Celexa, Lobsters, and the Overcoming Industry

 

Call me Celexa. I’m half man, half business. I should sport an advertisement on my back, something like: “Not depressed, and Eat at Joe’s!” for I’m a dancing hot dog, a man in a lobster suit–I’m “depression man” who just happens to live in a nation that doesn’t like depressed people as this is the land of the Big Smile and “I’m Feeling Great!”.  (Man, if you look bluesy in in America you’re dangerous. You might own a big gun or be planning something.) But not Celexa Man. He’s blue only on the inside. Outwardly he smiles like a game show host, optimistically deferential. But inside, oh oh. Here’s the problem:

 

Medical Narrative only reaches some parts of our bodies and the body politic, but other shores it cannot reach. Do you understand? I’m not well. I’m decidedly unwell. I’m hidden. I’m blanketed by commerce and its designs. 

 

Our public lives involve working hard, working very hard, never taking vacations, becoming sweet dinguses, statuettes. If you have some ideas they ought to be cheerful and they shouldn’t travel far. So much for the body politic and being well. 

 

I am well. As for my secret, the interior body, medical narrative says I can be cured, healed, mended, or “made strong at the broken places”. But if you believe this, then you don’t understand the Body Politic which has other plans. 

 

The Body Politic is like that cruel kid who lived next door when you were eleven–who made you play “dress up”. Today you will pretend to be healed. 

 

If you’re insistent you may declare you “own” the “dress up game”–you call it performance theory. You acknowledge who is making you dress up, and pretend to resist stage directions. This is called idealism. 

 

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine, or idealism.” (Carl Jung)   

 

I’m Celexa Man. I wear a lobster suit with additional accoutrements–panty hose, tattoos, a meerschaum pipe, many piercings. 

 

I believe, perhaps dimly, in counter statements. This is what I think narrative “is” for they told me so back in English class. 

 

Not only am I performing “being well” or “being alternatively, resistantly happy”–I’m imagining this for you. If you’re in a wheelchair, I want you to dance in your chair. If you’re blind, I want you to go skiing. If you’re a cancer survivor I want you to tell me how you survived on rage and the Tibetan bardo. This is the work of Celexa Man. And Celexa Woman, and Lord help us, nowadays, Celexa House Cat. 

 

The Body Politic is commercial, it accepts everything because it sells happiness above all else. You can be ironic. You can put a safety pin through your cheek. The BP will sell you music to accompany your fetish. You can tell yourself you have a counter statement. 

 

Celexa Man thinks he’s swallowed a chance to overcome his despair. He must of course think this afresh each morning. Crucial moments before a shave.

 

Celexa Man loves “overcoming narratives” more than medical marijuana and Whitman candies. He needs to believe moral victories and psychological health are co-determinates of imaginative language. Celexa Man loves irony, wears his crustacean suit with a brassiere, but he’s wary of too much ambiguity. He hopes when he puts down his razor he’ll be happy if only for a day. 

 

The Medical Model and the Body Politic sail along and Celexa Man goes to Portugal where alone in his hotel he turns on the TV. He sees commercials in a lingo he doesn’t understand. Men dressed in feathers dance wildly to ersatz acid rock and then an enormous omelette appears. The voiceover sounds like poetry. 

  

The Overcoming Narrative can kill you. But the adhesion of medical narrative and the BP encourage you to adopt overcoming for its easily commodifiable. 

 

At home, when he unclamps the complicated Czarist underwear of his lobster suit, Celexa Man intuits how overcoming is a trap. Lobsters know about traps. Yes, I had to try out that joke. Celexa Man makes jokes. Overcoming is predicated with a syntax of limited psychological possibilities, which is of course the work of the BP. 

 

You see, consciousness is sadness. Back to Jung: “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.” 

 

Jung again: “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.” 

 

Robert Bly now: 

 

Eleven O’Clock at Night

 

I lie alone in my bed; cooking and stories are over at last, and some peace comes. And what did I do today? I wrote down some thoughts on sacrifice that other people had, but couldn’t relate them to my own life. I brought my daughter to the bus—on the way to Minneapolis for a haircut—and I waited twenty minutes with her in the somnolent hotel lobby. I wanted the mail to bring some praise for my ego to eat, and was disappointed. I added up my bank balance, and found only $65, when I need over a thousand to pay the bills for this month alone. So this is how my life is passing before the grave?

          The walnut of my brain glows. I feel it irradiate the skull. I am aware of the consciousness I have, and I mourn the consciousness I do not have.

          Stubborn things lie and stand around me—the walls, a bookcase with its few books, the footboard of the bed, my shoes that lay against the blanket tentatively, as if they were animals sitting at table, my stomach with its curved demand. I see the bedside lamp, and the thumb of my right hand, the pen my fingers hold so trustingly. There is no way to escape from these. Many times in poems I have escaped—from myself. I sit for hours and at last see a pinhole in the top of the pumpkin, and I slip out that pinhole, gone! The genie expands and is gone; no one can get him back in the bottle again; he is hovering over a car cemetery somewhere.

          Now more and more I long for what I cannot escape from. The sun shines on the side of the house across the street. Eternity is near, but it is not here. My shoes, my thumbs, my stomach, remain inside the room, and for that there is no solution. Consciousness comes so slowly, half our life passes, we eat and talk asleep—and for that there is no solution. Since Pythagoras died the world has gone down a certain path, and I cannot change that. Someone not in my family invented the microscope, and Western eyes grew the intense will to pierce down through its darkening tunnel. air itself is willing without pay to lift the 707’s wing, and for that there is no solution. Pistons and rings have appeared in the world; valves usher gas vapor in and out of the theater box ten times a second; and for that there is no solution. Something besides my will loves the woman I love. I love my children, though I did not know them before they came. I change every day. For the winter dark of late December there is no solution.

 

 

Celexa Man, when he’s off his pills, understands there are circumstances for which there will never be a solution. American happiness is a strange addiction, washed with medical narratives and the political and commercial advantages of overcoming what ails you, but you see, the psyche knew all along you can’t live that way.