Stardust Memories

 Why don’t people like Woody Allen’s ‘Stardust Memories’?  "It’s a rip off of Fellini’s ‘81/2’, there’s too much going on".  Too much going on?  That’s what makes the film visually interesting there’s always something to look at, always direction and misdirection, it gives it a kinetic feel, it makes nothing look dynamic.  No doubt Allen understands how to give the cinematic to cinema and it shows.  It being too much like ‘81/2’ is fair criticism since he does virtually rob Fellini ver batem but being a fan of Fellini, ‘81/2’ is one of my favourite films, I’d like to defend Allen.  The reason why Allen can repeat Fellini is because he can imitate a great master while stamping his own style at the same time.  I allow Allen to indulge himself because if you don’t he stops being interesting.  He doesn’t rip Fellini because ‘81/2’ was such a success but because it really is one of his most admired films.  It’s a love letter to his art form and beautiful it is too.  And it’s funny while trying to get to grips with some big questions about the role of the comedian artist in a world of tragedy.  Write off ‘Stardust Memories’ at your own peril and if you are a fan of Fellini, don’t be scared, you’re in safe hands and it’s exactly what you want, to re-live ‘81/2’ while being offered something new.  It’s cinematic goldust.

My Experience With Psychosis

I have suffered from various episodes of psychosis/ bi-polar disorder and now when there is an awareness and acceptance of the illness it seems to be the right time to write what I have experienced.  What I have missed is the chance to talk to other people my own age who have experienced problems with their mental health and so in this way I can communicate to others who may want to compare notes.  I hope that this is helpful to you.

Problems with my mental health began with my GCSE exams and the last year of Secondary School.  I remember working hard to get good grades and trying to do the best I can but the stress was getting to me and I was feeling very numb and disconnected.  I was studying for a least nine exams, one I had to drop because it was too much for me, and it was tough.  

I wanted to do my best and I was very able but towards the end I couldn’t care about my results, I just wanted it to be over.  Although I liked learning I didn’t always liked being in school having to wear a uniform and not being treated like an adult.  It was tough but I got through with it getting mainly C grades for my efforts.  I was disappointed with the results as I felt that I worked hard for what seemed to be a mediocre grade. 

I went to college studying English Literature, Media Studies and Psychology.  I didn’t have any problems until the last year, when exams loomed.  I did have some criticisms of psychology as a field of study at the time as it seemed to me that all of the humanity was taken out of a person who became only sums to work out and for me that was not the reason why I took the course.  It didn’t help that the person teaching the course seemed to only care about us memorizing the facts.  Not a bad motive but a questionable one to me.  

We learnt about memory, conformity, sleep and Freud and while it was very interesting something was nagging at me saying that there was not the wisdom I looked for here.  I didn’t like most of my classmates who seemed to want to learn something profound but were not profound people.  They seemed to me, as I would uncharitably think of them as useful idiots.  

Though I made friends I also felt very alone as being a teenager will often feel.  My friends and me would sit in the cafeteria at lunchtime not saying a word.  Somehow I felt that they were going through the same things as me but due to some unquestionable rule we could not speak about it.  

As the exams came I began to feel disconnected and numb like I had felt in Secondary School.  I had skipped some classes but saw my English teacher about why I did this and told her the difficulties I was having.  She advised me to go and see the College counselor next week. 

  

It was a difficult time and I remember having read Albert Camus’ ‘The Outsider’ and feeling how he had exactly described my numbness, my disconnectedness, and I gathered that I must be some kind of existentialist believe that life is essential absurd.  Seeing the counselor did not make me feel better.  Straight off he told me that he used to write novels and considering that that was what I had wanted to do I thought that he was wasting his time with me and he should be writing.  

He seemed to be a macho type going to the gym so he can stop thinking about his problems and told me that I should do the same.  He personified everything I believed was wrong about psychology, about how it conpartmentalised human beings who could just stop thinking about the bad stuff and start thinking about the good.  

This was cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and I had learnt about it in class.  I couldn’t get on with him and lied to him about how many friends I had so I didn’t have to tell him the painful truth, which was not a good step.  A week or two later my mind had stopped trying to work and in one sleepless night gave me one single action to carry out.  I went downstairs to the kitchen, took a knife and walked into the shower while I began to attempt to slit my wrists.  I thought Sylvia Plath had it right.  I cut the surface but did not dare to go too deep and after a while I gave up and went to bed hoping that it would all end soon.  

My mum, knowing that I was going through a rough patch, tried to help me, in the morning, by bringing me a cup of tea.  I showed her my wrists and told her that I tried to kill myself.  She got my dad.  He looked at my hands and began to cry.  Suddenly I felt scared and knowing that what I tried to do was serious willingly went to hospital.  

While waiting for a doctor to see me my dad got into conversation with a woman who inquired about me.  When she found out she said how could such a lovely boy try to kill himself?  I wanted to know what made her so sure I was lovely?  Who was she to make that judgment?  The doctor saw me and asked me if I thought about my family.  I said I didn’t.  I wasn’t thinking about anything.  My mind was blank.  Later that day I saw someone from the mental health profession and she concluded that I was severely depressed.  The college was told and I didn’t go back. 

  

I missed my exams but I still got a grade based on the work I had already done and the grades that I was expecting to get.  I was still only achieving Cs.  I think at that time I was proscribed anti-depressants but the break from work didn’t make things easier.  That summer things got drastically worse.  The timeline is a bit confused but this is how I remember it.  For a bit things were getting better.  I was writing a screenplay and I had, somehow, a girlfriend.  I was happy.  But quickly my girlfriend had broken up with me over a text and had not given me a reason.  

Being dumped would not have been so bad if only I had a reason.  It was only another confirmation that the world was indeed absurd and life was meaningless.  I started to steal books, to believe I could morally do anything like a Nietzschean superman, or at least so said my rather basic idea of that German philosophy.  I went out to the nightclubs more regularly and one night I had one bad experience too many I have found myself chucked out of a nightclub.  I was full of rage and took it out on the streets and houses around me.  I wanted a fight but no one approached me.  After a while I went back home to sleep all the while plotting.

