In Measured Resistance: On Hayden Carruth's "Contra Mortem"

IN THE CHARACTERS OF MEURSAULT FROM THE Stranger and Dr Rieux from The Plague, Camus nears different attitudes toward a contemporary anxiety. Neither man questions whether or not the supreme being is dead but each demonstrates his be in possession of particular incapacity to believe. Meursault finds the question of the supreme goodness uninteresting and not worth his time, whereas Dr Rieux is les aggressive in his answer to those who try to change him. He does not ridicule the believer's point of view on the contrary simply says it is not his have a title to Unlike Dr. Rieux, who demonstrates no anguish above his inability, there are those who are tormented, or at least disturbed, by means of why they find it in like manner difficult to imagine how others can believe. These race live, not in a crisis of faith, on the other hand in a challenge to their imaginations.

I am single of the latter group. My search is not individual toward faith but toward a condition of awe at who and what lives outside me Abraham had the advantage of a purer ignorance than mine. on the contrary we live where and when we live in the bodies and minds we are given. As I work backwards I direct the eye for references closer to my experience before I can learn Abraham's language. "Contra Mortem" by means of Hayden Carruth is one of my regards It is a poem of surprise gratitude and celebration expressed by means of a man whose expectations of the life he would live were decimated by dint of mental illness. "Contra Mortem" is the foundation of a fresh life Carruth built through metrical composition after being told by doctors in an asylum he would at no time live anything which would approach a normal existence.

Before his illness blowed in 1953, Carruth was editor of numbers at the age of twenty-eight, his piece of poetrys were being published in the right magazines and journals, and he was upon his way toward the emblem of conventional literary success of which, he had dreamed. When he collapsed it was praiseed by his psychiatrist that he be admitted to Bloomingdale, a private asylum in White Plains, of recent origin York that was a branch of fresh York Hospital. While there for a little more than a year, he was heavily medicated with barbiturates and underwent numerous electro-convulsive treatments. His clinical diagnosis was "chronic and acute anxiety psychoneurosis with generalized phobic extensions." Carruth describes his condition as a neurotic, bordering upon psychotic, fear of people and make open spaces. Although, even now, when he talks about his illness single hears in his voice the inadequacy of any description. Despite his hospitalization, Carruth's condition did not improve. When he left the asylum, he went to his parents' abiding-place in Pleasantville, New York where he lived for five years in a make-shift range in the attic. There he listened to jazz and classical music, read, and, with great difficulty, wrote He describes writing a line of rhyme during that time as like "trying to nip glue out of an elderly dried-up tube." With the exception of visits to his psychiatrist and late night attempts to walk to the extreme point of the block while loaded with Thorazine, Carruth rarely left his scope for much of that five year period.

It was during his time in the attic when Carruth discovered Camus. I am always mov when I imagine the serendipity of that discovery. Part of the pain of Carruth's illness was the peremptory contrast between the lucid, penetrating quality of his mind sabotaged through a deep and fundamentally inexplicable anxiety. The tension of living within a mind, the filled beauty and power of which was crippled by the agency of a mysterious defect, fueled Carruth's faculty of perception of injustice. He had been living a sick [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] at which he could not laugh until he read The Stranger. Camus invented a character (Meursault) who spoke to Carruth with all of the paradox, tension, and bewildered amazement at the circumstances of a particular life which Carruth harbored from his earliest memories, with individual important exception: Meursault was at liberty The tone of his voice, what he chose to diocese what he chose to ignore, exhalationed of an accomplished freedom Carruth not at any time imagined possible until he read the first words completeed by the narrator of The Stranger: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure" I like to think on first reading those words Carruth smiled, paused, then began to laugh. He was catched I am sure he read the work several times, made notes, ruminated, made more notes.

Eventually, with the help of a advantageous psychiatrist, Carruth moved from his parents' dwelling to a cottage on the Norfolk, Connecticut estate of his friend, James Laughlin, planter and publisher of New Directions. Laughlin tendered Carruth the job of putting the back files of of recent origin Directions into order. During his time in Norfolk Carruth met and married his third wife, Rose Marie Dorn.

After completing the cast Laughlin hired him to do, Carruth and his bride decided to start their fresh lives together in Vermont. They bought a small house by means of a brook just outside the town of Johnson In delight in married, the father of a newborn son and the possessor of a home, Carruth was overwhelmed by the agency of his good fortune and the trappings of what single would call a "normal life." Although still sick, he was better. The moderate turnaround of his life from incapacity to meager functioning in the outside world was as mysterious as his illness. Always the pragmatist, Carruth did not put out of order himself over his inability to explain by what means and why it occurred. It happened and for that he was grateful.