Dog, homework, novel, mind (ate)

Can I blame my novel? Or is this a random collapse, reasoned as a windstorm or a barking dog?

I am clinically depressed. I expect this bout started in May, after I’d finished Double-blind and taken ARCs to Book Expo. I remember feeling utterly lost that weekend, not just a little fish but quite unmoored. I’m not a party girl, and crowd after crowd wore me. But I should have been happy.
The depression bore down. A death in June hit me hard. Another trip to Toronto and then Ottawa in July was difficult; I tired so easily, wanted only to stay inside or be alone. I forced myself out into the sun, into social gatherings.

In August I went camping with my family in Gros Morne. Respite: family time, devotional time.

Then I crashed. Weird disproportionate sadness. Shattered sleep. A tentacled desire to keep still. Weeks without writing. Just before I was go to Winterset in Summer as part of the New Voices panel.

I was due in Eastport on a Thursday. I started meds that Tuesday. Driving out, I pulled off just west of Clarenville to beat my head against the steering wheel while some demented despair took me. Deciding on (alleged) coffee at Irving nearly defeated me. Some automated face worked: I spoke, answered questions, listened. But all I wanted was to lie on the bed and keep still.

Participating in Winterset in Summer on Saturday took all my strength. I read, was part of a panel, received an unexpected sum on money to put towards the expenses of writing my next book – all amazing things.
All miles above.

Back to probable cause. I expect I’m wired funny, prone to melancholy – there’s certainly a streak of it in the extended family. But this particular collapse: fatigue. Not just the straining schedule I’ve kept, either, but the damn book.

Narrating a novel first-person through someone committing monstrous acts who yet does not see himself as evil is a tricky business. Dr. Bozeman is fictional, yes, and so is his story, but there’s precedent. Bloody precedent. Cameron and Mengele are perhaps the best-known examples of doctors experimenting unethically on patients, but they’re hardly alone.

Remember junior high English class, getting the list of the big conflicts, the big themes? Man against himself. Man’s inhumanity to man. While I’ve made a study of man’s inhumanity to man – hey, I’m an amateur historian – I don’t choose to tell these stories. They choose me. Stories scream. Like colicky babies.

Sure, it’s enough to drive ya mad.

Martyrdom of The Bab

On July 9, 1850, a man known by the title "The Bab" was martyred in Tabriz. The Bab is considered by Baha'is to be one of the Twin Manifesations of God for this age.

Whatever your feelings on religion, the stories of The Bab, and of Tahirih, are compelling. A good spot to read about them both is here: http://info.bahai.org/the-bab-forerunner.html

Dead weight loses to radio waves

I staked Dead Reckoning through the heart and then cut the cord that was wrapped round my neck.

And it feels good.

This insane idea I somehow had to finish an old flawed project before I could move on to the newer ms that was screaming for attention – fluttering in the winds, rags small and raindrops. Gone.

Do I need to tell you the new ms has exploded, like leaves on trees in June? Like a crocus?

The new ms uses radio waves and a bit of superstring theory to hold its shape. It’s framed within the moments of Marconi’s three dots in 1901 and the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005. Set in NL, mostly.

Signal to noise.

Dead Reckoning: Might burnt it yet, or, Get out the violins and the hankies so we can all have a weep

Burn it? As I had the guts.

Dead Reckoning, this gallstone of a novel I’ve been struggling with since 2001, wants to come out. I’m not sure it’ll ever be fit to be seen. Drafts five and six exist as first-person and third-person limited-variable versions respectveily of the same story, told in a linear fashion – that beginning-middle-end thing I get on my high horse about. I’ve shattered the narrative, for thematic and image reasons, but underneath that I need strong through-lines and character development – of devolvement, depending on the character.

So it’s hard to work on for the narrative strategy. The subject matter – violence, power, festering rage, alienation from conceptions of God – isn’t easy, either. And it’s set in the early eighteenth-century: yes, by, I’m a dialogue expert there.

A painful chronic condition has acted up, too – dandy, should have quite the edge on today. Which could help.

Gotta go deep.

