Gods.

I've spent my whole life being chased by other people's gods, and running away into the shadows until they get sick of trying to recruit me to their cause.

There was the Catholic god when I was young: austere and vengeful in the tales told by my mother as she recalled her upbringing under his auspices - sanctioning twisting of hair, striking with a cane and refusing to bury those who have ever been divorced. Like the airbrushed London gangsters of the 1960s, he only punishes those who are asking for it.

I tried to talk to this god, but I saw him for what he is. He cast a shadow over the very sick beginning of my life when I could have fallen at any minute from my slender tightrope. Death being at least as likely a possibility as survival, I was christened at the age of three hours. That my father had sidestepped the Catholic church was (literally) a sin to my grandmother, and I always assumed I'd never really been forgiven.

I spent time melting away to the sanctuary of an upstairs room, or trying not to let my breathing be heard, when Jehovah's Witnesses arrived at the door brandishing their dogma, repeated for posterity in innumerable copies of Watchtower.

There has been the need to raise my voice in the street - the last bastion of those with no further argument - to the proselytisers who care about the destinty of my mortal soul.

Then there are the African gods, whose roots are not suspended in the sky, but preserved in every cat, person, stone and house that has ever existed. The fatal lack of of empirical observation condemns those, too, though: while those with the power to see such things can tell a sick tree from a healthy one because of the strength of its life force, I can only see a tree.

I've spent forever either fleeing such gods, or frozen in terror at the thought of them. Now, the ironic thing is that I've lifted a fragile, reluctant woman onto the pedestal from which gods stare down icily, and just as she was warming to her role as my arbitor, she had to leave.

So I am, once again, without religion - and without religion, it was observed, man is nothing. This time, though, it has been wrenched from my grip instead of relinquished voluntarily. The scorch marks are striped and sore on my fingers: stigmata.

Poetess.

I come back to you every time, and it is no longer a shock.

To get anywhere, you have to start your journey - but my journeys are always circular, and they all terminate with you.

For ten years or more, a third of a lifetime, you have been my reference point. You gave birth to the twin ideas, both of them corrosive, that it is possible to become sufficiently depleted that the only option remaining is to take your own life; and that no great experiences are required to produce writing of huge significance.

Worse still, the logical conclusion of the two concepts above is that a writer is elevated to immortality upon an untimely or inexplicable death.

I was supposed to be dead eight months ago, according to the timetable I made when you first broke my skin and took residence there: the great weight which I drag with me everywhere. Had I been more brave, the thin gruel of my own words would have sold maybe a hundred copies by now. The shifting, celebrity-obsessed western society would have made sure that I had my five minutes, and then cast me aside in open-mouthed anticipation of its next victim.

At thirty I intended to die; to fill the oven with my oversized head and replicate your end. I wished to rise so that we might compare notes - you, whose tree overhangs with serious, difficult fruit - and the butcher could have made off with my sarcophagus.

Now you are not a harbinger of death but instead postpone it. In times of crisis I listen to you read your slow, devastating poetry, and I swear it is a form of medicine. I am not replenished by you; no - you complete the process of hollowing-out, that I might begin again.

The bare bones are yours, oh butcher, but the virgin residue which will re-commence filling them out any minute now is my future. That my new, fragile skin is made from your own laboratory-synthesised genetic material is a secret neither of us have to share.

Origins.

I wonder about the origins of our biases and convictions in the light of an observation made by Bluefish in the last few hours.

Since her condition has deteriorated, it is a fact that I have found communication with Bluefish more difficult. Why is this?

I contend that the reason is because, from somewhere, I have convinced myself that it is a source of irritation to the unwell to be weighed down with trivialities. In other words: conduct your business quickly, decisively, and then leave her body to mend. This mindset has become a source of conflict between Bluefish and I because, she laments, she needs my presence now more than ever.

So where did it come from, then, the notion that it is improper to laugh with or eat up the day of those who are sick? (I should clarify that Bluefish is not on the 'endangered' list.) As I write, I realise precisely why she might appreciate now more than at other times an opportunity to be leavened from pain; to be distracted by anything at all. Yet still, my stubborn viewpoint persists.

I remember a book called 'Carrie's War,' which I recall had the stink of misery and sickness and overwhelmed, seething patients seemingly drifting from every page - the doomed Mrs. Gotobed.

I remember my grandfather announcing: they gave me some good news today! I've got two weeks to live!

I know how I behave when I have anything from a headache to something which requires a hospital visit - unbearably, illogically angry with anything which dares to intersect my path. Just as the drunk feels free to punch you in the face because he is no longer in control, I find myself biting back rage and frustration. It is the only time that such thick, dark emotions come to dominate me.

There is, I realise, an element of fear (on my part) here too. I am scared that I am no longer the one doing the steering, and that Bluefish is not permitted to steer herself either. Instead, we are at the mercy of something abstract, something which has overloaded her and stolen the thunder of both of us.

This is the frightening thing about (even non life-threatening) illnesses. They arrive unannounced and cleave that which was unbreakable straight through the middle. It's no longer just you and I, love.

A confession, too. I am scared of dying, and any illness demands that we, for a moment, look our own mortality squarely in the eyes. The thing about existence, so the joke goes, is that nobody ever got out alive, and I contemplate this with a shiver.

Illness.

Is it possible for a person to be so ill or miserable that their condition has an effect on someone else located an arbitrary distance away?

Some sets of twins supposedly have this characteristic: when you're cut, we both bleed. This telepathy is cultivated by shared nature, and shared nurture.

What about outside such an immediate family environment? What does it mean when Bluefish, in Canberra, has been cut and I in England metaphorically bleed for her?

The romantic in me rushes to the surface and cries: this is the ultimate expression of love! To be joined in an intimate, lockstep dance with the sick girl from whom I am separated by thousands of miles of ocean!

In ecstasy, we point out where the malfunctoning of one is replicated and amplified in the other. This love needs no external validation, for it exists haughtily above the abyss of men in their dirt and cowardice!

Yet although we are correct, we are mistaken. It is true that when Bluefish suffers, I concurrently suffer, waking up from bad dreams with an anguished yell. We are one: you with your neck; and I with my nightmares. In the near future when the surgeons pull out your agony by its roots, and kill it stone dead, I too shall shed blood.

There, though, the correlation ends. When the toxins which are presently polluting your system are a fading memory, I'll still spend my sleeping time bellowing out the past, existing uncomfortably in this unnatural furrow, returned indefinitely to the stale, sweating pit in which I've spent all but five weeks.

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....)