Updated on samedi, May 20, when I moved the last of the bunch of columns about my recent very personal, but certainly not private, physical and spiritual experience off the Voices of Women pages and into the Orchard.
Yes, this is indeed a "music week".
Normally, I take such breaks from my paid job about once a month, but since mid-March I've been fighting what a friend rightly told me was the "battle with your mind". There have been no music weeks between February and this one.
Today, I'm a fortunate convalescent who has lived to tell you the last of that part of the story of that struggle for sanity. I can't say it's the last such battle, for nobody who lives with the manic-depressive illness can afford complacency. However, I can sum up and give you the page links to what's already been written here.
Total honesty is imperative when I know that what I've learned may help others if they live with the same serious yet widely misunderstood disease. Nobody knows better than me that I'm long-winded sometimes, but I also have a gift for making difficult issues clear.
If nothing else, sharing insight I've either strengthened or been given, between a time nobody -- including me -- knew I was depressed and being able to write this, may reach somebody who feels alone in their own inexplicable blues.
Or perhaps you're wondering why you "feel so tired all the time", like I often did as winter drew to a close, though I was eating well, usually sleeping fine and getting the exercise I need.
I'm still a smoker who finds it hard to give up. I thought this bad habit might be the cause of the exhaustion, but the doctor who has known me for many years told me that wasn't it. He is a good general practitioner too, but needed expert help to be sure of what was really up. Medication I was already taking had stopped being good for me.
To say the drug became toxic or a poison, as sometimes I do in shorthand talk, isn't strictly accurate, but those words will do in that this "mild" treatment I had been taking for many years began, at some still unknown time, to poison me by worsening my bipolar state of ups and downs.
I shan't go into the specifics of medication since these treatments, of which many are now on the market, have different effects depending on who we are. The decisions we make about any of them must be made with professional guidance.
Until I was told otherwise, I believed the prescription I was on was fine. So did Luc, my GP (general practitioner), because he had no way to know what was wrong while I occasionally mentioned very different symptoms and he knew I'd already had plenty of therapy, which ended in December 2004.
He may also have been working too hard sometimes, but that's his life. Maybe I never told him enough, since I've been prone to be concerned for other people in ways that don't always help. In part of a trilogy of columns I have, with some help, discussed the nature of caritas...
As an astute physician though -- and a wise man with the sense to stop when he must -- Luc came very close to the mark the day he recommended the right therapist for me, given that my previous one retired last year and once I'd told him about a bout of the blues that suddenly hit me very hard, robbing me of my love of music literally overnight and leaving me too messed up to work.
I have told and can only tell my own story regarding this disease. I'm no expert and to say what applies to me is true for you, should you recognise your symptoms of what might be "bipolar behaviour" in mine, would be absurd. However, to pretend that I'm fundamentally any different from most other people would be just as stupid. This Log, after all, generally tells the stories of women who frequently remind me of everything I have in common with you.
The period between today and next Sunday may be regarded both by my workmates and by France's national health service as a time of "rest and recuperation", which I need, but I'd rather think of it the way I've said, as my first music week in too long.
I've been fiddling with where I put entries on the Log. This means I've picked up my own instruments again and wish to "hold the front page" for the women and related columns -- or chapters -- in which musicianship and matters arising are the main thing, not me, Mr N.T.E. Barrett.
The last time I took a regular week off from the Factory to devote it to what is now far more than a pastime and also seen by others including some of my AFP colleagues as my life's creative "work", there wasn't any music in it!
That was in March.
I couldn't take music because suddenly it hurt too much, yet I felt completely lost without it. As entries I have referenced below describe in more detail, I then also lost my bearings in life and three "core values" seemed gone: truth, a sense of humour and the "Big L" love.
I mislaid them first regarding myself and then as I channel these things towards others, while I had stopped logging too. Soon I was more clinically manic than ever and occasionally prone to such paranoia that, though I knew it was paranoia, it crippled me every time it struck.
