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.
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 understand
ing, 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.
Tristimania Page 5