Editor's Note: "On Either/Or" is part of Michael Juliani's poetic series, From Young Rooms.

I.  Contradiction is what keeps sanity in place.  —Flaubert  

“I am a poet, so I can contradict myself,” I think, closing up shop in my mind for the night.  This is an idea that has no use but to comfort myself.  Nobody else cares.  Everyone else knows this about everyone else already. 

II.  There ain’t no devil, only God when he’s drunk.  —Tom Waits

Every once in a while I’ll have a dream in which, by drinking with me, men I admire begin to destroy themselves.  In the dreams, I’m able to stop drinking at the right time, and I watch as the other man begins to slouch further onto the floor, getting mean and helpless.  In one case, I’m trying to help a man, a writer I love, get cognizant and cleaned up for when his wife and newborn daughter come home.  I’m horrified, and trying to stuff enough food in my mouth to mask the smell of booze.  The harder I try to get him to panic, the smugger he gets.  He wants this scene of catastrophe to take place.  You all deserve it, he says.  

III.  The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.  —William Blake 

I have not read Artaud, but yesterday—happily stuck on the mattress after waking to the house so quiet I thought it was empty—I read a quote of his in someone else’s book: “I think both the theater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology.”  The author who quoted Artaud said, “I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.”  I believe she said this with Artaud’s line in mind, given her significant desire.  Artaud’s line sickened me at first, like realizing the difficulty of what I must do, an abstract pull towards a blissful, lion-like way of life.  Like the No Man’s Land between independence and freedom.  Maybe this thought—which shatters the construct of my family’s symbiosis (and my mother’s career as a shrink)—also crushes the Either/Or, and offers something new.  I must believe that this “something new” doesn’t create a narcissist or a degenerate, but one who breathes the sublime, a version of myself that exists but isn’t manifest.  So maybe I can stop this recent business of looking at people always wondering first what their problems are.  Maybe the mind—mine or theirs—is not what is.  Maybe freedom is what is.  But there’s no doubting the “new-normal” feel you get after forty-five minutes of therapy, even if the dialogue makes me view myself in dualities.  I know the Either/Or is convenient but false, since below that split space I can sense a commingled pit, like walking through a cave to a pitch-black clearing, where you can sense the drop in space with your hand, and know that there’s water beneath it.

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