musings – Page 15 – roughghosts

As the year draws to a close…

At the beginning of 2014 my world was rapidly spinning out of control. There were clear indications that the extreme stress and toxic work environment I was living under was taking its toll. I was clearly struggling to hold myself together but like any good manic depressive I could not step aside and recognize the crisis that was unfolding. No one else in my life had the understanding to step in either and, in all fairness, I am not sure how I would have responded.

Now, at the end of the year, I have been out of the office for six months. My future is unclear. I had loved my work with brain injured adults and their families. It was challenging, rewarding and I was well respected. At least until I went crazy.

As soon as I walked away from my job I realized the price I had paid to build a career from community field worker to manager in less than a dozen years. I had intentionally alienated myself from people. I have always been a person inclined to isolation, shy in a curiously outgoing way. Public speaking does not phase me at all. I could speak to a crowd of 300, riffing on a theme if necessary, but face to face small talk is uncomfortable. The thought of baring my soul to another person in real time, over a coffee perhaps, is almost unbearable. In my life I have made few friends and had only two significant love affairs. And somehow I had managed to convince myself over the past decade or so that in addition to the challenges of raising children on my own, the social interaction provided by my work with hundreds of clients and professional colleagues would suffice. Close friendships and romantic relationships were not required.

I was wrong. But what now? I am in my 50s. I have repressed the very uniqueness of my history, that which had always set me apart. The very queerness of my being in the world. The ostensible and hard won success of fighting to be true to myself in the world was turned to dust in an instant. The road ahead suddenly looked lonely and long…

Slowly I am recovering. Much slower than I expected perhaps, but this unplanned respite has forced me to explore, re-evaluate and reach out. My therapist (thanks Jane) has been an important sounding board. Blogging and making contact with both bipolar and bookish fellow travelers has been vital. It has allowed a space for cathartic dumping. A medium for strengthening my ability to clearly articulate my thoughts and reflections. It has given me confidence to move out into the world closer to home.

Thanks to the fact that I have not been working I was able to volunteer at our writer’s festival and meet writers I admired from around the world, all of whom are in my age range. Financial constraints encouraged me to cancel my TV since I was generally using it as a mindless distraction. Consequently, reading and music have regained the attention they deserve. And when it is not -20C, like it is at the moment, I make a point to get out every day, frequently just to read and write at a local coffee shop.

So here is a song and a haunting video to carry you into the new year. It goes out especially to my brilliant friend of Blahpolar Diaries fame (infamy?) whose typically colourful ode to the therapeutic value music inspired this post.

An eclectic collection of my favourite reads of 2014

I am not a conventional book blogger and, as such, I only touched on a limited selection of the 45 or so books that I read this year. Sometimes I can’t help devoting a post to a book that has grabbed me or fits into the particular flow of my life which, since June, has been waylaid by mental health concerns. I do hope that in the new year I will have more of a bookish focus but I am still likely to concentrate on musing about books that resonate with life for me at that moment. I am a firm believer that we have a kind of karmic relationship with books, that when we encounter a book that encounter is coloured by where we are at that moment in time. It might be the perfect moment. But that perfect moment might be passed or not yet come.

At this time I am particularly concerned with innovative approaches to story telling, especially stories that seek to give life to real or difficult experiences. To that end I have veered into some contemporary experimental novels, not always with entirely satisfying results. However, three novels are clear standouts, one new, one translated for the first time this year and one from a few years back. I have touched on all three to a greater or lesser extent in past posts.

My Top Three:
Seven Terrors, is the first novel by Bosnian writer Selvedin Avdic (Istros Books). Briefly, this is the story of a man who takes to his bed for nine months after his wife leaves him, emerging only when the daughter of a former colleague approaches him to help her find out what happened to her father who disappeared during the war. What ensues is on one level a detective story into which come elements of Bosnian folklore, politics, criminal interests and an increasing sense of madness. The Balkan war is only approached obliquely, primarily in the accompanying end notes. The overriding theme is one of the damage, collective and individual, that the horror has left in its wake. The book concludes with musings about, terror, philosophy and Bosnian mythology, followed by seven blank pages for the reader to use to record his or her own fears. I read this book back in February and it has continued to haunt me all year.

