“The Words”
A Film About a Writer
Post Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Trailer of “The Words” with Bradley Cooper
Created June 18th 2013
Posted June 29th 2013
POSTER 1
Movie Synopsis
Starring Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, Olivia Wilde and Zoë Saldana, the layered romantic drama The Words follows young writer Rory Jansen who finally achieves long sought after literary success after publishing the next great American novel. There’s only one catch – he didn’t write it. As the past comes back to haunt him and his literary star continues to rise, Jansen is forced to confront the steep price that must be paid for stealing another man’s work, and for placing ambition and success above life’s most fundamental three words.
SYNOPSIS:
After a couple of demoralising rejections, young writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) finally achieves long sought literary success with his latest novel and enjoys the change from poverty to glittering awards, in the company of his beautiful and adoring wife Dora (Zoe Saldana). The fact that he didn’t write it only becomes problematic when an old man (Jeremy Irons) in Central Park sits next to him on a bench and tells him the sad but true story behind the manuscript.
Review by Louise Keller:
The Words is a gripping film that plays mercilessly with the mind as it explores the precipice that divides the world of real life and fiction. Directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal have written a wonderful screenplay in which three stories are skilfully interwoven to deliver a rich and satisfying film that questions integrity above all else. A successful author, an old man and a university graduate are the key players in this intriguing story with themes about choices, truths and deceits and whose elements of drama, mystery and romance are played out in beguiling fashion. There are struggles, choices, highs and lows and the inevitable consequences.
The film’s structure is interesting in that there is a story within a story and yet another story within. It is credit to the screenwriters that the transition from one to the other is seamless; we are never confused or unsure as to which story is which. The narrative begins in the present with the acclaim of lauded author Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid, excellent), who is reading excerpts of his latest book The Words to a receptive audience.
We are then taken into the world of Hammond’s fictional character, a struggling writer named Rory (Bradley Cooper at his best) who is eager to make his mark. His wife Dora (Zoe Saldana, lovely) believes in him even though Rory is infected by self-doubt. It is on their honeymoon when Dora buys Rory an old briefcase, that fate plays its hand. When Rory finds the anonymous manuscript hidden in the briefcase, he devours the words of the story, wishing that he had written them himself. It starts innocently enough – he wants his fingers to feel the impact of the words as he retypes them…. The essence of the story, set in war-time Paris resonates to such an extent, he accepts a deal with the devil – and claims it as his own work.
Just like Ralph Fiennes in Quiz Show (1994) who cheats his way to success, so too does Rory, as his novel The Window Tears is acclaimed. Cooper is physically reminiscent of Fiennes and ably conveys the journey of the ambitious writer whose love affair with words challenges his moral compass. But it is Jeremy Irons, impeccably cast as the old man, who steals the film, bring real pathos. Irons is devastatingly good and he imparts the pain and anger of a stranger taking ownership of an integral part of his life involving the people who matter most. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up in the scene when The Old Man approaches Rory in the park, sits on the bench beside him and as he feeds the birds, tells some home truths.
Then, with Iron’s rich, distinctive voice as narrator, The Old Man’s story is subsequently told in flashback: a young man (Ben Barnes) falls in love with beautiful French girl Celia (Nora Arnezeder) in 1940s Paris. Devoured by the pain of the events that transpire, the young man types the manuscript when he is at his most vulnerable: it represents the essence of who he is.
Klugman and Sternthal play with time frames most effectively and by the time we return to the present in which the aspiring writer grad student (Olivia Wilde) flirts outrageously with Hammond, it is clear that real life and fiction have become inexorably intertwined beyond redemption. Or has it? This is top drawer story telling for those who like their films to challenge the mind as well as the heart. My kind of film.
COMMENT FROM Jk the secret keeper: “Here is the following note I left for my partner in an email I am about to send her. She gets up when I am sound asleep. And she is sleeping now. It will tell you that I am so taken by what I have found out about this film that I am so desperate and patient at the same time. I feel like I am going to lose my mind from the excitement. I should add that I recently had surgery and I haven’t been able to drive for a whole month. Now I don’t think one can forget after just a month of not doing it but it is a new car and I have actually only driven it a few times since we got it. It is my partner’s car. Soon to be mine. I have named him “Andrew.” I like naming my cars. Last one was named “Annie” long before I named the character in my book. Annie is a significant name in my life that goes back into my childhood. Very personal. Anyway, here is the note. In caps. Not shouting. Just for emphasis. It is also multi-coloured so I need to put it on a framed poster. Here it is:
they have the words poster by j. kiley written by Jk…m
QUOTATIONS on STEALING:
“Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.” ― Criss Jami
“Steal not this book for fear of shame
For on it is the owners name
And when you die the Lord will say
Where is the book you stole away
And when you say you do not know
The Lord will say go down below.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Miss You So Much More 14
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Fourteenth Posted June 18th 2013
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
New Year’s Day
Dear Annie,
I didn’t realize how much you effected me. Not seeing you now for over two weeks and still 7 days to go, feels unbearable, Missing you was not something I expected. Not this strong. I’ve gotten too attached. The way it feels, is awful. Please I can’t wait for you to be my private analyst. When will it happen? I have to stop feeling this way. I’m diving into a really deep depression. I’m not so sure I haven’t started to transcend into that dark hole. It’s always waiting for me. It teases me when I am totally alone. Scottie is away but will be back tonight. She has been working on her latest film. I should say our film. I wrote the original screenplay. It’s almost ready for release but needed some extra touches done on the editing. They needed the director to make some decisions on the final cut. I think it’s going to make a great film. Story is being kept hush-hush. I’ll tell you when I can.
