Copyright © 2016 by Jay Griffiths
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Lines on p. 168 from In Praise of Mortality by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead, 2005), reprinted by permission of the translators; lines on pp. 177–8 and 184 from Selected Poems: Rumi, translated by Coleman Banks (London: Penguin Books, 2004), copyright © Coleman Banks, 1995; lines on pp. 97–8 from “Hymn to Hermes” from Homeric Hymns, edited by Nicholas Richardson, translated by Jules Cashford (London: Penguin Books, 2003), copyright © Jules Cashford, 2003.
Originally published by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House UK
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Griffiths, Jay, author.
Title: Tristimania : a diary of manic depression / Jay Griffiths.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008987
Subjects: LCSH: Manic-depressive illness. | Manic-depressive persons.
Classification: LCC RC516 .G77 2016 | DDC 616.89/5--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008987
Cover design by Debbie Berne
Interior design by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
COUNTERPOINT
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www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-804-3
CONTENTS
PART ONE: My Maddest Wednesday
PART TWO: The Condition of Passion
PART THREE: The Trickster of the Psyche
PART FOUR: Till the Light
PART FIVE: Mind Flight
Artist-Assassin: Poems
PART ONE: MY MADDEST WEDNESDAY
If I had to pick the moment when it all began, I’d have to choose the afternoon at Twyford Down when I fell down a rabbit hole. Yup, ’strue. So much pain, like lightning striking my ankle, sharp tears smarting in my eyes, the swelling, hobbling clumsy-walking: none of these mattered much. What did matter was that I could not go running and my mind began to fall down its own rabbit holes: it needs to run with serious intent, seeking the self-medication of endorphins, the runner’s natural high, leading to the easy tranquillity afterwards.
So, then, I could not run for a month, and something began to go awry in my mind. It was the beginning of a year-long episode of manic depression. For much of the time it would, from the outside, look more like the years left blank in the Medieval Welsh Chronicles as if to say Nothing Happened This Year. I did not do any of the things associated with mania and hypomania: I did not have sex with dozens of men; not even one. I did not spend myself into dizzy, indebted oblivion. I did not have any car accidents. Following an earlier episode of hypomania some years before, I’d learnt the pitfalls, so this time I had three rules: no sex, no big spending, no driving – the latter after I had two near-crashes. I sat in my favourite corner of the sofa, nearest to the woodstove. I smoked one rollie after another. Intermittently, I drank too much. End of.
Except it wasn’t. The curtain lifted, the veil of the temple of the psyche was rent: I fell through into a further reach of my own mind. The world turned headside out. The interior was made exterior, writ real as plumbing, enormous as opera, jangling with life as if a zoo had eloped with a circus.
According to psychologists, there is an increased risk of manic symptoms in bipolar people at times when they have achieved an important goal, and I was just finishing a book on childhood, Kith, which had taken six years of research and writing. I had been working long hours with very little time away from my desk for the previous eighteen months. I was, as one friend said to me, ‘writing till the lights go out’. I was burning out, but also, in one of the paradoxes of the mind when it starts to tilt, I was becoming fascinated by the dangerous sparks flickering at the edges of my vision, catching fire and flaming across my mind.
Do episodes of madness have causes? What do they need, to unfurl themselves? They unfold like tragic dramas and, just as tragedy needs a tragic flaw, a backstory and the dramatic incident which kicks off the drama, so chapters of madness also need a tragic flaw (genetic vulnerability), a backstory (long-term stress) and an incident (a trigger).
Genetic vulnerability. Tick.
Long-term stress. Tick.
Trigger? Happened like this.
I’d met a man who was trying to persuade me to work on a project with him. He seemed clever and interesting. We’d gone for a long walk in the hills to talk over the idea. It was a hot day. Halfway up, he wanted to rest and offered me a foot massage. I love foot massages, and I said yes. Foot massage it was, to begin with. I fell into a warm, dreamy state, eyes closed, that deep-relaxation state. And then he wanked all over me.
I would like to tell you that I kicked him in the balls, spat in his face and maybe ironed his nose with a fair-sized rock. I did not. I froze. Like a child in the clutch of a monster, I froze. Like an animal choosing fight, flight or freeze, I froze.
As sexual assault goes, this was mild. Very. But any one-sided sexual encounter is nauseating and utterly humiliating. It left me not just frozen but dazed, bewildered and sick. Soon after he had come, he started saying sorry: he was under no illusion that it was something I wanted – his repeated apologies made that clear. Later, alone, I blamed myself for freezing, for being hopelessly ill-equipped, for ‘letting it happen’. I tried to forgive myself. I ran it through in my mind, many times, as if it were a film and I could re-shoot the crucial scene. (Or, indeed, him.) Nothing helped.
In the days after that, I could feel my mind on a slant, every day more off-kilter, every night sleeping less. And then I began to lose my appetite. There are those who comfort-eat, a pal said to me, while there are those who comfort-starve, and this was my pattern. I could not swallow. I could put food in my mouth, but my throat closed up and I had to spit it out.