Knowing my irrational feelings for what they were helped, since I could avoid acting on them and try to sleep them off. I did usually, but remained exhausted and at the mercy of wild mood-swings for more than a week before new medication kicked in.
I owe more than survival partly to my own actions and partly to the very few people who realised how ill I was, entering the last phase of a potentially fatal cycle of this bipolar disorder much more widely known as "manic-depression."
Nowadays we're apparently supposed to refer to the disease and its various degrees and shades as a "bipolar disorder", because it sounds so much less worrying, but I've joked about the stupidity of doing so. Irrational worrying about self and others can be a symptom of it, but manic-depression is terrifying enough to merit worry!
The illness should, I think, also be known by an alarming name to remind people what they're dealing with as an disease of body and soul.
Though a journalist by trade, I've always been a teacher by vocation, even if I resisted that calling despite numerous kicks from others to get on with it, for most of my 50 years. While I had no inkling early in March I was depressed, "the blues" hit just while my latest seven-month cycle living with the illness entered the manic phase, and at first I blamed my misery on a series of personal upsets and stress particularly about money.
I lost my centre of gravity, self-love, sense of self-confidence and inclination to laugh at myself soon after having a second big spiritual experience, when I was unable to pull the plug on a brain that crashed a bit like a computer when my mind burned out.
Luc the doctor last year told me and I believed him since I saw him typing away in August, but I only saw for myself that my friend had indeed even used the words "massive spiritual experience" when he filed on my national medical record how something similar happened last July.
By around mid-May, I'd slept enough to recuperate from a lot of what I'd only been able to take to clinicians as a constant but incomprehensible state of "exhaustion". Luc had sent me to a therapist ready to help implement my own "strategy for survival", which I devised in extremis.
I had already seen other therapists whom I regarded as a waste of money. They were only doing their jobs in probing my past, but Luc also felt "they weren't being serious" after I told him of my sense of "been there, done that" and despair in finding someone who would listen to what I needed and do something about it fast.
The man right for the job and for me entered my life, after a long preliminary 'phone call, on April 12. I lied sometimes to people about exactly where the strategy came from in me and pretended I'd been given more help with it than I had. I told lies because I was scared enough for myself without wanting other people's worry, but I'd been warned a third such cycle would do me in forever.
This gave me a seven-month deadline, a word with "death" in it. In some entries, I explore the death urge and giving it the boot. Of late, much previously subconscious stuff seems to have become a part of my spiritual awareness.
The deadline was by around my next birthday, early next October, and in any case, they needed me back at the Factory, since it seems nobody else can yet handle Africa's news like I have edited it in English for AFP in many years of a long career. But I wanted my music back in more senses than one!
The deal happily cut with my bosses late last year was to get these music weeks as the best way of dividing up my time off, right out of the news world and its violence for their duration, until I retire.
The strategy has somehow worked.
From therapy I'd had for well over a year, shortly before a woman I called the Shaman-Shrinkess retired, I was equipped with enough tools to start on healing. By dropping the drug that was bad for me the very day we knew about it, I could slowly bought the wild mood swings under control, with a newly prescribed treatment.
I'm still adapting to two new nightly pills, but can work again after being greatly slowed down, and I didn't think changing medication was sufficient. Spiritually, I found other tools I needed very deep in myself, in past reading and in my experience.
I also had what Luc Yang showed me on my medical file, though I still told him he was bonkers to put it there. The insight of the "massive spiritual experience" last summer that took me back to Taoism for help in understanding it, followed by another in March, has been enough. Some might argue using words like "spiritual experience" in medical records is something you can only get away with in a country still deeply impregnated with a monotheistic religious faith as part of its culture, but they would be wrong.
Luc, who is half-Chinese and not a Roman Catholic, told me: "Nick, that's what I wrote down since that is what happened to you." I long ago decided to be open about that story and never to adorn my insight with hypotheses or speculation, to take such experiences as they came and to spend the rest of my days living with the knowledge they've given me, trying to make sense of it and be wise with it.