I love writing screenplays. I just love writing. I keep my writing edge by occasionally writing short stories, even work on several novels which eventually end up as screenplays. Writing novels helps me develop the visual settings and characters and the story tends to grow around that. What I really love, as often as I am able, is to write poetry. That’s where I work out my feeling and thoughts the most. It keeps the divine madness and artistic temperament under a mostly manageable control. Maybe that is what I will do. I’ll write a poem for you. Someday, after we start meeting, I will show some of my poems and other writing to you. But first, I have to be sure you won’t misunderstand how I feel. Even I don’t know or understand that myself. It still makes me insecure about whatever I feel. Someday I will explain what I mean by that.
I am going to include a poem in this letter. I’ll try to express my feelings. My love has nowhere else to grow and nowhere else to be expressed. Love rises above the sordidness of anything Earthly. It transcends to something divine. Untouched, untainted by the baser senses. When I write a poem it releases the pain inside us. Reaching the pureness. How do I tell you that I have strong feelings for you, without scaring you away. My intensity has been with me since birth. If I am drawn to anything or anyone, it is in my nature to be taken over by an intense passion. My release is to express the overwhelming feelings into my art. It releases the stress, some anyway. But it continues to regenerate. I have feelings for you, maybe you’ve noticed. But I’m afraid you will misunderstand them. I had a therapist who made what I felt into something that was ugly. One of my alters now feels love is bad, which makes her feel innately bad. Her feelings have been corrupted. This fucking therapist totally fucked her up over this. Now we don’t trust anyone with how we feel. We don’t even trust ourselves.
We are hoping for more understanding from you. Nothing wrong with feeling love. Attraction toward another human is quite part of one’s nature. We love animals. They communicate realness. Humans don’t, not ever. What I feel is good. I want to share my feelings of joy and happiness and love. Why do people corrupt goodness by making it impure and perverse. The way the abusers destroyed those feelings in me. One would expect better to come from a healer. A psychotherapist is suppose to be understanding. Not another person to damage what you feel. Especially, when your feelings are natural. I’m talking about burning away fear and mistrust and converting it into trust and openness with a new person. If badness blocks you, what do you do. I feel I have found in you a truly gifted and trusting person. You show no fears when you open up and you don’t turn away from someone else’s nightmares. You are not afraid of love. Giving it or sharing it.
I have been working on a theory for quite some time now about the true nature of love and the multiple layers that love takes. First, love is eternal. It is the power that fills the soul and ignites the universe infinitely. Love gets confused with the energy found in the expressions of sex. I believe they are two separate sources of energy. Sex can be expressed separate from love. Love is expressed separate from sex. It doesn’t need sexual energy to exist. The two can be brought together but they don’t need the other. Love is a higher energy. Sex is a lower energy. Sex is a momentary release of a physical reaction. Love is all intensive and filled with the energy of the universe. Love is divine and fills you up continually.
When someone tells you they love you, if their words are truthful, they are feeling the energy of the universe within themselves and want to share those feelings by sharing the energy of love with you.
What I am trying to say is your absence makes me feel these feelings more intensely. I miss having contact with you. It feel agitated in your absence. My feelings overwhelm me and cause so much pain, physical and emotional. I just want to be near you. When I cannot be near you, I go mad. I’m becoming rather attached. I don’t know what to do when I feel this way. It is a real problem for me. It is difficult to think about you. The effect you have on me. I know I will feel better once you return. Seeing you again will make all the difference.
I don’t understand why I feel this way. Please explain to me why only certain people cause these feeling in me. It is rare I feel this intensity or pain for anyone. Mostly, I just see someone and when I am not with them, they are either forgotten or I just think I will see them again. That’s it. With you, my feelings are monumental in proportion. It is love. An intense form of love that drives me into a madness. I feel crazy. Is your love so pure? Or is my love so pure for you that it has no censorship that filters its’ intensity. My attachment to you is more than I can handle on my own but there isn’t anyone I can talk to. Not even you. I have to keep this locked up.
If we work together, maybe someday, then I will be able to tell you this in person. I am just overwhelmed. It’s like looking at the sun without a filter, it burns out your sight. Am I too sensitive or open and the feelings for you and myself crash together like magnets that have been turned up to full power? I just don’t understand.
I will have to write more about this in future letters. Maybe, I will find some answers.
Until I see you again SOON. I cannot write another thought. It is too confusing.
Happy New Year Annie.
