I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman (23rd April 2006)

I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman. I am deliberately becoming a grand wreck. It is part of my project to experience new things, push an experience to the extremes. “Crane wrote to a friend, “You may not think it, yet there comes a great peaceful exaltation in merely reading, thinking, and writing.” Yet this was not enough to ward off sporadic spells of intense depression; he first attempted suicide at the age of 15 by slashing his wrists and taking an overdose of sleep medication.” Think of the kindness D— tries to offer you. C——, too. I am lonely. That is why I keep gravitating back to the Flying Scotsman like a moth to a flame, to the girls I know so well & the drink I know better. “Mariani brings alive the doubts and self-recriminations that constantly bedeviled Crane and the accusatorial inner voices that must have haunted him during his frequent hangovers. Alcohol and depression exacted a truly terrible physical and emotional toll on Crane, and his hair turned from premature gray to white by the age of 28. He was frequently jailed or beaten for his drinking, and Mariani’s index lists 17 instances of Crane’s “outrageous and violent behavior” due to alcohol. He embarrassed himself, alienated friends and damaged his ability to concentrate on his writing, but Mariani notes, “Like [Charlie] Chaplin, he meant to pick himself up, brush himself off, and go on whistling into the teeth of fate.”” 

“Like Hopkins, Crane sought an epiphanic vision, and Mariani notes, “In spite of the absence of any God he can name, there is a desperate vulnerability about Crane’s prayer for meaning” in poems such as “O Carib Isle!”….Crane once signed a postcard to his mother with the name “Atlantis.” As Mariani notes, “Even to himself he seemed a lost city.”….Mariani leaves us with the tragic image of a brilliant mind struggling with the desire to push the borders of poetry beyond the familiar and traditional to “new thresholds, new anatomies,” all the while contending with interior realities that were the source of both his greatest inspiration and his greatest unhappiness. Although Crane sank beyond the reach of lifesavers, thanks to Mariani’s book we retain a strong sense of the spiritual gates this poet sought to enter.” Very much on Saturday night I was thinking how fake all the smiles & friendship from the girls is, as they only smile & pretend to like you for the money. There are some exceptions to this, I think. D— is not nice to me just to get pounds from me, nor is C——. Maybe M——, too, and for a while —–. I could of look back at all the arguments I have been having at the Scotsman with a detached amusement. It is just an adventure I am having.