‘Nothing.’
‘What have you not done to your sister?’
Then I would tell her everything.
She never asked me what I had not done with Fogarty, so she never got the chance to find out what I did. She therefore knew nothing and I absolve her now of all duty of care for me as a mother then. It is in the past and that, as they say, is another country.
My sister, Helen, is a remarkable and resourceful young woman. She has a genius for children, for caring for them. She is a nursery nurse. Each day she takes the responsibility of care from the parents who leave children at her nursery and makes the day better and fuller for the children whom she comes across. It is not something I could do. Children are allergic to me and I to them. I fear that I will taint them with my own childhood. It can be hard. Will I ever know the fearless, earnest love of a child of my own? I doubt it. This is not to say that this is not something that I do not want.
*
All this was achieved, as I said, with the guidance of Didi Eisner and also Eleanora Tennyson, in the fecundity of their intellectual awareness and of the right thing to do. They were aware of my problems, none more so than Didi Eisner, whose lack of weariness in the face of an insurmountable and intractable condition betrayed her bravery and her bravery on the part of the underdog. I could have achieved nothing in my life without Didi and nothing in my work without Eleanora.
There is an unstated moral rightness about Didi Eisner which infects all who are lucky enough to come into contact with her. Her passion is for achieved potential. Everything in her life is geared towards seeing the fulfilment of the gifts of youth. Year after year she would care for and support me, with meetings, messages, and hope. It was a sad day when she said to me that for years she had hoped it would all come right, but finally had to accept that it probably would not. Even then though, her boundless optimism and resourcefulness broke through and she said, in the spirit of Beckett, to try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Eleanora Tennyson has a first-class mind. Of that there is no doubt. She too predicates her life as an academic on the achievement of potential. Her secret pleasure is academic brilliance; she admires accomplishment with the passion of the accomplished. That said, her passion is also for the underdog; she wants the best for the most disadvantaged.
Eleanora made me a scholar, what I am today, but Jim Johnson made me an editor. Being an editor is not perhaps something that one would choose, but it chose me as a vocation. Jim and I have been in intermittent dialogue in an intellectual way for a good few years and I have something to say: our best exchanges have left me wanting to think more about things, but I sometimes want to say something which has an almost musical or mathematical or architectural inevitability about it and can be definitive and complete in itself.
Jim is not a steely intellectual, although everything he says and does is suffused with his sharp, practical intellect. Jim Johnson shows in his words that words count, in his textual criticism, and thoughts about the literary marketplace, that words do not come from nowhere and are not created whole for the world. Words need careful nursing to enter the multiverse. Lintot was one such nurse, shepherding his flock of intellectual and publishing copyrights into the culture of the eighteenth century.
*
Didi Eisner once asked me whether I would ever do anything other than editions. In the first place, I don’t think I have the largeness of mind or intellect to present an argument or a big idea. But also, there is something complete and definitive about editions which I like. For me, the monograph leaves more to be said, but the edition can be an end in itself: finished, polished, complete, exhaustive, and touching on ideas as a string quartet touches on ideas – as an exercise in containing within a form the elusive and uncontainable. I think this is something that comes from having a truly academic and always calculating mind and also something which is the result of being a single man and never having had a relationship. I have no lifetime companion except myself. I have arrived at a point where I realize that my constant companion is my job, not in the way that one is a workaholic, but in the way that I live the life of the mind in dialogue with itself.
I have to live in the world and publications are my public engagement with the world, but editions are something intensely private to me. I have found something that enables me to do what I want and which provides me with pleasure.
That’s all. Just a few random ideas, which I hope will fill out your idea of me.
