The Tyranny of Health

OK—if I’m alive today and writing this, it’s all because of a legend, though a legend who has escaped the fate of most of us: Having our first mention in a Google search be “Helen Whitman is on Facebook!”

Or was her first name Helen? Because I had it in my mind that her name was “Ernestine,” but that Whitman appears to have been a flutist whom I knew in the music school, not the Mrs. Whitman I knew as a head nurse at UW Hospital and Clinics.

It’s fitting, really, that I don’t know—did I ever?—her first name, since she was very much not on informal bases with anybody, much less her nurses. She was Mrs. Whitman, and everybody else was Miss or Mr. or Doctor whomever, and she applied the rule as rigidly as she applied her white nursing cap.

She ran her ward in a way that made Mrs. Thatcher look like a slacker, and no, it’s not true that she applied starch to her uniform. Rather, any uniform that Mrs. Whitman chose to wear was expected to comply with her own high standards: No creases or wrinkles ever appeared. Nor was it the case that her name was ever spoken: Rather, it was whispered.

She appeared one spring day with serious scratches on her legs: Obviously I couldn’t ask her what had happened, but a senior nurse whispered the news to me. Mrs. Whitman had “awoken” her rose bed for the season, and was I surprised? Of course not: I was gardening myself at the time, and passionately involved with heritage roses: Wonderful shrubs with tremendous French names—Madame Alfred Carriere or Souvenir de Malmaison. True, they tended to bloom only once, and they could be unruly. But Mrs. Whitman? No, she strode into the world of modern roses, much as she strode onto the unit each morning, with an appetite for errant medical students, one or two of which she would consume for breakfast (she munched steadily through the day on anyone at hand….) So of course she would have tackled the reigning hypochondriacs of the garden, with all their wilts and rots and mildews and mites. Had she been an animal lover, she would have had Siamese cats, and had them lining up in order of seniority for roll call each morning and night.

Nor was it true that no patient ever dared die on Mrs. Whitman’s unit. What can be said is that they all—terrified into obedience—waited until after Mrs. Whitman had relinquished her ward to the PM or night shifts.

Detour—my mother had three children. After the eldest child was born, in 1945, my mother spent a month in the hospital, on strict bed rest, with a long, wonderful backrub at the end on the day, and plenty of rejuvenating rest, since look—the lady had just had a baby, for God’s sakes! Anybody could see that she’d been through a hell of an ordeal!

There was a problem, of course, since after a month of lying in bed? Well, those ladies were weak, and then being sent home to care for a newborn. So for the second child—born in 1950—the month got chopped down to two weeks. And for me, born in 1956?

“Dr. Thornton strode into the room and said, ‘get up, Mrs. Newhouse, and walk!’ just hours after you were born. And I never did get a decent back rub….”

I tell you this because I had a second—and last—cataract surgery on Tuesday, and now, three days later, what has my doctor told me?

“You can do anything but bungee jumping!”

Yeah?

The surgery was not without a wrinkle or two, since it appears that the operation can be rough on the cornea. And what that meant was that the eye was swollen, painful, and mightily inflamed.

“Soak your eye in prednisone,” said the doctor, so I did. And what else did I do?

“I’ll be OK to give class on Thursday morning,” I told my newest student, who looked skeptical. Right so then I cancelled on Wednesday afternoon, and then cancelled Friday’s class as well. Why? Because it wasn’t the pain or the inflammation that was the problem: I was utterly exhausted.

I went to bed and felt guilty: I should be up and doing something about the weed trees growing in the back balcony. But wait—did I really want to be out there sweating, with my hands in the dirt, and wiping my brow? Look, I wasn’t supposed even to be reading!

I twitched, I jittered—I fell asleep and woke to guilt / shame staring me relentlessly in the face. And then I had the revelation….

Mrs. Whitman!

“You’re not to leave this bed under any circumstances,” she said, “and I’m sending Miss Porter in to attend to those hospital corners.” She sniffed, and then paused at the door. “I’ll be right outside, at the nursing station.”

Bliss!

