I open my laptop and gasp. After a day on which Trump’s quondam closest counselors denounce him as fascist, in which a slew of his fellow partisans declare their support of his opponent, when the tide of incriminating evidence continues to sluice like sewage from a broken pipe, when every fiber of considerate being howls, “No, we can’t!” Trump’s approval inches up?! We’d believed when the American people woke to the gravity of our mistake, we’d repent, recant. We the people were not suicidal! Yet on we stroll to the precipice, obdurate in our determination to destroy our patrimony of freedom and self-rule.

What’s going on?

I do not know. Aghast, gasping, I can only guess. If the American electorate persists in its stupidity, it will be the most blatant and fatal mistake in the history of nations (if history itself survives), a collective hari-kari that makes Germany’s choice of Hitler or Rome’s accession to Caligula seem oversights by comparison. What are we thinking! Or, in T.S. Eliot’s sob, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” If my tone here sounds apocalyptic, it's because my heart is speaking, and my heart is in my throat. A beloved relative is teetering on a high ledge. What can I say to convince my dearest to desist!

Twice in my life I have felt like killing myself. My diagnosis was depression. I knew I was teetering but, more than “half in love with easeful death,” I longed to be released from this veil of tears. My despair made no sense – I was comfortable, competent, cared about and cared for – but that’s how insanity operates, repudiating, ridiculing reason. The glass is half-empty, dust’s our destiny, hope’s a delusion, blah, blah – the predictable litany of grief. Doctors, drugs, time, and love tugged me to safety, I learned to smile again – and hug – and sing – but my dread of reversion to that bondage never fades.  So, it seems, for our state.

How to talk America off the ledge? We must keep on talking, with all our might, sharing our concern – urgently yet tenderly. Often in this space I’ve sounded a note of hate: and, yes, I am angry at this theft, this irresponsibility, this sloth; my fingers itch to wring every Maggoty neck; I revile the cynical gzillionaires and their panting toadies who have brought us to this pass. But rage is no way to dissuade a suicide. “Do this or else” may lead to “or else” – splat on the pavement – and that will be that.

I’ve been vowing at bedtime to write something cheerier when I wake – about poems, maybe, or Henry’s progress, or my loves – anything to divert. We could use a break from panic. But now is not the moment. Escapism never succeeds, except to compound the fault. We must do what we can while we can: the house is ablaze, but there’s still chance of rescue. Never say die.

A poem bolstered me. In his wizardly “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Auden equates the poet’s death in January 1939 with the slippage of civilization into what would become the Second World War. Things couldn’t have been worse: for mankind “a dark cold day.”

Yet Auden, in an ecstatic burst of determination, refuses to be crushed. “With the farming of a verse,” he exhorts,

That is our job now: to remind ourselves how to praise. Onward.