My Cousin Nell

My intention is to eventually write another book, the working title of which is: Nell: The Short, Sweet, Sad, Sublime, Life of My Manic-Depressive Cousin. She was practicing transcendental meditation and tai chi, especially a posture she called the circle stance (which I can’t find online) she would do for hours at a time. She wrote an extraordinary poem I entitle This Body which includes the line: “I must say this body because ‘I’ is something more now. Vast, oh so big.” She had earlier written about joining “the starry vastness.” But great fear started coming up in her and she had a premonition, sadly terribly accurate, of what was to come, for she wrote in the last line of This Body: “If the Chi warmth leaves while I sleep, there’s no telling, no telling. . . .”

And it did leave, leaving her full of fear. Fear of that devastating immensity Beethoven described in the first movement of the Ninth, which the masters I write of make very certain they kept out of their consciousnesses. And she started running from that fear, trying desperately to escape what is ultimately inescapable. She knew it was the wrong thing to do, she even wrote a note (found later by her mother): “should have meditated.” That running led her to be hospitalized, given shock treatment . . . and to buy the gun.

So this is what I want to pass on, briefly, here. If that fear starts coming up in any of you, see if it’s possible to not react to it. Keep sitting. Listen to some of the music. Read Cabeza. Email me. I’ve been through it. To the nth degree. Believe me.

I have read numerous books about, and by, manic depressives, schizophrenics, and autistics, as well as other mental “disorders.” The more I read the more I’m convinced the root of most mental “illness” is fear, or rather, the reaction to fear. I write in Cabeza that fear is really our link to the infinite. The finite being is terrified, but the infinite spirit within us all knows deep down this is what we really are. Below is from Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, by Daniel Tammit (who earlier in the book had made clear that he withdrew from people because of fear):

Page 222-223: “I still remember vividly the experience I had as a teenager lying on the floor of my room staring up at the ceiling. I was trying to picture the universe in my head, to have a concrete understanding of what “everything” was. In my mind I traveled to the edges of existence and looked over them, wondering what I would find. In that instant I felt really unwell and I could feel my heart beating hard inside me, because for the first time I had realized that thought and logic had limits and could only take a person so far. This realization frightened me and it took me a long time to come to terms with it.” Page 226: he has a “perfect moment. . . . All of a sudden I experienced a kind of self-forgetting and in that brief, shining moment all my anxiety and awkwardness seemed to disappear. . . . If a person can somehow collect [all such moments]. . . . I think in that hour or day he would be closer to the mystery of what it is to be human. It would be like having a glimpse of heaven.”

This is why, as Jamison points out in Touched with Fire, so many if not virtually all of the greatest artists, musicians, authors, and even scientists (one of Einstein’s sons was schizophrenic, showing that he likely had some of those genes also) were not exactly “normal” mentally. Some, like van Gogh were driven to the limits, or rather beyond the limits, of sanity and even to suicide. (Click here to read more about van Gogh, and scroll down to two of his greatest paintings.) As T.S. Eliot (himself manic-depressive) wrote: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” I.e., the finite being cannot bear it. But it is possible, if unimaginably difficult, to find freedom from that finite being. To this, to the best that I have been able . . . I have devoted my life.

I think I was born — nay, conceived — about as miserable as a person can be. Cabeza:

"In my family I had two cousins and an aunt who didn’t make it: they killed themselves. A sister, most of whose brief thirty-nine years were a sad parade in and out of mental institutions. An uncle I never met, writer and pianist who, probably with semi-suicidal motivation, joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco and fascism in the Spanish Civil War. And never returned."

I am most deeply indebted to Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, which I discovered about 20 years ago, for clueing me into how I had such a temperament myself, albeit mostly depressive, and that it was something that runs in families. I made two attempts at suicide in high school, then flunked out of college — twice — because it all seemed so meaningless. But then I found sitting -- the hard way, by trial and error -- my way of sitting. The way of just simply being with that fear, that depression, that "Hell" . . . .