Tristimania (15 page)

I let my doctor persuade me to take slightly higher doses, but the medication muffled me. At best, I felt like an amiable sheep: I could eat grass and shit by the fence, but without emotion or mindedness, simply as a set of biological compulsions. My emotions seemed to thud against a blanketed wall; they could barely move beyond middle C. At worst, I felt straitjacketed on the inside, a trapped animal, psyche snared.

I was bargaining hard with Mercury. Give me metaphor, and I'll let you run wild in my mind. But if you continue to make me lose my mind – and your job in myth was to find Psyche, not to lose her – I will drag you down to earth with drugs. So behave a bit better, Mercury, just a bit, or be damned with drugs, for I have to find a softer landing back to Plynlimon, Powys, happiest county in Britain, of which I am not a shining example.

Then Mercury offered truce terms to psychiatry in turn. Now
he
was plea-bargaining:

– Keep the doses low and I'll give you poems.

Deal.

A game of forfeit, played for poems.

Always dangerous, though, to deal with Mercury, the god unbound, who keeps no promises, honours no bargains and pays no bills. But, in this fragile peace accord, I wrote poems over the course of three weeks in January, in the rift of time, the hours between three in the morning when I woke and the first light at eight o'clock and the stirrings of the ordinary sounds of the traffic of life in my little town, as the first car drives past.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine, a retired psychiatrist, had returned to my town after some weeks away. She had heard that I was ill and came to see me. Andy is eccentric to the point of social concavity.
She is wild, chaotic and deeply kind. She's the sort of person there is no ‘sort' for. Some years back, following a conversation with a Labour local councillor over inadequate housing for elderly people, she bought a plot of land so the council could build sheltered housing. But the opening ceremony was commandeered by a Tory bigwig, and she was so disgusted by his politics that she presented him with a cake she'd made herself, out of cow shit. Doctor, farmer, mother, activist, ruder than giant hogweed at the Chelsea Flower Show, Andy brought a clarity and strength I needed.

– I don't want to go mad, I said, imploring.

– They all say that, she answered. Everyone with manic depression in crisis.

– And I don't want to commit suicide, I said, naming the stalking fear.

– They all say that, she replied.

– And I want to bring something back.

– They all say that, too.

– So I'm quite normal for mad?

She gave me a look more grimace than grin.

My psyche was on a dangerous journey, but a further reach of the human mind comes within one's grasp in those extra octaves, something exquisite and oddly impersonal. It is accented by one's individual nature, yes, but still seems to touch something beyond, a cry for the divine. I had to write poetry not in spite of madness but because of it, knowing something mythic is here in the numinous human mind.

A friend, with perfect timing, said to me at this point:

– Write. Right now. Don't lose these thoughts, this experience.

The composer Sally Beamish, who used to be a viola player, tells the story of how she began composing after her house was burgled
and thieves stole her precious viola. She turned to composing in consolation. I felt forced to poetry when madness stole my prose.

I do not write poetry; or, rather, I had never done so. Now there was no question in my mind that I had to and that I could write nothing except poetry. I normally never write at night but now I could write only in darkness. Normally, I cannot write without a decent amount of sleep but now I was jolted awake at three in the morning, after a bare three hours' sleep. And so, with the poet Francis Thompson, ‘I laughed in the morning's eyes.'

In the daytimes I became nothing, I did nothing, had no mattering and was dissolved. At night, though, for three weeks between January 5th and January 25th, I became myself. I wrote through everything, including what would turn out to be the single most dangerous night: January 18th. Why am I writing the dates? Usually, I am cavalier about the precise dates of things because that seems the least important part of any description. In this madness, though, dates seemed to be something to hold on to, as if they belonged, with strict rationality and housework, to the clarity of sanity and sense which I clung to in my daylight mind.

Awake at night, though, stalking poems, a poacher in paradise, I was searching in the fields of madness for the jawbones of the gods.