Fondly & In PAIN,
Madison
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as her Psychoanalyst
Thirst of the Soul
By Madison Taylor
December 27th 2007
Sorrow.
Broken hearts.
Rawness.
Burning tears.
Dark holes for escape.
Understanding.
Listener to listen.
Take the edge off without useless drugs.
Soothing sounds of trust
Comforting support.
Taking the burden away.
Relief.
Release.
Clearness of mind to hold onto.
Offering.
Will lift up spirit.
Always in the wings.
Great lift off.
Flying.
Soaring above the clouds.
Above the storm.
Love offered freely.
Never going away.
Vent the rage.
Explode.
Cry tears of pain.
No burning.
Tears of water
To feed the thirst of the soul.
Water the trees.
The flowers.
The love awaits.
Given freely.
Arms waiting to hold.
Embrace a heart so raw.
Love with softness and warmth.
Remember time does not count.
It is all relative.
Come when ready.
Arrival time open.
Love Always.
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
QUOTATIONS on MISS YOU SO MUCH MORE:
“If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.” ― Héloïse d’Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
“It was going to be a long, dark night but not quite as dark as it was in the abyss of his heart where there was nothing but hollowness, yet it felt heavy, almost as if someone still resided there.” ― Faraaz Kazi
“Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? … The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.” ― Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow
“Do you think everybody misses somebody? I believe, sometimes, that the whole world has an aching heart.” ― Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie
Now That The First Draft Is On The Page—Then What?
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Written June 11th 2013
Illustrated by j. kiley
Post Created June 16th 2013
Posted June 16th 2013
“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” ― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
“Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We *told* you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.” ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won’t need to take notes.” ― A.L. Kennedy
“One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.” ― Karen Fowler, Memories For Sale
“I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without the power to comprehend as men, at time, find themselves upon the brink of rememberance, without being able, in the end, to remember.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Miss Seeing You-Difficult 13
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Thirteenth Posted June 11th 2013Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
Christmas Day
Dear Annie,
Not seeing you today was so painfully difficult. I realize it is Christmas day and you are with your family and I am, of course, with mine. Our furry kitties, Patrick, Toker and Little Sparky and our feathery Amazon Parrot, V Woolf. At present, we are all spread out together in the family room. Scottie is looking for a great book to read for the holiday week. She likes to choose a special book every year. She starts it out and when her voice begins to crack, it becomes my turn. I love this part. When I was in school, I prided myself on being able to read without a mistake or tripping over a word for the greatest length of anyone in my class. It was a feat that I still hold the record to. It’s a good habit to have if you ever have to do a book reading. Which as you may know, I do fairly often. More locally, then in the past, when I use to travel all over the states and sometimes even over in Europe, particularly in England.
I know this is suppose to be a joyful time of the year. Scottie and I have a good time together. We have a special Christmas Eve dinner, which was delicious last night, and there are always leftovers. We started the Christmas Eve feast our first Christmas together, before we were actually together. But that story is for another time. Something has been running through my mind, which I cannot talk about in therapy, private or group, but I need to get it out of my system. It has to do with crying. All the films we watch at Christmas should make me tear up or cry, especially at the end of Alastair Sims’s Scrooge, A Christmas Carol. His is the all time best film on Dicken’s story. I’ve watched it every year since I was a child. That is what I want to talk about. When I was a child, I remember I would swallow my tears in the lump that formed in my throat. I was too afraid to cry or for anyone to see the tears in my eyes. I better explain why. It is not a pleasant story.
I don’t cry. It is something I cannot do. Only when something so traumatic happens can I cry and then I can’t seem to stop. Everything sets me off. But only in private can I show my tears. I shut down completely around everyone, even Scottie, and during a sad film where crying is completely acceptable behavior. As I said, Tiny Tim always gives me a lump in my throat. It is my body trying to protect me by holding back the tears. It’s probably because I really want to scream. There is so much rage pent up inside of me. I want to let go of it but I’m afraid.
It’s shame. I am ashamed of my tears. There is a really good reason. When I was really young I use to cry all the time. It really drove my mother insane. My brothers would tease me and call me a cry baby. I hate that term. It made me cry even more. My mother use to tell my brothers to leave me alone. She left me alone to. But then suddenly, I must have reached a certain age when my mother didn’t find it acceptable any longer for me to cry. She flipped out and became some dark creature and mean as Hell. It started. She turned into a Demon. When ever she found me alone, she turned on me, like some cornered animal and started to beat me, all the while screaming at me. I became terrified and of course I would start to cry. This made her even more angry. Her seeing the tears in my eyes and falling down my cheeks enraged her. That’s when I discovered that tears were dangerous. They ignited a full blown rage in my mother. That was when I started thinking of her as evil and in therapy I came up with the name for her of The Shadow Mother. That’s what I called her in my mind. I cannot use the other word alone. It disturbs me.
