I am doing this as I am nearing the first edit of my coming book, An American Resurrection. I need to get back into writing shape to answer my editor’s thrusts of elucidation and literary constriction to make the work as well defined and existentially lucid as possible.

I will blog as I leave the port of Nantucket in the novel and the safety of the “Nantucket’ of my known experience before shoving off.

Read along, comment or delete the entirety of the activity. It is good and accepted. This will simply be the log of my mind’s eye experience as I cross the equators of the work and my life to see where I am when I step back on solid ground. If I do….long journey and very treacherous seas can devour sailors on their journeys.

I just hope for an authentic crossing of the blessed waters of this wondrous sphere and hope to tell some good sea stories.

The novel is a multifaceted journey of a whaling ship that leaves port to sail in the deepest of seas in the most lethal of journeys.

The medium of sea travel and the vastness of mystery pushing miles down below your known norms allow for the destabilzation of the most concrete of norms.

Norms of identity, of place and of bias. The journey of sea travel creates a microcosm of society on the shipboard landscape and allows for a the anchors to soul to drag along the ocean floor of your being.

As Ishmael introduces himself to the work, we find ourselves in New Bedford, Mass. Ishmael is looking to catch a whaling vessel out of Nantucket and is forced to spend the night at the Spouter Inn in the howling and freezing winds of Coastal Mass.

He finds the Spouter Inn at the end of a long narrow avenue on the corner of the raging winds.

Ishmael cannot find a single room. And is forced to share a room. he waits in trepidation at the prospect of meeting his roommate, the ‘savage’ harpooner Queequeg.

Queequeg is out selling his shrunken heads while Ishmael waits in the dark confines of the inn when sailors from a 4 yr cruise enter.
One of the crew is named Bulkington, he is well regarded by the crew but seems unable to share their glee at arriving safe after a 48 month cruise to hell and back.

He is forever catching cruises back out to sea. He is described as being unable to stay on land, that the land burns his feet, burns his soul.

He needs the sea, the mystery, the deaths. He will be on the Pequod when it departs under Ahab and he will once again be in motion.

He is a New England Faust. Forever in motion. Never taking in the totality of the totality. Forever caught in the churn of the crest and troughs of sea travel and the isolation of being a constant home to himself with no ports to meet other inhabitants.

We can lose the ability to function outside of the swirl, the chaos, the constant motion of a life interconnected by a thousand electronic mediums. Forever lost in the invisible currents that lock into another 4 yr journey.

Bulkington will make his trip and we will make it with him.

Queequeg is physically tattooed from head to toe in a checkerboard/crossword pattern and Ishmael is dismayed at this initial physical introduction.

But there will much more to the story of QQ. Heathen, defender, gentleman and harpooner, his actions will be the forever journal Ishmael is forced to process against his ghastly first impression.

The first three crew mates we meet are worlds on themselves. Ismael as the observer. The critic. the center of experience about to enter the least centered landscape on the planet, the deep deep ocean. Bulkington, a man on fire to stay on fire, yet at the sometime he is water incarnate, cursed to forever flow or dissipate into the nothingness of the atmosphere, fighting his mortality in a life led under the false premise a man in motion cannot die.
And Queequeg, QQ, the tattooed savage. The man of action from worlds unknowable by Ishmael. The man on no ego, no pretense, the living man, tattooed by life and living his story. Defaced on the outside but truly living from a wise and human core.

All to step off into the death of the sea. All life built on death.
The baptism of sea travel.
Sea service.

The change a man is forced upon after months on top of a potential watery coffin 24 hours a day.

Like Hart Crane, the 20th century American poet, called a modern-day Walt Whitman, they will feel the call of the sea. Crane stared for hours at the wake behind his early 20th century schooner making its journey between the Caribbean and NYC. Lost in the questions of the ocean, its loving whispers of spray letting him know he will never be alone, until one day he leapt into the deep blue arms of his lethal lover and was lost from the world in a millisecond of release to that which is greater.

Dead but not gone. Buried but free. Lost to the dream and forever trapped in his heaven.