  

The next day as my parents and sister went to church I enacted my plan and hid the car keys and left a cryptic message referencing the German TV series ‘Heimat’ and left for Bristol.  I got on a train without buying a ticket and got into an argument with the ticket officer.  At Bristol I got off and jumped a fence to avoid the ticket machines and started to look for accommodation and a job.  I didn’t have anything, any ID or money so my plan was limited but it didn’t stop me.  

When my parents realised that I had no intention of returning they rang the police and looked for me while I ran away from them.  Eventually they caught up with me but I managed to get away from them.  Later I went into a church while a service was going on and had a change of heart.  I rang them and they took me to a hospital.  

There I was agitated and I was determined not go back home.  I had a conversation with my mum and she said something, which irritated me so I stormed off.  I took myself off to a part of the hospital that was not in use for patients and waited.  The hospital staff came for me and began to escort me back to the waiting room.  As we passed the toilet door I rushed inside and picked up a fire extinguisher I had stored earlier and let rip with water against the staff.  I ran out of water and by that time some of the staff took out a thick blanket and wrapped it around me.  I was hostile and very angry. 

  

The police took me into custody and at this point I had become almost hysterical.  In the cell I did everything I could to irritate the guard outside.  I called him by his number, I flushed the toilet regally, I did Marx Brothers routines, I tore up the polystyrene cup and wedged it in the holes of the grill so that the officers couldn’t open it up and pushed my mattress through the door as it was opened in the morning.  I was an angry young man.

  

I was reviewed in the morning and it was decided that I should be taken to the high dependency unit in the psychiatric ward.  When I got there I was disgusted by how they let me have a box full of tissues that I could get up to resourceful mischief with and having sabotaged my new room in various ways the hospital staff took me out so they could clean it and incredibly left me unsupervised.  

It was my plan to keep them busy but I would have never had thought that the door to the outside would be unlocked so when I tried the handle I took my chance and escaped.  I ran out barefoot and all I wanted to do was to destroy.  I don’t remember much about it but I remember being on the other side of town and beginning to smash up a car with a brick.  This caused a bit of noise and someone came out to stop me.  I gave chase and eventually let them catch me.  They called the police and I was taken into custody for the second time where I continued my antics as usual.

  

The next day I was taken back to the high dependency unit and treated with medication.  It was bleak, with there being not much difference between it and the cell I was in.  I could go between one or two rounds and there was an outside but with a tall-splinted fence I couldn’t climb over and I could watch TV.  

I remember being hungry and waiting for dinnertime hating how it was set for me.  I watched ‘Moby-Dick’ with Gregory Peck as Ahab and read ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ by Tennessee Williams.  At that time I did not know what was going on and did not want to face it.  After a while I was moved onto the main ward, which meant I had a little more freedom and could interact with more of the other patients.  I remember little from this period.  

I was given home leave and eventually I was discharged.  I was there for three months.  I do remember of an analogy being used, the one about the frog in a pot of water slowing boiling to death.

  

I got a job in the returns department of a furniture company, which meant factory work.  The factory was one of the most depressing places I have ever been to.  Windowless rooms with nothing but boxes upon boxes of broken items all had to be processed.  

I remember at this time that my mind was not up to full speed and being afraid of losing my intellect I made a conscious decision to try to make conversation with the other workers.  I remember trying hard to summaries the plot of the TV show ‘Heroes’ with great difficulty.  I hated it and I didn’t want to make conversation because it was very difficult to concentrate.  

I had a lot of problems due to anxiety and it was this that made me begin to strangle myself.  I strangled myself often and my mum who then called the mental health team to come and see me noticed it.  They asked me if I thought I should go back to hospital and unable to really think for myself I numbly replied: yes.

  

I went back to hospital for another two months.  There I had to share a room with another very ill man who told me late at night that I should kill myself where I tried suicide again this time by hanging.  Soon I was discharged again with the hope of going to University later on that year.

  

I went to University having taken a variety of drugs that I no longer remember what they were to help me get on.  At Uni I was enjoying myself.  I stopped taking the drugs and everything was ok.  At that time I had won a one-act playwriting competition and so came back home to receive the prize.  I was physically sick the morning of having to go back to Uni and though I was ill my parents still thought it was a good idea to drive me back, and so did I.  

When I got back my thoughts, the ones that I had numbed into silence, came rising back up and I panicked thinking that the drugs had done terrible things to me and I had to re-think all of my ideas about life.  I couldn’t get out of bed.  I spent a week in bed listening to Radio 4 not going to lectures or seminars and thinking sooner or later they will come and get me.  I couldn’t stand it and I went out for what I thought was a short walk but turned out to be much longer.  

Before I really knew what I was doing I found myself walking to the nearest town, which was about forty miles away, and I couldn’t stop.  All I knew was that I had to keep walking.  I remember the utter numb feeling I felt when attaining a lecture about how good English Literature was and feeling that I couldn’t feel any happiness about the subject at all and this worried me.  

I hitchhiked and made my way to the town where I stayed for a while sleeping in bins and derelict houses, stealing food and blankets.  Eventually I was caught stealing a sandwich and was taken to custody.  The police officer told me that I should go home and I thought ‘who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?’  In the cell I did nothing to irritate the guards.  I was too tired for that.  I had barely eaten or slept and was a shell of myself.  The police then realised that I had been missing for eight days and gave me back to my parents when they came for me.

  

At home I retreated into myself.  I didn’t get out of bed for whole days and did nothing but slept and read.  I still felt profoundly numb.  I read ‘Oracle Night’ by Paul Auster, ‘The Liar’ by Stephen Fry and ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ by Umberto Eco all books about how reality is turned upside down or how people run away from situations, which both appealed to me.  I didn’t take any medication as I thought it did more harm than good.  

The years slipped by.  I got a part-time job at a newsagent that I ended up hating and did very little.  I was trying to build myself back up without trying to deal with what had made me ill in the first place.  I had times when I was very low and when I was very anxious both difficult to deal with.  I started to feel better and went on a short trip around Europe.  

