Yesterday I was thinking of Mary Karr’s “Loony Bin Basketball” and came across this Q&A with her about the poem:
“Loony Bin Basketball” is dedicated to Phil Jackson, the remarkable former NBA coach whose nickname was “Zen Master” because of his interest in Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What do you imagine he would make of this poem?
Phil Jackson is a good friend. He’s called “Zen Master” because he has a serious practice in Buddhist meditation, and his book Sacred Hoops is a very wise way to think about competition not as war with the destruction of the other as its goal, but as a way to fully enter the instant. Sport as a celebration of pure presence with the excellence shared. I dedicated the poem to him because a recent class in mindfulness I took was taught by a Buddhist, and I felt close to him in that attention to breath, which is a spiritual solution in the poem to suicidal ideation.
He says about it in tonight’s e-mail: “Truly Mary, I thought of Jack Nicholson and One Flew Over The… however, that scene with Big Chief and those players doesn’t do justice to your poem. Catatonic Bill had game!”
The players described in the poem are far from the likes of the professionals Jackson so successfully coached. Can you tell us more about how you encountered (or imagined) Frank, Claire, and Bill?
We all hold excellence and quality in ourselves no matter how defunct we may seem to ourselves or the world at large. The basketball game was from my stay in the mental Marriott almost twenty-five years ago — a place where I decided to start acting like I believed in God even though it seemed like horse dookie. I just needed to.
The lines are rather breathless in tempo, and at the end of the poem you write: “Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self I’d come in // wanting to kill, and I left him there.” Can you talk a little bit about these lines, about breath and God?
Our autonomic nervous system breathes for most of us, and a priest friend told me once, when I asked him how I was supposed to know God’s will for me, that I should see what is. If you’re breathing, just presume you’re supposed to be alive and start looking around for some way to make yourself useful.
If you’re suicidal, your mind is actually the keenest threat to your survival. Yet depressed people still listen intensely to their minds even though said minds NEVER have anything good to say. Think of it, you try to employ the diseased organ to cure itself! If someone outside your body were shouting those awful things you say to yourself in such times, you’d plug your ears and sing lalalala. You have to stop that mind or die. A simple meditation practice I started twenty-three years ago involves counting my breaths one to ten over and over. Pure hell at first. I evolved through various practices — some Christian and Ignatian spiritual practices taught to me by a Franciscan nun and a few Jesuits along the way. I came back to breath last year. For me God is in the moment, and I tend to do everything I can to avoid being in such a stalled, unproductive place as the present. The ego has to stop inventing its reality and notice what’s actually going on, which process kills it (the ego) a little if you’re lucky.