Heaven II

Rarity in horror of the light

I’m wanted for a cause

The harshness of the sharpened metal bite

Children’s eyes are shaped like saws

You’re a precious little soldier of the fight

I memorise the doors

And running through the cold streets, taking flight

I realise my flaws



I will not try to fail again

I will not die for failing friends

It is not mine to face the end

I must not venture there

I see my body twist and bend

I see it oddly buck the trend

The angels cruelly comprehend

I feel I’m going there

I know what the lines portend

I cannot even fathom when

The angels cruelly comprehend



I feel I’m going there

"No, It Requires Revolt!"

If you have ever been low, perhaps very, very low, you will have been told that death is not the answer. Death, they will have told you, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. You may even have been told that dying before your appointed hour is selfish.

But first we’ll talk about life. The truth is that life is a very little thing. Life is a lifeforms’ thing. Some of us long for a maternal Earth, some for a vengeful God, but the world we live in is not a lifeform. We are alive, but we are not of life. Our substrate is impartial and indifferent. The matters of lifeforms don’t distort the field that they lie in. Life does not matter to the universe.

Now for death. You can take life to be heart death, brainstem death, or some nebulous soul death, however you please. You may even have a personal death pinned to some event in your life lying far away from the point of the end of gross life. It does not matter. Like life, death is a very little thing. Death is a tiny drop in a bucket the size of the ocean. The universe looks down on death with unseeing eyes. To the universe, life and death, the all-important existential currency of lifeforms, are tiny.

Life and death are equals in the grand scheme of things, equal pale blue dots. The life and death on a single planet must be a homeopathic preparation of change. The life and death of a single person like you is a motion blur artefact. To live with peace, we must realize that life and death stand shoulder to shoulder. If you are not afraid of death, then there is no reason to be afraid of life. The arc of life and death is ignored by the universe, and it is tempting always to take up its cause and carry its rebellious banner, reading, “I am all-important”. But better to make peace with the insignificance of the cycle, and, through that, cease to fear it. Do not fear death, and, moreover, do not fear life.

Review: Adrian Borland's "Last Days of the Rainmachine"

Adrian Borland (6 December 1957 – 26 April 1999) was a musician best known as the frontman of the post-punk band and Korova Bunnymen label-mates, The Sound. What's lesser known is his extensive catalogue of side projects and solo albums. Today, I'll be reviewing one of the highlights of Borland's career, "Last Days of the Rainmachine".

Take a Life in All its Glory

First, a little background. Adrian Borland suffered from schizoaffective disorder. SZA, as it is commonly contracted to, is a rare mental condition that I would describe as the unholy hell-spawn of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Sufferers experience affective episodes comparable to those seen in bipolar I, with soaring, grandiose, paranoiac, haywire manic episodes, excitable and disinhibited hypomanic episodes, and crushed, stagnant, nauseous, and in extremity catatonic depressive episodes, along with the manic depressive's holy grail - "euthymia", the state of normal mood.

However, the defining characteristic of SZA, distinguishing it from bipolar I, is psychosis regardless of mood episodes. People with bipolar I only experience hallucinations and delusions when in a manic episode. For schizoaffectives, unreal experiences can invade life at any time - even during euthymia.

When Adrian Borland writes about his SZA, he writes about the mood symptoms, and only rarely alludes to the psychosis side of town. He seemed to have held these things more private. That isn't to say he took them deadly seriously - he once wrote a friend a Christmas card reading, "have a schizo Christmas!".

The Album

Last Days of the Rainmachine is a challenging album to those of us going into it without the Samaritans on speed dial. It is quite possibly the darkest album I know. Joy Division, Rudimentary Peni, the Manics' Holy Bible, Steven Jesse Bernstein, even Barrett at his most abject - I feel the glimmers of light in their work, having listened to Rainmachine. I feel that this music has something universally affecting that can force anyone in a mental flicker to near despair. Shortly after discovering this album, and spending a good ten minutes curled up on my bed trying to process the monolithic nature of the album, I played it to my father. He asked me to turn it off after five tracks, warning me that I might not have the mental fortitude to listen to such music - commenting that he certainly didn't. I may indeed not have the mental fortitude to be unaffected by Rainmachine. But art is there to affect us, to make us grimace and twist and cry and feel heart-sick and in the interstitial bokeh of it all scream with laughter and fly with the curvature of the earth. 

