I felt that life was something I could toss away like a spent cigarette. I could chuck it in the bin like an unwanted sandwich. Life or death seemed almost a question of housework: a bit of a sort-out. Keep it or throw it out? To be or not to be? Trash or treasure? It is the absolute opposite of Dignitas, that serious, real, considered, intelligent, planned, thoughtful dying.
After that first suicidal night, my friends seemed to link up, and made an unofficial rota so that I was never alone for long. I felt I was being parcelled around, from one house to another, or, if I was at home, there was a steady, regular pattern of phone calls. Even my friends who had never met got in touch with each other, swapped phone numbers, linked arms so I was in a silk net of care. It was sweet, touching and necessary. If I hadn’t been so ill, I would have been embarrassed to be babysat like this. But I was, so I wasn’t.
Christmas was hideous. I spent the day with friends and their kids and I was sky-high all morning. By lunchtime, I was in slippage. I adore children and I’m not normally irritable, but my nerves were shot to pieces and the children’s noise and nonsense were making me want to shriek. The sound of Christmas champagne corks popping, normally one of my favourite sounds in the whole world, made me startle violently. Within half an hour I was lying in bed, my whole spirit aching, trying not to scream.
At my next doctor’s appointment, I told him about the suicide night, but I needed to bring him something funny, too, so I told him about the time when Byron was seriously suicidal. ‘I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out,’ he wrote, ‘but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.’
Some of a doctor’s work, my GP said, is to understand. Something physical – angina, for example – is easy. The psyche is harder and takes a long time. We talked about suicide. Like my friend, my doctor recalled me to my writing. Like my friend, he used the same term: duty.
– What you have is a gift which is also a duty: a gift that demands a heavy price.
My own mind had become unfamiliar territory. My brain, sleeping so lightly for so long, felt like a messenger in flight, travelling light, carrying hand luggage only. I was a volatile insubstance.
Mania is like the high seas, calling the seafarer to set sail; it is an enticing dare to the Odysseus within, who, hearing the siren call and ignoring the whirlpools and rocks, embarks on epics. The siren voices played me, swung me, seduced me; they wove harmonies of beguiling danger, whispered me to whirlpools of suicidal spirals, crafted their sway to lure me on to the rocks. Almost the last time I drove, before I banned myself, I had ignored a T-junction sign and driven recklessly right across the path of an oncoming car: it could have been fatal.
I heard music differently, and it was as if I was not listening outwards towards the music but as if the music were already in me; it was inside my psyche because its origin was in the universal human mind. From there, it could be released by composers of genius, so a song which had pre-existed in silence would be sung out loud for the first time. For music transcribes mind. It is as if composers can light a candle and step over an inner threshold and see by that candlelight visible caves and cathedrals of the human psyche, and can write the notes to describe it. I say visible, yet this is music and therefore audible. But it felt to me as if music was in itself a profound synaesthesia (only connect); from its sound, music allows you to see. What chimes, rhymes and resonates (be it music, poetry or empathy) is curative; the mind is understood.
I wanted to breathe in the inspired air of Bach. Respiration as inspiration. What is to me the spire of song (Allegri’s ‘Miserere’) is the irresistible aspiration within the psyche, for God or love or Orpheus.
Music, neutralizing the power of the siren song, is at the heart of the Orpheus myth. Orpheus sails with the Argonauts and, when they are in danger of being bewitched by the sirens’ beautiful, fatal music, Orpheus draws out his lyre and plays music louder and lovelier than the siren song, and the ship sails safely on. It is as if Orpheus stands for the soul of music, and this story illustrates music’s power over the psyche’s self-destructions. If the siren voices of suicide seduced me, listening to music could sometimes swing me back round to safety.
