Various meditations after my visitor goes home
In a parallel to the conventional wisdom about travel, it’s nice to have a visitor, and with all due respect to my dear friend Simon, it’s nice when they go… I’m still recovering from the violent mind-blending [sic] brain quake I had back in May or whenever, my second episode of mental ill health this year. The first was treated in the community. My CPN on hearing a variety of pretty inappropriate smart arse jokes and comments was assured I was hypomanic, and it was contained. Then some weeks later, with marital difficulties at a peak, and discussion about divorce, I tried to check myself voluntarily into hospital, which is more difficult than one would think. There’s office hours to contend with for one thing. I found myself prior to my first episode, parking outside the art college in the wee hours and walking the streets. I ended up at the local psychiatric hospital, rang the bell, and there was no answer. So I went back to my car (maybe 2 miles away, not at all as the crow flies, unless the crow were seriously disoriented) and drove home to take some tranquillisers and sleep it off. Anyway, long story short, I was in hospital for four weeks, by no means my longest stint, nor worst in terms of how ill I was or how upset by the other patients — it does seem a little weird that the unpredictable are all bunched in together; I always thought it would be better were they to be put to work with the Amish or something… anyway, as I was trying to say, he said, wondering if his writing style is indicative of neurodivergence of some sort, or perhaps, some new as yet undiscovered flavour of… I’m still somewhat burnt out and recovering.
It was nice to have Simon’s company. We did the usual, standard activities of drinking tea, looking in the charity shops, looking at records, having lunch, coffee, and I saw him back on his train the next day, gave him a semi-awkward but appreciative hug, and off he went on his way. In the interim, we spoke at length about music, a pet topic of ours, and his hobby, which I’ve acquired, of buying cheap obscure charity shop records (or record shop sale bin stock) on an educated whim based on cover design, verbal information, record label, date of release, band members, and so on; in basically a search for the Holy Grail of Records, some forgotten tune that hits the spot just so. We talked about my now defunct shooting star punk project Jazz Mags, which burnt out after our second and final gig, after I smashed up my guitar and limped off home, leaving everyone else to clean up after me, have I talked about this before? Repetition is beloved of musicians, supposedly, as Bizzy kindly said when I apologised for playing the same song repeatedly every day during lockdown, Papa M’s reworking of sixties easy listening banger “Wayfaring Stranger”; namely “Over Jordan” from his somewhat depressing and brilliant 2001 alt country opus “Whatever, Mortal”. It speaks in a sort of Johnny Cash type way, about a literal hereafter that most of us balk at believing in, but metaphorically, the call to transcendence and unity and release in death, something of an upgrade on the extended desire for oblivion, which in my mind is not available to me, for complex reasons, including notably, having a beloved daughter who I adore, let alone doting and longsuffering parents and friends.
I believe I am bipolar, but carry a schizoaffective diagnosis since reporting meeting a spirit person during a trip smoking Seer’s Sage, a legal high bought for it’s celebrated entheogenic possibilities of visions, which I forgot to mention, or just generally forgot, I had taken. So now I’m lumbered with a full time thought disorder diagnosis, rather than the truth, as I see it anyway, that I have a mood disorder and an unconventional but not medically significant atypical worldview, that comes of being a self-identified poet, philosopher, and visionary. I call this, for conventions sake, weirdly, being an “artist”. In actual fact, writing is my prime function, but I just happen to find therapeutic value in painting and have something of a knack for post-ironic meditations on artistic tropes in various media. I am not truly an artist, in this sense, that it is an interest rather than a calling. Nor am I paralysed by the usual perfectionistic fear that pushes artists to make their best work. Perhaps I have an eye, to some extent, and a creative mind, and I make art, so maybe I’m an artist. I’m questioning it though, because local Butter Market Burrito-magnate Barney was teasing me saying “are you still pretending to be an artist” and I was slightly affronted until I remembered both my Masters Study and my solo show at The Loft when he ran it with Fiona, during both I focused on my concept (which I think I’ve coined) of Identity Praxis, which essentially is a backasswards idea of making art to be an Artist, rather than the other way around (which is true anyway, also). I was boasting I had become an artist to think of myself as something other than a Service User in the Mental Health System. Russell Taysom said years ago, “If you weren’t at art college, you’d be an outsider artist”, and it’s true — that’s what I am, an overqualified and self-conscious outsider artist, halfway (on a good day) in towards the inside. I’ve done voluntary tutorials and talks for the college and put on group and solo shows. But it’s all in a way a game and something to do. I’m passing time, waiting, for what? perhaps Judgement Day.
