Jacob Schepers

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Notes on Vasectomajestic: An Essay Twofer

I. poetcriticaddictartist

The use of the term “poet-critic” elicits a self-knowing wink among its practitioners, at times a self-aggrandizing move and at others a self-effacing one. There’s a hubris, a target on one’s back, the risk of being met with an exasperated eyeroll when it comes to embracing the poet-critic badge. In his essay “T. S. Eliot’s Animus,” Adam Kirsch astutely sums up the underlying baggage of this label:

The poet-critic has been an institution in English literature because usually only an artist has the stubborn animus, the conviction that art should be one way rather than another, that makes for interesting criticism. To write something new is to imply that the writing which already exists is insufficient….Only an artist’s egotism, his certainty that he has something new to offer that the world should not be without, gives him the fruitfully skewed perspective on literature required to see it as deficient.¹

The world-making tendencies on display here—the art-as-it-might-be aspirations— are, no doubt, stubborn and egotistic. Yet the sneaky hyphen in “poet-critic” establishes a strict border in the presumptive roles of this label. The hyphen wants it both ways—permitting a “yes, and” rather than an “either/or” while hedging its bets in an almost apologetic sense. It screams, “Forgive the lateral thinking, the creative maneuvering; I’m a poet-critic. I trespass on the grounds of each. I overstep. I’m finding my own way.” This hyphen grants a special license of intellectual bravado, but so too does it come with a caveat from the creative and academic communities: “Take from each role as you will, but restrict your musings to the works you write and the works you write about. Keep your highfalutin self out of it.”

Now take the term “addict-artist.” Romanticized as the tortured artist suffering for the sake of art, the addict-artist stands as a counterweight to the goings-on of everyday life. Contrary to the stiff upper lip of the nonartists, the addict-artist acts as a barometer of social milieu and existential oppression, the canary in the coal mine who chirps an alarm to the workers that something is amiss. Outside of fictionalized accounts, the addict-artist is a stigmatized cliché, an individual who “can’t cut it” in this world and, due to some moral failure or past indiscretions, “tunes out” of the present. The addict-artist rarely meets a happy ending, serving instead as a tragic cautionary tale of wasted talent and squandered potential. The hyphen in this case usually prioritizes the “artist” over the “addict,” reserving the sordid details of addiction for a biographical footnote or tertiary jumping-off point for a more thorough analysis of the artwork that somehow emerged and persisted in spite of the drinking and drugs.

One more term: the poète maudit. The “cursed poet” designation remains a trope in the lives of artists and under which the “addict-artist” falls along with the precarious, the mentally ill, the impoverished, the destitute, the marginalized, the recluse, the outsider, the unrecognized. Its exotic, erudite sonority lends a gravitas to the woebegone fate of the addict-artist. And, while arguably two sides of the same coin, the poète maudit benefits from the artist-as-martyr mentality—suffering and victimized, chewed up and spit out, by a world too harsh for such a sensitive soul—rather than the moral failings of the individual addict-artist. It goes without saying that whatever alleged saving grace comes attached to the poète maudit and the company one finds in this label, the life lived is not all it’s cracked up to be. First coined by Alfred de Vigny in the 1832 novel Stello, the poète maudit is considered “la race toujours maudite par les puissants de la terre [the race that will always be cursed by the powerful ones of the earth.]”² Fifty years later, Paul Verlaine brought the concept into wider usage in his 1884 work Les Poètes Maudit, written in dedication to oft-cited examples of the poète maudit including Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Verlaine himself (under the anagrammatic pseudonym Pauvre Lélian).³ Decades later, fellow poète maudit Delmore Schwartz characterized the typical modern poet thusly:

He does feel that he is a stranger, an alien, an outsider; he finds himself without a
father or mother, or he is separated from them by the opposition between his
values as an artist and their values as respectable members of modern society.
This opposition cannot be avoided because not a government subsidy, nor yearly
prizes, nor a national academy can disguise the fact that there is no genuine place
for the poet in modern life. He has no country, no community, insofar as he is a
poet, and his greatest enemy is money, since poetry does not yield him a
livelihood.⁴

Forlorn, abandoned, penniless, the poète maudit for Schwartz pinpoints the paradox of the term—that no matter whether the artist receives respect, fame, or fortune, the underlying angst and ennui remain by virtue of the role and identity the poet occupies.

