Tristimania by Jay Griffiths Page B

and follow the way he knew and I’d forgotten, back to safety.
    In Don Quixote, the delusional Quixote is treated by the doctor(Cervantes himself), who aims to cure his madness by working within his lunacy, curing him through the very terms he uses. It is crucial that listeners do not scramble the message or scumble the precision of the image. If the listener can stay within the terrain of the exact metaphor the speaker is using, they will feel more findable, more reachable. ( I read you. What’s the mountain weather report? Stay away from the cliff edges . . .) But if, by contrast, the reply confuses the image ( I understand. You’re feeling very low. You’re in a dark pit ), then the person in crisis will feel more lost, more isolated and more endangered.
    People in psychiatric crisis are living more in their minds than in the actual world, and words have an extraordinary power. They can swap places with things; they can crush, poison and kill. They can also give life, illuminate and heal. Logos is indeed a divine principle: words create reality.
    My need for metaphor was ferocious: I clung to it as if my life depended on it, as if my SOS from Cader were a text message tapped out on a dying phone with low charge and a weak signal sent to the Mountain Rescue Service. Help. I am mad. North-north-west. Eleven o’clock on the dial, moving dangerously into the midnight hour.
    Sometimes, though, I had a positive sense of the metaphoric terrain; I was in another land, the other world. In a compliment to our species, I’d suggest humanity cannot bear too much mere reality, deadened reality unenlivened by significance, meaning, poetry or art. I wanted to escape the tethers of dogmatic rationalism, to say that this way of seeing is not enough, the mind needs more. It is a yearning for the ultimate, for God, for the divine, for art, for poetry, and I found myself longing to dwell elsewhere, where the mind can dream, awake. A yearning not toclimb an actual mountain but rather the mountain’s reflection in still lakes.
    Madness is a way of seeing aligned to the shadow rather than the object which casts it. Madness is a way of hearing attuned to the echo rather than the melody which causes it. The other world. The uncertain world. The peripheral vision. The idea-world, where metaphor is like the ‘sympathetic string’ on an instrument, which is usually unplayed but resounds in sympathetic resonance to the playing of the main string, most strongly at either the same tone or an octave interval. The main string actually played is not as important as the sympathetic string which sings its negative capability in a resonance of gold. Matter doesn’t matter as much as the immaterial world. Metaphor is not of matter and yet how much it matters.
    The literal world has a metaphoric penumbra of significance, and this is where the world glows, the halo of events; for nothing is only real. It is real and it is ideal, as if the psyche’s metaphoric idea of something is always the augmented version, the Greater: as if Idea in the human mind has grandeur far beyond Reality and Plato was right all along. It is the mindset of fairy tales, where every encounter has enormity and significance, where people are hugely good or hugely destructive. There are trolls, kind kings, good animal companions.
    People in a crisis of manic depression are said to be prone to idealizing people or demonizing them, though probably a better way of phrasing it is ‘to demonize’ and ‘to angelize’. I certainly did that medically, angelizing my doctor and demonizing the psychiatrist, and many memoirs seem to do the same. Both extremes are Ideal, from the realm of Idea. Metaphoric angels. Metaphoric demons.Because just as the mind makes distinctions between actual mountain and metaphoric Mountain, so it creates distinctions between the actual, sweet-hearted friend and the metaphoric Angel, between the actual, highly