Nov 2000
[From:] phil.pt@talk21.com [aka Philip]
Dear Catherine,
Earlier this year I had a spell in a mental hospital suffering from a mix of depression and outright psychosis (with some paranoia attached as a kind of added bonus). A dubious plus-point of psychosis is that it frees the mad person from responsibility - and/or takes him to such a stage of humiliation that he has no pride left. He can say and do what he likes, and it can be dismissed by the sane world as just madness - or merely pathetic. Although not in their right minds, insane people are rarely stupid, and tend to take advantage of this psychotic licence. And I am no exception.
So … A letter to you. Absurd, impertinent and inappropriate - no doubt. Embarrassing, and perhaps even troubling (in various senses ) - probably. Futile (words from the void into the void, one way or another) - possibly. But I'll write it nevertheless.
To start with, I want to try to reassure you that I represent no danger to you. I'm no kind of stalker. I may be psychotic, but I'm harmless (as most psychotics are). I have no intention of pestering you.
I got your parents' address from the internet. Everyone's there somewhere, and Fergus and Phyllis are uncommon name combinations, which pop out of search engines without too much prying. I'm writing care-of them so there can be no question of direct pestering of you. The address at the top of the letter is my parents'. Contact them if you want reassurance about the non-violent, unthreatening nature of my condition (or simply to tell them that their mad son is making a nuisance of himself.)
I would also like to say that I have no problems with the idea of you showing this letter to any partner you may have. I have no desire to disrupt any loving relationships. (And I don't anticipate that I will write anything that you would be embarrassed to share with a good partner.) Indeed, I have no desire to disrupt your life in any way. I do not believe that you have any obligations to me. You owe me nothing, not even the time it would take to read this letter - though I would greatly appreciate it if you did at least glance through it.
I resisted the temptation to write to you when fully psychotic - contrary to the empty bravado about 'psychotic licence' I was, in fact, a disappointingly self-restrained lunatic. So why do I write now (when saner if not particularly healthy)? Simply that I desperately need to attempt to make contact with someone - even with no expectation of a response. And the truth is that there is no one else to whom I could write. (I could pour out anonymous words under a fake identity to other fake identities on the internet. But that really would be words into the void. And the internet, for all its unifying possibilities [As one advert puts it: 'We are bringing the world together' - which really means, 'We are bringing affluent individuals of developed countries to dot-com sales sites'.] can seem a nowhereland filled with fragmented part-identities and fantasists.)
'There is no one else to whom I could write'? An extreme statement, and not perhaps an exact statement of fact. However, it is true to say that in 37-plus years I've only been close to one person, and that is you Catherine. And I have doubts about the extent of our brief closeness. We were at least, good friend for a while. That much is true. And also true is that the Catherine I knew was generous-spirited, thoughtful and insightful - and I'm sure these qualities have developed with time, as finer qualities tend to do. (My memories of you are 'warts and all', not idealized, and, with that in mind, you should believe me when I say that you are the best person I have known.) As a former close friend, whom I believe to be generous-spirited, please bear with me for the time it takes to read this letter.
Since the pain of your rejection of me eased, and hope of reconciliation faded (and that took years), I have missed you as a lost friend. I have sometimes thought that we ruined a decent friendship by trying and failing to be lovers. But at other times I recall loving you and feeling loved by you (though perhaps I'm recalling fantasies or contrivances), and I believe that a brief spell of love is worth a ruined friendship.
I imagine all this is tiresome ancient history to you. But I don't write it to rake over the past. Nor do I write it with any hope of rekindling anything. I write it to try to justify writing to you now. (A somewhat circular statement - I seem to spend a lot of time circling to no purpose. Perhaps what I should really say is: I'm sorry that I'm such a pathetic specimen, and I'm sorry to be bothering you with myself so long after you made the right decision, for yourself, to leave me.)