When I prepare to speak, lecture or train, I have two options prior to beginning the presentation. I can try to rigidly stick to the old discoveries and breakthroughs I have had and further some sortof  fictitious image of myself OR drop any image I hold of myself to myself and enjoy the moments of the speech as they happen, creating something organic, revolutionary and authentic.

When the fear presents itself in my stomach and demands a rebuttal to its physical query, my mind will flood me with ideas on how to emulate past talks and guarantee myself the praise and acknowledgement I have once experienced.

I fight from this position and through a series of questions to my frail ego; I plunder the idea of me I am trying to protect through simple negation.

Who will be embarrassed? What am I trying to protect? Is fear bad and why respond to it? Who are you looking to to validate and generate this idea of Eric Arauz? Why must the clock of psychological time keep ticking? Why must you even have a you?

And with each discovery the leaden cloak of self dissipates on my bones until I stand there devoid of an  I and devoid of You? In this Buberian ‘divinity by assocition’, the world is me and I am the world.

I can now see each veteran up close and without a windshield to dampen my pain. Their blue hats with thick gold stitching announcing to the world their ship, their unit, their battles, their wars, and their lives, sit comfortably on their unkempt crowns. Men in walkers, carry oxygen and rolling forward in their wheelchairs fill the front rows of chairs in my view and stare vacantly at me.

I see their bloodshot eyes and filthy, crusted fingers. I smell them from 50 feet away and know them as my brothers. I see their childhoods and young adult lives as they readied for active duty in their beloved country’s fighting forces. I know their pride and optimism as they raised their right hands to be sworn into the divine lineage of women and men that fought for something bigger than Self; for You.

I have known the sorrow and pain of diagnosis of serious mental illness and wallowed in the suicidal despair of our shared lives as we crashed through the floors of our lives that were on fire with our dreams and into the nightmare of this hospital. This ward. This NOW.

My fuse is nearing ignition as the group takes their places. The staff tells me not to worry if THEY don’t pay attention.  But there is no They, only Us, only We. And into the ALL of my life and pain, my future and dreams, All that I ever could have been and ever so subtly “Am”, I explode into the maelstrom of the perplexed energy of the room.

The cognitive linguist Umberto Eco argues back and  forth whether in our conversations with the world and ourselves whether the primary block to understanding is mental cognition or linguistic recognition. Here in this room I offer the landscape of my existence in a vernacular of suffering that  SPEAKS THROUGH THE WALLS CONSTRUCTED BY MENTAL ILLNESS, BY CULTURE, BY GEOGRAPHICAL SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND BARREL INTO THE SOULS OF MY FAMILY, OF MY FATHER, OF MY DILAPIDATED  SELF TO A MOMENT BURNED OFF OF DELUSION AND CONCRETE IN ITS REALITY.

Knowing the time is over for the day of sharing, emptied from the catharthis of my confession, more St. Augustine than  Rousseau, I hug who will hug me and make my way out to my car.

Leaving the grounds, I look back over my shoulder at this Somerset County Hades and know it is one big ward for me now and I no longer desire release. I am neither patient nor doctor. Not disease or recovery. Not anything and therefore…everything.

Vedanta is a Hindu philosophy based on the transgression of knowledge, tradition and bias. No psychological knowledge: No Mind. It is freedom of existence available to the student of its practice and then non-practice. It is the flow of a universe in motion and not fixed in the sophomoric ideas welded in place by unyielding beliefs and cemented doctrines about self and the world. It is Connection and Impermanence.

Trauma fixes an occurrence or system of occurences in place and the emotions, terrors and lacerations build upon themselves to lock the victim in place. Trauma without treatment places the victim in a mental isolation that blocks calls for help inwardly and outwardly from arriving to their destinations. Trauma has a victim and a transgressor. The transgressor can be nature, accident, man or woman and animal. It is almost always from the outside and the current political climate will dictate how hard society fights to right the systematic biases in place to allow these crimes to re-occur.

