Here’s what could get you lobotomized at the age of 12 in 1960 here in the United States: not reacting to love or punishment, objecting to going to bed but sleeping well, daydreaming and not discussing the content of the daydreams, and turning the lights on in a room when it’s sunny outside.
These are the “symptoms” that led to Howard Dully being institutionalized from the age of four and undergoing a trans-orbital lobotomy in which an orbitoclast was inserted into his brain through each of his eye sockets.
Please don’t make jokes about lobotomies or about mental-health issues and treatments in general. And please realize that we’re headed backwards in this country where mental healthcare is concerned. Lobotomies may not be in our future, but barbaric treatments and human-rights abuses are. I pray I won’t live long enough to see them or to be on the receiving end of them.
For me, the pronoun they works on many levels. One complaint about using they in the singular is that it’s grammatically incorrect. But is it? The mind is plural and decentralized. We may be one, but “I” may not even be a thing other than an understanding between us, a kind of “you there, me here” shorthand, a fiction that appears to simplify living. They is a better pronoun for me than he or she any day. It does more than help me escape the waist trainer of gender essentialism. It helps me remember that my mind is not one and never was and never will be.
Just as I was falling asleep again after the recurring nightmare about the house with thirty basements that are actually a portal to hell, the fire alarms went off in our house, making it, too, a portal to hell, an existential one that can only be reached by way of six interconnected wireless fire alarms blaring and yelling FI-YUR FI-YUR FI-YUR all at once.
This is the third time this has happened in less than a year with these fancy alarms the life partner installed, the ones that should last ten years with no issues. Maybe time’s moving faster than I think. Maybe years are decades and decades are eternities. Maybe I’ve been here forever and so have you.
The alarms are terrifying our dog, wrecking our sleep, and allowing my body to rehearse going into flight mode, which isn’t what it needs to be doing. My intestines got so upset, I think they consumed themselves and left a ball of iron in their place. I guess I’ll have to learn to live on air and remember to avoid MRI machines.
I’d rather die in a house fire than ever hear another fire alarm go off. I said what I said.
Neuro- is a combining form that means nerve, nerves, and nervous system. It does not mean brain, though the nervous system includes the brain. So when I talk about neurodiversity, I am not reducing folks and their experiences, identities, or labels to their brains, and I am not situated inside any kind of bioessentialism or biomedical framework. We are biological organisms. Everything that happens to us is biological. Our biological experiences are largely informed by our nervous systems. Our nervous systems are—both acutely and chronically, and both idiopathically and collectively—affected by everything around us, including our experiences, our abuses and traumas, the ways in which we are marginalized and oppressed, and more. Saying something is neuro-, including using terms like neurodiverse within the framework of neurodiversity, is not saying this, that, or the other thing starts and ends in the body. It is not the equivalent of denying or discounting the larger systems, functional and otherwise, in which we as biological beings exist or the forces those systems exert on our lives.
Image: A graphic depicting the human nervous system, including the parasympathetic nerves and the sympathetic nerves. The functions of the former include constricting pupils, stimulating saliva, constricting airways, slowing heart rate, stimulating stomach activity, inhibiting the release of glucose, stimulating the gallbladder, stimulating the intestines, contracting the bladder, and promoting the erection of genitals. The functions of the latter include dilating pupils, inhibiting salivation, relaxing airways, increasing heart rate, inhibiting stomach activity, stimulating the release of glucose, inhibiting the gallbladder, secreting epinephrine and norepinephrine, relaxing the bladder, and promoting ejaculation and vaginal contractions.
In September 1994, [David] Bowie and Brian Eno—who had reunited to develop new music—accepted an invitation from the Austrian artist André Heller to visit the Maria Gugging psychiatric clinic. The site’s Haus der Künstler, established in 1981 as a communal home and studio, is known internationally as a centre for Art Brut—or Outsider Art—produced by residents, many living with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.
The acclaimed Austrian photographer Christine de Grancy documented the visit, capturing Bowie engaging with these so-called outsider artists—a term often criticised for framing artists through illness or marginality rather than authorship. For the first time, these intimate portraits will be shown in Australia, when A Day with David opens at Joondalup festival in Western Australia in March, in collaboration with Santa Monica Art Museum.
And, of note: Gugging itself carries a darker weight. Founded in the 19th century, the clinic was later absorbed into the Nazi’s Aktion T4 program, which targeted those with mental and physical disabilities, and resulted in the mass murder of an estimated 250,000 people. At Gugging alone, hundreds of patients were murdered or sent to extermination facilities.
To be spared is to be pared, part of you left but part removed. To be spared means to pare, to reduce what happened to its essence and to find your own essence despite what happened. Injured but not killed. Damaged but not broken. Burned but not torched. You are what is left over, what you can afford to be, what you still have to give others. In Old English, spare means not enough. Were you not enough to be worth destroying or not enough after being destroyed? In Latin, pare means prepare. Do you feel prepared now that you’ve been skinned?
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, birders are calling owls “lil darlings,” and I’m here for it.