*
I have not yet mentioned my steadfast friends Richard Normanby and Sunny Mulgrave, who have been my safest harbour ever since we first clubbed together at Christ Church. They live their example, with kindness and no judgement. Discreetly charming, with none of the froideur of their class that so many have, although they have a certain sang froid, jointly. One of the proudest moments of my life was when they made me godfather to their first child: their daughter Hattie. They did that when I began my doctorate, which I date from her birth. Unlike all my other friends, Ric and Sunny come as a complete package, making each other whole. They give me insight into what a socialist needs to do to live in the world and to make it work better, for them and for others. Humble, in their own way, they have given me the confidence to think as a family man, with the hopes for the future and a nurturing approach to life which comes with having children present in it. Children are always a joy, and they have let me have a child in my existence, which smacks too much otherwise of the coldness of the library and the solitude of books.
*
I am in an ambulance shooting through the night-time of Prague, rushing my body, which is in dry, retching convulsions, to the Central Military Hospital (I think). I hope it is not on time. I don’t want to make it, not this time, not again.
The radio hushes out measured voices to no one, while the crew speaks to the driver.
‘Copak je s ním?’ [What’s wrong with the lad?]
The paramedic adjusts the blood pressure monitor on my right arm.
‘Holka. Kluk. Pospˇešte si, chci být doma vcˇas.’ [A girl. A boy. He’s young. Hurry up. I want to get home on time tonight.]
The driver switches the sirens on, hurriedly driving through the unforgiving autumn night.
*
In all my work, in all my studies I have had the company of two fine friends and fellow students. Fergus McFergus and Odette van Essen. We were the generation which came after the politically inflected scholars of Oxford in the late twentieth century, of high and low and Whig literary culture. Fergus McFergus embraced the world of politics wholeheartedly and turned it upside down; if there was ambivalence, then for him there was meaning. He brings to his work a sense of the impossible delivered, the inscrutable understood, even where it was not intended. Odette van Essen communed with the women who sat beside the men of state, who guarded their tea tables from the male culture of the Court and the coffee shop. The sexualized text would yield its intentions to her understanding. We were not the golden generation, but we had gold in our hearts, at least for each other, to whom we were all in all, at least for a while. If we had to face the world, at least the world of Oxford academe, then we would at least face it together.
Lintot had a bad hand. Frankly, his writing is barely readable. In another age they took time to read what had been written but now we scarcely have the time to read what is printed, let alone thrown out by a hand without an eye to the future. We puzzled over Lintot’s hand, the three of us. Those black dots of ink on an unforgiving page. Was L’Estrange’s edition of Josephus a ‘bad one’ or a ‘sad one’. It was hard to tell, and reading his Josephus did not tell you much more. We laboured over Lintot’s hand as he had not. Slowly we worked out that his five forms of the letter ‘s’ were but a mockery of his minims, which tumbled from his quill like words from a child. It is important if we listen to the past to know that we are listening to what it said rather than what we might rather it said. This holds true right down to reading the hand of the past rightly. There is a great sa
tisfaction to see what others saw centuries before us, clearly, as they did. That is the whole point of the textual editor, to get to the truth of what was said, how, why, where, and when. I have given the world Tonson and Dryden, Lintot and Rowe. What remains to be discovered in their hands I cannot guess at. If I have failed in my endeavours, I hope at least that it has been a noble failure.
*
This is not getting it done (I think). I must concentrate. The Library is emptying for lunch, but I won’t go to college now. I have to get this done. I sigh and start again, stop. Then start again.
Lintot’s promotion of the works of Alexander Pope …
*
I have a small line of red dots on the back of my left hand, where the needle goes in. I have had hundreds of ketamine injections, more than anyone else, perhaps. The needle goes in, and the truth comes out. Sometimes I am a child again. Sometimes I have the innocence of a child, but I am not innocent. I know too much. I have known too much. More than anyone else, perhaps.
