The Family Sickness:

In Theory:

  I moved back into the party and tried to reassure the family about my mother, who had sunk into the couch, frightened, her eyes following me. “My mom’s all right,” I told my cousins. “She gets like this sometimes.”

  My father cut in. “Betty Lee is just having a little case of the whim-whams.”
In our family “whim-wham” is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970’s and ‘80’s – when they were all straight depression – we called them “dark nights of the soul.” St. John of the Cross’ phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it.

   We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started, the year my dad, brother and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolar disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams. 
(p. 5)

And In Practice:

   I told my dad about the ambulance, that we were taking (Mom) to the hospital. I knew my father understood the situation deep down, knew he couldn't duck it. Below his smile, his careful manners, beneath his delusions, he knew it was grave. He knew his wife was near death and that he was not right and that he had left her there dying. He knew the soy protein was bullshit, that he sang the hymns all alone.  He knew that his chattered prayers were all bent and broken and still he prayed to God they would work.  And they did, too, because I came to triage his mind and pick up my mother, because I knew what to do; I’d been on both sides.  My father watched from his full blown mania, from his paranoid seat at the right hand of God, as the disgusted EMT’s stared at his smile with horror and lifted my mother onto the gurney.

  I love my father. I knew what he was attempting because I’ve done it at times, passed myself off as sane by sheer force of will. Like my father, I’ve seen the beautiful cartwheel of thoughts pitch past and crash and I’ve learned not to speak of them, to let them all go. I can stand inside a desperate circus and force my mind to slow, if only for a few moments. It is the hardest work I’ve ever known. And now I watched my father attempt it, try to gather a mind much deeper than mine; try to hold back a green interior ocean full of monsters and wonders. I watched as he reeled in each rocking moment, as he stood in her bedroom and loved her and smiled.             
(p.14)

 

On Why I Wrote this Book:

  Five years ago I was manic and sat on our porch with (Mary) and her brother. Mary was seven and Hunter just three; I was forty-two and full blown. She had some clay and we sat and made figures while my mind rushed away and I tried not to follow; I tried to stay home. My wife Roberta came home and rescued me just like the first time, twenty-two years ago. Roberta is quiet, strong. She knows the school calendar and remembers the mortgage. She leaves me notes in the morning. She says the kids will be fine, that they take after her side on this, my family’s disease. They’ll have, she said, the best of both worlds and I want to believe her.

   But I want to be ready. I’ve seen both my parents drown in the sickness. I’ve seen my brother sink down. I’ve denied my own madness and I’ve loved it almost to death. All my life I’ve heard my family blame each other, some devil, some church, genetics and shrinks. We come up for air but never swim home. We’re ashamed and afraid of our minds. I want to believe my wife and not worry.  I want to get strong and show my kids how. I want my family fearless and proud.     
(P. 29)

 

On Mania:

  Thought rose out of its banks and it spilled through sex, God and dreams, mysterious places the mind should not trespass. Mania flooded my tidy little village of memory and constructs, the sunny little place where I play, where I keep my desires amused. All the lines fell and connections sparked and went black and hissed through the water.

  What I knew of the world mutated continually, all a huge metaphor now – broken and heavy and rolling straight toward me. When I pulled on a thought it unraveled to trees to asphalt, spilled horizons and suns. I needed to look away and I knew it was already too late; I was blind and just babbling. This is it, I thought, this is madness and my family was chosen. I wanted my father, my brother and I knew I could talk with them now; I would meet them out on electric fields. I knew why my father held hands and tried to share it and I knew why my brother punched him out trying to save them.

  My thoughts moved so fast they begin to hum, and that humming was music, absolutely sublime movements strafed with dissonance and twelve tone. My father sang all his hymns because everything did. Twenty years later, I know that music well. It’s symphonic and fast and above all it is inclusive and sung by everything - every tree, rock and smokestack. These song cycles draw a skein up under experience, increasing its tempos, tightening the harmonies, connecting it all. There's a transcendental romance to mania, to this drawing together. And I believed, still believe, that this music is true, that the scattershot visions of madness are holy. They are also fucking crazy and hopeless and sad.

  At its core the transcendental manic experience remains one of great loneliness. It transcends, but it rarely translates. True visions find their grounding and validity in the universal, the spiritual, but these visions are poured into each cooking skull, one at a time. You’ll burn before you can share them. The face of God blinds and it burns, make no mistake. Approach these breaks in a sentimental fashion and you’ll find yourself seduced by nervous, chattering ghosts, maybe lost there for good. Worse, put your vision in a pulpit, wrap it up in some patchwork doctrinal robe, and you’re absolutely finished - done.

