"Just wanted to say that I am still around and still really enjoying your blog," commented Francesca the other day.
Francesca?
"Depression has twisted and distorted my life for many years. These blogs, Pushing an Elephant (blogrolled here) and Diet Coke are my attempt to make sense of the past and of the present. The first is [or was] a more or less daily journal of my thoughts, opinions, visited web sites etc. The second, Diet Coke, focuses on mental health issues, both my experience of depression and more general writing on the subject. I have also included a link to my poetry and art website, Scarlet Nails."
Still around one way or another -- if nowhere online I've yet quite pinned down pending actually asking! -- Francesca puts that very well. Her work is worth anyone's time.
"Nick, I haven't been over here for a while and am sorry to hear you've been vacationing in Hades, the one place the tourist guides don't tell you about. I hope you'll never set foot there again and that your next holiday is to Eden, and I mean a literal one here on this planet, not the one beyond the stars. Thanks for putting my pic among your mates, I hadn't seen that. It's great to be seen as music," Natalie added.
I've reconsidered a reply, because I think it goes for us all:
Well, you people are music. I've come to the conclusion that this, in its way, goes for everybody. The Kid reckons I simply happen to have two sets of ears: one for music and the other for "music". What on earth do we mean?
The latter -- "music" as metaphor -- is for me what lies behind what people do and express, sometimes by the direct practice of the former (with words or without), often in different creative ways of their own and always by being who they are.
I don't plan to write a discourse on the 'Big L', but like my friend BJ's definition of it, still in The Orchard here, where he holds that "love is the Higgs-Boson particle of human relationships". There's real wit, a touch of humour that makes the deepest sense to those both with an understanding of quantum physics and latter-day Holy Grail aspirants!
If you're neither, never mind.
You see, what BJ meant the day he said that is just something that binds, a force that has to be there though nobody's yet found it, since if it isn't, our known universe amounts to nothing and doesn't "work". The inspired genius in his remark was to apply abstract theory of the unknown to the daily practice of relationships we do know!
So I relish it and have often thought about it.
When it comes to the disbanded Bikini Kill of the '90s, their kind of music and the relationships we all have, one thread I look forward to picking up here in its time is a particularly poisonous piece of nonsense.
"Eden?" Natalie, to take the Genesis legends and then the Easter tale itself as millennial perennials of a paternalistic priesthood is to perpetuate, right here on this earth of ours, a notion of a "Redeeming 'Big L'," by a Real Man, isn't it? "Redemption" from what?
This was a well-nigh subconscious topic of my morning "meditations" for some time, before the Hades vacation itself turned some of those sessions into little more than a tiresome battle to keep Thanatos (let's simply say the draw of death in us all) in check. Francesca, a sweetie who is still around, is very bound to know know manic depression distorts thought, paralyses our deeds and perverts our relationship bonds with others, when its moods take charge.
Elsewhere, I've explored and shared a learning of knowing redemption from self and from others we love. It's part of a recovery process in different forms of depression and part of a strategy people need to be of the world and in it as ourselves, not patients locked into a purely clinical and thus exclusive type of treatment. It's wickedly exclusive, in making of all those who aren't fellow sufferers from disorders such as mine and Francesca's and the therapists who help us "outsiders" to our insides.
Such anapproach, though occasionally it may very sadly be necessary, puts the patients in clinics and it casts family and our mates in every sense, along with co-workers and friend, in the roles of actors on the outside.
This is a very wrong approach, unless it really must be for a spell. It alienates the so-called "nutcase", "loony" or whatever from the callers, visitors, well-wishers, bearers of grapes and "I'm sorry for you" people who -- with better understanding -- are by far the best placed, each in their way, to keep us in a real world they consider "normal" where we supposedly aren't.
Otherwise, there's perversity that takes some beating! Therapy helps, medication helps. But the saving grace a depressive needs as much as anybody else -- for what the "hell" or "heaven" or on earth is "normality" and natural behaviour -- comes in a form of "redemption" from deep within themselves and through all kinds of others close to them.
I have several threads to pick up on this log for sure, slowly, each in its time, but there's something even more perverse and indeed truly poisonous than a disease with which some of us have to learn to live.
Pulling through the last cycle that leaves me still called for something truly unexpected and for some unanticipated help in an understanding of what "redemption" really means. How I do hate, here in France or any nation with a very deep Roman Catholic tradition, potentially beautiful places of worship where all hangs on grotesque, often lurid imagery in statues and in windows of that Real Man, the Redeemer, forever nailed to a crucifix, the dying blood streaming down, the pain distorted into an act of glory, with a place on the side for his poor old mum, a woman -- and a Virgin, but of course!
I can imagine no more entertaining way than a randy and rebellious "rock" musician or two, along with some true poets among women singers, to deal a death-blow to a very pernicious notion put around about women by an all-male clergy and about one legendary Eve especially.
 That evil notion is Original Sin.
