Tristimania

by Jay Griffiths

  It is a matter of being allowed to become who you truly are, to express your exact self, precisely delineated, each of us our own logos, exactly defined, evolved into ever more discriminated a meaning. Mercury is the individuating principle, according to Jung, who helped people (and things) towards their quiddity, their this-ness. Only through individuation – becoming most fully yourself – can you fully enter into a relationship with others. Part of this individuation, in Jung’s therapeutic practice, included searching for a patient’s purpose and meaning. Logotherapy, according to Viktor Frankl, is the process by which each of us discerns our purpose in life, a self-transcendent meaning which is distinctly ours to follow. Aristotle, meanwhile, wrote of happiness as eudaimonia, and the term literally means that one’s daemon, an essential aspect of one’s soul, is ‘well pleased’, that one is flourishing, doing what one does best and doing it with excellence.

  Meanwhile, the contemporary Icarus Project was created to ‘navigate the space between brilliance and madness’. Of manic depression, the founders write: ‘We see our condition as a dangerous gift to be cultivated and taken care of rather than as a disease or disorder needing to be “cured” or “eliminated”.’ The project uses myth and metaphor for a manifesto of inspiration, as opposed to regarding madness purely as illness and dysfunction.

  Enid Welsford describes the role of the old Irish fili, or poet, as being one who was very highly trained in poetry, story, history and law. The fili must understand ‘the secret language of the poets’, which Welsford suggests perhaps refers to a time when ‘mastery of metaphor’ was not an art but a science, ‘the mark of initiation into an esoteric code’. It makes me wonder whether there is an esoteric code within the human mind for the mind’s self-description in episodes of madness: otherwise, why do the metaphors cohere? Hurricanes, cliffs, abyssal depths, oceans and black dogs are such common descriptions of bipolar or unipolar states that it seems there may be a kind of collective unconscious at work.

  In madness, just as in art, the individual human mind reaches out beyond itself, outside its own life towards a larger sense of Life. In ancient Greek understanding, life in its form of bios is partial, individual, conscious and personal, existing in time. Life in its form of zoe, though, is concerned with the whole, the eternal, the collective, unconscious and archetypal. Zoë Playdon writes: ‘This relationship between bios and zoe, between time and eternity, between the individual and the archetypal, is the central concern of Greek myth.’ It is also a central concern of art and, indeed, madness, where bios reaches outwards towards zoe.

  In these days, I was still spending hours playing the piano, because music harmonized me. As someone with a stammer might be able to sing fluently, so, although my days stuttered over quotidian logic, yet my fingers could make music. I poured myself into poetry and piano-playing. If I wasn’t doing either, though, I could feel panic rising and the only reliable anti-panic device was counting the days and then the hours before my next appointment with my doctor. If I can just get through three days, I’ll be safe. If I can just hang on four hours, I’ll be able to talk to him. As long as the spaces between appointments were a length of time which I could picture – in practice, three days – then I felt less panicky. I could imagine Today, Tomorrow and The Day After Tomorrow, but that was all. The appointments themselves calmed me, but simply the fact of having a fixed appointment within the visible horizon gave me a lifeline, a rope on the mountain so that I could attach a carabiner. What I didn’t know was that I was about to need him urgently for a wholly unforeseeable reason.

  I’d written three poems the first morning, three also on the second morning. But that night, my left eye began to hurt to distraction. It had been bloodshot for weeks, beginning exactly when I had started taking the antipsychotic pills. I’d ignored it, thinking it was due to sleeplessness and tobacco smoke; I don’t usually smoke and I don’t want to smoke, but this had been a steep few weeks on the baccy. Now, though, a month after I’d started taking the antipsychotic, the redness suddenly worsened.

  In the worst of crisis. The eye of the storm. Is blood.

  Then, on the third poetry day, my sight was clouded as if I were looking through a screen of pearly silk. And it hurt, aching painfully at any alteration of light. I did not know that the eye itself could hurt like this. The lights which had been metaphorically too bright on the inside of my head were now literally too bright on the outside. At first, I tried to blink repeatedly to clear it, and I dug out some sunglasses and sat in the dark, but it got worse quickly. I phoned my doctor.

