Tristimania (11 page)

When I found it hard to speak or, worse, hard to think, I played the piano. Sometimes I felt that it was descriptive playing – I played myself outwards, describing myself to the world, but this could go wild, as I played faster than my fingers could manage until, in the third movement of the ‘Moonlight Sonata', the arpeggios ran to chaotic breakdown, a pile of notes spilling out of the keyboard's grip, falling scattered on the floor like a cascade of jackstraws, impossible to recollect. Sometimes I played like a kind of emotional blood-letting, to let out an excess of sadness or joy, to let it bleed out through the keys and into the absorbent air, until I played myself empty, but this tipped me into a barren loneliness, the self unecholocated in music.

There were moments when I played better than I ever have in my life, precisely because I could step over, into the music. The notes were in me like laughter before it is born into the world, like thought before it is formed in words; the melody was in my fingers already, only wanting a cue, a key signature, to begin.

The philosopher Susanne Langer in the 1950s suggested that music doesn't so much represent emotion as mimic it. If it mimics
emotion, it can surely also guide emotion, lead it, conduct it. The seventeenth-century musician Werckmeister theorized that well-crafted counterpoint was linked to the ordered progression of the planets, to the harmony of the spheres. At best, music harmonized me, it put the planets in order in my psyche, harmonized the hemispheres.

Most of the time, though, music-less, my brain felt like a jumble sale, stories unravelling like jumpers, torn quotes for 50p, a tatty memory, a broken joke, bits of thought, shreds of mashed paper, a malfunctioning processor, a tilted cabinet of shoddy files.

I blame Mercury. The rascal. In his footlooserie he was kicking up logic like leaves in the heels of his fast, feathered flight.

All the old gods were aspects of mind, personifications of psychology, if you like, and Mercury is surely the god of manic depression. He has sneaked into language when we say someone is mercurial, the ancient Greeks and Romans intuiting something of the workings of the mind, for ‘mercuriality' is the perfect word for the volatiles, those who fly too high and swoop too low, wings at their heels.

So Mercury flirted with me, intoxicated me and intrigued me. He seems to personify – with incredible precision – the features, character, experience and facets of manic depression. Mercury is known as one of the Trickster gods, and a huge number of cultures seem to acknowledge this very specific character. So widespread indeed is the Trickster figure that it leads me to suspect that it is in fact a code word for an aspect of the human psyche, recognized throughout history and across the world: and that aspect is tristimanic. That trickiest of conditions.

When you know what you're looking for, the sign of the Trickster is everywhere. He is there in fiction and in non-fiction, in the ancient texts and in sharply contemporary satires: he is there in Shakespeare, and in so many artists, writers and musicians.

But to Mercury, first. Even as a baby, Hermes ‘has the look of a
herald', we read in the
Homeric Hymn to Hermes.
Like a good messenger, he travels as well by night as by day; air or water or earth are equally his to cross. God of the Rizla packet used to catch a thought unawares or a scribbled phone number after a flirting night, Mercury carries crazy messages across the unhoused brain. For weeks of madness, Mercury had played my mind in the key of havoc; he won't come at my bidding but then arrives unannounced, the winged messenger, wings at his feet and his wrists, making mischief: a companion to no one except the falling, shooting stars.

Restless Mercury and reckless; even when the mind is all in order, he carries a high charge: he pours through you with the currents of Earth, he raises an electric storm in the brain. He galvanizes language, this god of metaphor and wit, yoking apart and splitting asides together. But when the mind is broken, Mercury grabs his chance, goes haywire, flicking the lights on and off, tripping all the switches. At the speed of light he makes connections between previously unconnected thought – he takes the corners too fast, jumps the gun, careless of what he drops.

This lean-to god stands on a slant, one foot uphill, cocky god, head on one side, tilted to the world. He travels light, he carries no weight and little power – he is the god who never asks you to kneel. Sometimes he is the god best honoured in the inattendance, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye; he is the last and least of the gods, after all, and he may reward you better in daydream than in watchful prose.

