There’s then a gap of about two months until the next entry.22nd JanuaryDear Fuck-wit DiaryWell, I managed to get myself out of that joint at long last. What a pile of wank! To think that people get paid for administering that so-called therapy, and other people are prepared to pay for it. The blind pissing on the blind — that’s what it is. The best thing I can say about my stay at the funny farm is that it cut the costs at home — thanks to George’s largesse. And I managed to miss out on Christmas, which has to be the most depressing time of the year.George was right about one thing, though, the cunts didn’t make me talk about myself, or take anything I didn’t want to. They did however insist on my sitting in on group therapy sessions. What an absurd idea! As if forcing a lot of unhappy people to sit in a circle, prating on about their private miseries, could possibly make any of us feel any better.30th JanuaryIt’s not as if I ever really felt any better — so I suppose I can’t be feeling substantially worse. The house has been wreathed in thick fog for the past week or so. Every morning when I get up, I look out of the window and see it hanging like a cloud of gas at the end of the garden. I can almost imagine that soldiers are about to emerge from it wearing puttees and carrying Lee Enfields with bayonets fixed. They are advancing towards me, determined to capture the trench of my mind.I like to move very carefully now. To cross a room, or even pick up some small object, I affect an undulant motion, like someone with Parkinson’s disease who’s just taken some L-Dopa. I have to get the right rhythm into my actions in order for them to happen at all. Often I’ll be halfway towards doing something when I’ll realise that I don’t have the correct rhythm, and then I’ll just collapse back into despair.9th FebruaryI went to see Tony Bohm yesterday. Not because of my mental health, but because of a cyst in one of my nipples. I joked with him, saying perhaps he should inject a little collagen into the other nipple, to even things up.He gave me a peculiar look, and said in that nannyish way that doctors have, ‘You’re not at all well, Simon, are you?’ I confessed that I didn’t feel my stay with the other sads had done me a great deal of good, but so what? He suggested — in a roundabout sort of a way — that I try going on anti-depressants again. According to him, these drugs are far better designed than they used to be. They can now target exactly the receptors in the brain responsible for depression, like some smart misery-seeking bomb, dropped down the ventilation shaft of the mind.I started waving my hands about when he began this eulogy, saying All right, all right, I’ll take the bloody pills! I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m just exhausted, tired of fighting this thing day in and day out. I want some respite from my head, and I dread the suicidal urges coming back. I read last week in the
Bulletin of Suicidology that the suicide rate for male painters in their early forties is 700 per cent higher than the national average. No wonder I want to do a Rothko.I left Bohm’s surgery with a prescription and went across to get it at MacLachlan’s. For some reason the pharmacist in there — a drowned rat of a man, who is normally sulky and silent — gave me a broad grin, together with my pot of head-governors.I came home and took a couple. I’m waiting for the mushy feeling that comes before I’ve adjusted to the dosage. Waiting for it with something that could be anticipation — but isn’t. Rather it’s something that stands in the same relation to anticipation as a whore does to a lover.11th FebruaryNo mushy feeling yesterday, and none today either. Instead a peculiar lightening in my mood. It’s not that I exactly want to do anything, or that I don’t feel the depression still gnawing at me, it’s just that I can almost — almost, mind — imagine what it might be like to feel interested in something again, to want to include some of its essence within myself.Sat in my studio all day and listened to the sounds of the house around and below me. Jean’s shoes clacking across the wooden floors; the children’s crashing entries and slamming exits; the occasional waft of music; the chirrup and trill of the phone. I smiled, thinking about how I constantly complain that this rumpus upsets my work, when the truth is I haven’t done any work now for so long.12th FebruaryOn some odd impulse I bought an antique victrola today. It was sitting in the window of the noncey little antique shop in Thame, together with the usual cataract of tat. I had noticed the thing a number of times before, but on this occasion I found myself intrigued by it. With primitive music machines like this, the analog of the sound they make is so visible, so tangible. I only had to touch the thing to imagine that Chaliapin was creaking and groaning the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’. It will make a great object to place at the centre of a canvas.13th FebruaryStarted work on the victrola painting today. I thought I’d do some charcoal sketches of it just to get my hand in, and then it struck me: I was working! I had the yen to work for the first time in months. I had the impulse to shout, hoot, do a little jig, rush down and tell Jean and Christabel. . but I restrained myself. What if it was just an illusion, some function of the happy pills Bohm has given me?So, this afternoon I drove into Oxford and went to the Science Library. I had intended to look up all the anti-depressants commonly prescribed, and see if I could account for my creative rebirth. But when I got down among the stacks and was leafing through the pharmacological reference works, I lost interest in this mundane task. The juxtapositions of carpet tiling, strip lighting and blond wood in the library fired my imagination. The library — and the way it acts as an analog of the information contained in its rank upon rank of volumes — struck me as a counterpart to the victrola I bought yesterday in Thame.Why not amalgamate the two into one canvas? I could see exactly what it should look like: the victrola, hunched and black, with chunks of pharmacological gobbledygook radiating from its flaring horn. It will look Dadaist, and be a suitable memento of my voyage back across the psychic Styx.14th FebruaryI stayed up late last night and drew Jean a Valentine’s card. She seemed shocked when she saw it among the breakfast things — and then burst into tears and ran out of the room. I ran after her and caught her in the drawing room, where she hugged me and sobbed for a while. She said she had despaired of my ever improving and had made arrangements to take the children away, if I wouldn’t agree to go back into hospital.I was shaken by this. It’s peculiar how from the vantage point of even a partial recovery the idea of my former negativity, my rejection of the world and all its works, seems so remote.Worked on the victrola painting all morning. I’ve got hold of some second-hand pharmacological reference works back from Oxford, and I spent the morning cutting them up into the appropriately sized chunks. I’ve given up on doing the charcoal sketches and have decided to work directly on to canvas. I feel that confident.16th FebruaryI went into the health centre this morning to see Bohm. I told him, with some humility, that he was right and the new anti-depressants did seem to be having a remarkable effect on me. I now find that more or less anything I direct my attention to appears interesting to me, and worthy of some place in my life. Bohm asked me if I would describe this as ‘positive engagement’. I replied that this was a bit technical, but that I did feel a general enthusiasm for life and all it offers.The truth is that the posters Bohm has put up in his consulting room, which show cuddly toys — teddies and suchlike — inhabiting their own parallel realm, had begun to intrigue me, and I wasn’t directing much of my attention to him. He’s obviously put them up for the children, but perhaps, in away, they represent an idea of a better world that adults also find seductive. It would be interesting to do a series of paintings, in a photoreal style and employing the same colour scheme, but showing the cuddly toys working in laboratories, or industrial plants.20th FebruaryJean is a bit concerned about the way the house is filling up with laboratory equipment and cuddly toys. I’ve explained that they’re essential for the new painting