The Puzzle Factory

Rowley, Rosemarie (1942 - 0)

Original Text

Rosemarie Rowley, Hot Cinquefoil Star ([Dublin]: Rowan Tree Press, 2002): 113-42.

1. Admission

1I want to see someone holy, to confess

2The nature of my soul, free with grace

3The prisoner of my conscience, to bless

4My heart and mind, mend my spirit, trace

5In my confusion a sanctity. Can you address

6This, say I’m sending for one, place

7And time to be chosen. Nurse, lest I digress

8From the disorderly matrix of my case

9With words, I now ask you to impress

10It in your diary. I am out to pace

11The healing of my heart. You say bad cess

12To me, my illness is the token of a race

13Gone to extinction, burned out without will.

14Someone will come when I have had my pill.

15The priest will come when you have had your pill:

16Please sit down or you’ll disturb the sick

17Creatures in my care. You are very ill.

18This asking for a priest is just a trick

19To waste our professional time, kill

20With constant wearing down, incessant pinprick

21Our repertoire of compassionate nursing skill.

22The pill is good for you, just take a lick

23The candy coating’s nice. You’re very ill.

24He’ll come for sure when you have had your pill.

25Your eyes are bulging. I told you you were sick.

26Come here, you wretch, stop slinking out the door.

27The priest will come. I told you so before.

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28The priest will soon be here. Nurse said so before.

29I can’t believe you’re getting any better.

30Double dose, Nurse. And if you hear her roar

31Kindly call. I’ve got the very fetter:

32But of course we won’t use it. Give her more.

33The pills really quieten them. The letter

34From her GP I believe she tore—

35Up—I think she was declared a debtor

36To the bank. A hundred in the red, a score

37Of unpaid bills. She’s no go-getter—

38Hasn’t the gumption for the daily strife. Store

39Her records in this file. Now we can net her

40Give her ECT, a woman without a man

41I’m tired of helping them out of life’s thrash-can.

42I’m tired of helping them out of life’s thrash can,

43But a few electric shocks will sort her out.

44So trusting, a permanent also ran,

45A loser, a messer, there’s no doubt

46Anxiety personified. I believe she ran

47Through the ward in her night-dress. A scout

48Saw her clawing at the window. At once a ban

49Must be enforced on walking patients. Rout

50Their needless guilt and crucifying unsan-

51itary nightmares. They cause a drought

52Of human sympathy. But then I’m no fan

53Of unchecked impulses. And yet a pout

54On her dial as I give her the injection.

55I smile at her, to show her my protection.

56We smile at them to show them our protection.

57She’s safe now, in the stupour of the drug.

58The ECT machine has passed inspection

59It’s funny how it makes me feel a thug.

60Shock wave, then convulsion and projection

61Of limbs flying like a stranded bug.

62Her mouth foams. I think its found in section

63A of the manual. I don’t want to be smug,

64It’s really harmless. But pitiful. Introspection

65Punished here. They just need a hug.

66But who will hug the face of life’s rejection

67Especially now. The heartstrings’ tug

68Is dead forever in the electric shock

69She won’t remember love that science can mock

70You won’t remember love that science can mock.

71Well, I’m your social worker. And I see

72You’re still complaining about the electric shock.

73I haven’t time to discuss loss of memory

74You don’t need it, really. The lock

75On your door is necessary. The ESB

76Were on. The charge. This going into hock

77With public bodies has got to stop. Have you VD?

78Oh, good. There’s not a problem I can’t knock

79Off in three minutes. And Science is free

80To bare our secrets, systemise for good the Rock

81Of Ages. Nothing, it is clear, can simply be.

82There’s solution in sociology. Resistance

83Is a Case Study, just needing persistence.

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84I’m a case study, that just needs persistence.

85I rock myself all day. The constant flight

86From life’s troubles is my whole existence—

87I am tempted to yield to my spirit’s blight

88And remember little else. Your assistance

89And ECT have burned my memory bright

90With tears that can never be shed. The distance

91In my eyes shows thread of the dark night

92Where mystics have written of the soul. Co-existence

93Of chemical pill and mystic insight cannot light

94The lamp where my reason had subsistence:

95Pills hold me in thrall to nothingness and waste

96The sweet spring of my youth now has a bitter taste.

2: Experts

97He knew the under-sexed and over-privileged,

98Was on to a good thing with hysteria:

99Knew these maladies could be treated, wedged

100In with a 19th century mendacity feria:

101Days when a solitude of young women pledged

102A secrecy to incestuous fathers who were weary

103Of wives’ costly chilled ardours, hedged

104Implicitly in a materialist world. Wisteria

105And aspidistra were fecundity. Dredged

106From the classical annals of outer Siberia

107He made a new codex and creed, alleged

108Incestual fantasy the norm. ‘Twould sear ya

109But Freud couldn’t see Freud. He couldn’t see

110Beyond his own sad childhood fantasy.

