In Praise of Shite (and coping with mental illness)
What does art mean to me?
That was the question posed and one I will attempt to answer... in a minute.
First though, a friendly note of caution:
This article revolves around my own struggles with mental health, and I want to stress that what is written is my own PERSONAL experience of bipolar disorder along with my own PERSONAL coping strategies.
These might not be suitable, nor appropriate, for you, maybe not for anybody. We all have our own individual experiences and ways of coping so please don't follow mine blindly.
I share them here to try and convey the inner experiences of mental breakdown and neuro-divergence, which I hope will be of help both to fellow travellers and to those of you lucky enough not to have such experiences... to understand the incomprehensible.
This piece also contains topics and words that some of you may find triggering.
If you are struggling or finding yourself unable to cope, you can contact the Samaritans (UK) free on 116 123.
They have been a lifeline to me and will listen to you without judgement, 24hrs a day, 365 days of the year.
Don't leave it until you are at complete breaking point either. Reaching out is a sign of strength, and intervening early is the best thing you can do, no matter how 'stupid' you think you are being.
Bipolar UK (www.bipolaruk.org) also do excellent work providing information, guidance, and support, both in-person and online.
Both would be very grateful for donations to support their life-saving work, if you are able to do so.
Keep well and look after each other.
x
So what does art mean to me?
Art can be mean to me. Art can torment and infuriate me, impale, harass, mock and demean me.
And that's just the art I make myself... when it works, when it's doing its job.
When it needs to be wrestled with and fought, when it sits on my face to try and suffocate me, or tries ripping my god- damn guts out, that's when I know it's worth fighting for.
For survival.
Possibly.
But it's the same when it's the exact opposite, when it magically appears without you noticing... isn't it?
Oh art.
The things I initially feel unable to convey usually arise out of the detritus of failed efforts and embarrassed erasure, when I'm wallowing ecstatically in my lack of confidence and skill, with wounds wound, wrung out, wrought, and I'm stumbling in mumbling action, exposing bruises I have tried so hard to hide.
It's this that pushes things forwards into places I didn't expect to visit or had deliberately detoured to avoid. It's in this fight between my intentions and my limitations, my desires and my flaws, that something useful may appear.
That something other. An accidental truth. Possibly.
Living with HIV and bipolar disorder, I am that cliche of an artist who claims that their work is their therapy.
But it's true. Looking and making, hiding and faking, shitting and bleeding, destroying and mistaking... without it I might not be here. So fuck you, what else can I do?
For years I didn't know how I felt about my diagnostic labels, those boxes ticked on forms that force you into remembering and confronting your sicknesses all over again..
How am I supposed to react? What is that 'supposed to' doing in that thought anyway? Often, especially in the immediate hoursdaysmonthsyears after a diagnosis, you have no time to wonder how you actually feel.
Your only concern is what-the-actual-fuck? It's all 'how will I survive?' or 'will I survive?' not 'what do I think' about whether or not I will, should, could, want-to exist.
So I leave that to the hands. They know best in their brainless wisdom and stupidity, free from my spiraling and dilapidated consciousness.
And often they just want, need, to do something... something, anythingsomething, to distract themselves from reaching for the motherfucking knives.
So I let them.
Then maybe, just maybe, my brain will notice, and wonder, and pause to think: 'what on Earth are they doing..?'
That briefest of interventions can be enough. A new thought to interrupt the shite.
So I let them. Breathe.
It's only in these moments of making that my mind is clear, uncluttered, quiet even. It's the only time I feel something I assume to be 'relaxed', that alien concept from your alien world so often taken for granted.
Many people misunderstand mental illness as fish understand chips. Which is perfectly fair; how can you when you have no point of reference? Sanity bears no resemblance to its opposite, they operate on different planes and obey different laws. Like the visible and the quantum there is no unifying theory, not yet.
So
"Watch some comedy if you're feeling depressed" they say, as if the thought had never occurred before.
Well, the thought has never properly occurred before because I know with everysorryporeofmybeing that it is pointless, and meaningless, and reckless as allfuckinghell...