I had a bad experience while I was in the Czech Republic but it didn’t affect me too much and I returned home feeling healthier.  It was then I thought I could go back to University as I thought I should and so I returned to where I had ran away from.

  

The first year of Uni was great.  I made good friends with my housemates, was getting on with my course that I was enjoying and had a good time joining an amateur dramatics society that wrote and performed their own plays.  

For the first time in a long while I was having a good year.  I passed my exams and was enjoying the summer starting with Prague, this time as a journalist for the student magazine would got the chance to interview the late writer Iain Banks while meeting other writers such as John Wray, Gao Xiangin and Peter Mathissen.  It was one of the happiest times of my life.  The rest of the summer went well and soon I was back at Uni for the second year.

  

By this time my housemates and me had got a house to share, which was in excellent condition apart from the deep coldness it suffered from due to lack of heating which no amount of money could improve.  It was around January time that things begun to take a turn for the worse.  

I hated exams but had to sit them yet again.  One thing that should be noted here, I had recently been in a special lecture where one of my lecturers who I liked a lot told us that he would be resigning due to the conditions of the education system and the pressures it put on the lecturers.  It opened my eyes and I became more aware of how the University was operated and it confirmed my criticisms of education at that time.  

When the exams came I was in a deeply low mood.  Over the winter I had written a one-act play for the amateur dramatic that was an allegory for the anger I felt at the expenses scandal that had occurred in government earlier that year combined with my own fatalistic sense of life.  I hadn’t revised and had gotten into arguments with my mum.  I read the preface of Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook’ and felt that exams were worthless.  In the exam I made up my own questions in a tone of desperation.  I was angry with the University and made a document that took paragraphs from books by the lecturers at the Uni, paragraphs that I had thought as damning.  

I began signing my made up nickname on bank notes and in books by my lecturers as a form of obscure protest.  My Iain Banks article had not been published due to lack of funds for the student magazine and though I had been made Arts Editor of it I felt it was slipping away from me.  I felt that my message had to be communicated to my friends.  I was also beginning to have paranoid thoughts.  In my course I had encounter the columnist George Monbiot who had impressed me so much that when he was doing his ‘Left Hook’ tour where my grandparents lived I felt that I had to go and document it.  There was an amazing experience like I had felt when I went to Prague as I felt like a proper journalist but he also gave me some exciting ideas.  

His main argument was taken from Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ where she says that in order to pass unpopular policies in government you need to wait for a disaster so that the people become too shocked to be able to say no to any recommendations you may give them to ease the pain.  Monbiot said that the lastest shock was the financial cuts allowing right-wing governments to implement their cures.  Like the lecture my teacher gave this opened my eyes and made me look at the world in a different way.

  

Back at Uni I applied this theory of the shock doctrine to everything.  Everything that was happening, from the cuts to the building of property was because of the shock doctrine and it had to stop.  This was the time when I made a controversial speech at the English and Creative Writing society that gave offense but I was defiant and unapologetic.  

This was also the time that the Occupation had started in the University campus protesting the cuts and I had joined to help.  One Friday evening it was raining hard and I was talking to my dad who told me that he thought I was mentally unwell.  I rejected this.  I looked at the weather and thought that a storm was going to come and wash the whole town away, the only safe place being on the hill where the Occupation was.  I took my prize possessions, my books, in two suitcases and carried them up the hill.  At the Occupation I was frantic and exchanged ideas with like minded people who knew a bit more about politics.

  

Over the next week or two I slept and eat at the Occupation and I was becoming more and more paranoid, dogmatic and delusional.  I was fighting a cause that I believed in but it was not the same cause that my new friends were fighting.  They were fighting the cuts forced on them by the government.  

I was fighting the entire education system that fucked me over, made me ill and stopped me from achieving straight As.  As far as I was concerned I was a philosophic genius who had always been held back by the institutions that were supposed to be there to help me.  One of the Occupation members showed a Ken Robinson video about industrial education that made me want to shout YES in recognition of what he was talking about.  

His argument was that the education system we have was inherited from the Victorians who had an industrial society and did everything in a factory process.  This education was simply not working anymore as more and more students see the long work to achieve a qualification that may not even get them a job and wonder what is the point?  Education needs to change to the demands of today’s world.  One thought he has is why do we put everyone of the same age into the same class?  Why don’t we put pupils of similar intellectual levels who may be different ages together instead?  Education needs to change and I couldn’t agree more.  And once more education needs to be free. 

  

Though I was managing my new lifestyle my housemates were worried about me and came to see me at the Occupation from time to time trying to work out what was wrong with me.  I argued with them convinced of how right I was, how it was wrong to rip out Clause 4 of the Labour Party, how it was wrong I didn’t know anything about John Smith and it was wrong for the education system to make me ill and stupid.  

I was angry and there was nothing they could do about it.  My parents came up to visit me and at the top of a hill where we went to take a walk I got into an argument with them and danced all the way back down the hill.  They left without me saying goodbye to them.  After all I was, to use part of John Fowles phrase, a God spy playing a God game.  I was posting lots of videos up on Facebook, videos that I felt meant a lot about what I was trying to do, a rallying cry of sorts.  

Then it was around this time I became seriously deranged.  I went into one of my lecturer’s office barefoot with an umbrella and tried to explain what I thought was wrong with the University.  The library is under funded and falling apart, I said as part of purposeful government under funding to slowly get rid of it.  Then when my explanations were not working a started to pick out a number of authors from her well stocked bookcases, piled them in fives and asked her what the connection between all of them are.  

To my mind I was classing different writers as part of the political Right and part of the political Left, trying to show, I think, how many books are from Right-wing writers rather than left.  One Left-wing writer we actually studied was Doris Lessing, and we studied her book ‘The Good Terrorist’.  In that book there is a group of so called Marxists who all want to be freedom fighters but end up through their own recklessness in a tragedy involving a bomb.  

I thought that the terrorists in that group were not so unlike the group at the Occupation who were challenging the status quo, but my thinking was that the University had picked this book to show us that challenging the status quo only leads to bad ends and I thought that this book out of all the books Lessing had written was the most unreflective of her work and yet we now think that that was a typical Lessing book who dissuaded against political action.  It was a ploy and my lecturer was just a useful idiot who couldn’t see it. 

