Tristimania

by Jay Griffiths

  I had been ill, now, for three months. Returning from the shock of that suicide night took another month. By about mid-February, I could feel shoots of recovery. I hadn’t been able to read, because I could not concentrate and words on a page had been like camera images in an old-fashioned darkroom; they slid off the page in a swirl of black ink. Nothing spoke to me unless it precisely comprehended my state of mind, though, if that happened, it felt profoundly healing and I could pay attention. The first book I could read was Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, and my heart went out to Coleridge as if I knew him. If he wasn’t writing, walking or with people, he said, ‘my feelings drive me almost to agony and madness.’

  I could sleep more and eat more come springtime, but I was as weak as a kitten. I lived these weeks in the forest of the mind, at its best the Forest of Arden. All around me were daffodils. I was surrounded by yellowness, the open-hearted, arms-outstretched loveliness of them. And there was no reproach in them. The common life of everything struck me anew this spring, the glow at the heart of it all, the empathic capability of the mind to shapeshift through imagination and a kind of love into any living thing, everyone a Jaques transforming themselves into a stag.

  But I was frightened of the depression which almost always follows mixed-state hypomania, depression as simple and horrible as turgid nothingness. I knew that spring can be a difficult time for the damaged mind, precisely because it sharpens the distinction between the lithe, flexing vitality of a rising sun in a young year with the pitiful dredge of the sinking psyche.

  Edging out of madness, now, I felt shell-shocked. What happened to my mind? I remember asking my doctor once. It was like coming to, regaining consciousness in hospital after a serious accident and realizing that something terrible must have happened but having no continuous memory of it. Yes, I had scraps of memory, and those were intensely vivid. Yes, I had written notes to myself over the months, a guard-word of thoughts, to snatch these tatters of time. But I had the bewildering feeling that the last time I looked around me it was November and now it was spring, and every day in that period had been crazy firefighting, not to be mad, not to commit suicide.

  This was when my gratitude to my doctor overwhelmed me. He had been doctor, psychiatrist and counsellor. I’m pretty sure he saved my sight. I am absolutely certain he saved my life. There is no gratitude like it.

  And then my days began to stumble. They staggered. They fell. It was the awful, inexorable descent into depression. I couldn’t write, could still barely read. I felt physically sick thinking about the looming publication of my book and its publicity demands. I had utterly lost confidence in my own wellness at any future time. I couldn’t manage to be away from home and couldn’t cope with seeing anyone except my phalanx-friends. I was frightened of not washing and becoming part of the stigmatic stench. The rules of self-care became an almost religious duty: to shower, to brush my hair, to wear clean clothes every day. I made to-do lists, and on one day I wrote out the things I was aiming for:

  – Put bins out

  – Do laundry

  – Don’t kill myself

  – Buy cat food

  I had to stop counting the long list of things I couldn’t do and start instead with the short list of what I could. I offered myself as a general factotum to my friends. Just give me a job, a simple job, a physical one. So I weeded allotments, cleaned gutters, washed up, planted things. A ladder, a scoop and a blocked drainpipe, a wheelbarrow and a pile of earth to move. That kind of thing. Mainly, I tried to stay out of bed and not drink alcohol.

  Days turned into weeks which turned into months of utter depression. If my mind had been over-connected and dendritic when I was hypomanic, now it was disconnected from everything. I was back in the ‘real’ world, out of the faerie world, the woods of midsummer dreams, and into the Court of Athens. And that real world was a painful place to be. I looked around me, aghast at the devastation of days behind me, each new day only an old desolation and nothing in the future but despair. Even God cannot give back the months the locusts took away. Time was a sewer, fetid and blocked underground. I spent a lot of time in the dreamless dirge which passes for sleep; an abnegation of life, a denial of dream, a swimless, flightless annulment. The nothing that will come of nothing.

  My doctor gave me antidepressants at the highest dose I’d ever had, nearly five times anything I’d ever taken before. I felt as if my veins were running with water. I dreamt I was crying blood.

