After All

On Monday one of my spiritual advisers sent me a link to this song. It was a real blessing, because at the time I was feeling totally blown out on the trail: this book is extraordinarily hard on me psychodynamically. I absolutely loved the song and listened to the studio version and two live performances; I have supplied a link to one of them.

The song is simply stunning. You owe it to yourself to invest the 5 minutes, 10 seconds it takes to listen to Williams' performance.

"After All," by Dar Williams

You go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reigned my soul in tight
Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world, so I stopped the tide, froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

Then when I chose to live, there was no joy it's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost, so I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell
And so I traveled down a whispering well to know myself through them
I'm growing up, my mom had a room full of books and hid away in there
Her father raging down a spiral stair, till he found someone
Most days his son and sometimes I think my father too was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain form me
They could not see what it was for
But now I'm sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose, with so many colors it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art and I was a part off all that
So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back and there are worse things than that
'Cause for every price, and every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all|
'Cause when you live in a world, well it gets into who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me, I think life chose me after all

[Dorothy Snowden "Dar" Williams (1967 - ) is a singer-songwriter who performs primarily in coffeehouses. She has nonetheless acquired a national reputation and has opened for Joan Baez, who performed a duet with her in a song entitled, “You’re Aging Well.” In an adoring review of one of her concerts, Hendrick Hertzberg of the “New Yorker” called Williams “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters.”]

Battle Rhythm

“In war, the best strategy is always to be very strong, first in general and then at the decisive point.” – Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.

I need to develop a “battle rhythm” or this project will overwhelm me. I learned the term at the U.S. Army War College during my two years there as a visiting professor. Essentially it means a sustainable routine.

The first priority is self-care. I need spiritual support and friends to whom I can reach out. Re the former, two are in place, one of whom was a close friend of mine in high school, the other a senior-level chaplain in the U.S. Army. Friends include three classmates from my 1977 high school graduation class.

I need to make time to read the Bible each day, do a devotional, and pray. I also need to be sure to take a walk or do some other kind of exercise on a daily basis. I need to eat right.

The second priority is to be consistent in my work on this project but to limit the time spent on it to two hours 5-6 days per week—both to give me time to attend to other projects and also to protect myself from psychological harm. This work is extraordinarily hard on me emotionally.

The third priority is to put regular entries online—each day if possible, but at least several times a week. Most of these entries will be short essays of 500-1,000 words, and most of them will work as a way to generate the book manuscript in a modular way, so that as I construct the final draft I can move them around as best suits the manuscript’s organization.

Insofar as possible I want to use a “show, don’t tell” narrative approach informed by the works of Civil War popular historians Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton. I have already written magazine columns on Foote and Catton. There are two biographies of Foote, two volumes of literary criticism, and a book containing his correspondence with novelist Walker Percy, much of it consisting of commentary on the creation of “The Civil War: A Narrative” (3 vols., 1954-1975).

There is no biography of Catton but there are several article-length appreciations; a few essays that Catton wrote on the craft of narrative history; and a memoir, “Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood” (1972). Most importantly, I studied the works of Catton closely during my teenage years learning the writer’s craft, so I know his style very closely; and more recently I have studied the way he structures his books—it’s no accident that he is a superb story-teller (as well as highly insightful about the war).

The fourth priority is to get the project organized in terms of building an archive, I suppose you’d call it, of all the relevant material, of which there is one hell of a lot: four journals (at least) and three notebooks focusing on poetry, stories, copied poems, etc., from the relevant period; also about 200 pages of typed, single-spaced reflective essays and journal entries (mostly from 1986 and 1997). I can only expend so much time on it, but I need to build it into something reasonably complete and to a standard similar to that of, say, the Library of Congress. Either you do this thing properly or you don’t.

The final priority is actual research and writing, which of course will eventually replace the fourth priority. I’ll start with two general works on suicide: A. Alvarez, “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” (1971), a classic in the field; and “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” by Kay Redfield Jamison (1999). Alvarez (1929-2019) was a literary figure—a poet, mostly. Jamison (1946- ) is a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She co-wrote the standard textbook on bipolar disorder (which I own), and has bipolar disorder herself. I have read her memoir, “An Unquiet Mind” (1995). She’s quite a strong writer. Once I have learned my way around the field of suicidology I’ll begin to contact real experts on the subject.

War Child: My Battles Against Suicide

Well, man proposes and God disposes.

