Ideas of Reference

Over at Mike Barnes's blog www.graphomaniac.blogspot Mike will be posting over the next twenty or so days a long essay which might be understood as a continuation of his memoir The Lily Pond. I read an earlier version of this over the summer, though I've not yet read this new, edited version. I'm quite anxious, though, to read it, and will be checking in every day to read the installments as he puts them up.

I've taken the liberty of cutting and pasting Mike's introduction to this ideas of reference project below, and I'll be highlighting parts of it as he puts it up. But if you want to read the whole thing, I'd suggest bookmarking his blog. This will be worth tuning in regularly for.

(ideas of reference), a sidelong introduction

Starting with the next post I will be entering a long, multi-part prose piece that, based on the draft I have, and if all goes well, should take between 15 and 20 days to correct and enter.

This writing has no title. Or rather its title is a picture, an image that repeats with variations at the start of each of the work's three sections. But because it is tedious to refer to an "untitled prose piece," I am calling it by its bracketed subtitle, (ideas of reference).

It also has no genre, or no definite one that I can see. It seems to loiter between personal essay and fiction, though sidling closer to the former.

I will number its three sections and parts in each post title, so that, for instance, (ideas of reference) 2.3 will refer to the third part of the second section.

What is it about? I don't know if that matters to you. (Especially since I don't know if there is a you. Disabling the Comments and Followers (Followers?!) functions was the first step I took in beginning this blog, a liberating act that I have never regretted and without which 2009 would have expired quickly.) But for some reason I feel the need to try and say.

If I found myself stretched on the Theme Rack in the English Teacher's donjon–that place of dank groans I have long since tunnelled out of, and which I do my humble and secretive best to help others endure and escape from–I might give up this to my inquisitors: (ideas of reference) grew out of my wondering at how one slips toward, and through, the door of insanity (to avoid some more sophisticated but cumbersome phrase such as "states of non-consensual reality"), and then, slipping through and back repeatedly, learns to channel those slipping passages as a source of art: writing as a lucid dream.

But that, barring screams, is all I could give those dear old thugs.

In the Black Box of Bipolar Disorder

A review of the Lily Pond in the Guelph Mercury by Alex Good.

Mental illness has always been a difficult subject to relate to. The field is full of myths and common misunderstandings, making diagnosis and treatment both a bit of an art and a science. And so, if nothing else, a memoir of madness gives us a bit of insight into what may be going on.

In The Lily Pond, Toronto writer Mike Barnes offers a series of different perspectives on a life spent dealing with bipolar disorder. The book has four sections (Barnes calls them essays) that are arranged in roughly chronological order.

The first, which is also the shortest and most effective section, tells the story of the author's own early (mis) diagnoses, hospitalization, and search for a cure (including the usual laundry list of drugs and even electroconvulsive therapy). There is, however, no cure -- a point made at the end of the first section with a clever reversal of Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Just as Achilles can never catch the tortoise from behind, neither can he escape him if ahead. You can't shake depression.

And so, the next three sections describe Barnes living with his condition, focusing on his relationships with his family, his psychiatrist, and his wife. The presentation here is less personal, more layered with myth and metaphor and concerned with how experience is turned into the stuff of story.

But it remains compelling. Barnes, the author of highly regarded novels and short story collections whose sales figures (disarmingly documented here) are cause for depression enough in themselves, is a graceful yet economical writer with a knack for imagery you can almost feel.

Seeing his wife becoming cobwebbed in pills, he writes, "the image that comes to mind is of someone (I have done it many times myself) trying to secure a package that contains objects of irregular shapes and sharp edges, winding the plastic tape around it in fierce spirals, around and around, swathing and swathing until it lumpily muffled, sometimes (paranoia and fatigue combining clumsily) passing the dispenser over the name and address accidentally."

This is well observed and rendered, with the sentence itself wrapping round and round those bracketed digressions while suggesting the "fierce spiral" of illness and treatment swallowing the patient's identity seemingly by accident.

But The Lily Pond isn't just a portrait in misery. This is mainly due to the separation Barnes maintains between the autobiographical subject and the autobiographer, "the necessary sliver of space between my skin and what it was I was stitching." In other words, in the best postmodern fashion, this is a book that is also about its own writing, construction and interpretation. A portrait of the middle-aged bipolar man as an artist.

If there is one problem with the book, it is the final essay. This appears to have been almost an afterthought, telling the late-breaking story of Barnes' wife Heather's mental illness. The details, however, are sketchy, the imagery and mythic elements seem more forced and the picture we end with isn't as hopeful as it is disturbing.

