding idea how to talk to, care for, or protect the meth addict. The drug-induced rage you hear about in zombie flicks is science fiction for the most part, but not when it comes to the meth in your meth. It’s terrifying for the few who are able to put the drug down and go on, they may or may not be better off. Many effects of the instantaneous brain damage are permanent. Which means you may always be convinced your wife is part of a CIA plot. Or you may always be unable to feel an emotion because you have no more dopamine wiring.

I likely wouldn’t be so reactionary if I weren’t still doing the body count. And it’s not about ‘my circle.’ Truck drivers, ministers, and dieting housewives are constantly making the news for their descent into meth. Apparently, it feels so good at first, and then after your first three-day bender, you’re already certifiably insane and you’re just waiting it out until the end. You might starve to death before you overdose.

In some ways it’s the Government Liars’ fault for being so hysterical about other drugs and not arming people with reasonable facts and choices. Everyone who grew up in the Just Say No generation can’t trust the information they were given. Obviously, marijuana didn’t cause murderous rampages, so the info about meth must also be outlandish. It makes you feel terrific and thin and able to complete two double shifts, a bonus if you need the money, as most blue collar North Americans do. In fact, job efficiency and productivity is the main reason the drug is becoming an epidemic in Thailand and other Asian countries. Life’s a bitch, then you work, then you die.

Please pray for E. and her family and friends. If you have any strategies or information or an inspirational story that might help, please share it. I feel incredibly hopeless today. The madness is not just far away in the hills of Hollywood, safe for a greedy gossip gorge. It’s close to home, mine and yours, too. Let’s pray for each other and share any answers or hope that we can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17808933/#storyContinued

http://todaystoronto.com/content/view/100/88/
My review of Toronto author’s book about meth.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html
The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.