So I still have nothing to say about God and little about the interweaved destinies we human beings make for ourselves with our decisions and life choices. I "hear" the "music" of people, while I take life and love, just calling the latter the Big L, as great gifts we must learn how to use well and to channel. When we do, I hear the harmonies in the "music" and the Log has become my means of sharing what I know of these things with an ever deeper understanding that life is all about sharing, while teaching is about giving tools to others.
That is how the Log will go on.
Until things have settled down again there's a suggestion I'll temporarily disregard about how much to show on the home page of the Log and the Orchard. This holds, according to my Log hosts, that "it's a convention in Weblog-Land to set this number to seven -- showing readers one week's worth of news (and music writing here) and ideas (the "weird stuff" out back with the fruit trees, grass and streams)."
On the whole, I like my women up front so I'll give you a bit more to keep the balance, returning to "the roolz" once the dust has stilled around me. However, it may be a good idea, though I'd rather never get that lost again myself, to tell you what's moved.
There are some musicians in the Orchard, which began as a double-dose of sheer lunacy! It was a private place for my friend Eleanor once, though she never went there when I was that crazy about her...
Seeing some of those entries, written before I revealed the Orchard publicly, reminds me to consult the 'I Ching' again and try to get the message more quickly this time. I'll leave that said once more in case people wonder what it was about, all the "gardening."
Now, here's a list. Just before and since I became the maddest March hare a man with a wolf for his shamanistic companion can be, you got:
'Complicated people ... or simply music' (about my favourite blogging women and the one on whose account I ended up in France after a slight linguistic muddle in August 1980, to pick up friendship with again this year - March 4th).
I put that one in the list because it reminds me how I did feel -- if frequently to excess in my "ups and downs" -- before I discovered what "normal feelings" must be like!
Then came the first discussions of my disease and of related issues of the mind and the soul. Remember, I don't know what souls are, but I know we've all got one that gives us our deepest spiritual energies and needs feeding, like our bodies do.
Spiritual issues come up a lot in a 'Blues Triptrick', but I've been cautious with tips on the disease and the tricks it entails and double-checked the little clinical content, because real manic-depression is so very hard to understand. It claims thousands of often young lives and damned near killed me.
So you don't mess around when you write about it. The first part of the triptych came before I learned there would be two more by writing them. They are:
'Blues Triptrick (i) Where the Hell has Nick been?' (which told you about a long absence, covered the three core values, and showed how a musician, Mylène Farmer, came to my rescue - April 8);
'Blues Triptrick (ii) Intro to Lilith and getting laid back' (which does talk about Lilith, along with a crashed computer, raunchy RebeL GrrLs in music, the American psychiatrist 'KP Sauce' who is partly a real woman and partly composite character, and says more about the disease, as well as a French festival of women musicians - April 17);
and 'Blues Triptrick (iii): No Sin in being a Dickhead' (which goes the most deeply into religious and spiritual values, comes down hard against the notion of Original Sin, and pays tribute to a late and very great story-teller - April 18).
While recovering further, I wrote:
'In so dense a forest, we'll need a Knight like Tia' (a long but, I'm told, "engrossing return" to my old way of recounting my life and times in one of Paris's most renowned "gang warfare" districts, together with other bits and pieces like a first look at France's new copyright laws - April 22, with Tia Knight);
'Strange flows the Dom: a fanciful Faust' (an extensive mail that "knocked me out" about my own Faustian quest from an astonishing "ghost writer" who taught me how to kill the dragon - April 23);
'Altered egos and normal states' (the "revelation", for those who hadn't yet figured it out, that Dom A., that "ghost writer" who saved a part of my hide, was essentially no other than a bit of myself, whose existence I'd ignored until the healing strategy brought him and his real components also in other men into conscious awareness - May 6);
 'This Book of Lilith* (i): a brand new chapter';
and This Book of Lilith (ii): a page turned on the Thanatos drive' (a two-part entry somehow inspired by Lilith and saying "No!" to a death instinct that's been only too real at times in my life - May 14, with Sarah Fimm for a good soup recipe, Macy Gray and Paulina Rubio).