111Well beyond his own childhood fantasy

112Jung sought for spiritual food, was rapt

113In a mythic reconstruction of the memory,

114Where race enriches the individual, sapped

115By his failure to talk to God, to see

116Where his life takes him past the untapped

117Resources deep in his psyche. A mystery

118Of a kind to rescue him where he is trapped

119By the ordinary day’s demands. A pharmacy

120Cannot store the elixir of life. Wrapped

121Within the search, a person finds the key

122Deep in his own unconscious, a mapped

123Territory to Jung. We cannot blame

124Religion or the meaning of the game.

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125Religion or the meaning of the game

126Skinner understood to do with rats.

127People were like rats, exactly the same

128Only tiresomely mad as bats.

129Still, with a few electrodes, shame

130Could be seen as extraneous, and pats

131On the head an adverse stimulus, a tame

132Physical reaction. So congrats.

133To the nerve cells, to hurt or maim

134Is merely a blind animal impulse, that’s

135All. Love is a case, he claims,

136Of stimulus and response. Pour that in your vats.

137We’ll go on conditioned reflexes down to hell

138Or up to heaven, depending on the bell.

iv (Reich)

139Heaven doesn’t depend on the bell—

140My discovery was the function of the orgasm.

141No matter what sex is, just do it well

142I sent whole populations into spasm.

143When they saw my work was going to sell

144They flung me into prison with enthusiasm.

145They were certain I should be going to hell

146For feeling was a kind of protoplasm:

147Medical pros knew I shouldn’t excel

148At this peculiar brand of iconoclasm.

149The nasty and particular fate that befell

150Me has opened up in medicine a chasm—

151For the puerile info is, mind’s just a body-smith—

152I’m proof of sanity, sensation’s zenith.

v (Szasz)

153Proof of sanity, sensation’s zenith!

154Some folk would rather have it that they’re crazy

155My books set out madness as a myth—

156Whatever is socially not aisy

157I say power is the only monolith

158The kernel of the matter. Being lazy

159Is perceived generally as the kith

160Of she devils, born of a hazy

161Notion that witches were power-smith

162For man, not Satan. It was quasi-

163Religious views persecuted a fifth

164Of women at one time—I’d say none were mad,

165But the defiant, the unregenerate, and the bad.

vi (Fromm)

166The defiant, the unregenerate and the bad

167Were seen by me to be in a fix,

168And at bottom, it really makes me sad.

169I spend my life wondering how a person ticks

170Who can’t love his family, and be glad

171To be alive and kick against the pricks

172As if he enjoyed it. Instead, we’ve labelled mad

173All who can’t love, are hurt. The crucifix

174Holds hearts in thrall that daren’t pad

175With the cushion of affection, the onyx

176Jewel of life. It doesn’t, sorry, add

177Up to much. I mustn’t get prolix.

178For as you know, my name is Eric Fromm

179I’m un-ambitious, loving, and quite warm.

vii (Laing)

180He’s un-ambitious, loving, and quite warm

181I’m honest, poetic and Glaswegian;

182I tend to see the truths that others scorn

183That people just want to cry a squidgen

184And mostly there are reasons for mind’s storm

185Like himself below, their names are legion

186But basically reflect what can transform

187Love into hate, homely life into region

188Of frosty intercourse; failure to conform

189In grisly incommunicado. A Collegian

190Scorning academic discipline, I perform

191Wonders of healing. Without religion.

192My name, I’m sure you’ve guessed, is R.D. Laing

193To love mankind, I’m doing all I can.

3: Visitors

194When they visit her I stay downstairs

195Beside the office. What goes on upstairs

196I can only guess at. I saw my mother

197Here. And she looked far away. I was sure

198She couldn’t possibly love me any more.

199She held me close before the lift doors closed

200And whispered “tomorrow” before I nose-

201Dived away from her tears. It hurts me still

202She didn’t say goodbye, but that the pill

203Made her feel that things were going down-hill.

204I thought she loved me, her one and only joy -

205It’s plain to see I’m not at all a good boy.

206She doesn’t care now if I’m bad or good:

207The doctors say she’s doing what she should.

208The doctors say she’s doing all she should

209I always thought she was a little queer;

210And I, a friend, have done all that I could.

211Why, once she even called me “my dear”

212Another time, she told me I was ugly

213Because I tried to snatch her little snuggly.

214Even with her boyfriends, I was flirty

215And she grew morose. I found her dirty

216The Irish habit of never ever dusting

217Of leaving everything till tomorrow, trusting

218The dirt won’t show under the bed.

219I guess the men knew they’d never wed

220A slut like her. Literary pretension

221Leaves in the married state a fierce dissension.

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222Yes, in the married state there’s fierce dissension

223I favoured her. Watched her declension

224From mirthful girl tittering at the boys

225To serious critic of their serious toys—

226Motor cars, drink, sex and nightly snooker—

227And going home they’d swear to seeing a Pooka.

