Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  The effort of holding myself steady, of refusing to take the spiral descent to despair, imposes a strain on mind and body. Sleep, when it comes, is disrupted, unrestful. My muscles waste.

  Admit to Dr Ahmed that I still regret my failure to die last July, less than a week after I’d convinced him to let me go home after my first stay at Rydon House. I lied, then, impressively. At least I try, now, to tell him what I feel to be true.

  I think he wears a hearing aid, concentrating hard on what I say in answer to his caring questions.

  8 January

  Beside me on Beth’s sofa last night Thomas rolled over onto his back, head and one paw dangling, and I tickled his tummy. He purred. Bert and Dennis chased each other around the room. The cats love a coal fire in the evening, and the quiet company of Beth and me after the to-and-fro of her visitors over Christmas.

  10 January

  Missed a diary day. Will continue again daily, not squander the whole New Year’s resolution. A lapse, merely.

  Wish this afternoon’s feelings of numbness had missed me, could be dismissed.

  11 January

  Blackbirds in the frost strip the hedgerows of haws, I manage to notice as I stare at the lane from the windows of my study on another winter’s day of neglected beauty.

  No mouse in the house this year.

  12 January

  Bright green fronds of moss are scattered across the white frosted lane below the old oak, torn from its branches by birds hungry for beetles and lice.

  I want to reach out to my London friends, to write and share what has happened.

  I need people to know.

  Not yet, though. I can’t tell them yet.

  Six months ago I was taken by ambulance to hospital, sirens wailing. Broken, a wreck, distraught at finding myself alive. Some friends must have heard, from other friends. A few of the closest are in touch with me. I’d like to be able to take my place again on the merry-go-round.

  14 January

  I can function, my body works when my mind asks it to. Attacked with the aid of a double-ladder borrowed from Frank the ash overhanging the byre, grown heavy again in the two years since I last trimmed the branch that threatens the roof.

  I’ve not lost my head for heights, nor my balance and agility, yet I’m so so fragile.

  It’s difficult to eat, impossible, it feels, to cook, take all my meals next door with Beth.

  What happens to me? Can it really be reaction against my decision to halve, rather than double, the daily dose of venlafaxine? Why do I panic, draw the darkness down around me? Neither rest nor nourishment do I give myself. How will I survive?

  16 January

  See nothing. I let nothing in. NO ENTRY. There’s nothing. No note of song, no flight of wing. No word to write.

  21 January

  Given up the daily entries. No point.

  27 January

  Walked this morning the five miles to and five miles back from Kingston for my Monday 10 a.m. appointment with Jim. In the fresh earth of the track where it bends beyond the end of the lake, I followed the pawprints of a family of badgers, small, medium-sized and large. All my strength sucked dry on the road, exhausting the hope that something will happen to help.

  1 February

  On the way to Jim’s this morning I convinced myself that this would be the last day I’d see him, determined in the afternoon to end my life. Planned to place a bale of straw and can of petrol in the back of my car, drive out to a remote valley on Exmoor, drench the seats and the straw with fuel, unscrew the cap on the tank, lie back in the driving seat and light a match.

  The car – which I hate, a blue Vauxhall – would blow up, and finish me off, if I wasn’t already done in by the flames.

  I was not in any doubt, felt relief at the decision. This time I’d make no mistake. And so I said my tired, sad kind-of goodbye to the man who had held me through so much. He knew, I reckon, what was on my mind.

  I remember telling him, several times at different sessions, of my belief that, when all else falls away and life comes to feel unliveable, we are each left with one last legitimate choice: to be dead. Nobody had the right to stop me.

  He had agreed. Simply suggested that the time might not yet have come, that there were paths of possibility still open to follow before arriving at this irreversible resolution. In the end, though, if it became truly impossible to live, then I had the right, of course, to die, he said.

  It was a comforting thing to be told. Helped me believe in him.

  And I didn’t kill myself this afternoon. Wasn’t ready. Not quite. Didn’t trust myself enough, suspected I mightn’t be making sense. Put the bale of straw and can of petrol on the back seat but didn’t start the car, drove nowhere.

  17 February

  A voice, my voice, whispering in the dark.

  18 February

  Please please let it be that by writing this, to myself, I’ll stop panicking. For the moment. For this moment. Please.

  28 March

  Many days away from this self-telling. Return in despair. Can I write myself upright? I need to raise the eyes of my mind from the ground at my feet, the earth bare, dry as dust.

  I could try and describe how I feel.

  Terror. Hot terror. Cold terror. I’m terrified of feelings.

