Another composite of the Log -- the capital "L" has crept in of late sometimes because of people who have figured me out telling me what this place is about in their own eyes beyond the women musicians -- is 'KP Sauce', the psychiatrist in the United States who was one of a very small handful of people to help me survive what must be my last very extreme seven-month cycle of "the blues".
Very few people could help and some of those I hold dearest were even counter-productive in their attempts, in spite of their love for me. Eleanor, though, a woman who was at the time heavy with child and trying to work while we had lunch together some weeks back, did a wondrous job: very often she has in the two years I've really begun to know her.
There's an irony I like in the way she told me she felt ill-equipped to do anything, since she believed she knew nothing about my disease. Yet, while shovelling back what she could of a light salad and taking several phone calls, she found just the words needed to tell me what I knew somewhere that I must do.
A strange thing happened on Saturday, when the strongest of "hunches" stopped me from sleeping, so I got up and spent that night and Sunday doing something I hadn't for very many months, checking out Ellie's "stars" with a decent astrology programme on my Mac.
This is "weird stuff" indeed, real Orchard material, because the chart I got and studied for hours was full of mother and baby. Later in the week, I had another such intuition about a different friend whom I suddenly knew to be in trouble, not this time in town, but in Africa, and I acted on that hunch too, making contact to find out I was right.
Late in the afternoon of that day, I phoned Ellie. And I learned at once, with some astonishment, she was in the maternity clinic of a sudden, her baby boy having been born during the night and day I'd been delving into her chart last weekend.
So I'm glad she's still the woman to let me recount this kind of story when it happens, because I'd not expected the birth for a week or so yet, but everything I'd seen during my "night watch" made much more sense the instant I knew the truth!
Sharing our skills and crafts
From Sylvie, a friend who does star charts with the kind of real competence I can bring to the 'I Ching' after studying that immensely rich ancient text for very many years, you may recall me noting how I said something on the lines of "I don't think the planets and stars themselves have very much to do with what it is you can do. For you, horoscopes are just your way of 'tapping in' to something."
Sylvie teased me then, along her own lines of "So finally you've worked out that much, but you weren't 'ready' for this before." However, by way of explanation for these allegedly "occult" and esoteric skills, I don't have one, beyond a notion of tuning in to probabilities in the pattern of our lives, like I enjoy reading hard scientific magazines and reviews when the terrain they cover gets alarmingly close for some to a kind of meeting point among energy, matter and consciousness ... or "mind", I'm not sure what.
Now I'm told by therapists that brain burn-outs I've had, some of them terrifying, are for real! They happened, much like the computer with which I compared my brain after the one last summer when I couldn't pull the power plug on it, once it could no longer process data and crashed. But a few clinicians -- and other people -- get very insistent as to what happens to me afterwards, during my "time out" from reality as we usually experience it, with time going just the one way from past to future and so on.
I'm beginning to tell them to stop insisting since I'm somebody who needed treatment, not a wretched guinea-pig. One thing I know I can do is network real people like Dom and KP Sauce with one another for simplicity's sake and consistency in my writing, while the truth is that at the same time, sometimes what you get adds in with their words a part of me, a self that seems to know what's right and fitting for my survival and the healing process.
Doubtless, the professionals have all kinds of names for this (I know a few of them myself), but such terms strike me as irrelevant and unnecessary. Coming out of the manic phase of my last cycle -- after the medication I was taking before "backfired" and became toxic at an undetermined time that pushed me beyond the years of cyclothymia into "full-blown" manic depression -- that part of me did much very hard work itself alongside the professionals to build a strategy for recovery.
So I too have my "altered egos". In this, however, I've come to feel fairly sure that some weird stuff I'm apparently supposed to call "cognitive insight" instead -- or something technical like this that at least sounds scientific -- I can do -- like "reading" the 'I Ching' or tuning in to Ellie and that friend in Africa, is nothing special to me.
Nice to be 'nothing special'
Last year, I was still being told to consider I'm very strongly empathic to people and can bring "psychic powers" to bear at my times of deepest intuition, but I don't believe they are a rare or unique kind of gift. All that is nonsense born of being led to believe for most of my 50 years that I'm somehow "different" -- with "different skills" manifest sometimes on the Log and in the other things I do.