  

I thought about evolution and what the next possible step for mankind might be.  I was struck with the thought that I was being communicated by an alien life that was showing me the previous steps of evolution and I was acting them out.  I had a spot on my forehead that I thought was growing into an eye, all part of the next step to evolution.  

I had the idea of making flexible buildings out of steel balls and rope and then extended this idea to space travel where I believed that the most important number was 13.  The number 13 was important to me because it was the superstitious number that had appeared to me first on the house number I lived in when I first moved in to Uni, second as the house number of the second house I moved in during the second year and third as the number that I was given when I went to a rehearsal for Eugene Inocesco’s absurd play ‘The Rhinoceros’ and that convinced me that it was an important number and that I was an important person.  

Statistically it was of phenomenal chance that the number 13 should appear three times in my life at Uni and I mathematically justified it so: let’s say on campus in the village I was living in during the first year there are five hundred student houses.  I got one house out of five hundred so that is a probability of one in five hundred.  

Next I moved down into town where there are a thousand houses.  Out of those thousand houses I got one that has the exact number as the first house.  So that is one in a thousand probability in town alone but it’s much more when combined with the one in five hundred.  Next there are thirty auditionees for the play and I got the same number as my first to houses.  The chances of that happening are extraordinary and so I naturally took this as a clear sign that I was on to something. 

  

I got worse and when I was talking to a new friend I had got close to about my wonderful theories I had something of a fit that I believed was all part of the plan for the next step of evolution.  My friend became concerned and took me to the student union where he hoped a counselor would be there but there was not.  

Leaving me on my own he got a one of the lecturers at the Occupation to come and talk to me and at this point I was fully delusional.  It’s surprising to me now how I can remember so much of it considering how completely raving I was but then again I did feel that my mental capabilities where in full power and I didn’t have anything to drink for almost too weeks except lots and lots of coffee.  I didn’t sleep much during my time at the Occupation and I was so engaged with big ideas I was excited for much of the time.  

I named the alien creature that I thought was living inside of me Horton and began acting as if I didn’t know anything about planet earth or human beings just like as if I really was an alien.  It’s difficult to explain if you’ve not had this experience but at some level you do know that you are not really an alien, that it’s just an act, but it’s more like an actor who has become so convincing of his performance that he starts to think he really is the character he is playing.  

I believed I had no control over what I was saying and doing because I had allowed myself to do everything I had wanted.  It’s like what I had learned about Freud’s theory of the mind in my psychology classes where the Id, the part of your brain that is impulsive and wants to be gratified, is out of control and the Super Ego, the part of the brain that controls the Id, does nothing.

  

Soon the police came to take me to the hospital where the staff tried to get me to take some medication, but I would not co-operate and was quite rude.  I was taken to the police station because the hospital couldn’t have me if I wasn’t taking the medication and I was frightened.  

At first I was happy to go to a cell but I was told that I would have to wear handcuffs and I refused as I did not want to be treated like a criminal, but they put them on me anyway and I kicked off and had to be dragged to the station.  

I remember being very hostile, mainly verbally and I tried to undermine the officer’s intelligence by showing them my penetrating quick thinking.  I was taken to a cell where one of the new offices was slightly crying because of my behaviour and I refused to change into the padded shirt because I feared what the officers might do to me when I took my clothes off but the crying officer said I could change with a locked door and so that is what I did.

  

That night was one of the worst nights of my life where I broke down completely.  At times I thought I was changing size, growing bigger and smaller, and I believed that something had gone wrong with reality, there was a crack but it didn’t matter because this reality was only one version and the experiment had gone wrong.  

I felt like Doctor Who when he oversteps his boundaries and then the Time Lords have to intervene and take him out of the situation, the Time Lords were coming for me.  Though these Time Lords were angles and I was one of them but was caught in the middle of a crack.  They told me that I was going to fly but I needed to get on my mattress put my blanket over me and wait and that God was going to shrink me down and let me become an proper angel who can fly over all the lands, I could go anywhere I want but I would not see my family again, things had gone too far but because of my torment I would be allowed to have any pleasure I wanted as He was sorry such bad things had happened to me.  There I waited and while waiting I fell asleep.

  

The next morning I woke up and did not know where I was, but again it was that deep playacting, I did know where I was but I refused to listen believing that it was better to fake amnesia than to admit to all the shameful behviour I had done.  

I was served food, though I couldn’t eat it and I wondered about my situation.  A great revolution was about to come, I thought, I am being prepared for the next step of human evolution where ancient and mythic creatures would be brought back to life.  

The cell would collapse and I would be turned into a centaur for this new world.  In the cell I started seeing micro biotic creatures on the walls and floor and I developed a mythology.  

The micro creatures were of different tribes and some loved me and some hated me, they grew and I had to encourage the ones who loved me and avoid the ones who hated me for the ones who hated me wanted to hurt me.  I was becoming more and more agitated but soon the door was opened and I was taken to a hospital where I continued the delusion of the micro creatures and cried very hard until exhausted.  

Later I was better but still deluded and believed that there were messages for me in the ward.  My parents came to see me and I said how it would be nice if we could all go out for a meal but they said that that was unlikely.

  

The next day I was taken home back to the psychiatric ward where I went when I first started having problems.  Things had changed on the ward.  They were only using the high dependency unit for certain cases and were about to change it all into offices.  The rooms were single and did not involve sharing with a stranger.  I became more paranoid believing that I was being watched as I was a political activist not someone who was mentally unwell.  I was abusive to the staff and trusted them very grudgingly and only one at a time.  From there on things did begin to get better.

  

Initially it was difficult because I was very angry and was somehow given leave but then after an incident with my sister was sectioned under the Mental Health Act because of my aggressive behaviour.  My paranoia wasn’t helped by one of the patients who told me he was a Freemason and tried to get me to go to a Mormon church.  

