Tristimania by Jay Griffiths

Coleridge’s intense talkativeness ‘dazzled bystanders by containing too many ideas in too few words’, according to his biographer Richard Holmes. Sometimes the speed of connection in one’s thoughts is so fast that the steps are invisible and a lackbrain hearer may dismiss it as disconnected, whereas it is the result of an over-connected mind, going at the speed of light, faster than the speed of sound.
    Welcome to the foundry.
    Here we have Mercury or Hermes’ half-brother Hephaestus, the blacksmith of genius. And here we have melting of bells. Hear the silent temples. You may steeple your fingers at your head and pray, aspire to the pealing of gold, but madness has your feet to the flames, molten and made into bullets you can shoot – straight through your temples.
    Mixed-state manic depression is manic depression on speed. In mixed state, one’s moods oscillate within hours, even minutes; a flux of unplannable ecstasy and unpredictable agony.
    The hurricanes within want serenity but get doldrums. The doldrums want breeze but get hurricanes.
    As this episode for me began, appropriately, in the autumn or fall of the year with a literal fall down a rabbit hole, it was a falling into madness of a paradoxical sort; a soaring fall, a falling flight, tripping the switches. (‘I feel like I’m tripping,’ I said often to friends at the high points.) It was a sick, lurching helter-skelter of the psyche. The fall from hypomania to depression may be a matter of quicksilver timing, but then mania re-erupts through depression’s stupor.
    It is self-provoking, this gyre, self-swerving around an elastic axis, turning and turning. The licked finger circles and circles the rim of the glass till a wail rises and the glass shatters itself, shards of broken-heartedness which will stab the barefoot psyche.
    I developed an obsessive terror of losing things, particularly my notebooks, which I clutched at compulsively, sometimes every minute, checking they were still there. If I left my house, I often had to walk with my hand in my satchel, fingers touching the pages. I had to check every packet of empty Rizla papers several times before I burnt it, in case I’d written a thought on one of them and would lose it. Scraps of paper, shopping lists, odd reminders, the little docketwith the next doctor’s appointment written on it; all were nervously guarded. I felt real panic when I thought I’d lost a hat, and emailed and phoned friends trying to find it. Mad as a hatter, Mercury brimming. If I can’t even hold on to a notebook, how can I hold on to my sanity? was my reasoning. If I lose my hat it shows that I am losing my mind: lostness was the pivot of my panic.
    And then I crashed my computer, losing at a stroke the ability to receive the slips of sanity my geographically removed friends were sending me. It happened late one night. I was drunk. Both my common sense and my computer were running dangerously low on battery power. A red warning sign popped up on the screen telling me to turn the computer off immediately or there’d be trouble. It was an odd but precise parallel to what had already happened to me the day I went mad: I ignored the red warning sign, and then on the sudden the screen froze. True to its word, my computer wheeped and fizzled out to black. It never worked again. The motherboard was fucked. I knew the feeling.
    I could borrow a friend’s computer, from time to time, but I hated not being able to read and re-read my friends’ sane, kind, helpful messages at any time. The loss of that easy access made me even more isolated. At this point, too, it was becoming clear that it wasn’t safe for me to drive. I didn’t care much about an accident involving only myself, but I was concerned about a passenger of mine or anyone else on the roads.
    Everything seemed to be metaphor. Car crash for breakdown. Motherboard for rationality. Notebook for mind. Hat