Well, I mused about her, since I had been reading a book by Robert Whittaker: Here’s what one writer had to say:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Crown 2010), by the journalist Robert Whitaker, is one of the most disturbing, consequential works of investigative journalism I’ve read in a long time. Perhaps ever. Whitaker has persuaded me that American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis—harmful medical treatment–in history.

Well, my brother had recommended it to me, and my brother—unlike me—does not suffer depression. Shouldn’t it be “suffer from?” No, I meant that my brother, along with so many others, thinks that if I just got myself together, took a good long walk, and thought positive thoughts, all would be well. Am I being fair to my brother? No, of course not. But until you’ve been seriously depressed, it’s hard to imagine the peculiar hell of the noonday demon.

Well, I had read enough of the book to overcome my initial irritation. Then I had had my surgery. Then I pondered the fact that, with all our wonderful treatments for depression, the incidence of the disease is soaring, not dropping. So what gives?

It’s the tyranny of good health, I concluded. Because at no time in history have we been more healthy, and isn’t it time to speculate that sickness has a place in our evolutionary history? Even the most dreaded disease—cancer—is no excuse to take to your bed for extended periods of time: You have your chemotherapy one day, are sick as a kitten the next day, and are back peering at your computer screen at the office the next day. Repeat week after week until remission.

Consider the cancer of the 19^th century: Tuberculosis. Anybody reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain will know the story. Here’s Wikipedia’s telling sentence:

In the opening chapter, Hans is symbolically transported away from the familiar life and mundane obligations he has known, in what he later learns to call "the flatlands", to the rarefied mountain air and introspective little world of the sanatorium.       

Well, a serious blogger would look into it, would see if anybody has proposed the theory: Robbed of the illnesses that would take us to our beds, isolate us, force us to look inward, put us in darkness, we have created depression, and are suffering vast amounts of it. Man spent most of his existence working outside during the day, and sleeping during the night. Now we are chained to our devices, and outside, for most of us, is the walk from office to car. So I should look into all this, except…

…Mrs. Whitman is ordering me back to bed!

Two Bloggers and Twelve Old Men

OK—here’s what I hadn’t considered. First of all, the people are really nice: friendly, cheerful, and definitely hard working. Second of all, the church keeps you busy, going from meeting to prayer groups to God-knows-what-all. Remember that they had organized everybody so much that they had to declare a special night for everyone just to stay home? Also, the church takes over the smallest details of your life—even down to that famous underwear….

You’ll know by now that I’m talking about the Mormon Church, which fought like Tasmanian devils against marriage equality in California, then backed off and pretended to get more inclusive when Mitt Romney was running for president, and which now is accusing two of its members of—ah, the horror of it all!—apostasy.

Well, it’s a highly charged word in Mormon circles, since the Mormons, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, believe in the Great Apostasy. You’ll want to know: it’s the belief that everybody and every religion was wrong from the death of Jesus to the birth of their own church.

So what have the two Mormons done to get this label thrust on them? Well, John Dehlin advocates for the rights of LGBT people within the church. Kate Kelly set up a group that advocates for the ordination of women, as well as for increasing the role of women in the church.

Both have gotten letters from their local bishops, advising them that they will be tried and face either disfellowship or excommunication. Disfellowship may take various forms, but excommunication is dire indeed: you are erased from the church as if you had never existed. And though the church doesn’t officially practice shunning, your social calendar will definitely be much lighter. Oh, and all those business contacts? You might be leaving a lot of voice mails, and getting fewer returned calls.

And so for these two, excommunication is a major, and perhaps terrifying, possibility. Consider what one writer had to say:

Mormonism is an "all or nothing" commitment, Rosen explains. "If Pandora's box is opened regarding questioning one policy or mandate, it leads to more, because it's all connected. It's not like other religions, where you can accept some parts and reject other parts. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle. You have to accept every [church-mandated] 'calling.' You have to go to every three-hour church meeting. If I didn't go [to synagogue] for six months, the rabbi would be like, 'I am so happy to see you.' You can't do that as a Mormon."

Ready for the next paragraph?

Utah has the highest rate of clinical depression out of any state in the country, and the seventh highest suicide rate, according to a report by Thomson Healthcare. Rosen believes the LDS stance on homosexuality contributes to these statistics. One third of her patients are homosexuals who grew up LDS, and many of them were kicked out of their homes.