I didn't really care if these poems were good or bad; if medicine cures, it is irrelevant whether it tastes bitter or sweet. I had to write without censoring myself, to curl mania around and bring it home safe; to make a path of honest words, to write the truths which save the psyche, not because the words would be perfect but because they would be present and pure. In the darkness of night and illness, I could riddle the stars for their sparks.

It seems there is a strong relationship between suffering and poetry. Literary critic Leon Edel once said: ‘Out of world-sadness, out of tristimania, immortal and durable things are brought into being.' Shelley was to write:

                         
Most wretched men

                         
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,

                         
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Orpheus, legendary poet, takes Eurydice's hand to draw her out of the underworld, and when he looks back, and loses her, Pluto tells him: ‘Your wife is payment for your poems.' Poets pay a devastating price in the coin of suffering, and when Anne Sexton writes, ‘Poetry led me by the hand out of madness,' it sounds curative but it is also possible to see in it a warning. Following Orpheus but stumbling like Eurydice, Sexton is one of so many poets to have committed suicide.

If there is no doubting the relationship between the ability to suffer and the need to write poetry, so there is also no doubting the way in which poetry eases suffering. Cowper wrote that, in states of distress, ‘I find writing, especially poetry, my best remedy.' In the nineteenth century, people in mental asylums were encouraged to write poetry, with positive results. Les Murray wrote: ‘I'd disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you'll use any remedy you've got.' Recollecting the schoolteachers who introduced him to poetry, Murray calls it ‘an art form they may have guessed might save me, even as my unconscious aptitude for it might have caused my miseries'. Poetry is both cause and cure.

In Dante's time, books were bought in apothecary shops; literature sold as medicine. (Dante himself became a pharmacist, needing to be a member of a guild in order to take public office.) There is a deeper metaphor at work here – that the apothecary of language can heal first the writer and then the reader.

The links are there in myth, for Apollo is god of poetry and medicine and Orpheus is the renowned hero of poetry who is likewise associated with healing, while his lyre has the power to vanquish melancholy. So powerful was his art that he charmed animals and birds – even stones – but he was killed by those unable to appreciate his art. The vicious maenads first attacked him with sticks and stones, but this failed because the rocks and branches loved him so much they refused to hit him. So the enraged women tore him to pieces. Orpheus is gone but he leaves traces – his song was taken up by trees, rocks and rivers, as if he had left his gift of healing immanent in the care of the natural world.

To heal is to make whole, and when the mind is broken poetry can work towards healing it, uniting it with itself and reconnecting it with the world. Art comprehends us – it is through language that we are understood – and poetry, above all, steps into the heart and saturates it with understanding. Whenever I read poetry which has this kind of knowledge, I know that I am known. I am seen. I am not alone. How to understand a text is a matter of pedagogy. How to be understood by a text is a matter of healing. In the awful lonelinesses of depression and the bleak, mind-swept realms of madness, poetry comes kind to hand, offering to unpuzzle silence.

When the psyche is ill, the world can seem inchoate and unwordable, but poetry, shaping words, gives form to formlessness; it threads words like beads on a line to lead you up from the underworld.

And when poetry comprehends mania, it can be electrifying: Christopher Smart in ‘A Song to David' writes of:

                                  
Notes from yon exaltations caught,

                                  
Unrival'd royalty of thought.

In medicine I saw the science of pain but in poetry I saw pain's art. Medicine has an anaesthetic relationship to pain – it wants to rid the patient of it. Poetry has an aesthetic relationship to pain – it wants pain to speak. And the illness which seems to want to speak itself more than any other is manic depression. It is itself a storyteller, seeking uninhibited mouths through which to utter. Théophile Gautier wrote of Gérard de Nerval's poem ‘Aurélia': ‘It has been said of “Aurélia” that it is a poem in which madness tells her own story. It would have been even more accurate to describe it as Reason writing the memoirs of Madness at her dictation.'