He was eventually taken away to somewhere else.  Another patient who told me that I was a Reality Engineer didn’t help my mental health.  He was friendly at first to me but then turned abusive as he swore and cursed me every time he saw me.  There were helpful patients too who I got to know and came to like.  

It took time and I had days where I thought I was turning into a cat because the hospital was a school for wizards and witches and days when I thought that I was a wizard and had to defeat the other shamans and warlocks on the ward.  Things did get better.  I was in the psychiatric ward for fourth months.

  

Two or three months later I was back at Uni and although I didn’t think I was going to get through with it at first I finally managed to graduate with a disappointing 2:2.  Throughout that time at Uni I was on medication, Lithium and Risperidone and then later anti-depressants, and I saw a mental health officer once a week as part of the Early Intervention Team.   

It’s been a few months after leaving Uni and I’m still on the medication, though hoping to come off it at some point, and I see someone from the Early Intervention Team once every three weeks.  I was extremely low when I went on holiday with my parents and my sister to France, particularly when I was sat in front of this large tapestry of apocalypse that mocked my existence and I felt like jumping over the castle wall, and I had to spend half a week in hospital when I handed in my dissertation and I missed my January exams because I couldn’t get out of bed but mostly I am doing ok.

  

This has been years of experienced, analysed and sifted through, talked about endlessly and discussed, so how do I feel about it now?  To the question ‘if I had a button to take away my illness would I press it?’ then yes absolutely.  I know some people say that their illness is part of their identification but it is not for me and I do not want it to be.  

I believe that I can be creative, funny and insightful without having to feel the lows and without the delusions.  I believe that it is having a creative mind that helps to assist delusions and not the other way around.  It is the sometimes the curse of a restless mind and I believe that my intelligence does not at times help me.  It is painful and very scary.  

Being a teenager is hard enough without having to have a mental illness as well.  The difference between a physical illness and a mental illness is that it is harder with a mental illness to be able to tell the difference between your personality and your illness. 

  

Do I think that the education system caused me to be ill?  That’s a hard one because the exams have caused me a great amount of stress, which must have effected me deeply.  I wouldn’t say it was the overall cause but I would say that it has not helped me.  I wish that we didn’t have to rely on exams for producing good citizens, I wish there is an alternative.  

I would like a type of education system that better prepared children and teenagers to enter into a world of ambiguities where people’s opinions are divided and not clear cut and mostly an education system that tried to answer some of life’s big questions.  

I wish there was more trust between people and more friendliness rather than the insistence of having a good economy.  I wish we could learn to be better friends with a friendship that means something.  I would like to work on these theories and try to turn it into an actuality so that my own children won’t have to go through what I had to go through.

  

Do I think that politics caused me to be ill?  I don’t think it was the cause but it certainly was the catalyst for my illness.  Politics is difficult because it brings up so much heated emotion.  Rationality is the important factor in governing politics I believe.  

As for the Shock Doctrine I’ve recently been reading a copy of it and I think that there is a lot I think it gets right, though that does not necessarily make it true it is at least worthy of further study.  I think that our obsession with privatizing, creating a corporate world that ignores the environment and the orthodoxy of austerity ought to be challenged by the critical minds that Universities are supposed to foster.  But we should be aware of when we are becoming unreasonable in our stances, dogmatic in our views, when we become unwell while campaigning.

  

I once was with a conselor who said, in our last meeting, that there will be injustice in the world that will make us angry.  Learning how to deal with that injustice is part of growing up as much as it is learning how to stay well. 

  

What I want to do is to help others who have suffered from a similar experience while trying to traverse the complexities that is life.  Right or Left, Existentialist or Christian the choice is yours well or unwell.  What I would like is to talk to other people my age who have been through a similar experience, and if you are the same then hopefully this has been of some use to you.  This is my version of my experience with psychosis.

               

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The Poet, A Sermon

ACT I

Scene 1

The poet gives a sermon.

THE POET:

I would like to give in ordance to give.  Be it here or elsewhere from beyond the seas into the presence of the stars.  The ertswhile galaxies would know our kind.  Would they be hateful of what we have or will they love our difference.  We be still in a constant flow of death.  And still we hold our hands in a beautiful respiration.  This breathing is wonderful.  We hold it in full bark of our life.  Dogs know where to go for their tails.  We know our lungs very well.  The sundance of plants continues leagues through the way.  I have my doubt and if I am to denie it I would be a smaller man than I had had in view of myself.  God will be our advice.  We are no more likely to breathe ourselves in than to cough ourselves out.  Man died to give a history that is granted to our needs.  We are completely in control while we speed away from the accident.  We are slowly dropping away.  We do not need to hold ourselves braxy in the corner.  We are deeply felt and collar our desires from the baying silences.  We need no encore for our welts.  Who am I being trapped upon a stage.  An actor acting for his life.  We all know we've down badly and we are here to turn things around and we will.  Just not in the ways we expect.  For you have come here to be lifted up and made brighter from the inside out.  You have come here to find yourselves anew.  You have come here to go back out again.  Round in circles and forests green you are here to be seen.  Square fictions make a basic fact that build on blocks for the time fitted out.  But we will not go unchallenged.  We have our positive light put into action.  We will speak monepic and have monoblepsia in our sight.  We will burst into our emotion our strength of chattering colours.  We have many more and others waiting to fill the stance of realism.  We will fill a prism to cursp the last in line.  All will be fine.  This gives us time to stand stately and in long walks by the beaches.  You have been given sermons by preachers, well let a lyricist perform instead.  We will not be hold by any bound we will confound an unbeileveing nation watching television by one station.  All I'm doing is caring for impart persuation.  All that you have known and gathered in your head it will contain a brief slumber, a quiet restraint.  The pale blue clouds of forever form in fluffs of frightened gulfs.  We will be touched by nothing.  We will rise and sing in a withy flurry of scotched fustrations and ascending nonsense.  We will be the bees of a honeycrest, the salamanders of remaining trusts.  We will be royally blue and given to bias.  Let the flames flicker over our highest skies, let the dark quickens through these shadows and the greatness of our gift shall shine splendor over this cast of cowards who were suddenly brave.  We'll take this to our grave.  This is a moment of pure lightning, the sizzle of an upcast song.  Purity is a thing worth holding on to even if it is despoiled.  It is worth mentioning that everyone is a memeber of our lives.  Takening our squealing donkeys to a new worlds of hope that have arisen from the stagnet pools of our lives.  This is remembering all of life, straight from each final flight.  This all means something to each one of you.  I'm not frightened, no, not even a little bit, for the facts of life to find me out.      

