I Walk on Gilded Splendors

By David Widlan

The psychologist is running amok. He is simultaneously on the verge of an artistic breakthrough and an emotional breakdown. Narrated therapy sessions guided by rhythm and color reveal poignant and evocative stories. These contrast with his own twisted life and his attempts to write a novel about it. He believes there aretwo types of in

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Widlan
• Release date: Jul 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732431300

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I Walk On Gilded Splendors

David Widlan

Copyright © 2018 David Widlan

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-7324313-0-0

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Dedication

To Magnus and Shel, three generations…

Acknowledgments

The following are greatly appreciated for their adoration, denunciation, linguistic brilliance, peanut butter sandwiches, chromosomal contributions, feedback (distortion), feedback (contortion), red hot mama, crotchetiness, syncopation (cf. Hit It and Quit It), and harmolodics: Elisabeth Ballstadt, Janet Wagner, Kathy Hinds, Celeste Axelson, Marilyn and Shel Widlan, Sandy Widlan, Jeff Halpern, Beth Barstack, Theo & Kody, August Piper, Susan Radant, Thomas Irvin, Tim Flocos, Steban Waller, John Rosell, Eddie Hazel, Sonny Sharrock, James Jamerson, Tiki Fulwood, James Blood Ulmer, Bryan Youngs and everyone at Madrona Arms.

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Our Hell Is Your Heaven

3. Spastic Maximus & Charles Mingus

4. The Cymbal Ride, The Symbol Slide

5. Empathy with Evocation, Commitment with Carnality

6. Big Joe Williams & Blind Willie McTell

7. The Shogun’s Rotgut

8. A Trinity of Horns

9. The Meth-Addled Octopus

10. Every Act of Creation Is an Act of Destruction

11. Shooby, Shooby, Shibboleth

12. I Walk on Gilded Splendors

About The Author

Chapter 1

Introduction

Madness. An idea with a life of its own. It breathes, it eats, it even sleeps. Indeed, even the most conservative of neuroses spends time there. It runs from crazy (e.g., You won’t believe what my insane boyfriend…), through maddening (So you continue to smoke though you have emphysema and asthma), and careens toward psychosis (The government installed an electronic monitoring device in my brain when I was born). I should add that these experiences create a peculiar madness in the therapist. My own state we will leave alone for now.

One moment the sky is falling on me. Another instant I’m falling into the sky, she says through trembles while reading from her notebook. Everything is racing. I can’t catch my breath. The walls close in. There is this weight, this oppression. It is suffocating. No, it is SUFFOCATION. I’m hyperventilating. I don’t know if I’m in time or space! Not even the horizon orients me. Everything solid boils to gas. The elements disembody…fire dominates air, earth swallows water. I know I’m not making sense, but it is MY sense. The silence of the sky contracts and expands. It’s convex then concave.

Stick with this. I feel your agitation, but you’re safe here.

I start having difficulty breathing, she says, her breath as labored as that of an errant child lassoed by a cantankerous nanny, and my palms sweat profusely.

Stay with it. You’re doing great.

A thousand sets of eyes rain down. The sky deepens and deepens into an impenetrable field, an echoing reverberation screaming through me. My thoughts spin out of control. Indecisiveness engulfs me. The sky rapidly expands, on and on, forever, I can’t get my footing! It is the most deluging disquietude.

How do you come out of it?

I try to harness my breathing like we discussed. I remember that I’m not having a heart attack and calm myself by focusing on my centering metaphor, the penetrating waters of my summer at Cyprus.

Do this now.

She struggles for a moment while her breathing intensifies before slowly recapturing equilibrium. After a few moments I say, What was that like for you?

I mean it was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as it usually is.

Why is that?

Your presence helped, but there’s something else happening…

As much as I like adulation, and part of me would not mind lapping it up, I say, I did next to nothing. You did all the work.

