Bipolar Disorder: Entrails + Wormtrails
CW: suicidal ideation
It began with the yew berries. Just a few of them at first — upon the windscreen, bonnet, roof. A morning ritual of scraping them off, only to smear their sticky juices further across the glass. Better to leave them be, I wondered. Neighbours laughed — “park there and it’ll be those damned berries all summer, and bird shit come spring”. Someone offered to lend me a hose. I’d walked into town, initially. An hour and a half each way, through the combe and over the fields, sweating on the final slog up the lane towards my working life. A slower trundle home at dusk, collecting wild garlic, elderflowers, blackberries. But then I grew sluggish and followed the wrong footpaths, stumbled over roots and caught my feet between stones, muddled, incoherent — eventually immobilised. The car showed up just in time, a gift. Standing at the window of the bedroom, I can see the yew tree. From the bed I cannot. Is this a boudoir? Semantic connection, French, “to sulk”. Or a bedroom? Semantic connection, English, “to dig (a sleeping place in the ground)”?
Somatically, fear is often experienced in our bellies, in “the pit of our stomachs”. Anxiety brings forth “butterflies” or churning convulsions. Faecal analogies pepper our discussions of creative flow, blockages, the diarrhoea of verbal scatterings. If we consider digestion and the ideals of our prevailing culture as movement patterns or trajectories, we can begin to learn something about the disjuncture between the two. Mirroring the upward, outward drives of so many human lives, the radiant image of the eagle — “triumphant over all obstacles”, says Bataille — which in alliance with the sun, represents imperialism; cut-throat victory. Profit, accumulation, status, authority; all call upon mythical notions of ascent, sublimation, freedom from the dark and stultifying states which we’re heaven bent on soaring above.
Digestion, conversely, lures us into the world of descent. Guided by gravity, a downwards motion governed by mass and weight; the heaviness of things and the rotting away of things. Whilst the “sky may be the limit” of our productive drives, the descent of digestion is a gesture towards the ground; a transformation of the ripe and fresh into discarded mucous membrane, odorous debris, old proteins. Faeces are less recognisable as fertiliser when lolling about in bleached porcelain bowls. To descend is to shatter delusions, burrow into the heartlands, embodied. Darwin knew something of this, writing in joyous awe of the earthworm — those creatures whose lives’ work is digestion, making and re-making the surface of the earth itself. Munched up, now and again, by Marx, or Hamlet’s father, beneath the boards (“Well said, old mole! Canst work i’ the ground so fast?”). We might uncover crafty allies, venturing into the bowels of things.
But I am not a clever worm or an Old Mole. My body assimilates its new components. The cartographies of my innards and their memories — the churned, the chucked, the stuck — reveal a corruption of comings and goings. I know a maverick, Matthew Remski. He writes:
I hate that word: processing. Have we only started using it since computers? As if memory is a problem to be solved, and not some chaotic weight that immobilises you in one moment and then vanishes with the simplest shift of weather or perspective.
Indeed, there are moments in our lives when the weather shifts cruelly, our bowels drop and guts spasm — an unspeakably sensual agony. The sudden or slow deaths of those we love, losses of all kinds, unwelcome encounters on dark nights. Sitting in a hospital, facing a psychiatrist and being told that you have a disorder at the heart of your psyche is one such occasion. The trail reaches an impenetrable thicket, the soil scatters and shifts. A new path emerges — not formed of cobblestones or compacted and well-trodden mud. It is a tightrope of silk, straddling a cavern far beneath the world you’ve known. In moments it glistens, and in others it becomes invisible, treacherous in its intangibility. You must learn to eat your carrots.
The chemicals I imbibe and digest, alien at first and then routine, offer strange dreams. The forager knows the tasty fruits and the poisonous ones. I dream of concoctions brewed with yew needles, of fluorescent berries squished and their seeds extracted by a pang for death. The violent against themselves: Dante’s infernal suicides who are planted as trees, immobilised by their own murderous surrender. Death by yew can be abrupt and silent, or slow and agonising — tremors, vomiting, convulsions, the heart splutters with fright. Some psychoanalysts suggest that to attack one’s own body is to enact violence upon one’s mother. Borne as we are, of so many wombs, endless screaming passages, blistering exposures and spliced cords, who are our mothers? In my dreams the car and the wind blowing through the trees are gathering death for me, day by day.
I cease to move forwards, to produce. Many of us have become so finely attuned to the notion of work as a productive, output-driven ascent that we disregard the quiet work that comprises our just being alive. I tell myself this as I slurp tea and watch Outlander in bed. Digestion, like mourning or ageing, is a maceration that happens in fits and starts, at full volume or in whispers. John Bowker, in The Meanings of Death, notes that many myths across cultures “relate the origins of death to trivial accidents or to seemingly unimportant choices”. It is surprisingly easy to die. In the service of the head, we hone our bodies as instruments, for how can we reach maximum productivity, our ultimate capabilities, with a fault in the apparatus? The body — that is to say, the sum site of experience — becomes the vehicle by which we might succeed or fail, be good or bad, high or low, dead or alive. We wonder what our experiences might become as they are digested, but how can we live with our not knowing? The unpredictability of digestion does not fit the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as airborne eagles, swooping over the compost heaps of our former lives.
Sometimes I totter over to the desk and lay them all out in formation. I like to move them around a bit too — mood stabilisers to the North, SSRIs to the West, an SNRI to the East and benzodiazapenes to the South, an undercurrent or a bridge. Then I switch them around, a new map of effects — uppers, downers, inbetweeners, ropes and crutches. A game of Tetris, an ordnance survey of a body’s gaps. Then I throw them all up in the air, laugh at the daftness of it all, and chuck some down my throat.
Starved by straightened out cycles of the fallow and the fertile, we divert upwards to the head and its efforts, inadequately sustained (if not actively disturbed) by the proffers of our thwarted families, communities, cultures, biosphere. Adam Phillips tells us that Darwin and Freud, those sceptics of man’s perfectibility, posited our aspirational ideals as mechanisms of denial, “refuges that stop us living in the world as it is and finding out what it is like, and therefore what we could be like in it”. So, what happens when our shoelaces become untied? What happens when our minds dribble out of our noses, our eyes, our mouths?
From this room, with its bed and its desk, I refuse to move. Perhaps refusal to move or to be moved might carve a space between ingestion and dispersion which allows for the transformation of old materials into new ones — a quotidian sort of alchemy. Facing the faeces, allowing for digestion, like allowing for mourning, requires that we unravel our grip, risk chaotic decline, the snags on the cavern’s walls, madness. Whether gorging on knowledge, networks, or our own emotional states, we find ourselves trapped in a groundless realm, when all we really want to do is to dig a hole and place something in it — a flag, a stone, a scream.
Unstable ground can hold us up, wobbly though we may feel amidst these lives that can be mad, bad, sad, and all the rest. Such ground might not feature a trail to follow or ramparts to contain us, but there are arms beneath our feet nonetheless. When the drooping branches of a yew tree hit the ground they take root, form new trunks, a new tree and an old one, ongoing, ongoing, separate and yet the same. This is happening somewhere right now, in a graveyard, near you.
