From: Nikola Chubrich Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2020 16:56:10 -0400 Subject: Re: July 2, 2020 To: Ernst Meyer Dear Dr. Meyer: I am glad to hear you are writing well. Until this moment I have been unable to write anything. The following letter is my first attempt at writing since the second two hospitalizations, and I am gratified to see that it came out fast and fluently. I have not taken the time to edit it, so there may be infelicities; but there is also, as I think we have said, some advantage in not concealing one's thoughts. * I have made it back down to Boston. Michael and I are keeping strict separation, for whatever good that may do. I hope to talk to him at some point and heal the fracture in our relationship that became a fracture in my life, and spilled over into the lives of my parents and friends. My health is not very good. Several weeks after getting home from the last hospitalization, and having constant diarrhea (which I eventually found out is a common side effect from Lithium), I got blood in my stool, which announced the return of ulcerative colitis. I had not had this for three years, and had enjoyed until June robust digestive health. I immediately switched to Depakote, but the damage was done. I now have to go to the bathroom at least five times per day, and I am reminded also of the commonplace expression, "having the stomach" for something. I don't have the stomach for much. There are times when I have lost all hope (but here is a sign of hope: that I can write again). Back here I've found an incredible mess in my apartment, bags full of goods I had begun to stockpile, thinking this, in time of coronavirus, to be eminent rationality----bags of goods strewn also among a massive and perhaps unwise art collection. I slept in both of the last mornings, and this morning it was only (emotional) pain and anxiety that drove me to get up. Once I was up and about, I felt a little better. I have a threefold fracture in my being. The first: emerging from the hospitalization, my (former) strong sense of being possibly descended from the tsars. I think little of this now, at least not seriously, but at the time of my immurement in Cambridge Hospital it seemed to be the repository of my strength, and a source of endless challenges. Now it seems simply a delusion, or at the very least an unlikely possibility. I had gone through all sorts of evolution of thinking on this matter. Mary Mills, who was, as my father put it, my fairy godmother growing up, did indeed, once I looked at photographs of Anastasia, have a resemblance to her, albeit across years. In the hospital I thought I was obligated to think through geopolitical problems, and it seemed to me at the time also that several of the nurses----who expressed an inordinate amount of interest in my concern of being descended from the tsars, called me 'sir', and even bowed a little----were MI6 agents (MI6 being the British intelligence agency). The most peculiar of them had placed a whole bunch of books in the hospital library, many of which seemed to relate to my situation. They were all obscure books by authors I had never heard of. There was one book dog-eared to a page reading ANNI ANDERSON (this being the name of the most famous Anastasia impostor); another dog-eared to the water-game Marco Polo (I had lost my two front teeth playing Marco Polo when I was eleven); two books by one William T. Vollman, one of them about central europe and Russia: on the inside cover of this book, there was, incongruously, a Chinese character stamped in red, and I took it for a reference to the Dream of the Red Chamber, the book I have told you about; "memoirs of a nomad woman"----Mary had moved around a great deal in her life, from Fiji to New Zealand to Thailand--whether she was Anastasia or not;; there was a Spanish book, "Un Mundo para Julius", about a childhood spent in palaces; and another obscure author also, with one book in proof, with a notation on the front cover that it was not to be distributed to the public. From this last I conceived the notion that the nurse was demonstrating his power and connections. This nurse quite hinted, once, at being from MI6; he mentioned driving a BMW, and told me that "I could not afford his protection". One night, when you and I were on the phone, and I was afraid of being shot through a window, he came in to the room where I was crouching against the wall, barely minutes after I spoke to you about my fears, and took me into an interior and windowless room to do some sort of spurious or routine blood test. I cannot remember another instance of such a test being done in the middle of the night. On the day I left he said: "you may wish to consider Dunkirk, sir"----and from this I got the idea that I might get David Gonsalves to take me in a fishing boat to St. Petersburg. My roommate in Cambridge Hospital was a crypto-royal himself, a Black man, descended from a famous Black ruler, whom I decline to name as, he said, he and his family were keeping it "on the lowdown". When I mentioned to him my thoughts about the nurses (another told me she had met Queen Elizabeth, and when I said I might want to defect to Britain, she reminded me that the consulate would be open on weekdays), he shushed me and said not to blow anyone's cover. There was a Black woman who I came to think as the queen of the ward. I had the impression that she was my roommate's mother, and that he was keeping this a secret. She sat in a chair and made it like a throne, with the same regal posture I had seen Queen Elizabeth deliver a speech. She used to give me extra food from her plate at mealtimes, and I learned to show her great respect. One night, my roommate was switched out from my room on suspicion of having Covid; shortly thereafter, I met a very charismatic but, on second look, fairly criminal patient (he had in fact gotten out of prison); but before I realized I was uncomfortable with him, I invited him to replace my royal-blood roommate, thinking this better than dealing with an unknown new roommate in the middle of the night. I then realized that perhaps I was in danger, and that perhaps also this was a test for my abilities to protect myself as a Romanov descendant. I could not speak openly of these things, as royals, I thought, never explicitly referred to such things, and spoke within a layer of protective irony. (A key passage from history was my reference on this posture: when Winston Churchill was called in to the King to become prime minister, the King said: "I don't suppose you know why I have called you in today"). So I resolved to spend the night awake, pacing the hallways, lest I go into the room and get strangled. (It did not help that my roommate was a Catholic, and I had just made a sort of Voodoo Eastern Orthodox cross on my desk.) The Queen of the Ward had a habit of staying up all night, occupying the chair right next to the nurses' station, whence she could see down both hallways. She sat in the chair, as I said, regally, and I am reminded of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X. As I repeatedly walked by her throne in process of staying awake and pacing, I saw that she had uncurled her hand from the armrest and straightened out her palm. She was chopping her hand up and down on the armrest, and I saw the gesture of the guillotine. It seemed that she, too, thought I was in danger. I was now being taught and tested in the art of secret communications. The next time I returned in my pacing, I unfolded my own hand, palm open, and chopped it against my leg. She returned the gesture. I came back still twice more, and the same thing happened each time. The third time I went to the nurses' window, pretending not to notice her, and got some water. (It was very difficult to get water in that hospital; either you got in from the nurses' station, or from the locked kitchen. Towards the end of the stay, while on Lithium, I might add, I stopped drinking water for about two days, as it was such a chore to get it, and stayed in bed. Nobody in those elevated Stygean depths noticed anything.) I offered her in a cup. She looked at me with great horror and said, "I do not want that water", recoiling from it as if it were poisoned. From this I ascertained that she was forbidding me to drink water that night. At some point she gestured with her eyes towards the library, which was slightly to her left. I did not want to be stuck in one room, as I needed to pace, and so I kept pacing the hallways. When I returned in the course of my pacings to her throne, she looked at me and furiously said: "if you won't take it, get out, get out, get out!" Now I had a dilemma; she appeared to be telling me to escape. I would have to pull the fire alarm and try to get the door unlocked; or maybe there was already unbeknownst to everyone a door unlocked. Might there be MI6 agents waiting for me in the unsecured part of the hospital, prepared to spirit me in an unmarked car to a waiting airplane? And yet the nurse had told me: "you can't afford my protection". It seemed to me that delivering myself to the British, who had on many occasions been historical enemies of Russia, might be just the protection I couldn't afford. After pacing several half-lengths of the ward, avoiding its queen, I passed by her throne, ducking respectfully with the hidden intent of bowing to her, and took possession of the library. Now I could see the purpose of her demand not to drink water: I would not have to leave the safety of the library for the bathroom. * On this ward also was a hispanic woman named Zaida. She gave me a phone number, that I still have, to call one "Rosa Mulugueta" in Jerusalem. I tried the number but was unable to reach anyone. At times she wandered the ward laughing uproariously; at other times she went around crying "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!", begging expiation for her sins. I spoke to her almost exclusively in Spanish. One of the remarkable things that happened in January is that I began to speak Spanish fluently, albeit with poor vocabulary. I could get along in just about any conversation and make myself understood, without hesitation. In the course of these conversations she told me she had met me in another hospital (which I could not possibly have been in); she also asked if I was Jesus. I quickly disabused her of the latter notion (at best I was a Tsarevich), but did not contradict her on her having met me before. I supposed that, ourselves having experienced non-ordinary consciousness, that we had jumped threads in the multiverse, and she had met another version of me in alternative history. (I actually still find this plausible. On multiple occasions I have met schizophrenics or street people who distinctly claim to have met me before. I have never had this happen with ordinary people.) * One day it snowed. It was a very light coating of snow, but enough to artfully outline the tree branches; enough, also, for the ward staff to say it was unsafe for us to take our outdoor exercise. I looked out the lunchroom windows and remembered, as Alexis, looking out a row of tall windows onto a snowy landscape, but not being permitted by the revolutionaries imprisoning us to go outside. The last night of Alexis's life, going down the stairs in his father's arms to be shot, also became a distinct memory. And so I conceived that I was Alexis in a past life, and thought I perhaps might get in touch with the filmmaker Phil Borges, who interviewed me, and had also met the Dalai Lama, so that I could be advised on what to do about past lives. When I got back to New Hampshire I was still furiously trying to figure out what to do about my origins. It was, as you said to me at the time, a hypothesis, and I did not (so I thought) believe it to be certain; but it seemed to be of such possibly momentous consequence to my life and the lives of others, that I had to figure out what to do about it. And so I took long walks thinking about how I might find a fishing fleet to take me and my family to a waiting nuclear submarine in international waters: whether it was to be British or Russian, I still was not sure. I thought perhaps my Russian fencing coach, who had conveniently been retired this year, might be able to help me. In the midst of this cogitation I ran into a neighbor and had a perfectly normal conversation with him. He poured me a glass of red wine to keep me a little longer, and another neighbor came by, a relative of New Hampshire's former senator. In those days, it seemed, everyone wanted to talk to me, while I wanted to talk to nobody..... I struck up a conversation with a Portsmouth fisherman: he was tending to his pots on the way to Newcastle island. I admired the lines of his boat, which he had told me was built by a famous boat-builder, who built boats for both the Kennedys and the Mafia; and he told me I