I stick my neck out and raise my hand to identify as a rank-and-file member of all three of the terms above. It’s an audacious, vulnerable, and unbecoming move to make, largely unwelcome for an untenured academic and struggling poet. Indeed, the temptation to reserve discussions around addiction and the poète maudit until an individual has succumbed to a disease or committed suicide (after which, of course, “the art becomes worth much more”) may make it seem as if I have jumped the gun. It’s a niche market or readership for this kind of writing, but as an individual in recovery—an alcoholic with diagnosed Substance Abuse Disorder with comorbid conditions of Bipolar II and Generalized Anxiety Disorder—I’ve grown rather accustomed to transgressing and, in recovery, speaking my truth and destigmatizing the guilt and shame that comes with addiction. Though opening myself to attacks of biographical fallacies, this work is crucial to my own recovery, affording myself the occasion to share, disclose, and perform a dehyphenization of poet-critic and addict-artist.

Three sparks for this present writing: (1) a stint in rehab upon first getting sober; (2) three and a half years later, a relapse while I was at work on a new project about a recent vasectomy procedure that also saw me work out some kinks and demons about toxic masculinity and its viewing vulnerability as weakness; and, finally, (3) a second relapse just under two years from the first, a relapse brought about by a mental health crisis and which resulted in a stay in a mental health wing and my bipolar diagnosis. At root, though, such writing emerged out of a “Life Story” group, a standard meeting of which I was a member of during the aforementioned thirty-day stay in an addiction treatment and recovery center in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the winter of 2020-2021. As a manifestation of narrative therapy, the “life story” assignment asked each resident to share what may have led to addiction, how addiction affected them and their loved ones, and what lessons and perspectives they have now in recovery.

I’ll end on this: a 2018 interview between Tufts Now senior writer Laura Ferguson and English professor Sonia Hofkosh astutely notes a discrepancy in how Victor Frankenstein responds to his monster’s awakening between theatrical versions and Mary Shelley’s text:

In the James Whale 1931 version, there is that classic scene where Victor is shouting, “It’s alive!” In the book, Victor no sooner sees the monster open his eyes than he runs away and hides. That seems the point on which the whole novel pivots—he does not take responsibility.⁵

I’ve run and hid before. These words are me taking responsibility. This is me shouting, “It’s alive,” uncouth as it may be.

II. My Lightning, My Shame, My Redness

As the memory of past misfortunes pressed upon me, I began to reflect upon their cause—the monster whom I had created, the miserable daemon whom I had sent abroad into the world.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
—Martin Luther

Consciousness steps in and out of itself, it seems, amid lightning strikes. There is the pre-flash you and you in the post-flash. Benjamin Franklin, key-tied kite in hand, ran toward it, toward epiphany. Martin Luther quaked before the threat of it, putting to death his intended trajectory of a life of law, prayed for salvation and walked away a monk. His own schism was yet to come, and come asunder. Even Victor Frankenstein, the curious doctor, the remorseful and penitent doctor, who was to unite into life a monster made of dead bits, first came into his own through lightning himself. At fifteen and long before his infamous creation, Victor witnessed destruction while watching a thunderstorm. As Mary Shelley writes the scene,

As I stood at the door, all of a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.⁶

Years later in the narrative of Victor’s life, he reflects on the formative experience that this storm would become, the stage it set, the altered state of the oak tree: “But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.”⁷

I am no stranger to such thinking, the zap of a lightning strike and the thunder—its testament, its ghost—that has rolled on through thirty six years. My striking memory, me stricken, is also the first I can recall with any sort of accuracy. I need only look for the scorch-marked remnants of the point of contact between earth and sky. It’s quaint in a way that tethers me to the ground. I have revisited this site of the lightning strike for the first time ever—I had lost the map, the coordinates of that contact, and, had I had them, would not have willingly made pilgrimage there. Now, as I happen upon the spot, I gaze at the scorch marks, sift through the ash, and discover the ground was not as it seems. Sand turned to glass, fragile, beautiful, worth taking home.

