2. I came across something today online that led me to The New Yorker's list of top ten cookbooks for 2020. One jumped off my monitor and suddenly it was August 27, 2018 again. Melissa and I had finished our separate tours of the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street in Manhattan.
We met Erik at the appointed time and place and he immediately swooped us out of MOMA to Xi'an Famous Foods on W. 54th, a casual restaurant with counter service and no tables, just long counters on each side of its long, narrow room. Xi'an is a city in northwest China and its cuisine is spicy, multi-textured, and overwhelmingly delicious. We watched as workers behind the counter tore of long ribbons of handmade biang-biang noodles, a specialty of Xi'an cuisine, and Melissa and I surrendered to Erik's expertise as he ordered us a feast of cumin lamb noodles, stewed oxtail noodles, spinach dumplings, lamb dumplings, a green salad, a cucumber salad, and a stewed pork burger served on flatbread.
Well, as you have probably already guessed, Jason Wang, whose father opened the first Xi'an Famous Foods stall in Manhattan and who has inherited the task of expanding Xi'an Famous Foods throughout NYC, has published a cookbook: Xi'an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York's Favorite Noodle Shop.
I'll purchase it. I'll yearn to return to one of Wang's eateries. I'll assess what dishes I might be able to make here in Kellogg. Will I need to order ingredients online? Might a trip one day to an Asian market in Spokane or Missoula be warranted? I'll have to figure it out -- heck, I might be able, with a little imagination, approximate some of the dishes with ingredients available at Yoke's. We'll see.
3. Tonight, as I did some bedtime reading, I started off by looking in the poetry anthology, Being Human, to see if any of Jane Kenyon's poems appeared in it. Two did. If you read the third of my 3BTs yesterday, you know that Donald Hall's brief essays have me thinking about aging and loss, suffering and acceptance.
Jane Kenyon's poems deepened my reflections on loss in an unexpected way.Both poems explore Jane Kenyon's experience with the depression, or melancholy, she endured the entire span of her life.
The first one is what one reader described as a magisterial poem about depression, "Having it Out With Melancholy". Scroll down and you'll find it at the end of my writing. The other poem is "Back". You'll find it at the bottom of the page.
I read these poems and began to think about my inexplicable loss of depression, the disappearance of my melancholy.
It's hard for me to pinpoint when I began to have episodes of falling into depression's black hole, but I often think they began when I was fifteen. I remember one night going to a dance at Kellogg Junior High School. For a few weeks leading up to this dance, I'd spent many hours alone. Sometimes I'd sneak into the garage. Other times I'd sit in my bedroom. Some times I'd tell Mom I was going out for a while and I'd walk on the trail to the high school, reprimand myself, tell myself how stupid I was, all the time feeling emotional weight that I hoped the walking would relieve. That night at the dance, a girl I liked a lot was with another guy and I went harmlessly manic, proving to myself that the two of them being together didn't bother me. I danced vigorously, even dancing on the railing about six feet above the gym floor that divided the stands from where we were dancing. It was a charade, a charade I repeated throughout my adulthood, disguising confusion and depression with similar charades.
All through my adolescence and on into my young adulthood and into middle age, especially at home, I was prone to mood swings, outbursts of frustration and anxiety on the one hand (it looked like anger, but I don't think it was -- I think I was scared) and, on the other hand, times of being charged up, sometimes in the classroom, teaching with passion, other times (once again) out dancing, and sometimes robust, self-aggrandizing nights of drinking and talking hogwash.
I thought it might help these mood swings if I quit drinking and from January of 1985 until October of 1996, I abstained completely from alcohol. The depression persisted. I didn't need alcohol to have manic episodes and abstinence didn't keep me from experiencing the weight of self-doubt, feeling inferior, and self-loathing, especially in the face of what I experienced as my failures and being a disappointment to others.
The periods of frequent sleep, feeling emotionally weighed down, of near paralysis worsened as I recovered from having contracted bacterial meningitis in November of 1999. I had my worst experience in February of 2005. On February 6th, I met up with Ed and Nancy, Alan and Peggy in Lincoln City at the Chinook Winds Casino to watch the Super Bowl, hang out afterward, and spend the night. It was a fun time, nothing unusual happened. When I returned home on Monday afternoon, though, I staggered straight to bed and hardly got up again for three or four days. I slept long hours. My mind was occupied with bleak thoughts and the weight of depression. (No suicidal thoughts.) Debbie took me to the Emergency Room where the medical people determined I wasn't a danger to myself. In the spring, I reduced my teaching load at LCC. My system got a good jolt of positive energy when I was asked to replace an actor who had to leave the cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream and took over the role of Snug, the Joiner.
