The Edge of Every Day

by Marin Sardy

  Creativity shares some things in common with mental illness. For example, in order to arrange diverse ideas into something original, something new, the mind must first deconstruct its existing order. It must free itself from preconceptions and pursue alternate possibilities. The brain’s “default” state, a restful mode that occurs, for instance, when people daydream, allows for this by activating networks that enable communication among disparate regions of the brain, linking ideas that would usually not be connected. During these periods of associative, speculative, wandering thought, the mind becomes temporarily disorganized, freed from the demands of reality. The artist’s task is to then piece things back together in fresh and revealing ways.

  The chaos that occurs when thoughts associate freely is to me a great friend and a great danger. The process is unconscious, beyond my control, and it is similar to what occurs in depression, mania, and psychosis. And truly, when my associative mind is in full swing, nothing else quite functions right. Conversation gets difficult. Paying bills is confusing, buying groceries a challenge. I catch myself thinking out loud, sometimes in public. Yet these are the times when I have come out with paintings, poems, chord progressions, lyrics, stories, prints, costumes, essays.

  * * *

  —

  I wasn’t inspired by David Bowie so much as I walked into him backward. I didn’t know much at all about who he was or what he created, aside from his radio songs. But what I came to appreciate about him much later, what I related to as I learned and listened and grew to be a fan, was his beautiful disjointedness. His art was carnivorous, devouring influences and spitting them out scrambled, shaped by his history and diverse fascinations. His suburban upbringing, 1960s London, art school as a would-be painter, various creative forms—French mime, Kabuki theater, Beat poetry, German Expressionist cinema—and a family history riddled with schizophrenia.

  The illness ran on his mother’s side. Three of her siblings spent time in institutions, two of them with schizophrenia diagnoses. There had been electroshock therapy, depression, a lobotomy, and his mother was unstable as well. So mental illness was a kind of background noise for Bowie and his half brother, Terry, his protector and role model. A decade older, Terry introduced him to most of his early influences, like jazz and sci-fi and Buddhism. But as Bowie grew up, Terry, too, started to show signs of schizophrenia. Bowie first saw it at the age of twenty, one night walking home after a Cream concert, when Terry was overtaken by a violent hallucination. “He saw the roads opening up, fire in the cracks in the roads,” Bowie later recalled, describing how Terry went down on all fours, clinging to the pavement, saying he was being sucked up into the sky. “I had never seen anybody in that kind of metaphysical change before, and it scared me an awful lot.”

  Terry was institutionalized, and a few years later his illness became a central theme in Bowie’s album The Man Who Sold the World. Its first cover bore a drawing of Cane Hill Asylum, where Terry lived, while the song “All the Madmen” considered the physical and emotional isolation of asylum residents. Even The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust in many ways dealt with questions about schizophrenia and its consequences—alienation, a sense of doom. Ziggy and the other alter egos Bowie created, he later explained, were meant to protect him from insanity, becoming vessels for the madness he feared, keeping it at a safe distance. Yet the boundaries between self and character easily blurred. He later said, “I was so lost in Ziggy. It was all the schizophrenia. And it just got to be too much.” I don’t know exactly what he meant by this, but it is revealing that he chose that word to explain what happened.

  References to schizophrenia threaded through later albums as well, not least of which was 1973’s Aladdin Sane—a homophone for “a lad insane”—the persona that bore the now iconic red and blue lightning bolt makeup. “It was schizophrenic,” Bowie said of the Aladdin Sane album. He apparently meant this in the slang sense, the split mind sense that does not accurately describe the illness, but there is his preoccupation, persisting. It also suggests the actual schizophrenic man who was always on his mind. And how it felt to lose so much to madness. There is the way the lightning bolt shoots across his face on the album cover. All the schizophrenia. Something about being struck apart.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t think much about why I created a new look of my own, one that was, if not outlandish, then certainly eye-catching. I knew only that it felt deeply, pressingly necessary. Meandering through the racks at Buffalo Exchange, hunting for bargains after work, I found a small mesh shirt, navy blue and lavender, screen-printed across the front with the word ASYLUM. It pulled at me like a magnet. It suggested mental illness, of course, and old ideas about what it was and what to do with it. Institutions with echoing halls and blank-eyed sufferers shuffling aimlessly. But I also thought of safety, refuge, shelter. Which was a relief, really, to consider—that the word was supposed to mean something good. And there was this: To display it on my body felt like a transgression.

  It called to mind one afternoon the previous winter when I was manning the bakery counter. It was slow, the loaves baked and the rush over, and I was alone with the coffee machines and trays of sweets when I heard the noise of many voices and looked across the street to see a small crowd of people walking by, holding up signs and chanting. I went to the window and caught the words mental illness on a couple of the signs. Saw a name: National Alliance on Mental Illness. I stared, listening—shouts and responses calling for support, visibility, awareness. My God, I thought, gaping. Someone gives a fuck.

