Psychiatry.

I remember the first - thus far only - time that 'they' ever admitted me for psychiatric evaluation.

I'd been struggling to get out of bed for a few mornings; then a few mornings became several weeks, and the sleepless pressure was becoming enough to blow my head apart.

So I went and begged the doctor for pills: please, give me anything to stop my very life leaking through my synapses. Some months ago, I reported the recollection that these 20mg pellets - the anti-depressive equivalent of shandy - turned everything flat and white and featureless. I existed in cloud, in mist, in snow.

Easily, a gift, I passed from one side of the wall to the other, ghosting through solid objects and people like steam. Abracadabra! Like some cosmological mind-trick, a feat which seemed to take a matter of seconds had erased four hours from my life, and I would wake up shaking. Like one of Pac-Man's ghosts, the pills let me travel wherever I wanted for a while, uninhibited.

The pills didn't fix me. Being a modern, impatient child of my time, I expected that I should be fixed. This is how I wound up in the waiting room of a South Yorkshire psychiatrist, hostile eyes following the cleaner as she swept around my feet.

When I was invited into my consultation, I pushed angrily into the room and demanded to know why the psychiatrist had a spy in the waiting room, watching my every move. What had she reported back, and what was the thinking behind it? Is it because you know my answers in here are rehearsed, while the ones outwith your confines are natural and unhesitant?

It was without pills, and without profession infringement, that I re-established some sort of normality. The difficulty in waking up subsided, for no apparent reason, and I ultimately threw the pills in the bin. I wished that the bin was the deepest mine-shaft on the face of the earth, or the Mariana Trench. I wanted them to be irretrievable.

Now the same stirrings which precipitated the deepening of the misery I had are happening again. Lethargic, and falling fast from the high of three weeks ago. The financial markets have taught us the difficult lesson that for every boom there is a bust. Regretfully, I anticipate that the cycle will soon have completed another one of its inevitable circles, and it so happens that I must soon start from the bottom again.

Cathexis.

With each significant memory, either positive or negative, is associated an attendant charge of emotion or energy - this is nothing new, and Freud was putting the meat on the bones of similar theories over a century ago.

I am aware now that the magnitude of such charges is never permanently reducible to nothing, even when cues to a specific memory are presented repeatedly.

I haven't drawn the graph of the decline, but the charge of energy does fall away with the number of repetitions, dwindling to somewhere just above zero at the nth presentation of the cue.

The withdrawal of the stimulus allows the energy charge to replenish slightly. Without any scientific rigour, I tentatively state that the charge replenishes more slowly than it drains: after n repetitions, and n equivalent rest-units, the cathexis would be more drained than before the presentation of the first stimulus.

This idea gives us the opposite of learning - where increased exposure to something results in enhanced recollection; and its withdrawal weakens powers of recall.

Strong emotions, then, would seem to be a hindrance to recollection. It is best to engage in learning with a cool head, and avoiding the strong, familiar scent of memories (I don't best know how this can be done) which encourages the perfidious bubble of cathexis to inflate massively, and obscure everything.

Inversion.

There are in-built biases in language which, if we are not careful, condemn us every single time we open our mouths.

"Hi. How are you today?"
"I've been better - I feel a little bit down."

I envisage shades of mood arranged, according to the convention embodied in the second quote-marked sentence, on a simple (vertical) number line analogous to a Likert scale.

.
.
.
+5 This level of joy is seldom experienced by anyone, even once.
+4 I'm so happy that I can barely concentrate on anything else.
+3 Life is good. I smile at strangers.
+2 For no discernible reason, I feel pretty good.
+1 I've certainly had worse days.
0 I don't feel anything at all. I'm either neutral, or numb.
-1 I'm a little bit down.
-2 There's a moderate sadness that I can't shift.
-3 It is obvious to a casual observer that I am suffering.
-4 I am broken to the extent that I struggle to get out of bed.
-5 This could well be the end of my life.
.
.
.

Expressed simply, then, 'positive' moods align themselves with positive numbers, and depressed moods co-incide with negative numbers - this we see from terminology such as 'feeling upbeat', and 'on cloud nine' as opposed to 'hitting rock-bottom', and 'my mood plummeted.'

I contend that most people are more able to deal with positive numbers than negative ones. That is, positive numbers are more natural. In the most intuitive manner of speaking, negative numbers refer to (a lack of) objects which are not graspable by the senses. Consider the classic (and stereotypical) case of a caveman with the corpses of two mammoths on which to sustain himself.

He counts backwards thus: I have I and I mammoths = II. When I have eaten a complete mammoth, I have II - I mammoths = I.

When the latter mammoth is also consumed, I am back to where I started, and must go hunting again. Our caveman only being a hypothetical creature, we cannot ask him what happens when he initially has two mammoths, and three are taken away - but some 21st-century humans struggle with the idea of debt, and of being less than nothing, so it doesn't take too great a leap of the imagination to conclude that our caveman might recoil at I and I mammoths - I and I and I mammoths = -1.

(To be continued....)

Volume.

"Are you sure that I'm enough for you?" is the question upon which all relationships pivot - the see-saw which occasionally aligns itself with a nearby star, yet just as frequently points groundwards.

If we are fishing for compliments, though, instead of posing the question in all its dead-eyed austerity, we ask with the beginnings of a smile forming around our lips, and we hope that the answer is that we are more than enough: you are without boundaries, and yet still I can traverse any part of you without feeling lost.

