EDWARD HIRSCH ON LOVE AND CIVILIZATION

Like a young lion trying out its roar
At the far edge of the den
The roar inside him was even louder
― Edward Hirsch, “Gabriel: A Poem”

Poetry saved my life—three times. While growing up in Japan as a Boricua, born into the hierarchy of the US Air Force, divorced from my home cultures of mixed Anglo-Saxon European heritage and the Puerto Rican diaspora, and raised in the book-banning version of Mormonism, I saw poetics as an act of translating my wild emotions into coherent communication. Verse was associative, like me with autism, and it was nonlinear, like memory itself. Lyrics helped me feel not alone in being odd, so song gave me hope when depression engulfed me. Rhythm provided space to exist. This story was quotidian. However, at age twenty-eight, I fell in love with a famous poet. This story was grandiose.

Due to what can be called a high-profile hostage situation, I carry with me stigmas inherent in being a violence-adjacent survivor. Though I have always, since I was a child, carried this stigma. First, I had a genetic and hereditary predisposition toward instability. In my early twenties, I was prescribed the psychosis-inducing steroid prednisone. This trauma history plus hyper empathy and hyper-responsibility made my poet-rapist (rapist-poet?) see me as a landmark victim. I was the cocktail of vulnerability and value that he needed to get him prestige and money. I was naive due to my autism. Being with me legitimized him. Funded him. Promoted him. Being with him destroyed me. Delegitimized me. Robbed me. Erased my reputation and my professional and personal futures.

…

Over a decade later, in my forties, I still struggle with my health. I have ongoing cervical cancer from the HPV he gave me. At peak PTSD intervals, I lose my ability to speak in complete sentences and even to read. I struggle with dissociative fugue and amnesia. I have intermittent psychotic PTSD episodes.

…

At the time of the rape, I was not disabled enough to qualify for disability benefits despite having been raped at work by my poet-rapist-coworker. I did not win the court case, so I could not press civil charges against the business that did not run a background check on him. For a decade, I have had to show up at minimum wage job, worried about being raped by a new coworker at my new job. If that type of rape happens, I can never make a report—no one will believe me. Rapists also knew no one will hear me, thus I am seventy percent more likely to be raped by someone new. For the rest of my life, I will carry this threat.

Still, today, I am still not disabled enough to merit any type of guilty verdict. New perps like to use my trauma responses as a way to prove I am “making it up” and “hysterical.” I am not disabled enough for others to notice my trauma unless I unmask my autism. A deliberate undoing at my performative juncture is often meant to avoid the unraveling that accompanies a public autism/PTSD/psychosis meltdown.

Despite a cornucopia of white/green/pink/blue-pilled diagnoses, my symptoms remain steady and also unpredictable. I have seen too many physicians to be convinced that any word in English describes the passion of insanity. Violence and healing can transcend linear timelines, coherence, and constructs. Just like poetry. I feel the limits of English-only love (and hate). There is only one word for love and it is “love,” and that word is not enough caution to describe how we do and do not care for one another. The same thing goes for hate. These single syllable reductions are meant to express our deepest longings and connections. They are also four letter words, like “fuck” or “shit.” English is the most reductive language when it comes to expressing the complexities of the interior. So much so it is called a Killer Language by linguists. English murders an indigenous language every two weeks. English almost killed me.

All words are taught and therefore learned affectations of expression. Pictures or noises are the first intimations of the world when we are infantile, and language attempts to capture our sensual experience. However, language is not inherent. Words us our perceptions, but have no sense. Linguistics is nonsense. The West has been content to allow English to envelop all languages, losing authentic expression for native communities. And as Hirsch writes in “Song Against Natural Selection” on the subtle nature of meeting death in every loss,

this hurts, and yet we manage, we survive
so that losing itself becomes a kind
of song, our song, our only witness
to the way we die, one day at a time;
a leg severed, a word buried; this
is how we recognize ourselves, and why.

I must constantly see myself in the loss of myself. I have made friends with losing. Never have I won, and I will never win. However, that said, I am a relentless loser. Like poetry. I am disabled, so someday I might be killed by the American police. Easily. I wake to a death threat every morning, whereas Hirsch evokes loss in the melting cake under the infinity of lighted candles or stars in a midnight fog. I experience brain fog. I use ambition to numb my pain. I revert to grandiosity in times of pain and stress, like everyone else. Hirsch excavates the delusion inherent in my own American Dream and the epigenetics of my own family's imperialism in the largest cake ever, as portion sizes alongside all consumptive habits are multiplied on American soil,

Our country was having a birthday party
and so a company dedicated to sweetness,
patriotism and money
baked the largest cake in the world
and floated it through the Baltimore harbor,
though it turned out to be disastrous
when wind blew the frosting into the water . . .

