This Ain't No Party. This Ain't No Disco. (This Ain't No Lake Wobegon)

You can't say he didn't warn us. Paul Gruchow laid out his program clearly in the prose fragment that introduces Letters to a Young Madman, his recently and posthumously published memoir. He writes that a book of this sort cannot be "both amusing and truthful." You want amusing? Read about a place where all the men are good looking, all the women are strong, and so on. "There," he writes,” you could be amused forever and ever, and you need never know the heights and depths to which human beings are ordinarily called." Here, on the other hand, is a serious book.

For a loyal and affectionate readership, Gruchow was at once a great comfort and a great instigator. He wrote ecstatically, but precisely, about the natural world—especially about hiking in what he called the "empty" places from the Minnesota Northwoods to the Rockies and the Big Horns. Back home on the Minnesota prairie, he enthused about the potential of humans to work toward sustainable lifestyles and to return human culture to agriculture. At odds with these two passions were the depredation of the natural world and the ascendancy of a food-production system that, as he often said, "made the countryside safe for machines." And these pernicious forces, according Gruchow, share a provenance. As he wrote in a 1999 preface to a reprint of his 1988 essay collection, The Necessity of Empty Places, "In paying tribute to places counted worthless, I . . . hoped to offer homage to people treated as expendable. The same forces that ravage the land, I came to believe in the writing of this book, are the ones that destroy human communities." In Letters to a Young Madman, these same evil forces rise up to enable the dehumanizing, infantilizing, and humiliating treatment that he received and witnessed during his struggle with borderline personality disorder, the disease that that ultimately led him to suicide.

The range of Gruchow's writing is impressive; his popularity and success was enviable. As a nature writer, he attracted such a devoted readership that when he mentioned that he enjoyed a relaxing smoke after a day's hike, his fans flooded him with cigars. His natural history knowledge was extensive, and what he didn't already know he researched voraciously and grasped immediately. However, in the essays and talks collected in 1995 in Grass Roots, he turned advocate, fighting and arguing in his own unique and engaging version of agitprop. Through it all a love of land and place radiated that might be described as devotion. The natural world transported him. Again from the Empty Places preface: "If there is any cure [for sorrow] on this side of the grave, I am certain it lies in the balm of nature." In this, Paul was fatally disappointed.

However deep his depression, Gruchow never stopped being an activist and an advocate. He fumed against the institutional treatment of the mentally ill, and he longed to write again after being blocked for years. According to Louis Martinelli, who prepared Letters to a Young Madman for its publication, Paul had been working during 2003 on a disjointed manuscript made up of short pieces of memoir, research, and narrative. Martinelli suggested a structure patterned after that of Eduardo Galeano, an elliptical pastiche that eschewed transitions and other traditional devices. This freedom enabled Gruchow to finish a remarkable collection of prose fragments —few of more than one page—that are courageously brutal in their honest portrayals of depression and desperation. These combine with research, analysis, and description of treatments to expose the pathetic shortcomings of the mental health system. He recounts the chilling moments before and after electroconvulsive therapy, a night of struggling against suicide, the frustrating absurdity of occupational group sessions. He analyzes the utter loss and grief of clinical depression and uses his own case to represent the suffering of his fellow patients, the failure of his treatment to embody the failure of the entire establishment.

Paul died in February of 2004, but it wasn't until 2013 that Letters finally appeared. The book is, as he promised, a truthful and difficult read—with one heartbreaking exception: a 775-word mini-essay three pages from the book's end that describes a walk onto the escarpment above Duluth, Minnesota, where he was living at the time. It's like hiking with the old Paul, the ecstatic naturalist who had, in better times, experienced "the great power of healthy land to render consolation" and who believed that the "one absolutely irreplaceable and indispensable service that so-called empty places provide is keeping us sane."

