TOYS IN THE ATTIC
An Ars Poetica Under the Influence

Chase Twichell

Apoem is a portrait of consciousness. It’s a recording of the motions of a mind in time, a mind communicating to others the experience of its own consciousness. When I read or write a poem, I’m trying to open a window between my mind and the minds of others. Poetry is written for others. But it’s also a study of the self, which is a private kind of work.

Already I’ve had to use the troublesome words ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, and ‘self,’ which are approximate and overlapping in their definitions because the thing they describe is a slippery animal. Buddhism has a useful all-purpose name for what I am: a sentient being, but even this label doesn’t account for the persistent evidence suggesting that I am a unique and identifiable individual and can move as such through time. I want to explore this nexus of words–this atom of consciousness, mind, and self–by thinking about depression, from which I’ve suffered all my life, and its relation to poetry. For fifteen years I’ve lived with psychoactive drugs in my brain, among them Ambien, Celexa, Desyrel, Effexor, Elavil, Pamelor, Paxil, Serzone, Triavil, Valium, Wellbutrin, and Xanax, my Knights of the Round Table. I’ve studied the properties of each drug in the laboratories of my mind and body, and have made some unsettling but ultimately consoling discoveries concerning the nature of the self and its language. One is that the animal is slippery because it’s mutable. It travels light, moving from drug to drug as if from country to country. The traveler learns that in all those foreign places the same language is spoken, precise and unadorned but also playful. It’s the language I want for my poems because it’s the language of my consciousness, my little piece of the flux, which happens to be something I fine-tune with psycho-pharmaceuticals.

In one of my earliest memories, I’m standing looking down into a storm drain, in which my younger sister is crouching. We’re playing zoo, and she’s the animal. I’m watching the elder sister, me, shove the heavy grate back over the opening. I’m slightly behind myself, like a shadow, a sensation I used to call “the eyes behind the eyes.” In another memory, I’m about eight, reading in bed when my mother comes in to tell me that my dog, hit by a car the day before, has died at the vet’s. I put my face in my hands, a self-conscious and exaggerated expression of sorrow. My first impulse is to act the part of a grieving child. I am a grieving child, of course, but the real grief is inaccessible to me at that moment. In its place is a calm, numb kind of consciousness, out of which I can fake the expected responses. I’m also playing my mother’s words over and over in my head—she’s said the dog’s name, adding a y so that Centime (French poodle, French name) ends up Centimey, something my mother has never called her before. Centimey died last night. That y tells me a thousand things, among them that I am not completely inside myself the way I’m supposed to be.

The theme of third grade was Ancient Egypt. The teacher described how Howard Carter, excavating the Valley of the Kings for the first time, powered his steam-engines by burning legions of “lesser” mummies. No doubt this lurid detail was meant to enliven the study of history, but the irony of the dead digging up the dead struck me as contrary to the natural order of things, and I told the child psychiatrist about it. Dr. C. was a slow-moving, gentle, elderly woman who gave me a series of Rorschach tests. I said that the butterfly, the obvious one they show you to get you started, was a dead angel, and that another, blatantly phallic, was a tree split by lightning. The doctor had asked me to secretly clink minds with her, but I saw through the ruse. Outside myself as always, the watcher, the modifier, I lied to her in order to dramatize my pain, but also to keep her at a distance. I knew I wasn’t normal—at school there was clear glass between me and the playground, me and my young fellow humans. I was the feral cat that slunk in and out of the garage at night, not the house pet asleep at the foot of the bed. I slept in my clothes and climbed down the drainpipe like a boy. But there was a joy that came with that loneliness. It was poetry, proof of a companion consciousness. As far back as I can remember, I recognized its language as my own.

What happens in depression, for reasons that are still unknown, is that the limbic-diencephalic system malfunctions. The biochemical chain reaction that results is extremely complicated, much of it still hypothetical. What is known is that certain neurotransmitters (especially serotonin and norepinephrine) do not work properly, causing a disruption in the flow of information between nerve cells. It’s like a game of telephone; the message gets lost as it travels, eventually affecting cellular metabolism, hormone balance, and the circadian system, the internal clock that determines cycles of rest and activity. This translates into disturbances of mood, sleep, hunger, sex, memory formation, physical energy, hor-mone secretion (especially cortisol, the “fight or flight” chemical), and body temperature. As Dr. Demitri Papolos summarizes it, “Recent advances in the neurosciences are gradually revealing the central nervous system to look more and more like an interactive network of oscillating nuclei that exchange information across spatial and temporal boundaries that are modifiable by experience.” Across spatial and temporal boundaries that are modifiable by experience—that’s the part I’m trying to understand.

In my mid-thirties, which happens to be the average age of onset for clinical depression, I began shooting in the dark, as my doctor put it: searching through trial and error for a drug that would cure what ailed me with as few side effects as possible. Some of them make you dream, every night, the kind of dream you hate to wake from, rich and important-feeling. Others keep you skittering along the surface of sleep as if a car alarm were going off somewhere in the neighborhood, but not in your street. Some make you black out if you stand up too fast, or glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth. One cures migraines, another exacerbates them. All of them affect the way in which the brain processes language. It’s not something a person uninterested in words might notice, except for maybe a bit of tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, but to me it’s obvious that my relation to language has been subtly affected. Before the long parade of drugs, words were like water—all I had to do was dip my mind and it would come up brimming with new excitements. I always thought of this ability as a “gift,” a part of my being. Now, the river of words flows around me as it always has, but I write as a translator, slightly outside the boundaries of my original language, fluent but no longer a native speaker. It’s hard to explain. It feels like a new part of my brain has learned language, and the old part has atrophied. Put another way, it feels like a new self has displaced the old one. Maybe this sensation is just a physical metaphor for what the anti-depressants do, I don’t know, but I’ve come to see that this death of imaginary self (along with its language) is not necessarily a hindrance to my work, though it took me years to stop trying to call my “gift” back from its grave. Its loss functions exactly as form does in poetry: if the door’s locked, try a window.

What if the Self is a fiction of the hypothalamus? Aside from the uncomfortable inference that I may be nothing but a poorly-mixed cocktail of brain chemicals, this disturbing idea sounds like Zen, and also like science fiction. In the film The Matrix, a cyber-jockey called Neo (Keanu Reeves) is drafted by the underground to help bring about the downfall of the Matrix, a mutant computer program born of artificial intelligence, which has turned the human race into slaves. The “real world,” based on urban America sometime early in the twenty-first century, is in fact computer-generated, a gilded cage for the population, which is unaware of the illusion that controls it. It’s up to Neo and his new friends to reveal the truth, which, unhappily, turns out to be that the actual time is numerous centuries later than heretofore thought, and consists of a single surviving human city near the core of the earth, where there is still heat, and where the memory of freedom is kept alive by generations of escapees. I mention this particular science fiction because as a metaphor it expresses the essence of the Buddha’s teaching: Life is suffering. Full of craving, we try to cling to illusion, the flux. What we experience as our “self” is a mental projection, a changeable idea; to see the world as it is, we must forget the self. Forgetting the self means realizing its true nature, which is that the boundary between it and the world is imaginary. This is why Zen is said to be a study of the self.

Well, if the self is a fiction, then whose fiction is it? What consciousness determines how The Fiction should be feeling? What if The Fiction finds the magic wand of psychopharmacology among the toys in the attic? As the...