, page 12
The place where you don’t lie
It’s probably magical thinking, but I date the start of my meltdown to that night. In assuring the Gemini woman that we too would always love each other, that on some distant day in the future we’d look back on our lives and remember this wish that had come true against all odds, I let myself be carried away by sincere enthusiasm, but I also challenged the gods: hubris. In aspiring for unity, I made a pact with division. How much can I tell about this meltdown? How much should I keep to myself? Regarding literature, or at least the sort of literature I practice, I have one conviction: it is the place where you don’t lie. This is the absolute imperative, everything else is incidental, and I think I’ve always held to it. What I write may be narcissistic and vain, but I’m not lying. I can quietly affirm, and will be able to quietly affirm on Judgment Day, that I write what crosses my mind, what I think, what I am—all of which is certainly nothing to gloat about—“without hypocrisy,” as Ludwig Börne demands. However, Ludwig Börne also demands that it be written “without fabrication.” And although I’m usually ready to go along with that, too, here it’s different. Each book imposes its own rules, rules we don’t set in advance, but rather discover with use. I can’t say of this book what I’ve proudly said of several others: “It’s all true.” While writing it, I have to distort a little, transpose a little, erase a little. Especially erase, because while I can say whatever I want about myself, including less flattering truths, I can’t do the same with others. I do not give myself the right, nor do I feel the urge, to give the details of a crisis that is not the subject of this story. And so I shall lie by omission, and pass directly to the psychological—and even psychiatric—consequences that this crisis had on me, and on me alone. Because precisely that thing happened that, with age, I was sure would never happen again. My life, which I believed to be so harmonious, so well fortified, so conducive to writing an upbeat, subtle little book on yoga, was in fact heading for disaster. And this disaster did not come from external circumstances, cancer, a tsunami, or the Kouachi brothers kicking open the door without warning and massacring everyone with Kalashnikovs. No: it came from me. It came from that powerful, self-destructive streak I had presumptuously believed I was cured of, and that raged like never before, driving me forever from my enclosure.
Tachypsychia
It’s a word I didn’t know: tachypsychia. The first time I heard it was also the first time I saw a psychiatrist—a gentle, humane man whom I think of with gratitude. Tachypsychia is like tachycardia, only for mental activity. Your thoughts are erratic, disconnected, unrelenting. They’re all over the place. They swirl and scathe. They’re vritti, but vritti on overdrive, a vritti storm, vritti on cocaine. That’s a good description of my state. Rather than being, as I’d thought, well on my way to taming them and reaching a state of wonder and serenity, I’ve fallen prey to vritti on the rampage. I’m their captive, bound hand and foot. They drive me mad. And I don’t use that word lightly: the purpose of the following pages is to examine it. Ever since I came of age I’ve thought I was a bit more neurotic than average, which has made my life a bit unhappier than average. But it hasn’t prevented me from having periods of remission, the longest of which, almost ten years, is the one whose end I’m recounting here. They say it’s only when you’re no longer happy that you realize you once were. For me that’s not true: for ten whole years I knew I was happy. It did my heart good, I thanked the gods, I thanked love, I thanked my own wisdom, and I wanted to protect that happiness to the extent that I could. And throughout this crisis I continued to want that, only I wanted the opposite as well. I wanted disaster as much as I wanted relief, and I oscillated endlessly, unbearably, from one to the other. It’s for that reason that I’m no longer in the office of a psychoanalyst, as has happened to me so often in life, but for the first time in that of a psychiatrist, this gentle, humane man who prescribed high doses of an antipsychotic—although, he assures me, I’m not a psychotic—as well as a thymoregulator, or mood stabilizer, given to people with bipolar disorder.
