A Portrait Of Mania As Temporal Displacement.
Nietzsche’s atavism and the need for respecting our psychosis.
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word “inspiration”?
-Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo”.
In the inhuman span of ten days, Nietzsche committed to paper the first part of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, his most lyrical and grandiose work. The final product numbered 250 pages, all written in less than a year, during fits of inspiration “like lightning; it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly”. Nietzsche imagined Zarathustra — the historical Iranian spiritual teacher whose revelations predate, and might have later inspired, many contemporary world religions — as the first man to discern the mistake of differentiating good from evil. “Thus Spake Zarathustra” is ecstatic, energetic, remorselessly didactic. Its messianic protagonist cheers exultantly for the few who listen to him, and expresses a holy sort of remorse for the many who don’t. There is no apology offered to the throngs inveighed as “little men”. True inspiration is too grand for apologia.
Not many years later, Nietzsche would be arrested in Turin, Italy. Legend has it, upon witnessing the public flogging of a horse, he flung himself bodily over the creature in an attempt to arrest its punishment. In letters signed as “Dionysius”, Nietzsche, claiming divine authority, ordered for Wilhelm II and Otto von Bismarck to be executed in Rome via firing squad. His original diagnosis blamed “tertiary syphilis”, pre-DSM jurisprudence signifying “God only knows”. Eventually, this verdict was retrofitted into “manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis”. Nietzsche’s ascension from scrawling furious, primeval prophecy, to believing himself the world’s creator deity, seems almost logical. Oft I joke with my friends that I’d have been better off as a Victorian missus with a fainting couch. My humors climb so high, and crash so hard. Nietzsche, coetanous to Queen Victoria, detested his soporiferous era. Atavists, we bipolars are.
Last year’s spring-summer: I became suddenly and fulminantly assured that it was my destiny to be a painter. I spent money I didn’t have on tubes of oils I could barely handle. I would set my headphones to injurious volumes and while away the hours of breakfast, lunch and dinner engrossed in creation. Some canvasses were too big for my starter easel. Lacking an appropriate workspace, I’d lay them across the bedroom floor. My raving work stained the hardwood forever. When I was done with a layer, I’d pace back and forth, frustrated that my art was constrained by something so boorish as wet paint. All in all, I think the paintings turned out pretty good. There’s something magnetic about art commandeered by insanity. The raw and inexpressible mind finds a way to bleed through, whether or not you possess any sort of traditional skill in your chosen medium. For a time, upon looking at them, I couldn’t help but feel a twisted sort of nostalgia for my elated convulsions, a possession state I could never consciously reproduce.
I was convinced I had killed God with my mind.
Mania is a state of persistent, unmeasured excitement, a frenetic growth of spirit undaunted by reality’s inconveniences. The climb is exhilarating. Your mood and vitality increase; you go to bed a little later, wake up a little earlier. You apply an inventive polish to projects you’d never gotten around to finishing, and maybe start a couple of novel ones, get way into some new hobby. You have the élan to do all this, then deep-clean the house, and your only plight is an excess of good humor that you can’t seem to share with your friends, who are starting to look a little bland compared to the new you. This is hypomania — literally, “under mania”. Some stop here, under. Some start maxing out credit cards because nothing can go wrong, not for one of your unmatched caliber. You are, after all, the best artist who’s ever lived, and it’s your destiny to get a one-way ticket to a country where your expertise will be properly appreciated. Everyone is jealous of your sudden promotion to Axis Around Which The Universe Revolves: your partner, your friends, your boss, the four strangers you fucked last week, and government agencies with “Intelligence” in the name. Once you’ve struck every name from your address book, you discover that your thoughts are so brilliant and vivid, you can hold conversations with yourself. You never needed other people anyway. You’re on a collision course with the endless rainbow spray beyond meaning. You overstuff your brain with all the boiling, inchoate thoughts your mind barely has time to spit out before the next arrives, and the next, and the next. Fission. You become a helpless spectator to the sea of quicksilver flame. This is total, consuming psychosis, burning so bright that it leaves not even ashes in its wake, and you cannot remember if ever there was anything but the color and the fever.
A friend versed in biology pointed out to me that there are no accidents in the design of the human mind-machine. Our range of potential emotions, aberrant or not, were all developed for survival in lethal environments. One can easily imagine the primal utility of a state that reduces the need for rest and nourishment, while it increases temper, decisiveness and blind hope. I’m a rapid cycler, which means I experience “four or more” episodes of mania or depression per year. Fortunately, I haven’t ascended into psychotic mania since the episode that earned my diagnosis. But “four or more” is too many times a year to experience our world in the terrible scintillation of hypomania. Why, if I can discern centennials of grinding human industry every time I see cracks of neglect on a street wall — why am I stuck here, in this era of euphemism?
The struggles of our time are more multifaceted, require more global solidarity than ever. As a transgender woman and, yes, as patient of a demonized mental illness, I am often both soldier and sufferer. But that is the sane mind speaking. The racing mind crashes into our world of high fructose corn syrup and corporate social responsibility like a pinball machine with the power off. It expects bright lights, keening noise; receives dull clicks and ennui. Best to rocket off alone to the unseen place.
