Where have I been?
He's been on vacation, has your friendly neighbourhood subversive guide to the ways of the world and of human relationships, helped by his two favourite ways of having a go at this: music and people, almost invariably women, who love making it.
Smart readers have already understood this is my vocation.* What I do on the log is a kind of "calling", say most of my friends so often I'll buy that, especially since it gets slipped in thematically to tales of girls and their songs.
Let's not mix up vocation and vacation.
My holiday was nearly a total surprise one. I received final tickets and full details of the destination on March 14. How nice -- a whole fortnight off somewhere hot!
Was in it Africa (many kinds of great music)? Australia (wow, some interesting new musicians)? Brazil (plenty of passion thrown in there, part of Ritmo Latino)?
Can't have been Canada, can it? The Canadian musical scene's become so exciting today that it too is worth a long, regular podcast, CBC radio3. But at this time of year...?
No more messing; where I've been there was no music whatsoever, it was enough to keep any woman well out of the way, the company was extremely unpleasant, the service slow to come since proposed circuits are varied but Vicious Cycles. They're such roller-coasters it's very hard to ask for any assistance and the local colour is so wildly imaginative I'd long forgotten how extraordinary such trips are.
There's no sneaking this out back into The Orchard.
I have thoroughly redone the Grand Tour of Hell.
It was quite a refresher course in clinical depression.
I've not been there since 1997 and that journey was tepid in comparison. The music had to stop, random radio shows were scary, even the iPod became risky when CDs on it I love and know very well turned almost overnight into emotional minefields. The sort of song lyrics that suit shattered hearts, since sorrowing people can empathise with singers who know what it's like and help them through it, and the kinds of words that work wonders set to sounds that succour starved souls are one thing. They're fine, usually.
Very few are blues even extremely musical ears can use to rescue the hopelessly mixed-up brain between them when an accumulation of trivial troubles combined with a nasty surprise or three triggers off a latent, long-ignored clinical depression in anyone arrogant enough to believe it could never happen again and without the wits to have spotted small warning signs when the lights only flashed occasionally.
That was me, a long-known and very well-treated bipolar personality, by around mid-March. The last column posted had already felt like maybe a penultimate piece, beyond which I could go no further without going off the rails.
I knew only that I'd all but reached the limit of words applicable to an artform whose essence lies way beyond them, though most of the musicians whose stories both in sound and in real life fascinate me are lyricists, sometimes very gifted poets too.
Thematically, you may have seen it yourselves, read between my lines. With some subjects at least I'd had enough therapy in the past to know just when to stop and wait for a while, needing to learn more.
However, I misled myself so successfully that nearly nobody among even those who see me very frequently, still usually light-hearted and zapping out decent wisecracks, knew of the mostly subconscious lightning wars being fought in my innermost self.
I certainly had little idea of the intensity of these conflicts. That's the trouble with first-rate therapy when we're lucky enough to get it, which I did until the end of 2004 when a wise woman said: "That's it, we're done. You are healed and entire. Get out of here and have a whole lot of fun in the real world."
So I did, best I could.
Reality's a remarkable place, all the more so when strange stuff happens and quite stubbornly makes sense. We can make sense of it when we're lucky enough to have a few people around, which I do, wise to the weirdest of ways, who lend a hand to learners. I've indeed put some of that in The Orchard, where it will stay; there's no reason to undo a harmonious song.
What undid me -- and the stupidity of it was the same thing happened last summer, had I realised -- was mostly the small fry. It was things trivial and tiresome, rather like black little leeches in life's river. I sometimes found them draining on my resources, felt fatigued, laid off logging and bitched about being exhausted. That's always a bore for me and everyone else, so shutting up and getting on with stuff seemed the best and also the easiest thing to do.
The therapy I've had previously took intriguing turns too. I learned lots about myself, which is simply who and what I am, a man generally so little different from most people that the choice to write what I usually do now instead of my private life, friends and the rest, was an easy one. Others do that and very well. I merely forgot, completely, why I went for treatment in the first place: chronic, clinical depression.
Well, now I know.
That's to say, I got one Hell of a reminder! The word is the only one to describe it; I hope few people reading this know, the way I needed reminding, exactly how the disease takes charge of us once it's really got its teeth in and the utter havoc it wreaks not just with our emotions but with our perceptions. It is terrifying because the very first things to go are what I'd now call the three "core values" in our lives and in people: a good sense of humour, trust and love.
