Tristimania

by Jay Griffiths

Either this deep desire of mine

  will be found on this journey,

  or when I get back home!

  It may be that the satisfaction I need

  depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone

  and come back, I’ll find it at home.

  In homecoming, my body, too, was happy. After the fire, how healing is water. The soles of my feet had hurt for hundreds of hours; they had become swollen with heat, and now they rested cool on fresh grass in my garden. After the thirst and heat of the Camino, I could lean my face against damp, dark moss, and I drank glass after glass of clear, cold water. After weeks of shared showers, insufficient hot water and skimpy little cardboard squares of travel towels, now I had deep baths, with proper-sized towels and, afterwards, my favourite dressing gown. I had the luxury of shady solitude, feeling how priceless is privacy after knowing that your body, awake or asleep, night and day without let-up, can be under the gaze of strangers.

  The chancey nature of life on the road was over and I cherished the certainties of home. On the Camino, you don’t know where you will sleep each night, but back home is the simplest calm, the humble benediction of one’s own bed.

  When I was ill before the Camino I had at times felt trapped at home, as if it were an echo-chamber for my psyche and would replay to me my own mind’s shriek, ape me the shape of my madness. Homecoming now, I knew it gentle and gentling, newly seen and known, newly and familiarly beloved. Moment by moment, I could feel the consolation of home, my own habitat surrounding me, the intimate miniature world, handmade and tender, the tended home which tends in turn.

  Homecoming meant being with my friends, too. When I was ill, my friends understood that ‘I’ was not ‘myself’ and they held to their knowledge of the person they previously knew me to be. On the Camino, for the most part, I had hidden, a gaunt ghost in my own days. For everyone on the Camino, one’s ‘self’ is peculiarly un-anchored from its past. It can be hard to be a serial stranger to others and, walking ill, the dislocation was doubled: no one knew me, and I wasn’t myself anyway. I was unhomed even from my own selfhood, homeless in my mind, but coming home I could feel myself suddenly sturdy in the eyes of friends, my character leaping back like a dog wagging its tail when, after weeks of separation, it eventually hears its own name called.

  If this whole year’s episode began with falling down a rabbit hole and continued through the dark underworld of suicidality, it ended with a sense of coming up into daylight, small but alive. It would prove to be some months before I was back to my full strength, but this was undeniably the start of wellness.

  On the Camino, I had been spent utterly, emptied, dried, withered to nothing, but back home, at the end of it all, I felt a refreshment of sheer water. I felt daybright and eager, my prayers answered in a sweep of benevolence, a superlative generosity of pure largesse, pouring easy and abundant as endless liquid arpeggios. I felt like a small spring on a mountainside, the source of the Wye, water spilling up again and again within me, constantly innerly replenished, liquid life returning, life upwelling in unstoppable wellness.

  – How are you? a friend asked me.

  – I’m fine. Really fine.

  I’ve never said it with such feeling. Fine. ‘Fine’ meaning ‘well’. Up from the good earth, a wellspring of fine water. Fine as a shining field of sunflowers at dawn. Fine as a field of stars in a midnight sky.

  ARTIST-ASSASSIN

  Poems

  Getting My Bearings

  When sight is condensed to starlight

  Quick to eternity

  When mind has thrown its anchor

  Back to a raging sea

  When the rudder has sheered away in my hands

  The boat a stormwracked wreck

  And my sails lie in tatters

  Mast splintered across the deck

  Then reeling round its compass points

  Psyche’s reason undone

  Before behind within and down

  Shakespeare Hopkins Donne

  I’m steering by the poets now

  I’m steering by their song.

  Out of Order

  At two in the morning

  I emailed my friends

  Asking if I’d left my hat at theirs

  With an urgency previously reserved

  For an only-apparently greater loss

  An appalled finding:

  I find that I have lost

  My reason, logic, and – once –

  My words.

  There, I’ve said it, as I said it aloud

  To myself, on my knees in my study.

  Terrified of losing my notebooks

  I mark them with my address

  Check frantic in my bag every minute or less.

  My friend’s cancer-scare

  I was with her there

  In the hallways of the hospital

  ‘This is where I left her.

  Can you tell me where

  She is?’

  ‘Are you the patient?’ an orderly asked

  Three times and

  Three times I denied it, then

  I got the giggles disorderly

  At the comedy of loss.

  I have lost my mind

  My words

  My friend

  My notebook

  And my hat

  In no particular order.

  Giddy

  (for Marg)

  Happiness also fathoms things.