  ‘Depression’, as a word, does not convey the experience, as William Styron wrote so furiously: ‘the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.’ An intensity which Les Murray has called ‘shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain’. Yes.

  Then came the publication of my book, and I was flooded with terrible adrenalin: I was on high alert, in danger. It was an accurate apprehension.

  The whole publishing team gave me their utter protection. They stood by me, literally and figuratively, through the upcoming months, giving me support, strength and a sense of safety. Writers I dearly admire, including Philip Pullman, John Berger, Iain McGilchrist; Niall Griffiths and Theodore Zeldin, had loved my book and praised it publicly. It garnered beautiful reviews from people with a literary sensibility and was longlisted for a prestigious literary award in Britain and shortlisted for one in the States. Many readers wrote appreciative letters to me about it.

  None of these was enough protection for me in this state. It was the lies which were deadly. One academic used research from my book as if that were her own argument and then presented it as ‘evidence’ of things my book supposedly lacked. Research references were ignored as if the pages upon pages of notes simply didn’t exist. Ideas were misattributed. Metaphor taken literally. So profoundly was my work misrepresented in one newspaper that it had to publish a corrections letter, while its sister paper published such damaging and demonstrably false statements that I wrote to complain. The result? A curt note saying that my remark – challenging a national newspaper on its dishonesty – ‘could be taken as defamatory’: a veiled threat of libel action – against me.

  There is a peculiar, savage, screaming kind of pain in being publicly humiliated. Being lied about in public causes a sense of powerless outrage unlike any other emotion I know. Being bullied, in addition, was beyond my strength.

  That was the point at which something in me broke. Utterly and terribly. I felt ‘sung’, as Indigenous Australians say. Injured, wounded by malevolent, malicious words, poison-tipped to kill the spirit.

  A tractate of the Talmud states that to humiliate someone in public is as bad as shedding the blood of another: ‘Whoever humiliates another in public is like one who sheds blood,’ according to Bava Metzia 58b. In other words, it is one of the most serious sins one can commit, because psychological harm is quite as bad, and often worse, than physical harm.

  George Brown, of London University, has devoted himself to studying life events and their impact on the psyche: according to his research, humiliation is a key factor. Severe life events, including many different kinds of loss, can trigger depression, but more precisely they are worst when they include humiliation. Depression, says Richard P. Bentall, is likely to follow humiliation.

  ‘Words! Mere words! . . . Was there anything so real as words?’ wrote Oscar Wilde.

  There is a particular extra necessity for truth when one is psychologically fragile. ‘I can only speak what I perceive to be the truth,’ Stephen Fry said once. When Les Murray was asked about depression, he diagnosed a remedy in honesty: ‘for self-examination to work, you must tell the exact truth, suppressing nothing.’ Poet Gwyneth Lewis maintains: ‘Above all, depression is a disease that is concerned with authenticity.’

  When you are ill, you have no choice but to be honest; you’re stripped bare. Politesse and the ele
gant chiffon of etiquette are torn to shreds; the suit and tie of manners are crumpled and unwearable. You are naked. People in crisis demand authenticity from others, because inauthentic people have one over you; they may not abuse that power but they have abrogated to themselves the potential to abuse it, and the mad are highly sensitized to the fake or the phoney, which is why people in those episodes have a tendency angrily to reject untruthfulness: because lies create incoherence, which is maddening. Truth is sacred, both to tell the truth, and to have the truth told about you. Truth is also, as Keats knew, beautiful. It reveals, it notices, it listens; it is an active, creative stance in life, and an energizing one. Lies are ugly, silencing, brutal, stupid and deadly. I like the fact that Shakespeare’s clown Robert Armin was famous for honesty, and ‘honest’ was one of the most noted qualities of Shakespeare himself.

