“Interesting”

Many years ago, I came across someone whose signs and symptoms could only be interpreted as something serious, and the way I put it was that I couldn’t think of an explanation for their symptoms that wasn’t serious. Actually life-threatening, but I didn’t say that. It was while I was still training, so I wasn’t sure if it was just lack of experience, but in fact it did turn out to be very serious and they died a few months later. Now this blog is not about herbalism, so this might seem a bit off-topic, but sometimes things which are serious are also interesting, and this bothers me because it makes it seem like I don’t care about the people affected by it. It’s possible to broaden this. For instance, shortly before Ceausescu was assassinated (there should be a cedilla in there somewhere, and this is what I mean), I became interested in the Romanian language. It seems kind of cold somehow to do this. On the other hand, the world needs people to be interested in things in that way.

It’s been said that the world needs psychopaths, because for example they might make good surgeons. It probably wouldn’t be a good thing for a surgeon to wince with empathy every time she makes an incision. On the other hand, she then needs to explain the need and the outcome of an operation to her patients, and this ought to be accompanied by a good bedside manner. You can’t win really. Both kinds of people are important, or perhaps I should say that both kinds of attitudes are important.

I expect you know where this is going. Yeah, the Ukraine. More specifically, the similarities and differences between the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Because I couldn’t help noticing on televised interviews from the Ukraine that I could understand bits and pieces of what was being said even though I hadn’t learnt Ukrainian, and in fact I couldn’t tell if the people in question were speaking Russian or Ukrainian. When I looked up the words I recognised, it turned out that the two languages are very close to each other.

Here’s a diagram to explain this:

This image is absolutely lovely. Nonetheless it will be removed on request.

Right now, the relevant bit is the cluster of dark red circles at lower right. These are the Slavic languages. Ukrainian, Belarussian and Russian are East Slavic. Lexical distance is a measure of similar vocabulary, that is, either words which both mean the same thing in the languages concerned or are somewhat similar. It may or may not include faux amis, I’m not sure.

I’ve done something similar with the Romance languages, where I found that Portuguese and Castilian were the closest and Romanian was the outlier, as is reflected in this diagram. However, Catalan has been said to be the most central. There is clearly a linguistic continuum affecting many of the Western Romance languages, and also Western Germanic, where German blends into Dutch. Scots is missing from the Germanic cluster here. Speaking of languages spoken in Scotland, another linguistic continuum is Gàidhlig-Manx-Irish, and there’s a gap in this where Galwegian Gàidhlig has become extinct. The reason I mention these is that they’re more familiar to me than the languages of Eastern Europe because I’ve never been outside my Hexagon.

It’s worth doing a grainy pixelated zooming-in on the Slavic languages:

My attempt to learn Russian rather pre-dates my later flurry of interest in languages. Russian appealed to me because it had a different alphabet than usual, although it was less exciting than Arabic which can’t really even be written properly in the Latin script. My interest was further boosted by my adolescent Stalinist phase, of which I would say the following: many of the boys I knew at school got into fascism and the NF, and most have hopefully left that long behind. I got into Stalinism. I am no longer Stalinist and haven’t been since 1984 CE. Also at that time, I was aware that the grammar school in my city offered Russian, although I wasn’t at that school but a bilateral, and there was a Russian course on BBC2 on Sunday mornings I followed for a while. Also, I learnt a little Polish, and also felt very drawn to Serbo-Croat because it had a reputation for obscurity. I was using the ‘Penguin Russian Course’ primer, and it was the first time I had seriously attempted to acquire a second language, unless you count the French we did at school. Unfortunately schooling had managed to suck all the fun and interest out of French in a variety of ways, such as giving detention for not being able to remember the conjugation of «être» and promising a trip to France, which was just across the way since we were in East Kent, leading to both fluency in and hatred of French lasting decades, which I’ve only just got past. But the thing is, apparently you cannot extricate fluency easily from your brain, so I’m still fluent in French, and my Russian comprehension is slightly better than what they call “post-beginner”, and has sat there since my childhood with practically no progress since, or much practice. There are sadly several languages which have languished like this in my mind, a particular sadness being Gàidhlig. However, I do know enough Russian to make out little bits of conversation and more text, and there are also many loan words from German, Latin and Greek origins which help. There’s also the occasional cognate with other Slavic languages.

Ukrainian is close to Russian but also quite close to Polish, something I didn’t appreciate until recently. My Polish really is not good even though a family member is Polish. The situation is complicated by the fact that some Ukrainians mix Russian and Ukrainian in their speech, and of course some Ukrainians speak Russian as a first language. Listening to Ukrainian reminds me of the experience of hearing Norwegian and understanding it without realising it isn’t Swedish, except that my grasp of Slavic tongues is quite a bit weaker than that of Nordic ones. So would it be fair to say Ukrainian is intermediate between Russian and Polish? I don’t know.

Looking at the other Slavic languages on that diagram, it’s notable that Serbian and Croatian are two blobs in contact with each other. This is because they’re basically the same language, to a much greater extent than is usual for very similar related languages. Serbo-Croat is just the same language written in a different alphabet with different spelling. Bulgarian and Macedonian may be similar but I’m not so familiar with the latter. I do know it wasn’t an official language in the early 1980s CE. In fact, I get the impression that in general, Slavic languages tend to be closer to each other than Germanic or Romance languages are and that identity politics is particularly important in making distinctions between them. Czech and Slovak, for example, are said to be closer than English and Scots.