228Her aversion grew. She saw a paradigm

229Between the world’s power games, and mine.

230The penile appendage was another projectile

231Not in essence different from a missile.

232Phallocracy’s the centre of the matter—

233We can’t say heart, for fear it would grow fatter—

234Her thesis was, the male impulse to kill,

235Which she’s now counteracting with a pill.

236She’s now counteracting with a pill

237All I’ve ever done to make her ill—

238My promises to love her were a pain

239Which bled afresh like wounds, again,

240Prised open with my inexact criticism

241Which so often took the form of witticism.

242I thought her aspirations smacked of vanity;

243I mimicked her, made much inanity

244Out of her wholesome hope. She cried

245So often I thought our love had died—

246But no, it had become a separation

247Which became my malevolent inspiration—

248It wouldn’t have mattered save I was her spouse

249To whom she pledged and swore eternal vows.

250He to whom she pledged and swore such vows

251Was soon discarded. A regular louse

252He blackmailed her with threats of suicide

253Once he knew that love had really died.

254He didn’t love her, but felt a man diminished

255When she first told him their thing was finished.

256He’d rather move her purposefully, claim

257That underneath all women were the same

258Though she was bright. But that was her misfortune,

259As if she were born to carry a torchon,

260Be there if he raped her. That was the bitter end

261And thus a woman scorned went around the bend.

262Hell may have no fury, but the hospital has more

263Treatments to even up the score.

264Treatments may even up the score

265I saw her crying in the street, pour

266Her heart out to strangers. I ran inside

267To get her a glass of water. She denied

268Who she was. She said her name was Phyllis

269But long ago she was known as Amaryllis

270Then she said she was a lonely Valentine

271Who could see her undoing in red wine

272And then she said her name was Holy Mary

273And like the nursery rhyme, she was contrary

274But not because of cockleshells and bells

275But she had seen demons who had lived in hells

276Where phantom lusts raged in bodies pure,

277She was, she wept, a virgin and a whore.

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278She was, she wept, a virgin and a whore

279I understand, but I wish I knew more—

280In general, I’d say she’s very nice

281They say that every person has a price

282And she had none. She took seriously

283Every nuance and tone, even imperiously

284Withheld approval at a tincture of a lie,

285And she became worse as time went by.

286She couldn’t exchange the merest pleasantry

287Without her ignoble life, her peasantry

288Snapping at her heels with bitter pride

289Of ancient lineage. No bartered bride

290In work or misery, but trusting to failure

291Like babes whose brains had yet no suture

4: The Malady

292Her song is absence, but her art is absent.

293She exists in her own bad faith, a centre

294Flying out at her own frozen pace, a dent

295In the counterpane of her hated mentor,

296Herself. She exists to prove she’s hell-sent

297Out of the racket of silent cacophony, dissenter

298To the faith in herself she herself bent

299In the flying wind, a sad lamenter

300Of what is good, is gone. A secret assent

301Is wound up in the coils of her tormentor;

302Her language locking the floodgates like cement

303Now bursting in the tide of being repenter.

304Undone with nitpicker’s gravity, like a crime,

305Her centre is time, time spent doing time.

306Her centre is timeless, time spent doing time

307And its slow pace towards healing. Time and again

308She pulls apart the treasury of thought, rhyme,

309Lets it fall in a cluster on good. Pain

310Welcomes the transition, and the undoing, clime

311For a fated ego to unblock the drain

312Of warm feeling, current for the grime

313Encrusted hearts are fed. The purpose plain

314Is to loose the vestige of sentiment, climb

315Into the turret and throw away the key, main

316Chance with the stowaway scissors. Clip the sublime

317Tresses. Then throw them to the wind and rain,

318Crying “Whatever is, let it simply be

319Remember these beauties which are not for me.

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320Remember these beauties which are not for me

321And throw away also the brazen treasure chest

322Where I had etched our memories in my blood, see

323The unsalutary symptoms of my plague, test

324For reference and you will find perfidy

325Where once the Queen of Ransoms was thought blessed.

326All that issued from my pearlised eyes, the key

327You warders stole when trussing up the rest

328You called a person, whom you said was free.

329Degradations begin at the breast,

330Where once the child of happiness went on spree,

331Called his mother saint, and father quest.

332Now the imp has danced the reel of wrath,

333Seeing his mother near a psychopath.

334Seeing his mother near a psychopath,

335I tear my hair to make the falsehood right

336My heart is broken, tell it not in Gath

337Or how this lasting daytime’s blight

338Has torn my family, who in my wrath

339See an everlasting endless night

340Inhabited by the spectre of a Plath

341Scribbling in the darkness without light

342But my darkness is the troubled aftermath

343Of the pills and treatment, I am out of sight

344And in my place a wretch turns polymath

345Garbling in unknown tongues of wrong, to fight

346With streeling sense the battle order’s rage.