My own variant in childhood on the theme of being "driven" as an achiever, to reach parts socially and intellectually that were purportedly beyond my parents' capacities (however untrue that's sometimes proved), is so banal lots of us go through it. Long gone are the days when I was angry with anyone who put such pressure on me.
This is sensitive personal ground I won't write up much, because as with my very long period of complete abstinence from sex, I've got plenty from it by way of knowledge and understanding I can use on the Log. However, the reasons for such things involve other people with whom I'd not wish to use Ellie's kind "You can write what you like about me" approach. For them, I want more anonymity even than the "altered egos" with which I play sometimes, changing them a little here.
I know Ant my cousin -- a writer himself -- wouldn't mind being logged and, where possible, the journalist in me who likes "hard" sources much prefers to identify his friends and others who teach him stuff. At the Factory, another "Ant" -- a journalist named Anthony Morland (with whom I long enjoyed working like with Lauren Gelfand while they were both in Africa and me one of their "bosses" for years) -- told me on Thursday how these days what I've got is supposed to be called a "bipolar condition" rather than manic depression.
I appreciated the way AFM said this, with his deadpan drawl, as if he were reminding me how civilians killed in military operations aren't murdered men, women and kids but just "collateral damage". But still people do want to know where it is that I get the "cognitive insight" I'm now being encouraged strongly to cultivate. They do persist in asking what "that place" is -- using the name I did myself for it when I hesitantly told Luc my generalist doctor "I've been to that place again" between my last brain-burn in March and the Hell that followed when mania and paranoia set in while this place went quiet.
Well, the answer lies in drawing the above threads together and saying, "I'm not special and never have been, but have learned simply to use a few faculties available to everybody," and "that place" must be both inside each of us and outside us.
It's no "place" at all, in fact, and when I'm there, with no sense of my usual personal identity and "outside time", I come back with an often new knowledge it takes me a very long time to begin to understand and assimilate into my behaviour. There, however, I can resource myself.
I'd say we can all do this now. I know that my own way of "going" there has so far been very dangerous! It is invariably when I've apparently not merely been over-thinking but my brain has been racing away, often subconsciously, "like crazy", literally in the latter phase of each bipolar cycle so that it simply overheats and the fuses blow.
One thing I may have logged here after last July's 'Night of Unknowing' was what I told people instead with words like, "I believe I've seen what Van Gogh tried to paint, but couldn't." It seems now that I probably did, or so say some. On the theme that we can and perhaps should all seek to resource ourselves, I've told you and others how early last year I resumed the practice every morning of meditation.
Plenty of "weird stuff" comes to me then, though now I realise that until now, I've ended at least two cycles with periods of morning meditation that weren't. They felt wrong, anyway, qualitatively different. Instead I was at war, using that time simply to get my head relatively straight and clear, with energy enough to face another day's work.
Safer ways of sensing stuff
Meditation, though, is one very good way of doing it and so is learning from those who tell us to "stop thinking", when what they really mean is stop wasting time on unproductive analysis and worrying about stuff in life and people you can't change.
Music is evidently another, for me at least. Any means of tuning in to your own resources and sense of harmony and cultivating that in a relaxed and relaxing way for others can't be bad.
I'l unable to tell anybody how I know things about people, like Ellie and the baby, friends being in trouble, events that are happening -- but I don't care any more either. What does it matter?
Why does my "magic iPod finger" know who to pick for listening and writing about at given times? What does that matter either? It just does. Maybe one day I shall again be asking this kind of question, like the people who want to probe me! But I don't see the interest really.
Instead, there have been words on "both sides" of this log about what everyone seems to have been thrusting upon me of late. Or "of late" is what I believed at first, before realising, along with the fact that I'm not so very different from anybody else -- and that's a lesson driven daily home by women musicians who sing about our shared experience -- and thus have a role to play in teaching.