Type 2
It’s disturbing, at almost sixty years of age, to be diagnosed with an illness that you’ve suffered from your whole life without it ever being named. Your first reaction is to protest. I protested, insisting that bipolar disorder is one of those notions that are all of a sudden in vogue and get pinned on anything and everything—much like gluten intolerance, which so many people discovered they suffered from as soon as people started talking about it. Then you read what you can on the subject, you reexamine your whole life from that angle, and you realize that the shoe fits. Perfectly, even. That all your life you’ve been subject to this alternation of excitement and depression that is of course the lot of us all—because all our moods change, we all have highs and lows, clear skies and dark clouds—only that there’s a group of people to which you belong, along with, it seems, 2 percent of the population, for whom the highs are higher and the lows lower than average, to the point that their succession becomes pathological. However, where the description doesn’t fit at first glance has to do with the so-called manic phase of what until the nineties was called manic depressive psychosis. The manic state is when people strip naked on the street, or suddenly buy three Ferraris, or feverishly explain to anyone who wants to hear it that what they’ve got to do is eat guavas, lots and lots of guavas, to save humanity from a third world war. I knew a young guy who did things like that and who, once the crisis had passed, was appalled by what he’d done. He committed suicide, as it seems 20 percent of bipolars do—a more reliable statistic, I’m afraid, than that of Chögyam Trungpa on the amount of time the brain spends focused on the present. I felt sorry for this brilliant, desperate young guy, and never thought I suffered from the same disorder as he did. I was depressive, yes. As I acknowledged honestly in filling out the Vipassana questionnaire, in addition to what can be called empty periods, I’ve been through two phases of real, severe depression, the sort that lasts several months and during which you hardly ever get up, you can no longer accomplish the most basic tasks, and above all you can no longer imagine that things will change. That’s the hallmark of depression: you can’t believe that one day you’ll get better. Well-meaning friends say, “You’ll be fine, you’ll see.” But you only look at them with dismay and even start to resent them: they’re so wide of the mark … it’s so clear they haven’t got a clue … When you’re in a depression you think that you’ll never come out of it, that you won’t come out alive, that the only way out is suicide. If you don’t commit suicide, however, sooner or later you will come out of it, and then once you’re out of it you cross over into the camp of the well-meaning friends and can no longer imagine this state of intolerable and seemingly endless distress. When I was young, I had a bad trip on hallucinogenic mushrooms. They sent me to hell, whose very definition is to be frightful and never-ending. But I was lucid in my nightmare, and told myself: “Don’t panic. I took poison. Its effect will last as long as it takes me to digest it, in eight or ten hours it’ll be over, I just have to hold on until then.” I said this to reassure myself, it was reasonable and true, but at the same time I wondered, “Can I hold on until then? In eight or ten hours will I still be alive?” I lived through it, and I know that once you’re back among the living you put this hell in perspective, you quickly forget the horror, and that’s what I would like not to do in these pages. As Louis-Ferdinand Céline puts it in Journey to the End of the Night, “The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in.” Anyway. Unfortunately for me, I’m no stranger to depression. But what I still didn’t know during my first psychiatric consultations is that in the definition of bipolar disorder, the pole opposite the dive into depression isn’t necessarily a state of spectacular euphoria and disinhibition that leads to social suicide and often to suicide itself, but just as frequently what psychiatrists call hypomania, which means in plain language that you act like a fool, but not to the same extent. You don’t strip naked in the street, you’re just at the mercy of the tachypsychia whose name I recently learned. You’re bipolar type 2: agitated without necessarily being euphoric, but sometimes also seductive, flirtatious, very sexual, outwardly very much alive, but inclined to make the types of decisions you regret the most while being dead sure that they’re right and that you’ll never go back on them. Then after that you’re dead sure of the very opposite, you realize that you’ve done the worst thing possible, you try to fix it and do something even worse. You think one thing and then its opposite, you do one thing and then its opposite, in frightening succession. But the worst is that if you’re like me and are used to analyzing yourself, once the diagnosis has been reached and the mood swings identified, you gain hindsight, only this hindsight is of little use. Or if it is, it’s just to see that no matter what you think, say, or do, you can’t trust yourself because there are two of you in the same person, and those two are enemies.
