I recently deleted a couple of blog entries that were just too depressing (read: too real). I badly needed a distraction, so I decided to watch one of the many movies I've recorded and just stockpiled. Hey, what about this one? I thought. I know it's good, so there will be no surprises.
So I ended up watching (for the tenth time) Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas. I knew the movie was brilliant, but I didn't expect it to "take me down" (as John Lennon said in Strawberry Fields). Douglas was too good in the role, looking and acting so much like Van Gogh that it was scary, and taking us down and down and down until we spiralled and sank along with him.
Enlivening this harrowing scenario was Anthony Quinn, who won a well-deserved Oscar for playing Paul Gauguin. Believe me, I know Paul Gauguin, maybe better than I ever wanted to know him, from reading multiple biographies. He's the stockbroker who ran away from his wife and children (and a life of respectability) to sleep with 13-year-old maidens in Tahiti, before dying of syphilis in his 40s. Along the way, he casually tipped over the known art world and smiled as he watched it fracture, splinter and sink.
Ferocious as Douglas is in his painfully accurate portrayal of Vincent, Quinn just walks off with it, tall and fierce and ruthless ("I like my women fat, vicious and not too bright!"). Two powerhouse actors like these should have cancelled each other out, but they don't. There's a moment when they are arguing (like they do most of the time), and they are tete a tete - face to face so that their profiles almost touch, and it's so perfect. There's respect for each other in this nearly-comic pose, to the point where they can each let the other be their wild, sometimes irrationally crazy selves.
But hard on the heels of this exhausting spellbinder, I made another mistake. I opened the Glen Book, which is a binder full of correspondence I kept up with Glen Allen, a Canadian journalist who eventually committed suicide after 65 grinding years of alcoholism and bipolar disorder.
Familiar ground for me, as I've suffered from, and with, both of those conditions, and it's easy to feel cursed by such a thing, when others literally have no idea. This is why Glen and I connected so closely. I never even met the man, in fact it all started with a fan letter I wrote to him for his deeply-moving account of struggling with addiction in The Morningside Papers. But he actually answered me, in his uniquely graceful and melancholy style. And the exchange of letters continued for almost ten years, until I lost touch with him around 2000.
Then at the end of 2005, I opened the Globe and Mail to find a book review I had written for them, and - .
There he was, his picture, with his obituary, describing the tragic circumstances of his death. He had been hospitalized yet again for depression (and he had undergone ECT numerous times, though with ever-diminishing benefits), and this time he couldn't take it any more. He overdosed on pills, then wandered off, and he was found frozen to death the next day beside some railroad tracks.
This, combined with Kirk Douglas hacking off his ear and shooting himself in the heart, did not help my already-sinking mood, and I wished I had left Glen and his travails in the past where they belonged. He killed himself almost exactly twenty years ago, when I was in the most fragile state I had ever been in (to date - let's not try to look ahead too much). I don't know how I made it through that time, and I didn't have Glen to write to then, but he was suffering in a way I could barely imagine. He had already tried to kill himself by overdosing and passing out on shore (this was Saint John, New Brunswick, where my kids were born), and waiting for the tide carry him out. It didn't work, but there was brain damage, followed by a stroke. Even his brilliant ability to write, to keep a record, began to falter, the worst fate for someone whose writing kept him alive when nothing else worked.
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Worst of all was the photo. I had several pictures of Glen when he was doing well, and he was almost handsome in a soft-faced way, like a middle-aged boy. He looked sensitive and sweet, and vulnerable. But in this last photo, which was part of a police report after he had gone missing from the hospital, he did not look like any version of him I had ever seen.
He was listed as being 6' 2" and 150 pounds. Earlier photos showed a man who was quite stocky, probably well over 200 pounds, and here was this wraith, this unnaturally starved-looking man with uncanny eyes, just like two headlamps glistening in a way I recognized from my own bouts of mania. His front tooth had broken off, which added to the feeling that this couldn't possibly be him. But this is what his disease had reduced him to, a wraithlike figure with feverish eyes and a sort of eerie half-smile with a missing tooth.
I was going to scan and post those pictures, and found that I couldn't. Instead I found the tribute I wrote which was published in the Globe, with a picture that reflects who he really was, until mental illness ate him alive.
So why do I do this to myself? I don't know, and this entry may soon be deleted like the last two. But maybe not. I don't feel hopeless now, but I am struggling, and I do keep wondering if this is my last year on earth, or at least my last year with some semblance of health.
And Christmas is coming. Glen once wrote about his two "slips", lapses in his hard-won sobriety, once at an airport and again at Christmas, "those twin museums of lonely hearts".
I recognize the horror in how he ended it, but he had a deep and abiding compassion for the down-and-out, and even counselled people in halfway houses who were trying to make their way back to some semblance of a normal life. "It is so hard," he told me. The fact he was found frozen beside the railroad tracks had a sort of macabre poetry to it that he might have appreciated.
"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind. . . " And don't think I haven't thought about it - I keep a stockpile of pills that I have hoarded over the years, just in case. I no longer frequent airports, but that other museum of lonely hearts, Christmas, is speeding towards me like an inexorable set of headlights.
But I keep getting up in the morning. So far.
Glen would have wanted it that way.
