Christopher Isherwood, when asked, “Why do you go on living? replied, “Because I have a Wednesday lunch date.”
By the time I was 16, I’d already tried suicide. I was committed to an institution where, tranquilized, I made a second attempt. They didn’t issue Gillette Super Blues to patients on the psych ward, so I set about trying to starve myself to death. It was the sanest thing I could have done anyway, considering the food.
I lay for days in Room 0 cringing at the sunlight that illuminated last year’s calendar on the wall, and at the nurses who came and went, like starchy ghosts, with medication to make me sleep and wake. They urged me to go to the day room and make moccasins, but I started writing poetry instead, influenced by poets who had succeeded in taking their lives.
The ghosts took to spying on me through a peephole in the door and told my doctor I wasn’t making progress. My morbid preoccupation with poetry showed, in their eyes, an unwillingness to get well. I typed out a quote from a poem by Robert Lowell: Is getting well ever an art, or art a way to get well? And stuck it on my door. The message was returned to me stamped NOT APPROPRIATE.
In order to be discharged I had to obey their rules. To begin with I had to start eating. After that I dressed myself and left the ward for an interview.
If I wanted to be discharged, the therapist counselled me, I had to have a goal. I’d also have to accept that “pragmatic hypocrisy was the grease on the wheels of human interaction.” “White lies keep the peace,” she said. “People ask, “How are you?” without wanting the truth.”
Better to be mad with the truth than insane with lies, I thought, and headed back to Room 0 in search of a goal.
The woman across the hall who, despite dozens of shock treatments, still wasn’t cured of being a lesbian, had her door open; she was reading Freud. Freud claimed death was the goal of all life, she said, when I told her what I was looking for. I found this encouraging and began X-ing off the days on my calendar. The nurses told my doctor I was beginning to make progress.
I still refused to make moccasins. I preferred to spend my days alone in Room 0 engrossed in The Poet’s Calling. It had been loaned to me by 250-pound professor of English who, like Bellows Humboldt, had been “rushed off ding-dong in a paddy waggon like a mad dog” when he had overpowered the refrigerator at an English department drinks party. Eventually we organized a poetry workshop. As we used to stay in those days, throw a stone in any mental hospital and you’ll hit a poet.
We met once a week in the Anger Management Room. It had padded walls so the psychotic patients, who were taken out of their straightjackets for an hour each day, could be put in there to exercise. A nurse locked the door after us, as if we, who wrote poetry, were even more dangerous. My doctor viewed poetry the same way he viewed passion – as something to be done privately and in one’s spare time. Fearing that their next step might be to try to cure me of writing, I discharged myself by ducking out the exit marked ADMISSIONS, and fled to California where madness, like poetry, has never been a part-time occupation.
I continued to write, still focussing on death as a viable alternative, but there were no further attempts at killing myself. After a while even trying seemed pointless. As another poet said, “Suicide fails as you get older. There’s less and less to kill.”
I changed continents instead. In Rome, below the room where Keats died, I wrote an ode on the Spanish Steps, and in Mallorca I was Robert Graves’s White Goddess for a day. On All Souls Eve, in the west of Ireland, I slept on the Faery Queen’s tomb where the locals say you will wake up dead, mad or a poet. I woke up alive, though today, 55 years later, I still ask myself, occasionally, why I go on.
It’s been ages since I X-ed out days on my calendar. While death may be inevitable, I have learned to set shorter-term goals in the meantime. I go on because I volunteer at the Thrift Shop in Daajing Giids every other Thursday, I have an exercise class in Masset on Monday and my builder at Copper Beech House needs to know what colour to stain the shed over the weekend.
Sometimes I think I could go on living this way forever.
At least until Wednesday.