The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves (CB Editions), a recently encountered treasure, is an inventive juxtaposition of the mundane everyday snippets of conversation, remembrances and idle thoughts, against the extraordinary musings and reflections about the nature of human existence. There is no singular voice, no story arc, no solid ground. But in this collection of fragments there lies the essence of a rich and deeply human experience, at once stripped down and laid bare as they are collected and made whole.

In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (McClelland & Stewart), has been out for four years but I came to it this year, most specifically because I wanted to see how a personal experience could be pared down to its essentials and explored through the lens of time and memory. The result is some of the most evocative and precise writing about what it means to be grounded in ones self and in relation to others (or not); the allure of the road and the ambiguity of home; and, most vividly, the way that all truth lived is a fiction – one that is necessarily subjective. Galgut is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors and the opportunity to meet him and engage in an encouraging conversation about writing was the highlight of our local writer’s festival for me this fall.

Other books that had a particular impact on me this year included:

I Refuse by Per Petterson. Recently translated, this latest book by another of my favourite writers is darker, richer and more complex than his masterful Out Stealing Horses. This book explores the memories of youth, the mystery and pain of mental illness, and the re-evaluations that mark mid-life. Like life, there are no neat, easy resolutions. I discussed this book in a recent post.

Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. This was a recommendation from a regular poster on the brilliant Tips, Links and Suggestions (TLS) blog of the Guardian Books website, a must stop for any avid reader who likes to talk about books, reading and that endless TBR list. I had never heard about this classic tale of the brutal fallout following partition in India in 1947 as communities were dismantled and muslims relocated north to Pakistan, hindus south to Gujarat. Countless men women and children failed to make it across the border alive. I am ashamed that it took the death of the author just shy of his 100th birthday to bring this brilliant book to my attention and all I can say is, if you have not done so, read it. It is important, deeply moving and the last few pages are the most agonizingly intense you will ever read. Enough said.

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas. Honestly this is a book totally outside my comfort zone, I just am not inclined to huge sprawling dramas that take on all of the big issues of class, race, family, love, sex, death, success, failure etc, etc and clock in over 500 pages. Give me spare novels with lots of space for unresolved tension and moral ambiguity, thank you. So I was blindsided by how much I loved this book. It was, in part, a book I needed to read at the time, as I was coping with shame, desire for redemption and loss of identity following my breakdown earlier this year and uncertainty around my ability to return to a career I loved. It is also a skillfully crafted, fast moving and intensely powerful novel on every count. And it contains the best descriptions of brain injury in adults that I have ever seen in literature – the main character has a brain injured cousin and goes on to find in himself (though he fails to fully appreciate it) a gift for working with the disabled. Tsiolkas was another author I was fortunate to see interviewed live and speak to at length. I found him to be absolutely passionate about reading and writing and extremely kind and generous with his time and enthusiasm.

There were many other novels I enjoyed and more than a few that were mediocre at best.

In non-fiction, I only read a handful of titles, but my favourite was Lost and Found in Johannesburg by Mark Gevisser. The author came to my attention as the result of his recent article in Granta previewing his current involvement in a global survey of sexuality and gender diversity and, although these interests are also reflected in this memoir, the book is a fascinating family history tracing his Jewish ancestors back to Lithuania, recounting his upbringing in a segregated South Africa and his discovery through a childhood obsession with maps that there were places in his own city seemingly inaccessible. Communities, he would discover, that black people emerged from and returned to each day, often very close but in another reality altogether. He takes the reader on a journey back in time to the activists who challenged the colour barrier early on (a nice dovetail with my reading of Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter this year), on a tour of the black communities as they exist today, and through the vivid horror of being held at gunpoint for three hours as he and two female friends were the victims of a home invasion in early 2012. It paints a stark and yet loving portrait of a difficult city.