In March, I threw myself into the sea from the pier at South Shields. I did it without forethought and without feeling suicidal. (Such separations of thought, feeling and action were among the things that led the psychiatrists to conclude I was psychotic rather than 'merely' depressed.) Some fishermen helped me out, but I was in a hypothermic state (1°C above death-point, so I was later told).
This near-death experience was in no way glowing (contrary to some of the romanticized accounts one occasionally reads about such experiences). It was just a near-total engulfment by vacancy. Medical technology, and nothing else (certainly no act of will by me), pulled me back from it. There was no glad-to-be-alive afterglow to follow - no sense of life-enhancement through near-experience of its loss.
After I'd recovered from the hypothermia, I was taken to a mental hospital. The staff there didn't seem to have much insight into me, or into the other patients. Really all that went on there was physical and chemical constraint, which was helpful at the time. I can't say that I recovered my mental health while in hospital, nor did I regain much of a will to live. But the bleakness did ease a little.
At the near-death instant I had been next to nothing. By the time I left hospital I was a life with some things in it. And memories of you were among those things. What mattered was that you had once been there as a one-time special person in the past. That was something. Not nothing. (The saddest thing about some of the other patients was that their lives did seem to be absolutely empty of everything except their delusions and hallucinations.)
I don't pretend to understand what happened to me. It is probably significant that I view the events as things that 'happened' to me, rather than something in which I was actively involved. (It occurs to me that a very similar statement could cover much of my life - which has 'happened' to me rather than been lived by me.)
The paranoia was the most unsettling experience. Unlike some of the more extreme paranoid people I met in the hospital, I did not have a fully worked out conspiracy plot in my head. But the world seemed to be a totally untrustworthy place, peopled by actors who had hidden motives (not necessarily malicious), which I couldn't fathom. Perhaps in part I was just unusually sensitive to everyday role-playing, but that doesn't account for it all. Most of the time I didn't feel hugely threatened. But for a few hours, on about ten separate occasions, it was like living out The Trial or 1984.
I also experienced what I believe is known as 'ideas of reference', which I take to be the ultimate in self-centredness. For example I'd listen to pop and soul music stations for hours on end and believe (absolutely) that every song was being played 'just for me' - as if the producers had read my mind (which I somehow also believed) and compiled a personal play-list. The songs, especially the soul music, contained the intense, basic, universal human emotions that have been mostly absent from my life.
Cliched as the phrase is, I suspect that there were also aspects of 'mid-life-crisis' to my mental state [see the Dante quote at the top of the letter]. But in truth, 'it' (whatever it might be) has always been with me. You'll remember, I imagine, my negativity, resignation and excessive solitariness. It may be that these negatives are all you remember about me. You once, somewhat brutally, though aptly, described me as 'schizoid', which was appropriate then and now as an adjective, if not as a noun.
I must have been a deadening partner much of the time. You did the right thing when you left me behind to go off into the land of the living. It was an escape to life as much as a rejection of me. You probably saw that even in my early 20s, I'd resigned from life. As you seemed to anticipate, I've not made much of myself. I've rarely worked. I have no friends. I have had no partner since you. Rather a bleak existence, to which I have seemed resigned most of the time. There has seldom seemed any alternative (except in fantasies) - although I seem to remember (but again, perhaps I'm remembering fantasies) periods of hope when I was with you.
Most of the time I'm not particularly despairing. I take my St John's Wort and lose myself in various transiently absorbing, time-consuming pursuits. At the moment I'm doing an Open University degree mixing astronomy and biology. [Is there any life out there?] This course is the latest example of a large amount of studying I've done [it could be said that I am something of a 'Renaissance Man'], most of which has been fascinating and worthwhile in itself, yet still hasn't given me a sense of worth or purpose. Everything I do is done in the void of loneliness, which makes it all seem so futile.
I lost all career ambitions long ago. I gave up journalism, which seemed to me a largely pointless activity (at least when I did it), almost ten years ago. I haven't worked since. I've done some computer training and possibly I'll end up as 'something in IT'.