Mental illness and its traumas are unique. We are victims of ‘ourselves’. The disease lives in our blood and no governmental proxy will be able to protect us from us. We are subjugated to the plantations of our minds to be  whipped by our corrupted mental master until we are broken from our episodes and awakened to the horrific actions against self and family our disease has taken in our absence from lucidity.

The trauma is ever-present as we try to navigate back to the world wearing the scars of our myopic wars without any guarantee this psychological civil war will not break out in its personal genocide again. Ever present of our own destruction and constantly rebuilding a life we abandoned years prior, we become permanent victims; abandoned by our rescuers we die to our life and our future. We have welded a mask of loss and pain onto our skin and it will remain for perpetuity. The Iron Maiden of our disease can shut us off from the world and bury us in plain sight.

The use of mindfulness in DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, is a good start but immature in its desire to aid the traumatized and mentally ill or both, back to the world. Mindfulness and its attempts to be in the present are needed but flawed in its reliance on the self to transgress itself. It creates another set of knowledge based beliefs to take the place of the damaging ones from the past life and forces a constant battle between here and now and then.

Vedanta with its speakers, Krishnamurti, Romain Rolland, Ramakrishna and others allows for the ultimate knowledge of the fallacy of any self and the need to drop mind from the equation. To enter into mental disease is not to ‘lose one’s mind’ but to be lost ’In” ones mind  and its ever solidifying beliefs. The ability of Vedanta to show a reader to move into the evolving universe and stand away from their past and present can be a tremendous tool for those in society such as myself that have a personal history beyond charismatic biographical rewriting.

Vedanta can help trauma victims traumatized by themselves, which ultimately we all are, in our ever consuming self lacerations of horrors in the past and allow for a Resurrection to the sunshine and optimism of a moment truly not dictated by yesterday or tomorrow. It is the observance of and then stepping into the flowing River of Life and stepping away from the stagnate pond of despair so many of my brothers and sistesr on the brink of suicide and death are drowning in.

Look into Vedanta for the escape of a personal and cultural super-ego that fixes you in place with the belief that your thoughts are facts and can therefore be punished the same as actions. Live in the potentiality of now and keep reaching back into those stagnate ponds and re-light your human family.

Sincerely,

Virgil

As I would cycle deeper into my manic states, I would lose my connection to the world outside of my cycling psyche and I would lose contact with myself. The disease cements your thoughts in place as fantasy and delusion become reality. Mania is a self validating disorder. It takes any thought presented itself and rules it fact and absorbs it without any doubt or skepticism. It becomes a death row confinement that in its isolation strands the prisoner in his cell.

When my episodes would be broken with a pharmaceutical interruption I would be jettisoned back to the world. The journey back behind my eyes to reality was disorienting and terrifying. I would be introduced to the actions I took in my manic rampage and be forced to pay the debts of a madman I had never met. The disease car-jacked my body and the damage was never fixed quickly. More devastating than the simple problems of material loss and criminal activities would be the psychological lacerations that would scrape and twist my spirit.

I would pull back farther and farther from society as I entered each hospital. I was a stranger to myself and feared my mentally ill metamorphoses as they became greater in number. I saw a life layed out in front of me each time that was not worth fighting for, not worth overcoming for, not worth living.

The existential pain of burning a life to the ground each time you build it is exhausting and debilitating. Life loses its power of attraction and it becomes a process to endure. each breath leads to another against your will and the free floating agitation of a life lived in neutral dims the light on a future needless in its feigned and saccharin optimism.

I would die each time I left the hospital and my sins were delineated in front of me by my family, friends, authorities and strangers. No part of my existence was not coated by the shadow of despair. The way cancer paints the inside of a house with a loved one on hospice, my disease painted my body from the inside until it finally laid its black brush behind my eyes and blotted out the sun of existence.

My deadened corpse was no longer lit from the inside with a light that was looking for communion with the sun of society. I dreamed in death and wept in my promised demise until it would finally end. An unending conversation began in my head. Thoughts of all I had lost and failed at in life screamed throughout my skull as a perpetual soundtrack to the wreckage of my life. I could not hear the rescue attempts made from outside the scope of my myopic mind. In a universe ever expanding, a universe based on interconnection, a universe where no thing has ever been separate, alone, itself; I sat like a black hole of depression and despair, hating the life beaten down upon me and needing an end for this open-ended epic of pain.

