Tristimania (7 page)

In
Don Quixote,
the delusional Quixote is treated by the doctor
(Cervantes himself), who aims to cure his madness by working within his lunacy, curing him through the very terms he uses. It is crucial that listeners do not scramble the message or scumble the precision of the image. If the listener can stay within the terrain of the exact metaphor the speaker is using, they will feel more findable, more reachable. (
I read you. What's the mountain weather report? Stay away from the cliff edges
. . .) But if, by contrast, the reply confuses the image (
I understand. You're feeling very low. You're in a dark pit
), then the person in crisis will feel more lost, more isolated and more endangered.

People in psychiatric crisis are living more in their minds than in the actual world, and words have an extraordinary power. They can swap places with things; they can crush, poison and kill. They can also give life, illuminate and heal.
Logos
is indeed a divine principle: words create reality.

My need for metaphor was ferocious: I clung to it as if my life depended on it, as if my SOS from Cader were a text message tapped out on a dying phone with low charge and a weak signal sent to the Mountain Rescue Service. Help. I am mad. North-north-west. Eleven o'clock on the dial, moving dangerously into the midnight hour.

Sometimes, though, I had a positive sense of the metaphoric terrain; I was in another land, the other world. In a compliment to our species, I'd suggest humanity cannot bear too much
mere
reality, deadened reality unenlivened by significance, meaning, poetry or art. I wanted to escape the tethers of dogmatic rationalism, to say that this way of seeing is not enough, the mind needs more. It is a yearning for the ultimate, for God, for the divine, for art, for poetry, and I found myself longing to dwell elsewhere, where the mind can dream, awake. A yearning not to
climb an actual mountain but rather the mountain's reflection in still lakes.

Madness is a way of seeing aligned to the shadow rather than the object which casts it. Madness is a way of hearing attuned to the echo rather than the melody which causes it. The other world. The uncertain world. The peripheral vision. The idea-world, where metaphor is like the ‘sympathetic string' on an instrument, which is usually unplayed but resounds in sympathetic resonance to the playing of the main string, most strongly at either the same tone or an octave interval. The main string actually played is not as important as the sympathetic string which sings its negative capability in a resonance of gold. Matter doesn't matter as much as the immaterial world. Metaphor is not of matter and yet how much it matters.

The literal world has a metaphoric penumbra of significance, and this is where the world glows, the halo of events; for nothing is only real. It is real and it is ideal, as if the psyche's metaphoric idea of something is always the augmented version, the Greater: as if Idea in the human mind has grandeur far beyond Reality and Plato was right all along. It is the mindset of fairy tales, where every encounter has enormity and significance, where people are hugely good or hugely destructive. There are trolls, kind kings, good animal companions.

People in a crisis of manic depression are said to be prone to idealizing people or demonizing them, though probably a better way of phrasing it is ‘to demonize' and ‘to angelize'. I certainly did that medically, angelizing my doctor and demonizing the psychiatrist, and many memoirs seem to do the same. Both extremes are Ideal, from the realm of Idea. Metaphoric angels. Metaphoric demons.
Because just as the mind makes distinctions between actual mountain and metaphoric Mountain, so it creates distinctions between the actual, sweet-hearted friend and the metaphoric Angel, between the actual, highly skilled doctor and the metaphoric Saviour. As if the metaphorical vision capitalized the heart of things. As if it crushed everything to its quintessence, the fifth quality, the purest ethereal nature of things, as if I saw the Ocean of the ocean, the Moon of the moon, the Candle of the candle, the Solstice of the solstice, the Midnight of midnight with the I of my i. Alone.

But living in the world of metaphor can exact a high price. I was very lonely. There is an enormous difference between loneliness, isolation and solitude. Solitude has a sweet serenity, frictionless as flame licking itself. Loneliness is where solitude becomes too poignant and the flame begins to burn you. Isolation, though, has a punitive edge; illness can isolate you and so can the simple fact of my profession; the loneliness of the long-distance writer. Mostly, I love solitude all day and company all night, but I became violently lonely in this illness, not because I lacked company but because I became fussy as a cat over who I could be with, and when.

