Between the devil and the deep blues

Even during the day, I get ambushed by sadness; it gnaws at my emotions, like a demonic bird come from the deep to pluck me to pieces

EACH EVENING I wait for darkness to descend. I pour myself a bowl of cornflakes, and drench them with milk and sugar. I brush my teeth, fold my shirt on the back of the chair, and lie down on the bed.

By then it’s already dark outside. Sometimes the neighbours’ dog barks. Clouds drift across the mountain, bringing rain that pelts on the roof and reminds me that I am in Leitrim.

Sometimes I rise and sit by the window, contemplating the vastness of the obscure universe beyond the clouds.

And it’s only then that the obscure universe within me makes its presence felt; a formless black hole, churning and swelling like an ocean.

I didn’t realise that the heart contained such darkness, until I found myself in hospital one day in June, sitting in a wheelchair, drinking a jug of pink liquid, and waiting to be wheeled into the CT scanner. A nurse told me that the trauma of sudden illness can sometimes induce depression.

In that moment my ordinary melancholy transformed into a swampland of sorrow, an ocean of grief, oozing from the pores of my skin and constricting me in what strung-out jazz musicians might call, “the blues”.

But I wouldn’t call it blue. For me it’s black. And it’s that blackness I wait for, while the rest of the house is sleeping.

Even during the day, I get ambushed by sadness; it gnaws at my emotions, like a demonic bird come from the deep to pluck me to pieces.

It happened recently just after I had seen Paul Muldoon reading poems in the Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon.

He was wearing a linen jacket over a black V-neck sweater, and he was a bit like a bird himself, as he darted about the room, from one poem to another; his long hair falling in a mop of curls over the same bright and brilliant forehead that I first saw almost 30 years ago in Sligo, at the Yeats summer school.

In those days he didn’t dart about; he just stood intensely still at the podium, in a suit and tie, his fringe falling over his spectacled eyes as the audience sat on bean bags and leaned against the wall because it was fashionable back then to spurn anything as bourgeois as a chair.

But Muldoon looked well after all the years; a bit plump in the tummy but lighter in himself, as he pronounced each lovely word as if he had just invented it.

The reading was an absolute pleasure, and I left the building a happy man but then as I drove home, and for no apparent reason, the ocean of misery inside me threw up another black beaky demon to shred my peace of mind.

Thus, ordinary moments of pleasure, like listening to poetry or buying an ice-cream cone at a filling station, can be flittered away by the savage presence of inner sadness.

I have a friend, Tom, in his late 60s, who has good reason to be sad.

He arrived from London for a few days last week, with bottles of an ale called Bishops Finger, and he sat on the rocking chair on the patio for two days with a rug around him because he smokes a lot, and he didn’t want to smoke in the house.

From long years working with asbestos his lungs have been destroyed, and the struggle to come home on the ferry was a big effort. But he wanted to sit in the hills above Lough Allen perhaps one last time, and look down to the shoreline where he and his father once spent a splendidly happy day.

“I can still remember the sandwiches we ate at the waterside that afternoon,” he said.

He struggled for breath and stared at the lake and smoked his cigarettes in silence, and I wondered what flock of birds were eating his heart out, or what ocean of black terror awaited him every night.

I asked him did he sleep well, and he just said, “I was up every hour.”

When he was leaving he walked to the taxi on his own, gripping his walking stick, with a rug still slung over his shoulders.

And when he was gone I sat by the stove and looked out the patio door at the empty rocking chair, moving slightly in the breeze. And then a big crow landed on the chair, and turned his head sideways and gawked at me through the glass, just like an old friend.