Singing Wordsmith and Sound Philosopher - Jacinta Whitcome - The depressionist |

The Depressionist Letters and Poetics: I cannot contend

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I cannot contend NOTE: Title from Lee Whitcome's poem with the same title: see link page
By Jacinta Whitcome
07/23/09

I cannot contend with your horrors
I cannot contend with all you have seen
If horror and suffering make a person
Then you are made of the strongest Materials
I will never be as tolerant as you
Never as wise
Never as knowledgeable
You have the experience
I have only your stories of it
I will make you
Blankets
And compute your
Poetic
Interpretations
as they make horror
something of emotion
Quick cutting visuals
evaporating the water of your experience
to it’s most pungent, insoluble parts
the cliff note
for the repulsiveness of
dismantled humanity
what the collective human can do
when it sees only splinters of itself
I AM ALL
To
WE ARE ALL
Is a long journey
but you make it
seem
so light

The Depressionist letters and Poetics: a few words

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The night is darker sooner that it would be if water-filled clouds weren't lounging across the pilfered blue couch. I can feel the rain inside my body even thought I am inside and all the windows are closed. The feeling is almost like love, that deep, strong, weeping love that comes in spurts...like stormy weather I guess.

Depressionist Letters and Poetics: I am...but

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I am...but
9/20/08
By Jacinta Whitcome

I love you as much as there are stars in sky.
You are my blood, my dream, my air,
I see you everywhere
I am... but
still I am lonely for you
and you only.
You are as necessary as breath
itself,
you are my beating heart yet
I carry you not with me and
why?
You are an echo,
an echo I will listen to
and follow
until I reach the place of your creation,
the body which begets you
the body which holds
a warmth
more tender
more comforting
than a pot-bellied stove and
a quilt made by grandmother
and a book read by father
and the sound of crickets chirping to the night sky
you are my family
the family I fashioned out of clay
yet you took your own personality
and became greater than I ever imagined
and you have humbled me.
I feel like a goddess
who has decided to become human
because of a human who shows more
love, more tolerance,
more empathy, more understanding
than any god ever could.
Here is your dinner, your breakfast
here is your kiss, your hug, your comfort
if you seek it.
I have two arms to cover like a heavy, cool quilt
I have a heart which enfold you like a shield, like an ocean
I have a place and you are the x which marks it.
I am your woman, your lover and this does not degrade me but completes me
until death do us part whether the church hears it or not
I believe in you and believe in myself all the more
because you love me.
I had almost given up and become another Ophelia amongst the reeds and ponds
another hungry ghost
but I saw honesty in you and remembered the honesty in me
altruism it is not
but truth, may our lives be long together
may our deaths be the making of two more trees
in a field
tied together limb by limb
for viewers to wonder about
Let this be my statement of intent
and because it is in poetry
let that not detract from it's honesty
but let poetry be true expression
of what demands more than words of convenience
be not fooled
this is reality
this is truth
for whatever it is worth
I belong to you, my moon
I belong to you like a song belongs to the songwriter
and your singing evokes my being

Depresionist Letters and Poetics: Grapefruit Moon

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grapefruit Moon
2005
by Jacinta Whitcome

1
Letter to a boy

All I wanted to do was dance with you on a night with an orange moon hanging in the middle of it. I wanted to feel love and sex wanted to be. I didn’t see you as half crazy; I didn’t see you as needy; I just didn’t see you. It was as if in the place of your swaggering infirmity there was an ocean of mystery and sensuality that I had never known.

He loves me, he loves me not”¦

Charles Houston said “the true test of character is the amount of strain it can bear”. For three weeks I have barely had a thought of you, but tonight, even with school to occupy my mind, even with miles between New York City and Boulder the memory of how it felt to believe in a future that held even a small unity has tripped my momentum. The knees of my heart have buckled from the weight of this self-imposed exile. But, I came here to strengthen my character; I came here to bleed it out. The time I spend here is my cast and my cocoon from which will emerge a healed soul with expansive, intricate wings if maroon, sunrise orange and midnight blue.