  I wore the asylum shirt to work, threw a soft white apron over it, rolled out cinnamon roll dough in it. People noticed it, commented on it during our daily chatter. It became synonymous with me, with whatever it was that made me interesting to my friends. Over a series of mornings, we collectively decided that Tasha would someday open a bar called the Asylum and I would perform there occasionally on electric guitar, on a little stage not unlike the one we flocked to on Thursday nights to sing karaoke. This was where I first understood that you could find asylum in exposure.

  When I look back on that time, I want to say that what happened was everything. Everything happened. That was the year I took my first creative writing class. That was the year I stopped going back to Alaska. That was the year I found my way to a therapist who asked me about my life, and I started to tell her, and then I went home and nearly puked in the toilet. It felt awful but it also felt good, so I kept going back, talking ever-tightening circles around the fact of schizophrenia. I appeared in her office in the asylum shirt. I appeared in her office in yellow, blue, pink, white, red. I appeared in her office.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Bowie wrote “Sound and Vision,” in 1976, he was in Berlin, cloistered away in a small apartment in an attempt to kick a raging coke habit. He had by then had his share of delusions and paranoia himself—severe “cocaine psychosis” brought on by the drug, the kind of thing that led him to believe he was controlling the TV with his mind and that witches were stealing his sperm. Surely his brother’s illness and confinement were part of what Bowie was escaping by staying high. Perhaps, too, there was a fatal kind of loyalty at play, a wish to explore madness for his brother’s sake. Or maybe it was more like inertia, succumbing to the belief that his own loss of sanity was inexorable.

  I wondered often about reality. About the difference between the physical universe and the universe as our human minds construct it. Red, for instance—something our brains make for us. Beyond us, outside of us, it is light at a wavelength of about 680 nanometers, photons moving up and down at a particular rate as they travel. The point being that we’re never in direct contact with reality. And also that some ways of being wrong are useful, while others are not. It is mental illness only when the wrongness makes it harder to survive rather than easier.

  I wondered about words too, more and more all the time.
The ways I could arrange them on the page. The ways others arranged them. Including Tom, his words now scrambled by schizophrenia, in a screed he wrote not long before we went to Costa Rica. He had sat down in the dining room one day and opened my new laptop to take a look, and then typed out a couple of pages in a brief burst: “The Greatest Story Ever Qritten…” I found it in a folder some time later and kept the file among my own random writings, occasionally pulling it up to read, trying to decipher it as one would a message in a bottle.

  It was a dizzying document, mythic and strangely compelling, though barely comprehensible—words combined, collapsed, rearranged, broken down into sounds, full of assonance and alliteration and errors allowed to stand.

  …Now blisten dere’s in de tributrees a worbloed distinct to brlassted reflecsurrection to ours…Long ago freminin seed there could angods feel breathe, though knouw into devil’s light darkness we’ve all fallen….From this salsizar the reemer entered througth, and yeah we wond what is this sound…I tell the it is a harlequin mask of do….Yet when and win tee ten he on to brice did roll, though leauty, loy, and love evanscerate against the imgoodrant, ignorant tide, still agast the ghrend he walked…

  Reflecsurrection. Evanscerate. Agast the ghrend. I read it out loud sometimes, searching in the sounds of the words for some clue to make the tantalizing flashes of meaning cohere. It felt oracular, almost, as if embedded in it I could find the future, what to do.

  * * *

  · · ·

  As the months passed, the shadow on my lids grew more metallic and my eyeliner got thicker, blacker. I blended liner into shadow in a deep, shimmery charcoal and plenty of mascara. This reached its peak on a trip home to Anchorage in the fall, where, seeing Tom in essentially the same condition as before, I wore my eye makeup thick and dark every day. It was so glaring that Tom felt the need to comment on it. He said, “Marin, you’re wearing way too much eye makeup.”

  But I couldn’t not wear it that way. It was at once my armor and my leakage through the armor, the leakage of things I could no longer shunt aside and no longer wanted to. I wanted it to be the first thing anyone saw, especially people who already knew me. I wanted to surprise and confuse them, to shake them up enough to question what they thought they saw in me. It was suddenly necessary to project the thing I had always kept secret: I am not the person you think I am.

  I was glad to be with Tom for a few days, connecting in our way, but I also felt as if we were choking in some kind of toxic, slow-burning fog. As if I were reaching for him through it and only half finding him. As we sat on the carpeted floor of his apartment, picking vaguely at his guitars among his empty beer bottles and open cereal boxes, he told me he had discovered that he had sprouted crystalline wings. He could feel them growing from his shoulder blades. They shimmered and glowed and grew bigger all the time, expanding as his own consciousness expanded. He spoke, in rhapsodic tones, of the time his body turned into liquid diamonds—his tissues flowing in faceted brilliance, inside and out.