Not even Americans can fight nature. We the free are living within a disastrous spectacle we also seek to watch. We are the layer cake on the water, reaching for ever more. Americans seem so afraid of death that they would remember and celebrate old massacres, reframing them as triumphs for freedom, before admitting to participating in genocides.

Still, PTSD, depression, cancer, psychosis, and autism stick to my medical charts like red frosting that stains everything pink. Buried English words in my chart include “rape victim,” and “domestic violence survivor,” and “victim of family cult abuse.” And the worst word: “incest.” I move about with ease, but it is as if someone has cut out a piece of my brain. I can feel myself dying inside my mind, forgetting what I need to remember. I remember what I wish to forget. Not receiving the right type of care causes me to respawn into PTSD, like facing off with death. Not receiving the right care feels like meeting my rapist in my doctor’s office. My rapist’s poetry has been compared to Ezra Pound’s, published alongside Anne Waldman’s, and anthologized in The Smithsonian. He will be remembered on the fringes of literature for around a hundred years.

I gargle English. I know I am slipping into a PTSD episode when I lose my language. I exist as madder than average at certain times of the day and night, like at dusk when the orange hits the blackening bay, so I retire early to avoid kaleidoscopic, tectonic documentary replays. I tend to see everything that is predictable as a white base coat of experience. Raw beauty is too often maligned for how boring it seems. I try to stay awake. But I am bad at being alive to the quotidian. I am terrible at the practice of consistent, open-hearted loving. I have never been full of whole-hearted charity. I do not forgive, nor do I have wells of good wishes for strangers. Infinite care is not a virtue I possess, except for a few, as unconditional care was never given to me. I do not experience love as an infinite resource. But Hirsch gives me some guidance on how to be open to love despite my history, “Toni felt that love was a cultural construction/and left me for a female tennis instructor . . .” All of Hirsch’s comedic work points towards love as a gravity for the conscience. Love grounds Hirsch. Hirsch grounds love.

To heal from hell, I try to pay attention. In the carnal Spring of Iowa City, I am taken down by a baby bird fallen from a nest. I put the I-phone away without taking a shot. I would not want to be remembered without wings. Without chance. Without a grave. Not even going out squawking. In my moment of peak failure falling from my nest and not building a single feather on my way down.

It is important for me to note that my poet/rapist wrote me poems, and that our conversations were akin to a long-form poem from hell. It is essential to note that he had his moments of profundity and compassion. It is also important to say that this was not redemption. If not for poetry, though, I do believe he would have murdered me. This was the second time poetry saved my life.

He said, “I was a mercenary when I got out of the military.” He told me he bit two men in the face in Texas. His father was a murderer . He said he was on the same path. “Poetry saved my life.” In this way, poetry also saved me. Verse gave my captor a reason to live, and to allow me to live. Otherwise, I do think my story would have ended in murder, and not in madness.

When I am paying most attention, a direct stare into natural beauty can send me into a creative flow only to pull me out by grounding me in the chaotic or organized good of my own making. This juxtaposition of nature with the absurdist attempt to conquer all shows up in “Bicentennial,” as Hirsch writes,

My new lover said that sex enforces power,
and the red, white and blue fire hydrants
sprinkled around the city
reminded her of the fullbacks and line-
backers to whom she pledged allegiance
every Saturday night behind the football stadium.

Here we are mocked for our loyalties to hierarchies. I am loyal to my own instructions, to my madness, to the voices I hear that often urge me to care more, and to be awake to caring. These instincts are subtle instructions for loving.

I first heard voices at age twenty-eight after my rape case was thrown out of court on the basis of “lack of evidence.” Madness came on as a feeling, a wave that came and went, and then instability mixed with horror hijacked my language centers. Audible psychosis started with isolated words, like a peachy infant babbling within rainbowed spit bubbles, wanting more birthday cake. I could ignore these hints. A couple years later, my disconnect arrived in complete sentences, like a green-eyed toddler, hungry and curious, screaming for more. Many years later, my madness developed into full-body hallucinations, sensations, and delusions, like a teenager who wanted out of the confines of childhood at all costs. Possession grew up into an adult within me. I broke my ability to control my cognitive self and physicality. That was when I decided to stay on my medication forever.

I was always led through academics to think the irrational was illogical, nonlinear, and yet that was never my experience of the world. Hate was also logical, linear, within a construct. Mad people followed rules and patterns others did not observe, hear, or see, but within those patterns our behaviors made sense. Derangement was relative and sanity universal, or so we Westerners were constantly led to believe.