  Before this whole episode of madness began, I dreamt one night that I was setting off on a long journey to the sea, on a bike, with a horse in a rucksack on my back. Carrying something which could have carried me? Carrying more than I could manage? Or did it refer to my instinct, which was restrained, held in a rucksack from which it was trying to escape but which, if it was allowed its freedom, would be able to carry me? Whatever it meant, I knew one thing now: I would have to play out in daylight the dreams of the night.

  PART FIVE: MIND FLIGHT

  I had to walk away. Away from my work, away from my friends, away from my life. Away. I needed to see far horizons again, to realign myself with the realized world of wide mind, long sight and a fineness of things.

  For years, I had thought about walking the Camino de Santiago one day, walking right across Spain from the French Pyrenees to the sea on the Galician coast. Suddenly, I knew ‘one day’ was now.

  My preparations were minimal and barely sufficient. I watched the film The Way, because I thought I would feel psychologically safer if I had some idea of the path. I tried to reactivate my rocky Spanish. I spent an evening with a friend who had walked the Camino and who gave me priceless advice about what to take. As Little As Possible. This was going to be hard, though, because straight after the month walking the Camino, I was supposed to be flying from Spain to Melbourne, for the Australian publication of my book and a series of media events and festival appearances. I was assuming I’d be well enough by then to manage it. The practical and immediate consequence was that I needed things for Australia, which meant carrying a lot of extra weight.

  The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the full title of the pilgrim route, means ‘The Way of St James of the Field of Stars’. The Camino is over a thousand years old and ends in Santiago or, for those going one step beyond, Finisterre. Opinions differ as to the start of the route, while some say that the pilgrimage necessarily begins where you are: at home. Most often, though, it is begun in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, in the French Pyrenees, and the journey from there to Santiago is some eight hundred kilometres.

  Once I had decided to do it, the wish overtook me and I felt driven by a need at once stubborn and ethereal. I felt like Cyrano de Bergerac’s moon voyager, who, captivated by a desire to journey to the moon, encases himself in an iron suit and then throws a magnet moonwards which will pull him up. I would throw the magnet of desire ahead of myself and then be drawn by its force.

  It was, under the circumstances, rash, unwise and desperate. But its very desperation spoke: I had no idea what else I could do. I could either linger in that sump of long-term depression, taking more and more pills, my appetite for life failing daily, or I could get my boots on and hurl myself at the road. I was walled in, the room dark with fetid solitude, padlocked by the habit of depression. Pilgrimage might pick the lock; prise open that rusted year.

  The body is a self-healing mechanism and undertaking such a long walk would be strong medicine. ‘I have two doctors, my left leg and my right,’ wrote G. M. Trevelyan. ‘When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other), I know that I have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.’

  I made a list of what I wouldn’t take before I made a list of what I would. The first thing I wouldn’t take was friends. I felt that for this particular medicine to work I had to go solo. Several friends had offered to walk with me for parts of the route, but I felt that if they came I would attribute my being able to do it to their presence. I needed to know, unequivocally, that I’d done it myself. I needed to show myself that I had won back my own strength, not leant on others. So, no friends. For the same reason I would not take my mobile with me: so that I would have to walk without any voices except my own and that of the path. I was going to do it without tobacco or alcohol because I wanted no cushions or softeners. And, finally, I decided to do it without medication. That last was a unilateral decision and, given the situation I’d been in for the previous nine months, nuts.

  One morning, a few days before I was due to leave, I saw two friends of mine on the street; they both seemed cross but, clearly, not with each other. I walked up to them in all innocence and asked who they were so angry with.

  – You, Jay, one of them said after a pause.

  – And not angry, but concerned.

  They thought I was playing with fire, that it was stupid to come off my medication, particularly without talking to my friends, or my doctor, who, between them, had taken custody of my psyche.

  – Why haven’t you talked to your doctor? they asked.

  – Ummm, he’s away, I said lamely.

  – What would he say if he was here?

  – I don’t think he’d think it’s a good idea.

