Real Horror

On a night on which we might pretend to engage with the dark side, I find myself avoiding reading too much news of the real world and its abiding horrors. There are, as usual, lots to choose from. Too many to take in.

Coming Back

Finished Susannah Cahalan's Brain On Fire a couple of days ago and have been thinking about her experience of a mental breakdown in relation to my own quite a bit since. I'm sure that the causes of our breakdowns were different, hers being firmly identified as Anti-NMDAR Encephalitis and mine being firmly not anything definite. (Well, I'm labelled epileptic, but the doc who attached the label was quite clear that the label was the best he could do but it wasn't exactly firmly stuck on.)

I can see why Stacey who leant me the book thought that the diagnosis therein might be meaningful in my case, especially given what she'd heard me recount of my experience, but I was struck by the huge dissimilarities - most of all by how limited my particular ordeal had been compared to that of Ms Cahalan. I suffered no protracted onset of psychosis and my recovery was almost instant compared to hers. She took months to recover her sense of identity - mine came to me within two or three days, I think, from when I fully came round in ICU and there was a distinct sense of everything clicking back into place when I became me again. I vividly recall the conversation with the nurse that precipitated my re-arrival and the accompanying assurance that I wasn't going to go off anywhere again soon.

The question of what constitutes identity is, as far as I'm concerned, the most thought-provoking of the memoir and it's a strange feeling applying it to myself, something it had never really occurred to me to do until now. But I'm now aware that it's a real question in my case. If I found myself on coming out of the Delirium and knew with such certainty I was back, then who was I when I was lost? To whom did that anxiety-ridden, baffled consciousness belong? Obviously another version of myself, but where has he gone?

Oh, and something else I now realise. Since my recovery was so real, so definite, so complete I came to take it for granted that it was somehow guaranteed, part of the nature of things, like casting off a cold. But perhaps it wasn't. Was I just lucky? Did the doctors work a version of accidental magic? (I say this not in a critical spirit but simply because they all seemed so surprised at my sudden sanity.)

Out To Lunch

Ate well, but not exactly wisely, at a buffet lunch today for Fifi's birthday. Paced myself reasonably, but that meant I managed more than I expected over the two hours allotted for filling our faces. Fortunately I managed to get myself to the gym after the Maghrib Prayer to offset the guilt.

There's much to be said for having access to seemingly endless amounts of lovely grub, and even more to be said for generally denying oneself that access. 

Hearing Secret Harmonies

Read another book from the same cupboard from which I retrieved Understanding Comics. I can't honestly say I found Joseph Vogel's study of Prince, This Thing Called Life, quite as illuminating as McCloud on his beloved comics, though Vogel clearly loves Prince just as much, since I knew most of the stuff in it through a sort of cultural osmosis, I suppose. But one thing really hit home with regard to the production of Prince's albums, especially those of the early 80's. Vogel argues, rightly as I now realise, that what made Prince's sound so distinct, apart from his innate genius, was that he was pushing material out at a phenomenal rate and not over-thinking the production. The result was a sort of rawness, despite the essential glossiness of the product.

I listened to Sign o' the Times at a reasonable volume this afternoon whilst the Missus was out and, my goodness, my ears immediately got Vogel's point. Despite the brilliance and apparent 'finish' of the songs there's a sense in which these are drafts. It hit me most when playing Slow Love which I've always thought of as sweet soul music in the deepest sense, something perfectly made. Yes, but it's making itself up as it goes along. It's akin to grasping the underlying sense of improvisation in Mozart's most achieved works. The voice of something beyond delivered through frail human vessels.

Hey, I know that sounds more than a little over-inflated. But we're talking about Prince & Mozart here.

Not Really Complete

Busy day - so busy I just couldn't make it to the mosque for Friday Prayers. Felt the gap keenly. And felt frazzled by the evening, though thankful to be home. Played some righteous RVW to relax and felt English for a short time. But the gap remains, somehow.

Getting It

Came across a copy of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics in a cupboard at work. It's in pristine condition and I assume I'm its first reader. Cannot understand whoever bought it originally not wanting to read it. A brilliant exposition of how comics work by a brilliant maker of comics. What's not to like?