I spent most of my time alone in depression's one-person tragedy, feeling as if I were both the chorus, reading ahead in the script, and also the isolate agonist in a killing tale. I imprisoned myself behind walls of silence: the unanswered telephone ringing itself into oblivion; the kind-hearted emails, not ignored exactly but certainly unanswered.

Alone, swollen with self-loathing, self-revolted, I saw myself once like a rotting octopus, tentacles of dying flesh suffocating me, poison seeping colourlessly through my veins, all my pointless life in
cancelled colours draining into abnegation, the nearly nothing meaninglessness of obliteration.

Privacy can be dangerous, because it gives someone in crisis a place to hide their intentions, to conceal many things, chief among them suicidality. As Kay Redfield Jamison comments: ‘The privacy of the mind is an impermeable barrier.'

I craved solitude but I also craved company to ward off the devastations of my loneliness. The difficulty was that each need collided with its opposite so that when I was alone I could become desperate to be in company but as soon as I was with people I would often need to be alone. At worst, I'd withdraw instantly as if snatching my hand back from nettles.

I felt an urgent need to be understood and to be among people with whom I could be unlonely, so that I would not be trapped in solitude but could be released into telling talk. Sometimes I was alone, wanting company but unable to do the one necessary thing: I wished someone would just walk straight into my house, find me wherever I was – in bed, in the corner of the garden, by the stove – and hold my head, find the gentling words; the psyche-whisperers who could find the way towards me, letting words of light, of truth, of love, spool out into the air.

I yearned for people with minds of silk – delicate-thoughted, smooth against my sore, bruised psyche, soft as mare's tail cloud and yet with the tensile strength of spidersilk, five times stronger than steel, strong enough to withstand being near madness but subtle enough, sweet enough, silken enough, for me to be able to touch it. Maybe I could use that silk as a lifeline, could hold it to cross back over into the healthy world, finding the silk road between continents of minds.

But, alone, that transaction of sensitivity, that commerce of silk,
sometimes seemed impossible, the risks too great. What if I couldn't speak? What if they tried to reach me and couldn't? My disappointment: their hurt. Depressed people can make those around them feel badly rejected, and my sadness and madness could (and did) ripple out beyond me, my rejections causing further hurt to other people. It still pains me that many people around me were hurt by my inability to reach out to them and ask for help, because when I closed down I held on to just a tiny number of close old friends.

As far as the larger world was concerned, I tried to Act Normal. Being mad is, to put it bluntly, embarrassing. In manic depression, it is too easy to lose one's inhibitions, and the ordinary traffic of the world is weirdly dissonant: codes of behaviour and decorum seem peculiarly frivolous compared to the fury of emotions within.

Sometimes the incongruous disjunction of the private and public worlds is as ludicrous as it is heartbreaking. The poet William Cowper's
Memoir
records his breakdown in 1763, triggered by undertaking a job of a very public nature, as Clerk of the Journals in the House of Lords, and finding his suitability for the job questioned. High-stress work in the public eye was the opposite of what he really needed, which was a vast and protected privacy. As he became more ill, the breakthroughs from the public world into his private soul seemed maddening interruptions. In particular, his laundress and her husband always seemed to be busy too near him in his chambers, and at one point, suicidal, he tried to hang himself in his bedroom while the laundress was in the dining room: she ‘must have passed by the bedchamber door . . . while I was hanging upon it'.

Depressed and vulnerable, I was frightened of clumsiness. Stupidity felt as brutal and painful as being punched. I felt as if I were walking in crystal forests with stained-glass skies and crassness was as violent as swinging concrete arms; words like dumb-bells; cranes
for eyes. At times, even good-natured bonhomie seemed a terrible cacophony of raw trumpets baying, with violins used as percussion for gross toasts, a piano lid a drinks table, clarinets stuck, reeds down, into the ground, used as flagpoles for Ingerland bunting, and flutes stolen as sticks to crack heads open.