347Suppressed, my fever is to tear the page.

348Suppressed, my fever is to tear the page,

349To make what happened disappear. In fact,

350The long slow death of prisoner in a cage

351Is paradigm to show we cannot with tact

352Alter what has passed. Put on the stage

353A show to please the mainstream. Pack

354In anguish what can understand our rage

355Directed at oneself. It cannot be the rack

356Which I am strung upon, it is the age

357Abstracted in concerts to show its general tack.

358My sickness testament to the malady of the sage

359Who exclaims, all is futility. I am proof demoniac

360Our time’s neurosis hides eternal truth—

361I am the victim of my own timeless ruth.

362I am the victim of my own timeless ruth

363Compassion never really knew its name till me.

364I picked up every brown winged bird, couth

365With longing for the south, and set it free

366Pushed a leaf off every insect, smooth-

367Made the way for every tiny bee,

368So all should be free to sing. In youth

369I tried a quaver or two, like he

370Who charmed the generations, Bob of Duluth:

371Yet never felt as free as his songs said we’d be—

372Besides, money was involved. And my sleuth

373Said, don’t sing for money, for poetry is paid no fee

374I believed it, and gave away my song

375Sang everywhere I felt I didn’t belong.

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376I sang in places I did not belong,

377I wept in ruins younger than yesterday,

378Made every tried logic a fiddler’s song,

379Made every song lament that it should pay

380Respect to what the culture said was a long

381Concept of morality, the pedant’s way

382To higher densities of philosophy, a gong

383To summon spirits, dismembered and astray

384In the rank demonology of the cursed day

385God wove weft and warp, and right and wrong

386Sent angels upwards, bad spirits in the drey

387Where secrets bought and sold for centuries, bong

388Out the names of those who die for good.

389I am on-beckoned by an infinite sisterhood.

5: Regression

390The physical and the spiritual entrained

391Together, each got a body blow

392At the five doors of sense, were trained

393To ask “who’s there?" There was no show

394Only a dumb anguish, which fear constrained

395To mock with a meek smile. It was no-go

396Between the spirit and the body. Brained

397In the emotions, boxed in chemicals, no

398Ordinance of personhood, where once had reigned

399Sweet reason. Love was an absent foe

400Which hammered constantly to prove it gained

401Nothing by execution. It was always so.

402History was a fop, a dull conspiracy

403And truth was the mockery it could never be.

404Truth was the mockery it could never be.

405The fact was God, or godless, to be terse.

406What happened to the sacred territory

407Of “you and me” celebrated in verse,

408Popular song, crooned on the radio, free

409Our realm of household love and felt in Erse?

410Who hears it in the corridors of insanity?

411A demonstration of the knee jerk, privy purse

412Of medicine’s rendering up of soul to fee.

413Knave or fool, the hospital’s daily curse

414Reduces to physical reaction, eternal verity.

415A matted mass of measly microbes pressed

416As in answering a summons. It’s a cod.

417Believe in us, not in the one true God.

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418Believe in us, not in the one true God,

419Our name is Legion, and we live by lies.

420All who have the reckless midnight trod

421On creaking floorboards, have heard our cries.

422Once Truth and love and day are gone, a squad

423Of demons rushes in with night. And ties

424Of birth and blood friendship are odd

425Sport to our presence. Where there’s fear, prize

426Only what is ours. In the land of Nod

427Is the appetiser to our full-blown sway. Spice

428At first, we eat the heart away, prod

429At the props of decency. We advise

430A cunning madness to pay virtue’s toll,

431Alienation is our cherished goal.

432Alienation from God is our goal,

433And so the frantic woman in the den

434Of mad lionesses like herself, can roll

435Back the dawn of her burnished Imagist pen

436That rides high on uncommon destiny, a role

437To astonish history: to parade in the fen

438Of amazed critics who astutely poll

439Her chances of pulling off the impossible: zen

440Hell turned to heaven, a bartered soul

441‘Twixt good and evil. Faust again,

442This time a woman. And did the dice roll.

443How near she came to surpassing men

444Comprehending paradigms of moral weight and swoon!

445This gift to herstory wedged the crack of doom.

446Her gift to herstory wedged the crack of doom

447On which bad faith depended, and bad luck

448Though all the doors were opened to that room

449Of life abundant, she preferred to truck

450With half-baked notions, that needed a zoom

451Lens to enliven, bring the monstrous ruck

452Of materialist philosophy to its destined tomb

453With indifferent scorn and second-fiddle schmuck.

454She pipped such notions that have need to vroom

455Down the fables of casual accidental muck

456That so-called scientists call the present boom

457Of wealth, indecent waste, and pass-the-buck

458Philosophy. Hers was the chilling answer—

459Merit must be found, even if it were cancer.

460Merit must be found, even if it were cancer,

461And right must be subsumed for wrong to flourish.

