A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Misery

"I'm reckless, it's true, but what else can you do?"

So I walk a little too fast
And I drive a little too fast
And I'm reckless it's true
But what else can you do
At the end of a love affair?

Ain’t it the truth, Billie Holiday? Ed Redding wrote this song just a few years before Billie Holiday recorded it for Lady in Satin, and the Billie of your dreams might have been the one who lived and breathed among Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Wilson, and all the sublime Basie alums who followed her lead, even when—especially when—she was on her way to ruin. It’s like basking in Roman antiquity in the bustling metropolis of today’s Rome. Some people think it’s depressing to go to ruins, but that’s only because they’re thinking of the decay and not the beauty. But this is Billie at the end, and her afterlife is with Ray Ellis’s orchestra. Richard Thompson sang of riding the Wall of Death. It’s a ride, it’s fun, but only if you think it’s a game. Consider that Pink Floyd were once called The Megadeaths, then that there was an actual band called Megadeath. Kid’s stuff. Lady in Satin is for those who can handle the truth, knowing that a ravaged, decanted version of beauty is there to woo you all the way through.

There is much to say about Lady in Satin—recorded in 1958 and released a year before she died of, as her manager put it, everything she had been doing to her body for years—and much to say about all of Billie that led up to it. But I’m really here to talk about “The End of a Love Affair,” which, for me, is not necessarily about the actual end of a love affair—though it can be that, too—but the way I get through all the way. “The End of a Love Affair” does not exactly exist in time. Billie Holiday is with the angels, courtesy of her demons. It’s more beautiful and fucked up than what most of us could even imagine, no matter how down we get or how high we ascend. Billie will always be higher and lower than most of us could possibly imagine.

So I talk a little too much
And I laugh a little too much
And my voice is too loud
When I'm out in a crowd
So that people are apt to stare

In the spring of 2008, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and hospitalized at Lenox Hill for three weeks. One condition of admitting myself was that I could have access to music. I followed their instructions, I got a portable stereo with no wires, and for some reason it never made it past checkpoint. I couldn’t listen to Billie or anything else. I had been high on bipolar for over a month. (The low end was something I would not wish on anyone; not having access to yourself is a particular kind of hell.) One day, pre-inpatient, I went to the Philosophy Hall lounge at Columbia, asked for permission to play the piano, and I then went right for “The End of a Love Affair,” and at that moment, I inhabited the song in new ways, because I was living it. I’m reckless, my voice is too loud when I’m out in a crowd, I talk and I laugh too much, and I do this to cover up the unbearable agony beneath the elaborate performance.

The Augustan Age poet Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was having an “End of a Love Affair Moment” in “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” when, walking among ruins architectural and autobiographical, he comes to the same emotional place as BIllie in Satin and me in the nuthouse:

And keen Remorse with blood defil'd,
And moody Madness laughing wild
         Amid severest woe.

When you're manic, you think you're better than you are, but sometimes, thinking that actually makes you become better than you are, until you aren't anymore, but you can't tell the difference. I've never done cocaine, but I hear it's a hell of a drug, and it's something like that. There's a knock off of Rodin's The Thinker outside Philosophy Hall, and I wonder what he might have been thinking. A friend came to pick me up at Philosophy Hall and we walked down Columbus Avenue singing Elvis Costello songs. I sang better when I was manic because I thought I could. I forgot that I couldn't sing better. "Moody Madness laughing wild amid severest woe" is pretty much my normal. Thomas Gray was going from the top to the bottom. A century earlier, if it had appeared in John Donne, it would have been a metaphysical conceit. I call it survival. Life, the parts we can't fix, is unbearable, and if we are lucky, the inner life, the experience, has so much meaning, even as we are aware of the wound we are covering, it's ok, because we are lucky to even be in this flawed place if we get to create things that matter and experience our version of joy when we can. I was told by a person of faith that faith was something you had when you weren't feeling it. I am not such a person, but I follow. But for me, the gift is to be able to laugh wild amid severest woe. The phrase had a way of turning up. In Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, Winnie tries to remember it while she is up to her neck in sand. Christopher Durang wrote a play called Laughing Wild about two crazy people colliding with each other in a supermarket, and Durang played one of them. There is said to be a bottomless pit, and that is where Billie Holiday ended up in the end. But it also goes both ways. When we are at our highest and our lowest at the same time, that is the place of our most sublime and damaged muses. We are at our worst and at our best. We our up to our necks, but we're not done yet. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. There's another more quoted line at the end of Gray's poem, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” Touché, Thomas Gray, but you had me at "Moody madness, laughing wild amid severest woe." I'm not a fool. Ever since I got my diagnosis, I stayed on my drugs and I have never been tempted to go off them. I have found that a modified version of my brain chemistry actually helps me be more productive. I'm wacky enough to be sharing this with you, dear readers, but stable enough to be typing this at home without Nurse Ratched hovering over. Hail to the hypomanic base. Meet me at the intersection of "End of a Love Affair." I'll be holding a wild, little bouquet and singing my own survival song.