Tristimania (6 page)

In
Ion
, Plato has Socrates say: ‘For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him . . . for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine.' Oscar Wilde
referred to ‘the old fancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession'.

For the early Church Fathers, David was the greatest of all poets, able to move between divine gift and human consciousness. Historical figures such as the medieval Margery Kempe – who would today be considered psychotic – were considered mystics. If you see visions, are you delusional and sick, or a spiritual visionary? Ancient Norse bards considered poetry to be a gift of the gods which was then shaped by human skill. Traditional Arabian belief in djinns suggested a sense of being possessed by spirits who gave people knowledge but could also drive them mad.

Alexandre Dumas wrote of the poet Gérard de Nerval's episodes of madness: ‘Our poor Gérard, for the men of science he is a sick man and needs treatment, while for us he is simply more the storyteller, more the dreamer, more spiritual, more happy or more sad than ever.' The link between manic depression and the artistic temperament has been much studied, including by Kay Redfield Jamison in her fascinating book
Touched with Fire,
which, like all her work, is priceless in the way it comprehends, counsels and consoles the manic-depressive psyche.

Interestingly, one feature of hypomania and mania is hyperacusis – an increased awareness of objects in one's environment – which is certainly an aspect of artistic sensitivity. In general, manic depression is a condition of passion, the ability to feel pain, to create and to love. The word ‘passion', in its root, means ‘to suffer' (as in ‘the Passion of Christ'). Olive trees were, for Vincent van Gogh, associated with Christ's Passion, and, if I look at his painting
Les Oliviers
(
Olive Trees
), painted while he was in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, I see it instantly: the suffering art in his agitated, manic swirls, the turbulence which cannot be calmed. In this Passion, the trees are
screaming. No wonder he sliced off his own ear, for the world was shrieking at him and his psyche could not be quieted.

An Anglican clergyman of the seventeenth century specialized in treating people he called ‘unquiet of mind' (the beautiful phrase adapted for the title of Kay Redfield Jamison's record of her own illness), and it is a deft definition, a listening definition, for those in manic-depressive crisis do hear the sounds of madness within, the weird singing of a high-tension wire or a wind-wolf and, indeed, hear the sudden silence as mind crashes inward during a conversation.

People in mania often don't write about it, say psychologists, and cannot remember it until they are in that state again. Richard Bentall comments on the ‘poor descriptions offered in the classic literature of psychiatry' and suggests that ‘likely there is something about the manic state that makes it almost impossible to portray in words . . . accounts seem curiously incomplete. It is as if the break from normal functioning during an episode is so severe that the mind, on returning to sanity, cannot comprehend it.'

I'm not surprised. When your mind is in flight you don't leave tracks on the ground, so there are no prints, neither footprints nor printed letters on the page. But I felt fiercely that I had to take notes during this
wōdness
, that I had to mark the tracks of its passage. I've trained myself to jot down notes wherever I am: in the dark, while walking, while driving, while climbing, half asleep, underwater, in deserts and icescapes. This was just another form of difficult terrain, and I leant on my habit and training.

In my previous episode, years before, I had taken no notes, and had had no comprehension of what was happening; instead, I had to rely on the observation of others. My flatmate at the time said she felt she was helplessly watching me float upwards, borne skywards,
holding the string of a helium balloon, rising, dangerously rising. She wanted to grab me and pull me down, but I slipped ever upwards, out of sight. The painter Benjamin Haydon, a friend of John Keats, used a similar image: ‘I have been like a man with air balloons under his armpits and ether in his soul.'

Describing mania is like a sundial trying to tether the shadow of a sun gone AWOL, zigzagging across the sky. Sometimes I felt weirdly still, both weightless and vigilant, hyper-aware like an inconcrete meerkat fascinated by a mirage. Sometimes, the opposite of wistful, I felt wist
less
, recklessly so. Sometimes my mind was a giddy, vertiginous mosaic of turquoise lettered in gold. Sometimes the restless energy coursing through me was like being possessed by a divinity lightfoot in pursuit of feathers: shimmering, galloping and surging.

