by Paula Keogh
*
In the following days, I’m still distracted by memories – of Julianne, of growing up, of our first year at university. I’m trying to piece it all together, see it as a whole rather than as fragments scattered through my mind like the aftermath of a catastrophe.
I remember clearly the day Julianne lost herself.
At lunchtime I was waiting for her in the Garran Hall dining room. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew something was wrong. I turned to the door and saw her waving a newspaper in the air and shouting about Vietnam. ‘They’re dropping bombs, napalm. They’re killing children. It’s criminal. We have to stop it,’ she cried.
People stopped eating and turned towards her as she made her way between the tables, continuing her tirade about the war, the killings, the villages on fire.
I rushed to her, and when I put my arm around her, she collapsed against me, sobbing uncontrollably.
Once we were in her room, she sat on the bed, taking my hand in both of hers, pulling it towards her and shaking it. ‘What’s wrong?’ she cried. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I had no idea what to do, what to say. I stared around the room as if an answer would magically appear from the bookshelves or walls.
Our first year at university had started out as a huge adventure. On the first day of term we’d sat in the cafeteria, excitedly thumbing through our new textbooks and talking about the subjects we were taking.
Now, in M Ward, it seems much longer than four years ago. So much has happened. We were eighteen and so naive.
In 1968, the world erupted into chaos. There was so much to take in, so many new ideas for us to integrate into our understanding of life. The Vietnam War intensified that year, and every night there were news reports of soldiers killed, villages burned to the ground, bombs dropped on civilians. In the United States, millions of people marched for civil rights or protesting the war. There was violence and mayhem, cars burning, people killed, cities on fire. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. In France, wildcat strikes were held across the country and, for a while, the government of Charles de Gaulle was on the point of collapse.
Here in Australia, young men were being put in jail for refusing to register for national service, and anti-conscription groups were becoming more militant.
For Julianne and me, 1968 was an initiation into a disintegrating society. That year we lost our innocence. I would sit in the lounge room at home with my family, watching violent black-and-white images on the small television screen spark and disappear. My heart was filled with feelings I couldn’t identify, couldn’t give voice to. I didn’t know how to manage the intensity of my responses to violence, war, injustice, racism. I was trying to understand it all – as if it made sense.
I was also questioning the roles that women were conditioned to play in society. I was introduced to the feminist ideas of Simone de Beauvoir through her memoirs, and to Betty Friedan’s in The Feminine Mystique. I now noticed that the world reported in the news was one of men and their exploits: men in suits, men in military uniforms, men reporting on their lives. When women appeared, they seemed like dolls – men’s pretty accessories. I imagined a different path for myself. I wasn’t going to stay at home looking after children my whole life; I wanted to be involved in what was happening in the world.
One night I watched a television documentary about the hippies who were congregating in San Francisco and going to rock concerts, dancing wildly and smoking marijuana. They looked like revellers at a medieval-style carnival or a fancy-dress party, and I was fascinated. Sensational news stories in the Australian media described how these hippies were espousing the virtues of ‘free love’ and advocating the use of drugs. Stories appeared of drug-affected youths jumping out of high windows in the belief that they could fly and running naked through the streets claiming to have seen God. It all seemed like a wild, unnerving madness to me.
My home life was rooted in religious beliefs and rituals, and family routines. Sunday Mass was followed by a roast dinner or a barbecue on the banks of the Murrumbidgee. When we were younger, my siblings and I had knelt with Mum and Dad for the nightly ritual of the rosary, and on weekdays I’d ridden my bike through the breaking dawn to early Mass. In winter, there was ice on the puddles in the lanes, and my fingers on the handlebars were stiff, but I loved those early mornings, the Latin of the Mass, the mystery of Communion.
We’d been raised to believe unquestioningly in the authority of priests and nuns. When my mother had told the parish priest that I wanted to go to university, he had warned her I’d lose my faith if I studied philosophy. And he was right.
For months Julianne and I argued this way and that on Church doctrines and dogmas. In our philosophy class, we studied arguments for the existence of God and found them unconvincing. Eventually, we took our first breaths as atheists together. But while doubt had been an expansive experience, outright disbelief stripped us of all our certainties. God had held everything together: our sense of who we were, our families, our community and society. He had been the answer to all our questions.
In the end, I discovered there was not one prayer left in me. The doctrines and the rituals simply fell away. And once God ceased to exist, I lost the ground of my being. The universe seemed cold and impersonal; death cast a long shadow on my life. I didn’t know where to look for truth and meaning. Life seemed random and absurd.
I was falling into the darkness, cut loose from nearly every bond except with Julianne. Our friendship was the one thing that made sense.
*
In the myth, the day Persephone was abducted into the underworld started out like any other. The sun shone brightly while Persephone and her friends played and collected flowers in the fields.
The day that Julianne went mad had also begun like any other. As usual, we’d planned to meet for lunch and then spend the afternoon studying together. Instead, Julianne was seized by a dangerous god and carried off. Life was never the same again. When she sat on her bed and asked, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I had no answers.
