03-27-2013, 09:56 PM
Maybe the History Channel can do a show called the Dead Poet Code. And concerned people can chase after poets, warning them of their imminent deaths as laid out in their choice of words.
It's one thing to be depressed or have bad things happen around you. Then you dig into it, think about it all the time, even when you're not depressed, so you can write hundreds of effective poems over a few decades. Adrienne Rich wrote about world issues, and dwelled on them. She might have killed herself too, if she dwelled on herself. Maybe not. A person's mind is a dangerous place.
Depression is no good. You don't feel anything, somebody could tell you your son just died, and you know you should feel something but you don't. That's real depression. It comes in phases at first, but if you don't find some way to fight it from coming again, after a while the so-called phases can last years and years. That's when people just end it the old fashion way.
I think that supernatural ideas can help with depression. I think they're better than killing yourself: Although maybe not for the people around you. For instance, I'll feel the darkest, unbearable depression weighing down on me, and I just want to die. Then I say, "Some witch must have put a spell on me" and I activate all those zany areas of the mind that lots of people are ashamed to take advantage of these days. And I go through the rituals of the belief. I don't go out trying to kill witches or anything like that; I just try to get one to fall in love with me, which is lethal enough.
I think poets use similar ideas in their writings to ward off depression and other fatal things. But there's often a fine line between imagination and madness that many people can't see. And then the poet's intellectual dignity makes them ashamed of being seen as superstitious or crazy. Luckily I've worked out a way not to be ashamed of any of that. Actually going insane is what remains one foreseeable problem. But I've set traps for those bits of creeping madness too.
It's one thing to be depressed or have bad things happen around you. Then you dig into it, think about it all the time, even when you're not depressed, so you can write hundreds of effective poems over a few decades. Adrienne Rich wrote about world issues, and dwelled on them. She might have killed herself too, if she dwelled on herself. Maybe not. A person's mind is a dangerous place.
Depression is no good. You don't feel anything, somebody could tell you your son just died, and you know you should feel something but you don't. That's real depression. It comes in phases at first, but if you don't find some way to fight it from coming again, after a while the so-called phases can last years and years. That's when people just end it the old fashion way.
I think that supernatural ideas can help with depression. I think they're better than killing yourself: Although maybe not for the people around you. For instance, I'll feel the darkest, unbearable depression weighing down on me, and I just want to die. Then I say, "Some witch must have put a spell on me" and I activate all those zany areas of the mind that lots of people are ashamed to take advantage of these days. And I go through the rituals of the belief. I don't go out trying to kill witches or anything like that; I just try to get one to fall in love with me, which is lethal enough.
I think poets use similar ideas in their writings to ward off depression and other fatal things. But there's often a fine line between imagination and madness that many people can't see. And then the poet's intellectual dignity makes them ashamed of being seen as superstitious or crazy. Luckily I've worked out a way not to be ashamed of any of that. Actually going insane is what remains one foreseeable problem. But I've set traps for those bits of creeping madness too.