THE BLOG
The blog is a digital space for exploration about being a better person. It is particularly concerned with my journey with bipolar disorder. New posts every Tuesday.
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My high school art teacher was the only person that ever gave me a C & you know what, I deserved it, me over there trying to fake my way into a realistic conch shell. Ten years later, I finally found a more democratic visual art medium, thanks to the Surrealists & the New York School poets: the collage. The cutting & pasting happened on-&-off, but this year, greeted by my grandparents' lifetime collection of magazines, maps, & catalogs, a series of late-night energy bursts, & a heated garage, I've been doing the whole montage thing again. Here are my sixteen favorite collages I mustered up this year.
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Good gracious, aren’t end-of-the-year lists annoying? I repeat this sentiment I have heard elsewhere, both feeling it & rejecting it, at least for this purpose. I must insist on giving props to the makers--of things, of art, of moments--that, to not be hyperbolic at all, changed my life this year, or at least, prevented a negative change as I dealt with 2019’s collection of transitions--accepting myself as someone with a major psychological disorder, leaving Austin / moving back home to Indiana, & learning how to be a homemaker. The people I respected most in my formative years modeled an enthusiasm for stokedness, be it my dad psyched for another hunting season with his buddies, or my favorite literary folks blogging away about what they were reading, or the just-a-tad-bit older dudes in this area playing their rowdy songs & singing along to their friends’ bands with unabashed joy.
This list, though certainly incomplete & flawed, showcases a balance between the comfort of home & last-spark of time in the big city. I am feeling thankful for “my spots” in Austin that provided me good tunes (& other arts), good booze (& other things to toss down my gullet), & good times (& other variations of moments); as I told a friend today, Austin really was an amazing place to finish out my 20’s. But back here now, I am thankful for the local businesses & makers & their persistence, staying open & keeping on with the small town vibes, how the history of this place continues to pulse & expand. I cannot help but laugh at the people who think of this place as “the middle of nowhere.” *
Looking out at the juniper bush coughing through winter, my mind burps an old bit of Kenneth Koch’s poetry, a tangle of sentiments I would like stamped to my new year--“I have a knocking woodpecker in my heart and I think I have three souls / One for love one for poetry and one for acting out my insane self.” People I trust most on these sorts of matters, from psychologists to neuroscientists, ring variously the proclamation that people click first & foremost as biological creatures--synapses firing, free-will limited, reactionary. This guy here, my reality verges often on surreality, “the actual functioning of thought,” as Breton said; my default churns with the “neglected associations” that Breton sought to reclaim. Instead my necessary grounding comes through a somewhat-forced recognition of biological processes & ethical dilemmas, along with a hard-working lean on logical responses & artistic expression.
In life, often, I cannot react, trust my initial impulses, or live in the real world by “normal” standards, contained as I am in my own bubble of dissociation, paranoia, & polyvocality, & when I do drift out, it takes an enormous amount of energy, leaving me susceptible to further cycles of instability. That said, I am learning to live with these struggles through symptom management & shifted lifestyle / life goals, controlling the severity of my disorder through grounding techniques, open accountability from loved ones, & various acts of creation / expression (poems, collages, drum, etc.), instead of repression & conforming as I once did, lost inside myself inside myself inside myself, the swirl. This approach stands on the back of my new golden rule--setting myself & others up to be their best selves--centering the context in which I live. Already, I have found a softer landing spot back here. Oddly enough, some of the negative effects of the disorder--my inability to hold a career-oriented job, the uncontrollable combo of anxiety & mood swings, the harm I caused in the Austin & larger poetry scenes--have guided me back to my hometown, to my family, to this land where I can be my wild self in a safer, more supportive context. Here, I feel permissioned to dig deep into the Midwestern life I think is most sustainable, to become holistically healthy as a person with a psychological disorder, & ultimately, to be my best self, now & in the future. I know I am blessed for what others have gifted me--the land / house of my grandparents, the financial / emotional support of my wife, the “be happy” mantra of my parents, & the purpose granted by this community. This is the situation in which I find myself in. We live in the house where my mother finished off her teenage years, the house where my grandmother died, the house where my grandfather fell, leading to his transition to the assisted living community, the house which is situated on the biggest patch of what is left of our family farmland, the house & land I will inherit whenever the patriarch passes. We live in my hometown, thousands of miles away from my wife’s hometown & her birth family, only a mile from my parents & my longest-lasting loved ones. Unable to work a traditional job, I have been spending my days taking care of the house / property, writing poems / making collages, & developing several Future Barn future projects for next year. Depending on your perspective, what manners of empathy & open-mindedness you have been dealt, what values have been plopped into your path, you might judge this scenario one of two ways: 1) I am an overly-sensitive bum mooching off my family, piddling around in the barn, & wasting my time with art no one cares about or 2) I am someone burdened with a psychological disorder & gifted with grand enthusiasm, burning curiosity, & a desire to contribute to the well-being of my surroundings through a system of exchange built on my values. The former is my default setting, cemented in the ethics