Tristimania by Jay Griffiths

Author:Jay Griffiths
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028043
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR: TILL THE LIGHT

It was in the dark days of January that I became feverish to write the poetry of this madness. I felt a ferocious need to transmute the pain, to translate the fury and glory from inside to outside.

On the first and maddest night of this episode, Mercury had got the upper hand and had recklessly sent me mad. I had begged not to be sent incurably mad. He looked hell-bent on ignoring my plea, so I had pinioned him to the ground with drugs.

One night, half asleep, I dreamt of a woman saying:

– It’s the pylons, Jay.

And I understood the metaphorical truth of that image. The electrical currents in my brain which should be flowing had shorted, the neurotransmitters (the chemical messengers) had gone berserk and an electrical fire was almost out of control. Almost. The antipsychotics and mood stabilizers were firefighting. I was caught between the wisdom of sanity and the beguiling compulsion of madness. The leaflet with the pills I was taking said they ‘correct the functioning of the neurotransmitters’. Take that, Mercury. But he prowled, only half corrected, through my nights and days, making each one last a year. He cast spells of furious intensity, such messages from my memories that I was shocked into childhood. I was all the ages of my life, in one breathless present.

I let my doctor persuade me to take slightly higher doses, but the medication muffled me. At best, I felt like an amiable sheep: I could eat grass and shit by the fence, but without emotion or mindedness, simply as a set of biological compulsions. My emotions seemed to thud against a blanketed wall; they could barely move beyond middle C. At worst, I felt straitjacketed on the inside, a trapped animal, psyche snared.

I was bargaining hard with Mercury. Give me metaphor, and I’ll let you run wild in my mind. But if you continue to make me lose my mind – and your job in myth was to find Psyche, not to lose her – I will drag you down to earth with drugs. So behave a bit better, Mercury, just a bit, or be damned with drugs, for I have to find a softer landing back to Plynlimon, Powys, happiest county in Britain, of which I am not a shining example.

Then Mercury offered truce terms to psychiatry in turn. Now he was plea-bargaining:

– Keep the doses low and I’ll give you poems.

Deal.

A game of forfeit, played for poems.

Always dangerous, though, to deal with Mercury, the god unbound, who keeps no promises, honours no bargains and pays no bills. But, in this fragile peace accord, I wrote poems over the course of three weeks in January, in the rift of time, the hours between three in the morning when I woke and the first light at eight o’clock and the stirrings of the ordinary sounds of the traffic of life in my little town, as the first car drives past.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine, a retired psychiatrist, had returned to my town after some weeks away.

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