“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
Albert Camus
“Ah, yes! The Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering. What I saw today, and what I heard, is no more than a symbol to me of the entire earth. I have vainly sought a respite in quietude and repose in death, and I can find them nowhere.”
Octave Mirbeau, The Garden, Chapter 9, The Torture Garden, 1899.
Throughout my horrific childhood, my mother would say “children are resilient”. But I wasn’t. I may have thought as a child that I had avoided becoming contaminated by my mother’s madness by isolating myself from her - and escaping into a fantasy world of art and erotica. But I was wrong. In retrospect, I can see signs that I was suffering from a borderline personality disorder as young as eleven or twelve - even though I was not to be diagnosed with it until late 1991 at the age of twenty. But throughout my early visits with GPs in 1991, numerous admittances to the casualty department in Beaumont Hospital on the northside of Dublin from 1991-1993 after my suicide attempts, my three incarcerations in St. Ita’s Mental Hospital in Portrane in North County Dublin, from late 1991-1993, as well as my sessions with three different psychotherapists from 1987-2003 - I was never told what my psychiatric diagnosis was! It was only in around 1998 that through the Freedom of Information Act I got access to my diagnosis! In my psychiatric files of 1991-1995, I was diagnosed as; dangerously impulsive, with a tendency towards intellectualization, depressed, pre-psychotic, passive-aggressive and highly dependent. However, repeatedly I was described as suffering from a borderline personality disorder, in other words I was irritable, impulsive, had difficulty forming relationships and getting on with people or enjoying social situations. There are nine key traits of a borderline personality disorder. You only need five of them to be diagnosed with the condition and I have had all nine! To be honest, because I spent my childhood dealing with my mother’s paranoid-schizophrenia and my own psychiatric incarcerations and numerous friendships with severely mentally ill people - I was rather blasé about my diagnosis. It was only in late middle age, that I realised how serious and stigmatised borderline personality disorder was. It is in fact one of the most pilloried mental illnesses and many therapists will not work with patients like me. BDP is often thought of as the female variate of anti-social personality disorder although many men also suffer from it. Around 40% of BPD patients have suffered childhood abuse but it is also thought that there are strong genetic predispositions that can also result in or exacerbate the illness. Sufferers of BPD are often thought to be not just insane but also manipulative and evil. Moreover, while sufferers of BPD like me, can often analyse and understand their illness - but they are not capable of doing anything about it or changing their behaviour.
Because of my borderline personality disorder, I do not have a strong sense of self and I have a very complex and conflicted character. I have often felt that if people really knew me – they would not like me – so I am often like a chameleon changing my persona to please people, so they won’t abandon me. I have often changed my name, fashion, hair style or hair colour, sexual orientation, and artistic style. I am extremely emotionally unstable. I can go from angry to sad to cheerful in the same hour. I have deep fears (real or imagined) of being abandoned. I have intense relationships which start passionately and swing from intense love to anger and fears of abandonment. All my relationships have a rollercoaster feel. I often do not know who I am or what my identity is. So, I have spent my life fighting a desperate inner battle to find out who I am. And sometimes I can even pop into multiple identities. One day I could have a young boy persona, then the next a mad artist persona, then a serious intellectual persona and latter even a sexy man persona. So, my identity is really disrupted. I act impulsively without thinking about it and I have little control of my emotions. I always act in line with my emotions, and I cannot inhibit them. Which is why I have constantly got into arguments with people, and I have had to largely teach myself everything I know about art and writing - because I could not submit myself to the discipline of art college or academia. I have often binge painted, used pornography, drug taken, shopped, and in my early twenties I even binged on sex with prostitutes. A lot of the time it has been the only way I have known to sooth the acute pain and emptiness I feel. I often have had recurrent suicidal thoughts and in my early twenties I repeatedly tried to kill myself - but I always called for help in the end, because although I had wanted to kill myself in the immediate moment, after a short period of time the feeling had evaporated, and I had left terrified of dying. I have also tried to kill myself after fights with people I love, because I have felt terrified that they did not love me - and they would abandon me. People often think self-harm episodes by people with BPD are attention seeking and manipulative - but often they are really an expression of deep emotional distress. So, my greatest struggle in life has been with myself and I feel like my life is a constant emotional tidal wave that makes me overreact to everything. I feel chronically empty inside and my heart feels like an empty drum. So, I want to fill it up that sense of emptiness – by manically creating art, buying art materials and books, taking drugs, and using porn. But it is like pouring water