Our Laputa

 We had done it and it was amazing.  We were the private owners of a floating island.  The island was all made from natural materials and we used big industrial sized balloons to keep it afloat.  We had placed it in a part of the sky not used for air travel and in our lounge we looked down on the world.  It had been our dream, ever since we had talked about floating properties in that bar in Budapest, young and mad, we didn’t even think we would remain friends let alone achieve what we had dreamt.  Land was becoming scarce as we looked to own our own place and the alternatives were lacking.  What was needed, I said, was houses in the sky or on the ocean, my friend agreed and we talked of ways of building and keeping such a house afloat.  We had various schemes but we weren’t serious about it.  It was only later when I thought about ways of earning money and it was only the desperation that made such a mad idea seem possible.   

  It was long hard work but we should see our rewards soon enough when, after the experiment had gone to plan, we then start putting the air-houses on the market.  So far everything was going OK and the fact of being up so air with such stability made me giddy.  We took another look down below and then up to the edge of the atmosphere or so we imagined.  In some ways it would be nice to keep this bit of sky all to ourselves and not share it with anyone, but we had hungry bellies and the air wasn’t going to feed us.  For all our Utopian ideas we still hadn’t found a way around money, but we tried to do without too much.   

  Our idea, we thought, could revolutionise transport and the nature of the relationship between us and the world.  People would travel up to the island, which would in time be connected to a vast network of stations floating around the atmosphere, where they could get from one country to another without flying, almost by walking.  There would be in my new world three levels: the earth level, the underwater level and the sky level and people would be moving about between the three, yes we will be living underwater too.  This way overpopulation would not be the same burden as it is today.  We would have a few more years to come.  Meanwhile we were keeping this secret.  Only a few people, the ones who made it, know but if this experiment becomes a success than soon everyone will know about it.  I liked the idea of becoming some sort of sky pirate, like in the children's books I used to read.  That must have been where I got the idea from.  We would have to improve predicting the weather and think about how exactly to deal with the wind but I see no reason why it could not work.  

   Country and nationality could become a meaningless thing to one born in the sky and I look forward to that day when I see the face of a beautiful sky baby born to sky tribes.  Concocting this island expresses my desire to be a father, but then does one really create a child or is it just the inspiration of the womb?        

In the Time of Smoke

 It was the last time we would all meet and debate.  It was something of an anti-climax.  My time a University had been a mixed affair being both pleasant and terrible.  I was glad it was ending.  We sat in a room in our pub that we always used to go in and was always only reserved for us.  It was a special privilege that the debating society used to enjoy.  I was glad it was ending but I would miss it.  The speakers were coming to a close complimenting to those who took part in the debating competitions and preparing the ground for next years committee.  All in all I think we were satisfied. I never really took part in the debating, was never really that good at it but I enjoyed the pretence at being intellectual though in reality I was no wiser than when I came. 

  I was aching to get home.  I finished my pint ages ago and I was ready for bed.  After three years I had become tired and was not looking forward to the next part.  It was all finishing and with it felt that so was my life.  Now on the drudgery, to full-time work and full-time boredom.  Really what was the purpose?  I had come with a coat but as the heat had come in the last month this piece of clothing was unnecessary.  That could have been a motion, is it better to be practical or to be fashionable?  I knew I would lose the argument for either side being neither.  There was applause and I joined in only vaguely listening but then something unusual happened.  We could stay if we wanted to, said the speaker, and since the owner’s daughter was a member of the society we were allowed, if we wanted to, to open a pack of cigarettes and smoke.  I didn’t smoke but I was excited by this prospect.  Smoking had become outlawed some years ago, at least indoors, so this private disobedience was something liberating.  

  Different brands of cigarettes were brought out, brands that I used to know but no longer recognised due to the covering and hiding of packets in newsagents.  Some had borrowed (cadged they call it) and others had given with that in-crowd familiarity and generosity that I had often noticed between comrade smokers.  Soon there was smoke in the air, wonderful floating bands of the stuff.  No one talked, we smoked and passive smoked in silence.  I was reminded of bonfires as a child looking into the fire and becoming suffused with smoke.  It was tribal, the need to smoke and I felt included in an ancient rite before law, before health and safety and political correctness, a time perhaps even before civilisation and I wondered what was the good of it when what we only needed was our natural instinct.  Ash fell from the tar and nicotine stem that was smoked by a woman I used to fancy.  More or less I had gone through all the woman in terms of fancying and more or less in turn I had given up without really trying.

  That was disappointing about Uni, the myth that you would meet someone, a partner, a like-mind, when actually you had spent most of your time on your own, going to lectures without talking to anyone, going to seminars with people you didn’t meet up after coffee, only speaking in the most rudimentary of terms to the people of the one society you did bother to join, but sometimes you might as well think that it would be easier to do without.  Still you did your best and there’s no need to feel bitter about it, though you do find it uncomfortable and it even hurts a bit.  You had one close friend who disagreed with everything you believed in and never stopped criticising but that was something.

  Here you felt strangely close to everyone as if all you ever were was a close knit family.  It was as illusive as the smoke you breathed in and easier to believe in when you were all breaking the law.  Why smoking was banned indoors was beyond me and I missed the smoke in the pubs.  It’s the lack of freedom that I hated and I thought that there really should be a better way for consenting adults to organise their differences but I had come to the conclusion that difference between people was fundamental to their relations.  I studied politics in the hope of uniting people for a more peaceful world but my ambitions are not so high anymore.  All I wish for now is a quiet desk job where I am allowed to keep my opinions no matter how unfavourable.

  When Margaret Thatcher, the subject of my disseration, died me and my friend argued over her funeral, me for, him against, and although it had costed a lot I don’t see the matter in terms of money.  For me it was really a sign that the old life was really coming to an end and that it was time for me to move on even though I’m not sure I’m ready for it.

