Moody Madness and Laughing Wild

Two Cheers for Sanity, A Toast to the Manic Muse

My senior year in high school, I wrote a paper on mental illness and creativity for my AP psychology class and went to the Downtown Dallas branch of the public library to dig up microfiche on Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk, a scattering of my musical idols.  When I discovered Robert Frost writing, “I have been one acquainted with the night,” or when I heard Mingus’s “Hellevue at Bellevue,” Monk’s “Nutty,” Powell’s “Un Poco Loco,” I thought these people, already dead, were still giving me signs that we were all part of a tribe.  I was a bit off but could be on in other ways.  Some of what I dug up in 1991 is still not available on the internet.  I wish I could see what I wrote—or maybe I don’t!—but that 30 year old-pus period is long enough to produce an adult person who may or may not fully appreciate all the ways that being messed up can result in creating something beautiful. 

Is it a causal relationship?  Do beautiful things only come from people who are less than stable?  My AP Psychology class clearly did not lead to sample groups and clinical trials, except when it came from the meds that I’m taking, because I am so messed up.   I loved hearing Van Morrison singing sensuously of “crazy love,” because shared DSMRIV ailments felt like the intensest rendezvous.  I was also listening to Leonard Cohen sing “Wasn’t it a long way down?” and found that a perfectly crafted song about falling apart could be a form of seduction.

When I was 18, my parents didn’t know it, but I was living above a toxic, rotted foundation that made me get sick every couple of weeks. (When I found out, I kept hearing Harry Belafonte singing, “House built on a weak foundation /Will not stand, oh no (Oh no, oh no, oh no).”

My phlegmatic state was always caused by “burning the candle at both ends,” because I was living such a chaotic, undisciplined life, because it was God getting me for hubris, because I am Jewish and grew up feeling that way, from the Day of Atonement to Kafka and Freud.  My weight would sometimes drop below 120 pounds, and I felt so fragile, the wind could have blown me away.  By the summer of 91, a fling was cut short because my wild child lost patience with my recurrent illnesses and she ran off with a hale and hearty police officer in his 40s.  I was about as fun as Kafka.  In a poem by Thomas Grey, I came across this: “and moody madness, laughing wild amid severest woe,” which jumped out at me, because Samuel Beckett and Christopher Durang had plundered it before I got there.  Joni Mitchell, polio survivor and expert witness from the edge, said that she made Blue when she was “as vulnerable as cellophane on a pack of cigarettes.”  These were my tender years of cellophane.

That period of hypochondria was something I now associate with impetuous youth.  At 26, I was diagnosed with MS.  At 35, I was hospitalized for bipolar disorder. It was not an unfair assessment. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” True that, Samuel Johnson.  Now that I have official maladies that would have freaked out my younger self, I find that I keep track of my MRIs with an eminent specialist and take my meds for bipolar and that, as of right now anyway, I find I have a place to put all of my feelings of inspired instability, and here we are.  For two years running I have been fortunate not to catch even a case of the sniffles for the entire duration of Covid.

I continued to love Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus, and as my appreciations of melancholia and mania deepened and became confirmed, they became part of my life.  I studied with Harold Bloom, who talked to me about giving Powell a copy of The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, then discussing them with him later when he was 18—the same age I was when I felt it all. The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Sue Mingus became a friend, and she told me Charles would have liked me, and even though she’d had some to drink, I was touched. And the more I learned about Monk’s life, the more I learned about how he was given the wrong drugs from Dr. Feelgood, and when he got the right ones for bipolar disorder, the music-- and even the talking--stopped. I had lots of talk with Joni Mitchell and I eventually wrote a book about her.  My unstable 18-year-old self unfolded and held together enough to see some things through.

It has been over 30 years since my summer fling ditched me for being too sick.  We remained close friends for years until I was committed to Lenox Hill for bipolar disorder and she was convinced that I would be in a perennial revolving door and she ditched me—again, for my health—and we have not seen or spoken to each other since. Since then, I have suffered from setbacks and tragedies that would test the equilibrium of anyone.  I have felt extreme sadness and anxiety, I have had sleepless nights, but I have not stopped my meds and I have not gone back there, not even close. My actuarial odds are worse than they were 30 years ago, and yet I feel much more resilient now.  I come up hard, now I’m cool.

“I caught the darkness,” sang Leonard Cohen, and he gave me the secret key to the muse and everything else one epic night that I will never forget.  When he asked how old I was, he said, “I’m glad I don’t have to relive those 40s.”  I’m still living them, and this is evidence that I hit them hard.  I’m not going back to the mental hospital, not ever.  My brain and my muse are mine.  The doctors came up with a diagnosis, but the poets and musicians came up with how it feels and what it means.  I am one acquainted with the night.  I am on a lonely road, and I am traveling.  I am un poco loco.  I am laughing wild amid severest woe.