I think this needs tackling head on. For me, it's a lie, a huge Lie, ingrained in hearts and minds and toxic to our souls down century after century. While I've said and shown with examples in music from Bach to the band Hem that I've no lack of respect for simple Christianity simply practised, if rarely in far too many a church, the social scientist in me has known for most of my life how that legend, the Christ one, long predates a one Bible and its story.
I'm not sure about the "next holiday". I think we have to use every one of our senses to boot each other right back into Eden. Along with a little of what I'd much rather just call the 'Big L'.
Maybe Kathleen* of her Bikini Kill days will give me a hand, angry, sexy and ... a funny woman. I'll certainly count on a number of women -- including Lilith Fair types -- and on a fellow or two, dis-eased sometimes maybe, but not brain-washed by some smug sense of supremacy, to nail this vicious myth right on the head.
Easter eggs?
For now -- since I'll have other topics to take up first -- I'll do here what I've done in a real exchange or two elsewhere, including lessons learned about three core values evoked here and raised with a wise church-going man. It was intriguing to find that my own father had come down in the practice of life to the same essential values as me. He sees no service in saying "Thanks, mate, no woman could have done that for me," to a mysterious man who's perpetually nailed and held by some of disconcerting sureness never to have been laid.
My dad's seen far beyond that. And so did another fellow I've written about in a few "Thank you" mails lately, the late Philip K. Dick. I'm not sure my dad would like Dick or Bikini Kill, but I do know people who take pity on him for a few ailments of ageing give him the willies.
Before I shut down, let me tell you also what Dick wrote in a little novel called 'Galactic Pot-Healer' about another computer, a robot by the name of Willis. I'll quote in full, especially wrapped as I am in no shroud but a deliciously misheard "strategy":
"Little tragedy of life," the robot said. "Billions of them, unnoticed, every day. Except that God notices, at least according to my pamphlet."
"But I see what you mean," Joe said. "About worry. Concern; that's closer to it. I felt it concerned me. It did concern me. Caritas. Or in the Greek—" He could not remember the word.
"Can we go below, now?" Mali asked.
"Yes," Joe said. Obviously she did not understand. But, oddly, the robot did. Strange, Joe thought. Why does it understand when she doesn't? Maybe caritas is a factor of intelligence, he reflected. Maybe we've always been wrong: caritas is not a feeling but a high form of cerebral activity, an ability to perceive something in the environment—to notice and, as the robot had put it, to worry. Cognition, he realised; that's what it is. It isn't a case of feeling versus thinking: cognition is cognition.
Aloud he said, "Can I have a copy of your pamphlet?"
"Ten cents, please," the robot said [...].
Cheap at the price, I'd say ... well, depending which planet you're on; Dick's genius lay in that kind of writing, inviting a little rewriting of my own.
All the Easter tale says to me concerns caritas. However, it's an unwise way to behave when your sense of self-worth may have grown up to discard what others make of you, but still depends on always wanting to be "there for them". That's stupid.
People hate it when I worry about them too much, often subconsciously, but sometimes haven't shown it when it did matter since I've been too damned tired. Exhausted, in part, not by logging here about relationships and a human condition where I find the most widely known four gospels deal rather well in a caritas story, taken to extremes. But by wasting time on vicious cycles causing "bad vibes" among the animals in us all.
You've had three of these pieces now. I'm sure you'll agree that's enough. "All things in moderation," but religion more so than any since when any good story is pushed into extremism by fanatics -- and women fanatics are quite infrequent, aren't they? -- it kills. Nowadays the nails are bullets and bombs.
My expressed vocation, this log, is a vacation from all that, the violence I've never been able to endure in prolonged doses without breaks since what I called my 'Night of Unknowing' and logged it in The Orchard. I wonder what Dick might have made of that? Maybe just the ignition in me of cognition.
That's a reassuring thought before I give the Mac a going-over because it doesn't like borrowed time any more than I do. If we disappear -- me, Mac and log -- for rather longer than I hope it will take to speed the computer up while I go on slowing down, please do a "four-eyed" four-ears a favour.
Don't worry about me!
I shan't be worrying about you with no reason.
It's like I said elsewhere, maybe even here before, but I'll say it again with a further lesson learned, telling me to shift that "centre of gravity" of mine. My cognition is no different from yours. Not in the least. And we're all normal as well, those of us who don't try to stop the flow and just channel it right.
Perhaps I need four ears to do it with, while being different, you'll have your own way of doing it. You know what I call "it", a bit like BJ and Peter Gabriel when he was Genesis (in 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' with its 'Lilywhite Lilith' too). And I've scarcely met a soul without intuition.
How many times have you said it or heard it said to you? "Follow your intuitions." Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands, maybe? Has anybody been wrong in saying it? Have you ever heard anyone say, "Oh, I wish I hadn't followed my intuition"? Because I never have. Including the one that tells me unless I shut up now, it's not Nick who's now headed for a breakdown again. It's his computer.
Hear you soon, huh?
Oh -- and thanks again for lending me an ear of your own.
________
*The pic of Kathleen without Co. comes from Sarah's fan site I linked to in the previous column (aka 'Amethyst Skyz'). I see no sin in that scan!
5:37:43 PM 
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