The Birth of Poetry

FOREWORD

        Having been advised throughout time to not "wear my disease on my sleeve", I have taken into account of the possible stigma surrounding mental illness. It is true. Typically, upon introduction, people do not mention their ailments. Schizophrenia, however, affects/effects thought, language, and behavior so pervasively that an explanation is order in the context of sociability.

                 The writing style of this novella is highly idiosyncratic and utterly of different character than the traditional work of fiction. Having earned a writing degree from the university, it almost became a matter of urgency to put my talent to use. There, I primarily researched and wrote in the manner of abstract academia. Here, I write the piece in an intensely intuitive and vastly visionary narrative with continual notes of free verse.

                 Upon my psychotic break/spiritual vision amidst my studies, the abstruse nature of the concepts radically began to shift towards artistic and literary qualities of absolute relativism. I think the first instance of the possibility of such creative vistas was first introduced, when I had given a very brief visit to a philosophy professor, where with an air of mystery, the doctor had 'prescribed' to me James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-the title of which I would find myself thematically playing on, while theatrically bearing the delivery of exploring the travail of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, a man who eventually ended his life on the note of the mental asylum, verily himself.

                 With these things in mind, as the almost self-contained chapters of independent contemplations proceed throughout this novella, there is certainly a semblance of much interior brainwork taking place, while the reader has only a glimpse into this from the actual texts, somehow loosely tying the story together.

C. J. Swenson, February 9, 2020 (Supermoon)