You gave me the greatest gift. You gave me a situation where I had to turn inward and find something to trust and something to celebrate. I had to strip down and either start from there or end there. Do you know the service you did me? Because of you I saw what for years had its teeth around my neck rendering me motionless. Because of you, I faced the demons of insecurity.

Now, my determination has a fighting chance. Now, I am a freedom fighter, rising up against the oppression of depression.

2

The last time I saw him, the space between us had become thick as wool and heavy as iron. We attempted adult conversation and smoked from a Hookah while sipping soda with cherry extract. That night he seemed more like who he was than ever and I made a silent prayer of gratitude for the times we’d had and for a fleeting moment I wanted to again be under that grapefruit moon, “so bitter and so sweet”. After making plans to see him, I kept reminding myself to take it easy. I tried to feel secure, sure that I new how to be mature. By the time he came to pick me up I had almost gotten to a point where I was indifferent about seeing him. In the layers below that, I could still feel the butterflies though. We went up to this defunct mental institution in Saugus. It was in the midst of demolition. The patients used to be tortured in there and the now haunted the dark, damp insides. He had recently been trying to figure out his own mental mystery. After a slue of panic attacks and hallucinations he was looking for answers and as an artist he was looking for images that connected him to the enigma of his mental mechanism. We got five yards past the “IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER” sign and I suggested turning around. He obliged me and we left unscathed by furious ghosts and police officers.

n the car I was trawling the radio for a good tune and came across a special on Hoagy Carmichael. We drove along the sea side. The night was beautifully moist, the sky full of lighted wormholes. We reminisced about times past as we drove past his old school where we had visited a year before and played night-Frisbee. He said that he wished we had had sex that night instead of in New York when he was drunk and distant. I told him how much he’d hurt me and that I had never felt so used or alone as I had that “morning after”. He said he was sorry and that he regretted his absence of mind. I was glad to have found strength enough to admit how devastated I was.

We pulled into the driveway next to Castle Rock, a beautifully eerie castle on the sea. The waves were crashing against the break-wall and fog had descended. We walked down about twenty steps to a patio with some stone benches and a couple of those big, silver binoculars that you have to feed fifty cents into to get a view. There was an archway at the top of the steps and just beyond that a street lamp shone through the trees veiled in fog and hit the space of the archway in such a mythic it was beyond beauty, it was enchanting.
“What”¦ do you see something?”
His voice was like an alarm clock waking me up from a dream.
“What”¦oh”¦ no, it’s just really beautiful.”
“Really”¦ you think that’s beautiful, all I can see is horror. I am imagining a man with a ski mask on and a chainsaw waving in the air, running down the steps after us.”
I felt sorry for him. Here I had shaken off my propensity to entertain my fear and he was still being overthrown by his. I realized even more how much I had imagined who he was instead of accepting what I saw. It’s not that I was disappointed in him; it’s that I was able to see his fallibility, his fragility; I was able to see the child in him. I smiled a little amused at his chosen way of submission.
“Yah, Ernest” I said, “that thought occurred to me too.”

Later, we sat in the hookah bar. It was dark and color was red all around us with the unsteady light of candles. We sat next to each other drinking our sodas and alternating the mouth piece of the hookah between us. A woman walked in with a white pastry box in her hand and through her arms around one of two waiters. He was handsome, from some mid-eastern country. The woman opened the box and lit the candles on the cake. A couple others came in the room and we joined in as they sang happy birthday. The waiter brought two pieces of cake over to us. I love when things like that happen, ah, the inclusion. I started drawing the woman on a napkin and conversation turned the corner to our hopes for the future. I asked Ernest if he planned to collaborate with other artists. I was trying to make a place for me in your life. Even though I was the one leaving on a train going across the country in the morning I wanted to have some reason to give him a call. Now that I was older and more apt to see the reality of our relationship, now that I could see his humanity, I wanted to interact with him as an equal. he said that he definitely wanted to. We talked about the silent movies we would make. We bounced ideas off each other. We wrote a poem, alternating lines. We ate our cake, smoked up the hookah, said thank and goodbye and left

By this time, it was 2:00 AM and I had to be up at 5:30. When we got to my house we didn’t linger on goodbye. I wanted it to be quick and almost meaningless. I don’t know if I will ever see him again, but that last night was by far the most open and truthful night we have ever spent together.

