My mother was about three years old when Greta Garbo never first said, "I want to be alone," in 'Grand Hotel'. Since I recall the Hollywood star delivering the line she didn't, I was surprised to find I'd associated it with the wrong movie by taking strong images from 'Queen Christina', which I liked better, and displacing the words.
Garbo, whose unforgettable looks and mysterious allure were enhanced by being filmed in black and white, was vexed by the quote. She "reportedly told friends, 'I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be left alone." There is a world of difference'" (Who2?).
So there is, a whole world of difference.
Such plans as I had for the summer of 2006 didn't involve very much time alone. I have few close friends, but intended to see some once holidays began if they were still in town, get out as frequently as a tight budget allows to concerts before the city stops for August, and with great luck, even meet her this year, maybe at a musical event. She is the woman I've occasionally mentioned before, though I know no more than that she is bound to share my love of music.
There's England as well. I didn't go last year and saw my mother just for a day when she was briefly in France, visiting her granddaughter and my former wife. The years have notched up since I last saw my father and I'm ashamed of it. My daughter Marianne has been to York, where my parents live in separate parts of the lovely historical town, far more recently. My parents split up a few years after my arrival in Paris in 1980.
For well over a week now, however, I have spent many, many hours with my parents, with my daughter's mother Catherine and with other family members, seeing almost nothing of anybody else. This has been in my head and on my own. I didn't want to be left alone. I have needed to be alone, a great deal more than when I 've needed solitude each morning for about an hour as long as I can recall.
Today's morning hour began at 2:00 pm. I slept through the alarm clock set for 10:00 am, like I frequently did about three months ago during the initial stage of recovery from the nervous breakdown that became manifest when I plunged into Hell on March 14 and had to stop working when it became too much for me some days later.
In the previous series of Orchard entries about the disease with which I live, I described it as manic-depression. Calling it a bipolar disorder gives an idea of the ups and downs. I set out all I believed useful about a malady that affects many people and claims numerous lives. In pieces written between April 8 and May 14, I included tales from my experience and turned what I found relevant in the work of gifted psychiatrists who have helped me into language accessible to everybody (though most of that work was already done by them).
I stressed the importance of core values manic-depressives find they lose when in trouble, initially with regard to themselves -- love, trust and a sense of humour -- and then distort concerning people close to them, and I wrote about the dire effect this can have on relationships and how paranoia can set in.
My writing also explored ways in which people who have a crippling and dangerous disease tend, nevertheless, to resist help from those best placed to provide it and showed how strong self-destructive factors can be at work, which may add to the great strains in relationships.
The strangest story I told was how, given the seriousness of the last cycle of manic-depression I had, some higher part of me devised a strategy for splitting my personality in a way that enabled me to use healthy elements, including fictitious people who were composites of the best in myself and others I know, to tackle the disease. They gradually restored my self-love -- my sense of self-esteem -- to get me laughing again, at myself and with others. Within a few weeks, I thought I had the resources to go back to work.
This "strategy" I took to be a gift from the woman therapist I saw until December 2004 (known as the Shaman-Shrinkess on the Log because of ideas we shared), combined with the insight of manic-depression patient turned great psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison (whose books I've mentioned), and also from my Inner Shaman.
He put in an appearance when I later wrote of a conviction that we each seem to have a guide inside us to what's good for us and our health of mind, body and soul, if only we know how to listen. This isn't easy. We have addictions. We have behaviour patterns that are deeply ingrained in us, some going way back into childhood. People like some distractions and being taken out of themselves. Many people don't enjoy being alone -- psychiatrists say this becomes easier as we get older and see it as a merciful change given the way families alter as the children leave the home, then death one day steps in to take a partner.
My current therapist went along with the strategy. I went back to work -- for all of two weeks. The truth is that what I've done so far patched me up, gave me sufficent confidence back and courage to go on for a little while longer. But that wasn't nearly enough.
We're already well into July. I quit the Factory again after an initial surge of memories from the past that brought very strong emotions with it, got in the way of my work as a news editor. I should be part of a "production line" of people who bring the events in the world from places where journalists are covering them to you. But I couldn't focus on news from some African nation and concentrate on getting it into shape when what was going on in my head was overwhelming.
I didn't know what was going on in my head.
