MISCONCEPTIONS ON NATURAL FEELINGS

Talking Mental Health with Poet Dionysis Dissò

by Mirko Tarena

First things first, let’s talk about the place where your poetry stems from. What sparked your journey into writing? Was it something specific, or did you feel a physical or spiritual pull to start putting words on paper?

My need to write began very early, during my childhood, although it peaked at a much older age. What’s important is that I have written several works in both poetry and novels, which, after being completed, I read one by one… only to get rid of them eventually.

Did the reason that made you start writing originate from a need to solve a problem that seemed unsolvable, or was it more about expressing yourself through words?

For me poetry is a form of communication of the author with the author himself, which he simply wants to record through words. Regardless of whether people will eventually show their production, I understand this need to write as a mental or spiritual urgency that calls for a way out. The greatest freedom a person can experience in relation to his own inner dialogue is to accept changes and be free to reconsider what was once thought wrong as positive, and vice versa. For too many years, this communication with myself was confined to writing small, private texts. Later on, the time came for this conversation with myself to manifest as a book.

In what way does this conversation with yourself serve as a mirror to your inner emotional landscape, especially when it comes to your mental health journey?

Poetry became another deeper form of communication translated into art, compared to other disciplines such as painting or sculpture, each one having their own interpretations and levels of reading. Poetry goes a step further, essentially making its words reborn within the reader. Through a poem, what I’m trying to do is make the reader feel and picture the state of mind when I was writing it. For instance, in a text I can describe the 10-second moment of the sun hitting a flower, a moment so trivial that its duration is not what matters. What concerns the reader is actually how the author experienced this brief instant and how the same writer, the plant and the sun cooperated for a little time. These same three characters worked together: a huge celestial body identified with an earthly plant and with a member of the animal species. I usually prefer the geometry of curves to that of alignments, but in this case we are talking about an alignment of three elements into one sensitive contact.

When you’re writing, where does your mind go? Do you retreat into your own head, or is there room for connecting with the outside world?

Personally, when I write I sink very deep into myself to the point where I often wonder if I will be able to resurface. So, to sum it up, I guess writing is a game of life; a game that cherishes life, collecting all one has been through, the present moment and the hopes for tomorrow.

Mental health is often a tricky and abstract topic. How do you use symbolism and imagery in your poetry to make these complex ideas more accessible, more relatable for readers?

In one poem, I write about a group of birds who find their place in the heavenly watercolor canvas of the world alongside their friends until, led by passion, they are brought to their death. I think this impulse towards self-destruction is a characteristic element of society. We are influenced by our own passions, inebriating us so strongly with euphoria that we fail to recognize their dangers. Images like this are what translate my inner faith, my inner mind into concrete pictures. Images that come from reality, from your life, the plants, the animals carry something deep and personal, something tied both to the image and to my inner thought. At this moment I cannot define whether this communication with nature is a reality or my imagination. The reality of each of us is in the mind of each of us and nowhere else. For this reason, the world inside your head is a reality of its own.

How would you compare your relationship with poetry to your relationship with nature? Do you think feeling disconnected from nature ties into the sense of loss you talk about in your book?

In everything we do, we gain something that we later lose. What we lose, we usually later miss. But difficult discoveries can have already been lost, although we have not discovered them. People ravage time, trying to rush everything to catch up with a future they’ve lost before reaching it. We’re all running for something, amid the hustle and bustle, moving in every direction. Of course, in this journey you gain something too, depositing memories that make us feel the passing of time. We try to live much longer, in a more beautiful way, in a much happier, much more, and more, and more way, whatever that is, only to realize at a certain point the need to stop, take stock, and reflect on what was lost along the way. So loss is a very basic element. The whole line of modern psychology pushes you to forget the basic identity of who you really are, so that you can morph into an improved and perfected self. At all levels society tries to make you feel guilty for your experiences, offering you a hasty and one could say – violent way to erase and substitute your soul. We are burying our memories on an empty ground. Without memories, though, what are we? We cannot ignore the same life we have been living and dealing with since day one; for better or worse.

In your poetry, for instance, you talk of the delicate feeling of being small, almost insignificant in the face of massive climate changes caused by human activity. How does your coexistence with nature influence your mental state?

This is where vanity comes in. We assume that our entire planet is in danger, and consider human beings as the main cause of this damage. The planet, though, works on an endless and constant evolution, on a scale where we are merely dust upon the dust of previous generations. No matter what we do, we can’t prevent the planet from growing. With a puff of wind it can wipe us out. Under the guise of saving the planet, we’re really trying to save our own species, fearing that we won’t survive the conditions we ourselves have created. So vanity is the feeling that comes to me when thinking of the current state of the world, and this perception influences me deeply.

Given this awareness, can you describe how the process of creating poetry functions as a therapeutic tool in your mental health practice? How does it help navigate complex emotions?

Since the question is personal, I will answer with a personal response in return. We all get lost in thoughts and inner struggles. To deal with them, we all have our moments and some people get lost in their heads for a very long time. Yet those who can’t manage to get out of that state dwell in a seemingly endless state of melancholic depression. I have personally wallowed many times and for too long in this melancholic, depressive state, and so has my poetry. But through the act of writing, I have found my own path to rise to the surface. If someone hasn’t found a way to rise to the surface, offer them a hand to do so. This is the difference in poetry that I was talking about. While a psychiatric or psychological essay assumes you are doing something wrong and claims to have the right way to pull you out of the depths you are in, poetry reaches out to you from those same chasms. Essentially, the main factor that allows this contact is respect for what you are experiencing. Otherwise, the writer is just a columnist, a journalist, a psychologist, maybe a yoga teacher. Poetry does not promise you to solve anything, but it vows to stay beside you.

What advice would you give to someone who’s struggling with mental health and might be hesitant to try poetry as an outlet? How did you get past the initial hurdles of opening up through writing?

As for now, I could not give advice to anyone, not even to myself, since it implies following a precise instruction. I don’t think I can give advice, but I’m not sure if any human being can either. So I believe that my second book, which will be out in the next few months, could shed more light on this topic. I will deal exclusively with the feeling of pain: how a person experiences it and the extreme mental state it can create. Something has to be the generator of this congestion in you, this suffocation, the uncontrollable melancholy or depression that makes it too hard to be released into words. What I can say is that the correct thing to do when dealing with this condition is to first respect your own pain, in order to find the reason why it has come to be so. A situation cannot easily be brought out into full and comfortable communication, if the person experiencing it refuses a thought or a feeling of theirs as dumb, unnatural or pointless. All they’re going to do is make themselves feel worse, bringing themselves down because they’ll think that, seeing everybody around them happier, something must be wrong with them. We have to respect emotions in this sense. Touch your pain, approach it, embrace it, without necessarily justifying it in order to go further and further on your journey toward healing.