The prospect of moving blindly over an infinite terrain is terrifying. Without signposts, which develop when the private language of a couple is expanded, there is no way of understanding moods, gestures, words? Without knowing that I used to wear black every July 13, without knowing that I am scared of cars as toddlers are of monsters, without knowing that I worship cats, how can anyone begin to pare down what seems to be endlessness?

Nothing is endless, of course, except perhaps the universe - yet couples not only delude themselves that this is the case, but eventually give it primacy. Above laughter. Above love. Above intimacy, we raise the imaginary flag of infinity.

British marriage vows spell this out explicitly. In agreeing to love, honour, and obey, we permit our every last thought to be dissected in front of us in a thousand different ways. This is surveillance intimacy, but the machinery does not yet exist to drag out reluctant cognitions into the light.

From the disorientation of a blank terrain, then, we are presented with so many signs that every analysis is spiked on or trips over one or more, and the result is the same dull incomprehension.

Moderation, then, is the best thing. Trapped between the ocean, sick of its vastness, and the signifier which reveals all as it explains nothing, is moderation. Wedding vows should appeal to the possible, and leave the higher echelons of thought to the irresponsible dreamers and poets.

Withering.

The passage of time whittles away ambition, to the point where the non-talented become lip-curling, miserable solipsists.

If once the intention was to illuminate the whole universe with the light of the intellect, this aspiration soon dwindles, and getting out of bed is itself a lofty aim.

Oh, the exhaustion of trying to decode the world soon becomes too much - the ineluctable principles of imaginary numbers and dimensionless vectors just doesn't sink in, and defeat after defeat chills the bones.

So we compromise our ambitions - if we can't understand the world, then understanding even part of it will suffice. Even this, though, is too difficult, and we give up and walk away in frustration: learning another language where the strange words trip over each other and die.

What remains when ambition has dwindled to a cinder, a slender loop of light surrounding not the universe or even the world, but just the stinking vessel of the self? The remorseless ticking off of seconds and minutes and hours and days and.... spent in a self-contained bubble of anaesthetic.

Withering before my very eyes, there is little left. Writing like an incompetent, and the Spanish preterite's bones dissolving into forgetfulness. There is little left - determination, purpose, confidence.

Everything, when left untended, either grows unchecked or returns to a foetal nub.

Chain.

Suicide, says Camus, is brought about when that which has been tolerated for an arbitrary amount of time becomes at once unbearable, or absurd.

Go to work, go home, go to bed: this is the new-old reality in the absence of Bluefish, and I observe the pattern sadly.

I speak not of an internal 'observation,' enumerating day after day after day, but I instead stand outside myself, fully aware of the futility in which I engage.

I have no plans to end my life, but I understand the mindset which plants the seed of the decision. When it appears that one is condemned to an infinite number of repetitions, it is logical to want to break the circle.

Logical? But surely there is no logic in the thinking machine that unplugs itself forever?

(Some) physicists have postulated that the universe is a giant computer, which, when it is approaching its death is able to perform an increasingly large number of steps. At the very point when the 'Big Crunch' occurs, the number of steps is infinite, and so any calculation or rendering is possible.

On the much smaller human scale, what clarity and work would be possible at the moment the synapses act upon the decision to extinguish themselves, assuming that the physicists' view is a) valid and b) applicable in another domain?

How simple to encapsulate the universe! To evaluate and revise it - simplicity itself - when the mind is teetering between being itself and being nothing at all. And this is the logic of suicide: the brief unification of everything and then the void.

Indifference.

The sun is indifferent to the appeals of man: it emits light irrespective.

The sun is indifferent to questions: it shines on belligerently when I mouth at it.

The sun is deaf - the most hard-of-hearing object in a silent universe.

The rain is indifferent too - it would fill the whole world had it the strength.

The rain takes no commands; it drowns them instead.

Blind to suffering is the rain.

Other people are indifferent; smoking their cigarettes.

And talking about the TV - closed shells.

They have no redeeming words.

The northern hemisphere is indifferent.

Except for me -

Squinting at a dot marked 'Canberra.'

Return.

You weren't even able to look at me after we'd unstuck our bodies for the last time: a hopeless mess of kisses and tears at Heathrow.

I walked down the steps and away, and now as I write you shimmer thousands of feet above me, three hours into your journey back to the furthest point on the earth.

Meanwhile, I scrutinise every relic you left behind - the mostly-drunk glass of wine, the shirt with the pony on it, a cover cleansed of the blood you shed during our final, frantic burst of love-making on Thursday night - a coming-together which generated sufficient heat and pressure to give birth to a constellation of stars.

I want to rebuild you with the small stock of items that remain. I'll be finding your unbelievably long, unbelievably dark hairs for weeks yet and holding them in the air to assess how they catch the light in this position but not in that one.

There's a ticket from the public transport system in Geneva. Geneva, where we pretended to be married for a weekend, and I signed you into the hotel as my wife. This was the realisation of what had initially started as somewhat mocking and fantastical practice of naming our fictitious children, and whose evolution saw us examining names with great care and deliberation.

You weren't able to look at me in the despairing last throes of our time together, and I understand why. I understand that to look again means the re-emergence of tears which act not as catharsis but as a deepening of misery; crying for the sake of the past, present and future instead of just the past.

I scrutinise every relic, and I'm about to abandon the worst day of my life for the release that a heavy, burdened sleep will bring - a poor excuse of a release, but better than staying here with eyes that refuse to pull down the shutters. As I do so, I'll take the shirt and the cowbit, and hope that I can re-connect with you in some way in your cloud-spattered trajectory.