by BK Loren
When I mentioned this to the therapists, they said, “PTSD includes a diminished interest in social activities, feelings of detachment, and the sense of a foreshortened future.”
I didn’t fear that my life would be foreshortened (wouldn’t a foreshortened future be irrelevant to a suicidal person?). I did feel detached. I was sitting in a room, paying an hourly rate to effect the human intimacy that escaped me as I ran from one meeting agenda to the next, saying hello to scores of people I saw daily and whose names I wracked my brain to remember. I knew these folks only in the context of the four walls that surrounded us, like I knew my therapists. Everything felt packaged; I felt packaged.
My therapists assured me that such “external” stimuli were probably not the root cause of my depression. They said, “Let’s talk about your family.”
I soon felt myself drowning in self-absorbed trivia. I grew more depressed by the weekly search for the childhood trauma that the quake had dredged from my unconscious. But if that was the case, I had no hope of catching up. As soon as I overcame the psychological damage caused by the way I was brought into the world, I’d have to overcome the damage caused by the way I was treated in first grade by some anonymous kid, and the way my first boss treated me, and the way my self-esteem was doused by the end of that job or that relationship, and so on and so forth ad infinitum until I die.
None of my therapists agreed with my suggestion that I could be stuck in depression because I was overwhelmed and felt “powerless over” whatever it was that had led us here, to a place and time where our lives happen almost exclusively inside temperature-controlled rooms sheltered from the pleasures of weather and wilderness. It did not fit into the therapeutic process that I could be deeply troubled by something not born of my ego.
But when I felt the earth rumbling through the soles of my feet, I felt a power I could not comprehend, a wonderful, terrifying sense of awe that had been dampened by living in an overexplained world. When the quake hit, I felt connected to something many would call divine. To me it was the simple mystery of being wholly and inescapably human.
DANCING ON THE EPICENTER
After the earthquake, that constant tug I had felt earlier finally carved its way to my surface, and I was opened like sky. The dark ridge of loss that had been building within me crumbled, and in the rumbling that ensued, I was able to sort things out. I began to live as if my survival depended on my utter attention to the world in which I lived—to the loss, the violence, the absurdity, the celebration, and the beauty.
Outwardly, my life changed very little as my depression waned. I did not hearken back to that indelible hunting trip, buy a shotgun, and take up hunting. I did not become a vegan. I did not sneak “environmentalism” onto the agendas of those interminable meetings I attended. I did not seek to speak more openly about my emotions, or greet everyone I met with hugs. I performed the same tasks as before, but the avenues I took to them were different. I no longer drove to work, but rode my bike. I taught my classes wearing bike shorts and a hairdo that was obviously shaped by a helmet.
On the way home, I usually detoured off the pavement and pedaled through the woods. The path I rode through that almost-wilderness took me right along the fault line that had released its tension in 1989. I could sometimes see, with my bare eyes, the earth moving there: one wall meshing against the other, like two bodies grinding slowly on a dance floor. I gathered my geologist friends to confirm my sighting, and we sat for hours, staring at the wonder of the living earth beneath our feet.
It was not the only time I sat for hours staring at the wonder. The redwoods filled me with awe. The ferns filled me with awe. A deer turd filled me with awe. I didn’t wear this awe on my sleeve or market it to others; rather, I tucked it away in a quiet part of me. I was deeply content. On this last point, my therapists and I finally agreed, so I bid them farewell and thanked them for our time together. They had, after all, done me a good turn. Whether or not we agreed about the roots of my depression, they had listened to my arguments (maybe they, too, were frustrated that “distance from beauty” did not appear as a valid diagnosis in the DSM-III—the textbook that outlines diagnoses required by health insurance companies). They honored my choice to battle through my depression without the help of medication, which, they said, could have alleviated some of the physical and mental suffering I endured. Eventually, they even nodded to my suggestion that something other than the vacuum of my own ego might have contributed to my depression, but they never comprehended exactly why and how I believed the earthquake had played such a positive role in my recovery.
Though the earthquake had instigated the process, other factors had also helped me along the way. Among them was a silent conversation with a poet, Joe Bolton, who, at the age of twenty-eight, a month before his critically acclaimed poetry collection was published, killed himself. On a crumpled piece of paper found a few days after his death, Bolton summed it up:
I felt what I felt
Were parts of me
Starting to fall apart.
Outside, the bare tree
Shivered, and the black birds
Shivered in the bare tree.
I was afraid to walk out
And pick up the morning paper
Till well into the night.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And I was afraid to open up
The paper and read of a world
That had stopped having
Anything at all to do
With me, unless it be
News of my own death.
The voice in Bolton’s work became, for me, the voice of everyone who has ever asked, “Isn’t there a chance it’s we who require revision? How green do the grass, the trees have to get before you begin?” As I read him, I knew his depression was imperative; I also knew that his suicide was (and mine would be) a mistake. It was not wrong or immoral; it was simply a mistake, irrevocable and immutable. In “Weightlifter Poems,” he writes:
Not of cancer, not of old age,
But suddenly—
As when the bar slips
And the iron comes crashing through my chest
Like the shrunken planet through some unlucky ceiling.
