My Heart like an Escape Plan
On Schizophrenia, survival, and Jack Gilbert's "A Brief for the Defense"
Content warning: This entry discusses suicide and suicidal ideation very openly in tandem with Schizophrenia.
After close to a year in remission my Schizophrenia returned in January. I could give you a run-down of the ugly symptoms there-in, but other folks have done that and done it well. So I’ll point you their way: (The Center Cannot Hold, The Collected Schizophrenias).
Instead I will admit to you that this morning I sat with a knife to my wrist. Remembering scars from my younger days. Living in the space that five years had managed to carve out since my last incident of self-harm.
I will also admit that with January’s recurrence I began planning my suicide, knowing just how bad things were going to get. And, friends, things have gotten bad. Most days I forget. Most days I misremember. Most days I disregard. Most days are the most that I can handle without breaking. For so many of us (Schizophrenic folks) this is our escape plan—of the estimated 2.6 million people (diagnosed and not) in the US with Schizophrenia, 4.9% of them (roughly 127,400) will attempt suicide at some point in their lives (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951591/ ). Most of them succeed.
And after five months of planning I knew how I wanted to end my life. The details were fixed. I had made my peace with this potential. I was going to go through with it. But I wasn’t ready yet—the time wasn’t right—I would have to settle for a few cuts to hold me over. Like I had done as a teenager. Like I had done in my early twenties. Like I had come to know of pain as a stand-in for death.
But death is not painful. The process leading up to it undoubtedly is for some, but not all. No—death itself is an absence of pain. And for that reason it is appealing. I cannot pretend to speak for everyone when I say this but I know I speak for many: we do not wish to kill ourselves because we want this life to end, we have just run out of ways to cope with the pain.
And maybe we die a little bit when we learn of pain. But, maybe too, we live a little bit when we learn of joy.
I was reminded this morning of joy. Not by anything magnificent like a miracle. But rather by my only tattoo. It is inked on my wrist. Simple line-work letters that say “rejoice.” When I placed the knife to my wrist I knew then I could not do it. There would be no blood. No harm. No pain.
I had promised myself a tattoo if I lived to see 25. And this year I finally took myself up on that promise. Little did I know how badly I would need that reminder.
I have, too, promised myself a name change (as many trans* folks do) if I lived to turn 30. I want to change my name to “Joy David.” After the one who had slain Goliath. And after the thing I intend to slay the giant with.
This morning, instead of harming myself I texted my best friend Dan. I said this: “I’ve been thinking about dying again. It’s scary to admit that I’ve been struggling a lot this year. And not just struggling, but really getting my ass kicked to the point where I cannot imagine finding any ways to continue. I’m having a hard time looking forward to things, having a hard time finding pleasure in anything. Lately I’ve been planning my suicide and I’m scared if I don’t tell anyone this that I’m actually going to go through with it.”
There are promises in life that I am unable to make, and whether or not I stick around is one of those. I very often have little to no control of the things running amok inside my skull, but I promise you—I am going to fight like hell. I have, all along—and always as a lesson Hanif Abdurraqib once shared with me—been storing my joy where it is accessible for when it is necessary. Like my tattoo. Like my best friend. Like the poems I carry always with me in my bag. Like the dog I have been watching for a friend while he is out of town (she’s been licking the tears off of my face as I’ve been writing this).
The practice of storing up joy in little reminders feels loosely akin to how a lawyer prepares for a trial—by presenting a brief (a written argument given to a court or jurors to help in reaching a conclusion on the legal issues involved in the case).
I am reminded in this moment of Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Brief For The Defense,” which I read as holding a similar sentiment as my tattoo.
Gilbert, born to working-class parents in Pittsburgh, flunked out of school and worked as an exterminator, steelworker, and door-to-door salesman before being admitted to the University of Pittsburgh to study poetry. At the age of 37 Jack won the Yale Younger Prize for his first book and quickly rose to fame, being covered in spreads by places like Vogue and Glamour.
However, he tired quite instantly of fame, notably saying: “Fame is a lot of fun, but it’s not interesting. I loved being noticed and praised, even the banquets. But they didn’t have anything that I wanted. After about six months, I found it boring. There were so many things to do, to live.”
I have a great fondness for Gilbert and the way he lived his life—wildly, and beholden only to himself and his beloveds—eschewing institutions—often choosing simple pleasures over pomp and circumstance. He was intensely committed to a practice of joy. He was intensely committed to a life on his own terms.
My favorite of his poems is the one I’ve mentioned already—A Brief For The Defense. I’m reprinting it below:
A Brief For The Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
“A Brief for the Defense” from Refusing Heaven: Poems, by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert.
It takes perhaps four lines of reading to understand precisely what is on trial and its stipulations. The defendant is the enjoyment of life. Gilbert is asking what reason we have to enjoy life.
This is the brutal pastoral he presents:
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
This is not a novel sentiment: the idea that there are innumerable sufferings being experienced across the globe. How are we to celebrate then? Are we to celebrate? Are there just causes to believe this life is good?
I’d like to believe that there is a perfect answer to these questions. A worthy moralization to fall back on. But the problem of pain has confounded philosophers and scientists and poets since the inception of thought.
There is no easy answer to the question of whether or not this life is good. So Gilbert gives us something messy instead:
The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick.
I like this approach. Not because it offers solutions to existential questions, but because it holds off on doing so for a brief moment and offers us nuance. I think at this point in the poem of how easy it is to create caricatures of people. To dress them up in their sufferings and parade them on the page as an act of documentation.
Though these characters in the poem are depicted as suffering they are depicted in equal measure as textured beings—capable of laughter and delight. They are finding their joy in the dark places. This is what makes them all the more human.
Humans suffer, yes, but also in the midst of their suffering they still live. Still wake in the morning shuttling meals into children’s mouths and smiling that they have brought forth beauty into this life. Still dance at the fountain, their hair soaked against their scalp. Still hold hands as they walk across a ruined place.
The next portion of the poem is a small moralization that reminds us of this truth. It rings all the more true because we have tarried a bit on our way towards it:
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
This particular movement of the poem calls to mind the Bertolt Brecht quote “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” If life were nothing but suffering there would be no point. But even those who suffer sing. Those who suffer find beauty, make love, run through the streets naked and shouting like children.
This is why I hold close the last lines of this poem:
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
You see—it is the smallness of everything which saves us. The tattoo on your wrist. The nine digits you plug into your pixel-machines to speak to the person you care most for in this life. The dog panting for a treat. The lilacs in the garden blooming a season too late. The changing sky. The rowboat in the stream making distance towards trees adorned in raiment finer than silk.
Friends, it is never easy to admit you wish to die, but I am doing so in hopes that it will give another person permission to struggle. And to pass on the recognition that this struggle does not define us. Yes, I do wish sometimes, and very hard at that, to be evaporated. But so too do I wish for life and life in abundance. I want to find joy. I want to find it everywhere possible. And when I find it I take it in my teeth and dare the world to take it from me. I fight like hell for this joy. You will have to dig it from my grave if you wish to take it from me. And even then it will arrive singing.
There is a corner of my heart where I save all my reasons to continue. All my joys. All the beautiful things pulling me by the ears into tomorrow. There is no satisfactory name for this place. It is the holiest thing.
In the meantime, tell your friends!