At some point, I consulted with a psychiatrist who put me on a medication for bipolar disorder. I was also taking a second psychotherapeutic drug. Intermittently, I continued to have episodes of melancholy and episodes of bursts of high energy. I felt unpredictable to myself and to Debbie. In February of 2009, I was starting to feel unhinged. Things were good at work, but, at home, I secluded myself in my study more frequently, I got careless about taking my medicine, and in early April, I contracted a case of bacterial pneumonia and was hospitalized; then, in May, I contracted a case of clostridium difficile colitis (or c diff) and was back in the hospital for another five days or so.
And then I suffered a major loss in my life.
It took me a year or so to realize it, but I lost darkness, my old friend, that reliable depression, that experience of emotional weight, fatigue, unpredictable behavior, sadness, anxiety, madness, and jolts of high energy that had been my companion for about forty years.
In 2014, we moved to Greenbelt, MD. I continued to take the medicine for bipolar disorder, but when my primary care doctor no longer wanted to be in charge of this prescription until I saw a psychiatrist again, I made an appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner in August, 2015. After talking for about 40 minutes, she recommended weaning me off this medicine. So I took a half dosage for three months, returned, and she said, "Go off it completely and see me in three months." I did.
In February of 2016, NP Carolyn Clark looked at me and said, "Bill. I think you're fine. I think we're done. If problems come back, get a hold of me, but your mental health looks very good."
I don't know what happened.
In the same way that nothing in particular really triggered my episodes of depression, nothing in particular seemed to free me from them. I just know that after I had pneumonia and c. diff, I lost the experience of depression. I don't think, nor does anyone else, that my illnesses were the cure!
It's a mystery.
This is, by far, the most welcome loss I've experienced as I age. It's been over eleven years now since I've experienced falling into a psychological and emotional black hole, mood swings, the headaches I used to have, the feeling of having a fuzzy brain, and the overwrought feelings of anxiety and fear. Anxiety still crops up. Occasionally I feel the black hole pulling at me. I've learned to resist them.
There were times between about 2000 and 2008-9 when I was convinced that depression was an essential dimension of my personality, of my identity, that I wouldn't be myself without these descents into mental anguish. This is how insidious depression can be. Depression, the chemicals, whatever, was, at times, persuading me that I needed to feel this way in order to be fully alive. I thought I needed to be the king of pain.
I have experienced another loss: those thoughts and that internal argument are gone.
Yesterday I wrote that accepting my condition, accepting the facts of my life was key to alleviating suffering, especially when it comes to spending so much time alone.
I've also had to accept the reality that I have lost the depression that menaced me all those years.
Accepting this loss has been easier, but no less a source of relief.
Here are the two Jane Kenyon poems. If you have trouble reading the title of the second one, it's "Back".
Having it Out with Melancholy
If many remedies are prescribed
for an illness, you may be certain
that the illness has no cure.
A. P. CHEKHOV
The Cherry Orchard
1 FROM THE NURSERY When I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing the bile of desolation into every pore. And from that day on everything under the sun and moon made me sad—even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib. You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God: "We're here simply to wait for death; the pleasures of earth are overrated." I only appeared to belong to my mother, to live among blocks and cotton undershirts with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. I was already yours—the anti-urge, the mutilator of souls. 2 BOTTLES Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. The coated ones smell sweet or have no smell; the powdery ones smell like the chemistry lab at school that made me hold my breath. 3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND You wouldn't be so depressed if you really believed in God. 4 OFTEN Often I go to bed as soon after dinner as seems adult (I mean I try to wait for dark) in order to push away from the massive pain in sleep's frail wicker coracle. 5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT Once, in my early thirties, I saw that I was a speck of light in the great river of light that undulates through time. I was floating with the whole human family. We were all colors—those who are living now, those who have died, those who are not yet born. For a few moments I floated, completely calm, and I no longer hated having to exist. Like a crow who smells hot blood you came flying to pull me out of the glowing stream. "I'll hold you up. I never let my dear ones drown!" After that, I wept for days. 6 IN AND OUT The dog searches until he finds me upstairs, lies down with a clatter of elbows, puts his head on my foot. Sometimes the sound of his breathing saves my life—in and out, in and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 7 PARDON A piece of burned meat wears my clothes, speaks in my voice, dispatches obligations haltingly, or not at all. It is tired of trying to be stouthearted, tired beyond measure. We move on to the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Day and night I feel as if I had drunk six cups of coffee, but the pain stops abruptly. With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair. 8 CREDO Pharmaceutical wonders are at work but I believe only in this moment of well-being. Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again. Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet on the coffee table, lean back, and turn me into someone who can't take the trouble to speak; someone who can't sleep, or who does nothing but sleep; can't read, or call for an appointment for help. There is nothing I can do against your coming. When I awake, I am still with thee. 9 WOOD THRUSH High on Nardil and June light I wake at four, waiting greedily for the first note of the wood thrush. Easeful air presses through the screen with the wild, complex song of the bird, and I am overcome by ordinary contentment. What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment? How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples; its bright, unequivocal eye.
“Back”
We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenlyI fall into my life again
like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking.
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