of unwavering hardwork & the begrudged traditional framework of my youth; the latter is how, jetting into 2020, I am learning to reframe work, being proud in what I can muster for those I love very much. My wife often reminds me that what is “normal,” “popular,” or “traditional” is not what is always vital for us. “It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy,” is how Cal Newport put in his book, Digital Minimalism, when outlining his idea of utilizing technology in ways that represent & enact one’s values. This approach was what was first appealing about Pete Buttiegieg’s presidential campaign, oddly enough a characteristic that led to Trump’s rise in popularity in 2016; Buttigieg did not lead out with policies or credentials, he led with his values -- honesty, integrity, loyalty, etc. -- with the aim to build his actions around those foundations. It is how I attempt to approach my teaching, focused on modeling the values I aim to instill in my students, ye olde “practice what you preach.” My new year’s resolution is to lead a value-driven life as this version of myself here. So, in honor of my blessed situation, my hope to be of service to my community, & the determination to be my best self in this best situation, here is a list of values, each accompanied by a more drawn-out plan of action for 2020. I hope to define myself & my actions in the new year through choices centered around community, a balance of reason & expression, & mindfulness, & here are ways I intend to turn those seeds into stalks: Future Barn is the umbrella I am holding over much of my planned work in 2020--the physical space of my barn for gatherings, projects, & creative time, the blog space for explorations around art, culture, & mental health in central Indiana, the Dispatches From Elsewhere podcast for highlighting the great folks & great happenings here, & the Your Buddy, T-GOB service project for engaging a reciprocal system of helping. Future Barn will be staunchly this-community-oriented, operating as a model for curiosity & enthusiasm, a system for mutual-accountability, & a projection of contemporary hick life. Instead of evening the scales, I want to explore the possibilities of what a good intertwined life of both wild artistic pursuit & ragged intellectual engagement can look like. I seek to better understand how the input (whatever it is I put in my ears, eyes, mouth, etc.) affects the output (whatever my hands, mouth, body, etc., unleashes) & vice-versa. What kinds of solitude encourage me to be the best social creature? What social events call for recharging with solitude? What can I read / look at to enhance the verve of my writing / collaging? How much am I creating compared to how much I am absorbing? When do I talk & when do I listen, how do I respond? When is it time to support versus when is it time to oppose? These questions must continue to be asked. No place are these questions more relevant right now than in my relationship to technology. A couple months ago, I read this fantastic book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, a manifesto for linking one’s actions around technology with one’s values for living a good life. He lays out many research-based & psychological arguments for a mindful approach to technology use that fit very keenly with my goals for 2020. Playing off his suggestion for creating a philosophy of technology use, I scribbled this list:
Similar to the necessary review of how I interact with technology, I find it important, especially being back in the Midwest & in need of a twenty-pound weight-loss, to take a closer look at my relationship with food. Lately, I cannot think of food without thinking of Mark Manson’s declaration in Everything Is Fucked: a Book About Hope: “And it’s not because we don’t know better; it’s because we don’t feel better” (34). In the hopes that the opportunities of rural life, the calm of stay-at-home-ness, & the pressures of financial limitations once again will increase my overall wellness, I will lean on my knowledge more. If that fails, here are seven guidelines for the new year:
I also move into 2020 with a more articulate understanding of my spiritual, political, & philosophical beliefs, & more importantly, my interactions with others’ beliefs, progressing beyond the angry atheist-liberal-humanist stage, beyond the black-&-white “but who is wrong & who is right” phase. Instead of always leading with arguments for the non-existence of god or litanies about the problems with the right, I am leaning more towards what Greg Epstein called for in his book Good Without God, leading an ethical, loving, co-existent life. In my one-day-I’m-gonna-live-a-van phase, I owned a book called Making Things & Doing Stuff. There was an article about living a more radical, which turns out to be a sneaky synonym for mindful, lifestyle, & I remember a sentence like, “Stop supporting places that are trying to kill you and that treat your friends like crap.” It comes down to choices--where, as well as what, I choose to spend my time, money, & attention on. These feelings refocused are also flags of me accepting my situation, what is in store for my future; I am lowering my standards, finding contentment, comfort, & joy in maintaining a good property for my wife, my dogs, & our other critter / plant / human pals in which to thrive, in creating art with & for my immediate folks, & repackaging my insane self as someone more sustainable & good. Today I woke with that feeling hovering over the skin, like maybe I’m living someone else’s life, which rather than depress or disrupt, rather injects an needy empath like me with a grave, kinetic urgency for each & every moment. Top of the list of small-but-distracting agitators today is the fact that I can’t find the envelope this spirit I inhabit has been stuffing with an assortment of poems & collages, along with a letter, this body I find myself inside had been itching to send Dean Young--this brain’s favorite poet & a former self’s grad school mentor. If I learned one thing from Dean (though the mountain of quotes & anecdotes I lug say much more knowledge I’ve surely acquired), it is that poems are not modes of communication (“poems are not a horn you blow your shit through,” I once remember him saying in class); if I have learned one thing from my vast times living in the middle of elsewhere, it is that letters certainly are.