Finally, my guilty pleasure is science fiction, generally veering to the weird. I regularly read J G Ballard and I did read Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy this year and although I loved the first two books, the third seemed to try to resolve things in a most awkward and unsatisfying way for me. So my pick of the year was also my first read of 2014, the last installment of M John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Empty Space. It was just as haunting and grotesque as one could want, assuming one wants such an experience. But for me Harrison is in a league of his own and I am even enough of a geek fan to have purchased single story chapbook signed by the man himself this year. So there.

I may finish a few more books before the year is out but this is the longest post I have written to date, so I will stop here.

Happy reading in 2015.

And so this is Christmas…

Anticipating a quiet Christmas, with circumstances necessitating a modest celebration, the lack of snow and relatively warm temperatures suit me fine. I am content with a brown Christmas. Oh I am sure there will be some anxious naval gazing over the next day or so. Add to that a Boxing Day trip to visit my parents, always a festive occasion fraught with the tensions and dynamics that only family can create, but for the moment I simply want to wish peace, whatever that means, to everyone.

Throughout the world that is one universal gift humankind is in sore need of, no matter who or where we are.

The Absent Therapist or listen now, can you hear the voices…

“ When I was a child I didn’t have an identity and I didn’t want one. I was neither boy nor girl, male nor female. I was just a pair of eyes, a nose, some ears. Receiving the world, the brilliant blue sky, people talking above me.”
Will Eaves, The Absent Therapist

Oh yes I thought, but then they gave me a designation and it made no sense.

A-ha moments like this surfaced throughout my engagement with the slim volume that is Will Eaves’ brilliant The Absent Therapist. Deceptively simple, the fragmented pieces that form this most unusual, experimental, but achingly human novella are carefully crafted and finely polished moments in time.

Described on the cover as a “miniature but infinite novel”, I found myself returning over and over to my favourite strands and marking them in the margins. Although some fragments appear to be linked or feature the same characters or themes, the overall experience is akin to floating through the ether, engaging momentarily with the thoughts, frustrations, memories, and conversations – internal or external – that swirl through the mind. Your mind. The minds of others.

At times reflective and philosophical, at times obscure, at times laugh out loud funny (“I went to the Spanking Club once…”) these little pieces reminded me of the snippets of the stories we tell ourselves and others as we knit together and make sense of our lives. As we engage our own absent therapist.

I had heard of this book, and am familiar with the author’s more conventional work, but when I saw it appear on a couple of the “best of 2014” lists of reviewers I particularly respect, I became desperate to get my hands on it. Not an easy feat since it is not available here in Canada (even though as readers we spend time on the west coast and Vancouver on this little journey of fragments). I ordered it from the UK and coincidentally it arrived earlier this week as I was out on my way to my very present and vital therapist.

Rarely has such slight book offered so much, this is a company of voices to which the sensitive reader can return again and again. Relate to the lonely, commiserate with the angry, recognize the nostalgia expressed. Marvel at the philosophical musings, those poetic moments we strive to find meaning and guidance in, but that too frequently pass and get lost under the crush of everyday life. I would even dare the same reader to not mark favourites in the margin.

“ The balm of consolation is too strong for some. Its most powerful ingredient is not the emollient lie that time heals, but the more astringent perception that whether we heal or not, the wound was deep and real and ours.”

Indeed.

At peace in place, but alone in the world

An empty bench overlooking the reservoir. Ice and snow have stilled the water. In the far distance the Rocky Mountains fade in the distance. I spend many hours along the shore of below this bench and further to the west where the flatlands spread as the Elbow River enters. In the springtime the water level is kept low to allow birds and waterfowl to nest. Although in warmer weather the parkland that runs along the northern shore of the reservoir is frequently bursting with couples, families, children, reunions and other large group activities, I prefer to pick my way along the water’s edge. I meet few others, mostly birdwatchers and photographers with ungainly long telephoto lenses hanging off their camera bodies.