Margaret is a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student working toward her doctorate in English literature. As part of treatment for panic disorder, she has been writing her experiences both during and after a panic attack. There is nothing quite so poetic as a person’s genuine articulation of a panic attack. While Margaret is highly intelligent, an individual with limited education and creativity can suddenly provide a description with a Kafkaesque level of terror. Evocation is an essential part of the cure. It creates a tableau that allows us to be present with our experience—there is no past or future, only the present. Sensation plays an integral role. The depth and breadth of sight and sound with smell, taste, and touch jostling their way in is endlessly inventive and scary as a consequence. What we evoke, profoundly expresses who we are and how we struggle. When we are truly able to evoke our experiences, they become tangible and less uncontrollable as a result.

While Margaret is working on her PhD and trying hard not to be a Pretty heavy Drinker in the process, what she really wants is to write fiction.

Yesterday I was thinking about how you always say anxiety is your friend. When you first told me that, I thought you were high, crazy, or both. How could my bête noir be my kissing cousin? After I’ve recovered, when I re-read what I’ve written during and after panic attacks, I often see the minerals of creative fiction. I have struggled with anxiety since childhood, but I am finally beginning to see how there is a benefit to this: I have developed numerous creative energies. At the same time, anxiety often prevents me from actualizing these energies. Anxiety is the bifurcation of the creative process. One road leads to art, the other leads to shackles—that come to think of it—are its own genre of art.

Sometimes I think anxiety prevents me from becoming too cerebral. It allows me to tap in to a primitive part of my essence that otherwise flits away. And I’ll tell you, she says, leaning forward, I find it erotic. When I take Valium, my writing always ends up stilted, as if something is dying. My words seem so pointless, such a promiscuity. They never feel authentic when I think about what I experience. I am still trying to come to terms with the limitations of language to communicate my feelings, my dreams, my hopes. But my general state of angst and uneasiness plays an essential role.

It always comes back to this inexorable truth—anxiety is your friend. You cannot rid yourself of anxiety without ridding yourself of yourself.

The majority of my patients fall in to two types. Open people in closed spaces, that is, those who are depressed, and closed people in open spaces, that is, those who are anxious. Probably we are all a little bit of both. We long to be free from constraint yet fear the vulnerability of the open road.

They feed on themselves and on the other. Depression chasing anxiety and vice versa like a band of poisonous snakes coiling and uncoiling their heads, or a night of drunkenness careening from melancholy to euphoria and back again. Sometimes life is simply a precarious pirouette between the two, or to paraphrase Dylan, it’s like trying to balance a mattress on top of a wine bottle. In truth, the consubstantiation of depression and anxiety is like the relationship between the blues and jazz, ever bickering and irritable, yet warmly entwined nonetheless.

Man, I just can’t get out of bed.

My days overflow with hordes of depressed souls radiating an enervating fusion of apathy and melancholy. An indefatigable tedium has swept over the landscape like a relentless pack of goats clearing an overgrown field.

"I’ll tell you what, it really worsened when Charlie’s Bar closed. That place soaked up my time. It soaked up my space. I feel quarantined like I can only live in metaphor. Everything is like a metaphor within a metaphor. Remember how we were exploring, to use your favorite word, he says with a slight smile, the notion that music is the space between the notes? I can’t remember if you said it was Mozart or Debussy. Intellectually it seems so easy to sit still and place myself between the notes, but nothing could be further from the truth. He reflects for a moment, and then another, as tears begin falling. Each tear, like the colors of a bather’s suit in a Seurat, creates a pointillistic effect symbolizing the gap between thought and emotion. All these accumulated silences become difficult to deal with. It is like I ended up on a deserted island with only Kafka’s The Trial to read. His tone deepens like a trombone plunging into the bottom register. I am dissolving into fragments."

Have you engaged in any of your creative projects?

I can tell you the ostrich doesn’t see shit because I’ve had my head in the sand for going on six months, and there ain’t nothing there. He pauses as if searching for the perfect cadence before turning to one his favorite themes. I am surrounded by absurdity. The only explanation is God, during the presence of her one and only manic phase, created the world in a spasmodic, haphazard manner and then slunk back into an eternally depressive state. It is inconceivable humans are not yet extinct. He grimaces as if carrying his elderly aunt to the throne to complete her morning ablutions, and I consider, if his theory is correct, what it would mean to Dante, Milton, and Walter Elias Disney.