3
”¦and thank you”¦

Partly through your own insecurity and mental instability, partly through your expansive creativity, you gave me the chance to learn that real love looks past the egos involved, real love looks past the pain, real love sees the lesson but most of all real love really sees.

Depressionist Letters and Poetics: Revolving

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Revolving
2005
By Jacinta Whitcome

”¦ and in that I had achieved freedom. The last breath of August felt hot but was tempered by a cool autumn-like breeze and smelled of the ocean and fresh cut grass. I hesitated with the heavy, brown, metal door behind me before I let my foot slide to the edge of the step. The lightness in the air and the distant smell of autumn reminded me of my days as a child. I walked across the parking lot feeling the trauma and relief of each step. I was leaving, in this way, for the last time. I knew this so, as I took my first steps toward this new freedom, I really felt them. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and when I opened my eyes again I really observed what was in front of me; the trees that lined the parking lot, the paint flaking off the railing, the peculiar way the sun shined in Cambridge, it was different than anywhere else. I walked to the bus stop in front of the main building of Mount Auburn Hospital and sat on a concrete step. I was leaving the office of Dr. Andrew Untch, a psychologist I had seen weekly for past four years. This was to be a “tentative” last time, but, to me it was a breakthrough. I would be leaving in two weeks on a train that would take me across the country, to Colorado. I would be leaving home for the first time and trusting myself enough to be.
Memories were rushing through my mind, the memory of a death which became a rebirth. Like a clock striking twelve or the revolutions of a spinning wheel this death and rebirth was happening anew today perhaps the way it was meant to. Excitement, fear and a lust for life were tingling through my body to my finger tips. I turned around to look at the place where I felt my life had really started. The sun was glaring off the third floor windows. I smiled remembering bits and pieces of my week there. I don’t remember much, in fact, most of what I remember is probably from stories others had told of that very fateful week. I had only to look at the building to hear a soundtrack in my head, to remember what it was like. I had died, lying breathless on a brick floor with people I wanted to but didn’t dare call friends. It was this building where the EMT’s had brought me after reviving me, after pounding my heart with electricity, demanding it to keep beating, even if it was weary, even if it didn’t see the point.
My eyes had been glazed over for so long before that cold February night. I had been begging, chanting even, for death, god, the wind, whatever to release me from this tangled up, mixed up world. I used to think of ways I could do it: train, knife, ocean, but, I never clearly thought about why I wanted to do it. Not to say I couldn’t think of a million reasons. I would always mostly imagine peoples’ responses of grief or shame or pity; I would crave that kind of attention. If I had only known what devil I was entertaining with these thoughts of suicide.
Then one night after playing at an open stage, death decided it had had enough of my whining. Immediately after getting off the stage, while I was putting away my guitar, I fell to the ground. When I came to, I was in a hospital bed with tunnels of clear liquid running from a plastic bag to my veins. They told me I had suffered a cardiac arrest. I was seventeen years old. They explained it was because of a rare heart disease but I knew it was a call to take up arms and show my life that I was going to fight or die. I spent three years in cognitive rehab learning how do deal with the memory loss and the new cognitive difficulties I would have. But, the hardest struggle of all would be that now my depression was three-fold. I would points of extreme euphoria which would be mirrored by a depression that was just as extreme.
The funny thing is that even though I had depression before, it was so ingrained in my way of thinking that I didn’t allow myself to realize how much I suffered, but, now with a brain injury I suddenly had a reason or an excuse to start being concerned about myself.
So, as I left Dr. Untch’s office and remembered where I started I felt a pride that could last me a life time. I was entrusting myself to myself. I had accepted the help I needed and worked through the shame I felt in doing that and still I had come to this state on my on my own terms and in my own time. I was sitting on a concrete bench, feeling its hardness, smelling the air, remembering, knowing that I had made it through the toughest experience of my life and in that I had achieved freedom.