Over time the emphasis in my Commentary posts has shifted from the rise of conservative media to our toxic political culture to the beginnings of a consideration on manic episodes; and most recently to my suicide attempt in May 1977.

I am a faith-based person, and for me it is difficult not to see the hand of God in this.

So I’ve decided to shift fire and do a book on suicide, possibly suicide in general or possibly limited to teenagers and young adults. I won’t know until I’ve done more research in that area.

But the basic idea is to write a book about what might be called the interior experience of suicide: what it is like to feel suicidal, and, in the one case, to attempt suicide and then recover from it.

I decided it had to be a book after reviewing the abundance of material I have bearing on the subject. From April 24, 1975 (the spring of my sophomore year) through June 5, 1977 (the date of my high school graduation, I kept a detailed journal totaling exactly 900 pages of single-spaced, handwritten entries on college-ruled notebook paper. The journal continues through July 1987 and covers other key developments. I also have several 3-section notebooks consisting of poetry, stories, etc., some of which foreshadow the suicide attempt pretty clearly. In addition, I have five three-ring binders, most of them 2-inch D-ring binders that contain a lot of retrospective observations on the earlier periods. Plus a lot of other documents that will have to be filed, or already have been.

So basically I’m loaded for bear.

I’ve already announced this effort to the Facebook group for my high school graduation class (Westerville South High School Class of 1977) and my fellow alumni have been very supportive and have supplied me with additional information, much of it concerning a classmate who shot himself to death about two months before graduation.

This is something I feel called to do, and I think it can scarcely help but make an important contribution. There are memoirs by persons who have attempted suicide; but what I have in mind is a history that utilizes documents rather than memory. It is, in some ways, a bit odd to be writing a history of oneself; but my senior year was 43 years ago and when I read my journal entries for that period I experience them as having been written by someone else. They contain * a lot * of information that I no longer remembered, including some stuff that was very important.

It has been a very stressful project so far and, in the nature of the case, it will continue to be. So from time to time I’ll have to take a break and work on something else for a few days.

Before confirming my decision to do this as a book, I spoke by phone to several people, including a fellow alumna of the Class of ‘77; an Army chaplain I got to know well at the U.S. Army War College; my sister; and three friends. All of them approved of the project and were confident that I knew what I was doing. My therapist is already aware that I was writing publicly about the suicide attempt, but I have not yet had occasion to tell her of this new development.

Th Price of Inciviliy - Part 1

In general, I plan to let Senator tell his story chronologically, which is the narrative strategy Senator swore by. Already a close student of story-telling, he avoided flashbacks except when a character was in a pensive or contemplative mood, and he did not believe in flash forwards at all. But I think his ghost would—does?—approve of this departure, for reasons that will quickly be obvious.

A complex autumn and difficult winter have passed, dominated by an increasingly intricate relationship with Lorena, a fellow literary aspirant—primarily a poet. Lorena and Senator share a passionate relationship, but a uniquely passionate relationship, best characterized as that of two pen pals who would be all over each other in a New York minute if only they didn’t live four miles apart. I scarcely need to say who wants this arrangement and who puts up with it.

[Lorena and I have recently reconnected—in the here and now, I mean; and she has long since tweaked the modus operandi I have described. I know this because she has been married for many years; and the fact they have several children is fairly convincing evidence theirs is not merely a passionate pen pal relationship of many years. But Lorena, we’ll always have the USPS.

Email does not have quite the same sizzle, particularly given the husband and the kids and the fact that she is an ordained minister. On the other hand, the fact that she is cheering me on in this literary high wire act, is pretty hot, in its own way. Note to Lorena: I wouldn’t have the guts to do this without your support and that of a few others. You’re still magic. Also, I’m halfway through the sheaf of poems you sent me. Good stuff. (I will send you a critique more sophisticated than “Good stuff” once the Semester from Hell is over.)]

But to resume: Lorena has not been the least distressed—make that barely aware—of Senator’s new love interest, a fetching junior named Ellen who conveniently lives barely two blocks away. In early March he and Ellen discover a strong mutual chemistry and a sort of effortless rapport and—and we’ll leave it there for now.

It is Tuesday, April 21. Senator has filled the pages of Notebook Eleven and has reached page 37 of Notebook Seventeen—which despite Senator’s eccentric numbering system is actually the fourth volume of his journal.