The walk begins haltingly, but soon the former enticements of nature take hold:  "I was met face-to-face with a burst of wind. I felt its delicious coolness on my check. There was another sensation. It took me a moment to place it. Pines! It was the scent of pines! I could smell again!" Awakened, he begins to remember boyhood adventures and the names of the plants he walked alongside. "I ran their names over my tongue as if they were draughts of cool water." Earlier in the book he had said that the only two deterrents to his suicide were not wanting his children to have that legacy and not wanting to influence some of his friends by example—not a word anywhere in the book about watching a sunset over a lake in the boundary waters or a storm rolling in over the mountains. But after this last walk, even though "the darkness, as it does, closed in again," he was able to reassure himself, "if I could just get there, I knew where to go to find the light."

Sadly, in the same preface to The Necessity of Empty Places in which Gruchow invokes the balm of nature, he mentions another truth he discovered: "the futility of running away." Letters to a Young Madman tells the story of the mentally ill: "They take their meds, they see their doctors, they go to the hospital from time to time, and they continue to struggle and suffer. The name of the story is not triumph or redemption, but survival." And his story is no different. "It ends," he says, "with me alive. . . . That has to be enough, because it's all there is." And that moment, unhappily, was far too brief.

************

Visit the Paul Gruchow Foundation at www.paulgruchow.org

Folding My Google Map

That slight tremor on August 15, 2013—which passed without much notice in the rest of the world—was the earth shifting at The Georgia Review. On that day we began accepting electronic submissions. On August 18 an essay came in online that caught my eye. But after I read it a couple times, I found myself making a few lukewarm notes in preparation for moving it along to the next reader: “strong start, good closing, fuzzy in the middle—an ambitious essay that lost its focus.” For some reason that I don’t recall now, I decided to print the essay out and give it another try. You know where this is going: I immediately understood what the author was up to and loved the piece. It has been accepted for publication, and the whole incident has given me pause to realize that I don’t think that I read as well—that is, with the same level of perception—from a screen as I do from paper. Nothing against my iPad, which I dearly love, or even the big old Dell on my desk, but when I read at my job I’m evaluating the efforts of working writers, most of whom care and grind and hope. I owe them the courtesy of my complete attention and comprehension.

                                                                        ~

If you hold an opinion and look hard enough, you can find a study to back it up. Sure enough, the International Journal of Educational Research* reports a carefully constructed study of seventy-two Norwegian tenth graders in which two comparable groups were tested after reading either PDF or paper versions of texts running 1400-1600 words. Eight pages of education-speak and statistics boil down to this: “The results of this study indicate that reading linear narrative and expository text on a computer screen leads to poorer reading comprehension than reading the same texts on paper. . . . If texts are longer than a page, scrolling and the lack of spatiotemporal markers of the digital texts to aid memory and reading comprehension might impede reading performance.”

The study’s author, Anne Mangen, and her co-authors point to navigation issues as the main contributor to their results. First, scrolling “imposes a spatial instability which may negatively affect the reader’s mental representation of the text”; second, on-screen reading restricts a reader’s access to an entire text. “We know from empirical and theoretical research that having a good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text supports reading comprehension.” In summary, the authors quote a 2006 Canadian study: “Difficulties in reading from computers may be due to disrupted mental maps of the text, which may be reflected in poorer understanding and ultimately poorer recall of presented material.”**

The more we learn about how our minds work, the more we come to realize that separating the mind and body is an epistemological dead end. As Nicholas Carr writes in the preview issue of Nautilus.***  “What we’re learning now is that reading is a bodily activity. We take information the way we experience the world—as much with our sense of touch as with our sense of sight. Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols.” By holding that now-accepted essay submission in my hands, I had become completely engaged. I could quickly flip back and forth among the pages to pick up images and threads of the argument. My “mind’s eye” helped me to recall and reconstruct the “mental map” to the extent that even after I passed the essay along I could tell you what was being discussed and where in the text the discussion occurred. Instead of being left with a screen gone dark, I retained a vital piece of writing.

