Abstract

ABSTRACT

One Hundred and Twenty Poems about Jason Seligman, M.D. won’t change anything…

Meredith Darling
(as Glisten Chilton Guthrie)

The heroine, subject, and as Winfried Siemerling would say, “ubiquitous I” of our story’s name, Glisten, means, by definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, “to shine with a fitful twinkling light.” The author writing “as” another name is a trope that plays on the byline of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanna Greenberg as Hannah Green. To the author as a child seeing this book on her bookshelf, that mysterious identification was fascinating. It seemed random, considering the original editions of the book that were credited to Hannah Green were, to put it bluntly, long forgotten. Meredith Darling as Glisten Chilton Guthrie on the cover of the project is not only an alter ego, it is an identification with a greater context of women’s writing on mental illness. Glisten clearly exhibits schizoaffective disorder, with its characteristics of both psychosis, evidenced in the loose dissociations of the poems found in the poems in the section “Emergency;” and mania, evidenced in the way this epic collection of hypersonic poems is maniacally “churned out like butter” by Glisten. Glisten wants to step outside herself so much that she addresses herself in the second person. It is not surprising someone with Glisten’s degree of monomania—that is to say mania of the “I” [moi]—comes to see the voice of the “self” [soi-meme] addressed to her being as belonging to another entity [being-present]. The doctor is portrayed as a saviour yet he is the enemy of Glisten’s recovery, leading to a binary of good/evil. Glisten thinks with her mind that the doctor is evil, yet with her heart she sees herself as his lover. Not only is this a double bind but it also leads to another binary opposition: real/imaginary. These gaps and silences in the text are also marginalizations. It demonstrates the hierarchy of the dominant signifier, male over female, insanity over sanity. Glisten is a deconstructor in her process of realization which ultimately leads to a reversing these governing terms. 120 Poems is an allegory. Conflated with Jesus and named as “saviour,” yet deified on the grounds of human affect, Jason is symbolic of False Gods;” as part of the medical establishment he is also symbolic of “Reason,” conflating Reason and Falsity. Glisten, representing Everypatient, is faced with the apotheosis of reason and asked to be “patient.” Will is Glisten’s only power in the face of authority— the “messages mixed with authority” and the “healing authority,” but we see that will without agency only places her in an asylum without asylum. When it comes to love, however, just as in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” where the prisoners’ shadows projected on the wall are their nearest approximation of reality, the closet reification of reality Glisten ever experiences is her projections onto the doctor.