Most of the time, like a sick cat, I wanted to hide unseen in a dark corner, trembling with the toxicity of madness streaming through my veins. I couldn't stand being mothered, but I sought consolation. I craved understanding, but I staggered inwardly at the ways in which manic depression could be grossly misunderstood. One friend's brother, heavily into diet-related health, offered his opinion: ‘You eat too much wheat.' I felt winded by the abyss between my experience and his comprehension, as if he really thought that toast and marmalade could convulse the mind to psychosis, as if too many cheese sandwiches could cause suicidal ideation.

From time to time, I sought out particular friends for particular reasons: one, because he was authoritative by nature, and he was willing and able to outshout the siren voices in my head; another, because she could join me wherever I was: if I was kite-high with a mile-long streamer of giggles bubbling behind me, she could find me there and laugh with me, but when I sank and my heart had plunged like a broken kite to the Earth, suddenly, she was there, too, right beside me, serious, kind and quiet.

My friends were all different, but the nature of their friendship was alike. They were constant, loyal and enduring. I am still appalled at the time-consuming nature of an illness like this, and I am beyond gratitude for their generosity; they gave and gave and gave without end and without knowing how long it would last. I could count on them, knowing that they would hold themselves strong. If they had not seemed strong, I couldn't have leant on them, and it wasn't that
they didn't have their own difficulties and sadnesses in that long year but rather that they took immense care to hold firm in the hours they spent with me and to be weak, if they needed to be, elsewhere.

One gave me a bird's nest, woven with the softest feathers and moss, with a note tucked inside saying ‘A nest for your spirit'. One, on a horribly bleak morning in winter-spring, left a tray of gorgeous pansies on my doorstep. One, who lives too far away for me to see her easily, called me often on the phone. She could hear the silent words between my breaths and gauge how low I was by all I could not say. They protected me, standing between me and the world, gentle sides towards me and tough sides outward, and they were fierce to ward away from me anything or anyone who was unhelpful. I was sheltered by their shields – an unassailable, interlocked circle.

My cats were also acutely important when I was ill. The poet Christopher Smart, who was manic depressive, spent seven years in a mental asylum. He was allowed to keep a cat, and wrote the loveliest ode ever dedicated to a cat, writing of his cat, Jeoffry:

               
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

               
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.

Now, as I write, my cat Tom is asleep on my study floor. He is using two of my small black notebooks from that year of illness as a pillow for his head. He is a feral cat but has been with me since kittenhood and is more attached to me than any cat I've known. What do they do, these pets, for our savaged psyches? They are company; they breathe near us, and that in itself is consolation. They are more than happy to wake in the middle of the night and pad downstairs to sit with us in the kitchen. ‘For he keeps the Lord's
watch in the night against the adversary,' wrote Smart. They need us to feed them and, at my worst, this responsibility was more pressing than the need to feed myself but knowing that I could at least perform this task was helpful. They offer affection without analysis. They are an exercise in instant mindfulness: wholly purring, wholly stretching, wholly sunbasking, wholly catnip-toy-mouse-chasing. They cannot but live in an eternal present and do so beguilingly, drawing us, too, towards the glow at the heart of now.

Though my sleep was short, the medication made me sleep furiously – that phrase which Gideon Koppel used to title his exquisite film, precisely because Chomsky had said it had no meaning. If I slept furiously, I also felt a life force furious within, of green life in a green flame flowing, and it seemed both to conjure and confound the suicidal thoughts which devilled me. Mania was like a Faust in my mind, paradoxically both calling up the demon suicide and at the same time driving it off in rage: when suicide seemed to tinge the edge of my vision, mania roared at it:
Stand Where I Can See You. And FUCK OFF.

Maybe the sleep of depression protects you, through its anaesthesia, from something worse, from the pain that would drive you to suicide. Perhaps, further, that's part of the reason why mixed-state hypomania is so dangerous; because its depressions are sleepless, and that sleeplessness feeds on itself, self-cannibalizing. In sleepless mania, the mind is yellow-dizzy with a turbulence of colour, the air licks it with tongues of fire, flowers bow their petals like violinists and are bent to the applause of a rapturous wind while even the shadows of things are brilliant and burning. (Van Gogh knew.)