I prefer a wide angle perspective, capturing the vista but keeping the details and any people in it reduced to a comfortable manageable size.

And I wonder why I feel so alienated and alone? I realize that the roots of that feeling run deep and cannot be divorced from an intense sense of being different at an early age, fractured through the prism of living with a mood disorder. But I have also become an expert at engaging with a wide range of people at a superficial level. In recent years I framed it in terms of maintaining a professional distance from clients and co-workers.

Some have speculated that this sense of alienation is essential to the artistic vision. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider was a popular formulation of this notion, of much interest and mystique to me and my friends back when we thought we knew everything. Much more recently I sensed this essential detachment from others contrasted with a deep affection for place in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.

Copyright JM Schreiber 2011 Same location in the spring

So what can I draw from a landscape like this? A space I can return to throughout the year and always see anew?

The lonely journey of life

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time — those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

Five months have passed since I left my place of employment, deep in the manic vortex of a mental health disorder that had been stable for so long that I failed to recognize the indicators that work stress was taking a critical toll. The first thing I did was hire a psychologist, someone I believed would be able to help me address some of the serious realities that the return of bipolar symptoms threatened to expose. I trusted that her experience would provide a safe space for self exploration and I have not been proved wrong. Mind you I was pretty manic when I arrived at her office, but over the months we have worked together to unspool many of the challenges and concerns that I brought to our very first session.

At the core of our explorations over these past months has been the loneliness I feel and my persistent ability to reinforce the very barriers that maintain this loneliness. When there are people in my life on the superficial, safe level; I cherish being alone. Now that I am making some positive and healthy attempts to connect with others, loneliness seems to follow in the wake of each moment like a hangover.

I don’t know the extent to which my mood disorder has impacted this recurring sense of social isolation. Certainly the up and down waves of manic depression have been marked by episodes of outgoing behaviour, often in conjunction with poor judgement, followed by retreat to safety and protection. There are also temperamental and identity factors that have skewed my experiences. Now my son has shared with me personal concerns that mirror my own in a manner far closer than I ever expected but may help explain the much more severe social anxiety from which he has suffered all his life (and treated with alcohol in recent years). I am not even sure what to make of his situation but I also know that as an adult he has to find his answers on his own because I am weary enough carrying my own baggage.

I accept Durrell’s edict about loneliness and time as necessary for growth, but they can weigh heavily because no matter how much we achieve on our journeys, there always seems to be more open road ahead that, in the end, we can only travel alone.

Moving fast to slow down

With respect to many fellow bipolar bloggers who are weighed down with depression I am fighting a mixed hypomanic state. This is a more common concern for me and although I have only been fully manic twice in my life, I can run at a heightened level for years. Looking back now I probably was running high over the past few years while I took on increasing responsibilities at work in an increasingly unsupported and dysfunctional environment before landing in full manic mode this past June. I have had access to little psychiatric support since then so between my family doctor and a private psychologist I splurge to see once a month I am trying to stabilize my level of agitation. Hopefully before my disability benefits run out.

At the same time this time has allowed me to unpack a lot of baggage and make some critical reassessments at this point in mid-life. On that level I am making progress. But my brilliant experience volunteering at Wordfest last month, meeting and engaging with so many readers and authors was a high risk experiment with respect to my mood regulation efforts. I barely ate or slept for four days after the event ended.

For all the energy these past weeks have added to my creative efforts, I have trouble concentrating and tend to fall into periods of high energy thought processing without being able to channel the ideas productively. I have been making a point of getting out and spending a few hours writing or reading in coffee shops. Being in public spaces forces me to focus.

However, the word is that winter is truly rolling in tonight with snow and temperatures dropping to the minus double digits celsius. Since I haven’t gotten around to getting my winter tires mounted I am not likely to venture far for a few days. So I decided to spend the last temperate afternoon out, not hunched over a coffee cup but walking off some of my pent up energy.

