The Varnished Untruth (30 page)

Well, it was a day-to-day sturggle. I focused on trying to be the best parent I could be, while still attending to my studies . . . and I found my way to Jean-Paul Sartre, who, I suppose, helped me to recognize my own experience in the way he described his existential crisis in
Nausea
:

Classic existential angst . . .

All very well for you to say. It may not seem that bad to you, but it was really a horrible, horrible feeling. My feet didn’t seem to be properly on the ground. Later on, I learned that I was actually experiencing a pre-psychotic state.

Derealization? A perception that things going on around you in the world are not quite real?

That’s it. Really nasty sensation. Bit like the time I tried magic mushrooms in Bali, only, back then, it was deliberate and there was added vomiting. I even experienced a couple of full-blown panic attacks – terrifying! I didn’t realize what was happening to me, and thought it might have been a heart attack, until I recorded my symptoms later and looked them up:

Hmmm. If you’d recognized your symptoms while you were experiencing them, it would have helped assuage them; that’s the first step in the treatment for panic attacks – helping the sufferer recognize exactly what’s occurring . . .

Yes! As it was, I thought I was dying! Afterwards, though, at least I vaguely knew I was at the beginning of a terribly painful healing process. I clung to the belief that eventually I would feel better; if I’d not had that hope, I don’t know how I would have kept going.

Aside from the therapy you were receiving, did you manage to find some method of soothing yourself?

Well, meditation, poetry, prose . . . and I started painting. Oh, and this was so weird, I became obsessed with quarks – you know, the basic building blocks of sub-atomic particles? I painted abstract impressions of them. Now, that may seem way off-centre but, in fact, it made a lot of sense. See, scientists had named some of those quarks, but they didn’t really understand their attributes so they gave them names that suggested kinds of – well, they used the term ‘flavours’, such as ‘charmed’ and ‘beauty’. But here’s the kicker – the quark that had been named ‘truth’ was still waiting to be discovered! In other words, they knew it existed, but just couldn’t find it! I didn’t understand the connection at the time, but now it makes perfect sense that I should have become so interested in those particles, it was a metaphor for what I thought I needed most at that time – to discover the elusive truth about myself.

Pamela, were you aware that quarks are associated with strong nuclear forces?

Hmmm, well, I certainly felt I could explode at any moment. It must have been rather difficult for Billy to deal with my considerable unrest at that time. He couldn’t possibly have understood it, and probably felt quite threatened by what I was going through. I was undergoing massive change and was not emotionally available to focus on him as much as I had in the past. In those days, it wasn’t so good to be the King. He did his best to show appropriate empathy: ‘Hey Sugar Tits, I suppose a fuck’s out of the question?’

I became very interested in dream work, too, and took a DreamTending course at a Jungian Institute in Santa Barbara. Around that time I dreamed I was in a huge living room – rather like our one in LA. In this room there was a fascinating woman, Vigdis Finnbogadóttir, who was the Icelandic president from 1980, and the first woman in the world to be elected as head of state in a democratic election. I introduced her to Billy. She had a beautiful, spirited, white horse with her, who I was told was married. I wondered what that meant for a horse. Suddenly it started rearing up and the task of taking it outside to the beautiful, green, rolling hills we could see through the large windows fell to me. I tried to hold its reins but it resisted and reared up violently, jerking its head sideways. I completely lost control of it just before I woke up.

What are your thoughts about the meaning of that dream?

I think I was struggling with a personal metamorphosis within the context of my marriage. I had spent so many years focusing on my husband – all the abuse he’d had to deal with in his own family of origin, and his subsequent issues – alcoholism, self-destructiveness, his own sense of unworthiness – but now I was desperately searching for meaning and peace in my own life.