Mostly I'm just disappointed - in myself, in most of the people I encounter, in the world generally. All promise much but don't seem to deliver (though I've never given 'most people' and 'the world generally' much of a chance to impress me).
Yet, in spite of everything (or rather, perhaps, in spite of nothingness) I have retained a capacity to experience joy and wonder. The universe is full of such wonder and beauty that (perhaps in contradiction to just about everything I have written so far) it seems to me a fantastic place to be alive in. My biggest sadness is that I find it so difficult to make close contact with other people in order to share this joy and wonder. I think we came close to such sharing on occasions - but all too infrequently. I believe that I found in you a person who was unusually receptive to the joy and wonder of it all. [Although joy and wonder are available to all, most people don't seem to want to step too far beyond the realm of everyday banality.] Sadly, for whatever reason, we didn't approach harmony as a couple often enough.
Talking (or writing) of joy, wonder, beauty, harmony, and associated concepts can be risky. The words aren't really there (at least in my head) to talk about them adequately. And it is easy to seem pretentious, grandiose, sentimental, or merely mad.
When I started to talk to my psychiatrists about feelings of harmony with nature, they took them as psychotic symptoms - apparently most schizophrenics experience some sense of 'oceanic oneness', which is taken as a companion symptom to 'ideas of reference'. I tried to explain that I didn't believe myself in any sense god-like, or that such experiences represented mystical insights available only to the gifted few. But they seemed to be in symptom-hunting mode, and had found something to put on my record. Probably I didn't express myself well enough. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it.
Anyway, as a certified psychotic I'm freed from social conventions and I'm not too worried (or at least I can talk myself into believing that I'm not too worried) about seeming pretentious, grandiose, sentimental, or simply mad. So I can say that the universe seems to me wonderfully strange and beautiful, and essential harmonious. I believe in the sublime concept that the 'low' and the 'high', the 'ugly' and the 'attractive', the 'base' and the 'noble', meet and fuse in the grand union of all things. I believe that every thing, even the apparently futile and worthless, has value, and has a part in the largest processes. And I believe in the platonic idea that no one does wrong willingly - wrong-doing is ignorance of the good, it is not deliberate evil. ['Forgive them for they know not what they do.']. Understanding this, it is possible to look at the world and the people in it with magnanimity, an all-encompassing sense of sympathy and tolerance (which is not, I think, psychotic).
If I could recommend one thing to you (or anyone else) it would be to study some astronomy. The huge perspectives can seem incomprehensible at first. Like many technical sciences, astronomy can seem a mere collection of data and big numbers. [Age of universe: about 13,000,000,000 years. Total number of stars: perhaps 10 to the power 23 (1 followed by 23 zeros) …] It becomes more comprehensible through analogy. [There are move stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.]
Such perspectives can be terrifying, or even depressing, because they seem to render humans insignificant. But we have to live with them, because that's the way the universe is - there's no wishing it away. And although small, we have our places in the great scheme of things (which is taking its course for reasons we'll never comprehend). We bring a high level of consciousness to our local bit of it - and so bring life to what is mostly dead unconscious matter. We also bring complex emotional responses that are probably unique to humanity (so the universe would be devoid of them without us). And perhaps without us the universe would also lack finer concepts, such as justice (though I know religious believers would say natural justice was built into the scheme of things by God).
I have no way of proving this, but I suspect that studying astronomy even has a moral value. It is difficult to imagine how someone with an understanding of grand perspectives could be petty minded, mean-spirited and spiteful for extended periods (though of course astronomical understanding cannot overcome momentary impulses). I remember a conversation we had with your neighbour Tracey [right spelling?] in which she questioned if it mattered whether the Earth went round the Sun, or vice versa. It matters. Firstly, because the truth matters. And secondly, because the Earth-centred perspective is a false perspective, allied to many of the other small-minded false perspectives that make people do so much damage to each other and the world around them. It is difficult to imagine a Nazi astronomer (though there probably were some), or a serial killer astronomer, or any other kind of vicious, nasty and small-minded astronomer. (The most distressing thing to recall about my madness was that I lost perspective and lived in a very limited universe. Fortunately I was not violently small-minded.)