Richard is an unemployed, over-intellectualized Jew, not unlike yours truly in some respects, and we both share a passion for the absurd. He often wears a shirt that says 2000 years since the birth of Jesus and all I got was this crummy persecution complex. His moods during sessions can swing wildly from dysphoric diminuendo to a crescendoing charge. Sometimes they flit between the two like the eyes of a bunny as a train speeds past. He is a man of interesting whims. Several months prior he described a recent experience. He procured an escort, extolled her to dress up like a duchess, and asked her to paint flowers on his back porch in a state of melancholy.

Really? I said with a gleam in my eye I hoped was not obvious.

Yes. She spent a perfectly hygienic afternoon painting flowers in a style derivative of O’Keefe.

Richard has been struggling with depression off and on for many years. His tendency to feel disembodied is a common theme in my practice. As he puts it, each fragment of his life, of his consciousness, is part of greater fragmentation instead of representing part of a whole. Given that I am a master fragmentarian, empathy is fairly easy.

I mean, at first I romanticized this depression, but now it’s like a lapdog that has increased in size and outgrown its welcome. But I’ve been trying to work on silence…

Silence reveals one’s absurdities. It revels in absurdity. It allows us the greatest of pleasures, which is the joy of being in on the joke about oneself—one’s fashion, one’s hobbies, one’s loves, one’s profession, but most of all, one’s self. Not only is this pleasurable, but it is essential if one is to survive the lunacies of daily existence.

The suffering is fine, even satisfying in a way. It’s the endless denouement that’s doing me in.

Depression is a tapeworm, constantly shedding and growing skins, and feeding on its host to sustain energy. I have experienced depressive episodes bathed in the narcotic torpor of indecision. Simply the act of going to the mailbox felt herculean. It is like the way a massive snowstorm swallows up sound and everything it conveys—the cries of a baby, the sirens of the night, someone being born, someone dying. Richard and I have spent months exploring how courage can bolster any situation and, in particular, the importance of tolerating discouragement. This is crucial for me as well because my hopes of writing creatively have been dissipating like fog burning off a pond. Last year I went through a period of writer’s block and impulsively jettisoned my antidepressants off the Fremont Bridge, hoping to unlock the cipher.

I stir some coffee and breathe. I should be working on my Miles Davis story. I have been trying to pare back language toward silence, but the truth is, I would live a life of quiet desperation except I am far too chatty. In reality, my writing style is tethered to a baroque indulgence. On my most austere days, replete with sugarless orange pekoe tea and day-old bread, I veer into a stampeding grandiloquence unimpeded by tact or taste. When you march to this rhythm, you walk a tightrope of sorts. One wrong step and you’re thrown down the elevator shaft of banality. And I must confess, and it can be in no other form, alliteration is my guilty pleasure. And here’s another thing—sometimes I cannot stop myself from rhyming. It is like an autistic tic (an autistic-tic-autistic-tic…). Sometimes I combine the two like rhyming chancre with canker. The other day I stumbled upon an old poem I had written containing the lines:

It’s musical masturbation, a conjugal consecration / an obdurate obfuscation, an abdicated adumbration.

Uh…let’s just move on. I suppose some background information is in order. Well, what shall I say? How about I am tall, dark, and handless. Stop the falsettoing you say. Well you are no fun. I am an East Coast transplant, and, if you promise not to tell anyone, I followed a girl, uh, a woman, no, a lady friend here. My birthday is the third of May if anyone wants to send a gift. The patròn is a complicated guy. He was a major in the army, yet antimilitary to boot. He may have been on the ground floor of military LSD experiments. Then again, maybe not. I have a sister who takes names and kicks ass in the Lower East Side court system. She has two boys, one built a computer at age six, and the other fought off a black bear shortly thereafter. My momma plays the violin for the Boston Pops while moonlighting in a Borscht Belt hootenanny.