Rilke described his breakdown as a ‘boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit', and manic-depressive people often use images of the natural world. Shelley described Byron as ‘mad as the winds', and it was an image Byron echoed: ‘If I must sail let it be on the ocean no matter how stormy'; and he writes of the voyagings of poetry, of sailing ‘in the wind's eye' and bringing back images to ‘counterbalance human woes'.

But the flight cannot last. When mania falls to depression, it is as if the storm clouds have congealed, solidified to dank fat. Time itself goes stale. Depression, swollen and greedy, is a slug-glutton, feeding on the tender green soul.

It is payback time.

Sometimes the payback is literal, as people have spent and squandered money, giving it away and racking up debts. When mania turns to depression, the payback is also emotional – a sense of guilt about what sufferers have done, and taxingly difficult repayment,
the Danegeld of guilty gold, particularly when manic depression has encouraged overspending oneself sexually in impetuous affairs. Darian Leader points out that the Greek word
mania,
usually translated as ‘madness' or ‘frenzy', in its plural form evoked the Eumenides, ‘whose function it was to pursue those who had not, precisely, paid their dues'.

Manic depression can't balance the books, and it struggles in a mercurial seesaw of credit and debt, extravagance and penitence, exuberance and recoil, the endlessly kinetic commerce of Mercury.

Manic depression is more usually called by the chilly term ‘bipolar', a bipedal term; mathematical, binary and wrong. ‘Mania' leans to the waltz, falling and rising in threes.

In mania, the mind dances faster than usual: thoughts are quicker and speech is quicker. It also feels like an increase of ‘quickness' – of aliveness or vitality – which is paid for in depression later at the price of an increase of deadness. (‘I felt a Funeral, in my brain,' as Emily Dickinson wrote.)

The kinetic quality of mania involves many moving parts: physical energy in the need to keep moving, to run, to spend energy of all kinds. Money moves quickly in mania's hands; it runs, its currency (from
correre
in Latin, ‘to run') is spent at speed.

People's speech runs fast in mania. Coleridge's intense talkativeness ‘dazzled bystanders by containing too many ideas in too few words', according to his biographer Richard Holmes. Sometimes the speed of connection in one's thoughts is so fast that the steps are invisible and a lackbrain hearer may dismiss it as disconnected, whereas it is the result of an over-connected mind, going at the speed of light, faster than the speed of sound.

Welcome to the foundry.

Here we have Mercury or Hermes' half-brother Hephaestus, the blacksmith of genius. And here we have melting of bells. Hear the silent temples. You may steeple your fingers at your head and pray, aspire to the pealing of gold, but madness has your feet to the flames, molten and made into bullets you can shoot – straight through your temples.

Mixed-state manic depression is manic depression on speed. In mixed state, one's moods oscillate within hours, even minutes; a flux of unplannable ecstasy and unpredictable agony.

The hurricanes within want serenity but get doldrums. The doldrums want breeze but get hurricanes.

As this episode for me began, appropriately, in the autumn or fall of the year with a literal fall down a rabbit hole, it was a falling into madness of a paradoxical sort; a soaring fall, a falling flight, tripping the switches. (‘I feel like I'm tripping,' I said often to friends at the high points.) It was a sick, lurching helter-skelter of the psyche. The fall from hypomania to depression may be a matter of quicksilver timing, but then mania re-erupts through depression's stupor.

It is self-provoking, this gyre, self-swerving around an elastic axis, turning and turning. The licked finger circles and circles the rim of the glass till a wail rises and the glass shatters itself, shards of broken-heartedness which will stab the barefoot psyche.

I developed an obsessive terror of losing things, particularly my notebooks, which I clutched at compulsively, sometimes every minute, checking they were still there. If I left my house, I often had to walk with my hand in my satchel, fingers touching the pages. I had to check every packet of empty Rizla papers several times before I burnt it, in case I'd written a thought on one of them and would lose it. Scraps of paper, shopping lists, odd reminders, the little docket
with the next doctor's appointment written on it; all were nervously guarded. I felt real panic when I thought I'd lost a hat, and emailed and phoned friends trying to find it. Mad as a hatter, Mercury brimming. If I can't even hold on to a notebook, how can I hold on to my sanity? was my reasoning. If I lose my hat it shows that I am losing my mind: lostness was the pivot of my panic.

