He welcomes your feedback and story tips at On This Topic Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. In addition to his work as an artist, Goh works as an advocate and support person for others who are living through some of the torments he has endured while surviving Samsara. Goh, like his fellow Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, believes that “… love’s the only engine of survival,” and this memoir is a tribute to the love of his parents, his literary friends and his wife, Julia Hogeling-Goh, the loves that sustained him through agony and brought him through to a contemporary life in which, on the evidence of his luminous prose, the universe still pours through him like a sieve, but does not overwhelm him. We are incontinent, our bodies’ organs rotting: Jaundiced liver, green gallbladder black lung coughing up cigarettes.” We lash out at each other like an elderly couple gone senile. “Tempers flare, and there is a sickening aggression poisoning the air between us. Describing the breakdown of a love affair, he writes: Merciless spiralling lights descend upon me, keeping me awake night and day.” The sieve image is particularly strong and original, and only one of many such images the courageous poet has forged from the fires of his suffering.Īnd here is another striking passage among many. Throughout these weeks of sleepless nights, I feel the universe pour through me like a sieve. As an example, here is Goh describing his inner life in 1996: “I am too damn awake. Goh writes sentences that embody new and striking images of his inner chaos in a way that makes it both available to the reader and bearable. (Full disclosure: I have covered Goh’s career for years and am named in his acknowledgements.) This book is a moving, elegantly written record of those years and of his remarkable achievements. In the decades that followed, Goh lived through many of the catastrophes that occur for so many survivors of medical model psychiatry: Hospitalizations both forced and voluntary, medications that numb the mind and palsy and swell the body, ruptured relationships, agonizing loneliness and wildly oscillating moods.Īll the while he paid close attention to his suffering and found ways to transform it into art. Surviving Samsara is his elegantly written memoir of what happened in the wake of that fateful diagnosis. In 1993, Vancouver multimedia artist, performance poet, filmmaker and author Kagan Goh was first diagnosed as manic depressive. Samsara: in Buddhism, the round of rebirth. Kagan Goh | Caitlin Press (Qualicum Beach, B.C., 2021) This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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