In my most imaginative moments anxiety holds court. There is an optimal distance from anxiety where creativity amplifies: not too close or I burn up, but not so far away, as then I frolic aimlessly. I swear I will do anything to avoid sitting and writing in a disciplined fashion. Instead I write on scraps, a dictation in my phone here, a jot on my hand there, and spend most of my time cutting and pasting fragments in to imaginary chapters. I created these characters—the topless gas attendant whose tattoo says Pay Before You Pump and the mute chess player who talks more trash than anyone via his wild gesticulations, but I have been unable to shepherd them a presence. I self-published some poems years prior, but looking back on them, they read like a soon-to-be-contested will. Every time it seems something is about to burst, laziness sets in, lack of confidence joins the party, neuroses takes his stingy brim off, and before you know it, you are playing to lesser emotions. I had hoped to give up writing poetry and simply become one of my poems, but the pretensions led me into the sewer, that is, writing more poetry.

My literary aspirations often become stimulated during therapy sessions. Of course my thoughts wander from time to time (I should have brought lunch). Sometimes I come up with quasi-clever literary riffs (I could not decide if I was the doctor or the patient, the gardener or the tomato), but usually pretensions bowl over me (the irrational noumenon within the hidden chords?). I desire to write as one with the dappling, the way light glistens off sand and water and especially glass. I experience dappling glass as reflecting on one side and refracting on the other. How does one maintain their presence in the face of such fragmentation?

Last week my therapist intoned, in his languid Isaac Hayes baritone, "What do you long for?" Sitting here now, in my poorly lit office, I cannot decide whether I want my own backup singers or a chamber choir to follow me around. Why not both? It’s my fantasy and I can be as narcissistic as I want! How about my transgendered longing to be a kept woman?

I wander into fantasy. My amanuensis is hosing off a phalanx of female fans as I blast away on my shofar. While in graduate school and dealing with the meltdown all greenhorn psychs go through, I figured I would learn to play the shofar so I could obviate my guilt whenever necessary. Alas I procrastinated, and, well, all I can say is my procrastination evoked Kafka’s genius for incompletion, without the genius.

You still rolling? Jimmy is vulnerable to extended manic episodes with florid psychosis leading to destruction, including paranoid aggressiveness toward yours truly. On one occasion he leaped up and, as he put it later, chased me like a screaming voice frozen in space. The noose of crazed impulsivity has descended many times during mania. There was the time he blew his money starting a business selling Egyptian artifacts. This might have worked except he decompensated, thought a customer was following him, and charged through the night, somehow ending up naked in a fortune-teller’s dryer. He tends to race through a session like a crazed turtle bashing a scorpion with his shell.

Man, I’ve been on this trip. You know the key is to flow with the voices. If I fight them, I end up paralyzed.

There are movements by those who suffer psychosis to accept one’s hallucinations. His statement maintains this melody, and yet my instinct tells me we are about to veer off the rails.

I’ve been practicing more, the great eighty-eight, scampering left and right over the ivory like religious zealots improvising their beliefs.

Tell me, I’m quite curious, how do the voices affect your playing?

Brotha, I play Mozart when I want to drown out the voices, and Beethoven to fire them up. My left hand is like one of those rocking chairs that starts rocking all by itself in a slasher flick, while my right is as if Persephone decided to skip spring this year, he says, his thoughts magically arriving by flying carpet. Listen here, it’s like each note has its eye of the hurricane, and there’s this secret octave. When I tap in to it, a supernatural melody materializes, spraying luxuriant mist in its wake. I start with these phrasings recalling Horowitz before shifting into a virtuosity that would make Art Tatum blush. I mean Beethoven could turn any metal object into a drum, and I’m skipping over the baby grand like stones flicking across Lake Michigan.