462The scars must be telling, a gut-lancer

463Not the healing power of God and good, perish

464The thought. Ms. Average is a shoddy chancer

465Thrown out the window for normalcy to cherish,

466A viper in the bosom turned necromancer

467Which makes even her last few days currish

468In the extreme, snapping at the heels of a dancer

469Whose departed spirit love has failed to nourish.

470In his pop-eye stare the last great romancer

471As she bites the dust of a lifetime’s demurrage:

472Being sorry for oneself is jumping the gun,

473Saying no to life before it has begun.

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474Saying no to life before it has begun

475Refusing to take part in one’s own story

476Being sorry for oneself can be such fun

477Not accepting one’s part in Creation’s glory

478Is just a way of saying, I’m going to shun

479This life of accident, appalling gory

480Strife and competition. Attila the Hun

481Had the size of it. We’re doomed a priori

482To murder, bloodshed, before our race is run!

483I will abstain from this compact of fury

484Leavened in the gloom of mind. No sun

485Will shine its light. A ribald Tory

486Mocking rebellion in the frenzied fray,

487I’ll die before I live to fight a day.

6: In the Corridor

488The first cut was the deepest, the jangle

489Of many keys upon a laundered breast,

490The thud of silence, after the wrangle

491That ensues between the keeper and the rest.

492He’s not on till noon, this rota’s in a tangle

493Can I, with sanity and eyesight blessed

494Make sense of it? I’d ask you to wangle

495Another bed in the upstairs ward – Depressed –

496I’ll keep her there. It’s like being in a mangle

497With psychotic, manic. It puts to test

498Our professional forebearance and our angle

499Of objectivity. She needs to be caressed;

500But we can simulate with pills and shocks

501The nature of our nursing and our locks.

502The nature of our nursing and our locks

503Are intertwined in tight conspiring bonds:

504Our chief deterrent, a kind falsehood, rocks

505The towers of belief. The magic wands

506Of doctors’ pencilled orders, the lonely nox

507Of dreamless sleep keeps lies in ponds

508Where like trapped fishes, the poor soul knocks

509At the glass bowl of truth; to correspond

510With fact its punitive task. Deadlocks

511Of intuition and of sense, and diamond

512Of a dark jeweled head. A soul’s rot,

513Self a forever-running vagabond.

514Lies added to lies make fiction grate,

515Upon the brain, a client of the state.

iii

516The nerveless brain, the client of the state

517Is now the subject of much ripe canonic:

518Nerveless of course it’s not, it’s just late

519In registering emotion – unTeutonic.

520Or should we say, it registers a rate

521Unsuitable for programming. Quiet histrionic.

522A bandaged soul is not the proper fate

523For one dignified as man/woman. It’s ironic

524To call us human when the experts prate

525Of matters manic-depressive or catatonic.

526Why can’t we be normal, find a mate?

527Why be platonic and demonic?

528But in straps and chains the State no longer dresses

529Those whose being a bad entity possesses.

530Those whose being a bad entity possesses

531Will find a chink in their immortality.

532What began as admonishment regresses

533To where good is not a necessary

534Part of the fabric. Instead it dresses

535Up with lures to attack with finery

536Of thought and diction the unschooled messes

537Of adolescent putting on of agony.

538Fearful violation of self presses

539Against the grain of ineluctable reality

540And the often sought after caresses

541Contain the essence of the germ “to be”

542Gone putrid, dank with fright and with dismay

543A violation of all that for which we used to pray.

544A violation of all that for which we used to pray

545Brings us to the hospital’s grey door

546Our alter ego standing in the way

547Of “I” shouts “Rape me no more!”

548With your shard of promises. Now I pay

549Dearly with my dream’s life store

550I put off learning to be human, say

551Now I was wrong. I know your lore

552Of madness, debauched reality, lay

553At your feet my broken self. It’s sore

554To have carried the load such a long way,

555So out of touch. I know the score.

556Your tranquillising chain, your strait-jacket

557Await me with instructions on the packet.

558Awaiting me like instructions on the packet

559Are tortures both medieval and new.

560In darker days the sick kicked up a racket

561And it put visitors off, (like at Kew).

562It’s nice to know my treatments in a bracket

563With bloodletting, hot water, and the pew

564Where I was taught to sing hymns. A placket

565Round me, and the infirmary screw

566Tight around my neck. I’d like a whack at

567The orderly who tells me what to do

568But mostly, I’d like to put a tacket

569In that deep frenzied heart to which I’m clew

570And worm-eaten puzzle. And yet I thole

571Daily in hopes God will mend the hole.

vii

572Daily, in hopes God will mend the hole

573I shrive out in tiresome counterfeit

574I can’t be said, to own, at all, my soul

575And see myself always in defeat—

576A nicety. Conjecture and the whole

577Triumph of order, science and mercy-meat

578Ground out in daily routine. And the role

579Of patient is to be her own compleat

580Invalid, see herself as droll

581Carbon copy of a great deceit

582She has no right to herself. A pigeon hole

583Is perfect metaphor, she’s obsolete

584In the great life-game. She’s out of kelter

585Here she will find unremitting shelter.

