Preface

Writing begins as an effort toward autobiography, as an attempt to say something true about oneself. Invariably, writing breaks out of its mold and takes on a life of its own. Herein lies its fascination.

You are beginning to read a tale about the genesis, gestation and delivery of a literary work some twenty years in the making. I found the raw material---detailed poetic recordings of a young student and traveller---in a series of 15-20 handscrawled journals in a boarding house up on frat row at the U of Washington in Seattle back in 1997. They gave me this attic room to live in, and in the corner of one of the closets, I found a door into the attic proper. Dust,strained light, books everywhere. As I dusted off a rather large stack, I decided to have a peek inside as a dare, in the hope that it might be intriguing. Opening up anywhere I came upon this fine description of sunset in Seattle: "The sun has set leaving an orange aura above the farthest high hills. The sky climbs from this burneated orange up to an amazing blue, upon crystal clear blue, from aquamarine through lime-blue, dispersing prismatically into the darkening ultramarine blue overhead when the first star is awake. Depth is gone from the horizon---all of the houses and trees are in a dark monotone, as in a painting by Magritte." To be honest my appetite had been whetted, and there it was a cache of handwritten journals with no name for identification. And it fell to me to sift through, authenticate, situate and interpret these writings.

As a researcher and authority on American manuscripts, it is my job to know whether a literary work is worth its salt or is simply the puerile slobberings of some pathetic primadonna who thinks she is gifted. I also substantiate first editions and rare books for as a professional consultant. This is solid work, I enjoy my profession. The more I read into those journals, the more I discovered. Unanswered mysteries: who was the author? How did he know so much about psychiatry and so on...? Well it occurred to me that the journals exemplified periods of exaltation, spiritual highs, knowledge explosions, and then crashes, Icarus in Brueghel, dark upon dark. One of my colleagues at school, Dr. Guido Van der Veken, is head psychiatrist at St. Luke's University Hospital. I asked him one morning over coffee at Starbuck's whether he might be willing to read one of the journals. This writer's grasp of the mood disorder was impeccable. It is rare to see such clarity with regard to one's own mental functions. Guido's conclusion was that in fact there is a connection in these journals between the moodswings reported and the particular words and expressions recorded in the journals. For example, if the writer was in a state of hypomania, he wrote with one lexicon: swirling, ecstasy, celestial and light imagery. When the state was depression, the lyric poetry dries up, and words like 'shadow', 'harbinger', 'dust' appear and take hold. The entries are dated so we can more or less get a chronology or periodicity of these 'episodes'.

Two themes are at play here which are inextricably bound in the literary work, or at least, in what this literary work aspired to be. First of all there is the attempt of a young writer to establish and discover his personality through writing and literary production. The other theme is our interpretation of the the role that manic-depressive "moodswings" plays in this young writer's narrative..