Two Poems from An Elastic State of Mind

Wednesday Poems (Audio)

I first read about Dorothea Lynde Dix when I was in high school. I don’t understand why the woman haunts me. I took her on then, as a teenager, presenting a monologue in a history competition. My mother even made a costume for me.¹

I wrote and produced a play about her while working on my BA in theater—and much later, I wrote and published an imaginative autobiography in verse as part of my dissertation for my Creative Writing PhD.

I doubt I’m finished with her.

Dix was a celebrity in her time, renown for her voice and demeanour perhaps as much as for her work on behalf of the section of America’s indigent population that suffered from mental illnesses. Her accounts of visits to existing “care” facilities makes for bone-chilling reading, and in recounting her experiences, she has been given credit for developing the genre of American oratory.

Dix was the first woman in American history to have an office in the capital building—at a time when women weren’t permitted to speak in Congress. But make no mistake: she was not a proto-feminist. And that’s probably why she’s not as well known as some of her contemporaries, for example Florence Nightingale.² Among her accomplishments, she established 32 hospitals for the mentally ill. Never married, childless, and having outlived her only sibling, Dix spent her final years living in one of them.

I don’t know how many of her contemporaries knew that Dix herself suffered from recurring episodes of mental illness. Months of melancholy followed by months of intense productivity. She described it as “an elastic state of mind”. I recognise it as potentially bipolar disorder. In one of her letters, she wrote that writing poetry exacerbated her “no-thing disease”. But she continued to write: poetry, textbooks, orations, letters.

Dix’s closest friends complained about her self-absorption, and neediness. But they also recognized her sincere devotion. I don’t think I would have liked Dix much, had I been forced to spend time with her in the real world, and I’m certain she would not approve of me. Yet: how can anyone not admire such a force of (a sometimes twisted) nature?

At the age of 13, Dix ran away from her father’s humble house, where she spent her days hand-stitching his religious tracts. She showed up on the doorstep of her Grandmother’s mansion. And in this mansion, at the age of 15, Dix opened a school for the town’s poor children who would otherwise not have had access to an education.

It’s impossible to know what motivated Dix in all that she did. But most often I think it doesn’t matter—we can never know that about anyone. Do we even know what really motivates our own actions?

Dix Manion
Boston, Massachusetts 1814

Dix Mansion is white sheets and posture
devotions and Grandmother’s matt eyes
picking up the stitch of Grandfather’s soft-
cornered pipe smoke in the library

I am the favored child of the dead physician’s
disrespectful son who married beneath him
who put his hands into the mouth of the Lord
and pulled them out again glazed
as evangelical as touched as Lazarus

I am the unexpected bleeding
stepping off the stagecoach unannounced
in tight shoes and a christening dress

I am the melodrama dripping
in the entrance hall

I am the pigeon come home to roost
the statement the penny edition the very well

Miss Dix Opens a School for the Indigent 1816

With Grandmother’s seam ripper
I let down the hems of her skirts

With prudent stitching I lengthen the sleeves
because my limbs reach farther than hers

I am the chastened recipient of her bound profile
wasp-waisted

holding a wooden paddle
hand-me-down witness to maturity

I cut the leaves of Grandfather’s leather-bound
volumes pronouncing genus and species and behavior

Premenarcheal teacher-pupil the butterfly:
Lepidopetra means Scaled Wings the female

lacks alar spots
ingests its own chrysalis

The righteous child-mother the schoolmistress
Dorotheus means gift of God the student

submits to direction
swallows her own wisdom

(An Elastic State of Mind. D.L.D.’s Autobiography in Poems. Wigestrand forlag 2012)

Thank you for taking the time to read/listen. If you have any comments, I would love to read them.

I hope you have a great week!

Warmly,

Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.

1. Having been estranged from my mother for the 34 years prior to her death, this is a bittersweet memory that comes unexpectedly. I am grateful.

2. Dix actually thwarted an assassination attempt on her acquaintance Lincoln once. But that’s a longer footnote. Don’t get me started on her relationship with Millard Fillmore.