A nice woman working on the desk would ask if I wanted a coffee. Words like that would drag me back to the present, but it was still was far less about relief workers being denied access to some hot and hopeless refugee camp because a government had decided they were spies than wherever I was in memories. I found myself staring at Google Maps, more interested to see what satellite pictures showed of the houses I had lived in as a child, if they were still standing, than in any story waiting to be done.
Memories. I feared and wanted them. Talking to colleagues, I was agreeably surprised -- more than I should have been -- by the sensitivity they showed about the bout of illness I'd been through and the amount of time it had taken me to get over it, but the work bored me and I began during the second week to lose my confidence again. I found the stories out of Africa dull, but I was slowing down too. I kept telling people that emotionally, I felt like Pinocchio must have done. Mine felt new and subtle, pastel shades with which I needed to familiarise myself rather than the extremes I'd known before.
In fact, I was very confused about emotions.
What I did before returning to work was to make a partial recovery, in which I pulled myself together with help. Drug treatment brought an end to a manic phase in which my thoughts were still racing wildly, while at the same time I felt deep emotional pain and distress. The chemicals levelled out massive mood-swings that at their worst became a sustained period of depression, marked by times of complete hopelessness and helplessness I have mentioned, for which the only remedy I could find was sleep.
What I began to think about a few weeks ago goes beyond recovery: a recovery that is still under way from what I didn't understand at first to have been a full-fledged nervous breakdown. My "strategy" may have restored my sense of humour and self-esteem, but they proved very fragile. So I started to think that something else was wrong to render me so vulnerable and return me so quickly to a state in which I wasn't up to the job. What was really far too fast, however, was my assumption that I could do it. My doctor and therapist let me, but didn't tell me how bad things were for weeks. If they had told me while I was still manic, I wouldn't have taken it in.
It is healing I've been thinking about so hard.
What constitutes healing? How is it set in motion? What's the difference between recovering from a bad bout of illness and engaging on a healing process that could make it less likely to happen again?
I've been really scared that it might happen again. I don't know much of the answers to the questions I've just asked, just that for me music is part of it and so is harmony and so are things that happen in our souls.
Long before I got there, my doctor friend made a qualitative difference between what happened in March and previous depressions I've had, with his warning that the last one was extremely serious and should be treated to avoid a recurrence. Once he felt I was ready, he confirmed some home truths I had worked out for myself during the weekend I all but lost faith in the therapist because of the vile side-effects of a drug he kept me on for too long. I wrote about that in the one entry where I felt entitled to link my own experience together closely with music to which I'd listened: the piece on the Pretenders, a band with staying power that produces superb songs about real life with no pretending.
This entry could head one of two ways now. I shall resist a temptation to go all the way down the first simply because I've already written it and doing so kept me busy in self-chosen solitude for so long. Very old memories have welled up inside me incessantly and when they haven't, I've gone in search of them, back through my 26 years in Paris, back on through the first years I held down a job in England, still back on through my teenage life, and right back all the way into everything I can recall of my childhood. While I have done this, I've kept a record of it all. It made for a long story!
The second way of proceeding is simply to state that something went very wrong with me, the way it does with anybody who ends up needing therapy. It still goes wrong, every day. This is how I think it's going to be for some time to come. The therapist has taken me off work for the rest of this month and he has told me that he will be doing so in August.
It's going to take as long as my doctor said it would.
What might have gone wrong became apparent while I was boring myself with my life story and felt much more inclined to be out in the sun, watching the girls go by, listening to music, doing my musical homework or simply indulging in sexual fantasies. I wanted a love relationship with a woman who is interested in music and likes an uncomplicated life. But if this is to happen, my annual summer dream which doesn't really just have to be a seasonal one, I don't wish to be a complicated person myself and I want some of the mess of the mornings out of the way first.
You can't write about healing manic-depression. You can write about treatment with drugs, which is one thing, and therapy that helps with issues it raises, which is another, and finding ways of living with the disease. My mother has chosen her way of living with depression, which strikes her down for four terrible months or more at a time.
My mother has learned to accept being reduced to a state where she can do little more than survive from one day to the next during those awful months, waiting for them to end and then going up. When she's high, she tries to do as much as she can, seeing people and pursuing interests that are beyond her at other times. She can be exhausting both to herself and others during her highs. My mother knows this and backs off when she's aware of talking too much, warning others to tell her if she's tiring them. In her '70s, she isn't inclined to do what I did and delve into her past.