He is god of the crossroads, the roads between towns, god of benders, caravans and tents, god of tramps and trespass, border-crossing and waysides. But he is unpredictable, promising neither border control nor safe passage. Mercury as Trickster is the
ruler of the in-between, the no-man's-land, the neither-nor. Wayfarers pray to him and cairns are built for him, which is why his Greek counterpart is called Hermes, meaning ‘he of the stone heap', described thus by Lewis Hyde in his fascinating book
Trickster Makes This World
: the cairn which is ‘an altar to the forces that govern these places of heightened uncertainty and to the intelligence needed to negotiate them'. The cairn shows you your way, a guiding spirit to a path otherwise hidden, and sometimes Hermes-Mercury may be good to mountaineers and hillwalkers, to stop them being truly lost.

Mercury may offer cairns in the mind, too, when it has lost its bearings, or he may drive you madder, leading you astray with hallucinations of those spiral paths which I saw when I began to lose my mind, as if he were tempting me onwards towards a maze without a centre. When I was agitated beyond reason not to mislay scribbled messages to myself, Mercury teased me with lostness, for he is the god of the lost and found and hidden, god of lost minds and found friends, god of lost property, hidden beauty and found poetry, from the levity as ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles' to the grave gravity of finding the soul in the underworld.

In terms of metallurgy, hidden gold is found by mercury, which adheres only to precious metals, so Mercury the god leads the way to the psyche's hidden gold. As guide of souls, Hermes fetches Persephone from the underworld, and the spirit of Hermes or Mercury travels between the ordinary daylight world and the deep subconscious of dream, instinct, metaphor and poetry, coming back with mind-gold as it comes back with mined gold.

Bringing Persephone back from Hades, Hermes hastens spring, and in a dark consonance of mind and season, it was the depth of winter when I was most ill, in what turned out to be the longest
winter for fifty years. Spring will never come; Hermes has blithely forgotten.

Mercury-Hermes is the only shaman in the pantheon because he is able to go to the underworld and return: he moves between heaven and Earth, a knower of both the heights and the depths. He is at home in both eternity and time, life and death. In his rescue of Persephone, who was sentenced to live in Hades, one can read the narrative of manic depression as if mania, like Mercury the psycho-pomp, can conduct the psyche out of the hell of depression. Mercury has an element of anti-gravity, working against the grave of the underworld.

In fact, Mercury overturns gravity – he hurls you higher – Mercury, the only high-wire artist who doesn't care if he falls, because he can fly. He holds a candle for Icarus, careless of the wax-melt, because an ambition for wings is the signature of Mercury. In manic depression, if one cannot always walk, one can often fly. When it is hard to put on sensible shoes and walk through one's days in the ordinary working and waking world, yet one can fly in the unsensible fire flight. His feet as winged as his words, Mercury is agile, an escapee: ‘ropes would not hold him . . . such was the will of Hermes,' we read in the
Homeric Hymn to Hermes.

Of all the pantheon, he is the one whose energy quivers most fascinatingly: he is dynamic, quixotic, enigmatic. Fire is at the heart of him and Hermes is the inventor of fire, his character lit with magnetizing incandescence. ‘Touched with Fire', that concisely perfect phrase of Christopher Isherwood's, was used by Jamison as the title of her outstanding work on manic depression and the artistic temperament. Both the Trickster Prometheus and Loki, the Northern European Trickster, steal fire. Manic depression, whose canting arms are fire and hurricanes, is often described in terms of flame;
flaring, sparking, lit, on fire. The Austrian composer Hugo Wolf remarked that in mania the blood becomes changed to ‘streams of fire'. Mercury gives flame to the neurotransmitters so neurones can fire.

Hermes or Mercury (who tricks the more literal-minded Apollo) represents Imagination, as Zoë Playdon writes: imagination ‘that not only sees newness everywhere, but brings it into being, demonstrated by his invention both of fire and of the lyre, both literal fire and the imaginative fire of creativity'.

Mercury jumps the gaps easily from unconscious to conscious, from night to day, because he is god of the gaps, the openings and rents. God of the intersections of roads, he is also god of the intersections of time. His hour is twilight, the no-man's-hour, as he is god of no-man's-land. Out walking at dusk, you search for the cairns as every day at twilight one looks for signs of significance – messages, news, stories – something feathered, fleet and lively; the ever-curious mind trying to see in the dark: what happens next? Mercury catches the hour of ambiguity and paradox, opaque and elliptical, and the deft mind, free of daylight jesses, is ownerless as an owl by night. The mind is its own twilight in its mercurial moments, every modality is twilit – it might be, could be, would be: the elastic hour stretched for its enigma and mystery.
Logos
sets its fixed ratios with the rational and setting sun. Mythos stirs and rises, cannier than we can ken at noon. Twilight reminds us every day that the psyche is a twice-dweller, fluent in languages intuited by night.