Those are already quite a mouthful, written not only for me but sweet people who have told me sometimes they like to drop in over a pot of tea, knowing how prolific I can be at my best ... or otherwise.
I've given an account to my current therapist of what I did to beat it for now, being wise enough to know that can never be for ever. My regular doctor, Luc, had understood already. I owe my life to several people, some of whom I've wronged badly at times, and want to name my ex-wife, Catherine, daughter Marianne, father Ronald Barrett and friend Ellie Beardsley again -- she often crops up as being, well ... "truly weird" herself, since it takes somebody who is, in the simplest and most natural of ways, to put up with what she did at times from me, then tell me I can write exactly what I like about her, which is a great deal.
Few people would take such risks with me!
Anyway, Eleanor's role was unusual in that of everyone, she was the most honest about her ignorance of my kind of illness and how much it frightens her in people. Others pretended to know a lot more, but also cast judgement on me and my abilities in ways that are quite understandable but really unhelpful, because they put the boot in when I was already very down.
Since I do understand them and how they were motivated by real concern for me, I'd rather mention this and say it has just been a part of their "music". The harsh criticisms were fine, I acknowledge deserving most, but not when I got them, because the worst thing you can do around such a sick person is to fuel their own fears and insecurity. Avoiding that is just a part of learning life.
In those columns and elsewhere I have named the psychiatrists, American and French -- apart from retired Shaman-Shrinkess France Grisard -- who are also the writers from whom I learned most about a disease it's too easy to blame just on physical causes or your upbringing, when unhealthy and unwise living plays a very large role.
Grisard's place has been taken by a man who seems to let me do things my own way just as long as they make sound sense to him. From experience, I can say that therapists wise enough to trust a smart patient's judgement like he does mine and only intervene if he felt I might get something wrong aren't easy to find.
Outstanding among the authors is Kay, whom I've yet personally to thank for her courage, insight, life's work and writing about a disease she knows from the inside as I do.
Kay Redfield Jamison (a good Wikipedia entry) has inspired me to come clean as a journalist skilled with words because she knows and wrote in her prologue to her own "memoir of moods and madness", 'An Unquiet Mind,' that those who can write like us shouldn't behave:
"as though I have something to hide. One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still that: dishonest. Necessary, perhaps, but dishonest. I continue to have concerns about my decision to be public about my illness, but one of the advantages of having had manic-depressive illness for more than thirty years is that very little seems insurmountably difficult. Much like crossing the Bay Bridge when there is a storm over the Chesapeake, one may be terrified to go forward, but there is no question of going back. I find myself somewhat inevitably taking a certain solace in Robert Lowell's essential question, Yet why not say what happened?"
Since I can't express a fully shared sentiment better myself with feelings I'm now newly learning like a baby and know to be "ordinary" at last, I shan't. Kay said it then, about 10 years ago. I also have been foolish with money and my moods, with the people I love and with those I really don't like but now try to avoid rather than judging them, a right I lost last year.
On this Log, there's been much self-disclosure in the past, but I have hidden things too, deceiving others and myself, and I've tended -- particularly during my big "downers" -- to play down some of the insight and knowledge that is the extraordinary, beneficial aspect of a disease that has its "highs", hence talk of a fine line between genius and madness.
I've begun to write about what some call my ESP, which is real and grew stronger as part of the healing process, but I've declared too -- by way of my understanding of other societies and cultures much closer to nature than me in my inner city apartment -- that these "extra-sensory perceptions" of mine don't single me out. I grant it can be weird, but believe I've simply developed faculties innate to all of us. I have to learn about these too...
If I were very different from others, there would be little point in keeping this Log, since we're all fellow teachers, even people I can't abide for long when I feel they're being selfish and stupid. They may be, but I've become good with mirrors when I see them.
What I like least in anyone is purposeless secrecy, the kind about ourselves we believe shelters us from others but really fails to protect anyone and often works against us in the long run. I gradually learned to give up my own secrets as early as I dared, though I need to try to overdose less the other way!