My tears from that point on caused me to be physically, emotionally, psychologically, sexually and spiritually abused in the most vicious ways imaginable. The depth of abuse crossed the lines of any kind of abuse in ones childhood. The Shadow Mother wasn’t my only abuser but the things she did to me were so harsh. One would not expect a mother to do these things to their young child. Now that I am older and understand more I can describe what she did to me. She was into bondage and dominance mixed in with sadomasochism. In her beatings there were not any safe words to make it stop. That’s when I felt it brought the abuse into a questionably sexual realm with The Shadow Mother. The word No and Stop in her mind meant to keep abusing. Crying only doubled and tripled the intensity of the beatings. She started out by striking me through my clothing at first but as the frequency of the abuse increased eventually she would not get enough satisfaction with striking cloth, she wanted to beat my body on my flesh where she could see the effect of her brutality. She wanted to see the bruises and the tears in my skin. She used various weapons. Usually what ever was near at hand but she had a favorite switch taken from the branches of a tree from our yard that she liked the most.
Silence and no movement were the only things when combined that worked to stop her. I needed to be dead or show the appearance of someone dead for the abuse to stop. Maybe not technically but physically without sound or motion. That was the first part. When that was over there was one more phase to the abuse. It wasn’t over until I, the child and one abused, went to her closed bedroom door and groveled at the door with The Shadow Mother inside. She was always dead silent. I was always on my knees pleading with her to forgive me. I had to ask my abuser to forgive me. I’d ask her multiple times to forgive me. I was trained well into being submissive but even with all the pleading there was no forgiveness. Not ever. The door never opened. There was never a sound made from inside those walls behind that damned door. I was left there till oblivion escorted me away. Memory blanked from that point on. Rewind tape and repeat performance at a future but unknown time. Just her performance was the only thing that was repeated over and over again in all its brutality and my submission and pleas for forgiveness were echoed in those halls and bedrooms.
I am sorry that I am telling you this now but Christmas is about family and I have no family. I left them all behind when I became brave enough and my first therapist managed to convince me I needed to leave that place of unbalanced confusion, madness and inequity. There are no blood family I want anything to do with except a niece and her family. We are close and keep in touch but I have never met her. My agoraphobia has prevented us getting together. Her family want to meet Scottie and me. It’s just I have a terrible time being around people. I relate to them from a distance, through cyberspace. With the few exceptions. Physical contact is not something I am very good at except with my animals and Scottie. I do group and private therapy but do not relate well in my private sessions. As far as group goes, I can handle the people in group as long as it’s in a therapy room. Now, it seems to be developing into something impossible and uncomfortable to handle. If you weren’t there Annie, I wouldn’t return. Your entering my life when you did has saved me. I hope in the near future you will come to my rescue even further. You becoming my psychoanalyst is my Christmas wish and those wishes always should be answered.
Merry Christmas Annie. And thank you for entering my life when you did. It means more to me than I am able to express to you in person at the moment. Oh, by the way, Scottie finally settled on her choice of books to read over the holidays. It’s Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” We loved the series and have watched it several times. I seem to recall that the opening line of the series was spoken by Charles Rider, played by the actor Jeremy Irons (one had no idea of who he was at the time in the states) saying off camera, “I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds… I was struck less by his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large teddy-bear”.” It should be fun hearing Sebastian talk about his teddy bear Aloysius, “If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper…” Love both of these lines but I wish the second one could be true most of the time. I, also, love all the adventures Sebastian had with Charles at Cambridge together. Then there is Sebastian’s family, the mother was almost impossible to take to heart and overly pompous in her religiosity and the same of brother Bridie, what a bore.
It was easy to love Sebastian’s sisters Cordelia and Julia, and spending time at Brideshead, the Flyte homestead, that was mostly marvelous in the beginning. And Sebastian’s father was a free spirit, who was accepting and had found love away from England in Italy, away from his wife and the mother of his children. When all starts going wrong, that I don’t like. Sebastian is my favorite and I don’t like that Waugh gives him such a bad turn. It should still be exciting to have Scottie reading to us as I rest my head in her lap and stretch out the rest of my body on the sofa with a throw over me, our cats Patrick, Toker and Sparky curled up on top of the sofa with us, and a fire roaring in the fireplace. Quite the romantic and cozy scene. Add to that some Schubert or Rachmaninoff playing in the background or Michael Hoppe and the sweetness of the spiritually uplifting flute and the peaceful serenity the music induces inside one’s soul.
I’d say thanks for listening. In a way you are, at least in my head. Annie, that does help me make it through, believing that you are there for me. Maybe after this letter you might not want to deal with someone who has been so damaged. It isn’t easy to be around that shit I wrote about. It’s in my psyche and I hate having to remember. I don’t often. My defense mechanisms are like iron vaults. They lock up the darkness as best they can but there is always the sneakiness of memories. They don’t like being trapped in any containment. They have no idea they are so destructive to me. All they want is their freedom. Being creative helps to release them in a way that I have more control over them but one doesn’t have control over one’s nightmares unfortunately. They sneak out through all those symbols in the unconscious, thank you Carl Jung, that collective unconscious that manifests its self by bringing back the dead to haunt me, so that I will be forced to remember, even if it is in code. Eventually, the code is broken and the symbols are understood. They must be. It is the only way to work things out and be rid of their hold on me. Out, out damned nightmares. I may joke but I want my dignity back and my honour and innocence.