Instead of mutual support, one has the sense of an unhealthy, mutually reinforcing codependency on a prescription of "twenty-nine pills a day."

On that regimen, the tortoise might even begin to close ground with Achilles.

Despite such final misgivings, The Lily Pond is an insightful look inside the black box of bipolar disorder and an original artistic reinterpretation of the experience of living with mental illness.

Mike Barnes: The St. Clement's Talk

On November 2nd, Mike Barnes was the guest speaker at the St. Clement's 40 Minute Forum, and all indications are that it was, like every other Barnes / Lily Pond event this fall, a moving, powerful, and thought provoking presentation. Mike has since taped his discussion, which can be found here, at archives.org, where you can download it and listen to it at your leisure.

We're looking to set up some additional speaking engagements for Mike, so if you like his talk and would like to set something up, please get in touch. I can be reached at biblioasis@gmail.com.

BP (Bipolar) Magazine review of The Lily Pond

A short review has appeared in the important mental health magazine BP (Bipolar) Magazine, raving about Mike Barnes's The Lily Pond. As I have said elsewhere, repeatedly (sorry about that), I think this is one of the most important memoirs of its kind, better than Jamison, Styron, Solomon, Alvarez: most who have picked it up seem to agree. So, please, do so.

Here's the review:

The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis
By Mike Barnes (Biblioasis, 2008)

Reviewed by Rachel Bravmann

In 2008, memoirs about bipolar disorder are flying off the shelves. Barnes’ personal chronicle rises to the top due not only to content but to his sheer mastery of language.

Exploring 30 years of living with bipolar disorder from a variety of perspectives, including in-patient hospitalization, he weaves a complex narrative of memory and pondering. From descriptions of depression to the natural world and even mythology, Barnes commands a natural affinity for exposition and depiction. Take notice of his relationship to a nursery web spider, a wood frog, his family, and his partner, Heather, who also lives with mental illness. These bonds are beautifully illustrated, venerated, and illuminated.

In describing Heather, Barnes may also be describing the nature of bipolar disorder: “Mental Illness–meaning here, the diagnosis and treatment of it especially–is working against her confidence, implanting radical doubts in her about her basic capability.” In doing so he creates an essential element of trust with readers. Full of fraught childhood reminisces, explanations of the excruciating and familiar ebb and flow of despair, and complex existential tracts, The Lily Pond shines.

The Lily Pond: An Introductory Interview with Mike Barnes

The title of your new memoir is The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis. I wonder if you could start by explaining this a bit, with perhaps particular emphasis paid to your rather interesting subtitle?

For a few months the manuscript had another title, and only three sections instead of four. I thought it was finished. When I was surprised by the events, and then the writing, of the last section, I realized that its title, "The Lily Pond", had to be the title of the whole book, since it encapsulates so many of the themes and images explored throughout. But a book just called "The Lily Pond" could be mistaken for a manual on aquatic gardening or a study of Monet--hence the subtitle. It came from me asking myself a simple question: What is the book about? What are its main and recurrent elements? It's about madness, an old-fashioned term which I usually prefer to the more modern "bipolar disorder". Madness covers a huge range of extreme states: from craziness/mental illness to fiery creative passion to overmastering love and obsession. I think this scope makes it a more humane term, but also a more accurate one. The book is also about memory. This might be considered redundant: isn't a memoir by definition about memory? No. All memoirs draw on memory, but this one actively explores how memory may be lost or damaged (through illness and its treatments), how and to what extent it may be recovered, and how a coherent life story may be maintained even in the absence of reliable memory. The book is also about myth(s). It draws on world mythologies to make some of its points, but in a broader sense, it questions the daily myths of illness and wellness by which we know ourselves and others. How do these myths damage, limit, nourish, reveal? Can they be changed? Lastly, it is a story of metamorphosis: of altered states wrought by illness and confusion, but also by recovery and understanding. It is about the paradox of accepting radical ongoing transformation as the foundation of life and sanity.

Plus, I like the alliteration of those five "M"s. They sound like murmuring.

I like your use of madness as well. It seems more fitting, human, less clinical. Madness' shape more diaphanous, perhaps, than bi-polar or schizophrenic, more human. More true to life. There's nothing contained about it. It also seems to me that this is a book, in some ways, you have been working toward for quite a while. Your other books -- some of your stories, your poetry, perhaps most especially your first novel, The Syllabus -- have grappled with the subjects of madness, of memory (and forgetting), of metamorphosis. Especially M., the hero of The Syllabus. You describe memory in The Lily Pond as a Turner fogscape. Can you briefly explain?