  Six days ago I wrote, by hand, in ink-from-pen in an occasional notebook:

  I cannot write myself free of despair. A fly buzzes between the half-closed blind and the glass in the window at my back, against which the sun beats. I’ve raised the blind, squashed the fly, and the sun warms the back of my neck, glints on the right lens of my spectacles, in which, if I look to the side, I see my cheek reflected. The hairs shine. While up I let out another fly at the window to my left. I prefer not to kill the flies which are drawn to the windows of my study, the sunniest afternoon-room in the house. Only one half of each of the three windows opens, and when the flies obsess on the closed side it’s hard to persuade them to move over; I scoop at them with cupped hand, but they usually refuse to be shown their route of escape; and then I squash them, guiltily, on the white bar of the window frame.

  Repetition. I’ve said all this before. Round and round my thoughts revolve, in tightening circles.

  29 March

  Be specific.

  A month ago I started work, three days a week, planting hedges for Rich Ince’s country conservation firm. It was Carl Freedman, a regular visitor from London, who made me respond to Rich’s helpful offer. ‘You’ll do fine. Everything you have ever done you’ve done well. This too,’ he encouraged. ‘The most difficult thing’ll be convincing yourself each day to go!’

  Turned out to be true.

  The mornings are ridiculous, my bed a tumble of self-hate. Doubt about my adequacy at this simple manual work, out in the country air, steepens each day. You’d have thought it would get easier. Not at all. It’s a tougher and tougher struggle.

  2 April

  I don’t want to cook and I don’t want to be cooked for, I don’t want to speak or be spoken to and I don’t want to be silent or be silenced, I don’t want to be seen by anybody and I don’t want to be left alone, I don’t want to live and I don’t want to die.

  Are there limits to paralysis of will? Or is this passivity, this adoption of victimhood, this cutting back, cutting off, this retreat to claim a state of nothingness, this resort to depression, is all of this in fact a ferocious act of will?

  Who am I punishing? To whom am I declining to communicate?

  I do speak, though: I ask for help, and refuse to accept it. Sensing my own powerlessness, I seek to force those around me also to feel impotent. Hate this. Hate what I’m doing. Yet keep doing it, over and over again. Rolling over and over again in my shit.

  Beth continues to resist defeat. Strained to exhaustion by the pressure of my unstraightforwardness, by the endless push-and-pull, by the unanswerable flow of my tears-without-words, she nevertheless grows steadier in the pursuit of … In purs
uit of her own identity, stronger in peeling back the protective layers which separate her from acquaintance with her own nature. She’s working at it.

  I feel undeserving. Worse, I despise my despair, feel despicable in my self-inflicted distress, am ashamed.

  Guilt.

  Shame.

  ‘The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.’ Paul Tillich’s words are often with me these days, in the hope of somehow finding the courage of which he writes. In another quote, noted a decade ago, I see he used the word ‘annihilate’. His book, in paperback, its pages yellowing, is again out on my table waiting to be reread – as yet managed only a dozen or so paragraphs on anxiety, at the heart of his argument. For years, by now, I’ve seen myself in danger of being driven here there and everywhere by the threat of annihilation. And with the relief of recognition of Tillich’s words had imagined the threat to have receded, believed I was out of danger.

  Not true. Thinking isn’t feeling. And I feel, these days, close to self-extinction.

  Won’t flee.

  Must see it through.

  It? What is ‘it’?

  24 April

  Yesterday I shocked myself.

  This morning, in aftershock, I cover my eyes with my hands, do not wish to see, be seen.

  Yesterday, in fevered haste, I dug up with a pickaxe all the wild sorrel from the ‘butterfly meadow’, believing it to be young dock beginning to go to seed. While busy searching out every young shoot, I puzzled why this was the only dock in sight that extended upwards green stems ending in bunched pinky-red seed-pods. The roots too were different from the other dock I’d attacked. I kept returning to the task, spotting more shoots nestling in the grass.

  Sorrel, the wild flower book tells me, is of the dock family. I tasted the leaves from one of the dozens of small plants thrown from the barrow onto the pile of garden debris, and found the sorrel cultivated by Beth in her salad patch had the same slightly lemon tang.

  Wild sorrel is perfect, exactly the kind of plant I want to see grow from the seeds desperately watered and tended at this time last year. Some grew close to the path, others were scattered amongst the dominant clover. Thought I’d done well, on a day of distress, to tackle the task with thoroughness.

  Sorrel is too prolific to have been entirely eradicated, I afterwards noticed, with relief. Enough, I hope, remains to speckle the to-be-meadow.

  Next year maybe it will revive.

  I write of this to seek to calm myself. Such a terrible mistake. Difficult for me to accept it of myself. To make such a mistake feels unforgivable.

  25 April

  Maybe I’ll survive my failures. Maybe they’re not terminal.

  29 April

  Picked a handful of leaves from the remaining wild sorrel to add to a green salad for lunch for Beth and me.