There are routes between the clusters. One of these is between English and French, and I’m sure we Anglophones can perceive that ourselves. In the case of Slavic, these are between Slovene and Albanian, Polish and Lithuanian, and Ukrainian and Hungarian. This last is quite unexpected because Hungarian is a Uralic language not at all related to any of the Indo-European ones. Although Hungarian is a Uralic language like Finnish and Sami, it’s by no means close to any other language in its family except Mansi and Khanty, which are spoken thousands of kilometres away in Siberia. The distance between it and Finnish has been described as similar to that between English and Farsi, bearing in mind that Farsi has been described as “the English of Asia” because of its grammatical simplicity. Hungary and the Ukraine share a short border and the Hungarian language has a small number of Ukrainian loanwords but several times as many from Russian, so I don’t understand why the link has been made here.

The Baltic languages are another matter entirely. They have been lumped together with Slavic but in fact they’re not particularly close. There used to be a third, more conservative Baltic language called Old Prussian, not related to the German dialect. Lithuanian and the language I call Lettish but most other people now call Latvian are the most conservative of all widely-spoken Indo-European languages. There are a very small number of people in religious communities who have Sanskrit as a first language, which would be even more conservative. Lettish is Lithuanian with Estonian influences, more or less, which is interesting because it’s thought that Germanic languages are the result of proto-Indo-European influenced by an ancestor of Estonian, so either Lettish is distantly related to English or both languages went through parallel evolution due to similar influences. It makes sense that Lithuanian would have things in common with Polish owing to the fact that the former used to be a major East European country, and included Kyiv.

With the exception of Bulgarian, and therefore presumably Macedonian, the Slavic languages are grammatically similar. They tend to have three genders, although Polish has an extra one for male persons if I remember correctly, around six cases and perfective and imperfective aspects to their verbs. That is, there would be a difference between “drink” and “drink up”. Slovene, uniquely, retains the dual number throughout its inflexions. Bulgarian is special in a number of ways. Firstly, it forms the model for Old Church Slavonic, a liturgical language which is the most primitive recorded Slavic language. Secondly, it was the origin of the Cyrillic script, later to be adopted into other Slavic languages and beyond. Thirdly, it was written at one point in a unique script called Glagolitsa which seems to have been deliberately invented in such a way to obscure its origins. Fourthly, it’s a Balkan language, sharing features with other only distantly related languages such as a definite article suffix (the only Slavic language with an article). Fifthly, it has the most reduced case system of any Slavic language, with I think only two cases. Finally, it’s possibly the only Indo-European language with evidentiality as part of its grammar – that is, verbs are marked according to whether the sentence is hearsay. There are probably some other unusual features which have slipped my mind.

Bulgarian is also influential on all East Slavic languages due to the influence of religious texts. Just in case I haven’t said, East Slavic languages include Ukrainian, Russian, a little-spoken language called Rusyn, and Belarusian. Old Church Slavonic, that is, basically Old Bulgarian, was the liturgical language, occupying a similar position in East Slavic society as Latin did in Western Europe, meaning that it was used as the higher register, again like Latin. This means that as with the Romance languages, and in a different way in English, there can be two sets of words, one posher or more learnèd than the other, but noticeably similar.

During the Tsarist Era, the languages were all seen as varieties of Russian, but nowadays they are considered to be four different languages, three of them associated with a nation. There will also be pairs of dialects sandwiched between them, intermediate, so very “Russian” Ukrainian on one side of the border and very “Ukrainian” Russian on the other for example.

The differences, as I understand them, are fairly minor. Russian misses out the copula and Ukrainian doesn’t. This, along with the absence of articles which is usual in Slavic languages, makes Russian sound a bit like “note form”. Oddly, Russian at least is apparently not pro-drop: it uses subject pronouns even though its verbs are heavily inflected for person or number. I don’t know if Ukrainian does this. Ukrainian also pronounces “o” in the full form even when unstressed. The Russian tendency to pronounce «Г» as «Х» is fairly closely reflected in Ukrainian, which has a voiced H like Czech and uses that letter to represent it. It therefore also has «Ґ» for /g/. Spelling is more phonetic. Ukrainian palatises more. Politically, Russian is also a semi-official language in some other countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union, whereas Ukrainian is just its own national language.

Cyrillic script is, unsurprisingly, named after someone called Cyril, a Greek saint who brought Christianity to the Bulgars. At the time, it was common for languages in the Eastern Med to adopt a slightly modified Greek script. This includes Gothic, Coptic and the single surviving sentence of the earliest Romance language, “τορνε, τορνε, φρατρε”. Old Church Slavonic did the same, in something like the ninth Christian century. In this case, as well as Greek letters, there were also modified Hebrew letters and the occasional Glagolitsic character. Cyrillic has since been adapted for languages over much of Eurasia, Slavonic or not, and most written languages in the former USSR used it. There was a policy of introducing different letters for the same sounds pursued in Soviet Central Asia in order to make rebellion against Moscow more difficult to coördinate by disrupting written communication, which has led to some strange choices in some languages such as “&” being used for a particular vowel in one Turkic language. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several of the newly independent states adopted Arabic script for religious and nationalistic reasons. In the USSR itself, few languages were written in anything but Cyrillic. The Baltic republics used Latin, Armenia and Georgia had their own scripts, the Jewish communities used Hebrew and certain isolated Siberian communities had a pictographic system where entire phrases were communicated by means of diagrams. Due to its use in very diverse languages, Cyrillic has a potential store of letters able to represent probably the majority of sounds in spoken languages except for clicks.

