Schizoaffective

by Jay Paul "There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit."   — N. Scott Momaday   Who in their right mind cannot hear the vibratory life in minerals, in what is so often reduced to mere "resources"? We need to be careful with our names. We need to court gentleness with our names. Of course, we don't name a world simply into being. But our names so easily can cover not only the world, but the worlds of worlds. When this happens, so many worlds can be simply snuffed out. The world is not too much with us. It's too much of us. Even the dirt beneath a sidewalk contains particles and particles of microplastic. I can sense them there, 15 feet away, where I can see the sidewalk itself. To name without care is to poison. To name without gentleness is toxic. The voices of the grass and minerals, from gold to agate to natural gas, come in languag...

When I was around the age of 30, my oldest daughter was diagnosed with autism, and soon after I was diagnosed with bipolar. I felt some bitterness. My coming to terms with not feeling bitter marked the center of my personal emotional evolution at the time. The lessons I learned have helped me get through many struggles without succumbing to too much bitterness. This, good people, is my story! Bitterness is a real danger for both parents of children with special needs and people with mental illness. I was in potential trouble. Both then and now, I believe there were many factors that prevented me from ruining my life with bitterness. Part of it was the need to keep a clear head so I could support my family. I was not only the main breadwinner, but, for most of the time, the only person in the family bringing in much money at all.  There was one overriding factor, however: atheism. I think that, by not believing in a personal God, I was able to more easily navigate the perilous emoti...

by Jay Paul              "From hearts and brains                sprout the stalks of night"                                     --Paul Celan (tr. Joris)   there is no brain exactly as mandated there is only night just as there is no heart exactly as delimited there is only night because the brain inhabits a darkness as the heart inhabits a darkness   because the night is darkness the heart of darkness which is no heart because the heart itself by itself is darkness too   the heart pumps darkly the brain thinks darkly the dark comes down across thoughts that are born not of the brain but somewhere else entirely like the darkly heart or the darkly tree reaching down into loam communicating with fellows among the fungus...

by Jay Paul “My eyes have turned to four moons, two in the front of my face and two in the back of my bald head. I don’t see from them. They glow white, I am told by my partner. I no longer see. I just glow white orbs and listen, hearing the gurgling of a tea kettle and the scraping of frost off a wind shield in the parking lot. I cannot see. But I can hear. I can hear the morning news report of a killing by the police. I extrapolate to the crunching of bone, the cries of those brutalized for centuries. Bones are still crunched, down this very block. Moon eyes glow. I can hear the toilet clicking in the bathroom, clicking away. When will the landlord fix it? I can hear the toast pop up and think through my moon eyes of how politics ends up so often in the same place, putting down violently those who oppose. Is there another way? I smell the tea— pungent, from the earth half a globe away. My moons glow and I sense the whole earth in my body, knowing it all won’t come down the way I supp...

Various species of birds twitter and whistle, telling something or other to each other of which I am mostly ignorant. But listening in is important because  it confirms one realization— communication is not exclusively human. Birds do it. Trees do it. Biologists have shown that trees communicate through the roots. Communication is everywhere on this planet even though humans have pretended for so long that it is their exclusive domain. Animals are not dumb. Neither are plants. And I doubt the dirt beneath my feet is dumb, either. What's unusual in this world isn't life, but inertness. Does this concept point to anything real? Even the air is alive with microbes. That is clear. But is the air alive with itself? Could those molecules—oxygen, hydrogen,  water, and so on—somehow be communicating, too? It may seem mentally imbalanced to think so, but just a few decades ago  people who thought trees communicated were considered a little loo-loo. Anthropocentrism may have had it...

  by Jay Paul [A quick note on what to expect on the blog in the coming months. I will continue to post the second and  fourth Thursdays. Today, I will have a second post, "On an Escarpment Above the St. Croix River (The Ear)," a recent poem of mine. In two weeks, I hope to have finished an essay I have begun, "On Avoiding Bitterness," which details how I escaped from feeling bitter when confronted with the diagnoses of my daughter's autism and my bipolar. Long-term, I am researching and working on an answer to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , their two volumes in the capitalism and schizophrenia series. I want to read them as a schizophrenic and see what I think. That essay probably won't appear until September or October. Before then, I will continue to post occasional pieces.] Today, I am going to list a whole bunch of good things going on in my life right now. But, before I get to that, I want to address trauma briefly. O...