Some excerpts from that journal:

Two Revisions

One thing I will say for Senator, from a distance of more than 40 years, is that he was scary smart.

“We con ourselves as a matter of course; I suspect because to see our true selves would be equivalent to seeing the head of Medusa.”

He had pegged it correctly right out of the gate; Ms Curry would have been impressed.

She would have had a couple of criticisms, though. The first would have been modest.

“‘We *con* ourselves as a matter of course? Isn’t that a bit harsh? How about changing it to ‘We *kid* ourselves as a matter of course?’”

Technically that is speculation on my part, but not really. I knew Inez—that was her first name—for years after I graduated from high school, and for a little while even attended church with her. She helped me to craft my first published articles and—to quote the Acknowledgements section of my first book, which explained why she was one of three teachers to whom the book was dedicated, “for years thereafter read a number of my other manuscripts with a practiced, discerning eye.” So I’d bet real money she would have leveled that criticism and made that suggestion.

I would also lay odds that she would have gone after Senator about “the head of Medusa” as well. It was a lazy choice of phrase, bordering on a cliché. But in that instance she would not have suggested a replacement. She would have told Senator to go away and come up with one himself.

It’s interesting to contemplate whether Senator would have arrived at my own choice for a replacement. It’s possible: Senator had read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four” a couple of years before. But I doubt it….

Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not answered the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O’Brien’s face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him:

“What is in Room 101?"

The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily:

“You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”

***

“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

In the aftermath of the suicide attempt there would be brief speculation concerning what motivated it, but the speculation quickly subsided because everyone, Senator included, not only wanted to drop the matter but, insofar as possible, to re-conceptualize it so that it was not, when one considered things carefully, a suicide attempt at all.

But of course it was a suicide attempt. And as to the reason, it was really quite simple.

Senator knew what was in Room 101, and to avoid it he merely had to go to sleep.

At the Edge of the Stream

So stately strong the currents run
that down to death will bear us all
beyond the fire of the sun
beyond the musty marble hall
where light is banned and darkness reigns
the flickering glow of ego wanes
the hoarded store of spirit drains
where we slip into oblivion

-- Mark Grimsley, Autumn 1976

Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do—just start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do--.

-- Jack Kerouac, “The Subterraneans” (1958)

This is the story of a seven-month journey. It begins on an ordinary afternoon in the classroom of a Creative Writing course, early in my senior year at Westerville South High School--Monday, October 18, 1976, to be precise; to a moment, shortly after midnight on a balmy May evening in 1977, when I swallowed seven capsules of Tuinal, a powerful barbiturate, and succeeded in getting within a few minutes of my intended destination.

In telling the tale, I will follow Kerouac’s strategy: start at the beginning and let the truth seep out.

To be sure, I can’t recall the *exact* beginning, because I can’t recall a moment in my life when suicide was not a thinkable thought, sometimes more thinkable than others but always present; and although I had no particular method in mind, I couldn’t shake off the conviction that, sooner or later, I would die by suicide.

But in terms of a place to start, the session that day in the Creative Writing class is as good as any.

And for the most part I’ll let my 17-year old self, a youth who was a little too skinny and a little too serious—he always seemed to have some bitterness of mind to chew upon—tell the story.

The youth is long gone. Yet sometimes his ghost hovers close, the reason for his spectral presence never clear to me, but simply there.

Calling my 17-year old self “the youth” for several dozen entries will come off as stilted and mannered and a rip-off of “The Red Badge of Courage” (whose protagonist is known only as “the youth”); and above all, stupid. So henceforth he will be Senator, his nickname at the Ponderosa Steak House—“Pondo” to the largely teenage crew that worked there. And yes, this itself is a direct steal from Norman Mailer’s “Of a Fire on the Moon,” in which he calls himself “Aquarius.”

To be precise, the nickname will be bestowed, not on the day this tale commences, but a month hence, on Saturday, November 20. Senator records his christening on page 149 of Notebook 11, the third of the personal journals he has kept since Thursday, April 24, 1975.

“Worked 4-7:45,” he reports. “Mostly P&R [the baked potatoes and dinner rolls station]. Found I have a new nickname: ‘Senator.’ As in Mr. C [the head manager] saying, ‘Senator Grimsley, I need two bowls of French fries up front;’ or ‘Need a mop on the line, Senator,’ etc. Or, best of all, ‘Good job tonight, Senator.'"