Typically I walk with my camera and my ipod. It is a slow pace as I find myself regularly stopping to capture scenes or flora. However I hadn’t realized how that actually narrows my experience of some of the locations I regularly visit. When I was working such an activity was a great way to relax and unwind. Since I have been off ill, I have had little enthusiasm for photography and little motivation to visit my favourite natural haunts as if one required the other.

Today when I reached the riverside where I planned to walk I felt momentary regret that I had neither my camera nor my ipod with me. But as I set off on a brisk walk in the late afternoon light of this November day I was surprised to find how freeing and meditative the experience was. The movement helped me slow and focus my thoughts while, freed from the viewfinder of a camera, I was able to take in the fullness of the vista. I watched the changing colours of the slowly fading light reflected in the water and on the glass towers of downtown in the distance. I noted the shifting clouds and birds flying in to roost as the depth of darkness and shadow crept across the fir trees that cover the length of the high embankment across the river.

I returned refreshed, relaxed and calmed.

The path I walked today as it is likely to look in a month or so. Copyright JM Schreiber 2012 — The path I walked today as it is likely to look in a month or so.
Copyright JM Schreiber 2012

Reflections on the Day of the Dead

For years a small sugar skull sat on one of the bookcases in our house. Eventually it had yellowed and aged to a point that its value as a keepsake was minimal. One day with a last glance I tossed it out. There were two originally so somewhere in the accumulated detritus of twenty years in this house, another little skull is probably decaying.

The skulls were mementos of a special Members-only preview of an exhibition which passed through our city in November of 2002. ¡Viva Mexico! featured a selection of the glorious huge colourful murals of Diego Rivera, striking photography of Day of the Dead celebrations by Graciela Iturbide and a display of shaft-tomb figures. As a family event, there was also a wide range of hands on creative activities for the kids.

I had been, at the time, a single parent for a year or so, my children would have been coming up on 10 and 13 years of age. It was an era of fundamental change and transition in my own life, but it was also a time when my kids were young enough to really enjoy this type of outing. I had a family pass and the museum was a common weekend destination.

However, until that day I had, somehow been unaware of the importance and spectacle of the Day of the Dead. Hallowe’en was fun of course, and a highly anticipated event for the children in their younger years. But the magic and energy of the the Day of the Dead celebrations captured in the photo gallery left a deep and lasting impression on me.

Many years later it all came back when tackled Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano. I read it with The Guardian Reading Group, a three or four week monthly on-line opportunity to tackle a book with fellow readers. It is a challenging work to fully appreciate and before the month was out I found myself reading the text on an e-reader with the paper copy open beside me on the sofa so I could readily flip back and forth to cross reference and the link open on my computer to a brilliant website, The Malcolm Lowry Project, which provides chapter by chapter guidance and assistance to the humble reader along the way. Simultaneously long conversations were unfolding on-line within the Reading Group.

Now I can no longer divorce the Day of the Dead from the tale of Gregory Firmin, the alcoholic British consul in a small Mexican town, and his slow, tragic unraveling and demise throughout the course of one November day. Impending celebrations lurk in the air, but his desperate mental waltz with the push and pull of liquor, the reasoning and rationalizations he plays with himself held my greatest fascination. I have been lucky that alcohol has never held a serious allure for me, and my tastes tend to be above my discretionary budget anyway. Dedicated alcoholics don’t care and my family history has known its share. Especially on the side through which the mood disorder runs.

By the time I sat down with Under the Volcano, my son had been a heavy drinker for several years, although there is a long time before he finds himself in a state of crawling across the lawn toward the vision of a half empty bottle like the poor consul. I should hope. The struggle is a delicate matter for us to balance. He is almost 25, gifted and anxious to an extreme and over the years he has been on his own, on the street and now for the past few years increasingly isolated at home. Over a month ago he had a break of honest self recognition and quit drinking. But for many and complex reasons, especially some particularly horrific experiences in what passes for an adolescent mental health system, he has a complete aversion to any counselling or support.