Suicide whispered to me each day and when the screams were loudest and the black paint its thickest, it screamed at me to stop being such a fucking coward. As I went about my day-to-day business, talking to friends, eating with family, watching TV-it screamed for its will to be done. “Fucking Kill Yourself You Fucking Coward-NOW-DO IT NOW!!!”

I would weep and audibly scream at this thought in my head-No! NO! NO NO NO!!!!!!!!!!!!! until I would collapse upon myself-a dark and defeated star in a cold and hateful universe, with no orbit and no sun.

The answer came in many ways but none from myself. Others that had the luck to survive this common onslaught of self-destruction reached into my darkness to let me believe in the light again. I couldn’t look at the sun that powered their actions but in their touch I felt the heat of an outside source. Anything that was not me was enough to start the walk back up my circles of death to eventually scream open-mouthed back into a world I was sure wanted me dead.

The reality of my life was not painted in false pictures to elicit a purely positive landscape but instead was realistically exposed to me by people who would not let me walk alone.

I found people and then literature to speak to my broken spirit and eventually gained the ability to speak to myself while forever tethered to my sanghra. I have survived and I  live with my burns and lacerations forever exposed to a universe of love and potential and to let others lost in the cement sea of self to see a lighthouse that was once floundering in the blinding waves of depression, bipolar disease and suicidal obsession. The only difference is this lighthouse will swim out to you and blow into your lungs to help you live and when you drag yourself back to shore, you must eventually look  back and survey this ocean of despair and shine your lightforever looking for survivors. It is in this act that you will never burn alive from the inside again.

Sincerely,

Virgil

My father had destroyed my family and my life and when I was told that I had a mental disorder I just could not let myself accept it. The doctor was asking me to put a label on my life that trumped all others. No matter what else I had been in my life the diagnosis washed over and tainted the others. To admit I was bipolar was to admit I would die in the streets like my father. It was to admit that my life and mind were no longer my own. It was to admit defeat and I just couldn’t do that when I was released from my first hospital.

I chased other outside labels for 12 months after my release from the hospital. I took martial arts and gained entry to NYU. I was going to BEAT my disorder. I was going to be Captain Bipolar. I was fighting for my life the only way I knew how and I failed. I was put in the VA Psych hospital max security ward and I found out what true suffering was. I was beaten and restrained and screamed into the night to die while lashed to a bed for over a day.

When I was released I was less concerned with the diagnosis and more concerned with my mortality. I truly thought I would die and the cement shackles of being Bipolar did not weigh as heavy on my mind.

I knew my life depended on redefining what Bipolar disorder meant to me. I would have to see my father as a sick man not a monster, therefore I could see myself without the hate and shame I had defined my father with for 25 years.

I could step forward and live without the bias and translation based in my diagnosis. My life would be dictated by my daily actions and the open page sat blank in front me as I stepped into this new future.

Patients given devastating diagnosis are asked to imbibe the term and move forward as if the fight is a given. Many in my population do not want to fight. The journey can seem to difficult and the reward promised for compliance not enough.

When asked to take meds, change all your habits and commit to a life only offering half-dreams, many will not give a true effort as they see no goal on the horizon worth the suffering.

We all needs stereotypes of success to point us the right direction. These people can reach back over the broken lives and existential effort to pull us forward in our journeys. I would become my own stereotype of success.

Whatever struggles you have had in your life , you can be that hand across the canyon of despair others are currently in fighting to believe and then survive. Never stop looking for those opportunities to help others deal with new diagnosis and heartaches. You don’t know when you will need that same hand to alleviate your suffering and give light to your darkened steps. Give utility to your suffering and find divinity in the cessation of another’s pain. It is heaven on earth and your connection to eternity.

I am successful today because of my Bipolar disorder not in spite of it.