  He was nearly out of money by then and had already sold his SUV. He wrote a letter to our grandmother asking for financial support. A few months later, she showed me the letter. It described his recent experiences and said that he would be “very very very very very very very very very very very” grateful to have some extra funds. He explained, “I have come to realize that most people can’t see their wings.”

  What was I doing with all those colors? All that flair? That spectacle of not-belonging.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t know anything about Bowie’s family until much later, after he died, when I became momentarily obsessed by his visual artistry and pursued it all the way back to schizophrenia. I kept asking myself, How did I know? I was reading that, in 1985, Terry climbed over the wall of the psychiatric hospital where he lived and lay down on some railroad tracks, letting a London express train plow over him. I was reading that, by then, Bowie had given up drugs for good when he gained custody of his son and became a single father. I was thinking about how he rescued himself, not once but over and over until he didn’t have to anymore.

  It was almost too eerie. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just exactly right, in the way influence can feel perfect and inevitable. Kind of like Halloween of that year in Bozeman, when I went to my friends’ party dressed as Marilyn Manson. I didn’t listen to Manson’s music, but I liked his look as a costume, so I painted a black stripe across my face and put on a black wig and platform boots and a blue-tinted contact lens that I had ordered online. At the time, I didn’t know that Manson’s aesthetic was a dark descendant of Bowie’s, that it was from Bowie that he borrowed the mismatched eyes, that his getup often directly referenced Bowie’s personas—alien, feminized, extreme. Incidentally, I had expected my contact lens to turn my eye a glacial blue, as Manson’s was, but the lens was not opaque and so instead the effect was as if I had, like Bowie, one enormously dilated pupil.

  And as it happened, my friend Angie showed up at the party in a lavender spandex unitard, her face painted with the famous lightning bolt. “I’m David Bowie’s Biggest Fan!” she announced, bouncing gleefully. Not long after, our friend Tim came down the stairs dressed up as me. I laughed out loud. He wore a wig of blond- and blue- and pink-streaked hair, clipped everywhere with barrettes, along with a mess of bright necklaces, a pair of striped, multicolored bell-bottoms, and my asylum shirt, which he had borrowed through subterfuge and squeezed over a pair of balloon breasts. Together we formed a wacky triangle: Angie as some girl dressed up as Bowie as Aladdin Sane, me as Marilyn Manson’s dark reimagining of Bowie’s aesthetic, and Tim as me being my own thing, which turned out to be deeply Bowie-esque. All of which, in some sense, owed its existence to schizophrenia.

  I think I was trying to do what Bowie had done—to find a way to continue on in the presence of schizophrenia. I think the art making, the songwriting, the wild, colorful displays became means to draw from the illness some of its potency but not its poison. I think I was beginning to see my wings.

  Disintegration, Loops

  LOOP: 2001/1991

  In September of my second summer in Tok, in the subarctic black-spruce bogs of Alaska’s interior, I awoke at about 4:30 each morning and spent the next six hours up on a small hill, catching songbirds. In nearly invisible mist nets our research team caught them as they flew through the forest, where they stopped to eat and sleep during their long flight south. Yellow-rumped warblers, dark-eyed juncos, Swainson’s thrushes—doing my rounds from net to net, I plucked them loose and carried them in cotton bags back to the tent, where we would band them, measure them, take notes about their plumage, and then set them free. It was late morning when we rode the Fish & Wildlife Suburban back into town and passed the post office, where I noticed that the flag was flying at half-mast and wondered why.

  I was twenty-six and Tom was not yet ill and the world, to me, was still more or less a forest beneath the wide ether, the home country of the sharp-eyed kinglets and sparrows and crossbills I saw each day. In the big back room at the headquarters building, our crew leader met us in the doorway and said, “The World Trade Center has been hit by a plane.” His eyes were wide with excitement. “Both towers collapsed!” My mind turned over and came up empty.

  He showed us the footage on his computer monitor—that clip of the second plane disappearing as a smoking pair of rectangles seemed to eat it up. I don’t remember being upset. I was stunned, yes, and riveted, and I do think I was horrified. But even after we returned to the bunkhouse and turned on the television, after we spent the next two hours watching the same footage and piecing together the news accounts of the four planes, the crashes, the suicides, the rescues, the rest…it didn’t sink in like it was supposed to.

  Like it was supposed to. Now this phrase seems to contain everything I knew and felt and wondered during those years. My utter failure to react. The whole country was
in a state of alarm, and I wanted to feel like I was part of that, like my home and my way of life had been attacked. But I didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  I was young and from a state with fewer than a million people and national parks larger than Rhode Island. And though I had traveled outside the country and all around the West, I had only rarely, briefly, been east of the Rockies. My way of life, as far as I knew, looked nothing like that of those New Yorkers who I imagined spent their days fifty stories above the earth, their eyes on computer screens and telephones at their ears. It was a city I had only once seen and never understood, on the other side of the continent, in a culture that was purportedly my own but to which I had always, as an Alaskan, felt like an outsider. My life, as I saw it, was about holding small birds in my hands.