I have chosen a different approach less out of arrogance, though sometimes I am, than because my past came back to haunt me and I realised that what I'm doing every single morning is the same thing as people sometimes need to do periodically in a different way, when they rebuild their lives.
Every single day, I rebuild myself before I can get on with it. I put myself back together. Until I've done this, I can't face other people. If the telephone rings, I very rarely answer it, but just check out who is making the incoming call. When I know I've got to pick it up, talking is hard. And I'm a junkie.
Forget cereal ads I used to hate in which cheerful families eat cheery cracking food, slopping on the milk and spooning the stuff up into ultra-brite smiles. There is no music either, because I don't want somebody else deciding what to play me. If there's been a coup in Africa during the night that's going to give me a tough day's work, I don't want to learn about it on radio news. I'll do that when I'm ready, on the Net.
I'm ready once the drugs are working, the first cigarettes smoked and the Valium tablets swallowed. This was often a real pain in the butt when on holiday with the Kid. I hated keeping her waiting or suggesting that she head off for her breakfast, where I would join her once the hour was over, but that was the devil or the deep blue sea since if she stayed around she'd turn on the cartoons when there were any on a hotel television. The racket those made would drive me into bathrooms.
Numerous people take Valium for anxiety -- if not always for such prolonged periods as me -- and we get hooked on it. Doctors know this. Getting off it has to be planned. Valium can do something else too, like a load of other drugs prescribed for similar reasons or to treat other problems. During a recent assault on my medicine cabinet, when I inspected the notices of things that have been in it sometimes for years, untouched, each had the same warning on them: memory troubles.
I threw them away and that is where I was able to start thinking about healing, not just recovery. To recover is to get better, like healing, but can mean no more than a return to the physical or mental shape you were in before something got broken. But to heal can be to move on past that mending process to become someone more resilient and strong, less susceptible to life's blows.
My life story includes memories of a series of blows, like everybody else's. That Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders helped take the lid off when she sings so personally about the blows people give and take when love relationships go off the rails is hardly surprising, but the extent to which I'd falsified the reality of how the divorce happened in 1993 and made a monstrous "thief" out of my former wife has astonished me.
I was a fortunate father in our daughter's first four years, with a job that enabled me to play a much bigger part in her upbringing than is the lot of most. I knew what alcohol was doing to me; the marriage seemed unsalvageable and I rationalised myself into accepting it, but I'd done my best to steer clear of the booze when Marianne was up and about before it twisted me. The rupture with the Kid was more than I could face since my sense of failure was complete.
In reality, there was no failure. We went on to develop a strong bond of love like the one that exists between me and my father, who is one of the wisest people I know. If that was strained, as it has been, this occurred relatively recently. I've had amends to make to Marianne for the lesser role I gave her in my life once she was old enough to become independent-minded and build new love relationships of her own. That's no moment to turn off any flow of contact and affection in a child's life, but I did, and as soon as I knew it, I did something about it and still am.
Failures, real or otherwise, are big dents in self-esteem and everyone knows the best way to overcome the damage they do is to try again and succeed. However, doing this can make you feel pretty anxious. I've taken my morning hours to pieces while looking back. What made the least sense to me was the anxiety I feel, for real, hence the Valium, when there is often no reason for it. You can't feel anxious about nothing.
Money, yes. Until a few people, including Catherine, banged a bit sense into my head so hard that it seems to have stuck, I've behaved crazily with money and written about it as well. I can't claim like Kay Jamison did to have wanted 20 "sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony." She's got quite an imagination, both in her brave account of what she thought she was doing during the spending sprees that characterise manic behaviour, and in the wonderful way she brings it to bear in her understanding of the disease in creative people. I don't have so much to show for my irrational spending, but consolidating the debt led to a lot of anxiety.
So do some meetings. So does the imminent prospect of getting rid of a wisdom tooth. But all of them are quite manageable. I've never been a coward, tending rather towards foolhardiness and recklessness, including with women.
No, you can't feel anxious about nothing. But what you can feel is a generalised anxiety that I'd liken, on account of the tangible way I do, to a fish in the depths of my belly swimming around and sometimes wriggling so much that it upsets me. It waits for bait in the shape of some kind of worry and once it leaps on to the hook, I've turned Valium into the club that stuns it.