Virgil

My biological father suffered from mental illness. He took severe physical actions against  me as a child. He beat me with belts and bats and would strike me full force in the face with his fists. Psychologically his assaults were mostly abandonment. He would drop me off in towns I have never been in and come back hours later. In his last residence in Jersey City, he would lock me outside and make me wander the streets. I can remember playing Tempest and listening to Stevie Nicks in an inner-city arcade killing time.

He tried to murder me in a school parking lot while he was symptomatic.

I would later be diagnosed with my own mental illness-Bipolar 1 disorder- and cycle in and out of 3 max security psych hospitals. This would include a max security VA Psych hospital where I was restrained over 15 times including one evolution that lasted over 24 hours.

I have screamed into the anonymous VA night for forgiveness and when that did not come I screamed for my own death.

As I have journeyed back to society, reality and redemption, I found that I was lost to how the world thought and I was lost to myself. I had a free-floating pain that coated everything I saw and experienced.

I was like a caveman or astronaut experiencing life. I would walk among you and inside myself I was screaming behind my eyes at the life of pain I had experienced. I wept in my thoughts at the prospect of more hospitals, more loss, more time in the restraints.  I was burning alive from the inside out and didn’t know how to ask for the fire extinguisher.

This Existential Illiteracy and my inability to put voice to my hells was killing me. I needed connection with you and myself. I needed someone to translate this pain. The greatest failing of therapists is their belief that in talk therapy that the client has the words to express themselves. Combine that with the therapist’s(MD. MSW, M. ED, Ph. D.) own existential illiteracy and you have a team of two lost in the woods with maps written by thousands of others on how to get out but not one to tell you where you are.

I would eventually  find a Vernacular for my Suffering when I started to look anywhere and everywhere for people who have been though pain or simply life. I first heard it in 12 step meetings, then in discussion groups in day programs for people with mental illness like myself, then war survivors, mothers giving birth or losing children, rape victims, domestic violence victims, Holocaust survivors and others. They discussed their suffering, depression, degradation, desire to die, hopelessness, blackness, emptiness, isolation, fear, fear, fear, fear and its 1000′s of manifestations….How would we make another day?

I then found this same voice in literature. I could hear Sartre’s anguish in his writings on the human condition, I found voice in Dostoevsky’s chronicling of families riddled with guilt and shame, Willa Cather’s brooding optimism in her frontier heart and Ellison’s screams for recognition.

But it was one writer that woke me up to a vein of language that would grip my heart and squeeze out the isolation. WEB Du Bois. Du Bois and his The Soul of Black Folk let me into the desecration of spirit leveled upon the American slave. It introduced me to the idea of a’ Double Consciousness’ where you are so bankrupt of identity that you allow an outside entity determine your soul. In the case of the recently released slave in the mid-nineteenth century and myself as a seriously mentally ill man, society hated us and we imbibed the societal stigma and sewed it into ourselves with the needle and thread of self stigma. Du Bois’s ‘Veil’ not only hung between the slave and society but the slave and themselves. We were as blind inwardly as we were outwardly.

From this discovery of Du Bois, my existential language skills blossomed as I had a communal voice to sing with into my pain. I did not suffer like the slaves of America but in their experience I found myself. I learned a ‘Vernacular of Suffering’ that captured the pain of my youth and the hell of incarceration in the hospitals. I found in Blues, Walt Whitman, O’Neil and Arendt, translators to lead me to me.

Severe suffering and trauma leads one very deeply away from themselves. There are a multitude of techniques used to bring connection to those that have had great trauma and loss. These techniques range from therapeutic dogs to laugh therapy. No matter the treatment the patient will need to be able to speak to themselves and normalize what has transpired so pieces of their own psyche are not off-limits to their own mind.

Existential illiteracy is not the rare disorder of the mentally ill, traumatized or punished. It is a problem that when one is forced to confront can lead to a universal communion on the other side of bone breaking isolation and pain. It can show you that the world is also speaking a ‘Vernacular of Redemption and Resurrection’. You can find it in music and movies and hear it in the literary songs of Romain Rolland, Krishnamurti, Thich Nhat Hahn, RUMI, Shankara, Martin Buber, Amma, Mother Theresa and others.