It was a shock to hear music as I did at that point. Nothing could ever be quite as intimate as this when something from outside could steal gently into my psyche. The intensity of this intimacy is at one moment exquisite but might at a further pitch become unbearable because it unveils part of the mind, usually curtained even to itself. It is utterly intimate, and yet music could hardly be more public; it happens, after all, in the fundamental commons of the air. Connecting, linking the outer and the inner, it is part of the sense of connection which is key to mania. Hyper-connected, the manic mind is looking for rhyme and rhythm, sending out its lines into the world and responding in turn to the strings and cords and chords of strings. Unsurprisingly, composers, dwellers at that dangerous interconnecting border, suffer disproportionately from manic depression.
I did not just listen to classical music; Arcade Fire’s flaming honky-tonk lit me sometimes, or Tom Waits would step into an evening with his raw, hurt hope, his self-bewildering, damaged brilliance, unfurling a gutterful of aces. But mainly I was tuned to classical. Sometimes I felt as if music painted the mind’s sweetest serenity cerulean, sky blue and soaring, and I would feel like flying. Tie me to the earth when the sky is so canted. Tilted by its own incantatory song, world, stepping ever further inwards, becomes self. I was enchanted. Etymologically and actually. Bewitched by song – chant – which fascinated me and held me spell-bound, bound to listen, unfree to leave, surrendered to song.
Music created grandeur, the fullness of a composer’s mind so august, so augmented, so matured, so autumned, that its golden chords swell to a ripeness so perfect there is no listening left for anything less, but then its gold gives, gives, gives into a sunset so blinding that in its grandeur, too, it becomes unbearable.
Sometimes I didn’t dare listen to music, because I thought I would be lost; I’d never come back. Specifically, I thought if I really listened I’d never eat again; as if madness turned music to manna from heaven and if you’ve eaten the food of the gods you would never want mortal food again. Sometimes I would be frightened that music would mean a kind of dissolution, as if my words, my thoughts and my self-hood were made of sand and the inrush of liquid music would dissolve me entirely; no particularity would stand. All that would remain would be the rounded nubs of damp sand on a beach after the first wave has unspecified the sandcastle, and has departicularized the sharp, dry towers into soft, wet mounds. Then, lost to the tide and the tide’s song, I would become music. What was ‘I’ would be gone.
The rest would be silence. Music wanted me, swamped me, took me and lost me, until, and finally, nothing more could be said. An ultimate creation of music is the quality of silence it inspires in the moment when it has ended – in Mahler’s Ninth, for example – as the ultimate creation of a human life could be regarded as the quality of appreciation after its death. But the silence, perfected, exquisite, eloquent, is also unbearable because it silenced me. My words would die in the air, heaven too sweet for words or birdsong and therefore heaven unbearable for want of the imperfect, the twig that scratches, the awkward flit, the shadow that marks the afternoon, as if Earth is charged with the task of offering resistance to a perfect plainsong paradise.
When I found it hard to speak or, worse, hard to think, I played the piano. Sometimes I felt that it was descriptive playing – I played myself outwards, describing myself to the world, but this could go wild, as I played faster than my fingers could manage until, in the third movement of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’, the arpeggios ran to chaotic breakdown, a pile of notes spilling out of the keyboard’s grip, falling scattered on the floor like a cascade of jackstraws, impossible to recollect. Sometimes I played like a kind of emotional blood-letting, to let out an excess of sadness or joy, to let it bleed out through the keys and into the absorbe
nt air, until I played myself empty, but this tipped me into a barren loneliness, the self unecholocated in music.
There were moments when I played better than I ever have in my life, precisely because I could step over, into the music. The notes were in me like laughter before it is born into the world, like thought before it is formed in words; the melody was in my fingers already, only wanting a cue, a key signature, to begin.
The philosopher Susanne Langer in the 1950s suggested that music doesn’t so much represent emotion as mimic it. If it mimics emotion, it can surely also guide emotion, lead it, conduct it. The seventeenth-century musician Werckmeister theorized that well-crafted counterpoint was linked to the ordered progression of the planets, to the harmony of the spheres. At best, music harmonized me, it put the planets in order in my psyche, harmonized the hemispheres.