Annie, this is what you would have to look forward to if you decide to accept the challenge to be my analyst. I so hope you will. Please don’t turn away from me now. I can feel my insecurities are already starting to grow. There is nobody I am able to turn to who will help me. I’ve tried so many therapists and analysts. I need help. There isn’t much time. My strength is weakening. I feel suicidal so often. Holding back the dam from breaking just won’t work much longer. With all my heart, I am asking you sincerely to please help me.
Sorry for such intensity. I am not able to help myself. It is part of who I am. All I want to say now in finishing this letter is to wish you a great holiday vacation. I hope it’s wonderful spending time with your family. I look forward to seeing you after the first of the year. It will be hard to make it through that long. I will work on being creative. My new screenplay needs working on for Scottie to begin setting up her method of attack. She’s beginning casting after the New Year. The casting department at the studio have lined up actors for auditions after the holidays. So I am under pressure to have something decent for them to read in their try-outs. Plus I want to work are some of my computer art. That should capture my full attention.
I look forward to seeing you the second Tuesday of the New Year. Bye for now. Next week is New Year’s Day. I hope I haven’t totally freaked you out as much as I have myself. “Like madness is the glory of this life.” — Shakespeare-The Timon of Athens
Quite Fondly,
MadisonTo Annie,
I write these letters in the strictest of confidence. I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I don’t hold back now and never send these letters to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I need without any censorship. There will be secrecy to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself. But I also want to record the development of our relationship as it truly happens. At least, in the way it appears in my own mind.
I want you to trust me, Annie. I am freer writing to you this way. If I know I will not be sending these letters to you. I will be more honest with what words I use and feelings I express. I will know I am not hiding anything from coming to the surface. It frees up my libido. I will keep my letters confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
Fondly,
Madison
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.
This is the poem I would like to include in this letter. I like to leave a poem if I find one that I would like to share with you. Since I am not even sure if I am going to give these letters to you, I felt it is okay if I include a poem within these letters. And if some day, I change my mind and I hand my building collection of letters to you, then I will likely evaluate all that I have written to determine if all of the content feels acceptable to me to share openly with you. I may feel too shy to be so vulnerable. We will proceed as we have for now and see this as a way of recording the experience of getting to know you and in turn get to know how this all effects me as I record this experience in writing.No Healing But Time
By Madison Taylor
Dec. 23th, 2007
No healing but time.
Even that is a projected hallucination.
Feeling a hold on what is real.
Moments creep in and change things up.
Waiting for time to pass so the pain will stop.
Losing control.
Not able to control the intensity
hurting the flesh
corrupting the instrument of the mind
controls the dam from overflowing.
Tear everything apart
to stop the insanity of waiting
from circling the brain.
The madness takes over
rips it all apart so it becomes bearable.
Eventually, the torture subsides
is replaced with a more acceptable level.
The waiting feels less maddening
the feelings brought down
to a more manageable level.
But the waiting still exists.
The pain remains.
The intensity is spread out
to a bearable diversion of acceptance.
There still exists time between the madness
and the satisfaction
the pain will be subdued
to a reasonable state bearable
to only the divinely mad.
Losing control sometimes
is the only acceptable answer
to certain situations.
Healing needs to be done
only in a way that allows
for all possibilities of acceptance.
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan PoeQUOTATIONS on MISSING YOU-DIFFICULT:
“I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.” ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I had my chance.’ He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. ‘I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.” ― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
“All I can think about is what she must be doing, and how I wish she were still here.” ― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four
“Tamani smiled softly and lifted a hand to her face, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and letting his thumb rest on her cheek. ‘Trust me, it’s no picnic missing you. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” ― Aprilynne Pike, Spells
“He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.” ― Cecelia Ahern, A Place Called Here
“Didn’t I say I’d always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.” ― Anne Rivers Siddons, Fault Lines
“Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.” ― Rosamund Lupton, Sister
“I won’t let you have it. I won’t give you this moment. I won’t let you fill up this valuable organ…I own it. I won’t do it. I can’t think, I won’t think about it.” ― Coco J. Ginger
“…there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.” ― Robin McKinley, Pegasus
I love to write in childish rhyme. I really do it all the time. A Doctor and a Nana too, 'Tis ontheplumtree that I grew. And this is where I shall be writing, stories that are so exciting, by scribbling scribes ~ those authors who ~ love the child in me and you. But first I want to introduce ~ two books, I hope, will produce ~ excitement and a flitter flurry, of orders that will simply hurry, across the land and open sea, to read to children where they be, to stimulate imagination ~ and create a small sensation!