Still, I found myself crackling, moving through the static-heavy air of a storm just passed. Guilt and shame are like that, or at least can be, and though I continued the venture into self- discovery, I carried it out in utmost secrecy, consecrating or blaspheming myself along the way—to say which is beyond my present. When God called Moses from out of the burning bush—the story goes—she commanded him to remove his sandals. I have no burning bush, but its inverse: a blooming blush without command. To compensate for that lack, I make self-imposed demands too draconian to stomach. My guts rumble. I spill my guts. I gut myself.

Evisceration.

I grew accustomed to electrified obsessiveness, kept to myself, punished myself preemptively. My parents would crack that they never had to punish me because I always beat them to it, banging my head against the floor, ripping out my hair until bald spots formed, threatening to throw myself into trash cans. I could be a good boy, fool everyone in a land of make-believe. I poured myself into school, achieving and overachieving, overcompensating, paying penance with every memorized fact, every spelling quiz, every standardized test score. I was thriving, excelling to the naked eye. Yet in my nakedness I knew my shame, learning most of all how to carry it—bury it—well.

When it came to managing shame, I overcompensated with outward achievements. I bargained my way out of feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and low self-worth by chasing external validations, those proverbial mechanical rabbits zipping around my life’s greyhound tracks. I perfected this ongoing bait and-switch, my three-card monte, though like any exchange it came at a price. I fought with my shame, turned it into outward success, but attracted rebukes from my schoolmates for my shyness, withdrawing further into myself, every negative word outweighed a thousand affirmations. I became my own harshest critic, believing I could correct my guilt and faults by choosing stick over carrot at every juncture. My backwards shame hung on, and though I did not yet see the full extent of it, I felt that shame further in my confusion. I twinned my reddened fervor with my blooming blush, unsure in my innocence why the other boys would mock and tease me as they did. Folks assumed the socialization would chastise me and “learn me somethin’ good” in due time. I began to despise my sex while loving it, hating my maleness from afar while debasing myself through it, total immersion. I began loathing the boys who enforced the tacit rules of silent men who wielded shame unyieldingly in sideways glances and furrowed brows.

To bleed is affirmation that your heart still keeps time tingeing red.

Red. Affirming & alarming. Hence stop signs, exit signs, fire engines & hydrants & extinguishers, 99 Luftballons. Eye-catching, flashy, flashier than a toothy grin if baring teeth with bloody gums.

Painting the town red, as it were, if you will, if you please, if you would indulge me.

Red is, to me, then, simple. “Primary,” technically speaking. Though red, as blood, complicates too. It bubbles to the surface, it fills your face, it betrays my kept secrets. It catches me red-handed. A warm color, especially so for infrared, warmer than warm. The eyes can’t even catch it, don’t even register it, the light spectrum renders it spectral—& so special—but beholden to red as such and thus defined accordingly. So-called.

In high school, my redness took on another shade. My self-harming tendencies came to a head at that time, and any given slight or slant, any perceived insult or insinuation, could send me off to the races. I would cut my wrists, slice my thighs, and pierce my side with a piece of broken glass I found on the side of a road from, twisted enough, a discarded liquor bottle.

I began therapy and medication around then too, asking my parents for permission and showing them my scars. They promptly scheduled me in for an appointment, though after three sessions they asked if I were fixed. Not wanting to rock the boat—not knowing even how to, really—I said I think so.

