Saturday, May 29, 2010

Impasse / Chronic / Asklepion II

The one who could not be healed
would go to sleep in the abaton
"not to be stepped into"
"impassable"
to dream of Asklepios
who would reveal the remedy
or the dream itself could cure

I side with opacity

because it's in the dark something changes

and we never see it

Etel Adnan from Beirut writes that she has never seen war

They say healing needs witnesses
a patient, reintegration into community

but mystery requires darkness
(No one young can see how / opacity lends protection not risk)

I don't think we see healing
as we don't see a child growing every day

our bodies do not tell stories but enlist them travel them become subject to

[It’s because I’m not a subject I light out for the territory]

our bodies prepare for future bodies
at every moment repairing aligning acting interpreting

for plants it is always night

"I passed cancer two years ago"

In Greek the idiom is chronologic rather than victorious

Healing takes place in the impasse / the sickness passes

Time is a living being
                        - Alma Kunanbaeva, Eurasian Shamanism as Healing,
                           Stanford 2005

Poetry as antibiotic, malpractice, and placebo effect

I came across this article by John Lundberg in the venerable HuffPo recently: Can Poetry Heal?

I found these lines particularly ironic and troubling (in that they seek to make poetry untroubled and untroubling):

"Longo also speaks to a third potential benefit of writing poetry: that writing a poem can help to clear up one's emotions on a complex issue."

"Experts are careful to stress that poetry is a tool, which, wrongfully employed, can hurt rather than heal a patient. But many feel that it has significant potential. In a Time Magazine article on poetry therapy, Yale Psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg offered that "poetry by itself does not cure," but noted the benefit of its unique focus on verbalization, which, he offered, is "the lifeblood of psychotherapy."

Calling Robert Kocik here - by subtlest and therefore most potent means - to treat the iatrogenic effects produced above...gathering myself for emergent measures...induce the chronic to remediate the acute..

Poets, still trying to make poetry anesthetic to remove the sting of aesthetics?

Psychiatrists, still trying to defang poetry into talking cure?