7: The Cure

586Heaven, if depending on the bell

587Could be on earth, if we could get it right—

588If we could make positive the hard sell

589To keep us doped on optimism through the night;

590How lies and fibs we’d never tell

591To ears whose eyes were allowed the sight

592Of something good. And in our cell

593Of-nothing-is-under-the-sun-but-it's-right

594We’d call love into question, sound the knell

595Forever on the famous serpent bite

596In history nothing went wrong, tell

597No story, nor children hear a fight

598Psychologists tell us another fairy tale

599It hinges on the blaming of the female.

600It hinges on the blaming of the female

601The matter, mater, matrix of our song

602That she should live and yet could tell the tale

603And do justice to herself, right the wrong,

604But ambiguity is dressed in shyness, scale

605By which is measured, protesting, long

606Improbability. That she did not rail

607Against conception, suffered silence, did not bong

608Out the names of her betrayer, gave a pale

609Image of her integrity. A fiery tongue

610And truth locked in shame, indeed to fail

611To vindicate her honour had her hung

612Not in a gossip column, a rolling crown,

613But in the mental health hospice of a town.

iii

614In the mental health hospice of a town,

615The brain is deemed a strange and complex thing:

616No one understands, it is admitted with a frown,

617But there’s no knowing what experiment can bring.

618Our cunning chemicals and knowledge bring renown

619And soul and spirit, anachronism, ring

620Of medieval superstition. We drown

621The patient in our pills, a fairy queen

622Reduced to blubber. He blubbers. Down

623The hatch. You’ll get fat, probably sing

624Only one song of the hundreds that you own—

625Synapses seared with poison, heart a broken wing,

626And eyes that bulge with knowledge that has spoiled

627God’s work mangled in the serpent’s coils.

628God’s work is mangled in the serpent’s coils

629And stares out, a beheaded, gibbous post

630The pure subtlety of intellect, soiled

631And little left, wandering as a ghost—

632The self has been killed. Where one had toiled

633To mine the diamond heart in suffering’s most

634Difficult moments, now reduced and boiled—

635A globule to replace a sacred host.

636The body’s gross distortion, now foiled

637Of natural grace, on the moneyed coast

638In the profession’s gutter, a slovenly gargoyle

639Shows the profitable nature of the toast

640They raise to themselves “Control is the way

641On man-made pills we have the final say.”

642“On man-made pills we have the final say –

643Here’s to procrastination. I’ll earn my pension

644Of dull days with no combat’s edge to pay,

645Or decorate my feigned interest’s pretension.”

646Somehow, there was hope in the urge to pray

647An end to constant friction, tension,

648To bring living peace. I shouldn’t mention

649Survival of the fittest was the way

650Our natural historian’s notable dissension

651To edge God out of the picture, to betray

652With nonchalant vocation a whole Being’s declension,

653Reduce the power of thought, and good, to lay

654Wreaths at the feet of a secular, concerned world,

655While centuries of philosophy underneath whirled.

656Centuries of philosophy underneath whirled

657And on a raft of confused fear, I pay

658Respect to the one’s jealousy which hurled

659Mistrust of the ages, am witch to say

660Whether I sink or swim. Yet I am furled

661On the flag of disrepute, dishonour, may

662Be called mad. When my hair was curled

663And my dress pressed, I was eager, nay,

664Clumsily anxious for your praise. You purled

665My plain, turned rival in the fray

666Like a mother wishing a daughter gnarled,

667A jealous eye undermined my day.

668I keep looking for the good friend who’ll smile

669Who, seeing me well and happy, won’t be riled.

vii

670She, seeing me well and happy, won’t be riled

671Nor will she freeze the summer with her frown

672When she consults Britannica, finds there filed

673References she heard only in the town

674Yet I was familiar with. Me, that clown,

675Now out of hospital, whom she’s reviled

676To every acquaintance. “She’s really down

677Poor thing, she’s swallowing pills, piled

678High in charactery in her cabinet. Her academic gown

679Worth nothing, like her scroll. I dialed

680The holograms on her pills, a disjointed crown

681Got me the doctor. A roof could be tiled

682With what she’s taking. He’s found the right palliative

683The exact chemistry—her brain’s co-relative.”