Cyrillic, Greek and Latin form a closely-related family of scripts used to write the majority of the world’s languages. Each has its own distinctive features. Greek today is, as far as I know, only used to write one language. Latin is of course the world’s most widely used alphabet. It could be argued that Gaelic is a separate script but it’s more like a calligraphic and typographic style of Latin. Cyrillic is exclusively used in the former Soviet Union and associated states such as Outer Mongolia, and in the Balkans. The division between Slavic languages which use Cyrillic and those using Latin is the same as the historical division between Orthodox and Roman Catholic countries. Although it’s strongly associated with Russian, in the same sense as English uses the Latin alphabet, Russian could be said to be using the Bulgarian alphabet, although it’s modified in Russian, as is the English version of Latin with its J, W and V.

The script is distinguished in several ways. One is that it has fewer ascenders and descenders. Since this is one of the major differences between capital and lower case letters in English and Greek, there isn’t much distinction between those in Cyrillic other than their size. There are some, as with «p» for example, and there are also little “ticks” on some letters such as «ц». The italic and cursive versions of the script bring some surprises. For instance, «т» and «и» are written as we would write “m” and “u”. The ideal of Cyrillic handwriting closely resembles our own copperplate style, and I was initially impressed and fascinated by its beauty, but everyday cursive handwriting has a reputation for being practically illegible, even to thoroughly literate native speakers of languages using that script. It basically looks like a scribble of arcades. The problem is that many of the letters are composed of similar elements, including й, ц, ш, щ, п, л, ч, м, и and т, which is almost a third of the alphabet of thirty-three letters. My own Cyrillic handwriting is in two styles. One of them is printed and looks similar to printed Russian, but the other has an interesting hangover from my Marion Richardson days. To digress briefly, I initially learnt Latin cursive twice and then modified it. My initial style, which was more like the cursive most English people use (I don’t know about Wales, Scotland or Ireland), Marion Richardson, was practically illegible and I was asked to go back to printing. A couple of years later, I learnt to write in italic, which I later rounded off. My Cyrillic handwriting has the same issues as my Marion Richardson, which is that it’s difficult for me to make small neat loops because I tend to continue to move the pen in the same direction as the loop after I’ve finished it, and Cyrillic depends more on loops than Latin cursive, particularly to link the letters, and consequently my writing doesn’t stay horizontal and wanders all over the page. So my Cyrillic is as illegible as others’, but not for the same reason. Therefore, most of the time I just print it. Typing in Cyrillic is just “hunt and peck” for me and is incredibly slow. This is because Russian typewriters have a completely different layout to QWERTY and also have more letters, whereas Latin alphabet typewriters and also those for some other languages which don’t use Latin script tend to be close to QWERTY. I’d be interested in knowing the history behind this.

Cyrillic seems to give the impression to readers of the Latin alphabet of homogeneity, where a text in the script tends to be assumed to be Russian. It is certainly true that the language is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world and the most common language to be written in that script, but it can sometimes mislead. 155 million people speak it as a first language, whereas Ukrainian is natively spoken by only thirty-five million. Belarusian is spoken by considerably fewer, estimates varying between 2.5 and six million. Rusyn is spoken by six hundred thousand people, which is slightly less than Welsh, largely in the southwestern Ukraine and Slovakia. It started to become distinct only five centuries ago and wasn’t written down distinctively until the late eighteenth century. I know practically nothing about it.

The romanisation of Cyrillic is different in different Latin script languages. The English version tends to use “H” and apostrophes to indicate palatisation, and strikes me as ugly and cumbersome, and also rather too “English”. German has the amusing practice of transcribing «щ» as “schtsch”, so seven letters corresponding to one in Russian, and Castilian uses the letter J to represent «x», so for example it writes “Khrushchev” as “Jrushchov”. American and British English also transcribe the Russian “E” differently in some circumstances, with American using “O”. I romanise Russian in my own way which I imagine is similar to how Czech and Serbian write their own languages. Serbian I chose because Serbo-Croat uses both alphabets and it’s easier to work out what’s what on the whole. I do the same with Ukrainian, but until now it’s never come up. Hence I would write “Zelenskij”. It’s difficult to type what I actually write romanised Cyrillic as because it’s my own invention and there’s no keyboard layout corresponding exactly to it.

There’s been an issue about the use of Russian names for Ukrainian things until recently. The Ukraine became independent in 1991 and the decision to adopt official Ukrainian spelling for proper names was made in 1995, but until probably this year, Western mass media and other organisations have continued to use the Russian versions, or transcriptions thereof. This is most evident with Kyiv, which was written “Киев” until recently. This reminds me of how the German Ocean was renamed and various places and names, not least that of our royal family, in connection with German hostilities in the last century.

The actual Ukrainian alphabet I’m not that familiar with. I’m aware that it uses the letter “ï”, which is accompanied by “I” and therefore probably represents a sound which occurs only after other vowels. The other distinctive feature I’m aware of is the use of a rounded “E” for the Russian “E” and the presence of “E” for the non-palatised version, which means that the “backwards” “E” is absent from the script. It lacks the hard sign. I suspect that a lot of this is to do with palatisation or the lack thereof, which brings me to my final comment.

