Celia, the Sea Does Not Remember You Waves are not waves But the convulsions of a body That has forgotten the bones it conceals. The sea a wound that refuses to close. Celia goes there because the sea soothes her. She goes there because the air cools her. She observes gannet and curlew As one watches The slow collapse of a star. A big black sea bird stands in the surf Like an officiating priest. Its eyes are two shells Filled with the residue of night. Around it, strands of t

Tarrying with the Negative: A Second Hegelian Perspective on OCD Outline of the Problem Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is marked by obsessions, intrusive images, waves of anxiety, and rituals — sometimes visible, sometimes entirely internal — that feel compulsory even when they are not truly willed. Driven by absolutist and non-negotiable core beliefs or fixed ideas — ‘I must be certain’, ‘I can never be wrong’, for instance — the condition becomes a relentless overseer,

Uncommon One in the garden of statutes where rules multiply like weeds & stones lie about like scruples every step is a misstep in misadventure my ways are not steadfast nor my path clear fallen fruits ripen towards a crisis break a snail underfoot & the roses shiver disaster crush a flower with your heel & the frogs croak catastrophe offend the sun with a dismal glance & the heron broods at the water’s edge disturb a duck egg in the thick grass & the elms grow misty all

The Obstructed Dialectic: An Hegelian Perspective on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder characterized by inviolable beliefs, mental intrusions and repetitive behaviors that together create a cycle of fixation and doubt. What the sufferer seeks is the solid ground of certainty; yet in pursuing it he undermines that very aim. Each compulsion, meant to secure assurance, ultimately drives certainty further away. And still, there

Private Language In / creasing thought, the self doubles / folds inwards, suppose a private language against the world’s shared grammar — self-authored, a book written for no . one. A page torn away, stains in the margins, a footnote wrongly numbered, the letter ‘i’ faintly printed. Such is the pain of the man who yearns for his whole self between the covers of biography and meets only estrangement.

On the Point of Vanishing Cogito ergo ends with a sum beyond my reckoning: Thoughts add up and multiply exponentially like numbers. I must have miscalculated. It’s what happens when you cannot count on your own mind to make sense of the world. This time I’ll square the root - 100,000 to 316 to 18 to 4 to 2 to 1.4 to 1.2 to 1.1 to 1 - and keep on subtracting 1 to 0.5 to 0.1 … I arrive at a bare fraction of a thought, a mere variable

Something Less Than Human I came, through sea waves, misty-brained, My love songs crumbling to shadows, And I was halved to something Less than human. How could I grow Into something more than what I had become? Impossible now, the diminishing returns Of what was given me at birth. Smaller than a baby now, more of a creature Belonging to the forests, of stumps And traps and blood, the day-moon Hanging over me like a sad reminder. I was lost, having become lost, and

In the Dark, Dreaming (Inspired, in part, by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 5: 108-113) Tonight I am not in my right mind. It was the same last night And the night before. When at night the conscious mind Retires to its Monastic cell, and my senses are Asleep, the dreaming mind yokes together Heterogeneous shapes that Derive from the remembrance of Things seen in daytime. And not only that. It dredges up past deeds, produces Strange ideas that Run together in the Form of a

Words like mosquitoes swarming / Around me, pestering

My Name Is Lubbert Das I There is (if you care to know), a flower of folly growing On my brain, on the surface of the matter’s deep. Fit for the Fire, its fate is allotted. To be plucked - no - uprooted, And then chucked on the heap. But won’t it hurt? Well, yes, it will, but (And since you must inquire), there is more than one kind of pain. So with steady hand, and clutching his trephine, the doctor will Incise, excise, cut, and splice, and rid me of this fleur du mal. And i

Irrational Numbers In my mind a series of irrational numbers, of non-repeatable fractions without end. Something doesn’t add up. I am divided, incommensurable. I count on my intellect to calculate a solution but thoughts multiply endlessly and without purpose - an innumerable and undetermined infinity indifferent to sense. All this thinking-without-limits is a problem I cannot get my head around.

Saul The soul of the king an out-of-tune lyre with harpstrings for guts – many sharps and flats. Sent by the LORD the holy pneuma's hand scrapes unholy noise. It maddens the king with dissonant thought – the fatal vibration of blood in the heart until he is dead.

Thinking of Being without Heaviness or Depth Part 1: Being and heaviness People who suffer from depression often complain of a feeling of heaviness; not just in the emotional or mental sense, but as something physical — a visceral sensation pressing on the chest or wrapping itself around the body and the legs. Some sufferers say it is like having lead weights on their legs. Among the DSM-IV criteria for atypical depression is: “Leaden paralysis (i.e. heavy, leaden feelings i