Therapy

think Kierkegaard is the thin man inside me that has been struggling to get out, and in Copenhagen he finally did.
    Kierkegaard says somewhere in the Journals that when he discovered that Regine was engaged to Schlegel, and realized that he had lost her irrevocably, “my feeling was this: either you throw yourself into wild dissipation, or into religiousness absolute.” My frantic, idiotic sexual odyssey after Sally walked out, trying desperately to get laid in turn by Amy, Louise, Stella and Samantha, was my attempt at wild dissipation. But when it failed, religion wasn’t a viable alternative for me. All I could do by way of relief was wank, and write. Actually, it was all Kierkegaard could do for quite a time — write. (Perhaps he wanked too, it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.) It’s only the late books, the ones he published under his own name, that can be described as “absolutely religious”, and frankly I find them a turnoff. The titles alone are a turn-off: most of them are called Edifying Discourses. The so-called pseudonymous works, especially the ones he wrote immediately after the break-up with Regine, under the names of Victor Eremitus, Constantine Constantius, Johannes de Silentio and other quaint aliases, are very different, and much more interesting: a kind of effort to come to terms with his experience, to accept the consequences of his own choices, by approaching the material obliquely, indirectly, though fictions, concealed behind masks. It was the same impulse that made me write the monologues, I suppose. Dramatic monologues, I think they’re called, because they’re addressed to somebody whose lines are just implied. I remember that much from Fifth-Form English. We had to learn one by Browning, off by heart. “My Last Duchess”:
     
That’s my last duchess, painted on the wall
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder now...
     
    The Duke is a crazy jealous husband who, it turns out, has murdered his wife. I would never have murdered Sally, of course, but there were times when I came close to hitting her.
     
    It was Alexandra’s idea, in a way, though she had no notion of the torrent of words her suggestion would release, or the form they would take. I went to see her in a state of dull despair about a week after I got back from Copenhagen. I had renounced dissipation, but I still felt depressed. It was like the economy. The day I returned from Denmark (on the last plane — it took me hours to find Regine’s grave, a flat tombstone rather pathetically overgrown with vegetation, but after all her true monument is Kierkegaard’s works) the Government announced that the recession was officially over, but nobody could tell the difference. Production might be rising at the rate of 0.2 per cent, but there were still millions of people unemployed and hundreds of thousands trapped in negative equity.
    I holed up in my flat. I didn’t want to go out in case I was recognized. I lived in terror of meeting someone I knew. (Anyone except Grahame, of course. When I feel unbearably lonely I invite him in for a cup of tea or cocoa and a chat. He’s always there in the evenings from about nine o’clock onwards, and sometimes during the day too. He’s become a kind of sitting tenant.) I felt sure that all my friends and acquaintances were thinking and talking about me all the time, laughing and sniggering over the cartoon in Public Interest. When I went up to Rummidge to see Alexandra I travelled standard class and wore my Ray-Bans, hoping the ticket collectors wouldn’t recognize me. I was sure they read Public Interest too.
    I asked Alexandra about Prozac. She looked surprised. “I thought you were opposed to drug therapy,” she said. “This is supposed to be something entirely new,” I said. “Non-addictive. No side-effects. In the States even people who aren’t depressed take it, because it makes them feel so good.” Alexandra knew all about Prozac, of course, and gave me a technical explanation of how it’s supposed to work, all about neurotransmitters and serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. I couldn’t really follow it. I said I was already a bit slow on the reuptake, and hardly needed any more inhibiting in that line, but apparently that wasn’t what it meant at all. Alexandra views Prozac with some suspicion. “It’s not true that there are no side-effects,” she said. “Even advocates admit that it inhibits the patient’s capacity to achieve orgasm.”