silent words between my breaths and gauge how low I was by all I could not say. They protected me, standing between me and the world, gentle sides towards me and tough sides outward, and they were fierce to ward away from me anything or anyone who was unhelpful. I was sheltered by their shields â an unassailable, interlocked circle.
My cats were also acutely important when I was ill. The poet Christopher Smart, who was manic depressive, spent seven years in a mental asylum. He was allowed to keep a cat, and wrote the loveliest ode ever dedicated to a cat, writing of his cat, Jeoffry:
               For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
               For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
Now, as I write, my cat Tom is asleep on my study floor. He is using two of my small black notebooks from that year of illness as a pillow for his head. He is a feral cat but has been with me since kittenhood and is more attached to me than any cat Iâve known. What do they do, these pets, for our savaged psyches? They are company; they breathe near us, and that in itself is consolation. They are more than happy to wake in the middle of the night and pad downstairs to sit with us in the kitchen. âFor he keeps the Lordâswatch in the night against the adversary,â wrote Smart. They need us to feed them and, at my worst, this responsibility was more pressing than the need to feed myself but knowing that I could at least perform this task was helpful. They offer affection without analysis. They are an exercise in instant mindfulness: wholly purring, wholly stretching, wholly sunbasking, wholly catnip-toy-mouse-chasing. They cannot but live in an eternal present and do so beguilingly, drawing us, too, towards the glow at the heart of now.
Though my sleep was short, the medication made me sleep furiously â that phrase which Gideon Koppel used to title his exquisite film, precisely because Chomsky had said it had no meaning. If I slept furiously, I also felt a life force furious within, of green life in a green flame flowing, and it seemed both to conjure and confound the suicidal thoughts which devilled me. Mania was like a Faust in my mind, paradoxically both calling up the demon suicide and at the same time driving it off in rage: when suicide seemed to tinge the edge of my vision, mania roared at it: Stand Where I Can See You. And FUCK OFF.
Maybe the sleep of depression protects you, through its anaesthesia, from something worse, from the pain that would drive you to suicide. Perhaps, further, thatâs part of the reason why mixed-state hypomania is so dangerous; because its depressions are sleepless, and that sleeplessness feeds on itself, self-cannibalizing. In sleepless mania, the mind is yellow-dizzy with a turbulence of colour, the air licks it with tongues of fire, flowers bow their petals like violinists and are bent to the applause of a rapturous wind while even the shadows of things are brilliant and burning. (Van Gogh knew.)
The ferocity of life sought the idea of death like an artist might: a painter demanding chiaroscuro â dark light shining. Vitality connected me with every living thing and filled me with an acute lovefor the worldâs life forms, for every bird, every tree, every mountain. Nothing seemed to have its normal surface; everything and everyone seemed semi-permeable. This, too, is the over-connected aspect of mania, and one of its most profound experiences is the feeling of being able to step over the threshold of âOtherâ without quibbling about species difference, or language, or the expectation of either boundary-mind or barrier-body. This contains the blunt psychiatric concept of the manic âdisinhibitionâ but goes far beyond its crude enactions (taking oneâs clothes off in public; being wholly inappropriate) into the
My cats were also acutely important when I was ill. The poet Christopher Smart, who was manic depressive, spent seven years in a mental asylum. He was allowed to keep a cat, and wrote the loveliest ode ever dedicated to a cat, writing of his cat, Jeoffry:
               For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
               For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
Now, as I write, my cat Tom is asleep on my study floor. He is using two of my small black notebooks from that year of illness as a pillow for his head. He is a feral cat but has been with me since kittenhood and is more attached to me than any cat Iâve known. What do they do, these pets, for our savaged psyches? They are company; they breathe near us, and that in itself is consolation. They are more than happy to wake in the middle of the night and pad downstairs to sit with us in the kitchen. âFor he keeps the Lordâswatch in the night against the adversary,â wrote Smart. They need us to feed them and, at my worst, this responsibility was more pressing than the need to feed myself but knowing that I could at least perform this task was helpful. They offer affection without analysis. They are an exercise in instant mindfulness: wholly purring, wholly stretching, wholly sunbasking, wholly catnip-toy-mouse-chasing. They cannot but live in an eternal present and do so beguilingly, drawing us, too, towards the glow at the heart of now.
Though my sleep was short, the medication made me sleep furiously â that phrase which Gideon Koppel used to title his exquisite film, precisely because Chomsky had said it had no meaning. If I slept furiously, I also felt a life force furious within, of green life in a green flame flowing, and it seemed both to conjure and confound the suicidal thoughts which devilled me. Mania was like a Faust in my mind, paradoxically both calling up the demon suicide and at the same time driving it off in rage: when suicide seemed to tinge the edge of my vision, mania roared at it: Stand Where I Can See You. And FUCK OFF.
Maybe the sleep of depression protects you, through its anaesthesia, from something worse, from the pain that would drive you to suicide. Perhaps, further, thatâs part of the reason why mixed-state hypomania is so dangerous; because its depressions are sleepless, and that sleeplessness feeds on itself, self-cannibalizing. In sleepless mania, the mind is yellow-dizzy with a turbulence of colour, the air licks it with tongues of fire, flowers bow their petals like violinists and are bent to the applause of a rapturous wind while even the shadows of things are brilliant and burning. (Van Gogh knew.)
The ferocity of life sought the idea of death like an artist might: a painter demanding chiaroscuro â dark light shining. Vitality connected me with every living thing and filled me with an acute lovefor the worldâs life forms, for every bird, every tree, every mountain. Nothing seemed to have its normal surface; everything and everyone seemed semi-permeable. This, too, is the over-connected aspect of mania, and one of its most profound experiences is the feeling of being able to step over the threshold of âOtherâ without quibbling about species difference, or language, or the expectation of either boundary-mind or barrier-body. This contains the blunt psychiatric concept of the manic âdisinhibitionâ but goes far beyond its crude enactions (taking oneâs clothes off in public; being wholly inappropriate) into the
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