I feel very strongly that Q-Celtic orthography is highly defective. Manx attempts to adopt English spelling but only represents pronunciation poorly, and Irish and Gaidhlig use extra vowels to represent the same kind of phenomenon as occur in Slavic languages with what are called “broad” and “slender” letters. Gaidhlig also uses a grave accent which is difficult to type easily. All of this could be circumvented by simply writing the languages in Cyrillic. I realise this is never going to happen, but the script has an elegant and simple way of writing the differences easily and without confusion. However, Q-Celtic words don’t even take advantage of this when transliterated into Cyrillic. They generally just use the anglicised version and change the letters accordingly.

All that, then, is “interesting”, but it doesn’t alter the fact that it’s come to mind due to a serious and tragic turn of events. I suppose it’s important for people to be interested in such things so they can be useful to others, but I often feel somewhat guilty about it. Maybe that’s misplaced.

Love And Other Gods Part II

This is the second part of my reaction to Michael Nangla’s autobiographical description of his mental health journey, which I started yesterday

Michael Nangla, just to fill you in, is an acquaintance of mine from the Continental Philosophy MA at Warwick, academic year ’89-’90. As I never really integrated myself into Warwick University successfully for reasons I mentioned yesterday, he or any other student there could never be more than an acquaintance, but he interests me because we are the same age and made the same decision to follow this course, and he later got sectioned and diagnosed as bipolar. Michael is a passionate, serious and genuine person whose life, experiences and opinions are very interesting and thoughtful.

The second major psychotic episode was provoked by the second Gulf War. He felt the suffering and death perpetrated substantially by Tony Blair very intensely as a personal loss. By this time, I had already been through a rather numbing personal crisis regarding the first Gulf War, and by the second one I was rather more immured from it than I found desirable. The issue for him was confronting this loss at every turn. This wasn’t helped by his friend David’s death by his own hand. He began to feel that his work at the BBC, which one of his friends had criticised, seemed vapid and dishonest, which exposed the void and emptiness behind everything. An early sign of what an outsider might recognise as a psychotic break occurred when he heard a voice saying “everything is infinitely divisible”. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but this is metaphysically the view that hyle is the ultimate reality of matter rather than atoms. However, there’s also a famous quote by Demokritos:

νόμωι (γάρ φησι) γλυκὺ καὶ νόμωι πικρόν, νόμωι θερμόν, νόμωι ψυχρόν, νόμωι χροιή, ἐτεῆι δὲ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν.

• By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void. 

I’m not suggesting for a moment that this had any influence on his experience, but it is literally true that what we live in is largely an illusion, although his take on it is social in nature. Then he says something which has direct relevance to a conversation we once had at Warwick. As you probably know, I’m panpsychist and tempted to accept hylozoism. I believe that all matter is conscious. I once gave a work in progress seminar to this effect, to which Michael responded that it seemed like I’d been influenced by too much Cannabis. I’m paraphrasing here. When I expressed this belief, it impressed him as deeply delusional. The response he suggested, and which I took, was to base my ontology on ethics – as Levinas put it, “ethics as first philosophy”. I followed exactly this and found it led me in a circle back round to panpsychism. This is probably the most significant interaction between him and me, because it determined my future views and the foundations of my later philosophy of life. On the occasion Michael recounts here, he says that “everything outside and inside me was abundantly sentient”. This is notably close to panpsychism, except that the claim there is universal consciousness rather than sentience. For me, panpsychism is an almost prosaic fact of life, though one which means I have obligations to everything, even inanimate objects. For Michael, his similar belief was apparently a sign of madness, but the difference, apart from the fact that sentience and consciousness are not the same, is that it was a much more vivid reality to him than it usually is for me, although I have my moments. I actually feel that it would be better if I felt this as strongly as he.

I’ve previously mentioned (not sure that’s the right link) that I feel disquiet at what I perceive to be an Ayurvedic negativity about birth because it means one is still trapped in the round of reincarnation. Remarkably, Michael makes a very different claim about Indian and British attitudes towards birth. In his view, and this is from the horse’s mouth so I can’t really dispute it, that “in India birth betokened a gift from God. In Britain one sensed a feeling of it being sinful.” I can’t account for this discrepancy. To me it seems that in the Abrahamic tradition, as we at least would be expected to be here, birth is an unequivocally positive event. In our tradition, a baby is an entirely new creation rather than someone who has become trapped in another life, and therefore is a blessing. I can’t account for this discrepancy. I also don’t know how it would be for a Sikh, apart from this particular Sikh, because their tradition combines these two strands of faith. I just don’t know what to make of it except maybe to say that the grass is greener on the other side.

It’s often quite hard to distinguish which events are taking place in Michael’s head and which are “real”, but I’m immediately going to restate that. Michael’s reality and account appear to include elements which would not be widely observed. This is actually very effective. It reminded me a little of the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’, where it took me a while to register that Nash had become psychotic, because of course this is what psychosis is like. There’s a lack of what a psychiatrist might call insight into the condition. But it isn’t only Michael who experiences the world in this way. None of us know what it’s like to be anyone else or if that even makes sense. As Sartre might put it, there’s the world, which is our phenomenology, and then there are holes in that world which are other people. Hence Michael has a conversation with his counsellor and Tony Blair about the morality of the war, and whether this is a literary creation or a memory of how he experienced the situation at the time doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Blair was not held to account for his actions by the British public, and has still got away with it. His therapist, Peter, is, interestingly, also part of Michael’s account even when he would not be agreed to be present by others, and this is a dream-like situation, as is unsurprising because of the nature of many states others might classify as psychotic. Peter becomes a positive influence in Michael’s life by being able to be internalised in this manner. It’s like he’s his guardian angel. He is however decidedly not Michael. For instance, he appears to contradict Michael’s view of samsara.