And then I crashed my computer, losing at a stroke the ability to receive the slips of sanity my geographically removed friends were sending me. It happened late one night. I was drunk. Both my common sense and my computer were running dangerously low on battery power. A red warning sign popped up on the screen telling me to turn the computer off immediately or there'd be trouble. It was an odd but precise parallel to what had already happened to me the day I went mad: I ignored the red warning sign, and then on the sudden the screen froze. True to its word, my computer wheeped and fizzled out to black. It never worked again. The motherboard was fucked. I knew the feeling.

I could borrow a friend's computer, from time to time, but I hated not being able to read and re-read my friends' sane, kind, helpful messages at any time. The loss of that easy access made me even more isolated. At this point, too, it was becoming clear that it wasn't safe for me to drive. I didn't care much about an accident involving only myself, but I was concerned about a passenger of mine or anyone else on the roads.

Everything seemed to be metaphor. Car crash for breakdown. Motherboard for rationality. Notebook for mind. Hat for head. But, in a more extensive way, metaphor was becoming more true, if not more actual, than reality. Metaphor had more significance. There was meaning in this madness which I must find, I thought. Metaphor matters in madness. Matters so much that you could say metaphor
is the material of madness, the mothering tongue of the madstruck mind,
mater
of it all. I could feel the metaphoric weight of things in my mind, heavy as a mountain. More importantly, metaphors alone could bear the weight which my mind, heavy with intensity, placed on them. Metaphor was strong enough. Reality wasn't. Reality weighed so lightly on me that the actuality of the entire Cambrian mountain range was a skittering colt in frantic canter. Significance shifted. Gravity, heft and import were all located in the metaphorical world.

I was dwelling in the realms of metaphor. At the beginning of this madness, my main metaphor was ocean, being at the shoreline before the tsunami; later, I felt like a broken boat in sea surges of storm, in waves that would wreck me. Over and over again, I felt I was drowning. In a brief and brilliant moment, my realm was starlight; I felt I was flying in the flickering world of utter space. For months, though, my realm was mountains. The edge. The abyss. The death zone at the peak.

What does it mean, to live in metaphors? I was perfectly aware that my actual physical self was sitting next to my woodstove, or in the garden shed, or at the piano; I knew this was the literal and tangible truth, but this was not the whole truth. The wider, deeper truth could only be told in metaphor. ‘Meta-phor', in its etymology, means a carrying-across of attributes from one thing to another. Metaphor also carries meaning across from one person to another; it is a messenger bearing messages. The god of metaphor is Mercury; this is the realm of the Trickster, carrying things across borders, living in the in-between.

If a person uses a metaphor, they are carrying themselves over, towards the listener, but in madness this need becomes infinitely more intense. In a manic-depressive episode, metaphors are heavy
with meaning, and the metaphors one chooses must carry an almost unbearable weight. This, I think, is why people are so stubborn about repeating the precise metaphors which tell their truth. Gérard de Nerval saw depression as a black sun. Poet Les Murray, Winston Churchill and others describe it as the ‘black dog'. Some say they are in an ‘abyss' or a ‘black hole'; others that they are ‘drowning'. For the person in crisis, these images are carrying a burden of significance which listeners, be they doctors, psychiatrists or friends, need to appreciate.

When a person is ill, a metaphor is not a decoration, not a trivial curlicue of Eng. Lit., not a doily on the conversational table; rather, it is a desperate attempt to send out an SOS, to give the listener their coordinates, because they are losing themselves.
I am on Cader Idris, just before the first peak after the path leaves the lake: do you read me? Over.
The perilous geography where my psyche was situated. Situated but dis-located, alone and pathless. I had to be meticulously precise in giving the latitude of my madness, the longitude of my scraps of insight. I was lost and urgently needed to be found, to be located by someone who could (as shamans say) send their souls out to find mine. In terms of our culture, one way of doing this is surprisingly simple: listeners need to hear the metaphors and stay with them. My doctor used my metaphors with almost unfaltering precision, and I felt safer for it. In all the hours of appointments, there was only one time I remember when he used a completely different metaphor to the one I'd just used, and I couldn't say anything. It was a broken moment, and I was lost, all over again. But every other time, by using my metaphors, he made me feel located, as if I could hold his hand and follow the way he knew and I'd forgotten, back to safety.