in a drum with a gaping hole in the bottom - so everything I put in gushes out the end just as fast - and I still feel empty inside no matter what I do. All of this is a very panic inducing feeling for me, and I often have inappropriate and intense panic attacks or explosions of anger. What might seem like a very small thing to other people –will make me blow up. And it happens so quickly that it can terrify other people. So, family and friends have often felt like they are living on eggshells around me, and life with me is like some weird alternative universe, where they never know what the right thing to say or do is. When extremely distressed, I have had frankly paranoid symptoms and I have really thought that there was a conspiracy against me and my art - and that people might harm me. At these times, I was on the edge of psychosis, and I had broken off from reality. But usually, these episodes only lasted a few hours or days. When women have flirted with me, because of my abuse at the hands of my mother, I have even experienced dissociation where I have blanked out, panicked, attempted to flee - and if I could not flee - I have become verbally aggressive. One of the most difficult things about my BPD was that I was never fully sane or insane. Instead, I could swing from sober sanity to psychotic delusion in the space of a single day. My borderline personality disorder not only spun my emotions uncontrollably from elation to despair in the space of an hour or even minutes - it also consumed my talent. Crippled throughout my life by my borderline personality disorder – I wasted my artistic ability and social opportunities. Even my girlfriends, family members and friends who have known me for years have said that they do not understand me. Because of my borderline personality disorder, I have been crippled by toxic shame and I have constantly felt evil, broken, misunderstood and unlovable. So, I have often isolated myself from the world to avoid confrontations with other people. Which is also one of the reasons why I have preferred to turn to the safe distanced voyeurism of pornography - to avoid the terror of relationships with real women, and trauma of real sex. So, I am more emotionally and psychiatrically disturbed than virtually any normal artist, never mind most Old or Modern Masters. In fact, I am even more disturbed than my heroes like van Gogh, Schiele, Basquiat, or Schnabel and even many Outsider artists notorious for their eccentricity and psychiatric illness.
One of the features of people with BPD is their obsession with and love for inanimate transitional objects like paintings. And for most of my childhood, teenage years, and early twenties, I had a more intense and real relationship with paintings than other human beings. This even went so far as to being naïve and ignorant of the real-life failings of their makers and an idolization of art above human life. When I was young, I would have happily laid down my life to protect the National Gallery of Ireland or The Hugh Lane Gallery but not blinked an eye if the whole of Dublin’s population had been annihilated. That is why, when I finally matured, became more humane and worldly-wise I became such a critic of the sham of art.
Because of my borderline personality disorder, my vision of myself as an artist is extremely unstable and I can wildly swing from thinking I am the greatest artist the world has ever seen, to thinking I am the most sick, delusional, and talentless man to ever call himself an artist in the space a few minutes. And often I just feel a terrible sense of emptiness and worthlessness. I have continuously mortified and trashed myself in my art but just as often gloried in my talent. My BPD provokes me to have a very extreme and dystopia vision of the world - which is made manifest in my traumatic and cognitively dissonant artworks. My art is notable for both its erotic and confessional mania. Due to my borderline personality disorder, I aesthetically swing wildly from a love of the expressive and instinctive, to the traditional and academic. Because of my BPD my work is characterised by breaks in style and subject matter, and shifts from figuration to abstraction - that do not follow the usual linear chronology of conventional oeuvres. My artworks swing wildly between extremely repressed and impersonal, to aggressive, suicidal, and confessional. In the space of a few weeks, I have gone from painting realistically to expressionistically, to abstractly, and even conceptually. Due to my disassociation from my thoughts, feelings, memories, and identity, because of my childhood abuse, which I suffered through in silence, and which resulted in my borderline personality disorder, I often do not know what I am feeling as I make my artworks, and often I have no idea what their artistic or emotional meaning is after I have made them! Because my emotions and thoughts are so erratic and fleeting, I prefer to work on small-scale works on paper rather than on large laborious canvases. And it is in my works on paper - that my true personality is revealed the most. While painting any subject, but in particular, my self-portraits, female portraits and nudes and pornographic scenes, my vision, emotional attitude and perception of the subject can swing from love to hate to indifference and then back to love and hate again in the space of a few hours. I paint in tidal waves of creativity followed by equally intense periods of creative drought and despair. I have changed style constantly, and I have frequently had stylistic identity crises. At my most artistically uninspired, I have often adopted the style of artists who I hero worshipped like; Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel and descended into visual plagiarism and pastiche. My artistic vision has gone from fanatically grandiose to self-loathing and defeatist and back again to fanatically grandiose, depending on my mood. I have painted and drawn the most conventional and safe subjects but also the most extreme subjects from pornography and childbirth to violent boxing and UFC fights. I have continuously made confessional or sexual artworks fearlessly, but later felt mortified by them. And I have constantly confessed my sins and expressed my toxic shame and guilt in my art. Since I feared I would be rejected anyway by the art world, I have often painted porn to further alienate people, and confirm my rejection, or I have even made artworks in which I explicitly told the art world I fucking hated it! I have painted in joyful and ecstatic frenzies, but also in bitter shameful despair. At the age of twenty, I changed my name to Cypher to signify my loss of self and at my most depressed, self-loathing and hopeless my work was often noticeable for its repressed and impersonal style. But I also have painted myself attempting self-mutilation to try to unload my pain into paint. I have often painted realistic images - only to vandalise them mid-way through, because I despaired at my lack of talent and skill. I have frequently worked my artworks all over signifying my pre-psychotic fear of a horror vacui. I have frequently made artworks that expressed an extremely black and white vision of the world in which I either loved or hated women, or I was either cock happy or impotent, or where people were either beautiful or ugly, or where my art was either priceless or worthlessness. Or I have regressed into conventional realist artworks, when I have lost my self-belief, and I have been desperate to be accepted by art lovers. In my extreme periods of emotional distress my work has looked paranoid, or I have painted myself as a child as I did in works from 2009. At my most paranoid and fearful I have made most of my abstract artworks - hoping that I could sublimate and disguise the issues behind my trauma. I have also been angered at my lack of artistic recognition and been convinced that there was a conspiracy against my art. Thus, for viewers, my artworks have often been painfully emotional, distressing, and frightening to contemplate. My art has looked like it has come from some terrifying parallel universe, and it was extremely difficult for viewers to empathise with me or understand what I was trying to say with my art. So, most art lovers have written me off as a deranged maniac making filthy images, whose compulsive, purging, therapy artwork was worthless rubbish. As for myself, I have swung between being incredibly proud of my oeuvre, and being ashamed and bitterly disappointed by it. Because of my BPD, I have intensely identified with all kinds of artistic, philosophical, and sexual ideas - but I have also just as passionately later refuted them. I have also gone from adoring art to hating it. This makes my day-to-day life like living on a roller-coaster! And even girlfriends, family members or friends who have known me for years, have said that they do not understand me or my art. So, sadly, I never had what it takes to become a great successful artist. I had no consistent style. I was antagonistic not only towards society - but also the art world. And I lacked the strength, courage, cunning and sheer bloody mindedness needed to promote my career. But most importantly, I could not lie in either my art or my life!
Art is, and usually has been, not a monologue or rant – but a dialogue and discourse, a debate, and a shared communal celebration. I do not believe that only those that suffer can make great art - art history in fact proves the opposite. Most great artists have been healthy and socialized human beings, capable of running professional careers, that brings them into contact with others. Likewise, the world is full of people who suffer more than van Gogh or Artaud ever did, but they are not artists, and there are plenty of mediocre artists who will never create anything of significance. However, the art that I have mostly needed to look, has a tragic component to it, which usually was born from artists who had similarly tragic visions.
Personally, I have always made art because I suffer. I often paint my best works when racked by misery and self-loathing - but if I manage to create something and I am proud of it - I am briefly relieved like an addict who gets a hit. Suffering may have fuelled many of my art works, but it has also prevented me from creating freely countless times. The shadow of my mental illness, arrived at the same time as my creative urge, however, if I have continued as an artist, it has often been because I have had few other options. Trying to make the most of my limitation, I have tried to make a virtue out of my trapped, and circular creativity. Still, my borderline personality disorder and psychotic ambition led me to over-rate my arts importance, and its testimonial rights. I tried to turn my purgatory of creativity into a socially lionized fetish. My masochistic confrontation of my own failings – led me down an ever more tragic cul-de-sac. The solipsistic, autobiographical, pessimistic, anti-social and transgressive elements of my art, only further doomed me to failure in an art world that deemed such traits as old-fashioned, irrelevant, and unacceptable as art. Until my success with the Oisín Gallery, I thought that my suffering would end with money and fame, but in fact in many ways in increased; it took me years to realize that the trouble was in my head - not in the world.