Most of the time, though, music-less, my brain felt like a jumble sale, stories unravelling like jumpers, torn quotes for 50p, a tatty memory, a broken joke, bits of thought, shreds of mashed paper, a malfunctioning processor, a tilted cabinet of shoddy files.
I blame Mercury. The rascal. In his footlooserie he was kicking up logic like leaves in the heels of his fast, feathered flight.
PART THREE: THE TRICKSTER OF THE PSYCHE
All the old gods were aspects of mind, personifications of psychology, if you like, and Mercury is surely the god of manic depression. He has sneaked into language when we say someone is mercurial, the ancient Greeks and Romans intuiting something of the workings of the mind, for ‘mercuriality’ is the perfect word for the volatiles, those who fly too high and swoop too low, wings at their heels.
So Mercury flirted with me, intoxicated me and intrigued me. He seems to personify – with incredible precision – the features, character, experience and facets of manic depression. Mercury is known as one of the Trickster gods, and a huge number of cultures seem to acknowledge this very specific character. So widespread indeed is the Trickster figure that it leads me to suspect that it is in fact a code word for an aspect of the human psyche, recognized throughout history and across the world: and that aspect is tristimanic. That trickiest of conditions.
When you know what you’re looking for, the sign of the Trickster is everywhere. He is there in fiction and in non-fiction, in the ancient texts and in sharply contemporary satires: he is there in Shakespeare, and in so many artists, writers and musicians.
But to Mercury, first. Even as a baby, Hermes ‘has the look of a herald’, we read in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Like a good messenger, he travels as well by night as by day; air or water or earth are equally his to cross. God of the Rizla packet used to catch a thought unawares or a scribbled phone number after a flirting night, Mercury carries crazy messages across the unhoused brain. For weeks of madness, Mercury had played my mind in the key of havoc; he won’t come at my bidding but then arrives unannounced, the winged messenger, wings at his feet and his wrists, making mischief: a companion to no one except the falling, shooting stars.
Restless Mercury and reckless; even when the mind is all in order, he carries a high charge: he pours through you with the currents of Earth, he raises an electric storm in the brain. He galvanizes language, this god of metaphor and wit, yoking apart and splitting asides together. But when the mind is broken, Mercury grabs his chance, goes haywire, flicking the lights on and off, tripping all the switches. At the speed of light he makes connections between previously unconnected thought – he takes the corners too fast, jumps the gun, careless of what he drops.
This lean-to god stands on a slant, one foot uphill, cocky god, head on one side, tilted to the world. He travels light, he carries no weight and little power – he is the god who never asks you to kneel. Sometimes he is the god best honoured in the inattendance, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye; he is the last and least of the gods, after all, and he may reward you better in daydream than in watchful prose.
He is god of the crossroads, the roads between towns, god of benders, caravans and tents, god of tramps and trespass, border-crossing and waysides. But he is unpredictable, promising neither border control nor safe passage. Mercury as Trickster is the ruler of the in-between, the no-man’s-land, the neither-nor. Wayfarers pray to him and cairns are built for him, which is why his Greek counterpart is called Hermes, meaning ‘he of the stone heap’, described thus by Lewis Hyde in his fascinating book Trickster Makes This World : the cairn which is ‘an altar to the forces that govern these places of heightened uncertainty and to the intelligence needed to negotiate them’. The cairn shows you your way, a guiding spirit to a path otherwise hidden, and sometimes Hermes-Mercury may be good to mountaineers and hillwalkers, to stop them being truly lost.
Mercury may offer cairns in the mind, too, when it has lost its bearings, or he may drive you madder, leading you astray with hallucinations of those spiral paths which I saw when I began to lose my mind, as if he were tempting me onwards towards a maze without a centre. When I was agitated beyond reason not to mislay scribbled messages to myself, Mercury teased me with lostness, for he is the god of the lost and found and hidden, god of lost minds and found friends, god of lost property, hidden beauty and found poetry, from the levity as ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ to the grave gravity of finding the soul in the underworld.