That allegedly "beautiful soul" of mine "ever striving towards the light" shouldn't be so different from anyone else's, I believe, and what Dom saw and addressed in me extremely perceptively as the Faustus side is certainly there. I do wonder sometimes if it would be so pronounced had I done the same as most people and enjoyed a normal sex life for the 14 years -- because that's what it is now -- I didn't.
It became that long since for the greater part of that time I had to avoid sexual activity as a part of my loving mainly to ensure the sound and stable development of the Kid -- I might as well say so -- because for reasons to leave out, she would have gone off her own rails had her father done anything else. But once those long years were over, what a mess you've known me make with women and this year, I darned near started over! No thanks. I remembered a few lessons just in time and didn't make the old mistakes, so all is well.
A line many of us walk
One last thing I want to say about manic depression itself concerns those extremes it entails, both the hellish side and the highs of creative activity that can attain genius -- and thus also mean that fine line between genius and insanity that got me last week making Heather Nova my singer of the year 2005.
I hope Heather won't mind, but for friends and other twits who have yet to listen to 'Redbird' I've put a high-quality .mp3 of 'I Miss My Sky' in cyberspace. In so doing, I also accidentally wiped other stuff that should have stayed out there, but never mind since I think most people will have picked up what they need.
Just listen to the song subtitled 'Amelia Earhart's Last Days' (right-click for playback options) and you will be hearing a multi-facetted jewel of a poem which is also about "altered egos". I'm sure Nova knows it's an allegory for the "downers" in the disease and for the reason some writers I've admired on the log have expressed as much fear of the only too common "sledgehammer" drugs like Prozac used to treat it as of the lonely Hell it can induce in us.
Big boys do cry
Don't be alarmed if that song does something to you!
My ego altered last week in a way I've yet to enjoy to the full with the right kind of medical treatment when I heard it and other music again and discovered my tear ducts. Tears, it seems, are big and wet, as I've told people with much surprise. They roll down your cheeks and taste salty in your nose. You feel a lot better after crying them, but at first, when I did weep with sadness and joy and other emotions, I was sure there was something wrong with the medication!
Being much slowed down now, it took a while to dawn on me that I was feeling normal emotions like I hope most readers do, instead of very extreme ones in which I'd long since ruled out anger and jealousy as disallowed. Normal emotions! The "probers", of course, want to know when I last felt emotions like this that made me cry and then feel good afterwards instead of unsatisfied and choked on dry, stony tears.
The answer, yet again, is I don't know, but suspect it could well date back to being little bigger than Eleanor's baby. And again I don't care. I have said, given the various bouts of therapy that have been logged a little before, that this is like having been taken apart and putting back the bits I want and now getting a whole bunch of feelings to go with them that aren't extreme, like Pinocchio.
It's a moot point as to how I've been able to write as well as often I'm told I have about our human condition and the ups and downs in our relationships with one another while experiencing such extremes, but shrug ... that's for amateur analysts among you to work out. I can't. What I've said is simply: "If there is any onion left to peel in Nick, can we please do it now, while I can cry?"
With heartfelt thanks
I'm told the onion-peeling decades are finally over, though henceforth I shall never run the risk again of not having my medication regularly checked by a professional who can spot what a general practitioner can't....
If indeed that time is over, I want to end this entry not with any more "weird stuff" but with deep gratitude, particularly to David, my desk chief at the Factory, other colleagues there who have filled in for me and will for a little while still to come, and to the very few -- but enough -- people who saw me through the last of the worst because, somehow, they did understand.
How such loved ones and friends sometimes managed this I don't know, but the Big L doesn't strike me as strange! There's just been a lot of it about lately for me, channelled through people such as these. Trying to control the Big L too much, or worse to dam it, is immensely destructive: that I do know.
So there will be plenty more of it on the music Log, since love is such a preoccupation of musicians, but for now I shall revising my learning curves and then taking a spell of R & R, which will surely include a little music writing, and then we'll see about casting a few more spells of my own.
We simply have to "touch the ground" sometimes, yet I've been enabled, thanks to some courageous and honest people including a few friends truly worth having, to keep my sky.
5:51:06 PM 