When I first heard Borland's voice, in the album's opener Walking in the Opposite Direction, the first words that came to my mind were those of Psalm 130: "de profundis clamavi ad te, Domine". Borland pulls his voice from the deepest of depths as he proclaims: "my spirit's free, you won't get me/into the box your life is locked in". The clamour of the wishes of the masses "scream at [him] from flashing screens ... hassle [him] from city walls". Borland accuses us of forgetting why we are devoted to our idols: "I think you've lost the reason why, but you still carry out the motion". The anthemic chorus of the song tells us, "every day the things [we] crave make a play for [his] affection ... but ... [he's] walking in the opposite direction".

Walking is followed by the tearing threnody for volition that is Inbetween Dreams. The song addresses a person, apparently in a depressive episode, who, like Kasper Hauser in Herzog's film, only finds satisfaction in sleep. The song's rhythmic refrain - "breathing out, breathing in" - mirrors the monotony of the depressive state. Towards the end of the song, the words, "now you think that dreams are all you need", tear their way out of Borland's mouth, threatening to break his vocal register. That moment, the end of the phrase "all you need", is my highlight of the album.

The title track, "Last Days of the Rainmachine", likens the artist to a rain machine, made to produce tears. It is a rebellious song - "the last days of the rain machine, the last tears you'll see me cry". It is the album's Invictus moment - Borland is the captain of his soul; he may have been born to cry, but he can control the end of his tears. Musically, with the susurrating chloroform tone of the chorus contrasting with its declaiming power, it is the high point of the album.

Borland took his own life on the 26th April, 1999. Once I found this out, I could never listen to one of the album's latter tracks, Love is Such a Foreign Land, again. The song, describing repeated failures to sustain a relationship with an unseen partner, contains the lines: "the angels packed and left/And  they winked at me and said/"Hey, Adrian, why don't you give it up?"/There's a thousand ways to live/There's a million ways to give/You've got to learn when you've taken enough". This song, at first glance one of the less unrelenting of the album, towards the end of its initial impact, hits us all hard. Suicide is perhaps an over-analysed topic in rock, but, coming from a man like Adrian Borland, these lines plumb the depths of ideation.

Was I Hallucinating You?

I have some things in common with Adrian Borland. For one, I also suffer from schizoaffective disorder. I am well-medicated, but it does affect my life in various ways. Its various complications and comorbidities stretch out like a road map to tardive dyskinesia. When I listen to Borland's work, I feel as though somebody is sympathising with me. I derive catharsis from listening to his words. On another record, 5:00AM, the lyrics of the song Redemption's Knees describe perfectly the guilt I feel around my condition. The such moments on Rainmachine are too numerous to count. Adrian Borland will always mean a lot to me. I'm very glad that I found him. I hope there is no afterlife, no new substrate for torment. I hope Adrian Borland found peace.

Listen to and buy "Adrian Borland - Last Days of the Rainmachine" here

Review: Tilly Foulkes's "disorder"

Tilly Foulkes is a young poet from a remote outpost of Wales. She commits her thoughts on herself and the world around her to paper with a shattering detached acuity.

Foulkes’ most recent work, disorder, is an autobiographical look at the resolve to overcome mental health difficulties. Rather than employing the confessional style classic in the form of mental health poetry, Foulkes is here assertive, rebellious.

Foulkes’ verse has a kick, a self-conscious revolt. She “died when she was thirteen”, for the “rusty torn shell” of emaciation and self-abnegation. She is “freezing” under her downy lanugo, despite her place “in Hell”. This is a hell of her own design, she declares. She “earned” it. She was the architect of her own brutalist body. She only gives up her place presiding over an intrapersonal empire of bones because of inability to continue: she found herself “kicked out” by the headspace that allowed for it. She has been locked out of the palace that was her leprous etiolation.