Everyone thinks they know more than everyone else in my world, and perhaps in the world in general. It is a fact of my life that I have often been in a sense beside myself, psychotic. There is a strange compulsion that comes over the psychotic which is not familiar to the merely neurotic. There is an insistent truth to the thoughts of the psychotic, independent of the real world. All-consuming, these thoughts overwhelm me and convince me of their truth. Having a logic of their own, they refract and distort the world around me, so that although recognizable to others, it makes no sense to them. The logic of the paranoid is something else to be believed, although it cannot be believed. It is a universe made for its own satisfaction, convinced of its rightness. The difficulty is to master oneself and the truth of the world from such a distinctive and unhaphazard perspective.
I am not Christopher Boone. I am not on the autistic spectrum. But something of Haddon’s hero speaks to me. When Christopher sees the world, when the world crashes on him, a car crash of numbers with one insistent, vital number shouting out to him in the wreckage, that speaks to me of the confusion of the paranoid thought, a way of thinking which is known to the paranoid man. It is hard to see the one number which is important in the din of the experience, there is too much to compute, and chopped logic takes aim in the drive-by shooting of life. Haddon in this work is no doubt a genius, managing to express best what was neither often thought nor so well expressed. The clarity of his language and the beauty of it, the inescapable logic of the extreme, instantly lived, in the moment, is something to admire.
Mark Haddon reaches out to me in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Didi Eisner reaches out to me like Siobhan in it. The dog was ‘curious’ because of what it did not do, the noise it did not make, the unsaid. The unsaid by the dog speaks volumes to Sherlock Holmes, as I speak much by what I did not say in the past. What remains unsaid says a lot about us, as individuals. The love not uttered, the truth not shamed.
I do not think that doctors do harm, intend to do harm. Their whole reason is to see the world whole and to eliminate all that is wrong with it, insofar as they can. When you love cancer, when your existence is predicated on your love for it, what can they do? There is no reasoning with the paranoid, because they have their own totalizing reason. But there are reasons for this, and seeing that – perhaps for the first time – among all the half-truths and untruths of the perverted mind is part of the answer to its unquestioning rightness.
Doctor John Fortescue has an intelligent, questioning mind, open to the unknown, embracing experiment and discovery. Researchers in the US had shown that ketamine, given through a drip, could have a short-term effect, rapidly alleviating depression in people who had been depressed for years. Doctor John Fortescue had research funding to explore the safety of up to six doses. Charles Timmins, who knew of the work in the US and had been exploring the actions of similar drugs, referred me to the study. But the effects were sufficiently convincing in some people, including me, that the NHS trust supported Doctor John Fortescue in exploring whether the benefit could be sustained through repeated infusions, and then by giving it as a syrup. Unresponsive as I was to all conventional medications, Charles Timmins heard of this treatment and launched me into an experiment with ketamine, with myself, that was to have profound and, I hope, long-lasting consequences.
Ketamine works by blocking the glutamate receptors on cells in the brain. This causes the ‘buds’ at the finely ramified tips of the branches of the tree that is a nerve cell to rapidly grow, perhaps making possible, once again, the rich connections that have been lost in the winter of depression. It also boosts a chemical called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) – which, to extend the analogy, is a bit like plant food. Ideally, they would like to see the buds take on a ‘mature conformation’ (i.e. a narrow stalk – like a leaf or a mushroom), as this conformation is more stable than that thorn-like ‘bud’. But they do not know how to do this yet.
I began receiving ketamine injections five years ago. The effect of the drug was instant. It did not cure me of depression – or hasn’t yet – but it altered my mind in a way that I revelled in. It changes one’s perceptions, of time, of everything. Sometimes I would see the needle slip in, slip out, and think that nothing had happened, that no time had passed. Sometimes, I would feel the electric enervation of the Grand Unified Theory. Occasionally, I would scream out as Fogarty came into the room, but more often it was Margaret Thatcher. I could see her profile, you see, in the curtains surrounding the bed in which I received my treatment, and for an hour would be in the presence of an historical figure. It was comic to me that the great lady would visit me in my hospital bed, under the most unusual circumstances. It never crossed my mind to think that this was improbable and impossible. Her presence in the clinic was an honour, I thought, little though I then honoured her. Once, I was even visited by God.