I found inspiration in unusual places, unlikely people . . . For example, on a trip to New York I visited the Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and was profoundly moved by the painter’s life and work. They had designed the exhibition so his art was displayed in chronological order, and so at first I wandered past his early work – canvases he had painted from his parents’ house – finding it dark, repressed, almost sinister. But, as I walked on, more colour began to appear. The paintings were still naïve, with an unfinished quality, yet they had a kind of raw confidence about them. Soon after, I noticed the influence of other artists such as Turner and Cezanne, and the impact that fauvism, cubism and even Persian miniatures had had on the young Matisse. I found myself emotionally drawn to the man and his work. His frustration was palpable; his struggle to find himself – as a man and as an artist – spoke to me. I became aware of some of his personal issues – including his marital ones. His painting ‘The Conversation’ really got to me, with him in his pyjamas and his wife in a robe – him standing, her sitting – clearly more of a confrontation than a gentle chat. Oh yes, Billy and I had been there. Then Lorette, Matisse’s muse and mistress, appeared in many different guises and I became more and more intrigued about what was really going on in his life, and how on earth he had managed to keep those women from ripping each other’s eyes out.

The landscapes from Couleur, France, rendered during Matisse’s fauvist phase, held my attention less strongly, and the same was true of his New York paintings and those with a Moroccan influence, but when I came across ‘Dance (I)’ and ‘Dance (II)’ my heart began to leap. I found them joyful, alive and free, even though they’re unfinished.

Now there’s an unconscious subtext there – a strong connection with the role of dancing in your own life . . .

Wow, yes! Didn’t realize that before. But, anyway, eventually I reached the room that contained the really famous works like that one of the woman with the guitar. Anyway, all the ones I recognized were hanging there. But I was shocked to learn that, at that point, Matisse was pretty much bed-ridden. He was painting with an elongated brush on canvasses attached to his bedroom walls. Incredible – the pinnacle of his work as a painter achieved under such challenging conditions! Reluctantly, I turned the corner to the last galleries, expecting to see the sad, fading work of a dying, eight-four-year-old with a physical disability – but instead I was met with ‘Jazz’! For me, that was a moment of epiphany. I burst into tears. Instead of what I was expecting – decline and death – here were Matisse’s most vibrant, most daring, most colourful and most exciting works. Aged eighty-four and while bed-ridden the man had found cut-outs – his best medium. He could barely hold his scissors! I cried for hours. There is hope, I realized. Even at the end of one’s life. If all else fails, at least it wasn’t too late to achieve what I fundamentally needed – an understanding of myself, and a way out of all my pain. I wrote in my diary:

Now that I was imbued with renewed hope, my ambition for happiness became utterly unrealistic. Yes, as my Christmas wish list at the end of December 1992 reveals, I was greedy for a tad more than a pair of high-heeled Manolos:

Was that really too much to ask? At New Year we went skiing in Aspen, Colorado, as guests of the Davises. Well, the kids and I were skiing; Billy was standing by the skating rink, giggling at everyone who fell over. Aspen is hedonistic, crowded and ritzy; I found the place did not match my focus on spiritual and psychological growth, as my ‘New Year’ poem illustrates:

Oh yes, I was still in big trouble – and I don’t just mean because my poetry was crap. ‘Take control,’ I wrote in my diary. TAKE CONTROL . . . TAKE CONTROL! Another five months of therapy later, I was still desperate and questioning everything:

But after another three months, I was beginning to turn a corner:

And, finally, on 4th October,1993, I wrote the following:

Thanks to the brilliant help I had received – and my own perseverance – I was a different woman from the one who had first arrived in LA. Not yet in optimum psychological health, but a million times better. Over the next year I continued to work in therapy – in parallel to my academic studies of psychology. And I tried other forms of healing, other courses – including empowering physical exercise like Tae Bo – different types of meditation, the Avatar ‘creative living’ Course, Buddhist retreats, tantra (it’s not just about sex!), Qigong, shamanic healing, motivational speakers like Marianne Williamson, Ayurvedic massage, self-hypnosis, acupuncture and Vedic Healing. Fuck me, I was turning into the cliché of a card-carrying, classic ‘me-generation’ Californian!