The clock hands were counting back the hours I could sleep: eight per night, seven, six, five, four, three. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus prays for the hours not to pass: I prayed for them to speed me in sleep. A significant lack of sleep or food (or both) can in itself trigger mentally unstable episodes, and my own genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder or, as I prefer it, manic depression, hurls me to heaven or hell (usually hell) every once in a while. Finishing a book always leaves me vulnerable and exhausted. But in whichever ways one counts the causes, the result was a perfect storm. For three weeks I was in a state of slippage, a gap widening between me and my usual self.
The last time mania had tripped me up, thirteen years previously, I had gone to climb Kilimanjaro, taking my highs to a new height, and then, in the ensuing depression, I had sought help from a shaman in the Amazon who gave me ayahuasca, a profoundly important medicine used in healing for thousands of years. Now, though, there was simply no time.
I knew I had to get to the doctor. I say ‘the’ doctor because there was only one I’d ever met who I believed could help. He was a local GP. I knew him, and he knew me. I hadn’t needed to see him for years, but at the first appointment of this episode, I was crazed with distress. It was not a state bordering on depression but poised on a terrible brink, standing unbalanced and weightless on the rim of a volcano’s crater. He didn’t hurry me: a ten-minute appointment overran to forty minutes and longer, and I was choked with chaos. He offered medication, which I refused initially, but that night I felt worse and made an emergency appointment to see h
im the following day.
By this time, there was a rupture between what was happening in my mind and what I could say. I couldn’t translate myself outwards into the world. I tried to tell him about that terrible disjunction, as if the cabin pressure of my mind were at variance with the pressure of public air. In madness, the head can feel as if it is in a wholly different atmosphere and the consequent psychic pain makes you want to scream.
My doctor contacted the psychiatrist immediately, asking for an urgent appointment. He knew how far and how fast I was falling away from myself and, when he said it was urgent, he meant it.
The following days and nights picked up the reverberations of a sinister percussion, as if my mind were set to an inexorable rhythm, a threatening, ungainsayable, hideous enemy – a drumhead mass, a rhythmic ritual playing me into a deadly war. I felt trapped in a tragedy of terrible teleological intent. Reason was being drummed out into a courtyard to face a firing squad.
In an attempt to feel some kind of control, I tried to chart how mad I felt and put a wavy zigzag line on the pages of my diary, with a note when I first felt my mind slip: November 11th, ‘Mercury Goes Awry’. Mercury, god of writers and – surely – god of manic depression (that most mercurial of illnesses), was to play a big part in this strange drama. He flirted with me from the start. I ‘heard’ (while knowing it was not real) a voice saying: Meet me at the crossroads. That, without question, is the voice of Mercury. And his locus. But he is never punctual, and he will never wait.
By November 27th my diary has a double wavy line and ‘Mercury Double Awry’. By the 29th, my note says ‘Mercury Triple Awry’ and so it was to stay until January 5th. Months after I’d recovered, I read, with a sense of forceful recognition, the brilliant writer and psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison describing the three phases of mania, where stage one is low level, moving to stage two, and then to the third: full-on mania. This is something which may be caught in time – if the professional response is swift.
It wasn’t. The psychiatrist’s appointment failed to materialize. Instead, the mental health team took a week to respond to the request marked ‘urgent’ (underlined twice; I saw my doctor’s letter), and when they did contact me they offered me an appointment with a psychiatric social worker. I don’t fucking well need a fucking social worker, I managed not to say. I was ill. They were patronizing. I was furious.
They said they worked as a team. I hated the word ‘team’ like I hate the word ‘family’ when it is pronounced, smugly, two syllables, famly.
Each day was worse than the last.
And then I went mad.
I like the word ‘mad’, though I prefer its predecessor, wōd, of which more later. But ‘mad’ has its strengths. I like its bluntness; its forthrightness; its very shortness, which brooks no argument. It doesn’t bother with sophistication or nuance. It doesn’t seek out spectrums of subtlety or gradations of seriousness. Head cleaved open, madstruck.
The root of the word ‘mad’, from Proto-Germanic, means ‘changed (for the worse), abnormal’. Quite. I was changed for the worse. ‘I wasn’t myself’, we say, in that canny phrase.
If there is one part of this episode for which I feel responsible, it was the way I had been seriously overworking and ignoring the warning signs. I’d been pressuring myself to meet difficult deadlines and the stress made my mind gasp in protest. Specifically, I was forcing myself to the gruelling, meticulous, tedious necessity of finishing the index, bibliography and endnotes for Kith. It was a carefully researched book, and I couldn’t let it out of my hands till all the references and studies were checked. The argument it was presenting (including learning from indigenous cultures) might be unpopular with people who were right-wing or not very bright, but I thought that at least no one would be able to say that each point was not proven, study after study quoted, reference after reference given.
It was the worst kind of work to do when you’re ill. Any work would have been too much, but this particular job required conscientious care and neat, whispered referencing, when all the while the howling was in me.
My mind wanted freedom, time and openness; it wanted poetry, wondering-room, sleep, ease and unclocked hours. Instead, it was on a treadmill, no minute spare. The speed with which I was moving was necessary to complete what I’d promised to do before the book went to the printers, and yet that speed itself was contributing to my sense of urgency: the quicker I could finish everything, the sooner I’d have some time off, but the faster I went, the faster this impending crisis was coming, for it was feeding on my speed. I was trying to escape it, even as I was provoking it.