Today, on the Day of the Dead, he is working a couple of beers back into his routine and I am trying to maintain the boundaries. Our relationship as father and son is complicated, we are close, share many character traits and insecurities. With a history working in social services I am also acutely aware of the limitation of practical services out there. And the cost of living in this city currently precludes even his younger sister who has a profession from moving out. But I know I cannot own his issues.

So with this November 1, I will honour the Dead with hope and ambition for all of us trying to pull together and move forward with Life.

Myself included.

Want to write? Start with reading.

It has taken me over a week to come down after volunteering with and attending events at our recent word festival. I entered into the week slightly down and was spiraling up within a few days. If it was a test of my ability to return to regular work, this is clear evidence that my mixed state is still far from stable. But I would not have missed it for the world.

It was an absolute thrill to mingle with people who are passionate about books and listen to Canadian and international authors talk about their craft. Whenever an author was asked about his or her influences, a love of the magic of books and literature shone through in their responses. If asked about advice for want-to-be writers, the common answer was read, read, read… read widely and drink deep from the wealth that books have to offer.

The stash of books I bought at the event, not including the titles I purchased or read in advance. Volunteering in the bookstore can be expensive!

And so there was this man I crossed paths with at various venues throughout the festival. He told me he was a writer. Patting the breast pocket of his jacket he indicated that he felt he was getting ready to pull together his work. He had a gold pass so I saw him a number of times but always alone, ordering a coffee or buying a glass of wine at the bar. He would acknowledge me and we would exchange a few words on whatever interview or panel we was waiting for. But I never witnessed him engaged in animated discussion with fellow attendees.

The solitary man at a venue where excited discussions about books were regularly erupting between strangers is an anomaly.

On Saturday afternoon I encountered him in the lobby. He was carrying a copy of Sweetland by Michael Crummey. I got the impression he was done with the festival regardless of the major authors still to come. He said, “I have decided, this is the one that impresses me. Let’s see if he writes as well as he talks.” I responded that I had recently obtained a copy of his previous work Galore, the novel Crummey described as the one he feels he was born to write and that I wanted to read that first. He looked at me with surprise and said, “You mean you have heard of him?”

Suddenly it dawned on me that this man, the self-described writer, does not read at all. I suppose he thought he he would be able to absorb all the final inspiration and direction from this one book. If he did not know one of the best known Canadian contemporary authors and poets, even if he had never actually read one of his books, I could not help but wonder how he imagined himself ready to pull his accumulated scratchings into a final product.

With a full evening and day still ahead, he had selected his role model. I never saw him at the theatre again.

Even if it left me swinging up on my attempt to stablize this recovery from my recent manic episode, I was deeply inspired by the talks I attended, delighted by the company of fellow book lovers and especially grateful to a few authors who took a little extra time to encourage me as writer. I was regularly reminded that it is never too late to start.

And I am never lacking for books. In fact they seem to multiply in my life on their own as any truly avid reader knows.

What fresh yellow is this? (With apologies to Dorothy Parker)

Typically I love autumn – the crisper weather, the bright blue skies, the excuse to pull out sweaters. Normally this is the busiest time of the year as new programs and courses start and activities halted for the summer resume. More than New Year’s, this can be the season for resolutions, goal setting and looking forward.

Unless you are depressed.

Without the structure of work I feel lost. And unlike regular unemployment I am in a holding pattern, uncertain what type of work I may be able to return to when I do recover, if I recover, should I even recognize recovered if I meet it in myself.

I feel tired and agitated. Irritable and unfocused. I try to push myself out every day and have an exciting literary festival to look forward to in just over a week. Yet I am terrified that I have taken on more than I will be able to manage and I find myself fighting off regular amorphous panic attacks.

I feel like a wrung out dish towel. I miss having energy and enthusiasm but I have to guard against a reckless flood of these sensations lest they indicate trouble at the opposite end of the bipolar pendulum arc…

For now I am looking toward the brilliant yellows of the moment. Apparently yellow is the colour of the mind and the intellect, it lifts the spirit, stimulates creativity but can also heighten anxiety and emotional instability.

Sounds like a bipolar hue to me.

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