  In Olympia that summer I fell into a bottomless, unpeopled hell – the absolute cold knowledge that I’d gone quite mad, that no one could ever hold me again. Still, I thought maybe I could work out the sense. I needed to remember it, write it and speak it. I needed to organize and so fell to my knees, gathering rocks and muttering. So what if I was mad? Of course I was mad. Everyone should be mad.

  To hell with all the people who stared. I had done it, broken through Ahab’s pasteboard mask and harpooned my whale. I would justify my mania, all this quicksilver. I would speak it and write it before it all burnt, before it was smote down to ash and forgotten. The others would see, the ones who stared at the floor to avoid my fucked eyes, who whispered while leaving and never came back. I wrote broken poetry. I spun and I shouted past all the sweet music.
I was a god and I was scared shitless.
(p. 178)

On Depression & Grace:

“David, let me in. It's Sarah. I have food.”
“Leave it.” I was so stupid and mean, such a mess she couldn't see me.
“David,” she teased, “now don't make me break in here.”

I saw her standing there, perfectly blond, a sorority sister. - cute as hell and utterly different from me, from this. I'd flirted with her through the first week, through Loomings and Queequeg. I can't see her, I thought, not like this, not wrapped in my shrouds. “Hi, Sarah. I'm sorry, just leave it. I'm sorry.”
“I won't just leave it.”

So I stood slowly, naked and sick. I pulled up the sheet and covered my sickness and stood by the door. “Alright, Sarah. Alright.” I cracked open the door and she was shining. I took the tin foiled plate and she stopped the door with her foot.
“I'll see you later, David. I'm coming to check.”

“No, please.” My old mind knew I should love this, anticipate this, her coming to me. But that was gone, I knew it. This cold, sharp piece of knowledge cut at my chest and I wanted to cut it out with knives. Instead I took Sarah's food and leaned over the stove. I ate chicken. I ate at a thigh till I saw the bone, the small veins, and I spat at the sink. I ate rice. My jaw felt like a cramp in the chewing. I bit the side of my cheek, again then again. I just shredded it. There was cake. I couldn't even look at the cake.

  I sat on the bed. I wanted to call Sarah and tell her not to come but I couldn't. I couldn't even do that, let alone stick my head in the stove. Sarah was wrong. She could get hurt, I could hurt her. She wouldn't come she was just being nice. She won't. It's just pity, like you pity small animals that twitch on the road. I don't need a fucking night nurse. I need this to stop. This horseshit body all pasty and white, my filthy cock and idiot stare.  It was wrong of me to eat their food, to mumble, to go to their party. They shouldn't have asked me. They shouldn't have had to. I'm a sinner. Okay? Okay so I said it. Sinner. Flesh. I'm garbage and Christ if he ever existed he would spit in my face and I'd fucking clock him.

  No no no not that I'm sorry forgive me not that. Still. Cast out my demons, go ahead try. I'm Legion. The door has a lock. It locks. I should be dead - dead dead. Nothing after, no stupid heaven. If there is a fucking God and he cares he will leave us all dead. He'll slit open my belly and suck out my soul. Leave it dead on his cloud or some shit.

  I moved across the room like an arthritic and checked the locks on the door. I knew I could keep her out, that I would but I moved toward the bathroom, toward the shower. I scrubbed my white stomach raw and scraped at my groin. I smelled of soap and rot and went back to the mattress to wait. Sarah came and I just let her. I was wrapped in my sheet and she moved to the window and let up the blind. She was beautiful by that window, painted with light like a Vermeer. She turned and looked at me and I had to watch her face. I could not look away but I thought that I should. She undressed and all the time she looked in my bee-stung eyes.

  I laid my mind in her breasts and she smelled of sunlight. I curled up against her belly, my leg caught over her her soft perfect hip. Her breath was the only air in that undersea room and she saved me from drowning. She whispered but I just heard her breathing and her hair fell down across my eyes and I slept. The following day the Melville seminar ended. I returned to Colorado and Sarah went elsewhere. I never saw her again.
(p. 121)

 

On Meds:

  I don’t claim to understand neuroscience. I understand the role of transubstantiation in Holy Communion more than the dopaminergic causation of visions.  I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielson Ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tragedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, twenty percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads that sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I’m wrong about lithium. They don’t have a clue.                                             
(p. 200)