Happy New Year. Thank you all for making this one survivable.
I have to use binoculars to see the spines of the books on my high bookshelves is how I am.
I dreamed I asked someone to sign my copy of their chapbook. They were like, How do you spell your first name, Darling? Without thinking and without an ounce of humor or irony, I replied, S-A-D.
I know having a waterbed filled with zero sugar Cherry Coke that I can sleep on and drink from is impractical, but it’s what I want.
I’m stressing myself out in that way that I only am capable of stressing myself out is how I am.
Listening to Modeselektor on repeat is how I am.
Writing letters to my dead mother is how I am.
Facebook thinks I’m a library and is trying to furnish me.
Speaking the truth is not without consequences.
String art weirds me out.
More and more, I like less and less.
Oh. It’s December 20. My mother died twenty-one years ago today.
I don’t think of myself as sans serif. I think of myself as serif-free.
I bought a replica of a medieval carnival badge called “Good Harvest.” Badges like this one supposedly provided protection and ensured prosperity. The one I ordered depicts a person driving a wheelbarrow full of phalluses along a road that’s a giant phallus with legs. That’s quite the harvest. During the Middle Ages, phalluses were believed to drive out evil and confer good luck. Badges like this one were popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Google “medieval carnival badge” if you want to see an assortment of designs. There’s one that’s a vulva with legs walking around with a rosary in one hand and a phallic pilgrim’s staff in the other. That might be my favorite.
I really can’t see very well these days. I’ve needed glasses for years but have gotten around it by memorizing the eye chart right before the ophthalmologist comes in for my appointment. Today, I thought I was going to watch a program called “The Smurftown Tunes.” It was actually “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. Not at all what I was expecting.
This new font, Sans Gender, is hard-coded to replace more than one hundred needlessly gendered terms with inclusive terms. This font is so the boss of me. I don’t know if the font would allow me to say that, but it’s true. And something has to be the boss of me. Why not a font?
I see the poet who threatened me last year has a new collection out with a press that purports to be a safe space. Congratulations all around: to the poet, the press, and the community that makes it all happen.
CNN: Quit putting Hans Nichols on your program. He’s using the term “schizophrenic” right now to describe inconsistent behavior. That’s sanist and unacceptable.
The gash in my fitted sheet created by my rough heels has grown so long that one of my calves is now stuck in it. I could free myself, but that would require a teensy bit of physical and emotional effort. I think I’m just going to stay like this all day. My heels win. The gash wins. I’m going to nap like a cruel President.
The chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma in my hometown was a consultant for MKUltra. My friend told me this today. I’m super weirded out about it. My mother may have known him. He also killed an elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with a large dose of LSD.
There are pyrrhuloxias in Oklahoma. Hot damn.
The Nazis used the font Fraktur and its variations for their propaganda, including Mein Kampf, but banned it in 1941 for being “judenlettter,” which translates to “Jewish letters,” meaning it was linked to Jewish printers and writers, so an edict was issued to replace the font with Roman styles, which were required for all Nazi communications throughout Europe.
Now, the ousted font is one that’s accessible to people with disabilities. And its replacement is a Roman style. This is significant. This is eerie. This is history repeating itself.
It’s good to know fascism has a font. I’m still on the font thing.
Literary journals and presses that require all submissions to be set in Times New Roman may want to rethink that requirement. It’s not an accessible font for those with reading issues and learning disabilities. And now it carries an ugly political connotation to boot.
Dear Leader, I found a readable font family called Sans Gender that works for me as a dyslexic nonbinary individual, and yes I am buying it. And no, you can’t stop me. Take your Times New Roman and be on your way.
Keep your hate font away from me.
Well, I know what font I won’t be using moving forward.
Walan the wombat has stopped having panic attacks, has started doing zoomies, and is now shaking his head back and forth, which is a sign he feels happy and secure. He’s also been playing with other baby wombats. I’ll tag you on his latest video if you want to see it. And no. I’m not crying. Not even a little.
I am going to Thomas Merton myself into hermitage until I no longer say and do all the wrong things.
Yesterday in Utah, a skier had to be rescued from a crevasse, and a hiker had to be rescued from quicksand. This is why I say inside.
Hacking my gut microbiota with apple cider vinegar is how I am.
Dear New York Times: Cookies are delicious, but “cookie” is not a season. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Department of Injustice
Watching a video of a nudibranch pooping is how I am.
Apparently, the FDA is practicing evidenceless-based science now.
In the Oklahoma birding group, someone posts a photo of a dead white-throated sparrow they’ve found at their campsite, hoping to get an ID. Someone IDs the bird. Someone posts a quote from the Bible: Not even the sparrow falls to the ground without God’s notice and care. Someone posts a painting they created based on that Bible verse, an unassuming sparrow looking up into a shaft of light. A funeral of sorts is held for the sparrow. A space opens up in the group for mourning and love. This is deep birding, not the run-of-the-mill look at my beautiful bird photography skills found in other birding groups.
Sometimes, all I can say about a poem is that it exists.
