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                             Bi-Polar Bear

                                   by Ellen Orner aka Rykin
                                                   7/1/09
 
I am looking at the fortune-cookie ticket taped to my laptop: “Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.”  Apparently, attempting the absurd, my customary modus operandi, is a symptom of hypomania.  Achieving the impossible, which I have done to reasonable degrees of success in various projects, is a problem.  The pendulum swung both ways – following through got increasingly more difficult.

In March of 1998 I made the acquaintance of the residents at the Wilmer Eye Institute emergency room. My internist, Dr. David G. Roberts III, who sent me there, insisted that Dr. Neil Miller be consulted. The diagnosis did not get fancier upon consultation: just garden variety optic neuritis. I was the beneficiary of the Wilmer IV steroid trial; a three-week taper and ten extra pounds later, I was left to cogitate on percentages, heredity, and all other useless topics.

The sonnet below was written in the winter 1998-99.  Upon re-reading, it sounds very precise to me in its description of my “life-style” then.

Barter

Must feed the greedy beast inside my head.
To gain a moment’s respite from its clawing,
I throw shredded verses at its mauling
maw; gnarled concepts substitute for bread.

In fleeting satiety it frolics –
an overeager adolescent bear.
My brain, a beachball at its skull-bound fair-
grounds, is hostage to its manic,

heedless joy. Again the beastie wails
with hunger pains – in a Gargantuan pail
I serve thick ethics stew with chewy morals.

Unwatched a spell, it falls into a swoon
sometimes and softly, sweetly moans
a lullaby to pale infant moon.

Ellen Orner
1998

In 2004, I was definitively diagnosed with multiple sclerosis by Dr. Richard T. Johnson of Johns Hopkins. That explained the years of splitting headaches. I consulted Dr. Jason Brandt of JHU Medical Psychology in 2005 for a neuropsychological examination. In 2007, in the course of a repeat session, Dr. Brandt very mildly suggested that I may have some version of bipolar disorder, a notion I accepted as hypothetical. I finally sought psychiatric help from Dr. William Regenold at the end of 2007, with felicitous results.

It is very odd for me to be level-headed and calm now, but I enjoy it. Still, achieving the impossible, which implies attempting the absurd, may be my only option for the future, as it often was in the past. So I write, and Madeleine Mysko, an author and a very patient teacher from the Johns Hopkins Advanced Writing Seminars, reads my attempts. She is also a registered nurse who for several years kept vigil with her Hopkins colleague, the poet Anne Frydman, as multiple sclerosis took away Anne’s body, and finally her.

To Ivan Krylov*

After the turgid dread, a lucid lightness
of blessed disregard for woes of every
stripe – but do remember to express
appropriate concern at times.

***
The human lot to fear thrives
on empathy professed and felt
for terror of demise,
sorrow for the dead.

Yet fear is a flexible
commodity, unrivaled
as a yeast to raise
the dough of loss,
to give belligerent loft
to righteous self-defense
required for preemption.
A shared, communal
dread is triply precious.

Commodities all bestow
control upon
ones uncontrolled
by them.

Ellen Orner
June-July 2009

This poem was written in the daylight clarified by Zoloft and Provigil. I appreciate the newly-found intellectual detachment, disinhibition. Sadly, the beast of a decade ago rarely moans lullabies, but I now choose to accept the available barter.

*Ivan Krylov (c. 1769 – 1844) - was the Russian Aesop, a keen social commentator, my first poetic love, and a very clear-headed, humorously moral gentleman.

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