Peter’s fees were very high, and this raised the feeling in me that help should not be so expensive, including my help. As a healthcare professional myself, I often feel guilty (not ashamed) at asking clients for money. It isn’t that I don’t feel I deserve it although that can be there too, but more that we shouldn’t be living under an economic system where people’s suffering becomes profitable.

One thing that surprised me about this account is how left wing Michael seems to be. This leads me to think even more that we were presenting masks at Warwick to an extent which went well beyond how Kierkegaard meant it. I was much more myself at the philosophy department at Leicester Uni than I was there. It seems there was a kind of emergent consensus beyond anyone’s individual control, but I would raise a caveat there. Whereas this may have been true, it was also the case that I was constantly removing myself physically from the site. It should probably also be said that Warwick is a campus university separated physically from Coventry and that many students, Michael included, actually live in Leamington Spa. Also while we were there, there was a peculiar and I think irresponsible art project to make the site unfriendly with the use of searchlights and other things, which was supposed to be replaced later by a contrastingly friendly and welcoming atmosphere. Bearing in mind the mental health issues rife among students even then, this feels like they were playing with people’s lives. I suppose the people we think we know are merely projections of our own minds a lot of the time, and the atmosphere of the campus and my attitude towards it contributed to that.

It got to the point in reading ‘Love And Other Gods’ that I couldn’t even tell if his daughter existed for a while. People who know me will be aware of our “phantom baby” situation, a kind of game we played as a family to account for a child I felt we were missing a couple of years after our son was born. I won’t go into it here, but given my uncertainty regarding the connections between Michael’s reality and mine, and the apparent non-existence of several of his protagonists, it took me a while to register that Hayal is real. This reflects his own difficulty in adjusting to her birth. He wanted to be there for his child, but catastrophically the passion of his love for her once again tipped him over the edge. This reminded me of post-puerperal psychosis, the situation many mothers find themselves in after they have given birth, and in a way it’s a tribute to his empathy and involvement with his wife’s pregnancy and birthgiving that this happened. Practically, however, it was a disaster, as it meant that he got sectioned mere hours after becoming a father, missed those crucial early days with his daughter and was unable to support the two of them as they settled in at home. It also reminded me once again of Warwick, because one of the MA students took a year out when he became a father. He describes himself as “ashamed to call myself her father”, which I’m going to have to say is misplaced, but it is also interesting that he chose the word “ashamed” rather than “guilty”.

I love how Michael is so openly emotive and feel also that this is part of his diagnosability, by which I mean that the psychiatric profession as it is can technically fit him into ICD-10 F30-31 somewhere quite easily, but this should only be taken as a guide to how he might be approached and doesn’t reflect the florid reality that this is a whole person with entirely valid experiences in front of us, whose experiences moreover arise as a substantially valid response to circumstances such as parenthood, romantic love and grief at the loss of life from an illegal war. It felt like the people he encountered in his episodes were aspects of himself or a dramatisation of his internal conflicts, perhaps along the lines of dissociation, where action and conversation can take place projected out into his sensory perception which do appear to reflect what’s going on for him. It’s as if his inner critic is a literal figure standing there in the room with him, along with others who are also participating in his drama. I imagine this would be useful for a playwright.

I’ll finish by quoting Peter, Michael’s therapist: “I don’t believe existential problems can be medicated away indefinitely”. Now I don’t want anyone to go away from this thinking I’m down on anti-psychotic medication. I have known too many people whose lives and and the lives of those around them have taken a nosedive after discontinuing the likes of haloperidol or chlorpromazine, and I do recognise their value. I also think it’s potentially an insoluble problem for some people when they become psychotic, but there is also art and meaning in Michael’s life which he successfully emphasises in his writing.

So, I haven’t done this book justice at all in these two posts and I strongly recommend that you read it. You can get it here and it’s quite an experience to read. It was published as part of a larger project which aims to open conversations about mental health, and is hugely worthwhile. Please do the man some good and get it if you can.

Love And Other Gods

During my time at Warwick Uni, which I always think of as in Coventry, one of my more notable acquaintances (that’s a significant word) was Michael Nangla. He was a fellow student on the MA in continental philosophy, ethnically Punjabi and from Leeds. One of the most striking things about him was his seriousness. A mutual friend once said of him, and this is not a criticism, that it was impossible to have a superficial conversation with him.

I never really dove into life in Coventry. I didn’t live there, I became rather disillusioned with the philosophy department there and academic philosophy generally, mainly from a political perspective. It felt devoid of spirituality and seemed to be more about giving excuses for the way society was rather than trying to address the injustice. In particular, nobody seemed to care much about veganism or animal liberation. But there were other issues. I managed to organise everything on the same day of the week, when I took the first train there and got the last train back, I spent nine months only on the whole course and didn’t really get to know anyone. I was also rather owerawed by most of the people I met. There was hardly any social side for me, most people seemed to take about twice as long as I did to complete the course, a luxury I didn’t have due to lack of money, and I didn’t really get to know anyone. Probably the students I got to know best, and even that wasn’t very well, were Antonia, Anthony (only just realised that’s practically the same name) and of course Michael. I’m not going to pretend I knew Michael at all well, but I did know him enough to have a meaningful conversation with him. It was, as has been said, impractical to have any other kind.