I just misread a headline as “Hummus: A Monstrous History,” and everything I thought I knew about hummus flashed before my eyes before being supplanted with a darkness I could only imagine and barely fathom. But no worries. It was just humans in that headline. Not hummus. We’re all good. Enjoy your hummus, monsters.
The rock fracture at Yosemite National Park is actively occurring. Meanwhile, I am passively occurring. We all have our way, Yosemite.
As an aside, look at this glorious language. Geologists dispatched to the area of the fracture said they could hear it cracking like a frozen lake that wasn’t consolidated. That description must absolutely be used in a poem.
TFW you wake up in the morning and suddenly remember you shared one of your poems on Facebook the night before.
I’m totally involved in the life of a sick baby wombat named Walan is how I am.
I’m buying a humane catch-and-release bug trapper is how I am.
The laccolith shoulders this inelegant sky, nothing to write home about, as if this weren’t home now but that other place, the one I’m from, a town that’s rotting building by building, foundation by foundation, the fences, the red brick, the sweetgums and their dejected seeds. But mostly the psychiatric hospital, which the state left to vandals years ago.
Where I live now is less town than scrub, less scrub than sand, less sand than canyon. Plenty of room for a word to get lost, to go out on the air and never reach a listener but also never boomerang back to the speaker who stands, silent, beyond language, at least for a spell, isolated from everyone, including themselves.
That’s when the laccolith comes in handy, a kind of giant anchor for thought, for yearning. Headless under dark clouds, the color of night before night falls. A heavy future, a heavy past, a sense of always about it that makes humans seem like baubles, a bracelet of seals surrounding a whale in a faraway watery world before one slips into its mouth unnoticed.
What rises here rises in the distance, with its monzenite and spruce, big-eared bats and fir, bitter cherry, dollarjoint cactus, pygmy rabbits, sandweed, spleenwort. We’ve never been liberated from names or naming. In my ignorant past, I didn’t learn what to call things or what to call myself. Cardinal was red bird. Finch was sparrow. Father was father. I was daughter.
I read that if you think enough about a relative, your genes flip on and off to become more like theirs. Ten minutes a day for thirty days is all it takes. In case that’s true, who should I think of? I’ll take my chances with my mother, the way the white-tailed antelope ground squirrels take their chances with the feral cat when the neighbor’s trees are heavy with apricots in late summer. At least her genes helped me survive him.
Pistachios escaped cultivation in nearby mining towns and made their way up into the mountains. Birds, the first landscape architects, move them around the foothills, where they grow like bonsai. Humans spread from place to place, trying to find and lose ourselves. We look for footholds. We lock in. Even if we only grow a little, it’s something. A small life is better than none at all.
Horses and cows come and go here, the way they do where I’m from. My mother came and went, into and out of the hospital as a nurse and sometimes as a patient. Those buildings feel like her body rotting, returning to earth with no dignity. Her broken windows. The word PSYCHO spray-painted on her side. Her interior waterlogged and full of God knows what in the one-time hospital chapel that hasn’t shivered with song in decades.
Inger Christensen says there is war all the time. There is war. There is war. War in the cells. War in the genes. War in the heart. War in the mind. War in the family. War in the mother. War in the father. But there is also deerweed and spikemoss, manzanita and mat muhly. There is histone modification and methylation, expression and heritability. There is asbestos and lead, observation hatches and safety glass.
There is what happened and what passes for what happened, in memory, in polite company, in our palm lines, in our bloodlines. There is war all the time, even under new paint and old dirt.
Across the creek, cows have replaced horses. The windmill has given up on the idea of spinning. Rust keeps it still even on windy days. I dreamed I was beheaded, and Stephen Miller joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He rented me a pastel house in the middle of nowhere while I grew a new head. I lived there with Jason Statham, who let me see the world through his eyes until I had my own. He wore all black and sharpened knives incessantly. Folks like to walk into the wildlands at the end of my road. They always come back, like my head did. It was the end of times in my dream. Thirty days of unspeakable violence. CBS was inciting it by cutting their stories in a way that made us hellbent on destruction. The end of times. The end of the road. A nowhere going nowhere fast. A head that grows back but why. Even a cow knows better than to attempt such a thing.
Mental illness has an architecture. That’s part of the story of asylums and treatment in this country. Central State Griffin Memorial, the hospital in my hometown, wasn’t laid out like this, but it had that same grand feel juxtaposed against the lives of those who inhabited the buildings.
Throughout its history, which spans more than a century, Central State’s story has been one of hope, ignorance, dehumanization, and harm: the same story from the asylum era to era of deinstitutionalization to today. I can barely tell any of it but have to before that history is lost. My mother worked there as a nurse and was treated there as a patient. Her relationship with Central State spanned more than three decades. That architecture was in her body, her bones part of the structure of those buildings and that land. Now, we need to make sure these places don’t come back with a new story: one of coercion, exploitation, profit, and greed.
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Source: PBS Utah video about The Kirkbride Asylum, which was the template for many other asylums across the country.
Dana Henry Martin 