  He was with a patient. When he phoned me back, I was out, but as I was walking home he was driving away from the surgery and saw me on the street. He stopped me and looked at my eye and got me back into the surgery rapidly. He fixed an emergency eye appointment at a hospital. My pupil had stuck to my iris and the pressure was squeezing the optical nerve to screaming point. The optical nerve can be pinched like this until it is severed. I found out later that, if my doctor had not moved so fast, I could have lost the sight of that eye.

  A friend took me to the hospital and I had a manic-attack. I felt something of the gravity of eye emergencies, but the giggle-helium was pumping into me and I was overcome by the raucous cartoonishness of the situation. My pupil wouldn’t dilate, so I had to lie on a gurney with a purple plastic Marigold glove full of warm water on my eye. ‘We’ll be here for a while,’ my friend said: ‘There are nine hundred gloves. I just counted.’ Everything was balloons, inflated, ridiculous, gigglesome.

  I left the hospital with steroid eye drops which I had to apply every two hours, night and day, which was hard, as the one thing I needed most was sleep and this extra sleepless stress was likely to make my psychosis (my psychosis? are it and I now on friendly terms?) worse. But I would have my sight.

  Drug companies are under no obligation to publish complete information about side effects; about half of all clinical results are published, and that half is chosen by drug companies. It probably won’t amaze you to learn that positive results are roughly twice as likely to be published as negative ones.

  Obviously, it would be impossible to prove that it was the anti-psychotic which caused this potential blinding, but my eye had been affected from the day I began taking it and began to recover the day I stopped. This serious potential reaction to the antipsychotic was not published as a possible side effect of the drug, but my doctor reported my case on the Yellow Card Scheme, which is set up to identify adverse drug reactions which might not otherwise be known. What will the company do with that information? Turn a blind eye, I imagine.

  Strangely, in this psychological illness of two halves – half manic, half depressed – my body followed suit. It split down the middle. On the right side, I was fine. On the left side, my eye was damaged. It was my left ankle which I’d hurt so badly falling down the rabbit hole. My left shoulder was hurting and I couldn’t do cartwheels because of an old injury now troubling me again. Ankles and shoulders are joints and joining points – the Trickster body parts – and were playing up. Then the glands on the left side of my body began swelling. Ear, neck, armpit. But all their opposite numbers on the right side were absolutely fine; just the ones on the left had gone wayward. Of the brain’s two hemispheres, the left is more given to logic and rationality: the right is more gifted at insight, music, metaphor and jokes. It was as if the left side of my body were weirdly chiming in, a mind-body rhyme of brokenness.

  If the pupil of my eye was learning somatically, what exactly could I see? This blindedness coinciding with poetry was like a somatic performance of insight: the eye of the mind can see further and more deeply than literal sight can reach. I could write only by night, when darkness made things visible. In gorgeous spiralling hallucinations, I had been seeing things that didn’t exist, but now I could not see things which did.

  It was completely out of the question to drive. I felt an odd sense of relief that I had no choice but to stay in the underworld, the dark night
of the subconscious. The trappings and harnesses of the dutiful everyday were lifted from me. I was out of the traces, racing the dark for its sight.

  I was offered a replacement antipsychotic. I didn’t take it. I wanted to stay mad for the poetry I could feel in my fingers. It was a precise parallel to how I have always treated altitude: when I’ve climbed mountains, I have always been sensible about climbing risks but jeopardized my safety when it comes to altitude sickness. I’ve never turned back, I’ve been willing to take the pain and the danger for the views, the summit, the angle of exaltation at the heights.

  Mountains were calling me in all ways. I was reckless with the psyche’s highs, crying for sky. I wanted to climb Cader Idris again, because it’s the closest mountain to where I live. If you spend the night on Cader, they say, you will end up either mad, dead or a poet, and I was poem-stained and maddened enough already, my mind a high-wire, live firework.