Hermes was ‘born at dawn', and the Trickster is most active at the two joints of the days, dawn and dusk, when the light speaks twice; twilight is his time, he of the twins. Like the badger, he is twilight-striped, touched by two-light, day-streaked and night-stroked. At
the last light and dawning dark, he stands silhouetted against the sky, a handful of light cupped in his west left hand. The Trickster relishes the twilight of the mind, the two-light of manic depression, the light-dark moments and, in the calling cadences of falling and soaring, the Trickster finds his flight.

Mercury is about when there is moonrise in the mind and the poet is listening, thinking the world by two-light, the actual and the metaphoric. There are no horizons to the mind, now, no limit to its insight. In the potent penumbra of twilight, human vision changes: our peripheral vision is actually better in twilight than in daylight, and this is both literally true and metaphorically true.

God of the periphery, god of the edges, Mercury is on the edge of the twelve Olympians, a margin-dweller in those margin hours of dawn and dusk. One hour in twelve is a twilight hour, the Trickster in the pack of hours, as Hermes or Mercury is Trickster to the pack of gods. The joker. A card sharp who plays his aces high but never plays by the rules. He is a double-dealer, a tricky one, and he can play nasty tricks on the manic-depressive mind, alluring you with a manic marsh-fire, wilfully leading you astray but dumping you stranded in a sump, the claggy mud of depression which he himself wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

Mercury has been called a generous thief – distracting me, he picked the pocket of my life, stealing a year. If he is a thief, though, he is a disarming one – an attractive one – and he gives as well as takes. Even when he is on the pilfer, he never takes everything; he will not steal all your savings, for he is the god of scavenged things, the overheard remark, the quixotic word; he knows himself to be the picker-up of priceless trifles. As he eavesdrops, he passes on what he hears, if he chooses: altering it if he feels like it, so you can never be quite sure.

Mercury, like all tricksters, is reliably unreliable. He plays Paganini to Saturn's Johann Sebastian: he plays a riff of extemporized brilliance in the cadenza then throws a wolf note to trip you up. He deals in luck, good or bad, but he never gives you your just desserts or pays his obligations. He is to be welcomed but never completely trusted: he knows where we hide our secrets and he'll spill them willy-nilly. Beware the quicksilver, for Mercury never minds his manners or his morals. He is a rogue, a rascal, an opportunist who fiddles the books, but he is not bad; he changes things for the better quite as often as he changes them for the worse. Integrity he has none: he is god of tegrity, how every thing touches another, and he leaves you touched by his visit; a little madder hatter with more mercury around the hat brim.

He is a messy lord of misrule and he plays a chaos croquet on a mole-heap lawn. He knows no duty of care but he will sometimes walk miles out of his way for you. A singular god of the unlinked, the surprising, solitary event, he is god of both serendipity and the non-sequitur –

The gap which lets a new conversation begin.

We say when a sudden silence descends on a party of people that an angel is passing over. People used to say that it was Mercury flying past. It is, in essence, the same thought, for Mercury is the messenger, which, as we've seen, is
angelos
in Greek.

The Trickster is Polytropos, turning many ways. Trickster is adept at transformation but also good at turning to new paths, he turns the page, writes the fresh chapter. Mercury, in alchemy, is a transforming agent by which base metals are transmuted, and Mercury is god of transformation, change and metamorphosis. It is the alchemy of art to translate, to spring the meaning from the trap of reality, in the quicksilver unlocking of poetry.

When the story is stuck, the Trickster moves it forward, jump-starting the conversation, oiling the wheels. But. He may equally just stop you in your tracks. He stopped me in mine when he tripped me up at Twyford Down. Mercury never sprains his ankle, his joints are winged where they articulate him. As messenger, he is ‘articulate', and this word is connected to ‘articulus', a joint in the body and a turning point in the year. And it was at the turn of the year that he tricked me badly: the winter solstice was the first of two nights when I became very suicidal, Mercury losing my reason on my behalf.