And I will be the man
No one remembers,
Who won’t be able to tell them—
Even if he knew—whether it’s worth,
After all, the strength it takes to carry on.
A year or so after the earthquake, I could answer with certainty, Yes, it is worth it. On the other side of depression, life is unequivocally worth living. It is a certainty I first glimpsed in the moment the earth shook, and the power of connection that grazed me then is what gave me the strength to carry on.
It took me a year to find a new home after the quake. When I did, I uprooted the carpet of green lawn that surrounded the place. I tilled the soil and planted anything, everything native to that land. I wanted to give something back to the sweet black dirt that had saved me. I worked late into the night, gardening by moonlight. The cool earth felt like clay, and I felt like a potter creating something lasting, but delicate. With the night chill brushing across my skin, I planted seeds of food I would eat, flowers that offered beauty as essential to my spirit as food was to my belly, and bushes that would provide shade and nests to birds and other animals.
I dug to the bottom of my compost pit where the corn husks, melon rinds, and apple cores turned to a dark, unidentifiable muck. I lifted my shovel and carried my own private muck to a hole in the ground where it would provide nutrients for that year’s miniharvest.
As I worked, I relaxed into the solace that my body, someday, would become like this rich compost that offered so much continuing possibility. As for my spirit, it was already biodegrading, a sort of mythical centaur, half human, half earth, and that felt good to me.
The Loma Prieta (which means “dark ridge”) had picked me up, shaken me, and dropped me right smack-dab in the middle of geologic time. I
saw that my life was merely a blip in the evolution of this huge and powerful thing called the earth—and I was grateful. Every morning, I woke up before dawn and counted my reasons for living: the trees, the scent of the ocean, the morning air, the night air, the air. I recited these reasons like prayers—no longer prayers of desperation, but of gratitude. I listened to the sound of the ocean rising and falling, a constant motion beneath the surface, reshaping loss.
“Plate Tectonics and Other Underground Theories of Loss” update: In this essay, I do not mean to discourage others from taking pharmaceutical antidepressants. This kind of ecopsychology worked for me. But depression is a serious condition and exploring all available options is essential.
Joe Bolton’s poetry, from The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982–1990, is reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press. Copyright © 1999 by Ed Bolton.
WORD HOARD
Once, I became aphasic. “Synapses,” one of my doctors explained to me, “are an all-or-none proposition.” Mine were none.
Fish: Bagel.
Lion: Table.
Pelican: Funicular.
This is the way I named things. The funicular skimmed the surface of the ocean searching for bagels. Ocean was big enough, usually, to fit on my tongue and palate, to dance on my tongue and groove. The rest of the words I have filled in after the fact, like we usually do with memory (aphasic or not). We like to be understood. What I really might have said may have involved funicular and bagel, but the words between would have been gibberish. My brain was an unplanned language poem, and I a woman who disliked language poetry for its insistence upon ambiguity. When you don’t have it, language becomes unflinchingly precise.
Signifier: Signified: Bullshit.
Words carry on their backs their entire histories. This is what I learned the day they packed up and left me languageless. No forwarding address, no wish-you-were-here postcard.
Postcard: Night Cream.
Yard: Breast.
Water: Orgasm.
Fuck me. I was dead in the water without language.
As it is with any lover, I did not see my words packing their bags to go. If I had, I’d have tried to stop them. I’d have begged, “Let’s work this out, you and me. Let’s find a middle ground.”
I did not see the verbs colluding with the nouns, the adverbs separating off, the adjectives running like lemmings to the cliff of my lips. I went to bed one night with a congregation gathering in my throat to sing me awake the next morn, and I woke with a stale mix of nonsense in my mouth, Froot Loops instead of the promise of eggs hatching thoughts in my brain for breakfast.
My doctors were flummoxed.
A year into it, and I was depressed. I do not mean sad. I mean looking for the word gun daily, something to put in my mouth.
I had studied classics instead of writing in college. I needed to know the genetic origin of words. Their family tree. I mean, without that, all words are adopted. They grow up angry foster children wanting to burn things down. I wanted to know their mother and grandmother. I wanted to know their Adam, their Eve, their Eden, their original sin. Knowledge.
When you use the word flummox, for instance, your tongue rolls across the same territory of every person who has ever spoken that word. They say that every third breath you breathe contains at least one of the same molecules Caesar exhaled as he was dying. Muriel Rukeyser has said The universe is made of stories, not atoms. Think of words, then, the same words you breathe that have been inhaled and exhaled throughout history. If you’re looking for a link, there it is. They are only shapes and noises formed into meaning. But how many shapes and noises have crossed the tongues of those who have come before? And this exact shape and noise has crossed centuries to come to you now, fully formed, Athena from Zeus’s head (or so you believe as it transforms itself even as it leaves your lips).
Words say simultaneously too much and too little. This is why they’re perfect for communication, most people’s lives operating in the balance between too much and too little. Nothing more precise.