  I had, much earlier, cancelled all work plans for the foreseeable future: except one. The Royal Shakespeare Company was in rehearsal for As You Like It, and they wanted me to talk to the cast about wildness and the Forest of Arden, and to write a programme note on the play. The Otherworld. I didn’t need to cancel that because I already was in the Forest of Arden, and with the depression of Jaques and the irritable mania of Touchstone to boot.

  But the big work event which I could not cancel was the publication of Kith, scheduled for March, and looming, tense, monstrous and terrifying to me. I hadn’t lacked confidence in the process of writing, and both my agent and editor loved the book, but its publication felt utterly beyond me. It would demand press interviews, BBC broadcasts, as well as readings and talks at literature festivals. I felt like a kayaker at sea in a night fog seeing the hull of an enormous freighter set on an inexorable course towards me. I would far preferred to have been able to slink off into ornamental hermitude for a few months, but I felt I owed it to my work to do the media rounds which publication required, though the idea made me shaky and tearful. My doctor, though, was telling me over and over again that I should have no pressures at all and urged me to postpone it.

  I was at that point waking sharply every hour, my dreams fouled with nightmare churning up from psyche’s mud, and these nightmares were so bad I dreaded going to bed. Suicide was knocking at the door. At this point in my notebook, it says: ‘so hard to manage journey back from London then crashed at home – ways to do it?’ It being suicide. Thinking about that made me go back to Mercury, furious, white-lipped, intense. Give me poems and let me come back safe: that was the deal. Psychopomp, guide of souls, guide me back. As if.

  My notebook, in mid-January, records: ‘Desperate: Sat day, Sat night, Sun night, Mon day, Mon night.’ Something terrible was on the way and my heart was tumbling, sometimes beating so erratically that I was short of breath.

  What kind of drunk you are sometimes seems in the lap of the gods. Some people are violent drunks; some are spiteful, aggressive or argumentative. Some are grandiose, some giggly, some maudlin, weepy or affectionate. What kind of manic you are also feels down to the luck of the draw. I felt lucky because, although I was more irritable than I would be normally, it was seldom directed at others. I don’t get aggressive or paranoid. Even though I’d been hallucinating, I wasn’t delusional: a distinction which may be hard to understand from the point of view of someone who has not experienced it. To explain: even when I could ‘see’ – in that dreamlike trance – a hallucination, I knew, rationally, that it was not there. It felt more like seeing my dreams and my metaphors. This isn’t to say that my mind was controlled: it wasn’t. I felt like a goose flying dangerously out of the V-shape of the skein, frantically pecking at the air with my beak and clutching wings, grabbing at clear sky with my goose feet, flapping, ugly and panicky.

  I also feel lucky with manic depression in that I have years at a stretch without depression’s dreaded tap on the shoulder. I’ve only had two steep episodes of hypomania in my life, rather than the constant cycling of highs and lows which many people experience. But suicide has harried me in my worst times. In one depression in my twenties I stood around at the gates of a mental hospital, desperately trying to walk in, but I couldn’t because I didn’t feel I mattered enough. Then I crossed and re-crossed the road without looking, hoping I’d get hit by a car and have to be admitted to some kind of hospital, at least. Cars beeped and swerved, and one driver yelled abuse at me, which brought me back to at least a fraction of my senses.

  On the cover of the first of my notebooks from this current episode, I’d drawn an exploding star. On the next, I’d drawn a feather, for both flight and writing. On the third, I drew a mountain with the sharp, jagged heights of an Alpine silhouette.

  During this stage of my madness, I lived in the mountains of the mind, the kind which Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, his ‘cliffs of fall’. By choice, I’d spent the previous ten days in the death zone. I did it so that I could write the essence of the poems, so I could bring something back out of all these awful months, something of a record. But now, just as with physical climbing, the issue was how to get down safely, how to get off the mountain without having to be helicoptered off, without coming down in a body-bag. More accidents happen on the way down, I reminded myself over and over, and made myself start taking the replacement antipsychotic.