In medicine, pain is an enemy, held at lancet-length, and there is a simple ethical quest to overcome it. In poetry, pain is a companion, the wounded-healer needs to hold hurt hard by, a complex of injured-knowing held behind the eyes.

Medicine's science of pain is observant, paying attention to pain's symptoms to make pain obedient to experiment and the laws of chemistry. In poetry's art, pain is impetuous, disobedient; it has a life of its own, lifting off the page, vitally alive, leaving a scent of sea or civet and leaping onwards.

Medicine's science of pain seeks balance and asks for the typical aetiology, searching for patterns of illness and predictable outcomes. Poetry's art of pain eschews the norm, to sniff out the idiomatic. If medicine measures pain, poetry longs for pain's immeasurable echoes.

Medicine tests its hypotheses while poetry would take hypotheses for fireworks. Medicine likes Occam's razor, using the simplest explanation until that is proved insufficient; poetry would use Occam's razor only to slit its wrists.

John Keats – a licensed apothecary – trained unhappily as a doctor when he should have been working as a poet, and suffered depression accordingly: his brother wrote of him that John ‘feared that he should never be a poet, and if he was not he would destroy himself'. It is an illustration of what happens when the poet is stifled (or self-stifling), for depression (or manic depression) can be seen as the result of an unanswered calling. Gwyneth Lewis, in her memoir of depression, recounts how it was her resistance to writing poetry that made her ill: ‘If you don't do what your poetry wants you to, it will be out to get you. Unwritten poems are a force to be feared.' In a wider sense, those who refuse their vocation may be maddened by it to the point of serious illness. A Yale University study by Paul B. Lieberman and John S. Strauss suggested a trigger for people's manias was the ‘enforced pursuit of an activity that was at odds with their own goals and aspirations'. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas portrays Jesus saying: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'

In our society, poetry and the arts are the last culturally accepted forms in which shamanism exists and, as we've seen, cultures which have retained their shamanism hold a widespread understanding that shamans who resist their vocation become ill while the practice of that shamanism will be their cure. Perhaps artists who do not practise their vocation risk such psychological crisis that they simply
cannot
work in regular, habituated ways, because the work of the soul is calling and cannot be ignored.

It is a matter of being allowed to become who you truly are, to express your exact self, precisely delineated, each of us our own
logos,
exactly defined, evolved into ever more discriminated a meaning. Mercury is the individuating principle, according to Jung, who helped people (and things) towards their quiddity, their this-ness. Only through individuation – becoming most fully yourself – can you fully enter into a relationship with others. Part of this individuation, in Jung's therapeutic practice, included searching for a patient's purpose and meaning. Logotherapy, according to Viktor Frankl, is the process by which each of us discerns our purpose in life, a self-transcendent meaning which is distinctly ours to follow. Aristotle, meanwhile, wrote of happiness as
eudaimonia,
and the term literally means that one's
daemon,
an essential aspect of one's soul, is ‘well pleased', that one is flourishing, doing what one does best and doing it with excellence.

Meanwhile, the contemporary Icarus Project was created to ‘navigate the space between brilliance and madness'. Of manic depression, the founders write: ‘We see our condition as a dangerous gift to be cultivated and taken care of rather than as a disease or disorder needing to be “cured” or “eliminated”.' The project uses myth and metaphor for a manifesto of inspiration, as opposed to regarding madness purely as illness and dysfunction.

Enid Welsford describes the role of the old Irish
fili,
or poet, as being one who was very highly trained in poetry, story, history and law. The
fili
must understand ‘the secret language of the poets', which Welsford suggests perhaps refers to a time when ‘mastery of metaphor' was not an art but a science, ‘the mark of initiation into an esoteric code'. It makes me wonder whether there is an esoteric code within the human mind for the mind's self-description in episodes of madness: otherwise, why do the metaphors cohere?
Hurricanes, cliffs, abyssal depths, oceans and black dogs are such common descriptions of bipolar or unipolar states that it seems there may be a kind of collective unconscious at work.