The reason he comes up now is that I’ve just finished reading his excellent, recently published, book, ‘Love And Other Gods: Adventures Through Psychosis’, described as “a brutally honest account of being bipolar”. He’s certainly succeeded in striking a chord in me with his writing, and this is substantially down to his own personality, honesty, openness and diligence in what he wrote, but it’s also to do with the fact that we did vaguely associate with each other for about a year in 1989-90, and being my contemporary and moreover someone who opted to follow the same academic course as I did, we have certain things in common. We were at about the same stage in life when we were there as well as being the same age, and in particular our romantic sensibilities seem to have been rather similar, which is not at all surprising.

Before I go on, I want to do two things. One is to link to somewhere you can buy his book here, and if you can, please do because it’s great. The other is to mention the other blog post on here which talks about my experience of Warwick Uni, here, which is about Nick Land.

Michael starts by being very tough on himself. In the Prologue, he states:

By most accounts, I have failed in my life. I have no job. My mental ill health seems to have confined me to a life of forced indolence. But it’s my choice to reject a world that is fake.

I don’t think of him in any way as a failure. In fact, given his difficulties I feel quite badly about how poorly I could see myself as having done in my own life. Unlike me, he’s worked full time for Radio 4 and managed to hold down a job in London for several years. By some freak happenstance, I have managed neither to be sectioned nor diagnosed with anything now recognised as a mental health problem although, as I’ve said before, I’d be astonished if I wasn’t diagnosable as depressive. In spite of his difficulties, Michael has done a heck of a lot with his life and I feel the same way about many of the people who passed through Warwick Uni philosophy department back then. Comparisons are of course odious. But this isn’t just about me, but him. A major difference between us is of course our ethnicity, and the cultural background that happens to have accompanied his informs his perspective on his experiences considerably.

I have a rather amorphous collection of thoughts on Michael’s book before me which I may not even try to pull into some sort of order, and he’s coaxed me into asking questions about my own life back then. A major issue for him seems to have been that intense feelings of love and grief tend to overwhelm him and push him into an emotional place which he can’t really get back from without help. In writing this, I’m aware of how willing he has been to express his feelings, and I’m aware that I should try to adopt some degree of sensitivity in responding to them.

I don’t figure at all in the book so far as I can tell, which is hardly surprising since we’re mere bit players in each other’s dramas, substantially due to my aloofness from the university. I feel a sense of regret that I didn’t get to know him better at the time, but then I wouldn’t have relished having to be party in having him sectioned, which is what his friends eventually felt they had no choice but to do. One aspect of psychosis is that it never seems to be foreign to someone’s personality but very much a development of it, and if you go in the direction where your road would take you untrammeled, sometimes you simply will end up being fitted into a professional’s diagnosis of a psychotic condition of some kind. It absolutely is not stepping off the path for most people. It’s where you are led to by the way you and your life are. He has expressed this better than I. I was reminded of Nietzsche, and Nick Land saying that you couldn’t take what he said after a certain point seriously because of his psychosis. This has always seemed to be utterly wrong to me. You have to follow someone into their psychosis to understand them. It isn’t usually something which has just collided with them and caused trauma whose damage is a reaction to a foreign body by a broken brain. Unless you embrace Nietzsche’s madness and take it on board as a serious perspective on life, you may as well not read him. He rightly aims to stir you up and change everything about you. Michael does the same.

I want to describe my immediate trajectory across Michael’s life in a way that’s illuminated by his own writing. As an undergraduate, as is well-known, I became utterly fixated on another student who was unavailable because she was already in a relationship which had lasted a third of her life by the time I met her. Despite struggling to forget her, this failed completely and I did everything I could think of to purge her from my mind. Around two years into this, I also went vegan and over the following eighteen months I gradually developed a B12 deficiency which involved a mild and I might say boring psychosis. In early 1989, at the age of twenty-one, I finally began a sexual relationship with someone which wasn’t good for either of us and caused me a lot of unhappiness and stress. She persuaded me to study the MA at Warwick and because I wanted to maintain my relationship with her I turned down the possibility of a lecturing job at Stirling University and postponed moving to Glasgow, and also stayed in Leicester in order to be with her, hence my lack of engagement at Warwick. Warwick was, as I said, rather disillusioning. Towards the end of my time there, I split up with my partner but we remained close friends. As my MA approached its end, Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq and took some British people hostage. This escalated into the first Gulf War, and I was traumatised and disgusted by the supportive response of the British public which made me feel that we’d made no progress since 1914, the rhetoric of the mass media being very similar. This was how I got involved in the Peace Movement, particularly CND, which continued into the 2010s. At the same time, I was impressed by the spiritual and philosophical aspects of peace activism compared to the sometimes rather mechanical and impersonal approach of left wing radical politics, though not usually the Green movement. I came to see the cause of the Gulf War as ultimately and substantially to do with toxic masculinity and the patriarchy, as well as mature capitalism, and for that reason partly I decided to kind of come out as gender dysphoric, as a way of turning my back on masculinity, and went by the name of Ruth for a couple of years. I had one more relationship, which wasn’t serious enough for me, and a couple of years later Sarada and I married and had children, before I decided to train as a herbalist. There is a sense in which my response to the Gulf War situation was a breakdown, or at least a major adjustment, but paradoxically 1991 was also the happiest year of my life up until that point because I was single and not looking, and not interested in sex or a relationship.

