Tristimania (10 page)

– What about your friends who love you? You don't have the right to cause us such pain, he said.

More than anything, he appealed to my writing self.

– Your work needs you, he said.

I had been trying to explain to him that I didn't want to take medication because it would interfere with the glorious glimpses from the tops of the mountain, the sense that I could reach something of the mind's deeper insights if I only had the courage to stay in the mountain ranges.

– So you're doing this for your writing? he asked, double-checking.

– Um, yes, I said lamely.

– And how will you write if you're dead? I mean, forgive me for stating the obvious, but this is more than illogical.

It was, of course, mad.

He used a term I'd never heard him use before. Staying alive, he said, is a
sacred duty.
Then slowly, carefully, calmly and kindly, he simply told me what to do, utterly practical, in that voice stronger than the suicide voice. He told me to take the medication while he stayed on the phone. I did. He told me to find my cats and get them tucked up in bed with me. He told me to go to sleep and he'd call in the morning. He has my gratitude for life.

The figures for suicide in hypomanic mixed states are appalling. Twenty per cent. One in five. You feel low enough to want to and manic enough actually to have the energy. Being in a hypomanic mixed state carries the highest suicide risk of all mental illness.

People with manic depression are twenty times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population and, according to Andrew Solomon, author of
The Noonday Demon,
manic-depressive illness is the second-leading killer of young women. Kay Redfield Jamison notes that nearly half of those with bipolar disorder will try to kill themselves at least once and also writes that in manic depression ‘any combination of symptoms is possible, but the one most virulent for suicide is the mix of depressed mood, morbid thinking, and a “wired”, agitated level of energy.'

People with manic depression die sixteen to twenty-five years earlier than the average population. In mixed-state hypomania, a person can reel between suicide and the purest life force in minutes, as Mahler experienced, as he wrote to a friend when he was nineteen: ‘The fires of a supreme zest for living and the most gnawing desire
for death alternate in my heart, sometimes in the course of a single hour. I know only one thing: I cannot go on like this . . .'

‘Shield your joyous ones,' says the Anglican prayer. ‘It is a curious request to make of God,' notes Kay Redfield Jamison in her book on mania,
Exuberance: The Passion for Life.
Shield your joyous ones: for there is a terrible vulnerability in them, the high-risk skaters on thin ice.

In mountaineering, people talk of the ‘death zone' (over 26,000 feet, or 8,000 metres; the peak of Everest is in the death zone, for example), where there is so little oxygen that the body cannot survive for long; climbers may reach into the zone for a short time but cannot spend too much time there. It was a perfect metaphor, for in this madness my mind was running out of the oxygen of sanity. In the death zone, my judgement was awry and I clung to the Voice of Reason, which spoke through my friends and through my doctor. The Voice of Reason was, I knew rationally, the one to heed. Sometimes I could see for myself that the world was just too beautiful to leave, but the howling pain drove me to de-say myself, seeking to be unspoken and unsaid, wanting obliteration, my voice annihilated. Suicide had a surly splendour to me then: sullen as depression, magnificent as mania. In moods of depression I was de-voiced, but in manic moods suicide seemed an expression of voice, a form of communication, an act of theatre, a swansong flung to Earth. Not a ‘dead end' but an exaggerated performance, responding to life with a corresponding electricity: death. Suicide felt like a work of art, a flourishing, vital score, a blazon fanfare at the end of a symphony.

In depression, suicidality came to me with dulled despair, but in mania it came shining. It was oddly vital and extraordinarily appealing, as if my life could speak to Life only by
fucking
it, Eros–Thanatos in deadly embrace. As if, through suicide, I could have sex with the
elemental life force, turn myself back to carbon again so the whole rolling life force could throw the dice for another turn.

Orgasm, of course, has been called
le petit mort,
the little death, as if sex contains a little seed of death. Likewise, in long cultural understanding, death contains a little seed of sex. I could be joined to Life by one stupendous death, an uproarious explosion, the eruption of a volatile volcano. Agony and ecstasy were on kissing terms; their lips hot, not to exit this individual life but to enter more deeply into Life itself, exorbitant and priceless. In manic mood, suicide seemed almost celebratory, an intoxicating temptation, an audacious, flagrant dare. It had primed me, flirted with me and thrown fizzing stars across my path. It had put the glitters on me.