The Depressionist Letters and Poetics: Neither Gods Nor Oceans

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Neither Gods Nor Oceans
April 7, 2009

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...I cannot save the ones I love from the treachery of what they think of
as their failed moments

I am not a god

or even an ocean

and it seems that neither gods nor oceans
save anyone
from the torrent inside of each. But
one thing
that gods can be
that oceans can be
is silent
a compassionate witness
If one can
conceptualize either
and make a friendly silent witness from them
then perhaps we can make ourselves too
into
Gods and oceans

imagining then
(perhaps)
we can make ourselves into
God and oceans

but we often miss the mark we set out to meet.

Like a girl with slumped shoulders and her blanket dragging in the sand
of the waters' mouth
sad, pouty-lip face, grey of clouds matching the etchings of seagulls wings, stones
like flowers in the
sand
and heart after heart after heart
of all who walk, run, play, swim here.
The underlying tone is part Tom Waits/ part Bill Frisell.

"Awake ye whose hearts seem to wail for intelligent discourse."

Withering artist flowers of dissension .... destitute
for the rain of your tears but cry no more, no more to cry cry cry nomore to crynomore.

Our fingers are entwined;
our eyes search each other when our motivation is not known.
I love you.
I want to be your ocean and you can be my god, and though we are simply humans perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...
we can evoke
our ideals (gods and oceans)
for each other.
There is more here, however. I need to know what I am afraid will come out. Why am I afraid of falling apart? Why am I dancing on an edge or am I even dancing anymore?

When can I see you, my heart, my soul, my ship, my brother, my sister?
When I can know that
you are right
and
I am right
and
there is no need to run in fear losing our ride around the world... that we can take it together.

Beyond the mist there is an ocean and beyond the ocean there is only space and matrioshkas.

Thanks for Reading,
Jacinta Whitcome

Depressionist Letters and Poetics: Letter For My Teacher- ii

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Poem For My Teacher
Sunday April 5, 2009
by Jacinta Whitcome

I see you now
A silhouette
Of godzillic proportions
But...you can’t help casting your shadow

You fell with the empire state building
I know now that I will never be like you
I never could have been
Though I thought that I would
If I hated myself enough
I lost hope too quickly
Or...I did something wrong.
I don’t know
exactly...

Who is your Godzilla?
Your silhouette could
Walk from a street lamp
Beholden with identity
And you’d have none of it.

I see you now
And you have changed so
Often mottled things like
Youth become shadows

Download this as a PDF!
The Depressists- Letter To My Teacher- ii

The Depressionists: Article #5: Waves over the Mind

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

By Jacinta Whitcome
3/18/2008

After years of struggle, I suppose, one is not ”˜due’ peace. Perhaps, there is no such thing as ”˜deserving’ mental peace. I find myself thinking, sometimes, that I have struggled enough with this confusion...I determine to stop allowing confusion to enter my mind and two minutes later I am utterly confused. Now, with a somewhat recent development of what I call ”˜false memories’, there is even more confusion. I find it difficult to trust the idea of ”˜good’ and find myself believing in evil, though my whole life I have never believed in it. Without going into too much detail I have at least one ”˜false memory’ every day. They are almost always of a warning nature like ”˜you are going to miss out on something that is really important to your career, or, the person you are with is not who you think they are, they are trying to trick you...This makes it difficult to get a good and true sense of anything going on in my life.

I have only one source of relief for this issue of ”˜mind’ and the action I take is first to find something in the moment I can visually grab onto like a coffee table or a glass of water. It is here I begin to actually feel the fear...tightness in my chest hard, heavy breaths, flashes of light...I hadn’t thought about the scientific idea of ”˜what it is’ before, but, my boyfriend suggested that it might be a panic attack. How could I have forgotten...this used to happen sometimes after my brain injury and both the psychiatrist and the psychologist seemed to think that I was having minor panic attacks.

Since I am not actually due peace of mind, it is not to be expected; which means, of course, it is nothing to wait for. This is ”˜mind’...like it or not...What can I do but accept that sometimes I have to sit down and cry because the pressure in my body is so unmanageable, sometimes I have to sleep more than other people because my perception of the world is that of dizzying chaos, sometimes I am not in the moment. And, as my breath drags on right now, still like pulling a boot out of mud, I can find a little relief in knowing that this is what is happening in my body and that it is not fear but a reaction to fear; it is not me but the body I am housed in. I don’t know why that makes a difference in my willingness to accept the struggle...but it does.