  30 April

  Seeds of burdock, I discover, were amongst the ‘Wilderness mix (for the harsh environment)’ in my selective order of two years ago from the Countryside Catalogue of YSJ Seeds, the wildflower specialists near Chard. So: some of the burdock, the spread of which I despairingly seek to control, cursing its presence in my wood, I myself sowed. Since then I’ve visited YSJ’s nursery with Rich and two of my co-workers, to collect plugs of marsh marigold, primula and other plants for the project at Glist, one of the jobs I’m helping with at South West Silviculture.

  Been working for Rich for two-to-three full days a week now for three months, hedge-planting, way-clearing, spiral-guarding, tree-planting. Fitter physically.

  Emotionally I’m …?

  It’s been like this all afternoon: I write a word and then can’t think of another, keep repeating the syllables in my mind, hoping that whatever it is I want to say will emerge from my head … my head … my head …

  No, it doesn’t come. Must stop or I’ll panic.

  Mustn’t panic. Panic is the worst.

  How can I help myself get through such days as these?

  Almost every day, these days.

  There was a point, a purpose. I wanted to describe the nursery, its air of abandonment, of apparent chaos, and then to tell of their expertise at gathering and propagating the seeds of wild flowers, and to record the ambitious work at YSJ. They know so much, care so much, are dedicated, thoughtful people.

  I envy them.

  Envy Rich.

  Envy Phil and Timothy, his two full-time workers, who never let a task defeat them. They all, it appears to me, especially Rich, belong to …

  Words flee, thought veiled. Tempted to blame the drugs for the clouds billowing through my brain.

  6 May

  Beth is away for a week, on holiday with a friend at a resort on the Red Sea. I’m feeding her cats, talking to them, caressing them. And I do care, especially for Thomas, the big grey cat, a neutered male: Tom, the ex-tom.

  Earlier in the week I mowed the paths through my wilderness wood, and today in the late afternoon, the sun’s rays low and golden, strolled down the cut paths and sat for a while on the bench facing the park, where a herd of black bullocks presently lives. Tom followed me, padding in my footsteps. He’s deliberate in his movements, studied. I was surprised when he chose to sit, tail curled, ears pricked, on the rustic table made for me by Beth.

  ‘Hi, Tom. Hello, Thomas,’ I said. ‘How are you?’ and lent forward to stroke him.

  He purred, without turning round, and continued his observation of the cattle.

  I wonder whether cows wonder?: one of twenty-two postcard-sized colour photos of cows made last year by Keith Arnatt in response to their reappearance in the countryside after the lifting of foot-and-mouth restrictions. Good to like work by artists I like.

  10 May

  Beth is back, brown and beautiful.

  The filling I had done in a tooth ten days ago has dropped out, and the time-switch on the central heating has broken, minor grievances that weigh heavily.

  12 May

  Monday morning.

  I’m not sure I can write.

  I’d been thinking that it’s the one thing I can do with my life.

  I’ll write myself alive again, I thought.

  Can’t.

  Must.

  How?

  Why?

  Because I need to block the slide into thoughts of suicide.

  I can function.

  On Saturday night we met Rich and his wife Suki, with my SWS colleagues and their girlfriends, at the Crowcombe Arms for a staff supper, at which I talked normally, appeared relaxed, joked, looked to be enjoying myself.

  And last night, despite my state of gloom, I cooked Beth and me a cottage pie, with ratatouille.

  It was the same in Leeds last weekend, accompanying Carl on the journey north to see his father, a street musician whom he hasn’t spoken to for seventeen years.

  I functioned.

  And now this vacancy. What happens?

  Must go to today’s appointment with Jim in Kingston.

  Dead mole on the path by the byre. Intact, no sign of a wound. Grey body already stiff, though soft to the touch, with short flat tail and almost-human front paws stuck onto its torso like the hands attached to the shoulders of a thalidomide child, damaged at birth.

  Last autumn, walking down the Strand, I dropped in to the Courtauld Gallery shop to replenish my stock of museum postcards, and bought a card taken from Joseph Gerstmayer’s watercolour study of a mole. Bought, as usual, five copies of each chosen card, one of which I’ve kept. Have been doing this since 1984, collected by now in a dozen large date-bracketed envelopes recording shifts in visual mood.

  13 May

  Took five attempts to get to Rich’s house in Over Stowey for work this morning, a fifteen-minute drive away. Turned the car around five times, on each occasion almost arriving back at home. Turned again, repeatedly, almost reaching him. Glad I made it in the end.

  Rich seemed pleased too.

  14 May

  Warm and wet, plenty of
sorrel has revealed itself in the long grass of the butterfly meadow outside my front door. There are some butterflies too!

  15 May

  Drove this morning to an appointment in Wellington with the dentist, who informed me that the filling is intact.

  Dug up thistles all afternoon.

  16 May

  Rain on the roof, big drops, a sound that reaches me. It’s stopped now. My brain is corrugated cardboard.