In the extremis of this crisis, nothing could bear the weight of my emotions or withstand their temperature: as if fire had the weight of brute metal and my mind was a rolling ball of burning lead, and suicide was standing, like Hephaestus the blacksmith, working the boiling metal to the end-point of intensity.

Mixed-state hypomania is always on the move, it demands to go further, faster, higher, deeper; it has its eyes on the ultimate, the ultima Thule. Like fire, the more it burns, the more it will burn; it demands fuel and, if that is not freely given, the fire will grab what it wants, always onward, and in its heights as well as (more predictably) in its depths, it asks: Where to from here, except a blazing, euphoric pyre?

What surprises me most, looking back, is how mania caused a slippage in categorization. Suicide seemed as if it would be a momentary event without effect. It ceased to have import or corporeality; rather, it was a trivial, impetuous, reckless thing.
Reck
-less, it did not reckon; did not, and could not, count the costs. I wanted to feel disembodied, as if I could shuck off life and make my body a casualty
of a casual tragedy. The casual way I thought about it frightens me now, but it was of a piece with mania's meanings. ‘Casual' includes in its meanings both chance and accident: and we glimpse the signature of Mercury – in the realm of chance, we're in the territory of the Trickster.

I felt that life was something I could toss away like a spent cigarette. I could chuck it in the bin like an unwanted sandwich. Life or death seemed almost a question of housework: a bit of a sort-out. Keep it or throw it out? To be or not to be? Trash or treasure? It is the absolute opposite of Dignitas, that serious, real, considered, intelligent, planned, thoughtful dying.

After that first suicidal night, my friends seemed to link up, and made an unofficial rota so that I was never alone for long. I felt I was being parcelled around, from one house to another, or, if I was at home, there was a steady, regular pattern of phone calls. Even my friends who had never met got in touch with each other, swapped phone numbers, linked arms so I was in a silk net of care. It was sweet, touching and necessary. If I hadn't been so ill, I would have been embarrassed to be babysat like this. But I was, so I wasn't.

Christmas was hideous. I spent the day with friends and their kids and I was sky-high all morning. By lunchtime, I was in slippage. I adore children and I'm not normally irritable, but my nerves were shot to pieces and the children's noise and nonsense were making me want to shriek. The sound of Christmas champagne corks popping, normally one of my favourite sounds in the whole world, made me startle violently. Within half an hour I was lying in bed, my whole spirit aching, trying not to scream.

At my next doctor's appointment, I told him about the suicide night, but I needed to bring him something funny, too, so I told him about the time when Byron was seriously suicidal. ‘I should, many
a good day, have blown my brains out,' he wrote, ‘but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.'

Some of a doctor's work, my GP said, is to understand. Something physical – angina, for example – is easy. The psyche is harder and takes a long time. We talked about suicide. Like my friend, my doctor recalled me to my writing. Like my friend, he used the same term:
duty.

– What you have is a gift which is also a duty: a gift that demands a heavy price.

My own mind had become unfamiliar territory. My brain, sleeping so lightly for so long, felt like a messenger in flight, travelling light, carrying hand luggage only. I was a volatile insubstance.

Mania is like the high seas, calling the seafarer to set sail; it is an enticing dare to the Odysseus within, who, hearing the siren call and ignoring the whirlpools and rocks, embarks on epics. The siren voices played me, swung me, seduced me; they wove harmonies of beguiling danger, whispered me to whirlpools of suicidal spirals, crafted their sway to lure me on to the rocks. Almost the last time I drove, before I banned myself, I had ignored a T-junction sign and driven recklessly right across the path of an oncoming car: it could have been fatal.