I suggested that we go home to her family, but she didn’t want to worry them. So we spent the next two days and nights together at my family home, ensconced in my room. It was on the ground floor and had its own entrance from the garden, and it became our refuge as Julianne became more distraught. I had no idea what was happening. Once, when we went upstairs, she saw my mother doing the ironing. ‘The trouble with you Keoghs is you’re all too bloody normal,’ she said as she walked through the dining room.
In my room, Julianne obsessed about the war. She wanted to give a speech to the old men in parliament who were sending boys off to fight. She wrote it down quickly, not pausing to think, covering page after page, begging the government to consider the suffering involved, urging them to listen to their hearts. I was overwhelmed and awed by the speed of her thoughts, and the wildness and intensity of her feelings. Her mind was a whirlwind, drawing everything into its orbit, including me.
In the eye of the storm of madness there’s a kernel of sanity that’s so clear and so true, you think you’re in the presence of Truth distilled and laid bare.
My instinct was to protect her, keep people away. I could see how disturbed she was, but I kept thinking that she would soon recover, come back to herself, and I was caught up in our crazy conversations. We laughed until we cried about the absurdities of the world, about the Pope, about sex, about the Buddhist concept of ‘no-mind’.
‘My head’s exploding,’ Julianne told me. ‘It’s on fire.’
By Monday morning, my mother was aware that something was wrong and made an appointment for Julianne at the local doctor’s clinic a few blocks away.
I gave her some of my clothes to wear. She was less talkative as we walked down to the clinic in the bright sunshine. ‘Do you think he can help me?’ she asked. I told her I was sure he could, and I tried to hide that I was worried. Coming out of my dark room into the light and the familiar streets, I saw that we’d cro
ssed some line, though I couldn’t think what it might be. Neither of us had had much sleep, and Julianne was clutching my arm so tightly it hurt. She’d put my jumper on back to front.
In the waiting room, one wall was covered in postcards from all over the world. I stood staring at them while Julianne was in with the doctor. My eyes registered the different scenes, the tropical beaches and the European cities, but I couldn’t think. My mind was blank except for a buzzing headache, the sound of locusts gathering.
I remember what happened next as if the events are occurring now, in front of me.
I hear Julianne shouting. Minutes later, the doctor opens the door, takes a couple of strides out of his office and asks the receptionist to call an ambulance.
Julianne appears close behind him, her hair a mess, partly tied back and partly falling over her face, her eyes intense and bright. She’s holding the bust of a woman’s head high above her like a trophy. The logo of a well-known contraceptive pill is attached to its base, and I realise it has reminded Julianne of the Pope’s ruling on birth control.
I take the bust out of her hands, place it on the desk and hug her. She puts her arms around me and her head on my shoulder. She begins to cry. I hear the doctor talking on the phone. ‘Paranoid schizophrenia,’ he says. ‘Immediately.’
Everything takes place very fast, but stylised, not quite real, a movie scene that I’m watching from the front row. The ambulance pulls up at the door of the clinic, and two paramedics jump out. The doctor leans down to speak to one of them while the other puts his arms around Julianne’s shoulders and guides her to the door.
It’s clear that she doesn’t want to go with him; she pulls away and stares at me, confused. Without hesitation, the paramedic turns her back towards the door and escorts her outside. I follow, hearing the ambulance doors slam shut, the motor revving. I stand there on the footpath, watching the ambulance disappear down Madigan Street.
I’m numb. They’ve taken her away. I’ve abandoned her. I walk home along the suburban street, registering nothing.
*
One rainy day in M Ward, Kate McNamara introduces me to a new way of thinking about the word ‘mad’. We’re sitting with Michael at one of the laminex tables in the day room, drinking coffee and talking about life on the ward.
‘I don’t think I’m ever going to get out of here,’ says Kate.
‘Yes, you will,’ I say. ‘You’re unwell right now, but things will get better.’ I’m aware that I sound exactly like my mother.
‘Unwell! I’m not unwell. I’m mad. And so are you. You’d better get used to it.’
‘Mad?’ No one has ever said this to my face before. I feel as if I’ve been injected with a cardiac stimulant.
‘Yes, mad, like the rest of us in here. Don’t look so startled. We’re all lunatics. That’s why they’ve locked us up.’
‘But we’re not locked up,’ I say. ‘We’re voluntary patients, and this is an unlocked ward.’ Our conversation is making me anxious.
‘So you voluntarily have ECT, do you?’
I’m confused. I’ve never thought about this before. ‘I think I might have signed some papers,’ I say. ‘Yes, I think I did.’
‘Christ, Pauls, that clinches it. You really are mad.’
‘But we’re not locked up in here.’
‘Technically, you’re right. We’re not locked up, but we might as well be. Where else can we go?’
She has a point, one I’m well aware of. I look at her, and something shifts in me. Kate isn’t afraid to say she’s mad. She’s defiant and forthright. Not ashamed, not humiliated. She doesn’t hide herself away, or try to pretend everything’s fine.
When I had my first breakdown, I was taken to a private psychiatric clinic located in a large old building on a hill in North Sydney. One of the other patients in my room used to steal my toilet bag and clothes. When I asked for them back, she would say, ‘We’re all God’s mad creatures,’ and walk off. I mulled over the idea that I might be mad, terrified by it. Being mad felt shameful and sinister, and I would never say the word out loud.