Well, it’s not surprising that Utah has the highest rate of depression, since wouldn’t you be depressed, attending up to thirty hours of church activities weekly, and having to smile all the time?

Right—that’s unfair, and especially wrong since Dehlin, who is straight, has taken a big risk for those of us who are LGBT. Besides his website Mormon Stories, he also has another site advocating gay marriage. And he’s finishing up his doctorate in counseling at Utah State University—not a particularly easy time to be butting the twelve elderly white male heads that run the church. But you have to admire a guy who can write, as he did in his website:

I believe in many of the central, non-distinctive moral teachings within Mormonism (e.g., love, kindness, charity, forgiveness, faith, hope), but either have serious doubts about, or no longer believe many of the fundamental LDS church truth claims (e.g., anthropomorphic God, “one true church with exclusive authority,” that the current LDS church prophet receives privileged communications from God, that The Book of Mormon and The Book of Abraham are translations, polygamy, racist teachings in the Book of Mormon, that ordinances are required for salvation, proxy work for the dead).

So on 7 June 2014, Dehlin got the letter that he must have been dreading. And the following day, Kelly got the letter as well. In her case, the trial will be this Sunday. In Dehlin’s case, it will be 29 June 14.

And while neither one could be criticized for losing some sleep over the matter, Kelly’s case seems to be particularly acute. Consider, for example, that she got a whole group of women together and tried to enter a male-only meeting on the priesthood at the tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Here are her heartbreaking words:

I suppose I didn’t realize until I was at the door and physically barred from entering the Tabernacle just how hopeful I was that we would indeed get in. I told the man who blocked us from entering, “I understand that all men, even men who are not members of the church and have no investment in Mormonism are permitted to attend. I am a returned missionary and a faithful Mormon woman and I would like to listen to the prophet in person.”

He simply said, “this session is actually for men only.”

And as difficult it is to read, it’s infinitely more painful to see the clip below.

I’ll never know—which would have been better, to be (as I am) a non-believer, or to grow up in some faith, have it enrich my life, rage against it when I came out, and then, perhaps, make my peace with it? What I do know is that believing in the church, wanting to be in the church, and then being expelled would be infinitely painful, especially in Utah.

And while I very much hope that these two courageous souls can prevail…

…I’m not putting money on it.

Standing with Dr. Proudie

Living in Puerto Rico, it didn’t seem surprising that I knew someone who knew Andrew Solomon, since everybody on the island knows everybody else. Still, why should I have run into someone who not only knew Solomon, but had been to his wedding at Althorp, the family home of the Spencers, of which Diana, Princess of Wales, was one?

The guy explained—they were childhood friends, since Solomon’s father had been head of a pharmaceutical here on the island. And so they had remained friends, though Solomon had attended Yale and later Jesus College, Cambridge. Solomon’s story had similarities to my own: we’re both gay, we’re both depressives, he had written a book about the planned death of his mother, and I had written a book about my mother’s life and, especially, death.

More, his book on depression was titled The Noonday Demon: an Atlas of Depression, which was a phrase I had encountered when reading up on acedia. So I had contemplated reading the book, but decided no; it was too recent, you see, my own last bitter bout with the disease.

But I’ve returned, over time, to consider the disease, or the condition, or perhaps just the mindset of depression. And the fact that I can write that depression may be a quality or state of mind indicates how tricky, how elusive, depression can be.

Because Solomon is right—in some ways the world of depression seems like the real world. Really, is there any sense cleaning your house? It’s just going to get dirty again, as will your body, so showering is out, and eating? You’d have to open that refrigerator and get a nose-full of all that rotting food you’ve not had the energy to throw out, and besides, getting out of the chair? Too much work….

Following this logic leads to tumbling down the very slippery slope that ends up—as it did to Solomon—with his lying in bed, unable to get up, and unable to extend his arm for four hours.

As Solomon remarks in the clip below, depressives in some ways see the world more clearly. Most people, for example, overestimate their abilities, and certainly most people underestimate the amount of time and trouble that things will take. And that was one of the problems you had—or at least I had—in the university. Of course I can research and write a fifty-page term paper the day before it’s due! Hey, no problem!