I heard music differently, and it was as if I was not listening outwards towards the music but as if the music were already in me; it was inside my psyche because its origin was in the universal human mind. From there, it could be released by composers of genius, so a song which had pre-existed in silence would be sung out loud for the first time. For music transcribes mind. It is as if composers can light a candle and step over an inner threshold and see by that candlelight visible caves and cathedrals of the human psyche, and can write the notes to describe it. I say visible, yet this is music and
therefore audible. But it felt to me as if music was in itself a profound synaesthesia (only connect); from its sound, music allows you to see. What chimes, rhymes and resonates (be it music, poetry or empathy) is curative; the mind is understood.

I wanted to breathe in the inspired air of Bach. Respiration as inspiration. What is to me the spire of song (Allegri's ‘Miserere') is the irresistible aspiration within the psyche, for God or love or Orpheus.

Music, neutralizing the power of the siren song, is at the heart of the Orpheus myth. Orpheus sails with the Argonauts and, when they are in danger of being bewitched by the sirens' beautiful, fatal music, Orpheus draws out his lyre and plays music louder and lovelier than the siren song, and the ship sails safely on. It is as if Orpheus stands for the soul of music, and this story illustrates music's power over the psyche's self-destructions. If the siren voices of suicide seduced me, listening to music could sometimes swing me back round to safety.

It was a shock to hear music as I did at that point. Nothing could ever be quite as intimate as this when something from outside could steal gently into my psyche. The intensity of this intimacy is at one moment exquisite but might at a further pitch become unbearable because it unveils part of the mind, usually curtained even to itself. It is utterly intimate, and yet music could hardly be more public; it happens, after all, in the fundamental commons of the air. Connecting, linking the outer and the inner, it is part of the sense of connection which is key to mania. Hyper-connected, the manic mind is looking for rhyme and rhythm, sending out its lines into the world and responding in turn to the strings and cords and chords of strings. Unsurprisingly, composers, dwellers at that dangerous interconnecting border, suffer disproportionately from manic depression.

I did not just listen to classical music; Arcade Fire's flaming honky-tonk lit me sometimes, or Tom Waits would step into an evening with his raw, hurt hope, his self-bewildering, damaged brilliance, unfurling a gutterful of aces. But mainly I was tuned to classical. Sometimes I felt as if music painted the mind's sweetest serenity cerulean, sky blue and soaring, and I would feel like flying.
Tie me to the earth when the sky is so canted.
Tilted by its own incantatory song, world, stepping ever further inwards, becomes self. I was enchanted. Etymologically and actually. Bewitched by song – chant – which fascinated me and held me spell-bound, bound to listen, unfree to leave, surrendered to song.

Music created grandeur, the fullness of a composer's mind so august, so augmented, so matured, so autumned, that its golden chords swell to a ripeness so perfect there is no listening left for anything less, but then its gold gives, gives, gives into a sunset so blinding that in its grandeur, too, it becomes unbearable.

Sometimes I didn't dare listen to music, because I thought I would be lost; I'd never come back. Specifically, I thought if I really listened I'd never
eat
again; as if madness turned music to manna from heaven and if you've eaten the food of the gods you would never want mortal food again. Sometimes I would be frightened that music would mean a kind of dissolution, as if my words, my thoughts and my self-hood were made of sand and the inrush of liquid music would dissolve me entirely; no particularity would stand. All that would remain would be the rounded nubs of damp sand on a beach after the first wave has unspecified the sandcastle, and has departicularized the sharp, dry towers into soft, wet mounds. Then, lost to the tide and the tide's song, I would become music. What was ‘I' would be gone.

The rest would be silence. Music wanted me, swamped me, took
me and lost me, until, and finally, nothing more could be said. An ultimate creation of music is the quality of silence it inspires in the moment when it has ended – in Mahler's Ninth, for example – as the ultimate creation of a human life could be regarded as the quality of appreciation after its death. But the silence, perfected, exquisite, eloquent, is also unbearable because it silenced me. My words would die in the air, heaven too sweet for words or birdsong and therefore heaven unbearable for want of the imperfect, the twig that scratches, the awkward flit, the shadow that marks the afternoon, as if Earth is charged with the task of offering resistance to a perfect plainsong paradise.