Today I read from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. He wrote about the mind being like an ocean and thoughts like waves that rise from, then return to the ocean. It seems that if I can feel the worry it can dissipate: if I can sit still for a while I can realize it is not the world that is spinning but my thoughts. I can know that deep down inside there is a place of stillness and I can rest there if only for a moment. Chaos may come again and again, what will I do? What can I do? I am unskilled in my mind, and that is not an insult; I don’t have to feel badly about that; Why can’t I just know it and breathe it and continue observing, like an outsider, this ocean I am in. Maybe the more one watches the more still one becomes because in the ocean maybe stillness is just the loosely patterned movement of waves lapping up against the sand and stones of non-being. Yeah, that’s it, is that esoteric enough for you?

The Depressionists: Article #4: Letter to My Teacher

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

By Jacinta Whitcome
2008

Venerable Depression,

My one true love, you have been with me for so long now, loyal and truer than the most gallant night. You have taught me to sustain the most fervid torture; to let my tears become prisms to look through and see the many ways of viewing the suffering of humanity and vulnerability of skin, bone and mind. You are, to me, a long lost friend, which I never truly find, always in the outskirts of my reach, the ectoplasm, ever untouchable. Yet, somehow I have learned to destroy you as gently as you destroy me.

When I used to fear the scowling looks of the adults who thought I should be in church, and that it was time for me to stop “dreaming” such impractical, creative dreams. You came into me...becoming those voices of dissatisfaction, disgust, antagonism. You were a prism to those voices, those claims. One thousand fold, you mimicked them and cast their darkness inside of me. How I cried and hated myself for what I was not, never for a moment recognizing what I was. How I begged the air to sharpen my sword. How I called out inside of mind to ever person I came in contact with, “release me, love me, I cannot find love for myself.” And you...you sat there serenely in control...you new that if I could push up your weight I would become impervious with a new strength which would shield me from any emotional crime. You knew there were only two ways out of your trap: death or lightness.

Now I understand, my old friend, that you are the most compassionate of teachers, the most skillful. You make all of us into swordsman and archers, into warriors. To echo Chogyam Trungpa, “In the process of losing your awareness, you regain it because of the process of losing it”. (Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior; Bantam Books, New York, NY 1984) You do not think because you are only in action, like water, going where there are cracks and craters, moving with gravity and element.

Know that this is no mere love letter but a letter of gratitude and resolution. I am moving on brother but not out disrespect, and not without pieces of you integrated into my being. I am ready to explore this world with your shield, open, tender, exposed. This is not the path of least resistance but a path of no resistance. Still, I tremble with fear, but my step is only heavy with the weight of my leg. There is no armor anymore, just flesh and bone...humanness.

I bow to you, understanding your way.

Letter to my teacher

The Depressionists: Article #3: A Depressionist Goes to Norway

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

By Jacinta Whitcome
Friday, February 29, 2008

I am sitting, for the first time ever, mind you, in the waiting area for Continental Airlines in Buffalo, NY. CONTINENTAL AIRLINES...you know what that means.... I am leaving the great landmasses that are cumulatively the United States and traveling the big blue sky, over the big blue ocean to the Land of the Midnight Sun. Well, ok, it’s south Western Norway which doesn’t technically fit under that poetic headline but I could not resist. I am not really nervous anymore. I have been going through cyclical bouts of depression and anxiety for two weeks or so but now my “adventure girl” brain has taken over. Even if I die on this flight I can be satisfied knowing that I almost got there...

I forgot how much I love airports and places where people rome.

Traveling overseas has really brought me to consider my American-ness. At first I noticed myself with a privileged attitude...”oh, I am going to be so cultured.” Even though it was just a hair of a thought I recognized that I was feeling particularly special. It was almost an “Eva Peron...from country to city” type feeling. I am not kidding either.