Sorry.
Laughter lives mostly on the surface, in the ripples and the waves and the galloping white-horses.
Depression exists and breeds at the bottom of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, deep under pressure of oceans where no light can reach. They flow on different planes and react to different currents. Depression undermines everything, every single thing, every t, every h, every i, n, and g. It is a world with no concept of humour and where laughter has no relevance. How can a joke be funny when every word, every syllable, each letter and every gap is completely, utterly, desperately depressed? When all movements are sinister, every action pointing out that you are nothing but a calamitous mistake? When the screen on which you are told to watch this somethingfunny on, each pixel, each glimmer, every bastard proton is telling you you are a meaningless piece of shit?
And you know it SHOULD be funny..?
Hafuckingha.
Or
"Go for a walk, that'll cheer you up..." Go out into the world... you know, THAT world where the ground will devour you,
where the birds are screaming,
where the trees want you dead,
where the sky aims to suffocate you,
and the sun is only there to light up your suicide.
No.
No, thank you.
Can't.
Mustn't.
Won't.
Or
"Have you tried meditation? Breathing exercises..?"
Something calming. Some thing calm. Somecalmingcalmthing? No. No I fucking haven't.
Can't. Won't. Impossible to.
There is no calming there because there is no concept of calm here. No.
Know.
No.
When I am paddling in the shallows of depression or hypomania then these strategies can, and do, work. But when flailing towards drowning in the middling depths/heights they are intolerable.
You see, in my alternate reality, each of these remedies reveal how depressed or hypomanic I really am; they emphasise, expose, exaggerate, and mock.
They are the evidence of my madness, the proof of my off-kilter. They reveal in real-time 4D the terrifying distance between what I should be feeling and how I actually feel, hammering home the depths in which I have fallen.
So laughter exaggerates my depression, and within meditation I can't help but speed up.
They force spirals, down and out, deepening the gulf between myself and that thing called reality, between sanity and bust. They compound the problem and pound me, remorselessly, confirming all my worst fears, punch after fucking punch. Relativity in action, right there, right now.
In these states my senses are not logical nor obey your standard laws, so I cannot force a laugh nor breathe myself calm. But what I can do is try and make myself perceive that I am less extreme, less depressed or less manic, to make it bearable whilst I ride it out.
Because it WILL pass. It will pass. Itwillfuckingpassitwill...
These states of mine need the opposite of the assumed, a comparison of intensity, something to position themselves against/amongst which is more excessive than them, higher or lower, to put them in their place.
Put simply, my depression needs confronting with things that I hate, and my hypomania requires chaos and incomprehensibility to calm me down. Only then may I judge myself, position my own sense of reality, in relation to that thing. They become a measure of selfhood, a gauge of my internal present, which in turn gives me co-ordinates upon which I can begin to regain some co-ordination.
If I can find something more horrible than me, some thing I hate more than myself, what then?
If I can find something moving faster than my mind, that's overtaking me on a blind bend, where am I then? Somethingwhere that might actually make some sense.
So it isn't just my own work that I use and abuse therapeutically.
When I am the most worthless pieceofcrap it is Constable to whom I usually turn. Or 21st century Hirst. Or the minimalist sculpture galleries on Tate Modern's upper floor. The list does go on. In case of emergencies.
They have become my saviours, my saviours whom I love because I hate them so.
To my eyes, Constable's insipid palette is the worst crime of bullshit: unnatural, offensive, fetid and vile. The overthinking, the restrictive, staged, caged version of nature disgusts me, without fail, always.
So no matter how low my self-esteem, how disgraceful and desperate I feel in my disintegrating world, I know when I stand in front of a Constable, I know that the world can actually be more beautiful than that, and I know, deep in the perverted backroom of my mind, I know I can remember seeing it more beautifully, more glorious and radiant. Somehow, somewhen, buried deep beneath my self-loathing and bile, I realise that beauty DOES still exist, somewhere, and I remember, I KNOW, that I can still recognise it... and I can remember that I've seen it... and I know that maybe, just maybe, I could see it again.
