Loony Bin, Baby-eating

Merry Christmas, blogland!


I have not blogged lately. Nor will I probably do regular posts for a few more days.

Here are some things that happened today (or yesterday because, whatever, it's after midnight now):


1. CV and I got engaged.

2. While we were sitting in the cafeteria of the loony bin.

3. Where CV had himself committed Friday.


Also, there is a bunch of snow.

CV is not permanently committed. Only temporary, I think. He succumbed to stress and sadness and some increasingly erratic thinking.

Which doesn't appear to be quite gone yet. Since after he told me he wanted to get married, he told me that he is now (overnight?) a Republican. Who wants me to go to church. Also something about suspecting there really are aliens.

But this has to be the meds talking. Right?

Fortunately for my mood, my brother is here.

After I got him at the airport I was supposed to drive him to our parents' house. Instead, my parents came here. They were supposed to take my brother away with them but I teared up and asked if he could stay with me.

My mom offered to stay with me but I said no, I'm sorry, it will only work if it's my brother.

My brother is much funnier than my mother. Also, he's gay.

Which means I get to make terribly, terribly funny jokes about how of course he doesn't say/do/like such-and-such because he is one of the Baby-eating Homosexuals.

Which is an actual term from an actual Martha Nussbaum book.*

Which makes both my brother and I giggle fairly alarmingly.

We watched The Saddest Music in the World, in which a legless Isabella Rosallini is given the gift of glass legs filled with beer.

And in which she also says something like "If you're sad, and if you like beer, then...." Only now I forget what the punch line is.

I am sad. Also, usually I like beer. Anyway, it is a very strange movie. We loved it.

My family is very loud. This is actually refreshing for me. This is because I am sometimes told that I am loud. I am also conscious that when there's something I really want to say but someone else seems like they are about to start saying something that will probably change or redirect the subject, I almost can't help myself from just sort of talking louder and faster to get what I want to say said.

But my brother, my mother and I are all this way so the afternoon was a chaos of wrapping paper we left all over the floor (it's still there, actually) and all of us talking all over each other and only half listening to what everyone else was saying.

So today I was loud with absolutely no scruples or self-consciousness. At least there's a reason for it, the way my brother and I will both talk UNBEARABLY LOUD when we are really excited or really invested in the subject. To get heard over my mother, we had to learn to just start talking and to talk loudly and not stop until we are done, whether anyone appears to be listening or not.

It is funny. I thought this was going to be a very short post. I also thought I'd manage not to mention some of the paranoid things CV has believed lately. (Though trust me, I am keeping secret the really good ones.) But this rambling is what has come out. One of the things CV and I talked about today (in the mental-hospital cafeteria over trays of actually-fairly-decent food and among the other visiting people and of course behind locked doors as if we were in a prison) was how I, unlike he, have always kept a journal, even if sometimes sporadically, and have for that reason a process for blurting, for writing without editing beforehand. I write whatever the hell occurs to me, in my journal especially. Then I go back later and can ignore the tedious or stupid parts but can also find the few insights or gems. Also I can discover patterns I couldn't otherwise percieve. This is the way I, for example, discovered that the Friday before my period I ALWAYS believe that the world is a mess.

Knowing this, if I start to feel really upset, but then realize that it's the Friday prior, I miraculously settle down, and decide to give the world a few more days.

So I am good at constant self-discovery, self-interrogation.

But CV is doing "soul-searching," and it is really throwing him. Because he doesn't have the record of his mean or crazy or angry or worried thoughts, and doesn't have a long relationship with seeing that these thoughts can go away or change or be consciously changed, he feels very nervous about self-interrogation, as if questioning himself and his motivations or influences has the power to MAKE HIM DISAPPEAR.

I said that just because he is questioning some things doesn't mean he must now be a Republican. I told him that I thought the wrong way to think of it is that he has always been mistaken or duped. That what he is in danger of doing is merely flip-flopping: trading one set of unsatisfactory beliefs for another. But that he was leaping to belief in just as blind a way. That writing can be edited AFTER, not before, and so can thinking. That writing in a messy way -- tolerating messiness -- and then rereading can be the way of discovering the good parts of a belief. That editing later -- editing after but not before -- can let the best parts of the writing and knowing remain, the parts that couldn't have come through a tidy process.

That confusion is painful, but that the answer is not necessarily to rid yourself of confusion by adopting the easiest new conviction. That I think it's a better idea to learn to tolerate confusion, like an athlete adjusting to the pain of lactic acid.
That tolerating confusion, in order to allow to occur the process of blurting and thinking and investigating and revisiting and revising, will lead to better beliefs, better convictions. "Better" in being more true to the complicated topography of the world or reality, but also "better" in being made up more of flashes of insight, blossoming out of the empty husk of what you think you know about how to do things, to something unimaginable and better.

I was as gentle as I could be, because he is sad and fragile. But I was firm, and this is probably a character failing in a way. What I mean is, I couldn't let the Repbulican thing and the church thing drop.

Because I don't want to find that after living with a militant vegetarian athiest radical, I am to be married to a church-going Republican. ++

But what I said seemed to resonate with CV. And it resonated with me, too. And it's why I am going to publish this post even though I am far too tired to edit it and even though it reveals some uncomfortable things.

Because I don't know how not to be honest. To blurt. To say what seems pressing in me to be said.

Or I do. But it involves not saying anything and not writing. And talking to CV today has made me think that not-saying and not-writing are even worse dangers than the danger of saying too much.

One other scruple. I am not the one in what I so charmingly keep calling the loony bin, so it has of course occured to me not to tell about it, not to talk about it.

But I do not believe in not talking about things.

Because there is nothing embarrassing or weak about CV being depressed and so worried that he talks a little crazy.

Because this is an anxious-making world, and an anxious-making profession.

And I am very proud of him for being able to admit that he needs help, that his fragile human parts need protection. (It's partly why I was able to ask my brother please to stay with me because yeah, he was supposed to spend time with my parents and I don't like to impose as if my whims are most important but I really needed him.)

And all my favorite people are a little crazy.

And if I don't show to the world what the world creates in us, in me, then I am not allowing myself to experience messiness and confusion in the hope of making it through to a better clarity. If I am cowed by the Proper and the Polite, or by the possibility of going too far and making a mistake, then I have no hope of really changing anything, for me or anyone else.

And if you think less of CV for his sadness and his confusion, or me for my honesty, then I think less of you.

And someday, world, you will hire us. Craziness, sadness, blurtiness and all: you will hire us.





*It's not Nussbaum's term. She's quoting it from actual pamphlets distributed by actual anti-gay-marriage "activists." Honestly, these pamphlets also allege that homosexuals eat feces. This is the world we live in, people. Really it's dogs that eat feces, but I notice that we welcome them into our homes anyway.

++I want to point out that "Republican" here shouldn't be construed as simply a political leaning. I'm using the term, unfairly probably but this unfairness doesn't particularly bother me, to denote a set of characteristics not entirely congruent with the actual politcal doctrine. The repressive, paternalistic, smug and most of all complacent model is what I have in mind.