Withdrawal

The more I think about Sophie's behavior, seizures and involuntary muscle contractions, the more I believe them to be symptoms of benzo withdrawal.  I've invested the process of removing this drug from her body with all the fuckeduppery of The Whole Business. I feel stripped of trust in anyone or anything.

I also fight off feelings of despair that this will ever be over. Benzo withdrawal syndrome can persist for years, even after the drug is weaned completely. I've always hated war imagery when describing illness. Her battle with epilepsy. His warrior spirit in the face of cancer. Etc. Actually, as long as I "fight" the feeling of despair, it increases. Instead, I allow it to wash over me, acknowledge it, bathe in it, open my eyes even as I'm in over my head. It goes away, then, leaves me dry and again, stripped.







I'm suspicious of the "mental illness" excuse that people of all persuasions trot out every time a man uses a gun to mow down innocent people. I'm not talking about gun control, either. I think the mental illness trope masks something deeper and more rotten that has everything to do with a culture that has always glorified violence, that is deeply paranoid and most of all, intellectually lazy. Does that sound pretentious? It's certainly not original, but it's what I'm squirming about today.











Here's a poem:


In the Library

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

Charles Simic

Curmudgeon

Frontier schoolhouse

I do love a curmudgeon, especially one who writes well.

Here's an excerpt from an especially incisive essay in The New York Review of Books by Charles Simic.

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

...

If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high school curriculum and of families that don’t talk to their children about the past, there’s another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth, without comparable success. 


You can read the rest of  The Age of Ignorance here.


I'm not sure what to do with it all, though, other than shake my head and feel a certain smug satisfaction draped over growing dread that I'm in total agreement.