  My giddy friend plays

  Jove, the bringer of jollity,

  A one-goddess ode to joy,

  She is all the world giggling,

  Gravity in reverse,

  Serious about frivolity,

  A superfluity of light.

  Nocturnal in C Sharp Minor

  (for George)

  I

  There is a fathom of a different kind

  Which knows the call of the high seas

  Where the siren voices steer

  And waves have a resonant frequency with mind

  The cadences are sheer

  Beguiling.

  What sounds like song to the mad

  Is a deadly wassail

  Composed by suicides past

  A ship of drunk poets singing up

  The tsunami which shatters them

  Alluring.

  What looks like madness to the sane

  Is a self-bewitching:

  Spells of the psyche hurled

  On its own waters, crying

  For the pitch that will rhyme them

  Enchanting.

  The howling causes

  Fractured chords

  The devil’s interval

  Augmented fourth

  From crest to gulf

  From eros to thanatos

  From music to madness

  From poetry to anguish.

  II

  I am a nocturnal in C sharp minor

  At three midnights in one: the day’s, the year’s and mine.

  Midnight’s alcohol-saddened third

  The winter solstice a frost-sharpened seventh

  And the minor key’s treachery dominant

  Seeking the resolution of a chord

  Which has been playing me for years –

  When the very word suicide has the sweetest ring

  In the inaudible octaves far above and below.

  I want to die: the phrase is music

  I am not the pianist but the keyboard now

  Resounded by every hand which has ever touched me.

  Tonight transposes all the sounds across the highest Cs

  A pitch too much for me –

  I have become part of the siren frequencies

  Captivated by the acoustics of the deepest seas.

  I am being sounded by the sustained notes

  At the furthest fathoms of hearing

  The high wires which thrilled Odysseus cry for my reply

  Knife in one hand, telephone in the other.

  III />
  If I could call into the night

  If someone could outshout the siren voices for me

  If they would please pick up the phone.

  Please pick up the phone:

  The prayer which all of those who’ve been there know.

  I know it’s late, I know I’ll wake your child

  I know you know I wouldn’t be ringing

  Unless what is ringing in me is a terrifying bell –

  I am wrung out – I can find no reason not to –

  – I have no reason now.

  The phone wires ring.

  I don’t exist

  Between notes

  Lost for words

  Between books

  Unharmonized with life

  Between no one and no one,

  Unless someone could please

  Please pick up the phone

  My prayer is answered

  I ask: Please

  Tie me to the mast

  Put wax in my ears

  So I cannot hear

  These terrible siren voices.

  One in Five

  One in five in this madness

  Go and bloody do it: OD, knives or hanging.

  But maybe the statistics count it wrong:

  It’s not one in five people

  But one in five moments

  One in five devastations

  Will wipe you out.

  One in five memories

  Will explode you.

  One in five stalkers

  Will catch you.

  Maybe everyone can stay with the living four

  If they counted different:

  Four hours bearable

  Four friends reliable

  Four hillsides runnable

  Four pianos playable

  Four poems writable

  Not one life unwritten.

  Betrayal

  Our dreams betray us

  To ourselves,

  A fraternity of the unconscious

  In the corridors of waking.

  Spirals

  The quixotic spirals of galaxies call me

  Towards everything that shines,

  Lightning electrifying the mosaic of the stars.

  Night sky the first chiaroscuro,

  Dazzling distance:

  How light defies the dark

  Even if the dark was dictated

  Long ago,

  Light strikes back,

  Thousands of years later.

  All my moons are spinning out of true

  In galaxies of the human mind

  Compelled to mirror the real.

  With the moons of Jupiter, by Jove,

  I can only see in silver and gold,

  The spinning light

  Where moons both wax and wane.

  Wax itself can wane, Icarus,

  You and I know, but not yet,

  Let me stay here while

  The waning earth

  Waiting through winter

  Wants candlewax, matches, flame,

  Until it gets a spring in its step.

  But the wax in my psyche is melting,

  My mind can’t hold itself,

  Turning frantic in its circling

  The dial of twelve mad hours without words

  Until even Mercury knows his day will pass,

  Mercredi, even this Wednesday,

  And tomorrow he must play his other part, and guide

  Me to a hammock of silver silk,

  Psyche spun out and back to the cocoon

  Of earth.

  Essay

  I try it once or twice.

  Try it with all the scissors I’ve used

  For the literal cut and paste

  Editing thousands of paper strips,

  Sharpened text on my bedroom floors

  For the last twenty years,

  Scissors turned happily book-blunt,

  Content on the shelves,

  The right kind of essays,

  The forays of the human mind

  Exploring mountains, Montaigne onwards.

  This is a trial of a different kind.