(Small extra point: If you're feeling a bit low it pays to turn to the work of someone who's really talented and happily sharing that talent with the world. It just brightens things up somehow, even if you're jealous of the lucky soul with all the talent you haven't got.)

Not Getting It

Have just read Sayaka Murata's novel Convenience Store Woman. It isn't the kind of book I would have picked up for myself, but a colleague kindly gave it me as a Teachers' Day gift and I was happy enough to give it a go. The thing is, though, that I just couldn't grasp what it is about the text that turned it into an International Bestseller, as announced on the front cover in lurid yellow type and won it at least one fairly major-sounding literary prize in Japan. Possibly it lost something in translation?

Actually the idea of having a protagonist who works in a small convenience store and grows a sense of identity based on the routines of her work strikes me as a good one. But I just couldn't see how the flat narrative brought this to genuine life. I didn't smile at all in the course of my reading, though at least one reviewer quoted on the back cover reckons the book is hilarious.

Maybe it's just me. But I suspect it's not.

Getting It Done

There's something unproblematically objective about getting to the gym and achieving one's targets. I'm now up to 55 minutes on the elliptical trainer at full resistance and I don't enjoy it at all. But it's good to finish and great to write about it later. Something has been achieved even if it didn't feel like it at the time.

Ending Well

Must say, I thought Ken Follett's narrative power was somewhat deserting him as I moved into the final stretch of World Without End. After the red hot central segment of the novel with the wars in France and the Black Death reaching Kingsbridge, the stuff about the children of Merthin & Caris & Gwenda & Ralph & Wulfric & Philippa etc etc began to seem a bit tepid and more than a bit soap-opera-ish. It didn't help that I was wondering whether we were going to get something of the magic of the ending of Pillars when everything brilliantly connects to mainstream history and the murder in the cathedral and, I suppose, the gunpowder plot ending to A Column of Fire, though I don't think that was quite as hypnotically convincing as the ending of the first of the Kingsbridge trilogy.

But I was wrong. Despite the lack of historical fireworks the subdued ending of World Without End proved highly satisfying in its final chapters. Continuing the story into a second generation made sense once the idea of the legacy left by those characters we come to admire worked itself out. Most of all it was Gwenda's story that worked for me. In a sense she achieves little other than simple survival, giving herself and her husband and children a life in the most difficult of circumstances. But it's her resilience and tough-mindedness that, in some ways, give the novel its essential character. And her bloody killing of Ralph had me cheering.

I think Follett is consciously celebrating a certain kind of Englishness in these novels and I'm happy to join in, especially since it's distinctly dark and contrary in its nature.

In Parallel

I got hold of Brain On Fire, a memoir concerning a sort of psychotic episode affecting Susannah Cahalan, a journalist at the New York Post, a few days back. It was passed to me by Stacey, a colleague in Boarding School from ACS (International), who has had some experience in counselling kids, after I'd given a bit of a summary of my own breakdown to some of the staff here. One or two of the things I'd said reminded her of details given by Ms Cahalan in her account of what her subtitle calls her Month of Madness and so she kindly passed it on, wondering if it might afford me some insight into my own basically undiagnosed condition. Initially I thought I'd put the memoir to one side for a while, but I have found it quite an easy read and gripping in its way.

However, I don't think I've found it quite as remarkable and shocking and memorable as the reviews quoted on the back cover, simply because I've gone through something reasonably similar. Rather I've been noticing the marked differences in our experiences. For example, the opening section of the memoir focuses on the writer's gradual descent into her madness, over a period of weeks. Mine was very abrupt, taking rather less than twenty-four hours, after which I don't remember anything of what went on after being warded or, indeed, actually being taken to hospital.

So as I move into the second half of the account I'm not expecting stunning insights, though I remain very interested indeed in what happened to Ms Cahalan. One thing's for sure though - I have no intention of subjecting anyone anywhere to a full-length account of what happened to me. She has genuine talent in this direction; I, happily, haven't, and I don't think I'm quite so self-absorbed. (I know that sounds a little bit unkind, but I don't mean it as such. I'm just keeping it real, as they say.)