Notes

1] This poem "won the Prize in the Scottish Open International Poetry competition in 2000, though it was written in 1987 after a psychiatrist, Dr Brion Sweeney, said it might be therapeutic to write some of my feelings down about hospitals and hospital treatments. The poem came out in sonnet form, because the form carried me along." (poet's note). Back to Line

11] bad cess: an Anglo-Irish expression meaning "bad luck." Back to Line

31] fetter: see "infirmary screw" (6.vi). Back to Line

34] GP: General Practitioner, family doctor. Back to Line

38] gumption: personal "drive." Back to Line

40] ECT: electro-convulsive therapy, electric shock treatment, a routine pre-1960 way of managing mental disorders, use of which is still prevalent today. Back to Line

47] scout: orderly, watchman. Back to Line

54] dial: face (after the "face" of a clock or watch). Back to Line

75] ESB: Electricity Supply Board (Ireland power utility). Back to Line

76] hock: debt. Back to Line

77] VD: venerial disease. Back to Line

81] The hymn "Rock of Ages," by Augustus Montague Toplady, addresses Jesus as it opens, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, / Let me hide myself in Thee!" Back to Line

92] mystics: especially St. John of the Cross (1542-91), who authored Dark Night of the Soul. Back to Line

100] mendacity: habitual lying. feria: fair. Back to Line

104] Wisteria: climbing blue-flowering shrub. Back to Line

105] aspidistra: common household pot plant. Back to Line

109] Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian psychiatrist, the founder of psychoanalysis, who coined the phrase "Oedipus complex" for what he believed to be a common but repressed human desire to commit incest. Freud’s theories have now been discredited by Richard Webster in his book Why Freud was Wrong (1996; poet's note). Back to Line

112] Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss founder of analytical psychology, who proposed the existence of a collective unconscious that expressed itself in myth and archetype. Back to Line

126] Skinner: B. F. Skinner (1904-90), founder of behaviorism, a form of psychology that used conditioning to produce well-adjusted individuals. His experiments were based on the behavior of rats. Back to Line

138] the bell: one of Pavlov’s theories influenced Skinner's stimulus-response experiments—this recorded the flow of saliva in dog when feeding was preceded by a rung bell. It reduced everyone’s behaviour to this idea. Back to Line

139] Reich: Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), an Austrian psychologist who proposed a novel form of energy, the orgone, that contributed to health and sexual potency. He died in a US prison where he was serving a two-year sentence for selling orgone accumulators in defiance of a prohibition by the Food and Drug Administration. Back to Line

153] Szasz: Thomas Szasz (1920-), a professor emeritus of psychology at the State University of New York in Syracuse, published The Myth of Mental Illness in 1960 and has worked for decades to assert the rights of people judged mentally ill, as with schizophrenia, and consequently institutionalized, tortured with electric and insulin shock therapy, and condemned to social deaths before their bodies died. Back to Line

156] aisy: easy. Back to Line

159] kith: kin, people. Back to Line

166] Fromm: Erich Fromm (1900-80), German-American social psychologist. Back to Line

175] onyx: jewelery, a "form of chalcedony consisting of plane layers of different colours" (OED). Back to Line

180] Laing: R. D. Laing (1927-89), Scottish psychologist who argued that the so-called delusionary thoughts and ideas of the mentally ill ought to be accepted as truthful, authentic accounts of individual experience. Back to Line

183] squidgen: little bit. Back to Line

199] lift: elevator. Back to Line

213] snuggly: woven shawl (not in OED either as a noun or in that sense). Back to Line

226] snooker: a billiard game with elements of pool and pyramids. Back to Line

227] Pooka: Irish folk evil animal spirit. Back to Line

230] penile: penis-like. Back to Line

232] Phallocracy: male society. Back to Line

259] torchon: dish-cloth. Back to Line

262] "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" (Shakespeare). Back to Line

273] nursery rhyme: "Mary, Mary, quite contrary, / How does your garden grow?" Back to Line

275] seen: "seem", a misprint in the 2002 edition. Back to Line

289] bartered bride: the title of a comic opera by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. Back to Line

291] no suture: a baby whose brain lacks sutures, which are channels of soft tissue that separate six cranial bone plates, suffers from craniosynostosis, which prevents the normal growth of the brain. Back to Line

295] counterpane: bedcover (poet's note). Back to Line

297] racket: din. cacophony: loud discordant noise. Back to Line

310] clime: atmosphere. Back to Line

319] "Here, what is beautiful is not so in the eyes of the narrator" (poet's note). An allusion to one of Grimm's fairy tales, the story of Rapunzel, a maiden imprisoned in a tower who let down her hair to enable an enchantress, and later her prince, to climb up to her. When the enchantress found out that Rapunzel was with child by the prince, she cut off the maiden's hair and cast her into the wilderness. Back to Line

323] unsalutary: unhealthy. Back to Line

330] spree: "wild splurge, i.e., shopping spree, from the Irish word for `fun'" (poet's note). Back to Line

335] To the mad person, wrong and right can be confused. Back to Line

336] Gath: ancient city in Israel, the home of Goliath. Back to Line

340] Plath: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), an American poet, married to British poet laureate Ted Hughes, and the author of a semi-autobiographical work The Bell Jar, published the year she committed suicide. She also had undergone electric shock treatment. Rowley has written an essay on this, published in Thumbscrew (Oxford, 1995). Back to Line

