Hi, Anny,
This is sort of a perhaps necessary reminder of the messiness
of life and being that is ignored in the statistics or in
various attempts to measure distress. Which is one of the
issues with the study about suicidal poets as well, I think
anyway. For instance, each suicidal poet was 'matched' with
a control poet of similar era, education, and background, so
that Hart Crane is 'matched' by Joyce Kilmer. And, not only
poetically, I wonder how this is a 'match'? For as you say
how can you know or feel what it's like within this Italian
poet who has had lung cancer three times or has AIDs? not
to mention the social conditions which you also mention in
regard to your neighbors. All of these realities are factors
as much as being of a similar age, education, and background,
and I anyway can't find them irrelevant.
Take care,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Anny Ballardini <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 08/17/03 02:56 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Poetry & Psych
>
> Yesterday this Italian Poet I am sometimes in contact with, called mebecause he needed to talk to me. He was initially a doctor, inherited a
fortune, dilapidated it, got lung cancer three times, and said he wanted
to
go back to his first profession as a doctor. To which I said that it would
be the best solution both for him and his future patients, because only
through sufferance can a person come to understand other people's
sufferance. He also told me of his new collection of short stories of
which
a critic we both know said: "I have never met such a degree of perversity
and malignity", to which the Poet added that his disease brought him to
reach an indescribable wicked way of "seeing and perceiving" things.
All this to say what? That maybe statistics are not that right, as Alison
and Rebecca are trying to point out (no I just read their posts, not the
original articles), first of all because there are Levels of intensity be
it
in the good and in the bad. Such forms of perception are personal, and a
psychologist can empathically interpret them according to his/her own
scale
of perception. How can I, who never had cancer, and/or Aids, know how this
person feels or has felt? Or intuit his feelings? I can rewrite his
thoughts, as I am doing now, and show them to others, but I can't even
"imagine" from afar what he has inside, and/or how he sees me, and/or what
is going into his mind.
I am not particularly referring to this person now, I have plenty of cases
of people full of heavy mental instabilities around, starting from my
neighbors, the in fieri process of unsolved psychological problems in
teen-agers and their parents at school (I also talked of this with a
couple
of judges, who both said: "We are constantly facing the rotten side of
society and this fact anyhow and/or somehow acts on us"), going to
relatives
with bad health problems and thus daily unbalances in their routines who
rely on pills which have been changing their chemical composition. And we
have to deal with them, usually their physical problems and their
highly-sensitized reactions are and in time become (not mental, that is
too
heavy) but problems which limit your life, your interactions, your way of
seeing and evaluating things even if you are not sick. Fundamentally why?
Because you do not know what they feel. They say they feel "uneasy" for
example, but you have no idea of what that "uneasy" means. Add to it all
pathological stagnant attitudes which drain the sick person down, and here
they go complaining even if they are all right and you believe in them.
Afterwards when they are really sick, you do not think they are because
you
remember when they feigned. An endless vicious cycle which sucks your
energies, again limits your life, eats down your enthusiasm, builds up in
you an enormous armor of guilty feelings, and brings you to think that
Stoics are - after all - the ones who were right.
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