Yoga for Bipolars
The thoughts come thick and fast, twist like flames, burn themselves out, and ignite all over again. One flashes to mind and gives me a thrill. If I can’t be cured of this disease, I can describe it. That’s my trade. That’s what’s always saved me, despite everything. What a great idea! I’ll tell the story of my life from that angle, I’ll even reread my books from that angle, not as literary works but as clinical documents. The first one that was readable, The Mustache, tells the story of a guy who shaves off his mustache without anyone close to him noticing, not even his wife. At first he’s baffled, then his bafflement spreads and spreads, turning his life into a nightmare. Is his wife trying to drive him mad? Is he going mad? Neither of the two hypotheses is tenable and yet there’s no number three, so he goes from the first to the second and from the second to the first in a panic-stricken, frightening, tachypsychic oscillation that leaves him no alternative but escape and, finally, suicide. As for my last book, The Kingdom, its hero is the apostle Paul, and I now pull out all the stops to cast him as the patron saint of bipolars, first because his conversion made him not only the opposite of what he was, but also what he dreaded to become the most, and second because he spent the rest of his life in panic-stricken fear of retracing his steps in the opposite direction. At first glance, my new psychiatric autobiography project and my upbeat, subtle little book on yoga—which clearly now belongs to bygone times—have nothing in common. Nothing at all, except for the fact that it’s both a rule for me and one of the most reliable teachings of psychoanalysis that when you say two things have nothing in common there are strong chances that on the contrary they have everything in common, and I remember very precisely that evening in September 2016 when, sitting alone—as I did almost every evening—on the terrace of the café Le Rallye, on the corner of Rue de Paradis and Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, where I’d just moved, I was blinded like Paul on the road to Damascus by the obvious fact that my psychiatric autobiography and my essay on yoga were in fact the same book. Because this illness I suffer from is the deranged, parodic, gruesome version of the great law of alternation whose harmony I so sincerely praised some fifty pages back. From yin is born yang, from yang yin, and you recognize the sage by the fact that he lets himself be wafted gently by the current between the two poles. How do you recognize the madman? By the fact that instead of being wafted by the current he’s swept away by it, buffeted from one pole to the other while struggling to keep his head above water, and by the fact that for him yin and yang are not complementary but enemies, both set on his destruction. Everything I was getting ready to say with the calm tone of one who’s confidently progressing toward the state of wonder and serenity I see today in a harsh, grim light, the pale light of a dawn execution that I can’t help believe is true, truer than the daylight that chases bad dreams away. But I still have one way—just one—to resist the vritti, which is to relate the story of the long and unequal combat I’ve waged against them all my life. To relate the various attempts I’ve made all my life to calm the vritti and become what I so desired to be. I love this sentence by the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing: “It is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.” What did I desire to be? A stable man, a serene man, a man who could be trusted, a good man, a loving man. Because, of course, the real thing, and even the only thing, that is at stake in this combat, the only thing at stake in life, is love, the ability to love. Disabled as I am, I’ve tried to bolster this ability with disciplines like the martial arts, which aim to foster something inside you other than your ego. Thirty-five years of writing, thirty years of tai chi, yoga, and meditation to foster whatever love there is in me: no one will be able to say I haven’t tried, no one will be able to say I was lazy, no one will be able to say I didn’t fight. “Give up, my heart,” writes Michaux, “we have battled enough. And let my life stop. We’ve not been cowards, we’ve done what we could.” Yes, we’ve done what we could, and you can’t say the long and unequal combat did much good. At the same time, I’m aware that such thoughts are thoughts of the night, thoughts of madness and sickness, and that they’re not what I always think. At other times in my life, I believed I was this stable, loving man, this man who could be trusted. And neither I nor the women who loved me were mistaken in believing it. This life, my poor, miserable, sometimes vibrant, sometimes loving life, has not been all delusion and defeat and madness, and the cardinal sin is to forget that. In the darkness, it’s crucial to remember that you’ve also lived in the light, and that the light is no less true than the darkness. And I’m certain my book can be a good book, a necessary book, if it can hold these two poles together: on the one hand a long aspiration for unity, for light, for empathy, and on the other the powerful, opposing force of division, self-immurement, and despair. This tension is more or less what everyone has to deal with, only with me it takes on an extreme, pathological form. But since I’m a writer I can do something with it. I must do something with it. My own sad story can take on a universal character: that’s what I say to myself, sitting on the terrace of Le Rallye, and I remember I even asked the waitress, a smart young Chinese girl with whom I chatted from time to time, if she thought that Yoga for Bipolars was a good title for a book. The question puzzled her, but to be on the safe side and to make me happy, she said she thought it was.