We must have the fortitude to find where we are before we can map our way out. You are not alone and never will be. I have sat behind your eyes and suffered with you. I have found the words to lead you into yourself and will not dessert you in your hell. As you turn to face your darkness and lean over the abyss of your pain, I am holding on to your belt with tens of thousands holding on to mine. I will not drop you. You will survive.

Sincerely,

Virgil

Ask yourself this. Are you the label you welded in place sitting in junior high school convincing yourself that your social status will change with such an existential imbibement?

Are you a proud Republican or delighted Democrat forever fighting for “your” side? Are you pro-this or anti-that and have your formed your psyche around that infantile assertion?

Could you simply be here? Is this enough? Can you listen to the universe and feel its pulsing energy behind all that “is” and yet not label the manifestation to create the image of it?

It is easier practiced to another. Can you see your husband today? Not the image of a thousands conversations and arguments. Not the idea of him. But the man looking at you in the moment. His reality. With his fears and hopes but without your translation. Can you see yourself that way? Without the connection to car and community. The you that wanted simply to love and be loved as a child and is still that which is  looking out older but the same eyes. See your loved ones today as is, without bias, trying to live in this world also and without the answer either. Find true love in the lack of story and then turn that same compassionate gaze on your self. Heaven is here, it is applied compassion.

Can you not translate what is spilling into your senses and ride the river without beginning or end? Can you finally see the love in a world beyond measurement against arbitrary markers posted in the fallacy of the nostalgic and castigating past?

Stay with me……pull back behind the illusion….de-center……listen.

You don’t have to be encumbered with the heretic screams of a cruel and pernicious super-ego.

Drop the story of you that you have been whispering into your own ears since you were old enough to fall from the group and digest the bitter apple of damnation and isolation.

You are what it is you decide to do this moment. The past has no bearing on the push and pull of your daily effort. God, god, the way, divinity is never in your subjective past and future-It is only here, dancing on the ends of your fingertips and nibbling on your ears.

You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV 4.5

Put me back together or separate the skin from bone
Leave me all the pieces
Then you can leave me alone

Tell me the reality is better than the dream
But I’ve found out the hard way
Nothing is what it seems

SLIPKNOT “Duality”

The role of Virgil will be celebrated here. We have all been to our own personal hells and many of us are there presently. This blog is dedicated to the idea of finding Utility for our  Suffering. A place to sing freely with your wounds exposed to a world that is easier to live in with teammates.

I am a professional mental health advocate and inspirational speaker that experienced trauma and heartache at a brutal level during my childhood. I have watched my father in his mental disease wage war on my mother and sisters; and stared down the front of his car as he tried to run down my 12-year-old body.

I have understood pain, suffering, degradation and humiliation since I could spell my own name. I was sure I was meant to suffer alone and when I was strapped to a restraining bed in a maximum security ward of a VA psych hospital for over 24 hours and screamed for my death; I was sure i was stepping over the event horizon of my predicted death into the misery of 1000 years waiting to tear me to pieces.

Alas, that would not come to pass. I have stepped from the hells of my mental disease and journey around the state of New Jersey and the rest of the United States looking for survivors of the hells of everyday life and let them know they are not alone. I offer them a vernacular of suffering to translate their own pain and I hold their belts while they look over the edge of the dark parts of their life to see the reality of their trauma and to wash away the emotional hyperbole that hides our lives.

I am free and constantly looking over the landscape of our shared lives for other Virgils to guide me into myself and out to the non-biased, image-less now.

This site will discuss the questions of disconnection that run behind all our eyes; surgeons, stewards, sopranos, teachers, technicians, transit cops, hoboes, harpists, heretics, daughters, dentists, drivers, mothers, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces and nerds.

You are not alone. You are connected. The lie of the ego tells you that you exist on an island and your super ego tells you that you  are wrong for questioning the lie.

Here, we are free to reach our hands back into the darkness to saves those unable to save themselves. Here, we find solace in the collective and exist in relationship to all. Here, we know we are free to fail and fall. Here, we stand and scream to a world we have never known until this single moment that we will never suffer alone again and that we are Virgils All!!!