Monday, March 3-5, 2008
The Depressionist meets anonymity on a new level of existence...As I was walking down the streets of Oslo with my boyfriend, Kenneth, yesterday my heart was full of excitement and eyes could not have opened any wider. He took me to a sculpture park in the city by a small river. There was a bridge over the river and on the bridge were 20-30 bronze statues in very human situations: a toddler crying and stomping his foot, a man with a child under each arm, a woman with a baby, two women talking, two lovers embracing, men conversing. All of these situational pieces, when lined up together on the bridge and then with a real man playing a jovial melody on an accordion, and real families laughing and talking brought about a feeling of celebration toward humanity. It was beautiful. Coming over the bridge then, I spotted a gigantic phallic shaped tower over the park, which was set above all on a stone platform. As we drew closer to it we came upon a fountain with more statues. However, these pieces had an extra element to them, which I interpreted to be situational comments on how human interacted with nature. There were about 20 pieces set around the fountain, which was quite large. Each piece had the common element of a shrub or tree-like structure. But the artist was very imaginative with what these structures represented. One of them had a man and woman upside-down coming through the branches as if the tree were giving birth to them. Another structure had a woman swimming through the branches as if it were a tunnel made from seaweed.

This place was like a garden of humanity. Then we walked up a set of steps to amazing penis in the sky...as it turned out the penis was made of humans, men, women, and children all climbing to the top. It struck me as new way to view the sexuality of men, or might have been when it was made centuries ago. Instead of a violent, war-iffic, stagnant and sharp symbol of manhood it seemed soft and moveable, it brought humanity and indeed emotion to the subject of men and sexuality, at least for me.
Just before I left the states I was online and happened upon a site, which was selling t-shirts with activists logos and humor printed on them. I saw one that had a sperm with eyes on it and a big smile; the t-shirt read...”masturbation is murder”. The gigantic penis made of human body forms seemed to make a similar statement only without the underlying cynicism of what pro-choice activists were trying to convey and yet it also lacked a strict adherence to the “every sperm is sacred” idealism of the pro-lifers. It seemed more to be a comment on grasping nature of humans. There were more statues around this one, mostly of older people interacting with each other and with younger people, as if to show the full spectrum of life for humans. Some looked to be in pain, some were in situations of bondage, like this one that had an old man holding a cloth which was wrapped around an old woman’s face. I think this was the strangest one of all, but then these statues were not as joyful as the rest, they seemed more pained,

The last sculpture was where my neuroses began to remind me of its existence in my world. It was a circle made of human forms. When I looked at it, I recognized it immediately though could not place it. I had a feeling of wonderment and electric awareness. As we walked on though I began to feel more and more of a fear based feeling. I had what felt to be a memory but may be a fabrication, which is an effect from the brain injury, mixed with extreme stress. I think I had dreamt that I was running from someone at night and I ran to hide in that “garden of humanity”. I ran to the circle of people of people and tried to become one of them, tried to wrap myself around the cold bronze bodies and to be that still...as if I were a bronze statue. I don’t remember if the hiding panned out or what the outcome of the dream was but the fear was definitely very real and is tied into the fear of being controlled in a relationship that is supposed to loving. Indeed, this man I came here to see is not person I fear. He is gentle and kind, attentive and caring. But my mind is having a hard time leaving the past and what’s more, my own feelings of shame, the feeling that I deserve, even need punishment for some undisclosed act.

How did I begin to reconcile this? I saw the fear, questioned it and opened up a conversation with my partner. That was most frightening but gave me a sense of control over the fear, oddly enough. This experience is about diving into the fear. I know how swim, in theory, here I am in Norway, in a relationship with someone I really care about, and this all constitutes the water I am learning to swim in. Though sometimes I feel like I am drowning, I know that I am learning how to navigate through a different substance. Trust is a hard thing to purposely follow because it requires, much like water, that you learn which type of resistance furthers you and which aids in your drowning. I believe in Aikido they would call this Irimi- going into the middle of an attack to through the attacker off balance. To enter the peace held in the eye of a hurricane one must pass through the hurricane. I guess I will just have to live and see.