die in the air, heaven too sweet for words or birdsong and therefore heaven unbearable for want of the imperfect, the twig that scratches, the awkward flit, the shadow that marks the afternoon, as if Earth is charged with the task of offering resistance to a perfect plainsong paradise.
When I found it hard to speak or, worse, hard to think, I played the piano. Sometimes I felt that it was descriptive playing â I played myself outwards, describing myself to the world, but this could go wild, as I played faster than my fingers could manage until, in the third movement of the âMoonlight Sonataâ, the arpeggios ran to chaotic breakdown, a pile of notes spilling out of the keyboardâs grip, falling scattered on the floor like a cascade of jackstraws, impossible to recollect. Sometimes I played like a kind of emotional blood-letting, to let out an excess of sadness or joy, to let it bleed out through the keys and into the absorbent air, until I played myself empty, but this tipped me into a barren loneliness, the self unecholocated in music.
There were moments when I played better than I ever have in my life, precisely because I could step over, into the music. The notes were in me like laughter before it is born into the world, like thought before it is formed in words; the melody was in my fingers already, only wanting a cue, a key signature, to begin.
The philosopher Susanne Langer in the 1950s suggested that music doesnât so much represent emotion as mimic it. If it mimicsemotion, it can surely also guide emotion, lead it, conduct it. The seventeenth-century musician Werckmeister theorized that well-crafted counterpoint was linked to the ordered progression of the planets, to the harmony of the spheres. At best, music harmonized me, it put the planets in order in my psyche, harmonized the hemispheres.
Most of the time, though, music-less, my brain felt like a jumble sale, stories unravelling like jumpers, torn quotes for 50p, a tatty memory, a broken joke, bits of thought, shreds of mashed paper, a malfunctioning processor, a tilted cabinet of shoddy files.
I blame Mercury. The rascal. In his footlooserie he was kicking up logic like leaves in the heels of his fast, feathered flight.
All the old gods were aspects of mind, personifications of psychology, if you like, and Mercury is surely the god of manic depression. He has sneaked into language when we say someone is mercurial, the ancient Greeks and Romans intuiting something of the workings of the mind, for âmercurialityâ is the perfect word for the volatiles, those who fly too high and swoop too low, wings at their heels.
So Mercury flirted with me, intoxicated me and intrigued me. He seems to personify â with incredible precision â the features, character, experience and facets of manic depression. Mercury is known as one of the Trickster gods, and a huge number of cultures seem to acknowledge this very specific character. So widespread indeed is the Trickster figure that it leads me to suspect that it is in fact a code word for an aspect of the human psyche, recognized throughout history and across the world: and that aspect is tristimanic. That trickiest of conditions.
When you know what youâre looking for, the sign of the Trickster is everywhere. He is there in fiction and in non-fiction, in the ancient texts and in sharply contemporary satires: he is there in Shakespeare, and in so many artists, writers and musicians.
But to Mercury, first. Even as a baby, Hermes âhas the look of aheraldâ, we read in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Like a good messenger, he travels as well by night as by day; air or water or earth are equally his to cross. God of the Rizla packet used to catch a thought unawares or a scribbled phone number after a flirting night, Mercury carries crazy messages across the unhoused brain. For weeks of madness, Mercury had played my mind in the key of havoc; he wonât come at my bidding but
When I found it hard to speak or, worse, hard to think, I played the piano. Sometimes I felt that it was descriptive playing â I played myself outwards, describing myself to the world, but this could go wild, as I played faster than my fingers could manage until, in the third movement of the âMoonlight Sonataâ, the arpeggios ran to chaotic breakdown, a pile of notes spilling out of the keyboardâs grip, falling scattered on the floor like a cascade of jackstraws, impossible to recollect. Sometimes I played like a kind of emotional blood-letting, to let out an excess of sadness or joy, to let it bleed out through the keys and into the absorbent air, until I played myself empty, but this tipped me into a barren loneliness, the self unecholocated in music.
There were moments when I played better than I ever have in my life, precisely because I could step over, into the music. The notes were in me like laughter before it is born into the world, like thought before it is formed in words; the melody was in my fingers already, only wanting a cue, a key signature, to begin.
The philosopher Susanne Langer in the 1950s suggested that music doesnât so much represent emotion as mimic it. If it mimicsemotion, it can surely also guide emotion, lead it, conduct it. The seventeenth-century musician Werckmeister theorized that well-crafted counterpoint was linked to the ordered progression of the planets, to the harmony of the spheres. At best, music harmonized me, it put the planets in order in my psyche, harmonized the hemispheres.
Most of the time, though, music-less, my brain felt like a jumble sale, stories unravelling like jumpers, torn quotes for 50p, a tatty memory, a broken joke, bits of thought, shreds of mashed paper, a malfunctioning processor, a tilted cabinet of shoddy files.
I blame Mercury. The rascal. In his footlooserie he was kicking up logic like leaves in the heels of his fast, feathered flight.
All the old gods were aspects of mind, personifications of psychology, if you like, and Mercury is surely the god of manic depression. He has sneaked into language when we say someone is mercurial, the ancient Greeks and Romans intuiting something of the workings of the mind, for âmercurialityâ is the perfect word for the volatiles, those who fly too high and swoop too low, wings at their heels.
So Mercury flirted with me, intoxicated me and intrigued me. He seems to personify â with incredible precision â the features, character, experience and facets of manic depression. Mercury is known as one of the Trickster gods, and a huge number of cultures seem to acknowledge this very specific character. So widespread indeed is the Trickster figure that it leads me to suspect that it is in fact a code word for an aspect of the human psyche, recognized throughout history and across the world: and that aspect is tristimanic. That trickiest of conditions.
When you know what youâre looking for, the sign of the Trickster is everywhere. He is there in fiction and in non-fiction, in the ancient texts and in sharply contemporary satires: he is there in Shakespeare, and in so many artists, writers and musicians.
But to Mercury, first. Even as a baby, Hermes âhas the look of aheraldâ, we read in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Like a good messenger, he travels as well by night as by day; air or water or earth are equally his to cross. God of the Rizla packet used to catch a thought unawares or a scribbled phone number after a flirting night, Mercury carries crazy messages across the unhoused brain. For weeks of madness, Mercury had played my mind in the key of havoc; he wonât come at my bidding but
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