|
Anne Sexton
the lovely dead poet who saved my lifeBedlam. It's a concept I can certainly relate to. The bedlam inside my head. The bedlam of the crazy city. Anne Sexton's To Bedlam And Part Way Back. I don't recall the exact circumstances. But this much I know: that book made its way down through time and space and into my possession straight from the poet herself. It's not the sort of thing scholars or most anyone will ever believe. But it's true. They'll explain it away saying that because of the suicidal ideation that led to my hospitalization (that's the way the doctors talk) last October, I was searching, and thanks to that receptiveness to and interest in other's like me, I found it. The book. Anne's first collection of poetry. Bedlam. But what of the circumstances? When I say I don't recall the circumstances, I'm referring to the details of the moment I actually realized what I had in my possession. Of that day in New Orleans not long after Mardi Gras, I have little recollection. I know I was severely despondent, and that the book and its empathetic author quite possibly saved my life. But back to subject of when the book and I first met up. It was at my grandmother's in the lakes region of central New Hampshire. The book was there on her shelf, her book. I suspect, however, that it wasn't a book she'd chosen, but rather one that had made its way into her life after the death of her daughter many, many years back. This is complete guesswork. I really don't know how my grandmother got the book. If I asked her, I doubt she would know herself. But my theorizing is grounded in our family's history. My aunt Nancy was diagnosed schizophrenic, institutionalized, and died by her own hand. Just like Anne Sexton. Honestly, I have to admit that aside from a vague recognition of the name Anne Sexton, I really knew nothing about the poet or her work. I thus made no connection between my recent brush with suicide and Sexton's. Bedlam was simply one of half a dozen books of verse that I plucked from grandma's shelf that day. The more I've both battled with and come to terms with chronic depression over the years, the more poetry has etched itself into my soul as the only language I really care to speak anymore. One of the other books I grabbed was Kerouac's On The Road. I think it was this book that I expressed an interest in, which led to Grandma's invitation to "go ahead, take some books with you," and I did. I don't know how aware I was of it at that moment, but my entire reality was crashing down around me with undeniable force. Either that very day or a few days in either direction, back or forward, I can't recall, the linchpin on my long and mostly wonderful partnership with Cootie came out in my hand. Well, not so much in my hand as in my face. Cootie herself pulled it. Or someone claiming to be Cootie. A beast, really. A mean, ugly, straight-out-of-the-mouth-of-hell and straight-out-of-the-bottle devil girl, she was. I wish I could remember whether it was before or after I got the book. Damn. At any rate, Coot flew out to meet me midway through my birthday visit to late-autumn New England. When my cousin Justin and I went to fetch her at the airport, Coot was drunk. Very drunk. So drunk that she had crossed over into the beast who single-handedly put an end to some five years of Duke & Cootie. For though I am certainly not without fault and she will likely go to her grave believing that I left her, it was the beast who called it quits. Time and again when violently drunk, Coot would say it had to end, that she couldn't take it anymore, that I had to be out by such-n-such date. Christmas was the date she gave me that decisive night in New Hampshire. And if I'd ever had doubts about the validity of her feelings whilst drunk, the beast put them to rest that night saying, "Don't listen to what I say tomorrow when I'm sober. THIS is how I really feel!" To Bedlam And Part Way Back. What an incredibly appropriate title for the final days of Cootie & Duke. This ending, this final smashing blow illustrates more than anything, I think, the significance of the arrival of Anne Sexton's first collection of poems into my life. There I was dropping through the trapdoor in the floor of the no-such-thing-as-forever world, and there was Anne throwing me a lifeline. And it was a time-release lifeline, one that wouldn't reveal itself until the grim reality of being out in the world penniless and alone without Cootie hit me three months later in March of this year. For it was then whilst stacking books in the middle of the room for an appropriate platform from which to hang myself that I would open Bedlam and become so engrossed in the beautiful mind of its author that I would forget to hang myself! And as if that wasn't reason enough howl Anne Sexton's name from the rooftops, I would then go on flipping through the pages back and forth until finally Angel Anne's telepathic yodeling through the vast canyons of perception between this world and the next would pierce my thick skull causing me to look again at that type and those curious scribblings on the first pages of the book and realize, oh my God, oh my God, I have here in my hand an extremely rare item indeed, an autographed first edition of Anne Sexton's first book. An ensuing internet investigation of the book's dollar value put a very large smile on my face as I realized that not only was I far from penniless but that I was not alone in the company of my new friend and guardian angel, Anne Sexton. [postscript: I have since studied up on Sexton's life and read a lot of her work and I can't recommend her enough.]
Anne & family reading Bedlam The book in her hand is the one she sent me
Click HERE for Rick's latest rythmic ramblings!
Site Design by me and Michael Strickland 
|
