Like the poet Dante I have beheld the most horrifying madness, utter despair, and tortured souls...at so many different times in my life...each time to 'rise above the sun and smile', in my own words. My last descent into mental hell began in January 09', upon telling a friend of good news and finding that he could have cared less, preferring rather, that I join him in misery. Teetering on the edge of the abyss as I was, it was not difficult to fall. I fell headlong from about mid-January to May 1st, when I was well enough to decide to crawl out of the grave, resume my yoga practice, and the thirst for life. Through it all I chanted what was a dull monotony of Sanskrit chanting, that literally kept me from killing myself. Chanting has been my saving grace. It is now, as I chant for hours daily, including, most importantly, the Reman Shabd while in Bound Lotus. Like the monks who became sick and melancholy when the Catholic church stopped the plainchant, and until it resumed for those monks, I am indebted to chanting and singing mantras for my relative evenness of mood. When I stop, or cut back, I become like Cinderella after midnight.
Being from a family where suicide is historically prevalent, as well as debilitating depression and mania, I am well acquainted with misery and it's depths. What surprises me now, is my almost hypnotic gravitation toward things full of darkness, especially when I have not been able to sleep without the lights on for more than a decade. At night I do not like the dark.
But this morning, I am drawn to re-read William Styron's "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness." I am drawn to listen to The Cure's 'Lullaby', and yet, curiously, also the tinny plinking sound of 'Lara's Theme' from the movie "Dr. Zhivago". This amuses me. All of it. I have my ideas about what all of this means, and as I am in no hurry to revisit the depths of despair I found myself in at it's worst last March and April, I will continue what is now practically 4 hours a day of yoga, meditation and chanting. Even though, during that time I touch the madness and the pain from my past, I feel that it is coming up from the very depths of my soul to be healed.
Dangerous but necessary work this is...
And so this rather long essay (it appears) is a meditation on madness and the way it can transform into peace and joy.
I think of Wim Wender's strange and beautiful film: "Wings of Desire", and the 'storyteller' listening to a tiny music box. I see myself bending my ear close to listen to first the small keychain music box my mother placed in my Christmas stocking one year, and the beautiful blue intarsia one I gave her years later. Both play 'Lara's Theme', a favorite of my mother's and a sound with the regenerative effects much like Albinoni's Adagio has for the residents of Sarajevo in "The Cellist of Sarajevo", and that Brahms Alto Rhapsody had for William Styron.
I am sad. I am hurting. I am remembering the indescretions of my grandfather and grandmother, the sexual misuse of my body many, many boyfriends, being treated as if my only purpose in life were to serve men's sexual needs, uninvited to movies, shows, concerts and other outings, but useful in the bedroom. Remembering the grief of nearly dying from pregnancy, and the uncaring thoughtlessness of the man in my life. Remembering stories of a great aunt who hung herself upon hearing she was pregnant with twins. She had six children already. Remembering how horribly sick my mother was with me, her physical and emotional abuse toward my sister and I, and her changing as a mother, only to hate herself for who she had been. This long saga...miasma of grief and misery stemming back to my grandmother's rape and abuse at the hands of her stepfather. Memories not even my own...and they come up in the meditation room to be healed. Which is what I do. I am a healer of others and myself.
Each time these pains and griefs return the damage they can do to my life lessens. Working the grief out slowly feels like I imagine the writing of Dostoevsky's "War and Peace" to have been. It is rough going, but necessary work, as pills and therapy never worked for me; I expect because on the one hand pharmeceuticals like Ativan and Seroquel created psychosis for me, and on the other because I had really bad luck with therapists. Except for one. But that is another story.
Wounded Healer that I am, I use everything I can: Chanting, meditation, reflection, devotion, Reiki, crystals, healthy food, walks in nature, the re-reading of books. And here, while I want now to read Sobin, Woolf, Plath, Hedayat and Styron I feel a monsoon of tears on it's way. I know I have more grief to air out into the sunlight. As I read Styron, I find an incredible depth of feeling in his words, his explanation of the path through the darkness to the light:
"The morbid condition proceeded, I have come to believe, from my beginning years - from my father, who battled the gorgon for much of his lifetime, and had been hospitalized in my boyhood after a despondent spiraling downward that in retrospect I saw greatly resembled mine. The genetic roots of depression seem now to beyond controversy. But I'm persuaded that an even more significant factor was the death of my mother when I was thirteen; this disorder and early sorrow - the death or disappearance of a parent, especially a mother, before or during puberty - appears repeatedly in the literature on depression as a trauma sometimes likely to create nearly irreparable emotional havoc. The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed 'incomplete mourning' - has, in effect, been unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himself through later years an insufferable burden of which rage and guilt, and not only dammed-up sorrow, are a part, and become the potential seeds of self-destruction.
"...So if this theory of incomplete mourning has validity, and I think it does, and if it is also true that in the nethermost depths of one's suicidal behaviour one is still subconsciously dealing with immense loss while trying to surmount all the effects of it's devastation, then my own avoidance of death may have been belated homage to my mother. I do know that in those last hours before I rescued myself, when I listened to the passage from the 'Alto Rhapsody' - which I'd heard her sing - she had been very much on my mind."
- to be continued-
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