As a final personal statement, I would like to say that I am eternally thankful that we met up in a little part of this vast expanse of space and time and that I shared your company, loved you and was loved by you, however briefly - although I am sorry that I did not bring joy to your life.
At a less grandiose level, there are simple delights to be found just in looking at the beautiful sights in the night sky, without thinking too much about the details involved. If you happen to read this letter before or during the weekend starting Saturday 11 November, then take a glance at the moon that night or the following night. It will be a full moon, with Saturn and Jupiter as very bright objects nearby, in or around the constellation of Taurus. Objectively it probably means nothing - parallax effects and coincidences. But it should be beautiful to see. And subjectively it might mean something to a Taurean who, as I remember, had some faith in astrology. November 11 is also Martinmas, Celtic feast of St Martin, a friend of dejected beggars, sometimes associated with spiritual awakenings and/or brief autumnal returns of summer. It is also world war Remembrance Day - a.k.a. Armistice Day, a day of peace.
.
So, what became of you, the 'one and only' Catherine?
Are you still like your feisty but vulnerable younger self? Or have you mellowed and grown in confidence? Are you still generally sharp and witty, with a keen sense of irony, and yet, on occasions, bewilderingly literal-minded? Do you still swear with surprising frequency, and overuse the words 'sweet' and 'yuck'? Do you still raise the pitch and tempo of your voice to an extraordinary extent when you are animated or anxious? Do you snap your jaws together, crocodile-like, when nervous/ bored / lost for words/ at a loss for anything else to do? Do you chew toast with your incisors, as if your had no molars? Do you smoke and drink too much? Do you still toy nervously or distractedly with locks of your great mane of Celtic curls? (Do you still have a 'great mane of Celtic curls'?)
Has your sight improved or worsened? Have you lost or gained weight? Have you grown (or shrunk!)? Do you still have an intriguingly changeable countenance, one second looking 5 years older, the next 5 years younger? (One good thing about not seeing people for a long time is that they and you become locked at a younger age in mental images. You remain early 20s in my mind, and it is difficult to imagine what the person I'm writing to actually looks like now.) Are your living spaces still somewhat disordered? Are you still prone to unpredictable swings between tough-mindedness and sentimentality? Are you still often disconcertingly frank? And do you laugh and cry more or less than you did 15 years ago?
Do you ever see any other Durham people? As you might expect, I have not kept in touch with anyone.
The last time I met him, Gavin Henderson was a surprisingly earnest character working as an English teacher at a comprehensive in south-west London. The Mick Kersse I met a few years ago was a walking beer-barrel, with right-wing opinions, but a nice line in self-mockery. He worked as a city recruitment consultant (or 'head-hunter', as he insisted on putting it). Andy Maslen lived in Kilburn at the same time that I did, but after a few meetings (and a party at which I think I was drunkenly boorish) I didn't see him much. He worked for an alcohol marketing company, a perfect job for someone who didn't drink much. 'Mad' Mike Metcalfe was at one time the manager of McDonald's in Putney. The last I heard he was working as an accountant (apparently his theft and fraud convictions didn't bar him) and living in Surbiton (sure signs of continuing madness). I noticed that Tim Crane (who in case you didn't know became a 'real' philosopher at one of the London colleges) had a book out recently, though I didn't read it.
As for other 'bright young things' we used to know, I have next to no knowledge. And that's true of my knowledge of you, brightest of all the people I have known.
The last time I saw you, in 1988, you were training to be a probation officer and partnering a chemistry postgrad. Of what you did next, I know nothing, except for some vague suggestions of possible lives that I picked up from the rubbish tip of newspaper columns.