That’s one way of describing the narrative that leans towards Michael’s experience. I probably wouldn’t have described it that way if I hadn’t just read his book. It does of course cover some near-universal themes in people’s lives at that age and period of history, and is probably somewhat more like Michael’s life due to the fact that various things led us in the same direction regarding our academic studies.

Michael’s own romantic experience at that early age was with a woman he calls Anarkali. I presume he has changed her name, although he does name Anthony accurately. He admired Anarkali from afar and, after his time at Warwick, got together with her, but was so overcome by the intensity of his passion for her that he tipped over into a psychotic episode and his friends, including Anarkali herself, had him sectioned. I was above all else shocked by her coldness towards him after this happened. She attributed his response to egoism and was absolutely brutal in her reaction. I would accept that his mental health was not her responsibility because she wasn’t to know how extreme her effect on him would be, but as a significant person to him, as he was to her, I still believe she owed him more than that. I think this is partly out of fear, and I’ve seen it a lot in people confronted with other’s mental health issues. They have the precious territory of their own sanity, or what they see as that, and they draw a firm line around it to avoid being pulled in by the other person. And this is a real danger: folie à deux is a thing. But it wasn’t like she didn’t return his feelings at all. He wasn’t her stalker. And of course I’ve been there too. It occurs to me that if by some fluke the woman I became obsessed with as an undergraduate had responded positively, it could have pushed me too far in that direction as well. Maybe I should count my blessings. But this is the same kind of coldness as I experienced from her, and also from some of my friends when I graduated, sometimes for baffling reasons.

In a way, and I think he acknowledges this, Michael was fortunate still to have been in a mental hospital when the first Gulf War began. He was fairly insulated from the belligerence and jingoism of the atmosphere in this country at the time, and perhaps his medication would have helped with that. But when the world goes “mad” in the way it did here in 1991, what’s the sane reaction? Are you just supposed to acquiesce to the bloodlust and orgy of hatred? Nonetheless, I’m happy that he was shielded from it because it was a deeply traumatic experience that made me feel very hostile towards most of the people I came across in the street. I didn’t behave in an aggressive manner at all towards them, because that would perpetuate the cycle, but it was very hard to keep a lid on things. The BBC in particular didn’t help with their 24-hour so-called “news” coverage of the war. And to me at the time, and for long afterwards, it really was “The War”, just like the Second World War had been capitalised, because it seemed so significant. I could easily spiral down into something at this point too, so I choose to drop it. Nonetheless, Michael was blessed by not witnessing that, though not by the conditions in the hospital.

While in Whitchurch Mental Hospital, he met a guy called David with whom he stayed close for the rest of David’s life. The name is significant to me because I also had a friend called David, who had AIDS, was gay and died young. In Michael’s friend’s case, it was by his own hand, and I suppose one bright light in that is that AIDS as such didn’t “win”, though it’s only a faint glimmer.

The philosophy department at Warwick had a highly secular atmosphere. There was one openly theist professor there, Roger Trigg, who was Roman Catholic. Students used to take the mickey out of him for what they saw as shoehorning religious themes into every seminar and tutorial he was involved in, but that’s just intellectual honesty to me. If your spirituality includes religious beliefs, how can you not include that in your work with students? It was always in the spirit of open discussion. Apart from Roger, however, there was actually not a secular atmosphere come to think of it, but an atmosphere where the assumption was that religious beliefs belonged in the Kindergarten of human history and we’d all outgrown that. That is not in fact secular, as that involves giving equal weight to all schools of thought. Nor was this attitude confined to religion. When my partner brought up the question of animal rights in a meeting, one of the people responded with an anecdote beginning “While we’re on this level . . .”, with the implicit assumption that compassion for other species was once again an immature and anti-intellectual concern which “we” had all outgrown. As I’ve said before, one of the flaws of the English language is that it lacks a distinction between inclusive and exclusive “we”. I wonder what pronoun would’ve been used on that occasion if we had that feature.

I have a history of being religious, which came to the fore in 1985 during my first year at university. I kept it fairly quiet for most of my time there and at Warwick it was almost entirely eclipsed, but I noticed that Michael comes across in his book as a lot more religious than I ever noticed him being while reading for the MA, and it occurs to me that there may have been considerable inauthenticity from many of us students. He was religious, I was religious, but it was the sensibility that dare not speak its name. And considering that we were, among other things, studying existentialists, authenticity was a major issue on the MA. There’s a degree of hypocrisy here which is likely to have hampered free discussion and thought on these matters, and perhaps across the board. I don’t hold anyone responsible for it, but how could the department have been more “real” in this respect? How did it manage to lose this and what were we really doing? Philosophy of all things needs to be taken seriously and engaged with holistically. It shouldn’t be an act or a performance, except to the extent that everything is.

Syncretism is an issue for me in approaching his life experience. I can’t work out if his awareness of the significance of all sorts of faith traditions is part of him being a Sikh, connected to his South Asian background or related to his mental health. Perhaps these divisions are irrelevant or even racist on my part, but the reason I wonder is that we have known another Sikh who was bipolar, sectioned and unfortunately ended his own life. Then again, clusters are a feature of randomness so I think this probably is pure racism on my part. Michael, I can only apologise. Just on the subject of racism, another student following the MA course at the same time, which was of course mainly White, was Antonia, and I have recently wondered whether they could’ve bonded over that because she was also ethnic minority.