You never return to lucidity. New clarity pupates in the cocoon of your episode, teneral and trembling, shaped slightly askew of its predecessor. A mind capable of psychosis is an eternal imago. It is forever pliant and receptive to grand ideas, and the grandest ideas always seem to belong to leaders bygone, whom we do not have to watch debase themselves in real time through social media embarrassment and concessions to corporatocracy. Such ductility is not dissimilar to that of a frequent consumer of psychedelics, the crucial difference being that we lack any inference regarding frequency and pleasurability. Still, one of my favorite fantasies to entertain is that of being a pre-Christian oracle, smoking primordial entheogens out of a pipe and seizing with religious fervor. That seems like a far more appropriate outlet than walking circles around the living room, making conversation with the A/C’s hum. Archeological consensus says the Temple of Apollo was located over a leak of subterranean ethylene from which the Pythas inhaled their visions. But Plutarch, the first to note the “sweet smell” emanating from the Pythas’ rooms, also claims it was only present “on occasion”. A later study from Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology claims that Delphi’s environment could not have consistently produced ethylene at intoxicating concentrations, instead positing carbon monoxide and methane; later, Dr. Jelle de Boer, responsible for the original ethylene study, would counter that carbon monoxide and methane at sustained hallucinatory doses would have killed the Pythas, who averaged long and healthy lives. So, the third option. Psychosis.
Not that all psychotics of old were treated with vicarial reverence. Societal division between the sound and the unwell was based then, as it is now, on the service madness can pay. No one would call the rich man’s hoarding “addiction to money”, though it undoubtedly is — a neurosis of devourment, the need for more and the fear of losing it, the isolation and the paranoia and the brokerage of objects over people. All systematically enabled, because the rotting rungs of our human ladder are meant to carry the weight atop. So, if you were not a soothsayer, then you were a victim of divine punishment, in which case trepanation let loose that which had taken hold of you. The medical mystifies even as it purports to clarify. I’ve been told by my psychiatrist that mental illness is merely an “inflammation”, a platitude which, like the high-school nihilist who points out that love is a chemical reaction, explains nothing about the border between touch and thought. That is the job of philosophy and religion, which share with mania a qualia of electric violence. Violence, in that they obliterate all preconceived notion, all wayward thought. There was a jumble of ideas before, and now in its place there is a theory of all — even if, from the outside in, the process you are undergoing appears to be the exact opposite. If you are, or have been, religious: imagine explaining your belief system from scratch to someone of tangential or even null contact with your church. Explain not only the physical symbols of divinity immanent, but also the nature of the divine substance itself, at once everywhere and beyond the coarse realm of matter. Take care to dethread your personal philosophy from canon scripture. And summarize it all succinctly, so that your five hour ramble doesn’t make you sound completely fucking insane. If you can live the vain effort of caging with mere words these instincts which make you the animal you are, then you have an organic portrait of mania. One can then see why we — the psychos — don’t just yearn, but solemnly believe we belong to an era before mindfulness paperbacks and the History Channel. Even if such pasts are largely fictional. The first draft of any legend starts with ordinary men, ordinary men and an excess of spirit. Other acquaintances have expressed a profound affinity for the Matter of Britain, even for specific Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table. They are not Christian, yet such struggles are their apotheosis. For all of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian aphorisms, he still felt best at home in the skin of the prophet. Prophets don’t have to stoop to explanation.
Then there’s the comedown. The post-episode is a scary, solitary and humiliating time. You have to come to terms with all the crass things you did, unguarded by the galvanizing of your manic mind. Most of your actions were not the stuff of legend. No one looks heroic in line for a refund at Guitar Center, wild-haired, clothes unwashed, fingertips bleeding from texting apologies. You feel then choked by a double bind. You pray to be delivered from that blinding fire, motes of which you still blink from your sleepless eyes. Yet, when you look at the identical rows of smartdesign architectonics stretching across the city’s ends, you are overcome by the weary, heavy knowledge that nothing will ever be that resplendent again.
But we are still in the era of revelation. The human struggle is ever one: tests of conviction, victory in truth. What we live is already myth. It happens that the shape of our brain is better wired to respond to this myth. I don’t mean to make a sensation out of our condition. The flourishes of creativity certain bipolar artist-celebrities flaunt are purchased at an inflated price, collected by that inevitable agent, depression. I do mean to encourage us to care for ourselves as swiddens, rich grounds for the cultivation of unseen foliage. Reckless pathologization of the mind has mental health patients eager to forbid ourselves. Fear makes us both prisoners and victuals of our disease: we stand outside its cage, feeding it tiny nibs of self-loathing, until the inexorable day of its escape, when it’s become all the stronger for our efforts. Much has been said, from Foucault to now, on the carceral nature of psychiatry, and the salient need to replace institutions like production-oriented therapy with community care and empathy. Such a revolution would require a shift in the discourse which penetrates the mind of the sufferer, too. We are our own first responders. Learning to sift through the deluge of episodes past to separate the absurd from the jewels of truth has been much more conducive to my long-term mental health than discarding my manic self as essentially “not me”. Some of my hallucinations have found their way into the more extravagant ends of my writing. And I’ve made peace with my abortive career as a painter.
Atavistic as the mind may be, it is but one component. Our hands, like a clock’s, dictate the now. It is daunting to discern which of our actions is the correct one. Indeed, it is rarely possible at all to do so in the throes of mania. When we are overcome by anger and terror, that is when we need compassionate care. Not the medical chill we so often get, which regards us as a snarl of wayward connections that must be disentangled as to return to work ASAP. The utmost compassion is human: people who won’t, post-facto, discard our grand and intimidating thoughts as mere babbling. Some of the most universally resonant works ever were penned in just such a manic state. I find myself today in the words of a man who, over a hundred years ago, began believing himself God and calling for the Pope’s incarceration. It cannot have helped Nietzsche’s deteriorating mental health that “Zarathustra” was disesteemed even by his closest colleagues. The true anachronism is how little we’ve advanced in this regard, despite the development of neurochemistry, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics. Anything that can be distributed in neat flavorless squares, at stratospheric prices; demand is a guarantee. We do need our lithium. By all means, let us take our meds. Let us never lose sight of the damage we can wreak, and always be prepared to bow our heads and make amends. And, if we are ever to heal the degloved nerves of mania, let us start respecting them as part of ourselves.