In an article written in 1994 (by your sister Lisa) on the subject of 'presenteeism', (a.k.a. overworking), there appeared someone calling herself Elizabeth. She came from 'quite a privileged background' and worked in a 'modestly paid' job in the probation service. She was motivated not by money but by the desire to do the 'best job possible'. Faced by a 'bottomless pit of need and deprivation' in her caseload, Elizabeth was 'driven by guilt to work herself almost into the ground'. She ended up on long-term leave, 'with exhaustion'. Afterwards she found a 'less stressful job'.
It occurs to me that the excellently intentioned but overzealous Elizabeth lacked a friend of my ilk. If I had known this woman at her time of stress, I could have given her some perspective, if not comfort. And if the words I said to her had been deemed useless, then at least she could have used me as an object of contrast. I'm the antithesis of the 'presentee' - the absentee, driven, by nothing much, to do the least work possible. (And if all else failed, she could simply have used me as a zero reference point - against which everyone can plot themselves positively.) I assume that between the extremes of my non-involvement and Elizabeth's over-involvement, there must be some workable middle ground. I hope that she found it.
I also have a cutting from the previous year of an article about the 'psychotherapy industry' [sic]. It includes an interview with a trainee therapist named Kate. She came from a middle-class, south of England, Anglo-Irish-Catholic background and had grown up in a safe and happy environment. But she had a 'difficult time' at university, where she read philosophy. Afterwards, she had left the 'hypothetical life' behind her and worked as a probation officer. [The careless author of this article then wrote the following (which had the schoolboy in me sniggering): 'Kate found that being a probation officer confirmed that she gained her satisfaction from contact with clients.'] As a trainee therapist, Kate underwent weekly therapy sessions - 'Most human beings have unresolved problems or traumas or unfulfilled potential. [Which is still true if you replace 'most' with 'all'.] I have problems just like the next person.' Kate then mentioned some of the qualities that made her well-suited to therapy work: 'I've been a confidante to a lot of friends. I find I'm quite approachable and people find it very easy to be open with me.'
Reading about Kate, it occurred to me (hypothetically) that if this 'approachable' woman had a hypothetical former friend and lover, then he might feel himself justified in reaching out from the void to confide a few things to her. He could also, perhaps, give some reassurance to himself that any 'problems' his approach caused could be resolved at her therapy sessions.
(It's ironic, perhaps, that if I had been less close to you in the past, then I could have contacted you now - as someone whom I knew to be much more than 'quite approachable' - with many fewer qualms about it being an inappropriate thing to do.)
Having read through the cuttings to check the quotes, Philip, (or perhaps it was Phil, who had a comfortable, English provincial, middle-class, Low Anglican upbringing), turned over one of the scraps and wryly noted the heading of another article - a quotation from Henry IV part 2: 'Presume not that I am the thing I was'. Prone to reflecting too much on such inconsequential matters (he led a hypothetical life), he reflected on this inconsequential matter. It seemed to him that the randomly noticed quotation, with its myriad potential connotations and associations, was not without a certain resonance. Another Henry IV quote passed briefly through his mind. He thought of 'redeeming time when men think least I will', but without much resolution to do so. Then his thoughts drifted off to other inconsequentials.
Something. Not nothing.
That, whatever it might mean, is what I wrote to say to you Catherine.
Perhaps this letter was a kind of thank you note - thank you for being the one person (from outside my family) to bring to my life some love, of which it would otherwise have been devoid.
Perhaps it was also a sort of passing wave from a fellow cosmic traveller - who's not sure whether he's waving from or drowning in the sea of space.
More simply, I have long wished to write to you, but always feared it would be unreasonable to do so - and losing my reason gave me an excuse to put aside my qualms.
I hope your experiences in the second half of your life's journey are rich and plentiful, and sources of insight and joy.
Spare a thought for me once in a blue moon - but don't waste too much time on such cliché-ridden idle fancies.
May your god, if you still have one, go with you, and may the peace that passes understanding pass into your understanding, however briefly.
Love,
Philip Talbot.
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