I had the feeling that God came into the clinic to make his visit one dull Friday morning. I did not expect Him and He was not what I expected. A genial fellow, He carried Himself well for His age, I thought. He did not remain long, and I was not inquisitive after the great truths of creation. I was more surprised that He was accompanied by Margaret Thatcher, to whom I thought He might have had more to say. I can’t remember what we discussed – probably Star Wars. He did not come back. Perhaps He was surprised at the reception He received. We don’t stand on ceremony in the ECT suite of the Warneford. He shuffled off and was not seen again.
My greatest discovery during my pastoral days at the Warneford was that knowledge and understanding brought great comedy with them. My scholarship had always been tinted with, tainted with, comedy, not comic effect, but the comedy of a divine, benevolent resolution. There was something joyous about ketamine, its light touch, although sometimes its effects were heavy. Even when once or twice I thought I was being raped, it was done with good humour. The nurse would have a dexterous way of dealing with the situation, holding my head so that I did not shake myself into an injury. Sometimes the anaesthetist who sang Rossini in the clinic would break off his aria and wonder if perhaps the dose was not too much. The odd thing about ketamine is that it wears off in these cases almost instantly. The needle would come out and five minutes later I would be singing the anaesthetist’s aria to myself, walking around the clinic with a renewed vigour and a spring in my step. I always left thinking that all was right in the world, even when I had been visited by Fogarty or by God.
The effect on me though was profound. I had seen God and seen that He was good. He was not what I thought He would be and, to be frank, I did not think Him any great shakes. I seldom told anyone of the company I kept. I knew they could not see my visitors. Are there any side effects? I would be asked. I thought it would sound odd to say none, but the presence of the masters of history by my bed seemed to me to be a truth they were not yet prepared to countenance.
Gradually, over time, Doctor John Fortescue adjusted the strength of my treatment, and I ha
d no more visitors. I missed them, but they always brought dissociated, sleepy after-effects, which made me incapable of functioning well as I bustled afterwards round and about Oxford. A fellow, I would go to lunch in the Senior Common Room at University College after an injection. It was strange to me to think that only an hour before I had existed outside time, answering only to eternity and the insistent call of a bladder latterly incapacitated by anxiety.
Ketamine has perhaps cured me of my condition. I retain the symptoms of depression, the sleeplessness and the somnolence, but apart from those old friends and rivals, I do not feel depressed. Ketamine has brought about the conditions to cure my condition. The extreme dissociation I experience when taking it is the end in itself. It makes it possible for me to recognize the truth that my mood is just an unhelpful thought, not the visitation of the eternal. Likewise, my paranoia – yes, my paranoia, something I own, as I would my own child – can be cured by the realization that it is wrong, that the thoughts themselves and the reasons for them, their unrelenting reason, are wrong.
I had to ask myself a question: was I afraid of being cured? Doctor John Fortescue one day told me that I was now in the ‘recovery phase’, something I had never thought possible. What would it mean to me, what form would this recovery take? Ever since I can remember I have been ill. I owned that illness as my own, as myself. It would take courage to be well again, as I was when I was a child. I thought I had the courage to be a sick man, but the bravery that wellness would require was asking a lot of me. I had become a patient, needing patient help. What would it mean to me to be impatient for the day, to seize the moment and live for it?
I am a well man. Can I cope with perfect confidence, with the honest fact that there is nothing wrong with me?
*
Complication upon complication. I have a thought (I do not know where it has come from). That someone, somewhere is planning my destruction. It is as simple and as complicated as that. I have no evidence for it, but to my mind the heaps of evidence are piling up. I can be rational about it, but already it is convincing me, has convinced me, that it is the truth. Thinking about it is not the right response. Feeling it, that is not the right response either. I feel it, I know it. I know it to be true, that without any just cause someone is plotting my downfall.
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