A lonely, needy boy, my brooding introversion cut me off from the rest of the world, and made me the subject of suspicion and jokes. I went around with my eyes cast downward, and with a perpetual pout. I became dark and suspicious, reacting aggressively to any slight, and was paranoid that the world was out to get me just as my mother had warned me. I lived through a terrible kind of loneliness as a child. I felt like a dog kicked so many times it could only cower in a corner. Within this solitude, I had to learn how to entertain myself. I lived more in my head than in the world. I had an unbounded capacity to enter books and paintings, to inhabit cultural worlds often long since passed. The more I avoided the real world, the more literary and artistic worlds became my greater reality. I was moved by art so much that Dickens and Degas, Kafka and Rembrandt, Joyce and Picasso seemed more real to me than my own family or friends. I used art to both escape the real world and at the same time reshape it.
I have taught myself without any greater purpose than to stimulate my mind and find solutions to my own existence. Teaching myself from books, I let my tastes and interests at the time to guide my idiosyncratic studies. I find being taught by someone else almost unbearable. Yet, when I was young, and if I trusted you, I could talk to you for hours about Schiele, but I did not know how to pronounce his name! Because, I had only read about him in books.
Intellectually and creatively, I may be very talented, but emotionally I am stunted and immature. Most of my talents are those of the housebound ‘genius’, not the active man of the world. Locked in my bedroom, I dreamed of artistic glory. My fantasy that I was the greatest artist alive, was based on nothing but a depressive need to justify my meaningless life to myself.
Sometimes I have a great day with the paintbrush, other days I cannot seem to do anything right. Thus, every few weeks I find myself plunged into depression, unable to find any pleasure in life, in art or in friendship. Like a cripple, I lie in my bed, my stomach tight, my brain like cement and my mind running in a downward spiral. None of this is new to me, I have suffered similar bouts of despair all my life and I will suffer them again. They come and go as inexplicably as rain.
They say that more women suffer from depression, but that more men kill themselves. Trying to answer this riddle some have suggested that the reason for the disproportionately high rate of male to female suicides is because of the more aggressive ways that men chose to use to kill themselves by. There is some truth in this, but I would ask, what does it take to push a man to the point of a lethal means of disposal, one with no hope of rescue? I think that the answer lies in men's repressed and inarticulate psychology. Men simply are unequipped to analyse and deal with their darkest emotions, they bottle up all their frustrations until it explodes upon themselves or on others. Moreover, for a man, it is often worse to admit depression than to kill themselves, such is the shame and emasculation they feel. Add to that men's lack of physical comforting from others, emotionally stunted friendships, and inability to talk about mucky female things like 'feelings', and you have a molten ball of hopeless self-hate, with nothing to cool it down.
When I ended up in a psychiatric hospital at the age of twenty, after my first attempted suicide, my family and doctors kept asking me, "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I could not answer the question. I did not know myself. All I knew was that my life was unbearable. It took me years of therapy for me to realize that my fucked-up childhood had twisted and distorted my mind beyond reason. I mention this not to go into my past but to point out that many people don't understand their illness or as the psychiatrists say, they have no 'insight' into their condition. Personally, I found that understanding the root of my mental illness was vital, though not a cure.
There are many kinds of depression, but since I am not a specialist in the workings of the mind, I will restrict myself to my own. People think that depression is a rather monotonous catatonic experience, if only that where true. My depressions range from mild sadness to morbid melancholy to boiling rage, to self-loathing bile, and self-pitying martyrdom. Depression seems to strike like a blow to my heart and mind, robbing me of all courage, energy and will to live.
Swamped in depression, I morbidly feared for the beloved lives of my mother, my girlfriend, my best friends or even my pets both living and dead. Or I could only selfishly think about myself, my suffering, my rotten childhood, my rejections from women and the art world, my failure as an artist, my pain, and me, me, me and oh yes me!
Some say that depression is a highly narcissistic illness, and they are not wrong. Perhaps that is what makes it feel like such a selfish, cowardly, and defeatist experience. Depression feels like a capitulation from the fight of existence and the race for power, but it also feels like the most clear-headed assessment of existence - absurd, meaningless, cruel, and pointless.
I remember reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (1946) and in his chapter on Arthur Schopenhauer he pointed out, “From a scientific point of view, optimism and pessimism are alike objectionable: optimism assumes, or attempts to prove, that the universe exists to please us, and pessimism that it exists to displease us. Scientifically, there is no evidence that it is concerned with us either one way or the other. The belief in either pessimism or optimism is a matter of temperament, not of reason, but the optimistic temperament has been much commoner among Western philosophers. A representation of the opposite party is therefore likely to be useful in bringing forward considerations which would otherwise be overlooked.” (Bernard Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1993, P.727.)
