Follow You Down to the Red Oak Tree
Beast Body Epic Soundtrack
This is for section III of Beast Body Epic. James Vincent McMorrow’s voice has an ethereal, airy sound that suits this section for me.
The section begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno: “I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” The accompanying visual poem uses the text from this epigraphy and is also on the cover.
This feeling of having gone astray is the way it seems to me, the way my health crisis made me feel, especially the delusions: scared and disoriented and continued to haunt me, still do sometimes.
As I was recovering in the hospital, my body felt heavy, as if I had been pulled down into the darkness and couldn’t really climb out.
I mention Persephone in this section, a reference to the Underworld. The red in this book comes from blood and hell, a bloody hell, but also from the joy of surviving, of being alive, a kind of vibrancy, that you probably notice when you see me.
The delusions felt completely real to me, the horror of the sound of a foot on the stairs leading to my dark basement room, the looming shape holding out a hand, being carved up into a torso and a head, and put in cages, all the mocking laughter of the medical staff. I could go on and on. I finally was able to tell the difference between reality and the delusions by the way the hands of the clock on the wall hanging across from my bed looked. If there were only one set of hands, I was fully in reality, if there were two, and one was going backwards…delusion time. I have to tell you, I doubt there was a big clock hanging on the wall in my room. So … nice try subconscious. To this day I mention something about that time to Charles and he explains that it wasn’t real.
I still wake up with a clenched jaw. I still wake up curled up tightly as if I am protecting my body.
What surprised me when I first started to put these delusions on paper is that they made me laugh. I know this is dire stuff, but being able to express it rather than to let it fester inside my overactive imagination…that helped a great deal. Now I get to share it with you and I hope that you’ll find some joy in my sharing it too, some sense of release.
The other thing that I thought after the delusions stopped was how awful it would be if they never stopped. What if I was never able to tell the difference between reality and the delusions. There are people in that situation. I feel so badly for them. I know a little bit what that is like. I feel more compassionate towards those with mental health issues than I used to. I feel more compassion for those living with any kind of health issue.
Sometimes while I’m out walking, the person in front of me is walking really slowly. It used to make me impatient, but now I just give them a lot of space and continue slowly behind them, trying not to rush them. Disability can be invisible or subtle to the eye. Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. That’s something I’ve learned.
“Names get carved in the red oak tree
Of the ones who stay and the ones who leave
I will wait for you there with these cindered bones
So follow me, follow me down”
James Vince McMorrow, Follow Me Down to the Red Oak Tree
You can listen to the Spotify Playlist or the Youtube Playlist for more music that I chose for Beast Body Epic.