Being a threat to no one, really, but myself, I didn’t carry an element of danger: I fell over myself with vulnerable and self-scathing insight, the things I would not normally show the boys. I said “I love you” early and often, always the first to say so in my comparatively few serious relationships, I had a lot of love to give, and still am a giver. I gave and give because I crave reciprocity, a mutual passion, a radical recognition and acceptance. I wanted my redness to be seen; it has been invisible, infrared, far too long.

Turning blood infrared turns my insides positively radioactive.

Churning out blood turns stomachs. Pumping, hemorrhaging, replenishing to an extent. To Out the damned Spot is easier done than said: a bullet, a hickey, a nick of a razor. A nosebleed. Kissing hard once, I was not pay attention to my own body for once but expending myself elsewhere, to another, and so I missed the telltale signs of another onset. A cautionary dribble appeared—& too much now to ignore—I withdrew, mortified as ever my teenage self could be, and dabbed at my lip.

Which brings me to my disease and the shame it once abated and then aroused. It’s a well-kept secret that graduate school has alarmingly high rates of mental illness and addiction. As the rigors of study settled in, my drinking kept me company. I drank to oblivion, blacking out often, browning out most others. “High functioning.” Ha. Somehow my shame and drinking kept me in orbit, symbiotes feeding off each other and keeping up appearances. To outside observers, I breezed through my courses, my teaching, my dissertation. I worked my ass off, but the good-night kiss of the day’s last drink let me turn my mind off and bury my ramshackle guilt. The promise of the dawn’s first drink gave me reason to wake up in the morning and do it all again.

Alcohol led me to believe that I could not achieve anything without it. It became more than a crutch. It became the lifeline of lifelines.

Family and friends began to take notice. I somehow always had a drink in hand at family gatherings, bottles of wine and liquor would somehow be emptied from the night before, my schoolbag would nestle bags of wine or bottles of beer between my books and lesson plans. My addiction was hurting my partner in immeasurable and innumerable ways. When she realized before me that I had a growing problem, she rid the house of alcohol, packed up the boys, and gave me a weekend to sober up and sit in shame.

I would pay my penance, promise with sincerity and sobriety that I would never take her for granted again, and remain sober for the next few months, or the next month, or a couple weeks, or a couple days. Yet when her unconditional love got me off from the couch and back into our bed, my addiction whispered that all would be well, that this time it would be different, that I’ve still got this.

2020 exposed me, my shaky handling of secrets, my shameful pattern. The truth will out, and it did in a major way. Caught three times in the month of November alone, I had broken all trust because of my addiction. I have risked my family, my safety and health, my most stable and merciful love I have ever known. It took me a decade of wrestling with alcohol and a lifetime of shame to admit that secrets have a way of slipping out, that nothing hidden can be healed, that I had no choice but to enter rehab.

I’m still working at it. Progress, not perfection. As Vonnegut observed, “So it goes.”⁸ And echoing again Wollstonecraft Shelley, “I am but a blasted tree.”⁹

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¹ Adam Kirsch, “T. S. Eliot’s Animus” The New Criterion 38.8 (April 2020): pp. 30ff (https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/4/t-s-eliots-animus)
² Alfred de Vigny, Stello, ou Les Diables Bleus. Bruxelles: J. P. Meline (1832): 57.
³ Paul Verlaine, The Cursed Poets. 1888. Trans. Chase Madar. Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer Press 2003.
⁴ Delmore Schwartz, “The Isolation of Modern Poetry.” Kenyon Review 3.2 (Spring, 1941): pp. 209-220.
⁵ Hofkosh, Sonia. “Think You Know Your Frankenstein? Think Again.” Interview with Laura Ferguson. March 20, 2018. Tufts Now. https://now.tufts.edu/articles/think-you-know-your-frankenstein-think-again
⁶ Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. 1818. Norton Critical Edition (1996, 2012) 2nd Edition. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012, p. 23.
⁷ Ibid, pp. 114-115.
⁸ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Delacorte Press, 1969.
⁹ Mary Shelley. Pp. 114-115.

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Banner Art:
Adolph Gottlieb, Movement East to West, 1956, WikiArt