Those people unfamiliar with depression like to trot out helpful tips like, pull your socks up, stop pitying yourself, go for a walk, get some sun, make a list of your achievements, tell yourself that you are a good and worthwhile person and so on. But how do you go for a walk, when merely getting out of bed is an ordeal? How do you get pleasure out in the sun, when you crave the privacy of a darkened room? How do you make a list of your achievements when even if you do, you find them all hollow and meaningless? How do you tell yourself you are a good person when every single sin, act of cruelty and stupidity you have ever committed, lurches forward in your mind like a mass of mutant zombies?
Yet that is all part of the madness of my emotions. When I am depressed, I don't think to myself, "You have a distorted sense of reality!" Instead, I say to myself, "Ah-ha here I am again - staring the reality of human existence full in the face! Life is utterly meaningless! There is no God! My art is worthless and will end up on a rubbish tip when I die! There is no hope! Life is just a vicious and unjust game - and I am a loser!"
When I am depressed, I can hardly bare to watch television or listen to the radio. I see the smug, vain, and stupid media heads chattering utter gibberish, talking about this new car, or that new film, or this new actress, or that new dress - my stomach turns, and I am fit to puke. Watching hour after hour of boasting fools: attention whores: strutting macho pricks; sub-standard intellectuals pontificating; Feminists moaning and craping; politicians lying, fighting for power, shitting all over each other, and seeking to police the thoughts and actions of everyone in society - makes me revolt. But watching the news is even more upsetting in all its painful barbarity, senseless violence, and human misery. As for pop music with its ‘I love you. You love me’ or 'I'm a sexy boss-bitch you'd be so lucky to have me', or 'I'm a gangster stud bow down to my greatness', or ‘shake your booty’ chants, is sickening in the extreme! A loop of hormonal repetition, and narcissistic posturing as insane as any lunatic’s rant.
Personally, the only cures I have found for my mental illness are my art, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, psychotherapy, and the time to reflect and rebuild my psychic defences. Then one day out of the blue I wake up and feel happy, and events conspire to encourage my optimism. I paint, I draw, and I enjoy my hours and days again. As the days progress I feel more and more confident and start to hope that my art will be one day be recognized, then I start thinking about my retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art, my interview in Artforum and my lecture at Yale! Of course, I am genius I realize, so I send off some submissions, to small art galleries in Dublin and abroad. Then I wait and wait and wait. Like a trickle the replies come back one after the other, no, no and thanks but no thanks. So back, I fall once more, into the cold dark light of reality.
You see for me art is an alternative religion, a purpose for living and literally a reason not to kill myself. As a religion, it is not up to much. Even if I were to become a genius like Michelangelo, Goya, or Picasso, it would not be enough. I would still die, still rot in the ground, and my art no matter how revered and cared for by the most skilled conservators in the best museums in the world, would decay to nothing in a few thousand years. I remember when Woody Allen as a child in Anny Hall went to the doctors suffering from depression. The doctor asked him why he was depressed, and Woody said something to the effect that the universe was endlessly expanding and would eventually burn itself out - so what was the point of doing anything? It was utterly hilarious, but exactly the kind of thoughts I have had all my life. To a megalomaniacal egotist, such thoughts are part of the morbid fabric of despair. Art creates a fictional lottery of immortality, but the prize (even if you win it) is a bogus one, with a built in used by date.
But I do take courage from the fact that heroes of mine like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, Winston Churchill, Sylvia Plath, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen, Robert Hughes, Morrissey, Curt Cobain, and Brian Sewell have all suffered similar 'black-dogs'. To me that is one of the great things about art, it is a community of like-minded souls who as Morrissey would say, "Have lived and loved and suffered just like me.” In a world of shinny happy people, their voice is even more profound and all the more meaningful. For one of the most perverse things I have found, is that the sadder I am, the more I need to hear sad music, but it does not make me feel worse, it makes me feel a bittersweet joy that sooths my heart and calms my mind.
Of course, there are communities and communities, and some are more helpful than others. One of the saddest things I have ever heard about on the Internet, are those suicide groups in which sick and twisted people goad others into killing themselves. Personally, I find such groups utterly revolting. If suicide is anything, it is a personal choice, anything else is murder and cowed stupidity. Moreover, if depression has taught me anything, it is that depression is a temporary emotional state, that can change with a kind word, embrace, or new friendship. As they say, "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary crisis.” For me suicide is no longer an option, I have long since outgrown it. Maybe life is meaningless and absurd, but everyone has the right to live his or her life to its fullest expression.