There's hot and there's hot. That means, for people who say "Not before before Hell freezes over", the place does. It's so darned cold, your emotions eventually frost icy, your blood doesn't warm you, and your racing thoughts get slower and madder. Next stop? Paralysis.
This isn't just a column on depression, which takes many forms and has a number of more or less known causes. It's an entry in a log about music. The music I tend to write about and the lyrics that are part of it often overtly concern all nature of ways with love and trust, served up by some musicians with great humour.
Occasionally I shall write about depression or depressing things in the future as I have before. When women tackle them -- men too of course -- the outcome can be marvellous music to be shared, sometimes from people worth getting to know much more widely than they are.
So what did me in was no single thing, but I let a little heap of them grow and grow while my immune system against such an appalling downer got weaker and weaker. That's my life, now I'm getting some more help; the part played by those I love is indispensable andgreatly appreciated.
On depression itself, there are many books and much information already out on the Net, some wise and some less helpful, being full of jargon and lacking in insight. But that goes for many subjects on the World Wide Web, doesn't it, notably music? We're all different in our qualities, strengths and weaknesses and especially in our tastes.
I would first add -- having had no choice but to begin learning a lot more than I already knew and with other people to help me recall everything I'd found out -- simply that it is indeed a disease some of live with. It's one I'd describe as a "cancer of the soul", leaving the last word for you to define in terms of your own beliefs, not mine. Depression is never who we are, unless we're stupid enough to let it define us.
Secondly, I've needed to remember less that it's also stupid to let others define who we are, because that's something learned a long time ago and while being valued by those we love is important and it's good occasionally to be told about it, what matters most is the love, trust and sense of humour we've got for ourselves. They're essential, tempered and adjusted with experience. During the period from which I'm emerging, those qualities regarding myself went straight out of the window before anything else. That's how it is with such a disease.
To those who know for themselves what I'm on about, but who are more terrified and much less practiced travellers than I've been and became again -- there's always a first time if you are prone to it -- I say a third and last thing tonight. The nature of that "dis-ease" you fear you might have since you don't know what's happening to you is profoundly irrational! It can often ensure you most hurt, or maybe just think you do, then obsessively so, the very people you'd least want to harm. That's why there are vicious cycles, working in both you and your relationships with others.
Some may get hurt, for real, not just in your head. Many who tell you to "pull out of it" by yourself are not being unkind or uncaring. They've simply never had the luck to make such astonishing journeys, but it's a bad idea to expect them to envy you as much as you do them. You should never blame them for saying what they do. A few who might insist, with genuine conviction, "You can do it, just grow up," are almost as alarmed as you are. They also happen to be wrong; your feeling you'll never make it on your own is the right one. You can't. You won't! Don't make it worse. I never thought to write this despite but also on the strength of years of experience behind those words.
But there are people who know what to do. You may feel very weak -- physically, emotionally and mentally -- but there's no weakness of values when yours are all skewed in asking, then trying to help them to help you. Doing so not only also helps break the main Vicious Cycle, so you begin to feel better and they do as well. It even starts to restore the sense of meaning and purpose you've lost; you haven't completely "lost it", that's just how it feels.
It feels so much nicer when the new cycle takes effect, a Life Cycle, life-enhancing experience you can learn more from. It sometimes feels like a well-kept secret, but while of course nobody likes being put under pressure or finding you demanding, most people like helping once they know how.
Losing the music again for a while really scared me. A lot of things did, I shan't take you there; but there's a line across the top of this place. It's there for a good reason. It's true! Among parts of my life, the voices of women are wonderful "since their songlines help me stay on track and in tune".
A few women, as well as their voices, along with a fellow or two, gave me a hand, held on tight and brought me from March 14 to the date I get to publish this, April 8. For a chunk of that time I was still working, and hard, but something was very badly wrong once the music stopped. Any singing that at first I could bear and then really enjoy became a huge pleasure again no more than long enough ago to start recovering my strength and now tell you that Taliesin is also back.
Don't forget, that's one of my real names, in wherever Britain now keeps records of such things. I'll shoot anybody who comments, phones or sends me a mail that says, "Nicholas, you've been writing increasingly and ever better about music and sex, so if you mislaid your music along with your wits, that's because you're quite obviously not getting enough!"
