Tristimania by Jay Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page A

we receive the greatest blessings.’ Dionysus, meanwhile, subject to great agony and equally great ecstasy, is the god in the grip of this wildness. Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, wrote of Aristotle’s view that melancholia caused men to experience ‘many times a divine ravishment, and a kind of enthusiasmus . . . which stirreth them up to be excellent Philosophers, Poets, Prophets, etc.’
    In Ion , Plato has Socrates say: ‘For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him . . . for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine.’ Oscar Wildereferred to ‘the old fancy which made the poet’s art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession’.
    For the early Church Fathers, David was the greatest of all poets, able to move between divine gift and human consciousness. Historical figures such as the medieval Margery Kempe – who would today be considered psychotic – were considered mystics. If you see visions, are you delusional and sick, or a spiritual visionary? Ancient Norse bards considered poetry to be a gift of the gods which was then shaped by human skill. Traditional Arabian belief in djinns suggested a sense of being possessed by spirits who gave people knowledge but could also drive them mad.
    Alexandre Dumas wrote of the poet Gérard de Nerval’s episodes of madness: ‘Our poor Gérard, for the men of science he is a sick man and needs treatment, while for us he is simply more the storyteller, more the dreamer, more spiritual, more happy or more sad than ever.’ The link between manic depression and the artistic temperament has been much studied, including by Kay Redfield Jamison in her fascinating book Touched with Fire, which, like all her work, is priceless in the way it comprehends, counsels and consoles the manic-depressive psyche.
    Interestingly, one feature of hypomania and mania is hyperacusis – an increased awareness of objects in one’s environment – which is certainly an aspect of artistic sensitivity. In general, manic depression is a condition of passion, the ability to feel pain, to create and to love. The word ‘passion’, in its root, means ‘to suffer’ (as in ‘the Passion of Christ’). Olive trees were, for Vincent van Gogh, associated with Christ’s Passion, and, if I look at his painting Les Oliviers ( Olive Trees ), painted while he was in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, I see it instantly: the suffering art in his agitated, manic swirls, the turbulence which cannot be calmed. In this Passion, the trees arescreaming. No wonder he sliced off his own ear, for the world was shrieking at him and his psyche could not be quieted.
    An Anglican clergyman of the seventeenth century specialized in treating people he called ‘unquiet of mind’ (the beautiful phrase adapted for the title of Kay Redfield Jamison’s record of her own illness), and it is a deft definition, a listening definition, for those in manic-depressive crisis do hear the sounds of madness within, the weird singing of a high-tension wire or a wind-wolf and, indeed, hear the sudden silence as mind crashes inward during a conversation.
    People in mania often don’t write about it, say psychologists, and cannot remember it until they are in that state again. Richard Bentall comments on the ‘poor descriptions offered in the classic literature of psychiatry’ and suggests that ‘likely there is something about the manic state that makes it almost impossible to portray in words . . . accounts seem curiously incomplete. It is as if the break from normal functioning during an episode is so severe that the mind, on returning to sanity, cannot comprehend it.’
    I’m not surprised. When your mind is in flight you don’t leave tracks on the ground, so there are no