By: Dorie LaRue
Among the paradoxes
of modern society:
a woman in San Francisco
spies an image of Christ
in a potato chip, and eBay
makes her a millionaire.
A twenty year old in Boston
refuses his antipsychotics,
which diminishes the voices
he hears, and is promptly
detained. How do we know
he is not The Messiah?
He has a point.
To be sure, St Paul’s mood
ranged from ecstatic
to tears of sorrow.
We'd call them
marked mood swings
in some circles,
accompanied as they were by
sublime auditory and visual perceptions,
grandiose hallucinations,
delusional thought content.
The man was informed
by a talking donkey
for Christ’s sake.
He wrote 70 thousand word
letters regularly on papyrus
no one could afford. Still,
his fears of evil spirits!
They rivaled our Uncle John's paranoia.
Under the protection of bankruptcy
Uncle John became a drunk and threw
the Easter ham into Aunt Mabel's
blue-heavy hydrangea bushes.
Drunk, Uncle John stole his
neighbor's lawn mower
and sold it to a stranger
and one moon void night
filled his wife’s gas tank
with sugar.
Really no one's uncle,
and Mabel no one's aunt,
but it was she whom
the whole church adored
because but for the grace of God,
went we. And her eyes,
behind her legendary specs,
constantly considering
the lilies of the field,
made Christ's cup of passion
look like a piece of cake.
Aunt Mabel worked
in the canning center, slinging
slabs of beef “like a man.”
At church, her lenses
resembled cut glass crystal
designed by the globules
of fat slung all week,
which, if left unsmeared
by the teasing boy,
did not entirely obscure her view
of the stained-glass Jesus's
tap dancing on water, the vestibule
cloyed with flowers from someone's
bright garden, the front pew of children,
like bobbing daisies,
none hers. She was our heroine,
a martyr more real than those
in our Catholic cousins’
Lives of Martyrs.
Now? Codependent.
Back then we had the slackers,
the bullies, the shy,
the dreamers, the cut ups,
but if you called their number today:
motivationally disordered,
oppositionally defiant,
panic syndromed, attention deficited,
and all poised to gulp the promises
of a drug-based paradigm of care
fueling the present plague.
In literature class we read
Melville's old parable
about Bartleby the scrivener.
By the end of the semester
he comes on more Ahab
than Ahab. I beg,
would not one of you,
have given Bartleby
a space in your office
just to be crazy and safe?
They move uneasily or stare,
confused, or maybe they
are just bored, and my ego talks.
But most of them, like the skin-flint lawyer,
want the Bartlebys tucked away,
restrained by pharmacy,
so they in their snug retreats
can tote up their college credits.
So, no one beds down in Bartleby's Tombs
without confronting the blankness
of the walls. In the movie he died
with his eyes open. It is not so bad
the lawyer said, here is the sky
and here is the earth, not knowing
he too was a walking requiem,
and to which Bartleby replied,
I know where I am.
Seems as though after decades
of cutting-edge pharmacology
we are getting nowhere,
spending more on drugs than
Cameroon's gross domestic product,
yet walk on we must among
the broken glass of theory.
To be crazy in a safe place
is no longer an option. Like
that pale wight, we are doomed
to progress—
we are deranged
by progress--
while in India folks grow out
of schizophrenia, and in Nigeria
bipolar is a language,
soon forgot. How?
Chanting? Mantras?
sacred snake-dances?
cumin stained thumbs?
Mongolian camel underwear?
Or just space,
and the absence
of medical breakthroughs...
Gone are the days we pulled
our cures from fiction
and philosophy and art.
Poor Tolstoy if he'd been born
in the 20th century. Poor Socrates.
Poor Picasso. Poor poor Heidegger.
Now the DSMV puts us in categories,
creates our parameters of normal.
After all, everyone knows
Jesus was suicidal
with every chance possible to escape.
I often consider the men who
created him. Full of high rhetoric,
crafting their astral projection,
they lit a dark corner of the world,
little knowing his hubris was this:
Suicide by proxy.
Ecce homo, they said, said they,
which translate thus:
Now look at him. Just look at him.
Dorie LaRue is the author of a novel, Resurrecting Virgil, by Backwaters Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press; and forthcoming novel, The Trouble With Student Affairs from Artemis Press; two collections of poetry, Mad Rains by Kelsay Press, and Seeking the Monsters by New Spirit Press, and is at work on a collection of short stories. Her fiction and poetry and book reviews have appeared in a variety of journals including, The Southern Review, The Maryland Poetry Review, and The American Poetry Review. She lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, and teaches writing and literature at LSUS.