GUEST WRITER/ANTHONY CHARLES BRENTON
A luxury of Mistakes
© Anthony Charles Brenton: portrait of the writer
About the author
Anthony Charles Brenton is a poet and novelist living in Newfoundland & Labrador, duck-footed and hunched over his work, housed lovely with his wife and two children. As someone battling with mental illness since early childhood and on heavy medication for the majority of his life, I have proposed Anthony to write for the second time an article revolving around mental illness, writing, and precarity. I kindly thank him for generously accepting my offer.
Anthony has written articles for CBC, local papers and recently an anthology on the subject of mental illness. A wild story of medication, hospitalizations, ECT, poverty and writing. He has published so far Near Death, Maccles/The Honk of Goose/an of rearing a youngster/The Mechanical Egg Bughouse/Daybreak, Saint City/Lowlands Gulp. Anthony is currently writing three books of poems: A Coughing Fit of Psalms/A Skeleton’s Clack/For The Blind.
© Anthony Charles Brenton
A luxury of Mistakes
© Anthony Charles Brenton
“I learned how to see paintings by writing poetry and reading the words of holy people, monsters! Eating the paper of scientists (bless your rainbow soul Dr. Hoffman!). Downing psychiatric medications by the handful to try and write in text the song of birds.”
Aside from functionally reshaping the palette and miscoloring the form, I had begun to harvest the faults of my consciousness as a bridge between the worlds of nonsense and of commonality in painting and called it Schizocartoonism; these tendencies of silliness in hearing, absurd and terrifying visions, and an obsession in the language of images, rendered in acrylic.
I learned how to see paintings by writing poetry and reading the words of holy people, monsters! Eating the paper of scientists (bless your rainbow soul Dr. Hoffman!). Downing psychiatric medications by the handful to try and write in text the song of birds. To revel in delirium/sweet, sweet disorientation, to have auditory impairment, to have visions and poor sight, to have an imagination too large. I believed writers who drank themselves to death. Men who took drugs to their deathbeds. Those who were so very romantic about their time in prison. Poetry. Crime. Genius. Dressing the part, reading the newspaper, living in dives, madhouses, on couches. The bedbugs rained from my blankets as the shivers woke me, startled. It was only when I settled therein, that I could look at a Masterpiece and see it. Before I could take any inspiration, and once I witnessed that drop off from reality, I awoke an avenue of scrambling coherence.
© Anthony Charles Brenton
A tarn of boiling faces surged through me at all points then. My skin crawling in waves up the aching spine and into my hairdo as my mind recoiled in horror from the poetic hellmouth which had lodged itself within the brain-folds. Just a walking cartoon in the hallways of the ill. Sweating out the foul residue of Rx sickness. Horrid! Horrid is thy fried mind. Thus, I hatched a plan to come off of all medications under the scrutiny of my psychiatrist. To remove the pharmacopoetic tit. The resolution to unhook from this type of medication regiment is a long and agonizing process. It cannot be made in a fit of depression, or herculean mania, but a decision of hard contemplation and introspection that takes serious calendar time. The chemistry of reality is on the line. An abysmal fall could be the result. Tossed from your meager pain into a darkness from which some never recover, a pit of irreparable nonsense.
© Anthony Charles Brenton
I could feel the strangeness of bent reality sneaking upon me then. A vibration in the body, like being pelted with warm water, and a swimming head, a thinning school of apothecary fish confounded and dizzied me. In the clockwork of detoxification the first days of acute reduction were not altogether unpleasant: trembling muscles, mild visual distortion, electrical head, runny
nose, vivid dreams, and racing thoughts. The first cracks in a crumbling, unveiling dawn. The growing of cartoon bones.
By the time I squished my last dose, the niceties dropped off rapidly in a seasick tumbling. I was in a total struggle of sorting and reckoning input. Then a strong psychedelic vertigo, with an underlying stimulant mania, jigged at the old withdrawal strings. The adrenaline and alertness of a pursued animal scrambled my rapid inner-eye cartoons in insomnia’s daybreak. Creeping visuals. Rubber teeth. A lostness where the lord god tempts with salvation.
© Anthony Charles Brenton
The weight of memory makes the days and hours very long. Like an uncrackable knuckle. And a new capacity for information retention arose out of the amnesiac fog. Notating the floodgates.
And the continuity of existence is weighty! A rapid jumble of memories, intrusive thoughts and overlapping images. I’m exhausted by the tremendous and unprecedented build up, buckled under the weight of piling time.
Reality began coming again, overwhelmingly to the forefront in an emotional display of learning. Humanity suddenly comprehended with a rush of grief. And a nauseous panic swung off my deflated stomach like a drowsy egg.
“The idea now, properly medicated and well healed, is that I must harvest the mistakes of my mind. When it missteps, when it misfires, when I was downright wrong. When I mishear a sentence. A rumble of conversation, like a crowded bar between songs, full of drunks pontificating and regaling.”
© Anthony Charles Brenton
The years-long ignorance of my physical body returned absolutely to the forefront. Lungs, back, and belly got it special, as the boundaries of my anatomy blurred in a panic. The unconscious limits of the self melted away, lost in a static, cringing as my nerves jumped and sang, setting the corpse into fits. My morning eyes bulge from brown sockets as I shuffle duckfoot and hunchback to my work. Behold! I squirm before the typing machine, and brush around colour in a contemplative fever, completely unable to relax out of this wooden knot, tapping a foot to no tune. For, beyond the control of numbness sits the ape, itchy and smarting, reeling from the jump headfirst out of the Rx bottle for a permanent fix. Enduring its fading into something less than a whisper. Then rearing up with a roar of life amid the bustle of colour, out of the sickbed I look around, a carrion scavenger and dodge away from my hermitage, wild-eyed and belly-sick, heels clacking.
“Art is not a coherent life. There is no singular definition. Do not think you can solve it. It is as varied as humanity itself, and there is no extreme that a brute will refuse.”
© Anthony Charles Brenton
An absolute ordeal! The worst and most profound trip I had ever been on. With a ghastly comedown for weeks, months! Years later and I’m rapturous with the visions and insight of a nostrum fast.
The idea now, properly medicated and well healed, is that I must harvest the mistakes of my mind. When it missteps, when it misfires, when I was downright wrong. When I mishear a sentence. A rumble of conversation, like a crowded bar between songs, full of drunks pontificating and regaling. I pick up on some louder than others. The thinnest of meats one says. Mistyped words, malapropism, misquote. Art is not a coherent life. There is no singular definition. Do not think you can solve it. It is as varied as humanity itself, and there is no extreme that a brute will refuse. Consciousness is a fragmented coagulation of experience with endless variables, thus unpredictable in some instances. Generalizations are a mistake, usually,especially with the animal homo sapien. A confounding divergence from harmony.
No single unified truth!
Art is freedom occasionally. Part of its beauty. And if any artist or critic or mystic or cleric or child prodigy or septuagenarian tries to impart upon you the secret of art, fill your ears with the honey of loud colour to record your consciousness into a score as they talk.
More information about Anthony Brenton’s work:
Instagram: @your_uncle_tone
Articles for CBC news: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/author/anthony-brenton-1.5471695
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