Now comes flooding a memory of a letter Mary Ruefle sent to an old pal of mine, another influential poet I’ll leave unnamed though whose moments & verse are stitched here inevitably; she dusted the page with perfume & a small drawing, if memory concocts properly. “All poems are a form of hope” is what Dean Young declares in his latest. For me, the hope is in the future possibilities that the poem represents. The poet lives, has lived! Another poem will be written! I’m about to see something I’ve never seen, yay! That’s what the best poets insist in us, I think, even if they are in fact dead or a thousand miles away (real or perceived); luckily for us, like these new volumes & like the vigorous poems within, MR & DY are anything but dead! Once I saw MR open a reading by demonstrating how to fold a fitted sheet. Once DY let me come over to his house so he could sign a copy of his book for my parents. It’s not what is communicated, what meaning might get made, etc. It’s about the grand possibility of the raddest gift of human consciousness--language. In these two new books -- Solar Perplexus by Dean Young & Dunce by Mary Ruefle -- I found what I have come to expect from these personal Mt. Rushmore poets. DY is pushing the limits of contemporary poetic disjunctive & dysfunctional utterance through odes, occasional, & litany-laced poems, while MR is dancing in brevity & the anecdote as modes for reflective revelation. We find MR in continued conversation with the contemplatives, the Japanese poets. We find DY channeling the huge spirits of the lost bodies (Tomaz Salamun, James Tate, John Ashbery). Even in this check-marked expectation, there is a reverberating baffling quality of where those modes & meanderings lead. Once DY wrote a poem called “Mary Ruefle Poem,” which she published in one of her books, & MR, likewise, wrote “Dean Young Poem,” which he plopped inside his own volume. In a recent interview at Neon Pajamas, MR recollected very simply this collaboration, “It was a lot of fun to do. It was like trying to channel him. I don't really remember. I loved the project, I love that we did it.” No extravagance, no nostalgia, no fabricating. The poems in her new book hark a similar herald, gluing plain memories & crisp language to the page. She reminds us in the power & difficulty of brevity. DY, likewise, spins some smaller webs, among his normal page-and-a-halfers, but anywhichaway, these poems enact what DY has been preaching for years. Take this ending paragraph from a short 2005 essay in Poetry Magazine: “Poetry’s primary & perhaps only obligation is, through the manipulation of its materials, to express and discover forms of liberty, thereby maintaining the spirit through constantly renewed meanings. Its greatest task is not to solidify groups, is not to broadcast, but to foster a necessary privacy in which the imagination can flourish. Then we may have something to say to each other.” This chunk of his, fairly enough, could be its own review for each & every DY book. I will be honest with you--I did not even know these two heroes had a new collection out till my buddy Brendan sent me a screenshot of a DY poem after he carried it home from a bookstore. “How embarrassing,” I thought / felt. But of course, these two might would say it is better this way. I do not attend poetry readings anymore. I live nearly two hours from the closest bookstore with a reasonable poetry selection. I have not spoken to a poet in person in months! Instead I have been clapping through the clutter of my grandpa’s nine decades, setting up this Future Barn for hopefully a few more. I have been walking the dogs across the family field. I have been reading & writing, hallucinating & cutting out, inventing & drowning in lots of words, both my own & others. Still, the joy these two poets have once again brought me is paramount to my continuing, obvious in my grinning. I couldn’t quit poetry if I tried, as it stitches together my hide. After years of chit-chatting about it, my wife, Diana Lynn Small, & I have begun writing some songs together, combining her angelic voice w/ my weird words, her strumming with my shitty drumming. We're calling the project, Leon Tyner's Antique Horse Blanket; so far, we're six songs in. Each song varies, but typically, it plops out like this: Diana records herself strumming a new tune & singing "dummy lyrics", then I "translate" her sounds into words, before we finally sit down & jam it out together. From time to time, I'll post some of those lyrics here:
ASSESS DESIRES & MAKE TIME Keep your chin up / you’re electric Keep your chin up / you’re electric Tune the mattress carry us tonight In the mornings / you wake angry In the mornings / you wake angry Surely we’ll use your lava pies tonight Mornings are an ancient hole But you can get out my boy & when you do reach my heart We get so high When you’re drooling / you’re an angel When you’re drooling / you’re an angel Fuel yourself for fragrant heat tonight Learning / on the mattress We’re learning / on the mattress Pulling for making good time tonight We’ve always been the worst At taking chance for whispers & I was hoping to lay down On the fire Keep your chin up / you’re electric Keep your chin up / you’re electric Tune the mattress carry us tonight |
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