Love the opening Rhyme @DrNaNaPlum. Brilliantly clever. And the Rhymes in the books are delightful and will tickle a child's tummy causing giggling laughter. I find them brilliant. Do think seriously about discovering DrNaNaPlum's Rhyme Corner and the children's books that she offers there written by Niamh Clune and Illustrated by Marta Pelrine-Bacon. Thank you from Jk the secret keeper
Importance of Imagination
J.K. Rowling Speaks @ Harvard
Commencement June 2008
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Created June 7th 2013
Posted June 9th 2013J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination…”
“I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.”
It is Rowling’s gift to draw universal life lessons from her own discoveries—of personal failure “on an epic scale,” and, from a day job at Amnesty International, “evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power.” And yet, “I also learned more about human goodness…than I had ever known before.” Of those who “prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all,” who “choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience,” Rowling said, “I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do.…I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters.”
Quoting Plutarch, she said, “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” In a final challenge, the 42-year-old Rowling—seeming too young and too slight for the weight of her words—told the graduates, “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
In honoring Rowling for igniting in millions the passion to read, Harvard discovered that it had also welcomed a teacher beyond compare.
So follows the video of the J.K. Rowlings Harvard Commencement Speech from June 2008 followed by the text of the speech.
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement 2008
Text of Commencement Speech June 2008
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.
“What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”— Plutarch
“If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” — J.K. Rowling
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.” ― Gloria Steinem
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ― Sylvia Plath
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” ― Maya Angelou
I first met Marta on FaceBook when she joined my Plum Tree Books group. Immediately, I was stunned by the quality of her art ~ so full of whimsy and understatement, a natural sense of design and quirk. I asked her if she would draw the Plum Tree Books logo. We haven't looked back since.
When I decided to venture into the world of children's books, Marta was my fist choice of illustrator.
This post is about a very talented artist and writer who is going through a trial in her life that is taking a great deal of courage and strength to battle. Please return to the origin of this post and read what Niamh Clune has written about this marvelously gifted and talented person. Find out what you are missing and what you will find. Jk the secret keeper
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Last Time This Year 12
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated & abstract digital art by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Twelfth Posted June 4th 2013
Tuesday, December 18th 2007
Dear Annie,
This week I want to tell you some serious shit about myself. Letting my guard down almost to naked in these revelations. You know more about me in these letters than anyone does so far. And I haven’t even started filling you in on anything that gets close to the deeper meanings in my life.
I have been reading a great deal lately about bipolar disorder. Nobody has come out and told me straight that it is part of what I am dealing with in all my weirdness and bizarre behaviors. But I am not without analyzing the material and figuring out what seems too familiar to my life. I may not see things accurately from the inside but when I see it in Scottie’s eyes and read it in my writing I know without any real reluctance that bipolar visits me on a regular schedule with its major fluctuations.
I have the speed of someone who mainlines coke. Try having a conversation with me when I am not depressed or suicidal. How often does that occur. My wanting to die. Being obsessed in my mind all the time with thinking of ways to cut open my arms and bleeding out. It seems a gruesome way to die but even though blood usually bothers me, in this state of mind it seems the easiest way to slip away into death. Losing consciousness into a slow comatose state. Pain becomes unnoticeable. It really ends the pain. Suicide does. It’s not death I seek. It’s peace. Pain free and finished. No more memories. No more primal screams inside my mind. No emotions. No tears. Stolen. Robbed. Buried deep within my soul so it bears the suffering I should feel. What I feel is lack of feeling anything when I am deeply depressed. Maybe I am wrong about that. Maybe depression is the strongest of feelings. It may be all of them at once. All the negative emotions ripping out my heart at one time.
Who says bipolar isn’t fun. It can take you higher than a kite. Not a drug high, though that is kind of what you feel. But in this instance I am speaking about real flying high in the sky. Soaring. Catching the up draft. Being your own motor and wings. When I write on bipolar, I am hooked up to the muse and she goes fast. She is one blazing force of nature. Hot waves of energy pass through me. All that she wants is to give freely but you need to accept her terms. Simple really: just create until you can’t see the screen of your laptop. All becomes a blur and even then you must keep moving forward until the last ounce of creativity is used up. You will know when. You just stop. There is nothing left but to end it.
I read a book called “Touched With Fire” by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison. She has become my Goddess. Her words speak to my mind like she lives inside of it. Her theory about creativity and divine madness and the artistic temperament all touch my insides like fire has scorched my body with truth. When I was a teenager, I had the strangest idea that I was going crazy. But why would I even think that. What did it feel like to be crazy? I had no idea but somehow I thought I was headed in that direction. It felt like it would be so easy to just lose your mind. It would break away just like that. Well, reading “Touched With Fire” was actually reassuring. Knowing all these famous and creative people who had bipolar and a divine madness, as I have grown to like it referred to. An artistic temperament that made you delusional, but made you one hell of a creative artist. A poet, a musician, a writer, a painter, from Lord Byron to Beethoven, Lincoln to Churchill, Kurt Cobain to Emily Dickinson. People from all professions that contributed great amounts of creative work to charge up the world with gifts unimaginable.