And so the cheery optimism that most people arm themselves with is highly adaptive, but not necessarily real or true. It may be true, as Thoreau said, that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, but a great many of those men—and women—get through their days by telling themselves that everything is fine, and will get better.

Will it? Not for a depressive, or at least not for a depressive who cannot do the simple, rational thing: pick up the phone and call a therapist. Because paradoxically, the farther you have sunk into the pit of depression, the less likely you will somehow manage to crawl out of it.

And Solomon asks the question: is there anything to be found in that pit? Any diamonds, or even lumps of coal? Isn’t depression linked to creativity?

I don’t think so. Yes, the depression I endured may have lead to more compassion, more understanding of suffering in others. Yes, for philosophic reasons, I have to embrace my depression, since it’s part of me, it’s part of what shaped me.

But when I was severely depressed, creativity was impossible. And even if it had been there, would I have had the patience, the endurance to learn a Bach suite or write a book? Those are more than acts of faith, they’re inherently improbable shots in the dark. And the likelihood that anyone will hear the suite or buy the book? Not high….

Really, the worst part of the depression I suffered was the loss of so much joy in the world. But it was more than that. For decades, I was starting ten feet behind everyone else in whatever race we were running. And the effect of losing so many races meant that I was pulled farther and farther behind everyone else. The feet became yards, the yards miles.

Most people…well, let me copy and paste from Wikipedia’s article on the epidemiology of depression:

People are most likely to suffer their first depressive episode between the ages of 30 and 40, and there is a second, smaller peak of incidence between ages 50 and 60.[8] The risk of major depression is increased with neurological conditions such as stroke, Parkinson's disease, or multiple sclerosis and during the first year after childbirth.

My depression started when I was in my teens, and may have stemmed in part from knowing that I was different, fearing that I was gay, and enduring the isolation that bearing that secret entailed. But more than that, the depression occurred when I was forming—quite literally—my adult self. As such, it became part of the warp and weft of my personality; in those periods when the black dog—Churchill’s metaphor for depression—had trotted off somewhere, I was still depressed. However good I might feel, I knew the dog would be howling and butting his head against the door and sighing, and I would have to rise and let him in again.

I grew up and became a fatalist—the marriage would end, the audition would be botched, sickness and death were right around the corner. And I had no baseline of happiness by which to gauge my depression. It was the only land I knew; reports of other territories I deemed anecdotal.

Had the depression been treated in my teens, what would my life have been? I might have been happier, would I have been the same? Would I have sacrificed some sensitivity, some knowledge of suffering?

If I believe that, aren’t I saying that people who have not suffered depression are less sensitive than we who have, or who do? I’m not sure I’d go there.

Nor am I sure I’d trade the decades of silent suffering for decades of euthymia, the technical name for feeling good. I think I feel as Dr. Proudie did, when his wife died: the good Lord had sent the affliction (to paraphrase Trollope), the Lord had banished the affliction; blessed be the name of the Lord!

Tropical Koan

Susan sent me an email, having read a review of a book on the depressing topic of…depression.

“Depressing,” because, according to the article—well, here’s a quote:

At any given point, 22% of the population exhibit at least one symptom of depression and the World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will have led to more worldwide disability and lives lost than any other affliction, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, accidents, and even war.

Well, I turned to the review, and was stopped in my initial tracks by the first sentence:

“Depression is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals,” legendary psychologist Martin Seligman observed in his essential treatise on learned optimism.

Yeah? So who is Martin Seligman, legendary though he may be? And what the hell does he know about depression? Has he ever been trapped in a toilet stall, has he ever had a crying jag he couldn’t stop, has he ever sat at a computer and looked at the screen and felt his mind turn to mush and realize that his thinking has slowed so far down that his thoughts can’t make it up to the surface? So that email that he has to write? He can’t concentrate, he can’t focus—all he can do is sit there numbly and mutely and hope that, in some way, the governor will sign the reprieve. Because, let’s be clear—there is no chance whatsoever that anything he does will affect in any way how he is feeling. Why? Because he is not feeling.

Or is he? Because he’s been crying, sobbing, and he’s been ruminating.

Maybe you don’t know….