                                                                        ~

This sudden immersion into reading and evaluating manuscripts online has reinforced for me the importance of a framework—a mental map—in shaping nonfiction into an essay. However, I don’t mean to imply here that merely committing a piece of writing to paper rather than a computer screen will automatically provide that necessary map; it has to be inherent in the thought that precedes writing and as a constant presence throughout the writing. Without an author’s help, a reader is left hiking a random path. The details are still present—and they may be profound, dramatic, or beautiful—but lacking context and commentary, they lack sense and purpose.

Keeping a reader on track might call for simply providing ongoing and specific references to time and place; it will certainly involve transitions. However, the most-often overlooked, and perhaps the most important, addition to a writer’s map is a little more telling and a little less showing. Not every aphorism is misleading. Some—Warren Zevon's "Enjoy every sandwich" comes to mind—can be quite useful, even important. But believing something just because it's repeated endlessly is a mistake. “Show, don't tell" is one of those tidy saws that, although filled with good intention, has replaced thought, and it has put authors in mortal fear of straying, even briefly, from the concrete. But in an essay, a writer should be pursuing an idea, as well as relating a story. It’s okay, even necessary, to “tell”: to take some time to ruminate—generalize, synthesize, analyze—get abstract for a moment, then return to the details.

Alfred Korszybski warned against confusing reality with the definition of reality when he coined the often-used phrase, “the map is not the territory.” But I would suggest that the structure and direction a map provides are the tools that inform effective nonfiction: work that enables true insight into reality rather than trying and failing at the task of “writing” the reality itself. An essay’s mental map is not the territory, nor should it attempt to be. Consider Borges’s brief story “On Exactitude in Science,” which describes a country in which cartography had reached such perfection that “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” That map, of course, proved useless because it wasn’t a map at all. The nonfiction equivalent, without forethought and design, without an internal structure, will leave readers feeling that they’re scrolling down an endless page, looking in vain for a cairn, a blaze on a tree.

           

* Mangen, Anne, et al. “Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension.” International Journal of Educational Research. 58 (2013): 61– 68. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

** Kerr, M.A. and S.E. Symons. “Computerized presentation of text: Effects on children's reading of informational material.” Reading and Writing. 19.1 (2006): 1-19. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

*** Carr, Nicholas. “Paper Versus Pixel. natil.us. 1 Aug. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

****A previous version of this piece appeared in Brevity, 18 January 2014 and yet another on The Georgia Review website.

*****Map image from simpleicon.com

                                                           

           

Bitter the Uses of Adversity

Cyclophosphamide, Hydroxydaunorubicin, Oncovin, and Prednisone altogether equal CHOP—Joel Oppenheimer's chemotherapy and the subject of one of his last and best poems, “The Uses of Adversity.” It is a poem of nearly 700 (Oppenheimer-short) lines and was published by Zelot Press: staple-bound; Oppenheimer-thin—3.5 by 8.5 inches; cover lettering in lower case of course. Joel inscribed my copy “News from the front,” a heavily ironic sideways look at one of his favorite William Carlos Williams quotations:

                          It is difficult

to get the news from poems

             yet men die miserably every day

                          for lack

of what is found there.

The inscription is dated 2/18/87; Joel died in October the following fall. Lung cancer had spread to his brain. He was 58.

Joel believed that poetry, like myth, was a way of understanding the universe; he saw myth as “quintessential fact.” And as his work moved from the discursive assertions of The Woman Poems (published in 1975) to a shorter, calmer line and the compressed diction that he had learned years earlier from Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, his own perceptions of his immediate surroundings increasingly took on the importance of myth.

This sea change in style and approach took place during the early 1970s after what he called “the last shout of the old [poetic] line.” He saw himself as a poet of middle-age, a single father with two sons at home, starting a new life having satisfied himself that he'd dealt in The Women Poems with the various Jungian “mothers” of Robert Bly and Erich Neumann—and with his own. Also, and of considerable significance, was the fact that his mind was clearing up. Joel had been an earnest and dedicated drunk until he took his final drink in 1970. A new focus and an ability to concentrate, which gradually returned to him over the next few years, balanced in some ways the nightmare of early sobriety, which he accomplished, for the most part, alone. The disease of alcoholism stayed with him until it was overtaken by one more immediately, but no less, deadly. In “The Uses of Adversity,” writing about mixing prednisone and booze, he admits, “of course i want / to take a drink // i've wanted to / take a drink since / that August day in 1970 / i took my last one.” But he never did, and in the next stanza he gives himself a pass on the 1.4% alcohol in his cough syrup.