  I’m trying it out with a Stanley knife,

  The wrong kind of sharp,

  Implorer not explorer,

  A literal essay

  Best edited round

  Into metaphor.

  Because It Snowed on January 18th

  A little bird died in the night

  Instead of me.

  The snowfall which cancelled my voice of reason

  And put the cat’s-paw in my head

  Froze the treecreeper’s mind

  To reckless and suicidal behaviour

  Dropping like a plumb line to the snow

  Inviting the cat

  Only too happy to accept.

  I’ve shut the cat into the kitchen

  With the still bird and the still

  Fluttering knife.

  Nature’s easy, psyche not,

  Being both its own

  Predator and prey.

  Blackbirds

  (for Vic)

  Blackbirds in London’s January pouring their real songs

  Into the artificial dawn,

  Looking for the trees of Arden

  With all their ardent hearts,

  Burning from within,

  Thinking if they could sing

  With more heart, more song,

  Then the sun will rise.

  Though it is night for hours yet

  They sing and burn

  And burn and sing

  In the false-fire neon

  Until the real sun rises

  And they burn out into day:

  The price of streetlights

  Paid in song.

  Their hope is a heartbreaking faith

  In fake stumps parked

  Along pavements which never lead

  To the forests, which know no roots

  In Arden’s earthed, enduring language

  Where the birds trust the root-truths of trees

  Where, when the real dawn breaks,

  It trysts with their unbroken song.

  In Reverse

  It’s the daylight I can’t stand.

  I can see the dark circles under my eyes,

  Reverse moons stitched black

  On to the sky of my white face.

  By day my hands are purposeless,

  Ambling between keyboards, piano and type,

  With nothing to play for on either:

  By night my fingers feel quick and light.

  Hours of daytime stall cold on the floor,

  Useless as broken pressure-cookers,

  But the night hours are warm and fine

  As suns of midsummer.

  Night thoughts are lit from the inside,

  Candling the living work

  Of the kindest poets who revealed most truly

  World-mind turned inside out.

  Their work is awake, long after they’ve gone,

  Awake and speaking in my night

  When – with relief – no one else is here

  To mirror to me all that I am not.

  One Second

  In the distant past

  Ten tidy minutes ago,

  Checking their watches

  They started the car

  Not knowing how

  In prehistory

  Two sad hours ago,

  Had I hugged my nephews

  One second longer,

  I would have come punctual

  To the double collision

  Of geological time and now

  The road punctuated by significance

  The failure to read the stop sign

  My mind wrecked and reckless

  So when I drove across the path

  Of their oncoming car

  At the fatal crossroad

  We were all one bare second away

  From something that had already happened.

  ‘The Eye Begins to See’
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  (see Rilke, ‘In a Dark Time’)

  Poems depend on sight in the dark,

  I can only see to write

  In the literal night

  When this madstruck time began

  – Hallucinations enchanting my eyes –

  I could see things which were not there

  While, driving without looking to see,

  I had no regard for what was there

  Real as hard metal.

  And then my real vision fogged

  My left eye could not see the irreal presence

  Of some protecting angel

  Who measured the distance by which I missed

  And made a better judgement than mine

  Cast a mist

  On half my sight

  A spelled-out cast so I cannot judge distance

  Out of the question to drive

  Staying me to meanings of the righter mind

  Found in soft pencil only

  And only in the kindness of dark.

  The Lonely Letter

  I

  Lonely as one letter of the alphabet

  I walk beyond the snowline of Kili,

  A canary for altitude sickness,

  I get it violently: quicker than anyone.

  My head is an ice palace of crystal pain:

  In sick vision, snow is pillows and pianos.

  I the inexorable solitude,

  A tiny iota divided from other minds.

  My idiocy is my implacable will

  To go on, against wisdom, against advice.

  Because the views from the summit impel me –

  Everything here is ice, fire and spirit –

  Because the mountains become me

  And I can lose myself

  Because I can see worlds

  And I am unlonely

  Because on the top I cannot feel

  The peopled isolation of the valleys.

  II

  If the unlinked climber sleeps

  One night on Cader Idris

  They wake either mad or a poet

  (Or both, poets always reply.)

  But the obliterated letter losing sight

  Of other eyes knows the third choice

  Where the path is a hairpin turn –

  Annihilation –

  Striking a cliff of fall

  Filed away by suicides-future

  Like a grid reference:

  That’s a likely site.

  Now is no time to risk it:

  Cader is come to me: Kili in my mind.

  The snowline has slipped, it

  Pillows my voice to a monotone,

  Freezes the fingers of friendships,