I’ve been diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’, but that hasn’t helped me at all; it means nothing to me. I’d hardly heard the word before Julianne’s diagnosis. And the explanation that I have a chemical imbalance in my brain is confusing. The word ‘schizophrenic’ makes me feel cut apart, split open. It makes me feel that something incomprehensible is happening to me, whereas I can relate to the word ‘mad’ even if I find it deeply disturbing.
Schizophrenic, I belong to science; mad, I belong to the human race.
We all understand King Lear’s confusion and despair. And Hamlet – his hallucinations tell us of his grief. Don Quixote’s tale is a classic for a reason. We can relate to the madness in these stories and many others. All through history, there have been mad people who’ve seen things that aren’t there, heard voices when no one is speaking, who’ve become strangers to their loved ones.
But I can’t relate to the idea of schizophrenia, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
I’ve heard a saying that words are either like trees or like sores. Words that are like trees put roots deeply into the earth and reach high into the heavens. I don’t know if the word ‘mad’ reaches into the heavens – though I suspect it did for Julianne – but it does reach into history and into our souls. It’s part of the spectrum of human experience. It speaks to me and to people generally, mad or not, while the word ‘schizophrenic’ is like a sore, making me ill and cutting me off from other people.
Sitting here with Kate and Michael in the day room, I now see myself in a whole new way. Since my diagnosis I’ve felt humiliated, unworthy and degraded. But as Kate says, I have to get used to the idea that I’m one of ‘them’, the mad ones. I have to see that madness is something that could happen to anyone. I need to acknowledge the state I’m in, wholly admit to it.
Easy to say, harder to do, but I can at least begin to think more freely about my experiences, and those of Julianne, Michael, Kate and other patients in the ward. ‘Mad’ is a heavy word, but I think I can carry it. I already feel stronger.
*
For the first time since I’ve been a patient in M Ward, I go into the female dormitory for a reason other than ECT treatments. The last time I visited there was when Julianne was a patient four years ago. Kate and I have been talking about her favourite metaphysical poets, and she wants to show me a book of poems. As we walk into her room, I’m shocked by a flash of recognition. I look towards the corner next to a window.
There we are: Julianne and I sitting cross-legged on the bed. Julianne is telling me about a vision she had that revealed to her the connection between music and mathematics. She explains carefully that music is a series of interlinked mathematical problems and their solutions. She closes her eyes for a few seconds, enclosing this thought in the interior space of her being. Her voice is slow and deliberate, each word drawn up from somewhere deep inside her. She says that music is in our bodies, in the sky. In someone’s scream. It’s in a flower. In everything.
But then she pauses and looks directly at me, a flash of excitement in her eyes, her voice lit up. ‘You know, the world’s not like we thought. The world plays. It’s music. We live in music, and it lives in us.’
As Kate and I walk out of the dormitory, it hits me. That visit to Julianne was the last time I saw her.
I’m overwhelmed by memories. I see Julianne as she was through thousands of our conversations, her familiar gestures matching the rise and fall of her precise and emphatic speech. I think of how she’d look when she was searching for the right word: she’d narrow her eyes and stare into the distance beyond my shoulder. She’d laugh and brush her hair back off her temples with both hands, then shake her head, letting her hair fall around her face again. She completed this little ritual with a self-conscious deliberation, adjusting her glasses and smiling her slightly myopic smile.
I think now that beneath all her confusion, Juliann
e saw the world as the mystics see it. She understood a profound truth that I reach for but can’t quite grasp. In some essential region of herself, Julianne was whole and unbroken within the music.
4
Inside the Green Bell
he is white pain flowering
he touches me
we fly
laugh at the sky
Michael wants us to get engaged. There’s an urgency about it for him, an enthusiasm for the wedding ceremony and for the idea of marriage that I find irresistible. It’s simple and obvious: I love him, I can’t imagine life without him, so we get a day pass from M Ward and go on a mission into Civic Centre to buy our engagement rings.
It’s one of Canberra’s archetypal spring days: cool blue sky and warm sunshine, with the hint of perfume from wattles in bloom along the road and plum trees pink with blossom. Michael and I hold hands and make jokes about being escapees, free at last. But in Civic Centre the streets are too close and too hectic. People hurry by, cars swerve around corners, loud music blasts from a record shop, and I feel exposed and uncertain. I can barely process the light, the noise, the rush, but we have rings to buy, so I take deep breaths.
As we cross Garema Place, we see a small market selling crafts and jewellery. Without hesitation, Michael steers us towards a colourful stall with handbags hanging above a table of silver jewellery. We’re attracted by the rings with Celtic designs. Michael becomes excited as he tells me about the ancient Book of Kells in Dublin’s Trinity College Library, the delicate knots and patterns painted on its pages.
‘Look at this, Pauls,’ he says, interrupting himself and holding a ring out for me to examine. ‘It’s the infinity symbol repeated in a circle.’
I take the ring and see that it’s composed of two silver bands twining around each other. I think this symbol is perfect for us. Our love is about space: it’s limitless.