Associations from the poem, ‘Theology’ by Ocean Vuong in the recent New Yorker

(note: I did not know that the poet was a man when I wrote this)

“The man lowered a box into the slot he had dug.

As if pushing a coin into a giant machine.

That must be how they pay to be here.

It is as if the poet had about 14 poems inside and they all ended up on the same page. So many different journeys. My mind wanders like that sometimes. I have given into it sometimes and the results are just as mixed and oddly coherent. I wonder what it is like for those people who cannot stop doing that. Who can’s get up from the chair and go outside and feel the wind as meaningless and yet gentle, the smell of flowers as sweet – not sinister.
I always wonder why crazy people are angry and aggressive. Are there people who are crazy that are genuinely happy about it? Why is it so frightening to them. That inability to understand what is happening around them.
My mother was crazy. What made my mother crazy was that she didn’t know how to verify things. She came up with an interpretation of an action and the true meaning of the facts didn’t get in the way of her interpretation. A hard way to love.
So we interpret things. We assign meaning to them. The bigger and more encompassing questions become theology. The smaller things are just getting along with your neighbors.
When I was working on my novel I was able to visit my imagination regularly, but it took a kind of discipline that was hard to sustain. It was fun, but I didn’t think I could keep it up.
I keep going back to Hemingway. He was a drunk and saturated with testosterone. As he aged, he got more and more depressed. He got electro-shock-therapy. One of the things about EST is that it messes with memory. Hemingway couldn’t remember things. He couldn’t write novels because he couldn’t keep them in his head. That is why he killed himself.
It is a cautionary tale. #1 is do not get EST. #2 is memory is who you are – you lose your memory, you lose yourself. That is why it is so hard to forget your keys. No – let me rephrase it- it is easy to lose your keys but it hurts. It is scary because it feels like you are losing your mind – you feel like you are in the early stages of forgetting who you are.
Perhaps crazy people are angry and aggressive because they are so scared. They don’t know the rules. Gravity is something you can break. The trip to the top of the tree is not metaphorical, it is real. It is as real as the stupid bowl of oatmeal on the table. The squirrel tail that she lost was made of real fur and bone and the boy on the bridge took it from her. I wonder if that is a way she has of thinking about being raped by him. His lips are red as a scab, not a rose or a plum, so she sees something wrong about him, then he pulls a rifle on her. How close can she get to writing about that without going through it again. The image is there but she doesn’t finish it.
A friend of mine worked in Social Services. Her job was to advise and help protect abused women and children. Get them shelter and help them get away from the abusers. She also had a private practice and saw a lot of “psychotic” women in her practice. She said that 9 out of 10 of her disturbed patients had been sexually abused as children. The more pervasive the abuse the crazier the patient. You can look at that and see that crazy is a response to something.
Is optimism a form of crazy? Is not-crazy sane?
Is the pressure of staying “normal” so intense that it is a necessary relief to scream and rant and break things?
And the price the poet pays is to know that death is the coin we pay to be here in this life.