  I took the first pill at four thirty in the afternoon one day and fell asleep from five thirty to seven thirty and then slept from eleven until six in the morning. A total of nine sweet hours: more than I had slept in months. When I woke, I felt like crying for Hopkins and John Clare, for Kit Smart and Coleridge – and all the unknown people who have walked this curly cliff-edge living too early in history for this kind of help. And I realized just how suicidal I had felt when I realized that the feeling had ebbed. (For the moment.) In the twelve hours after that first pill, I felt I’d climbed down at least to an altitude where there was enough oxygen, and I could see how close I had been. Andy said later that she had been very concerned at that point because, she said, I didn’t sound right. Long ago, I read that a crucial suicide clue is the voice: the time to worry seriously is when someone is speaking in an utterly flat tone, a hollow monotone without intonation. That is where I’d been.

  More accidents happen on the way down, I repeated. In the literal mountains, this is because climbers are tired and, after the fierce focus on getting to the summit, their attention is dispersed. Take your eye off the target and your feet slip; the mind, without its edge of ambition, is a blunted blade, its judgement unsharpened. More accidents may happen on the way down, too, I thought, in the mountains of the mind. It was possibly my physical knowledge of mountains that prepared me at some level for what was coming.

  Postponing a book’s publication, at barely two months’ notice, is not a small thing for a publisher. The knock-on effects can be difficult and tedious, unexpected and awkward, all together. But I realized I had to ask. I called my editor and my agent and explained quite how ill I was. They rallied round me with a speed, care and emotional intelligence I’ll always be grateful for. They made me feel that publication was as easy to reschedule as a pint down the pub. (It wasn’t.) They gave me the chance to choose a revised publication date without speed or pressure, and more than anything they gave me a sense of care – even love.

  The publication date was put back, removing for a while my fear. But something else was coming: I felt dread, a sense of constant emergency. I’d reverted to waking at 3 a.m. and, in this frozen January, those night hours were still and quiet enough to hear the gods.

  I live in a small town in the hills and in the summers I like walking, running, swimming, biking and horse riding. In the winters, I like tobogganing as well and, the height of my pleasure, skating on frozen lakes. In this illness, I was desperate to be outside: mania charges me with the electricity of intense vigour which seeks to be discharged, to be spent. But this winter’s weather prohibited everything. It was too icy to go running or even walking, let a
lone horse riding, as the stones and rocks were like wet glass and I’d nearly fallen badly twice and I didn’t want to risk hurting my ankle again. There was ice everywhere but, really disappointingly, the ice on the lakes was not thick enough to skate on. There had been a slight snowfall, but not enough to toboggan. I was pacing like a wild cat, agitated, despairing, caged.

  If I felt trapped physically with that unusual combination of weather factors, I also felt caged in time, in one trapped now. As if in one terrible tripping of the switches, there had been a massive signal failure in my brain and all the depressions I’d ever had were now shunted together like train carriages in a derailment, each previously separate carriage shoved into one compacted whole, a gargoyle of twisted metal.

  I spoke to several friends about suicide and one said she believed people have a choice and no one should try to stop someone who wants to do it. I felt juddered, shaken into unsafety by this, for while I agree that if someone in their right mind (perhaps towards the end of life, with an incurable disease) chooses to walk out into the snow with a fistful of pills and a crate of champagne, that is their right, but I would want to be stopped by any means necessary.

  My notebook at this point is littered with the word ‘suicide’, and the statistics compilers, a benevolent force of cautious, serious understanding, seemed oddly helpful. Knowing that one in five people in this state commit suicide is sobering. Added to this, writing is a profession with a high suicide risk. Think on’t, the facts seemed to say. Tread very, very carefully. I’d attempted (if that’s the word) suicide when I was twenty, in a cack-handed, lackadaisical, be-drunken despair, swallowing a bottle of paracetamol in front of my boyfriend, who then shoved a toothbrush down my throat till I spewed. Yuck: the vile indignity of the young drunk. I remember a nurse and a liver-function test.