In terms of metallurgy, hidden gold is found by mercury, which adheres only to precious metals, so Mercury the god leads the way to the psyche’s hidden gold. As guide of souls, Hermes fetches Persephone from the underworld, and the spirit of Hermes or Mercury travels between the ordinary daylight world and the deep subconscious of dream, instinct, metaphor and poetry, coming back with mind-gold as it comes back with mined gold.
Bringing Persephone back from Hades, Hermes hastens spring, and in a dark consonance of mind and season, it was the depth of winter when I was most ill, in what turned out to be the longest winter for fifty years. Spring will never come; Hermes has blithely forgotten.
Mercury-Hermes is the only shaman in the pantheon because he is able to go to the underworld and return: he moves between heaven and Earth, a knower of both the heights and the depths. He is at home in both eternity and time, life and death. In his rescue of Persephone, who was sentenced to live in Hades, one can read the narrative of manic depression as if mania, like Mercury the psycho-pomp, can conduct the psyche out of the hell of depression. Mercury has an element of anti-gravity, working against the grave of the underworld.
In fact, Mercury overturns gravity – he hurls you higher – Mercury, the only high-wire artist who doesn’t care if he falls, because he can fly. He holds a candle for Icarus, careless of the wax-melt, because an ambition for wings is the signature of Mercury. In manic depression, if one cannot always walk, one can often fly. When it is hard to put on sensible shoes and walk through one’s days in the ordinary working and waking world, yet one can fly in the unsensible fire flight. His feet as winged as his words, Mercury is agile, an escapee: ‘ropes would not hold him . . . such was the will of Hermes,’ we read in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.
Of all the pantheon, he is the one whose energy quivers most fascinatingly: he is dynamic, quixotic, enigmatic. Fire is at the heart of him and Hermes is the inventor of fire, his character lit with magnetizing incandescence. ‘Touched with Fire’, that concisely perfect phrase of Christopher Isherwood’s, was used by Jamison as the title of her outstanding work on manic depression and the artistic temperament. Both the Trickster Prometheus and Loki, the Northern European Trickster, steal fire. Manic depression, whose canting arms are fire and hurricanes, is often described in terms of flame; flaring, sparking, lit, on fire. The Austrian composer Hugo Wolf remarked that in mania the blood becomes changed to ‘streams of fire’. Mercury gives flame to the neurotransmitters so neurones can fire.
Hermes or Mercury (who tricks the more literal-minded Apollo) represents Imagination, as Zoë Playdon writes: imagination ‘that not only sees newness everywhere, but brings it into being, demonstrated by his invention bo
th of fire and of the lyre, both literal fire and the imaginative fire of creativity’.
Mercury jumps the gaps easily from unconscious to conscious, from night to day, because he is god of the gaps, the openings and rents. God of the intersections of roads, he is also god of the intersections of time. His hour is twilight, the no-man’s-hour, as he is god of no-man’s-land. Out walking at dusk, you search for the cairns as every day at twilight one looks for signs of significance – messages, news, stories – something feathered, fleet and lively; the ever-curious mind trying to see in the dark: what happens next? Mercury catches the hour of ambiguity and paradox, opaque and elliptical, and the deft mind, free of daylight jesses, is ownerless as an owl by night. The mind is its own twilight in its mercurial moments, every modality is twilit – it might be, could be, would be: the elastic hour stretched for its enigma and mystery. Logos sets its fixed ratios with the rational and setting sun. Mythos stirs and rises, cannier than we can ken at noon. Twilight reminds us every day that the psyche is a twice-dweller, fluent in languages intuited by night.
Hermes was ‘born at dawn’, and the Trickster is most active at the two joints of the days, dawn and dusk, when the light speaks twice; twilight is his time, he of the twins. Like the badger, he is twilight-striped, touched by two-light, day-streaked and night-stroked. At the last light and dawning dark, he stands silhouetted against the sky, a handful of light cupped in his west left hand. The Trickster relishes the twilight of the mind, the two-light of manic depression, the light-dark moments and, in the calling cadences of falling and soaring, the Trickster finds his flight.
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