It does make one grandiose at times. Feeling better about yourself. Going on an ego trip one minute and feeling like death is the only answer the next. It destroys your ability to think clearly or tell the difference between reality and delusions that appear so real and believable. It is so destructive and then so creative and productive. Bipolar enables you to produce feats of creation beyond the bounds of most people. You go for hours and days just creating. Your concentration is unbelievable and so crystal clear and focused. Everything keeps pouring out of you.
It’s balancing the mood swings that make it so difficult. I will not take psych meds. They are poison to me. They have fucked up my health. They’ve caused me to faint. I’ve had seizures. My mind gets so dulled out I can’t think clearly or remember anything. It’s fucked up my short term memory so I am lost at recalling anything someone has just told me. Terrible with names I heard a moment ago. I try to say something and if I don’t get it out in that moment, it is gone. Blue what, I ask myself. Why did I say blue and then forget what if anything did it mean? It is frustrating. When I get into conversations with people, I get so excited that I must speak more words in a minute than anyone speaks in an hour. And topics are like butterflies flitting from flower to flower but in a hurricane wind storm.
The divine madness does allow me to be creative. It frees my mind to release control and let ideas and words and images flow through my mind and out onto paper. Thank the goddess I have a computer so I can almost keep up with my thoughts. My hand would break if I had to write as fast as my thoughts pour out of me. The drawback is the pain I feel going from pure elation to feeling terror and depression and the loneliness I feel when all I want to do is die. There is such a hopelessness. I cannot reach out to anyone. What do I say? I am too frightened or introverted to open up about the depth of my darkness. It is an all-consuming dark that takes over. Blinding me to anyone or anything. I have figured out how to work through the suicidal feelings and the depth of the depression that pulls me into the darkest, deepest of holes. I write. I keep writing. Anything that comes into my mind. I have no shame about speaking the truth. There is no honour in silence. The world must know and understand that there are places the mind can take you that do exist but only some can enter.
This is what you would be working with if you ever became my psychoanalyst. You would hear my stories and live through my mind and delusion and irrational thoughts. I have ruined relationships, I am sure because I had no idea the bipolar was causing me to behave in ways that I did not understand. I have hurt my partner because of what I thought I needed. It fucks you up sexually. Being abused when I was a child screwed me up to have sex with anyone but it also set me up to think or believe that is the only way one can relate to another human being. Everything between myself and another person always became sexual. It wasn’t because I wanted sex. It was because that was the way it was supposed to be. So I was taught by my abusers. If you wanted attention, you spent time with them and when they tried to touch you, you tried to stop them but it never worked. If you didn’t want attention they just raped you and molested you. It taught me that was the way life was. Sick. Demented. Perverted. Cold. Damaging. Surreal. Abusive. Everyone abused me except one. She was someone special. Someday I will tell you all about her.
It seems sex is supposed to be one of the addictions that bipolars have. Would I say I was addicted to sex. Yes. Not in the way you think. It was really fucked up for me. Now I don’t want anyone touching me.
If we work together, I hope you can help me with this. I don’t trust anyone but for an unknown reason I am drawn to you and I believe you are the one who can help me. I have gone to so many shrinks. Some I became really attached to. But most of them fucked me up more than I already was. One even thought because I was obsessed with her that I was going to stalk her. She was the one that was crazy not me. I admit I do get obsessed but that is one of my personalities. That therapist knew that. She also knew that she became obsessed when she lost the only one who loved her. That person died suddenly and it crushed her. Shattered her into pieces. Left her feeling abandoned. Nobody to love her. So when anyone shows her any attention she is drawn to them like a magnet. She is so filled with needs. But the others let her have her needs and accept her. That therapist was a fool and really fucked up that alter to the point where she felt so bad about herself that she just wanted to disappear forever. Instead she just felt guilty about everything she felt and she started to feel that if she felt love that she was being bad. What kind of therapist drives a kid to feel that she is bad for feeling love?
These are issues that need to be worked on. It is an enormous job to take on the responsibility of us as a client. Mr. Xxx was a jackass. He had no idea who we were. He drove everyone underground into the darkest hole. We felt depressed all of the time. All we wanted to do was sleep. So that is exactly what we did. Sleep. All day. All night. Get up because Scottie made us feel we needed to wake up. And we felt guilty leaving her alone by herself. Not that we were great company. All we did once we were awake was to watch TV until it was time to go back to bed. The only time we got up during the day was to go to out therapy appointments or to see the doctor. The world was fucked. We were fucked up. We just wanted to block out everything. We didn’t want to feel anything. Whenever we felt anything we just would fuck things up.
Now we actually have a chance to rejoin part of the human race. We may actually get to see you in therapy. Something might actually start to make us feel better. Right now that is the only hope we have. The hope that someday soon we can tell Mr. Xxx to go fuck himself. With great pleasure I would look forward to that moment. To really, actually, in a state of reality, I would be able to utter those words. “GO FUCK YOURSELF. IT IS OVER. I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.” Exit stage left. Here it comes, the final curtain call with Mr. Xxx. The forceful and intentional slamming of his office door so hard that the reverberations would be felt all the way to the door of my home and Scottie would hear and applaud. That is the day I am waiting ever so patiently for. Do I have the guts to do that? You had better prepare yourself to wear headphones at that very moment. Be sure it will happen. Exactly when, is still to be determined. As a child I was a famous door slammer. I slammed my bedroom door so hard, so many times, that the last time I did it, it fell off its’ hinges and crashed to the floor. The truth. May the goddess strike me with lightning if I am telling a lie. Oh, by the way, I do not lie. I tell the truth. I am too honest for anyone to believe.