In those years without language, I was limbless. I had no way to reach out. I had no way to touch others or myself. Water: Orgasm. My body had no reason to come or go anywhere.
Words are my nourishment. They are the molecules that seethe in my veins. They are the light that filters through the rods and cones of my eyes to create color and dimension. They are my resting heart rate, my tulips, my knives, my forks, and my spoons.
Writing, to me, means food, means sustenance. If I had another choice, I tell you, I would make money. It’s a Catch-22. You must eat to live, must live to work. I eat my art for breakfast because I know what it is to go wordless, to be naked on the tongue and groping for a story that makes sense.
Towel: Meridian.
Apple: Bird.
Chalice: Fly.
Write: Live.
Silence: Die.
It’s a cliché. But here’s what I know. I have come into existence alongside words. Others have come into existence alongside business or sculpture or engineering or music or acting or science. But words carry with them a unique challenge. We use them daily, whether we love them or not. And so, loving them is a fix. Unless you are stuck in a Hollywood musical, people do not usually sing as a form of communication. Unless you are Neanderthal, they do not usually draw. But people will talk to you with words even when you are a writer. They will toss your medium around willy-nilly. They will use it to bad ends. They will use it to create wars, to manipulate leaders, to rape people, to sell.
You will be tempted to think your medium mundane, sometimes evil. You will be forced to discipline yourself against this. It will make you poor.
Once, I was aphasic. The condition lasted, to some extent or another, ten years. When I came back to words I came back like a lover who’d had a mistaken affair. Once the damage is done, it’s done. But there is a carefulness that follows. You don’t take things for granted. You speak from the soles of your feet, a current of meaning running through your body, each word carrying with it its history and the intimate mouths of your ancestors speaking it. Their lips touch yours as the word leaves you.
This is what connects you to who you are. What you love. What you caress. Whatever it is that leaves you and in its absence, makes you lonelier than God.
When it returns, it becomes holy. When it returns, you see the sacred in the profane. You do not fall prostrate before it. You hold it. You let it go. You live with it. You live.
GRATITUDE
Lisa Cech, you know the words I often say, and you know how they fall short. When I lost words, you listened to me all the same. You were the tectonic shift in my life that shook me home.
Doreen and Joe Piellucci, you give my words a wing-span that their feathers alone could never dream of. Besides that, there’s this friendship we have. I hold it dear. See you at Kenny’s.
Jack Shoemaker, as long as you’re working in this business, there will be books full of words written with patience and care, book covers with beautiful images, and pages filled with humanity. Your integrity is stunning, Jack. Thanks to all my editors at Counterpoint.
Barbara Sloan Jordan, Verna Sloan, and Don Jordan. Here’s a huge thank you for always being there over the decades and across the distance.
Mary-Gaye Kinsala and Beth Bogner, you make my hometown a home. We share cooking, skiing, dogs, music, and you read my work with patience and intelligence. What’s more, you bring your whole fam damily into it: Kathryn and Mother Mary, you are two of my go-to readers, and your friendship is golden. Boob (yup, Boob), Susan, Barbara, you’re my go-to gals for laughs, games, reading, and good old home-style food. See you at the next BBQ.
Ann Pancake, Sarah Saffian (my homeslice!), Kelly Dwyer, Juliet Patterson, Lisa Cech, Susan Taylor Chehak, Aina Barten, Chip Blake, Harry Greene, Doreen Piellucci, Sheryl St. Germaine, and someone I am no doubt forgetting (apologies), thank you for your careful reading of early versions of these essays, or for your support of
the finished pieces, and thanks, most of all, for your friendship.
Tattered Cover, you great good place, thank you. And thanks to independent bookstores and booksellers everywhere. Charles, you know you’re at the top of this list.
Liz Darhansoff, you’ve made all the difference. Thanks, as ever.
Lauren Bishop-Weidner and Ellen Pinkham, you get a line of your own, just because. I can’t sum up the reason for my gratitude; you’ll just have to trust it. It’s huge.
To Susan Booker, Rachel Hanson, and the PAC/LCAC crew in Lafayette, thanks for engulfing this corner of the world in art and compassion.
To my dogs and cats: No matter what I write here or what I say to you when you’re in the room, you won’t be able to understand my gibberish. We communicate clearly and with love all the same. So much for the necessity of words.
To my readers: Thank you for every moment you have spent with these words. Thank you for you. And thanks to you for keeping independent bookstores alive.
On my father’s last day of life, I wheeled my mom into my dad’s hospital room. His spine was broken and she could not stand. I had to lower my dad’s bed, tilt the wheelchair, and then help Mom stand without getting in the way of what they knew would be their last kiss after sixty-five years of marriage. I wheeled my mother out of the room and she called back, “I love you.” My dad said very softly, just the words, “You know, Marge.”
To Mom and Dad: You know.
REPRINT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Trends of Nature” first appeared as “Coyotes” in Alligator Juniper, volume 6, 2000. It was revised and retitled, “Trends of Nature,” and first published in that form in Between Song and Story: Essays for the 21st Century, Sheryl St. Germaine and Margaret Whitford (Autumn House Press, June 2011).