Ruminating is not—not where he is—pondering a problem deeply. No, ruminating is the incessant—shouldn’t it be incesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssant?—repetition of a single thought. Today it’s “I want to die.” Yesterday it was “I can’t think.”

Sure, Styron did it better than anyone—myself included—in his book on depression Darkness Visible. But don’t think that he or I or anyone can get this one right. Why? Because, by its nature, depression defies description. It’s a black hole, where any light shone into it is lost, consumed. And when, at last, the master of the universe relents and you’re out, the very memory of it has been consumed as well.

So the legendary Martin Seligman has pronounced himself on depression—how very nice! At best, it accounts for one and only one of the many depressions. Because when I went from 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams of one drug and began to take 15 milligrams of another, guess what? I began humming to myself as I rode to work.

I’m lucky; as I understand it, the serotonin reuptake inhibitor basically floods all of the brain, and all the receptors, with serotonin. And some of those relate to mood, and some relate to other things having nothing to do with mood. Which means that some people get lots of side effects and remain depressed; the lucky ones like me get relatively few, but a blessed lift in mood.

So do I come down on the side of chemicals, medicines, physiology? No, because what you do with your life changes your brain. That I learned one afternoon as I saw a group of people wearing new clothes—and really terrible ones, at that—waiting to be photographed by a clearly professional photographer.

The “models,” however, were just-as-clearly not professionals. But who were they, I wondered, as I pondered them standing around on the beach under the palm trees? And where was I?

Lolling on my back in the water, after a day of writing and playing music and taking a walk and listening to Monteverdi. I hadn’t made a dime that day, but I was happy. And the people on the beach? They were Wal-Mart employees, who had been chosen to be the models in the newspaper advertising insert.

I had worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and for many of them I was lethally depressed. I was laid off; I went into crisis. I got out of the crisis and put myself on a schedule, a schedule I still follow. And I was at that moment splashing in the blue Caribbean waters, watching a group of prisoners from a prison I had escaped.

“Escaped,” because merely being laid off would have been “paroled” or perhaps “released.” But the prison I had escaped from wasn’t Wal-Mart—I had escaped from a brutal, decade-long battle against myself. I had willed myself to go to the brink of madness, to stand on the precipice and grant the Gods permission to push me into it.

It wasn’t a psychiatric crisis—or perhaps it was. I had been an angry, impossible steward for a man who had been given great gifts. I had raged at myself, scolded myself, belittled myself, bitten myself….

But wait—it wasn’t “myself.” Because I had had nothing to do with it—I could no more write a book or play the cello than I could scale Mount Everest. My job was to feed him and give him as much water as he needed and exercise him and put the cello into his hands and sit him at the computer and then GET THE HELL AWAY! He’ll play perfectly well on his own.

Wrong—he’ll play infinitely better. Because you know all that criticism for all those years?

Sorry—but it was shit.

The person you see occupies a middle position. I came to know a presence, which to me was the wind. And from this presence, which I call Domine, the cellist gets his talent, and the writer as well. My job is to get him in front of computers and embracing cellos.

I take him to the dentist—just as I brush his teeth. At the end of the day, I read what he’s written, or I listen to him play. ‘Where did that come from,’ I wonder. ‘He’s so good,’ I tell him. ‘Wow!’ I say.

I had made my life a koan, which, for the benefit of my red-squiggling computer, I will define, via Wikipedia:

A kōan (公案?)/ˈkoʊ.ɑːn/; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Korean: 공안 (kong'an); Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen-practice to provoke the "great doubt", and test a student's progress in Zen practice.

What is the music of a mute cellist?

What happens when the music goes away?

Should it matter if he plays better without the instrument than with it?

None of these fanciful statements are true. I was simply holding on to a small thread of faith, which I could only grasp by observing with agonizing detail how I went about my life. I lost the ability to use a computer, and then stared at my fingers until I could connect my right first digit with an icon that was on my dock. I looked at the icon, absorbed the blue, noted that the downward slash of the small part of the “W” is superimposed over the upward slash. But am I supposed to do a double or a single click?

How many Word documents had I opened before?

And why was I doing it?