This new nickname, however, is not necessarily all that big a deal to Senator, who spends the next two pages recording the play-by-play of a hot date, after he clocks out, with Annabelle [not her real name; very few real names will be used in this story]. Annabelle will be among the major figures in this story’s cast of characters.

But the story itself begins a month earlier. Senator describes its commencement in a 3-section theme book he has purchased that day. He inscribes the cover, “Notebook 14, 18 October 1976,” then gets on with its maiden entry.

Facing Facts

What follows is an after dinner talk I gave ten years ago to a group of academics at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. I'd been asked to offer some reflections on an exhibition in Capital's Schumacher Gallery concerning the lives of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.

On my c.v. it appears as "Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant in Public and Private Memory," but I had already posted it on a blog I once maintained entitled “Facing the Demon: A Personal Account of Managing Bipolar Disorder.” I had entitled the blog post “Facing Facts,” and I use that title here.

I dislike giving presentations that don't build toward projects underway, and since the next speaking engagements on the horizon would have to do with mental health advocacy, I decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with one. The talk was something of a high wire act, interweaving personal observations of Grant and Lee with those concerning bipolar disorder. But judging by the response I received, it worked.

***

It’s a pleasure to talk with you this evening about Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, particularly in light of the exhibition at the Schumacher Gallery. I’ve heard it said that an exhibition, even when installed, is not really an exhibition. It becomes one only people come to experience it. They see in it, and take from it, meanings that the designers of the exhibition did not necessarily intend to impart. This is so because people bring to it their own experiences of life, their own concerns, and above all their own imaginations. Were this not the case, I doubt if exhibits would be at all worth the investment of time, money, and energy required to create them.

During the Civil War a pair of Union officers climbed atop a mountain to survey through telescopes the Confederate encampment beneath them. They saw soldiers brewing coffee, writing letters, reading newspapers, and washing clothes. To one of the officers this was a revelation. “My God, Adjutant,” he said to the other. “They’re human beings, just like us!” The Grant-Lee exhibition invites us to reconsider these two icons of the American military tradition, these central characters in the American Iliad. Their lives had the same common place experiences and the same complexities as our own. They were human beings, just like us.

I grew up with Grant and Lee. I got to know them through children’s books, and particularly got to know Lee through a biography entitled Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor, written for young people by the Southern progressive journalist Hodding Carter, which I read at the age of eight. But the really critical experience occurred when I was twelve and first read A Stillness at Appomattox, Bruce Catton’s brilliant evocation of the epic struggle between these two commanders in the Civil War’s final year. When I say that I grew up with Grant and Lee I mean this, of course, in an imaginative sense, and yet the imaginations of the young can be so vivid and intense that I still sometimes feel as if I grew up with them in a literal sense. And in terms of their impact on my life, that is quite likely true in the deepest sense of truth.

Recently I turned fifty years old. That makes me just seven years younger than was Lee in 1864 and actually eight years older than Grant when he led the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan River and into battle against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. My life has gone in directions very different from theirs and has taken a very different shape. But in dealing with the challenges of my life, I have often looked back on these two men, both what I thought I knew of them as a youth and what I think I know of them now.

The biggest challenge that has faced me in life began to confront me in 1986, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder — what used to be called manic depression. For reasons I’ll explain in a bit, it has become important to me to talk about what it is like to live with the disorder, but at the time it was something that I simultaneously acknowledged and ignored, with an odd kind of doublethink that, I have discovered, is not uncommon with people confronting facts that are unavoidable and yet still something one wishes to avoid. For the first few months I saw a psychiatrist and took medications, but then I simply stepped away from that and for eleven years thought and lived as if bipolar disorder were something I had in theory, not in fact.

A hypomanic episode I had at age 38 finally brought me to reality. With hypomania a person can be charismatic, unusually creative, and brilliantly high functioning. But those who know them well recognize that something Is wrong. And if the person is wise, so does he. So early one morning, refreshed and wide awake after only two hours of sleep — notwithstanding the fact that given the pace I’d been keeping and the sleeping pill I’d taken I should have been out cold — I came to realize, and I mean really realize, that I had bipolar disorder and always would have it and was lucky during the preceding decade not to have met with disaster. I sat down at my computer and composed a sort of memorandum to myself. I’m going to read some of it here. At first it will seem to have no relevance to Grant or Lee, but then it will take a turn that should surprise you. It certainly did me.