No, you'd be a dummy to have got to the bottom of this bit and think you've got to the bottom of that too! Part of being here to say this is I know what's been written is pretty good not because I tell you so, but since other people have told me it is and so far I got it right.
In Hell, however, I got it as wrong as I could and irrationally convinced myself what was "quite obviously" true but was very twisted. The truth was still out there, where others live, nowhere near me. I very seriously need to relax! I've also had another huge kick up the ass.
What I now plan to do about it since finally I can afford doing so without also worrying about money -- that stress got mentioned here and I must say, with a sigh of relief, now it's over I don't want it back -- includes adjustments in a number of ways to make as sure as possible there'll be no more Grand Tours of Hell. To go there again would kill me.
When people tell me that, I listen up!
Many singers who come up here and shall in the future are so attached to the idea both Hell and Heaven are inside us, you'd almost believe it's something they really know for themselves, since if they didn't they wouldn't put body, heart and soul into telling us about it, usually for a living, would they now?
Guess what? As a powerful act of faith I find practical, I really believe these girls, chicks, lasses, ladies...
Somehow, I didn't quite lose that and I imagine this has been clear for a long time. My past few weeks have been chastening and salutary. If you don't know what it's like to be right "out of it" on a surprise holiday you think might last forever, we're bound to meet a woman or two who says it far better than I could.
Even if I could, I wouldn't do it, without reality firmly grasped in one hand and the other being equally strongly held by somebody else. You know what one of my wise friends told me recently? "Take a holiday!" That's what she said and she was right. I shall.
I'm going to take a very long holiday indeed, but I'll send you postcards whenever I learn something during the changes from the one I've just had. If that's all right with you. What of my vocation? It would be silly to end such a marathon without telling you the name of the woman I found my ears pricking back up to with a warm glow inside me after I began to come in from the cold.
As usual, it was by accident, while I was doing the sensible thing, staring at walls other than my own, since I grabbed the chance to inspect other people's whenever I could. A woman in one place had a great CD on, which I knew well. It's called 'Anamorphosée' (1993), there's a song on it called 'Vertige' and another that's been a long-lasting hit called 'L'Instant X'. I must have had mine by then, my "X instant" of being out of it so far that I was back in it again.
You may not agree with what I think about "accidents that aren't", like Ms Farmer being on. On that album, yet another title says 'Mylène s'en fout', which is sometimes the sort of thing she likes to say. Life would wall us tight between a rock and a hard place if we never learned to sing, like Mylène, "I don't give a ...".
We've briefly heard on previous occasions that Mylène Farmer does actually. She has a new album out where she proves it again.
I left off with a French one. I'm picking up soon with one of my favourite Québecois. If this disconcerts too many English-speakers, shame on you. Go to more concerts, like I shall. Because if you want me back in this real world of ours, I find touring that much more fun than what you now know. In two weeks, I'll back at work, a place that even has clocks in it.
There's a lot of it about, time.
Ms Farmer knows that as well as anyone because she plays tricks and games with it, like with words. But I was right out of that too, simply stuck. Our clocks changed to summer time Sunday before last. I didn't even realise they had until rather late on the Tuesday, which by even my standards is a record. If you'd like more records with music on them -- and Mylène among others -- I've learning a new game with time. Her 'Tomber 7 fois...' is wordplay too.
Never mind what it means yet. They say cats have nine lives. I'm not one, but might have had seven. You take Mylène like I am. I've put good stuff by her in private 'Songlines' for others: slow down and chill out music. Now she's in my very own, that's enough for one column. The next comes when I'm ready.
But it sure is good to be back.
Heaven? If you want to know about that, ask a gifted musician.
________
*Until tonight, with the last one posted, I didn't know this would be a set of three pieces. So be it. Writing them has helped me and if my words help anyone else as well, then you are very welcome to them. Depression is such a hard thing for many people to talk about or understand, for very understandable reasons, that I believe I'm fortunate to be able to do this without guilt, shame or a stain on my career.
It'll be a month and more before we -- yes, a "we" there, with gratitude -- think I'll be well past this and safer against it happening again. That's no reason, however, for anyone who needs a bit of guidance such as I've had in my time to steer clear. The log "postbox" is all yours.
1:53:28 AM 
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