I love, admire and respect many of the women I write about for doing the same because without them and their music, I truly wouldn't know how just normal and ordinary I really am. I know something else useful too, which we'll learn over and again as we go always with the music, finding how women teach that "no man is an island" and we need never feel alone.
This is a very great truth to know in our solitude.
Perhaps the Lilith I've begun to write about -- who will slowly find her place here among the musicians who have often chosen her for their own heroine, guide and name-giver to their festive fairs -- is that "eternal feminine" Dom, who has become a part of myself, showed one man he is seeking throughout a life marked by a bad habit of projecting her on to real women, the long-suffering creatures!
If, however, it is to be a real music week again and a page has really been turned, I reckon it may well be another quiet one. The best Log entries have often been those that have taken me by surprise! I enjoy the process of discovering what they have to teach me. So I declare a "music week" in line with those orders to "rest and recuperate" before they want to see me at the Factory again.
I apologise, finally, to a -- very small -- number of women who have even offered to help me break a vow I never did take a long time ago, since my life just happened that way. Some rare advances also got me asking the doctor a few weeks back, "Why on earth is it people come for advice with their sex lives to somebody who hasn't had any for around 14 years?"
"What do you tell them?" he asked back, so I told him what I've said since I stopped making a secret of this, and Luc reassured me: "I guess that's why they come to you -- since it isn't all about sex, is it? It's about love and relationships. And you tell them the same things as I do."
This may not be the week for it, but with Lilith firmly implanted in my mind, I plan to take Lady E up on the best advice anyone gave me, which was: "Nick, get a life!" By which wise words of course Eleanor really meant, "Get yourself a woman again!"
It isn't Lilith, but there is someone who is very fair and has become free, but could only take the way I've sometimes behaved "in small doses"! We both seem to want the same things: simplicity, generosity, honesty, music, a natural life, lots of humour and not too much of a rush! I don't know if this will work out, but I sure plan to give it a go.
However it goes, I rather doubt I shall be writing much more about a "flower girl" of whom I'm fond and her "music".
So, to a small handful of other lasses, I can only say, "Thank you, you've been most remarkably kind and I do appreciate such forward and becoming behaviour, but I'm ever so sorry. The very last things I want now are to be multiple again and complications of any kind."
I've managed in life sometimes by presenting myself and others with false problems and using them to solve real ones. But there can be enough real ones as it is. When a friend -- writing out of what I knew to be a feeling of helplessness -- recently said she felt sorry for me and wished me courage in that "battle with your mind", then told me of her confidence. She had no way of knowing a battle was finished, but I'll never be complacent in saying that again.
I felt surer the latest round was over when she and a few others could reassure me: "I understand and I believe you." Those are the last words I want to leave on the subject of the illness some of us live with, when much of the faith that makes it possible for me to write them came from people who helped me to believe in myself again. I haven't named them all.
I'm pretty sure of my intuition about Lilith.
If ever we find her at all, she may indeed be widely seen as a witch with a "Satanic" side but she'll be a white witch too, no feared incarnation of evil, and her place is beside a well, or a spring, deep inside all of us and it's behind a door. We all have that door in ourselves from the day we know to open it and stop being afraid of what we'll find in our souls.
________
*We shall be seeing lots more of Lilith.
The serpentine perspective pictured is by English painter John Collier (1850-1934), who was rather less uptight than some of his contemporaries and clearly liked straight jackets no more than me.
Paul Ripley, who has a web site on his own passion, Victorian Art, quotes Collier's obituary in The Times, which said that in 1920, the painter had these words for critics of his "problem pictures":
"They are nothing of the kind. The ones that have been so-termed merely depict the little tragedies of modern life, and I have always endeavoured to make the meanings perfectly plain. If I ever again paint a picture of modern life, which is doubtful, I shall give it a title a yard long, setting forth the history of the characters, and if necessary their names and addresses."
I think I like Collier! But I shall go on leaving out the addresses myself.
10:41:04 PM 
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