  People coughed and began to stub their left overs of their cigarettes in the prelude of leaving.  I knew it was late and I knew I had to go home but I just wanted to stay for a little longer, just for a minute more, just let me be a student, don’t send me home.  I thought about asking someone for a fag, as they call them, but the time had passed.  I got my coat and walked out of the door.         

Razor's Glint

 The sun shone on the knive and it reflected onto the Ricardo’s eyes.  He knew what was coming and was quick to react.  While he stood to his feet I stepped forward and put the knive to his throat.

“Do you want to die like a rat?”  I said.  He didn’t, it was obvious that a more peaceful way he wanted.  He had done me a great wrong.  He had killed someone who was close to me and I wanted to make him pay.  “What do you know of knives?  Do you know how they feel when they cut into you?”  I could feel that he wanted to struggle but knew I wouldn’t hesistate to cut him if he did.  I wanted to give him a taste of terror, to let him know that he has done wrong and that he was a bad man.  It was a hot day and our skin, sticky and dry, touched with tension.  My shadow was cast against his pale skin and sweat ran from his forehead down to his vest.  I could kill him now but I wouldn’t, I would let him sweat some more.  I began to cut his neck knowing that he was waiting for an opportunity to break out and run away.  I wouldn’t let him.  He breathed with pain and slow wet blood covered the edge of the knive.  I kneed him in the gut and he doubled over.  I stood over him and began to cut the back of his neck lightly.  It would be slow work.  I made it so that it was slow.  The sun was high in the sky and was no cooler in the shade than under it.  Sand blow at our feet.  The breeze was teasing.  Blood ran to the ground.  It dripped down from Ricardo’s body.  An Eagle flew overhead. 

“You make it easy for me.  It’s as if you want to die.”  I could not imagine that he would be sorry for what he had done and I spared him no forgiveness.  This was a day to kill.  This was my day.  After the killing had been done I would go back home and grieve then after the grieving I would go back to work.  I had not forgotten the feeling of that day.  The memory lay within the senses of touch and sound.  I muffled his screams while I dug that knive into him.  At the end I was covered in blood but I did not mind.  It was simple revenge one life for another.  He had robbed me of my heart and I could not cry over him.  I could not care less for what the authorities would think about it.  They had failed in their duty but I promised that I would not in mine.  His body was covered in sand.  At night the heat remained only cooling off later on.  I drank a bottle of whiskey and laid into a deep sleep.  I had no dreams.

My Ideal Library

My ideal library would be a private one located in a warm country like Spain.  It would be built on the side of a mountain and would house an enormous amount of books.  There would be large windows overlooking the sea or a river and ladders on castors to reach the top of the bookcases.  There would be large tables and sturdy chairs for writing, as well as deep seated comfortable chairs for reading, and it would be well lit.  Drinking water would be at hand constantly and a kitchen would be nearby but food would not be allowed into the library itself.  The library would be sloped and there would be spiral staircases leading to the top sections and levels.  There would be cool shady areas and warm sunlit areas.  There would be a roof garden full of pungent flowers and a chaise-long under a umbrella overlooking the countryside.  There would be a bird house containing tropical birds of many varieties.
  It would be planned and designed by me while enlisting the help of expert builders and craftsmen to bring a polished beauty to house my collection of books. 
  I would spend my time arranging and re-arranging the books to my every whim.  I would periodically invite a writer to come and look at my books and to talk about their work they would be currently writing.
  This is a basic idea and I may well come back to it and elaborate in detail at a later date.  It is, for now, an imaginary place but hopefully one that will become less so over time.   

Broad-Ways

 

I am Broad in many Ways

It’s how I want to spend my days

It is more than a passing phase

Theatre is what I want to make

Writer, actor, any role I’ll take

Any mold I’ll break

Worker for four years

And maybe a fifth soon

To say it gives me pleasure

Understatement.  Over the moon

I’ve worked with presidents

Adam the founder, great actor, learnt a lot

The second put us in the bandstand in winter, fuck you Scott

Gemma worked as several women

And Sab who gave as much as he was given

Each facing current fears

Leaving will give me cause for tears

Cut me, find the society in my blood

Where the best ideas start in a pub

So hip-hip to the Broad-Ways

Let it continue for as many days

Father Figures

ACT I

Scene 1

ANT MILES and STEPH COLE are at a door.  ANT rings the doorbell.

steph:

I have to say this is good of you, you know how I rate him, Peter Offenbach, the great novelist of ideas.  I can't believe you've grown up to become one of his friends
ANT:

yes, there are many perks to being a novelist

STEPH:

successful one at that.  Do you think he would care about you if you were a failure?

ANT:

always the contraian, but you better drop that act, as genuine as it is, today.  I don't want anything to spoil my friendship with Peter

STEPH:

I know my place

ANT:

I'm sure you must have read Richard Park's article about the evil of America.  He really has a chip on his shoulder, but he's your friend, your mentor, what do you think?

STEPH:

he's always held a grudge against America ever since his study, 'Eastern Exercise', of the Middle East but, yes, he has outdone himself.  He's always been a complex person, that's why we get on

The door is answered by PETER OFFENBACH with a newspaper in his hand.

peter:

Ant, very nice to see you, I've just put some coffee on, come in, I believe I've not met your friend

ANT:

you would have heard about him, this is Stephen Cole

PETER:

ah, the polemiscist friend from Oxford, yes I have read a few of your articles.  You're making quite an impression

STEPH:

that's nothing to the impression you've made on me

They shake hands.

PETER:

well it seems on both ends it is a pleasure

They go into the living room.  ANT takes a seat like it's his childhood home.  STEPH takes a look at the bookcase.

PETER:

I'll just go and get it

Exit PETER

STEPH:

well, well, here I am, in Peter Offenbach's living room.  And his prize possessions, his books, look he has a copy of everyone of his books.  There's 'Goldsmith, Retired', 'The Luck' and 'Common Ancestary'.  It's amazing

ANT:

yes, one would like to meet any number of writers, Doestoiesky, Dickens, but to meet a living writer...