I didn't find my theory. Anthony Storr did in his work I have been slowly reading about 'Solitude: A Return to the Self'. In this 1988 book, Storr introduces the work of Heinz Kohut, whom he describes as "one of the most original psycho-analysts of recent years" before outlining a number of the man's ideas. Then he states:
"Kohut believes that the deepest anxiety which a person can experience is what he calls 'disintegration anxiety'. The individuals whom he considers liable to this are those who, because of the immaturity of their parents' responses to them in childhood, or because of the absence of empathic parental understanding, have not built up a strong, coherent personality."
That passage leapt off the page at me.
I'd never heard of "disintegration anxiety" before. I turned the words around in my mind for several days, thinking about them, extremely cautious of them, and feeling them. I spent ages, cautiously, just trying them on for size. I wanted to talk about them and what I'd written with my therapist. We decided they fit.
This is to say, I had decided they fit and when I talked about why and how, the man responded in like manner, but he expressed regret when I began going on about wanting a "strategy" again.
I thought I wanted a strategy, but I'm sick of devising them, and when he told me it wasn't a good idea, I felt a wash of relief and said I was glad, because the prospect made me want to shit. It's a vulgar French expression that made him laugh.
Storr cites two reasons given by the late Kohut (Wikipedia), who died in 1981, for the development of disintegration anxiety. I'm not sure that, in reality, my parents showed any great immaturity in bringing me up. I was a first child, they tend to get a lot of love as well as being a bit experimental. The understanding may well have been there too.
But I wasn't very responsive and frequently, especially the older I got, preferred to be out of it, in homes that weren't my own. And I know for sure that I buried any true feelings for most people to respond to a long time ago and have lived a great deal of my life behind facades of different kinds.
Countless times, I was told of my inability to let go of things. I know this to be true enough, less so than it used to be, but it's still one of my faults. Having to let go properly is a desire that was foisted on me this summer, at first as a great hindrance, and then very slowly as a pleasure, by my breakdown, once I understood that I'd had one.
This has left me no option but to operate one day at a time. For days that became weeks, planning was out of the question. I've written of vile weeks, but said nothing of a perfect day. I've had some. One of them began with the realisation that one kindness leads to another and the wish to do one, but not to the same person, got me past a morning failure of courage and out further into Paris than I'd been for a long time.
I took advantage of the excursion to drop some paperwork into AFP, acknowledged my body's request for plenty of exercise and set about walking home, which is a long way but far less smelly and hot than the Métro was that afternoon. When I got to the rue Bonaparte I found that it was open day at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, went inside and spent a good while there letting myself be opened by the works of art on display.
I discovered that it's possible altogether to avoid two long main boulevards I don't like, because of the heavy traffic and what I find dull, heavy architecture, if you follow a nose with a decent sense of direction like mine and take smaller streets where you end up park-hopping. In the Jardins de Luxembourg, which are lovely at this time of year, I saw and heard a uniformed police officer out on patrol with his partner who was singing. He had a fine baritone voice. You don't hear policemen singing on duty every day, but this was a beautiful one for it and he obviously felt the same way.
I do believe I am nearly done. Sometimes I feel that each morning, I'm using drugs in a ritual to get rid of the anxiety and somehow get those core values turned on so I can use them. I've told the therapist that I'd much rather dispense with the drugs and the ritual and become the kind of person who could star in a cereal advertisement.
That's the plan.
But I don't have a strategy. The therapist tells me I'm doing fine and I don't want to write any more about the distinction between recovery and healing, now I've drawn one in this column, because I know that the latter is happening in ways I don't understand and frequently while I'm asleep. I know a bit about what dreams do, in initially helping us file away our memories and then playing a role in sorting us out. I've had a lot of those that have taken me back as far as my writing. Occasionally, I find I can ask to dream about something and I do.
If I were to say any more though, it would be about matters of faith and the soul and about music. There's room for all those on the front pages. I'm about done with the psychology and the psychiatry books, which I've found helpful. But tomorrow I want to come out again and return sometimes to the front pages. I want to be able to tell you how I feel about music and people who make it again. I hope I can get the balance right because this has been all my story. I've lost none of my appetite for different ones as told by musicians whom I've set on one side for a while. I really have needed to be alone.
11:48:57 PM 
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