Things are slipping away. Say something! "The last part of the Fifth is practically rock-n-roll. The thundering kettle drums—"

Hell yeah, it’s only rock-n-roll but I like it, he says with a wink, acknowledging the comedown from Ludwig to Mick. I get into the groove, and it’s like a colorful glazing of complimentary hues bathing me and me alone like in those cartoons. You see I’ve been foolin’ with an idiosyncratic approach to arpeggiation, he says, as he races along like jealousy steamrolling through the polyamorous convention. My right hand is the echo and my left is the shadow. Together they reveal the echo within the shadow within the echo. I mean, you know the therapeutic setting, the therapeutic relationship, all of this, he says, gesturing wildly, consists almost entirely of what I’m saying. All of your genius interpretations occur within an echo of a shadow of an echo. Loneliness is an echo lost in shadow.

At first I struggled. I grimaced like those symphony goers who look at you disapprovingly if you clap between movements, but man, all of a sudden, he says pausing mid-gesture, his arm halfway to slapping my Mr. Rogers mug. "You ever read The Arabian Nights? Before I can nod he continues, It’s the way a dust cloud suddenly emerges out of the ether and swallows up an invading army in The Arabian Nights! Put that in your professorial pipe and smoke it into a story!"

Careful kid, he’s volatile…at any moment he could cross the Rubicon from frenzied outcry into unabashed roguery. His eyes light up as if he has succeeded in cutting out his kidney. They radiate fury like the river god chasing Achilles for his transgressions, and yet, prance with the insouciance of schoolgirls in a glitter factory. His gestures constantly threaten to metastasize into a rampaging donnybrook. The X- and Y-axes could switch on a dime at any moment. I am losing presence. Images flash through my skull like a well-coordinated chess attack with the sole purpose of swallowing me whole. I hear him say, a song stripped away of everything. It’s not even there, so it’s more there than ever. There is nothing preventing the sky from falling down. I barely regain my presence as he segues in to one of his favorite themes—death as a cessation of time versus music as the creation of time.

I don’t wanna say it. I want to propel it with a full brass section. Trumpets echoing the theme, trombones scattering the color, the cornet dispersing the shading, and dueling tubas providing the bottom. And there are layers upon layers of call and response. What lurks in the space between call and response?

Music is language in its purest form. Language without the constraints of language. And let’s not forget about silence because it’s an integral part of said language. Gravity keeps your head on but makes your ass fall. Melody stimulates what harmony conceals. As if falling from a cliff and grabbing desperately at the last rock, I find the rhythm, I turn into the Midnight Moses! Listen man, I know you’ve had some wild times in your younger days. You know all about the drunken, dappling melody, careening from melancholy to euphoria and back again.

I nod because it’s starting to make sense again, but is that good or bad? And we’re out of time! How to wrap this up?

I gotta meet a man about a horse, he says, vanishing from the room.

Manic psychosis often results in the stallion returning unbridled, blood on the saddle. A silvery mist of reality lingers for a moment and then flickers and is gone. Jimmy shifts from delirium to sublimity and back again. He pirouettes from dream to consciousness without notice, sometimes imperceptibly, but often like a whirling dervish. Other times it’s like a Fosbury Flop. His consciousness sways and slays with time’s ebb and flow until dream and reality converge. At times the jump is translucent like a fife band in perfect rhythm. Other times his energy stimulates a labyrinthine connection between our experiences.

How to make sense of this in the few minutes before my afternoon commences? Music expands where language compresses. But then why do I write when I could jam? It seems unfair. If I have a gift, it is for words not sounds. Oh, the irony. Music has always been my protection from the snake. Yet silence, that most radiant lacuna, is where vibrant emotions exist. Of course emotions quickly change into what they are not. So does rhythm for that matter. A dapping melody pierces my consciousness. I need to steady myself for the afternoon slate. I slowly breathe in and out. The light shines through the pleated burgundy lampshade indicating my noon appointment has flipped the switch, announcing his arrival.

My afternoon begins with Dominique, a middle-aged commercial artist, with a penchant for scriptural quotation. We have been exploring how he can deploy faith to assuage depression. I should mention, and I apologize for the pedantry, I would not have broached the topic directly if it did not fit in to our therapeutic relationship. The fact my snow angels melted