The cough syrup detail deserves mention because it indicates the tone that drives the poem: witty, ironic, and bitter. Further, there is something wickedly funny about the premise: elevating to myth status a government pamphlet describing the side effects (he rightly calls them head-on effects) of the four “poisons” that comprise CHOP. But what might in other hands remain merely an annotated compilation—albeit with great care paid to line breaks—becomes a poem about language, suffering, myth, and, of course, death. He tips his hand in an introductory section after dismantling the prefixes “mal-,” “mis-,” “and dys-“ as they apply to “functioning”:

all words break down

into their parts

even as you and i

even as you and i

The reader is put on notice that we're dealing with basics here. His doctors warns of cankers, and even though “there is / a more precise / latinization / available to him / for obfuscation”:

. . . this is not

necessary

                  canker

cancer  chancre cancel

are all the same

Most of the rest of the poem follows a call-and-response pattern. A listing of side effects will elicit a response in the form of a trenchant wisecrack, each time revealing the simultaneous hopelessness and importance of the new information being relayed. For example, after listing “unusual bleeding or bruising,” he writes,

but what is usual

bruising and bleeding

i question

after “blood in urine”:

as if going to pee

and peeing blood

would not prompt

some concern

after “shortness of breath”:

                  hell

it's my damned lungs

at the seat of this

so of course i have

shortness of breath

and after another ridiculous collection that includes agitation, confusion, dizziness, lightheadedness, and loss of appetite, he embraces the irony:

doesn't this all

begin to sound

like being in love

And for evidence he offers a half-dozen lines of Lord Byron parading love “symptoms” in rhyming iambs from a translation of Catullus, then translations of Sappho by Sir Phillip Sydney and Mary Barnard. Before returning to real-life symptoms, he asks, but doesn't answer, a question toxic with sardonic wit:

so is it not love

these racing chemicals

and poisons chasing

down the cankers

to cancel all

Although the naming of side effects is repetitious, sometimes absurd, and, in the final analysis, beside the point, we can be sure that Joel knew them all. They were the monsters lurking under the sick room bed; each had the power to become momentous. One in particular turns the tone of the poem: “wounds that don't heal”:

for which i read

stigmata or

emotionally

as feuds

And he wonders about his enemies, if they have “these medicines / these cancers / growing in them.” “The Uses of Adversity” is a decidedly self-referential poem, as is much of Joel's poetry. But he has the gift of welcoming us in, even into the horror of chemotherapy, because he knew that we are, all of us, connected by the curse we share:

i take CHOP

every three weeks

a time span

called a course

combining thus

the words curse     

and corse:  the body

****************

During a lifetime of teaching, Joel was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project in Manhattan, visiting professor of poetry at CCNY, and associate professor of communications at New England College in New Hampshire. In the mid-1980s he held a Gannet Distinguished Professorship at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

His poetry booklist is an impressive one: eleven collections, as well as a number of broadsides and single-poem chapbooks as was common during the 1960s and 1970s. His short fiction was collected in Pan's Eyes, and he wrote three plays and two popular nonfiction books: one about Marilyn Monroe and the other about the New York Mets. He was a regular columnist for the Village Voice from 1969-1984, and a selection of those pieces has been gathered in Drawing from Life. Of particular note is a 1983 White Pine Press project Poetry the Ecology of the Soul, which collected transcriptions of three Oppenheimer master classes as well as a generous group of selected poems. “The Uses of Adversity” was reprinted in New Directions 52: An International Anthology of Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin.

Books about Joel Oppenheimer and his work include Robert Bertholf's Remembering Joel Oppenheimer, Lyman Gilmore's Don't Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer, and David Thibodaux' Joel Oppenheimer: An Introduction.