Foulkes realizes in the final lines of the piece that she must relinquish her desire to return to the ivory tower in order to come once more to life. Like a plant which has for too long gone without nourishment, she releases herself to return to the ground and to grow. As the poem ends, there comes an pounding iambic, gunfire-like manifesto, a statement of psychological ideology, a statement of intent to prevail. And I’m sure that Tilly Foulkes will prevail, both as a living person and as a poet. She deserves to be recognized for her uncommon mastery of the difficult medium that is poetry.

Devotion

So it’s back here again with myxie-mouthed me

And the News of the World and the old BBC

And the Secret Service and the KGB

And the dish-eyed young children and the artillery



Yes it’s back here again with the Sturm and the Drang

And the trees by the road where the cameras hang

And the memory failed as the soaring light sang

To people immune to its splitting bright song



And it’s back here again with a spoon in my mouth

With the fear of the sentence set by the devout

With the pledges to loved ones with interests to tout



With the fear of the abject light not going out

Coming of Age in the Eyes of Psychiatry

The Pathogenesis

I turned eighteen on the 26th December, 2014. It was only in the following February that my mental health services started to take notice. My community psychiatric nurses warned me that I wouldn’t receive the same intensity of care as an adult, something which cheered me greatly, as I had come to find child and adolescent mental health services invasive and overbearing. I looked forward to meeting my new psychiatrist, as I’d found my CAMHS headshrinker less than satisfactory, and I looked forward to having more of a say in my treatment, hopefully staying away from hospitals and supported accommodation.

The Hopes

I’m looking forward to meeting my new psychiatrist. I’m hoping that I’ll move him to adjust my medication — 250mg fortnightly depot injections of zuclopenthixol, a typical antipsychotic responsible for causing me socially damaging extrapyramidal symptoms, such as repeated rhythmic twitching of my head, are not ideal. I also suspect that the zuclopenthixol exaggerates my negative symptom of cognitive impairment. Another medication that I’m hoping to be rid of is lamotrigine, a mood stabilizer that also treats my epilepsy but which gives me “ataxia”, a medical term roughly translatable in this case as becoming a clumsy clod. As J. Spaceman puts it so well, “I’m waiting for the day when I can be without these things that make me feel this way all of the time”.

The Arndale Centre Experience

On a date which I can’t now remember — forgive my amnesia — I first visited the Arndale Centre in Drumchapel, Glasgow. This was to be my adult mental health services clinic. In the waiting room, I saw a man with severe extrapyramidal symptoms, a woman talking to thin air, and an apparently single mother trying to control three young children with floppy faces. The lighting was dull, hitting the off-white walls like a dirty dishcloth. Waiting rooms always have a sense of desperation. They are by definition spaces of inexorability.

After a while, my new community psychiatric nurse called me. We discussed my conditions briefly, something which I hate doing as I feel I’ve repeated the sordid details many, many times, and then progressed to the depot shot. I was relieved that they let me stand up to be administered it, as I always felt vulnerable and humiliated face down on the treatment couch in the child and adolescent clinic. After the shot, the nurse let me leave quite promptly. I exited the exclave of the psychiatric world and reentered the world of the healthy.

Epigraph to the Prologue

The metal casts a bitter shadow on my day -

I don't know whose mistake.

The truth and light, they say, show you the way -

The pallor I can't take.

The final plan, I'm told, will take my eyes,

The purples all away.

What plan is that for which all voices die?

What do they never say?

I will not dare to fly so high

I will not dare to cling to lust

Memories so frail and light

I must not venture there

I do not care to try to die 

I cannot spare the time to fuss

Darknesses all touch on white

I feel I'm going there

I am not fit to live on high

I do not have the nerve to try

And darknesses all touch on white, 

And I fear I'm going there.