Another issue raised for us during the course was the question of the Look, Sartre’s account of the acceptance of the existence of other minds as it would be put in analytical philosophy. Sartre asks one to imagine spying on someone through a keyhole at the end of a corridor when one hears footsteps behind one, and we experience guilt, making one an object for others. This is clearly related to Sartre’s view that Hell is other people. I took three main approaches to this. One was to attempt to extend it to other species, particularly cats. Another was to relate it to other sensory modalities such as hearing and touch, to see how it altered it. Christine Battersby, our tutor, said she couldn’t relate to what I said about other species and this was one of the crucial exchanges which was ultimately to lead to my disillusionment with much of continental philosophy because it felt more like a brush off, that she would never take the idea of non-human sentience seriously or give it any serious thought and subsumed that to feminism, when they were in fact part of the same struggle. There’s also an element of ableism in the assumption made by the spy that they were seen, because they don’t know the person approaching is not blind, hence the emphasis on sensory modalities. Michael managed to engage more successfully with the discussion by contrasting guilt and shame, although I can’t remember where he went with that. What I can remember is that he stated quite emphatically that his cultural background was based on shame rather than guilt, and this came to mind in something his friend David said: “There is nothing to be afraid of except your own shame and guilt”. It made me wonder how this contrast between the two would influence the experience and construction of mental illness in South Asia.

Michael was told that he could expect to be on medication for at least the next two decades. This for him would mean the numbing of his senses and walling off of life as it is experienced in the raw for the sake of avoiding another psychotic episode, and that was a price too high to pay. I got the impression that some of his family members felt that having had a psychotic episode had put him beyond the point where they could expect anything positive from him that would fulfil their expectations and hopes projected onto him, which actually reminds me of when children come out as gay and are rejected by their family, possibly out of shame, and there’s that word again, and also because their expectations that they would live a life with which they would be able to empathise easily and have grandchildren would be frustrated at that point. Both of those things are about wanting your children to be forced to live for others alone, and we’re back to Sartre’s Look. Although I dislike Sartre’s view, I can see its relevance here.

Nearly all of the long-term patients of his acquaintance at Whitchurch he perceived as having had contact with God. In some cases, they actually believed they were God in a different sense to how others are. As a result of this sensitivity and openness to spiritual meaning, these people “are disenfranchised and possess rights only to a rudimentary life”, because civil society as it stands in urban Wales does not have a place for this experience. This is more an indictment on life in Britain and the West than anything else. It therefore makes perfect sense that Michael’s next step was to spend some time with a healer in India. He discontinued his medication. That sentence might lead one to expect a steady spiral towards catastrophe, but the fact is that this absolutely did not happen. Three months after stopping his haloperidol, he still seemed fine and this was in no small measure due to the respect his healer in India had for his experience which had been classed as psychotic by the NHS. Indian mythology recognises the madness brought on by passionate love and limerence. As he says, the power of the imagination must be applied to the world to ensure that it does not dissolve. To a geologist, the Himalayas are simply two continents ploughing into each other and raising a range of mountains. To a Hindu they have spiritual import, and relating this to existentialism I am of course going to say that they have meaning – significance. It’s like the notion of the sublime in Romanticism, which also approached mountains as important rather than just interesting.

The scars of former love were still there. Of Anarkali, he says he “was stricken with self-contempt and fury at being a nobody for her”, a sentiment I can closely relate to. I was nothing, so far as I could tell, to the woman I fell for during my first degree, and I’m impressed with how clearly Michael has managed to express this feeling. I suppose, and this is my take, not explicitly his, Anarkali’s attitude towards him is like a geologist’s attitude towards the Himalayas as opposed to a non-geologist Hindu. I am caricaturing geologists here, but bear with me. He wanted to be sublime to Anarkali, and he wanted her to turn her face to him and see him in all his inconvenient but beautiful detail, but perhaps out of fear or her own scars, she had decided to turn away.

On returning to England, he became a producer and journalist for Radio 4. His perceived seriousness made it hard for him to integrate into social life with his coworkers. I recognise this Michael from the time I knew him, and it shows how his personality survived the onslaught of the British mental health care system. It seems that his time in India nurtured the person he really is. He felt strongly, and as an outsider I completely agree, that there was relatively little integrity in the journalism pursued by the BBC. He then met his future wife, a Kurd, in a cinema. By this point he hadn’t taken antipsychotic medication for ten years. Unfortunately, this was about the point at which the second Gulf War began, and this time he wasn’t cushioned from it by being on haloperidol or lithium in a psychiatric ward. He had no asylum. During the Gulf War demo of 2003, it seems that his perception of reality becomes much more vivid and dreamlike. At this point it was impressed upon me that I can imagine a psychiatrist looking at his medical history and attributing his psychotic break to Cannabis use while ignoring the fact that the country was pursuing an illegal war at Blair’s behest, and that if criminalising the herb is justified on the basis of potentially triggering psychosis in some, then not pursuing that war and many others, such as the “war against terrorism”, was a much more important measure to take to protect the mental health of the British public, entirely aside from its wider morality for the people dying there. But of course that doesn’t happen, and Cannabis remains illegal while our governments continue to send young, impressionable people to murder and be injured, traumatised and killed thousands of kilometres away.

I feel now that I’ve said enough for today on the book, but I’ll continue tomorrow.