Francisco Goya wrote, “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” So, this unreasonableness was seen as in need of controls, and patriarchal logic was considered the only appropriate control for the human race.

These misrepresentations of sanity were blown apart by feminists, BIPOC queer disability activists, poets, essayists, postmodernists, contemporary artists, disabled activists, AIDS activists in the 80’s and 90’s, environmentalists, the American First Nations’ assertion of sovereignty over equity, and even the pandemic.

The Marquis de Sade wrote of the shallowness of sanity and the rigidity of violence, “Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.” Sade was “morally insane,” like my rapist, which was old-school lingo for sociopath. Moral stability or sanity existed in the malleability of morality and perception to culture and circumstance and in the predictability of ethical behavior in the face of uncertainty.

In other words, madness was an associative moral sanity bouncing up against a linear patriarchy. People on the autism spectrum experienced forty percent more violence than the general population and were no more likely to be predatory. We metabolized our violence. We did not pass it to others. We were the world's violence interrupters. We were also a behavioral herd immunity to the construct “hurt people hurt people.”

The mad were doing something right despite what had been done to them. We were returning love despite our inheritance of harm. Michel Foucault wrote, “Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence.” Foucault also wrote, “It is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.” White man logic was an either/or mind fuckery; madness was a sane/logical response. A Western prescription for survival often sent my people into graves. Discreet Genocide: In 2024, the disabled were murdered by the police in America more than they were in any other nation and they were murdered more than any racial minority alone. In this conflict-oriented competition for survival, my disabled chosen family members were losing the right to author their lives.

Hirsch’s “Bicentennial” starts with mentioning that the speaker has been reading Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. He tells us this poem will be about constructs. Hirsch is a champion of poetry, so he is also a champion of nonlinear existence. Autism and psychosis are nonlinear. Violence is binary. Love and poetry are an associative process. Hate is dissociative, and so is our legal system. We are associative beings surviving a linear distortion/reduction of the human experience.

Goya saw the world in binaries by saying, “For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.” Goya loved either/or. He adored contrast in his work above all else. Goya painted violence.

Freedom existed in the East as a lack of want. Freedom existed in the West as the satisfaction of desire. As a Latina raised in Japan, I towed the line between lack of want and passionate desire. On lust, Hirsch wrote, “Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.”

Our wants cannot be wholly reduced, and so they cannot be ever satisfied by words. We piece together slices of our want which is also to admit to losing, which is, as Hirsch argues, to die while singing. Which is poetry, madness, and love. Hirsch’s work “The Case Against Poetry” reads,

While you made the case against poetry—
Plato’s critique of the irrational,
Homeric lying, deluded citizens—
to a group of poets in Prague,

night depended in old windows,
swallows gathered on a narrow bridge
and called to the vanishing twilight,
and a beggar began to sing in the street.

While making love, the same parts of the brain that light up, like fireworks, also light up in madness. Synonyms for love include “possessed” and “weakness.” There is a correlative we know through neuroscience research among hearts so big they are confined to make their paintings on walls no one will ever see and their poems in their own babbling, echoing off bars and gated windows. I still love the mad poet in my rapist. That version of him is safe to adore.

Each evening he morphed from the nerdy man who took care of his dying father into the monster who threatened to hit and kill me for booze.

Madness and love are a spirit of generosity, a letting go of outcome. Abuse and hate are prescription, a linear control, and a destructive attachment to the outcome. Every object of desire has its haters, who despise being confronted with the haters' need and dependency. Lust is psychic glue, holding the West together like a binding protein, like the gluten in risen dough.

Or, as Foucault wrote,

The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.

Poetry is shaped by a lineage of mad people, and in this way we escape into a world of our own making. And perhaps a nonbinary, associative, and nonlinear world is more prepared for the complexities of love. Because I am mad, this is the third way poetry has saved me. Poetry taught me to choose my own life, so I was no man’s songbird. Poetry’s past is akin to a baby from a branch. A peachy infant inner voice. A melting giant patriotic portrait of risen dough.

Mad logic might be mysterious, but it is powerful. With it, I have carved a new shape of my heart to survive my poet, something squawking and full of self-immolation. Risen like cake and blown about like frosting, baby birds, and a relentless wildfire. Hirsch is correct in claiming, “All that rescues us is love.” That truth spoken aside, deliverance from harm also requires a certain level of irrationality, as we the mad are (mostly) hurt people who do not hurt others. Love itself is irrational. So, all that has saved me has been, at the very least, a little bit mad.

Shelli Hoppe (Michelle Renee) has work in The Massachusetts Review, Saw Palm, South 85 Journal, Cleaver, and Litro, among others. She is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.