  – And guess what? That’s because it isn’t a good idea. In fact, it’s a terrible idea and we’re worried because we care about you and we don’t want you to end up suicidal and alone and in another country where none of us can find you or even speak to you.

  (Yes, there were that many italics.)

  I backed down, saying I would put the pills in my rucksack, even if I didn’t want to put them in my mouth. In the meantime, I prepared the most important thing: an anthology of poems. I asked thirty-three friends to choose a poem for me which they really loved, so that I could read one each day and then pass it on to someone on the path.

  Just before the Camino, though, I had a happy promise to fulfil. I have two nephews I adore; the pair of them the apple of my eye. One of them was turning eighteen and I had said I would take him to Paris for his birthday. It was a time of glee, a time out of time. Robust, hilarious, earthy teenage-hood had him in its paws. Part of him was a child still: sweet, affectionate, endearing, playful and giggly. Part of him was a young man: taut, lean and street-wise, his haircut as razor sharp as his wit. He was half kitten, half alley-cat. Those days with him were without question the happiest I had known in eighteen months.

  We said our goodbyes in London and I turned back to France, finding my way down to the Pyrenees and realizing by the very first night that this walk, supposed to take about a month, might prove impossible for me to accomplish. The most immediate reason was that I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t mean that I felt like crying all the time, I mean that I cried, everywhere, continuously. At St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the evening before leaving, I picked up my credencial, the ‘pilgrim’s passport’ which everyone receives at the beginning that is stamped along the way as one stops at hostels or churches. Everyone who walks the Camino is called a pilgrim, which took a little getting used to.

  The man in the office wished me Bon Camino, and I started crying. I was so lonely, and this was suddenly horrifically hard. I didn’t know what to do. So I went into the local church to pray. I don’t believe in any kind of god, so I was not praying to anyone or anything. But I was praying, because I simply had no idea what else might work, other than trying to find my strength by imploring it of myself. I prayed for a friend of mine, who was ill. I was carrying a small stone for her, which she had asked me to place on the way. And I prayed for help for m
yself, to get well by walking.

  The first day’s walk is thought by many people to be the hardest. It certainly was for me: my rucksack was heavier than anyone else’s I met that day because I was carrying all my gear for Australia. I had lost a lot of my accustomed fitness in the months of being so ill. Mainly, though, depression was making every part of me ache. The spirit carries invisible weight, sometimes harder to carry than the body’s physical weight. I had come self-laden, heavy of life, lump-loaded and ugly with gravity. This kind of weight is hard to lose. I was also acutely embarrassed about crying all the time, so I was trying to walk without people seeing me, which, given the popularity of the Camino in August, was impossible.

  By the time I got to the highest point of the first day, going over Col de Lepoeder, I had a sick headache and was dizzy, faint and confused as to why I was feeling ill. I stopped for hours by a fountain, drinking and resting. Several people tried to persuade me to walk on with them, because they said I looked so ill they thought I shouldn’t be alone. Why didn’t I say yes to all the offers of help? I didn’t really know. It was part of my rigid self-demand to do this walk myself. Being half carried off the mountainside on the first day was not part of my plan. So I ended up walking down alone into the dusk, stumbling, forcing myself to walk ten paces before I let myself stop to rest and counting these out loud. I thought I might pass out on the path so I tried to walk wherever there was more softness underfoot, a little leaf mould, moss, even grass, and not to walk on rocks, so that if I did fall over I’d have a softer landing.

  When I did finally reach the hostel at Roncesvalles, several people immediately came to help me, and someone phoned a doctor. I could hardly speak, by this point, and a kind couple helped me to eat some food and someone else gave me pills for my headache. The doctor thought it was altitude sickness. Altitude sickness supposedly strikes at 8,000 feet (2,500 metres). The highest point of this day’s walk had been 4,719 feet (1,430 metres). But I should have realized, since I’d had altitude sickness before at this height. It all suddenly made sense: the confusion and stumbling, the headache, the stupid decision not to let anyone help me.