Bricked in, immured, fastened to facts, I felt breathless, panicked and claustrophobic. I was almost fantasizing about the moment when the last detail would be done, when the final footnote had its laces tied, when the last syllable of jot and tittle was bibbed and tuckered, each scruple’s weight recorded.
I kept promising myself I’d take a break, a real break, as soon as it was done. But I was too late. The pressure I’d put on myself took its toll. Perhaps if I had followed my own needs and taken a few weeks off, I might have avoided this breakdown.
Instead, every incoming email made me want to scream. If anything was required of me, I felt my bowstring stretched tighter and tighter, bent out of shape, each day tauter. The worse the pressure was, the worse would be the result; I could feel it. When the bow was released, arrow after arrow after arrow would shoot out over my coming days and weeks, injuring and wounding.
I usually work at home but that became impossible. I usually work a full day, but that was suddenly beyond me. For a few days, I forced myself to spend about two hours a day in a shared office-space near me where all the other desks were taken by friends because I thought it would be easier to cope with the screaming in my head. I was using all my willpower to hold the threads, rags and ribbons of my mind together.
I finished what I needed to do, n’er but just. I had to send a couple of emails to turn down offers of work and commissions, the sort of messages one can normally write without a second thought, but the task became a cliff face of impossible reach; it took me hours to gear myself up to do it. My fingers were trembling with the effort to write these excuses, by which I could be excused from my own life.
For one awful moment, I felt the pure panic of an imminent emergency. And then I stopped. My mind staggered, jolted and was sundered. The screen of my mind froze. Time ceased to pass. One intense present moment. Nothing moved. Nothing could move. I could feel no motion in my psyche and all the usual easy fluency of thoughts streaming into each other, confluent and waterful, was slung into reverse. It was the silent onset of sheer dread. It was like the terrible sucking back of the oceans just before a tsunami crashes to the shore; the frightening in-breath before the storm-surge roars inland. The sky was going to fall through the sea, the clouds would smash on impact like glass, and the great pale sheet of a dead white sky, motionless, frozen and broken, would lie noiseless at the bottom of the ocean.
But the ocean was in the wrong place. So was the sky. And the shore. Nothing was speaking as it should. The horses were stampeding to higher ground. The gulls fled in fear; all the birds were in silent flight. The water was milling, a mob-anger moving it. The wave was crossing the oceans towards me. Later, I knew, would come the disaster, the broken houses and crushed cars, the lamp-posts bent in two. Now was only now, stark and brutal.
I was staring at the computer screen, and I think I said, ‘Fuck!’ a couple of times, in a whimper of fear. One of my friends turned to me.
– Are you okay? she asked seriously, nervously almost.
– I’ve. Got. To. Go. Home.
I pulled these words out of memory, as if I were speaking a foreign language unused for years, each word needing utter concentration. And I fled home, like a terrified animal seeking the safest place it knows. I tried desperately not to meet anyone’s eyes, wishing I could be invisible, finding the two hundred yards an almost unconquerable dist
ance. I felt my terror must be visible on my face, as if my mind had stepped outside my skull, white and frozen.
My mind! I’ve broken it! was all I could think. It was blank: deadly blank. After the fire, after the flood, after the bomb, after the tsunami. As I got to my front door, I tried to use logic: This cannot be happening because it has never happened before. Useless. My exclamation turned to pleading: This must not happen. The last clear thing I remember is being on all fours in my study, my hands hammering the floor, saying aloud to myself over and over again: I am losing my mind. I am losing my mind. I am losing my mind.
For the next twelve hours I was in a kind of delirium. I was giggling one moment then crying; soaring then crashing. My moods were swinging within minutes, flinging me from the thrilling high-wire paradise of exuberance to the wrenching agony of a pain so gripping I could hardly breathe. It was a Wednesday, my maddest Wednesday, mercredi in French, the day of Mercury indeed.
I was hallucinating, and I could see spirals rising, each one spinning upwards faster and faster the more I watched it, like the tiny flecks you can see with your eyes shut which fall faster if you follow them with your gaze.
Some medical conditions can be called ‘florid’ and it is a particularly apt term for mania, the sick psyche’s self-flowering, les fleurs du very very mal. I could see unreal blooms – the idea of flowering without the actual flowers, wandering bloomings, the very blossom of the mind – a rose arose, blossomed and bloomed and was blown. Then my hallucinations turned to blood and silence. I lost my words. I could think only in images. In the small hours of the night, I sat by my woodstove and got the giggles because I found the woodstove so comical a companion. One of my cats crept near me, and I cried in pity for its languageless state. Even as I was myself.
‘Tristimania’ is an old term for manic depression, precisely capturing that sense of grief and hilarity, of violent sadness and mad highs. I tried to go to bed, but my pillows made me laugh. Eventually, I fell asleep, but I woke within the hour to find my pillow soaked with tears, as I had been crying in my sleep. Tristimania in an hour.
Tristimania Page 1