So there you have some of it. Do you still have the courage to take me on as your client? The last length of time that it took to write this letter has left me with a blank in my mind as to what exactly I shared with you in the words I wrote. And whether I have the courage to read this over is, at this very moment, an uncertainty. I may just take my chances that you will be able to accept my honesty and to get past it and accept the conditions of my paying you, or rather, my insurance paying you to hire you as my soon to be next psychoanalyst. I do hope this deal goes into effect in as short a time as possible. The waiting and anticipation is, pardon the expression, killing me, literally killing me. I have so little time left to deal with where I am now. I am in desperate need to change the conditions of my life and to rid myself of someone I need to be gone from my consciousness and I need you to help me do it.
I am not an extremely confident person at the moment. Do not let the bipolar or stronger personalities fool you. We are very afraid of change. We fear leaving our home to go anywhere. And now we have finally gotten to a place where it actually might happen. That we will in the real world, fire our psychotherapist, better recognized by the name Mr. Xxx, for all his perversely sick sense of humour and his tasteless innuendos of a sexual nature and the endless telling of his self-promoting and unwanted sharing of his personal life during my therapy time when we are supposed to be working on getting me into a better state of being. And added onto that, his egotistical need to be the smartest person in the room. It is sickening and I really want to see it come to an, unknowing on his part, ending and before the next full moon rising. That gives us some time but not more than I will manage to live through.
This has been exhausting but worth letting go of some truths. I am trying to be open with you and writing these letters is great practice for when the real therapy sessions actually happen in my waking life. You sitting across from me and my either lying down on the couch or sitting up facing you. I don’t know how traditional you will want to play it. We will see. Soon. Please make it soon.
Until next time, I hope things have progressed.
Regards,
MadisonThis note is to assure the strictest of confidence.
To Annie,
At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the boundaries between us and to record the development of our relationship.
I want Annie Haskell to trust me. I want you to know I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. Writing to you in this way frees up my words as I speak them onto the page. Some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I have written in honesty. Right now, I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
Regards,
Madison Taylor
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.
Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”This is the poem I would like to include in this letter. I like to leave a poem if I find one that I would like to share with you. Since I am not even sure if I am going to give these letters to you, I felt it is okay if I include a poem in these letters. And if some day, I change my mind and I hand my building collection of letters to you, then I will likely evaluate all that I have written to determine if all of the content feels acceptable to me to share openly with you. I may feel too shy to be so vulnerable. We will proceed as we have for now and see this as a way of recording the experience of getting to know you and in turn get to know how this all effects me as I record this experience in writing.Don’t Lock Me Up
By Madison Taylor
December 16th 2007
Don’t lock me up
Don’t make me sleep
Losing consciousness
Loses part of me
Holding on awake
Needing senses sharp
Safety’s what I seek
Don’t want nightmares
Living inside of me
Roaming my sleep
Dead wanting me
If I’m awake
There’s no way out
To follow me
If I let go
Give in to them
Let sleep take hold
They’ll find me easy
Trap me, bind me
They’ll never ever
Let me go.
the labyrinth called “wandering wonderland.” it is where madison, scottie and their cats loves to escape to
madison’s “woods of imagination” where she takes long walks to reflect. it is starts just past the labyrinth
LE CHATEAU DE ROCHER
le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie & their three cats sparky toker & patrick
madison’s study/library
scottie’s study library
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan PoeQUOTATIONS on BIPOLAR:
“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been mildly manic. When I am my present “normal” self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.” ― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients – bipolar type I – experience both extremes; other – bipolar type II – suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don’t understand, we say. They just don’t get it. They’ll never be artists.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
“Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.” ― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“There was no twinkle in his eyes.
“Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough.”
Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn’t understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn’t work that way.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“To not do what you can to protect someone, that’s cowardly.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“An unspoken rivalry threaded their relationship, in which Tiger Lily thought that if she could keep up with him, she could hold tighter to him. It didn’t occur to her there was anything in which Peter would want her to fail. But sometimes, I could see that, even for him, she was too fast, too sure-footed, and didn’t seem to need him quite enough.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“It was like this sometimes, and I felt I should look away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be there, having my face touched, defeating a heart like Peter’s, but the next best thing was seeing it for Tiger Lily.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“I began to see that Wendy had something Tiger Lily hadn’t even known she was supposed to have. Of all the things Tiger Lily had thought she might have to be for Peter-strong, brave; to be big and to keep up-she had never thought that the one thing he wanted most from her was simply to show that she believed in him, always and without fail.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
