Crushing slow heat — I threw open the shutters and windows after midnight and a host of tiny flying insects filled up the dark rooms. Not a breath of wind.
Went out before dawn into the shadowy garden and discovered that a small flame lily (Gloriosa superba) has rooted itself in a wall planter and is flowering away. A reminder of my Zimbabwean childhood. I don’t plant flame lilies in the garden because all parts of the plant are so poisonous (toxic alkaloids), but it is safe enough so high on the wall and a joy to behold.
Thinking about creativity and addiction: this succinct and bleak comment from the poet Franz Wright
[Drugs] had a huge effect, for about twenty-five years, but largely a negative one. One of the most sinister things about addiction is that in its initial stages, in the early years, it seems to produce a state resembling religious enlightenment, or a Blakean sense of the infinite in the small and particular, the eternal in the moment. And this is the right thing to be looking for, but drugs only produce the delusion of having this experience, and pretty soon (if you’re made that way) you start needing them just to leave the house and function in the world, forget about visionary sensations. The other effect they have—Ill Lit is a good example, Berryman’s Dream Songs are an immortal one—is that they may lead you into writing what amounts more or less to a textbook on what it’s like to be a narcissistic and terrified psychotic.
The Landscape
I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath
filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame
lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.
I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked
the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,
or flared an instant, just where the road forked.
It is the star struck under my heel in the night.
It is the word no book on earth defines.
it is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.
As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.
The street fall nameless, and the knots untie.
Now, with this landscape, I fix, I shine.
The most passionate moment of love recently was holding my 74 year old former boyfriend’s hand while we said the Lord’s Prayer after the meeting on Sunday. It was divine.
I love that!
I imagine that drugs hold a persuasive inducement to experience nirvana but that soon turns to purgatory. To be chemically numbed rather than aware seems a sad thing to me but so many seem to have an underlying mental illness that the drugs help to temporarily lessen.
For many people, the search to numb emotional pain ends with some chemical release or euphoria — and then they find the price is too high. So sad, as you say, Syd.