Tristimania by Jay Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page B

prints, neither footprints nor printed letters on the page. But I felt fiercely that I had to take notes during this wōdness , that I had to mark the tracks of its passage. I’ve trained myself to jot down notes wherever I am: in the dark, while walking, while driving, while climbing, half asleep, underwater, in deserts and icescapes. This was just another form of difficult terrain, and I leant on my habit and training.
    In my previous episode, years before, I had taken no notes, and had had no comprehension of what was happening; instead, I had to rely on the observation of others. My flatmate at the time said she felt she was helplessly watching me float upwards, borne skywards,holding the string of a helium balloon, rising, dangerously rising. She wanted to grab me and pull me down, but I slipped ever upwards, out of sight. The painter Benjamin Haydon, a friend of John Keats, used a similar image: ‘I have been like a man with air balloons under his armpits and ether in his soul.’
    Describing mania is like a sundial trying to tether the shadow of a sun gone AWOL, zigzagging across the sky. Sometimes I felt weirdly still, both weightless and vigilant, hyper-aware like an inconcrete meerkat fascinated by a mirage. Sometimes, the opposite of wistful, I felt wist less , recklessly so. Sometimes my mind was a giddy, vertiginous mosaic of turquoise lettered in gold. Sometimes the restless energy coursing through me was like being possessed by a divinity lightfoot in pursuit of feathers: shimmering, galloping and surging.
    Rilke described his breakdown as a ‘boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit’, and manic-depressive people often use images of the natural world. Shelley described Byron as ‘mad as the winds’, and it was an image Byron echoed: ‘If I must sail let it be on the ocean no matter how stormy’; and he writes of the voyagings of poetry, of sailing ‘in the wind’s eye’ and bringing back images to ‘counterbalance human woes’.
    But the flight cannot last. When mania falls to depression, it is as if the storm clouds have congealed, solidified to dank fat. Time itself goes stale. Depression, swollen and greedy, is a slug-glutton, feeding on the tender green soul.
    It is payback time.
    Sometimes the payback is literal, as people have spent and squandered money, giving it away and racking up debts. When mania turns to depression, the payback is also emotional – a sense of guilt about what sufferers have done, and taxingly difficult repayment,the Danegeld of guilty gold, particularly when manic depression has encouraged overspending oneself sexually in impetuous affairs. Darian Leader points out that the Greek word mania, usually translated as ‘madness’ or ‘frenzy’, in its plural form evoked the Eumenides, ‘whose function it was to pursue those who had not, precisely, paid their dues’.
    Manic depression can’t balance the books, and it struggles in a mercurial seesaw of credit and debt, extravagance and penitence, exuberance and recoil, the endlessly kinetic commerce of Mercury.
    Manic depression is more usually called by the chilly term ‘bipolar’, a bipedal term; mathematical, binary and wrong. ‘Mania’ leans to the waltz, falling and rising in threes.
    In mania, the mind dances faster than usual: thoughts are quicker and speech is quicker. It also feels like an increase of ‘quickness’ – of aliveness or vitality – which is paid for in depression later at the price of an increase of deadness. (‘I felt a Funeral, in my brain,’ as Emily Dickinson wrote.)
    The kinetic quality of mania involves many moving parts: physical energy in the need to keep moving, to run, to spend energy of all kinds. Money moves quickly in mania’s hands; it runs, its currency (from correre in Latin, ‘to run’) is spent at speed.
    People’s speech runs fast in mania.