Well, that comparison comes specifically from "Two Rooms", the first section of the book, where the period I am trying to remember is the eighteen months I spent on and off (mostly on) a psychiatric ward...when accurate recall was swamped by a perfect storm of memory disruptors: multiple electroshock treatments, phenothiazines and other powerful drugs, and the confusions and distortions of psychosis itself. So the snippets that come back to me are often like those tantalizing gleams in Turner's veils of fog. Sometimes, if I concentrate, more details will come and the object or face, a scene, will solidify and make more sense. And this also happens looking at Turner's paintings. This doesn't mean, though, that the glimpses of things could be anything, are random. I have a sense--a memory trace, I assume--of what is really there, and it has weight, a "rightness" on those occasions when I find it. For example, a year ago, my sister told me of visiting me in the hospital at a time when I was catatonic, just lying on my bed unmoving day after day. And fleeting images of her then came back to me, bits of her face, hands, the hospital wall behind her...and I trusted these. Partly because they had that weight I'm speaking of, a mass that felt like more than fancy...pieces actually dredged up from something sunken...but also because they stayed as bits, fleeting fragments. I think a wish-fulfillment fantasy would have bloomed more completely. This was one of the worst times, memory-wise. Nearly obliterative for those years, but also very destructive of my life up till then, as if a retroactive fog had swallowed much of the past. And then the memory troubles continued forward too, with fog and "gap-outs", as I call them, especially during times of illness. In recent years I have felt much clearer and more certain about remembering my life. Relatively speaking; when I compare notes with other people, they express surprise at how places I've been, books I've read, etc. could vanish so completely. But I've learned a lot of tricks that help: checks and double-checks, ways of reinforcement, and also habits of concentration and reflection to lay down and maintain a stronger memory track. And I've learned to live with the holes. Turner's fog can be unsettling, disquieting...but it also has its gentle and allusive aspect, a richness of suggestion. Whereas easy-to-see could also mean easy-to-dismiss, which is another kind of forgetting. I'm sorry: you asked for "briefly" and this hasn't been. Memory is a raw nerve.

Can you say a few words about the writing of the book?

The story of the book's genesis is told in the book's third section, "Leavetaking", where, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, I follow, in an almost detective-like fashion, a number of mysterious clues and events that lead me to an answer which is also a course of action: telling my own story, this memoir, for the first time.

One of the key precipitating events, described in the book, was being asked to speak about my life as a writer for a university group. In preparing that talk, I realized that I had not told, even to myself, my own story—or this important aspect of it—in explicit and detailed terms. In my poems and fiction I had alluded to it constantly and tried to illuminate it from various angles. But I had never consciously tried to explore at length, in writing, the meaning for me of my decades of mental illness. This preliminary thinking led me into areas of exploration that were unusable for a short talk to a few strangers but which proved to be the beginnings of this manuscript.

After writing the first three-quarters of it, I sent it to five friends, less to get their judgement on its literary merits than to see if it spoke to them as a "human" story they could relate to. Their enthusiastic and encouraging responses led me to continue the project, eventually writing the last section about my wife's recently-diagnosed illness and, in slow steps, to consider and finally say yes to Dan Wells's offer to publish the book.

A Thaw Foretold

Mike Barnes's 2006 collection of poetry A Thaw Foretold has been reviewed on the McNally Robinson blog, as well as on Todd Swift's UK site EYEWEAR. It's a good, thoughtful review, and one of the few, unfortunately, this damn fine book has received. It's also one of our most beautifully produced, the cover letter pressed on a St. Armand handmade stock. And one of our scarcest to boot, as Canada Post destroyed at least half of the print run in transit. But there are still copies available, either on the website, directly, through amazon, indigo, or via special order through your favourite independent.

Here's a brief quote from the review:

The poems in the collection don’t all fit perfectly but most do, engaging and challenging in equal measure, many of the poems demanding a second and further readings, bringing the reader back time and again to flick through the pages and join the poet on his journey through shared emotional seasons.

The full review can be found here:

/toddswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/guest-review-robinson-on-barnes.html

Mike Barnes's latest book, The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis, is in the final stages of production. A memoir of his more than thirty year battle with bi-polar disorder, it's one of the most intelligent, moving, beautiful, and horrifying treatments of mental illness I've read (having a tendency to wallow in the dark waters myself from time to time, I've read a lot of them). You'll be hearing a lot more about The Lily Pond, here and elsewhere, as the launch date approaches.