STEPH:

particularly one so great

ANT:

...particularly, it is an enormous good fortune of being born at the right time

Enter PETER with a tray full of coffee stuff

PETER:

here we are, what time is it?  Just after five, well, I think I'll find a drop of whiskey, would you care?

ANT:

you know what drinking goes on in our Friday lunches

PETER:

what with Hilton, the critic, and Kensington, the poet?

ANT:

and Steph, the polemicist

PETER goes to the sidedraw to get the whiskey and then puts a drop in each of the cups

PETER:

you too?

STEPH:

yes, been having these Friday lunches since our graduate days.  It's a regular fixture

ANT:

well it was until you left for America

STEPH:

yes

PETER:

how do you like it, may I call you Steph?

STEPH:

(touched)  yes, you may.  Washington I like better than London.  I was bored in London

ANT:

so naturally he's bored with life

STEPH:

that may have been true in Samuel Johnson's day but now in the International world there's always something better in someone else's back yard.  The writers are better too.

PETER:

(laughs) of course

ANT:

now come on, we have J.G. Ballad, Harold Pinter...

STEPH:

yes but America has Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, John Cheever

PETER:

let's not start a fight, but then if you are going to than literature is a perfectly good battleground.  I actually prefer Indian writers, Rabinath Tagore is one of my favourite poets, I take a lot of inspiration from him

STEPH:

yes, I've noticed.  In your 'Garden of Two Swords' there is a lyrical robustness that usually springs from hot countries

PETER:

yes poetry that can do battle

STEPH:

but in 'The Crying Stone' you take a different tack, still concerned with ideas but is fluid in execution

PETER:

yes, my Buddist phase

STEPH:

I can see that you are interested in meditation but, tell me, do you practise it yourself?

PETER:

I have tried, but it is usually unsatisfactory as you have to empty your mind, well I don't want my mind emptied, I want it to be filled with interesting thoughts

ANT:

yes, an empty mind for Peter is a tragedy

PETER:

I read 'Mrs Samson's Lot' recently by the way Ant and I liked it very much, it's very much grounded in the here and now

ANT:

thank you, I tried my best.  I might go into a different direction

STEPH:

he wants to be the next Agatha Cristie, except that you're rooting for the criminal to get away with it

PETER:

you do know how to do the perverse with exactitude

ANT:

it is my forte.  And you, you must be ready to publish a new by now

PETER:

yes, I've nearly finished it, I'm rather pleased, would you care to take a glance at it?

ANT:

why certainly

Exit PETER

STEPH:

you get to see the old master's work before it's published?

ANT:

why yes, Steph, yes I do.  We're good friends, Peter and I, he looks after me well

Enter PETER

PETER:

well here it is

Goes to give it to ANT but stops

PETER:

actually, Steph, would you like to have first look?

STEPH:

first look?  Me?

PETER:

yes, go on

PETER gives the manuscript to STEPH

STEPH:

(reading)  'The Wailing Tenament'

PETER:

yes, have you ever thought of writing a novel Steph?

STEPH:

what?  Me?  No, I'm an essayist, I don't have the musical instinct to allow me to write such sentences as these

PETER:

oh Ant, I was meant to show you an article I found most interesting, it's an anti-American piece by Richard Parks

STEP stops and looks up, frozen with horror.  ANT becomes tense.

PETER:

have you read it?  It's completely mad, Richard has gone entirely off his rocker.  It's so one-sided that it's hard to believe its come from what used to be a respected scholar.  What he used to write was excellent, now it's worse than garbage.  Eh?  (laughs)

STEPH:

he's not mad

PETER:

sorry?

STEPH:

he's not off his rocker and he actually makes some rather good points

PETER:

you have to be joking

ANT:

Steph...

STEPH:

he still is a respected scholar, he's seeing a world in trouble and he's doing something about it.  He's making arguments, causing a stir, getting a debate going, because its badly needed

PETER:

how can you defend him?  Do you know him?

STEPH:

that's not important

PETER:

but it has its place

ANT:

please...

STEPH:

I am capable of developing my own independant thought

ANT:

indeed he often spoils a friendship for the sake of argument

PETER:

and you think he 'makes some good points'?  Does he not see that America creates wonderful culture?

STEPH:

it's the foregin policy that gets him, it's the imposing American culture onto other countries

PETER:

isn't that a good thing?  You said yourself that America has the best literature

STEPH:

doesn't give you polictical authority, even the Nazis listened to Mozart

ANT:

oh God...

PETER:

are you comparing Americans to Nazis?  You, sir, have offened me by such a crude comparision.  I think you should leave

ANT:

oh Peter, that's his job, to offend and he likes to bring his work home

PETER opens the door and ANT and STEPH reluctatnly walk out.  The door closes and PETER exits.

ANT:

did you have to do that?  Did you really?  After what I said?  You were always like this, always bitterly defending your position, you couldn't let it drop or slide you always have to attack, attack, attack!  God, you are infurienating.  To pick an argument with Peter Offenbach of all people.  He said I was pervese but you're an equal match

STEPH:

Richard did not deserve those comments, yes he's spikey but its well placed.  It keeps people from going soft.  I had to defend Richard whose 'Eastern Exercise' is still the classic text on the Middle East, he's just become slightly eccentric but he's no less the razor sharp mind that he always was

ANT:

you will always defend Richard no matter how ridculous his proposals.  It's because you've always looked up to him, you always needed him to hold your hand

STEPH:

at least he is politcally active unlike Peter

ANT:

what about Peter?

STEPH:

he's locked away in his fantasy worlds, he doesn't want to engage with the active world

ANT:

what about 'Mammon Created' wasn't that political?  Not all novelists have to be politcally active, some are dedicated to their art

STEPH:

providing dictators something to boast about

ANT:

oh enough, just enough Steph.  You always take it too far.  Learn when to stop, for God's sake.  Are you going to get a cab?

STEPH:

no I'll walk

STEPH exits, leaving ANT frustrated and exasarbated realeasing a small cry expressing this.