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    The Sea Of Conscience
    The Sea Of Conscience
    The Sea Of Conscience
    Ebook106 pages56 minutes

    The Sea Of Conscience

    By MJ Holman

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    About this ebook

    Spanning thirty years, this collection of poetry and prose documents the discovery of mental illness through writing. It charts the slow crawl of mental decline and the gradual realisation this illness is a background noise that cannot be ignored.
    It is not a volume defined by mental illness alone; passions for art, literature, opera, and history are here; passions which help us survive when illnesses can be unforgiving and we fail to forgive ourselves. These words explore our perception of ourselves during times of duress and how our passions can be part of our coping strategies, helping us to remain here - embattled - but as survivors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMJ Holman
    Release dateMay 28, 2014
    ISBN9781310222283
    The Sea Of Conscience
    Author

    MJ Holman

    I have been a poet and a writer since I was a teenager. I have always adored the English language, words impact upon our thoughts and emotions throughout our life's journey no matter how we view their importance. This love for language brought me to my first job in a library where each day was a new discovery and a learning experience. Names called to me from the shelves: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, John Steinbeck, Gustav Flaubert, Mary Shelley, and Dacia Maraini; all of them hold a power over me and have influenced each word I place upon the page. A love of history and further training to become an historical researcher brought the disciplines of literature and research together and now I write primarily historical fiction. I have always had aspirations to be a literary author and believe in writing innovatively and in a thought-provoking way; I write my characters as if they want to share their motives and emotions with the reader and they can be heard murmuring behind the themes and plots.

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      Book preview

      The Sea Of Conscience - MJ Holman

      The Sea Of Conscience:

      Poetry, Prose, And The Pursuit Of Self

      By

      MJ Holman

      With contributions from Queen Of Spades

      Published by MJ Holman at Smashwords

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2014 MJ Holman, except

      Corroded, Accidental Tattoo, and Ointment, Copyright © 2014 Queen of Spades

      Cover Painting by MJ Holman

      Cover Design Copyright © 2014 MJ Holman

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Forward

      It’s a little pretentious, the ‘pursuit of self’, isn’t it? And perhaps this whole collection is a little self-indulgent; but I will try and vindicate my decision for the subtitle by explaining its meaning in reference to the journal entry of 30th November 1996, published here for the first time. It was a difficult decision to include it in this collection; once read, however, it should be clear why ‘the pursuit of self’ became an apt title: I was losing my health to mental illness, to bipolar disorder in fact.

      Back then I had no idea this was happening, I only knew something was very wrong. I no longer recognised myself and lost sight of the type of person I was; I became ashamed of my behaviour and blamed my spontaneous reactions on character faults.

      In recent years, I have been able to recognise episodes of hypomania and their link to my behaviour and through this realise I am not entirely to blame. I have used my journal as a therapist and my poems are an expression of those therapy sessions. So, rather than my self-indulgences, I hope the Finding Depression poems will help other sufferers and their families see a way through the mire of mental illness. Just to re-evaluate its presence may well be enough to discover some peace, some empathy with the sufferer.

      The poem ‘Nobody Sees Me’ is about perception, therapists may refer to it as ‘mental filtering.’ It was written in 2013, yet it completes the circle to the journal entry of the 30th November 1996. Other poems from this section, ‘Crowd the Cobalt Heaven’, ‘A Plaster Over a Decapitation,’ and even ‘Whispering In My Veins’ all look to hope and the future. I am exclaiming ‘I am basically a happy person inside a bipolar body!’ I think this applies to many sufferers of bipolar disorder.

      Lucia

      The Lucia poems are very early poems and I chose the best out of some poor offerings. I make no excuses for them, I do not consider them to be of high quality, and I only include them to illustrate my development as a writer. And because there are already signs of bipolar within them, they also act as a prelude for the Finding Depression section.

      Lucia was a character I created for a novel. Oddly enough, particularly given how difficult I find it to write creative fiction these days, the poems bemoan Lucia as a distraction. I was experiencing a burst of creativity on the back of frenzied elation, but of course I did eventually crash and the muse was no more: Lucia was dead.

      Arcadian Love Poetry

      Amor Hereos was written especially for this collection and is another prelude (I like preludes!) to a future work concerning the Florentine Camerata, that group of poets, musicians, and intellectuals active in Florence during the 16th and 17th centuries. The poem required quite a body of research and took approximately one month to write, it is my longest poem to date.

      Soul Stories

      This section includes a number of poems inspired by history: ‘Homage to Lebrun,’ ‘The Sovereign Amongst The Crowns,’ ‘In Amaritudine,’ and ‘Five Very Lost Boys.’ The latter poem is about Captain Scott, but also references Scott’s friend, J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.

      The Sea of Conscience and the Cover Painting

      The cover art took approximately five months to paint and was inspired by the journal entry, ‘The Sea of Conscience,’ the follow-up poems ‘See This As An Exorcism,’ ‘Whispering In My Veins,’ and the stained glass in Hereford Cathedral.

      Acknowledgements

      Thank you to my dearest sister, and mother, to my late father; to Kate, Kim, and Annick. To Johanna and Linda, no longer there but the love is; to Jenny Lloyd for her support and enthusiasm, to the Queen of Spades for

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