346] streeling: straggling, disorganized. Back to Line

361] ruth: pity (cf. the more familiar `ruthless'). Back to Line

364] couth: known. Back to Line

370] Bob of Duluth: Bob Dylan (1941-), enormously popular and commercially successful American folk song writer. Back to Line

373] poetry is paid no fee: “poetry has no fee” in 2002. Back to Line

386] drey: unwheeled cart. Back to Line

409] Erse: the Irish tongue. Back to Line

412] fee: pay. Back to Line

416] cod: joke. Back to Line

419] Jesus asked a demon that possessed a man in the country of the Gadarenes, "What is thy name?", and the demon replied, "My name is Legion: for we are many" (Mark 5.9). It was long thought that mental illness was because of demonic possession. Back to Line

426] A country, east of Eden, to which Cain was exiled after murdering his brother Abel (Genesis 4:16). Back to Line

435] Imagist poets such as the Americans Hilda Dolittle ("H.D.") and Ezra Pound sought to reduce poems to their essentials. Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is typical:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Back to Line

441] Dr. Faustus, the subject of plays by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe, sold his soul to the Devil for knowledge, power, and love that turned out, in the long run, to be comparatively worthless. Back to Line

445] herstory: the feminist's personal "history," a term coined by Robin Morgan in 1970. Back to Line

450] truck / With: do business with. Back to Line

451] ruck: controversy. Back to Line

453] schmuck: fool. Back to Line

454] pipped: gave birth. vroom: "The roaring noise of a motor vehicle accelerating or travelling at speed" (OED). Back to Line

462] gut-lancer: a newly coined word (a knife's drawing out of a person's guts in what used to be the most brutal form of execution, hanging, drawing, and quartering). Back to Line

464] chancer: risk-taker. Back to Line

466] necromancer: one who raises the dead by magic. Back to Line

467] currish: snarling like a bad-tempered dog. Back to Line

470] pop-eye stare: fixed gaze so intense that the eye appears to protrude or start out. Back to Line

471] demurrage: hesitating, refusing to take action. Back to Line

480] Attila the Hun (406-53), who invaded Europe from the east and was well-known for his cruelty in war. Back to Line

481] a priori: from the very start. Back to Line

485] Tory: British political conservative, traditionally representing the interests of the landed gentry, nobility, and monarch. Here, "a conservative who believes that life and its strife will never change and so will give up" (poet's note). Back to Line

492] rota: rotation of duties among a roster of employees, roster. Back to Line

494] wangle: somehow get, as by devious means. Back to Line

496] mangle: a mechanical wringer of wet clothes in a laundry. Back to Line

506] nox: night (Latin). "Some Latin writers, like Catullus, believed that death was nox perpetua, or eternal darkness" (poet's note). Back to Line

517] canonic: dialectical systematizing. Back to Line

525] catatonic: in a state of stupor. Back to Line

531] "Being immortal was considered a good, but what if one ends up with the wrong crowd? " (poet's note). Back to Line

539] ineluctable: inescapable. A favourite word of the self-exiled Irish writer, James Joyce. Back to Line

544] used to pray: "used pray" in 2002. Back to Line

548] shard: broken fragment (of pottery). Back to Line

559] "The mental hospital often enables research experiments" (poet's note). Back to Line

560] racket: a real fuss. Back to Line

561] Kew: an allusion to Richmond Royal Hospital near Kew in southwest London, which specializes in psychiatry. Back to Line

562] in a bracket: of the same sort as … Back to Line

564] placket: female underskirt. Back to Line

565] infirmary screw: collar to restrain the patient. Back to Line

568] tacket: nail. Back to Line

569] clew: guide to a maze. Back to Line

570] thole: endure. Back to Line

573] shrive: make confession. Back to Line

577] mercy-meat: gift-food, charity, good will. Back to Line

579] compleat: after the manner of books, e.g., compleat gourmet, etc. Back to Line

584] out of kelter: in no good spirits, in a bad way. Back to Line

601] mater: mother. matrix: womb. Back to Line

607] bong: sound out loudly, like a bell. Back to Line

625] Synapses: the interfaces between neurons. Back to Line

629] gibbous: hunch-backed. Back to Line

664] purled: "pleat or frill like a ruff; to frill the edge of" (OED, "purl," v. 1). Purl and plain are knitting stitches which often go together in a pattern. Back to Line

669] riled: angered. Back to Line

672] Britannica: the encyclopedia. Back to Line

678] charactery: (pharmaceutical) symbols, an echo of Keats:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
` Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;

Back to Line

680] Drug companies put holograms on the packaging of pills to foil counterfeiting. Back to Line

682] palliative: pain-killer, temporary reliever of symptoms. Back to Line

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2007

Rhyme

various but mainly ababcdcdefefgg

Form

Sonnet Sequence