Double-blind: unwittingly playing with the family jewels

No, I have not read all 702 pages of the recently released "Family Jewels" files, a collection of misdeeds to which the CIA had admitted:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/06/26/cia-documents.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA's_family_jewels

http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs.asp?doc_no=0001451843&title=%22FAMILY+JEWELS%22&abstract=&no_pages=0702&pub_date=5/16/1973&release_date=6/18/2007&keywords=FAMILY+JEWELS&case_no=F-1992-00353©right=0&release_dec=RIPPUB&classification=U&showPage=0001

Summaries of the report indicate there are documents pointing to, amongst other Cold War delirium, testing electronic equipment on US telephone circuits and the funding of behaviour modification research on "unwitting" US citizens.

"Unwitting" is crucial here. That means the subjects didn't know. Were not informed. Could not possibly give proper consent.

This brings to mind the CIA's funding of Ewen Cameron's behaviour modification research on Canadian psychiatric patients – unwitting and unprotected. http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Room-Anne-Collins/dp/088619198Xhttp://www.annewheeler.com/films/the-sleep-room/thesleeproom.html

But before Canadian readers here get too smug, we do need to remind ourselves that the Canadian government stepped in with funding for Cameron after the CIA pulled out. Stand on guard for thee.

All of this high-strung lethal foolishness is in the background of my novel Double-blind, which is narrated by Dr. Josh Bozeman, an American psychiatrist contracted under a program like MK-Ultra, working in Newfoundland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA
Dr. Bozeman's fictional research includes behaviour modification and some farther paranormal activity. His big struggle is with his own empathy. His big question is "Who could forgive me?"

So. Some jewels are out. Some mistakes were made. My big question is "What do we learn here?"

I've learned that knowledge eats sleep.

Here's a bit about Double-blind:

It's the 1970s, the final icy winter of the Cold War. American psychiatrist Josh Bozeman finds himself in St. John's as part of covert research group SHIP, the Society for Human Improvement and Potential. But SHIP defines "improvement" and "potential" as anything that can be forged into a weapon.

Enter Christy Monroe, one of Bozeman's favourite patients, a nine-year-old girl with an extraordinary psychic gift. She becomes Bozeman's subject in a SHIP double-blind experiment where the whole reality is dangerously obscure, blurring the lines between patient and doctor, duty and conscience, sanity and madness.

Twenty-five years later, Bozeman is drawn into an even darker paranormal agenda that sends him back to Newfoundland as the principal player in an endgame that could have mortal consequences for Christy, or for his own soul.

Double-blind is a feverish story of complicity, empathy, and the extremities of duty and love

Ferryland Lightouse -- reading on June 16th

So I was on the same bill with Michael Crummey – an honour. My husband and children came out to see the lighthouse but would not be staying – I didn’t think the younger one had the attention span, and I didn’t feel like using my characters’ profanity in front of them. So they went off to have supper, but not before clambering around the restored lighthouse.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather. Sunshine, warm winds, whales playing offshore – and quiet. After the previous weekend in Toronto, I needed this: big ocean, clean sky. Our blood is salty.

Feeling better than I had in weeks, I read the story “Late lunch” form the shadow side of grace, then gave ‘er with the opening of Double-blind, which is narrated first-person by an American psychiatrist, originally from the south. I had no business writing that novel from Dr. Bozeman’s POV – man, it was fun – and even less business reading in his voice, but the prose just falls that way. The rhythms. I’m no actor, and I need to work on control, but reading Bozeman as Bozeman felt like flying.

Fine line between bravery and foolishness.


http://www.lighthousepicnics.ca/

Doubt and Depression, demons at large

You can pick your friends, but your demons pick you.

Doubt was in the living room with his feet up. Depression was outside having a smoke. I lopped their heads off last week, but both demons have this dandelion quality to them. Seeded. I’ll see them again.

Clinically depressed, as in needing and accepting medical intervention? Not this time. Teetered close, though. Looked like a raggedy darkness creeping under the door.

What does it feel like?

C’mere.

Like a dental abscess. A kidney stone. A razor cutting open a bruise. Like all of this, while at the same time the sparks that make you you are battered to powder, which then blows away. Some dim awareness you inhabit a shell. Some limp desire for numbness, until that, too, dries up. Love is farther away than stars. Then the wound consumes you. Depression exists. You do not.

So that’s why I lopped off his head. A trip to Ferryland helped.