I wanted to change something so fundamental about myself that I required a reboot. “Put the detergent on the sponge,” I told him. We were doing dishes—which he generally did by wasting water, slopping water all over the floor, and not paying attention. Now, I had to tell him how to wash the dishes—first you put the soap on the sponge; then you lather, as it were, the coffee cup; then you place the cup with soap still on it on the side of the sink; proceed to the next cup.

The important thing?

There was no abuse in it. Just patient directions—completely explicit, clear, detailed. He didn’t know how to do prosaic stuff, and had been too impatient to learn. And I had berated him for decades about the stuff he really could do.

I blew it a few times; so did he. He was holding on, too, to the thread. Perhaps more than I, he had heard the wind through the palm trees, heard the fronds stir to life, appreciated the swaying green against the constant blue, felt the hand caressing his brow, smiled, looked up, and said…

…Domine.

Why Are Female Poets Nuts?

I came on it in two ways. The first occurred last Sunday, when I was coaching a student on a poem by a poet unknown to me: Jane Kenyon. Paradoxically, the poem is called Happiness:

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                  It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Well, it was that image, that “wineglass, weary of holding wine,” that stuck in my mind. So much so, that it wasn’t the name of the poet but her image of the wineglass that allowed me to track Kenyon down.

And if Kenyon knew about happiness, it was hardly the neighbor who dropped every morning for coffee, gossip, and laughter. For Kenyon, happiness was the ghost she saw slipping into an abandoned house at dusk.

How depressed was she? Well, consider a famous poem: Having it Out with Melancholy. The first stanza clues you in pretty quickly:

When I was born,

you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery,

and when we were alone, you lay down

on top of me, pressing

the bile of desolation into every pore.

Kenyon, born in Ann Arbor but living in New Hampshire, died early at age 47 from leukemia. But the question troubling my afternoon today is whether she also suffered from the Sylvia Plath effect.

The idea goes back to Aristotle, if not before, but got named in 2001 by James C. Kaufman; Wikipedia has this to say about it:

Kaufman's work further demonstrated that female poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other class of writers. In addition, female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other eminent women, such as politicians, actresses, and artists.

Well, looking at the 20^th century, it’s not hard to see that there were seriously troubled women out there, often writing extraordinary poetry. Besides Plath, there was Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale, and not so much a raft as a cruise ship of others.

Writing, in fact, is on the list of the ten most depression-prone professions. But it seems that female poets outstrip all others for being nuts. Why?

Well, unless you have the fortune to be born with…well, a fortune, poetry is a pretty awful profession. And what happens if you don’t particularly want or like to teach?

You’re also digging, digging into some of the messiest terrain around—your own psyche. Worse, there’s the terrible fact that there is all too often an inverse relationship between a poem’s intrinsic worth and its financial worth. Which is to say that bad poetry sells.

Then there’s not much support out there for being a poet. Novels are sexy, everybody venerates a Hemingway or Steinbeck. But a poet, who has produced a slim little book of sixty poems or so—the fruit of two years of sitting alone with her thoughts and feelings? It sort of pales next to a 600-page novel.

Right—so now we get to chicken and egg: does the poetry create the madness, or do crazy people decide to become poets? Well, the age-old question has now been solved, and by a Harvard man no less. Here, from the American Psychological Association, is what the authors have to say:

There isn't a link between mental illness and the actual process of creating, says psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, MD, of Harvard Medical School, who has studied Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and other highly creative individuals. Rather, he argues that mental illnesses such as anxiety, thought disorder and depression disrupt the cognitive and emotional processes necessary for successful creativity.

I agree—but there’s something that has to be acknowledged: it may be that the depression of creative people is distinct from the depression of the rest of us. Business people, plumbers, doctors have some external yardstick against which they can measure themselves. But creative people—and especially artists and poets—have no such thing. The question, “am I any good?” awaits by the bedside in the morning, perches on the shoulder for the rest of the day, sours your morning coffee, and stalks you, side by side, throughout the day.

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life—resolve the issue with the cello, that had led to self-inflicted bites on my arms, and three or four spectacular choked auditions. In the space of two or three weeks, I went through madness and came out the other end.

Two or three weeks?

Sorry—a lifetime….