It won't last of course, but that's not the point. It's those few seconds of realisation that count, that salve and save.
Those fleeting moments of remembrance that grab your arm and pull you to the surface gasping for air.
They divert.
They prevent.
That's magic.
Likewise if I can I drag my sorry arse to confront yet another vintrined pastiche of creativity or oversized pipecleaner, turd-zeros of thought, by Hirst, suddenly I realise that I do actually have something to fucking say.
Or when entering the room of Judds and Lewitts and bores and blahs, shockingly and ridiculously I become, in my mind, a meaningful thing... perhaps the most meaningful thing in that room... if alone.
I'm still just a 'thing' of course, but it's several leagues above the perception of myself pre-entry and I leave feeling somewhat valid... valid because I want to BE somewhere else... and I want to be, to exist, because I want to leave... and I leave wanting to exist... or I want to exist long enough to leave at least...
All are validations otherwise absent, no matter how brief. They are the vital jolts I need to remind myself that I do still retain a glimmer of a speck of a grain of a sense of myself that is coherent, that is good. When I see something in the world I think is shitter than me I can think myself worth something, and suddenly I'm also remembering that this state of mind will pass... it WILL pass because I remember feeling differently, feeling better, somewhere, somewhenelse. Magic.
The flip side is that when in a depressive state I must never, ever, confront a Wojnarowicz or Jarman, Bourgeois or Bacon. Then I will know that I AM shit, KNOW I am worthless, and I should just fuck-off-and-die immediately and rightthefucknow.
Or what if I thought them to be shit..? The horror.
Hypomania (a state below mania) is a frenzied state in which you think and act with crystal clarity but at hyperspeed. Layer upon layer of thoughts and actions, solutions and possibilities, fire simultaneously in all directions in a nuclear fusion of emotions and ideas, yet you perceive yourself to be operating at 'normal' speed.
No, not 'normal', you're brilliant and unstoppable, if only everybody else would get out of your fucking way. You're playing at 78rpm in a world stuck on 16, and it can be exhausting, then tortuous. But it's the sweet spot. Left unchecked you can keep speeding up, layer upon exponential layer of clarities and speeds, birthingamultiverseofthoughtsandactionsandsimultaneouswhitenoises, until you break free of gravity and all concepts and explode across infinity, dancing obliviously in manic ecstasy around the rim of that blackest of holes.
When hypomanic I therefore seek the anti-zen.
I need Bruce Nauman cacophonous abrasive and no no no on repeat repeat repeat.
Or Anne Imhof all-consuming confrontaional repeat repeat repeat.
Or Kutlag Ataman overloading repeat repeat repeat.
Or Pina Bausch thrashing in futility and grace again and again repeat repeat repeat.
Or Roni Size & Reprazent loudmaxvol169bpmrepeatrepeatrepeat
And there I stay for hours, in those places that scream faster, more chaotic, more vivid, and more overwhelming than my mind. Repeatrepeatrepeatrepeat.
Externalising my p(m)anic onto something more m(p)anic than me and I can then feel calmer than something, more coherent than chaos and slower than light.
Oh the peace
In the stasis
Where I can actually take a breath
An actual fucking breath
Fuck
Art
It's magic.
So I celebrate the things that I hate, and I revel in the things that overwhelm. They have saved me and will do so again, and again and again. Repeatrepeatrepeat. Which makes me glad if some people don't like my own work too, if they don't get it or can't engage. Not everyone should and it'd be shit if they did; that hell of magnolia and beige and men's clothes. Everyone should have a thing that they despise, that speaks in a voice they recoil from, with an ugliness unique to their eyes. That's as it should be. It's fine to disagree, to not understand, to not 'get it', it's probably none of your business anyway, so use it to your advantage or move on... there's something else out there for you, somewhere.
We need the ugly so we can recognise beauty, shite that gives meaning to brilliance.
Weeds are just plants we deem to be in the wrong place after all, but they flower and give life still.
@coombspaul 2022
www.paulcoombs.co.uk