had quite an eye. (I did, I thought: I am an art collector with a piece in the MFA.) One night, a few days after I got back, and in the midst of stress from being with my parents (I found my mother was quite comfortable talking about the tsar situation, my father not at all), I was taking one of these thinking walks at night. I began to have the symptoms of a heart attack, so I had my father take me to the emergency room. (He insisted on not calling an ambulance.) It turned out, so they said, to be an anxiety attack, and they "offered" to put me in Parkland Hospital in Derry. Since this would be a way to escape Dr. Delisi's insistence of going to McLean (I was concerned that, as an elite institution in the mutual orbit of Milton Academy, McLean would find a way to wreck my life should I make any claims of the sexual improprieties that had been so damaging to me at Milton), I took the bait. They said it would be a three-day hospitalization. Nine days later, with the Lithium upped still further, I emerged a more or less broken man. I had no coordination, could not so much as play an easy piece on the piano, felt my body utterly separated from my mind; and three weeks later, as I said, I came down again with ulcerative colitis. There were further uncanny signs at this third hospitalization, though not so many as at Cambridge. The code to reach me from the outside via telephone was "5150", which is the name of the law in California that governs involuntary hospitalization, by which I had been immured at Langley-Porter in San Francisco. When I got to my room, my roommate, a Slovakian, offered unbidden that he was descended from Olga Romanov. She had had at least two secret pregnancies, then, during the first world war, with the regime fobbing off the children as war orphans. They had been placed in such a way as to maximize Westward the possible claims of a future Russian monarchy: one to Slovakia, one to an American family originally from a Serbian community in Croatia. And then my parents, by some mysterious suggestion, had been encouraged to move to Portsmouth, the site of the confirmation of Russia's greatest defeat, where I would be half-raised by Anastasia; and the kings, ever-conscious of symbolism, wishing at all costs to continue their line, could say a phoenix had risen from the ashes. I met there a man with a ranch in Montana, and I had a sense that perhaps I could work there as a cowboy, if I wished. He had been hiking the Appalachian Trail, and had attempted suicide. He was terribly depressed. I could not at the time imagine being depressed. * What was the purpose or tenor of all these fever dreams, and why were there so many persuasive signs? Was it mere Jungian synchronicity? Returning here to Boston, finding myself isolated and the life I thought I had in ruins, it's hard to believe that I thought I had to spend so much time thinking about my geopolitical responsibilities, when I cannot handle the matters within my own doorstep. This is the first extended piece of writing I have done since the third hospitalization, and I am surprised and heartened that I was able to get it out, rapidly, and tell something of the story of what happened to me. But I have only so far narrated the first two of the tripartite fractures in my life. * The events of the past year have been a dividing line, it seems, between past and future. Looking into the past (which you wisely advise me not to do), I wonder how much of it had any value: the merry trip to Europe two summers ago, where I met the builders of Biosphere 2 and followed them for a time, but never really found a creative milieu in which I could write the paper I had promised to Noam Chomsky: which magical streak ended in any case at Burning Man in Nevada, where I found that the friend whose presence at this festival I had bankrolled was indifferent to my well-being. The heedless buying of art in London that summer; and fast-forwarding to the present, the heedless buying of gemstones, foodstuffs, stationery, and books this past half-year, which I must now find a home for, amid a pile of unopened mail and taxes due July 15. I am not sure what to make of the psychiatrist I found online. Yes, she gives practical suggestions, but sometimes she makes me feel very bad. The last (Zoom) session she suggested I might suffer from a "thought disorder", and that were it not for the risk of Tardive Dysknesia, I might do better to be on Thorazine. When I looked up the notion of thought disorder, I saw things like schizophrenia. Are the few things I have managed to accomplish so worthless and incoherent as to be evidence of thought disorder? Or was I (as I have tended to believe) not very good with relationships, and subject to difficulty in finding supportive relationships for creative activity? Dr. Rako (this doctor) told me I was "playing with fire" by reducing my dose of Depakote. I should mention I spent about three years on Depakote in my twenties, and they were not good years. When I went off of it the first time, the pastor at my church said my eyes were no longer glazed, and that I was "back". For ten years, until the shooting I escaped outside my apartment in San Francisco, I was more or less well, if not at all accomplished: that hospitalization at Langley-Porter, I refused medication, and on the whole did better than I have now. Post-medication now, I find myself with problems I never had before: times of intense despair and depression, where before I only experienced something like exhaustion; utter doubt as to the value of my own life (I find myself passing into middle age, and my parents aging, and I find that apart from you and them I have few other people I can turn to. My friend Lushen is himself terribly depressed); and finally, outbreaks of intense anxiety such as I have never had before. Here, then, is the third fracture: for the past four years I have entertained the notion that what medicine calls "mania" is in itself a healing process, chaotic as it may be. I got over my stutter four years ago, and for a time this year, it seemed that I might have gotten over the cognitive blocks that prevented me from writing. Those who are faced with a threat of the kind I faced in high school, implicit though it may have been, have two avenues open to them. A student is unable to complain about his teacher without bringing the wrath of the world upon him, so he sits in class while that teacher makes him uncomfortable to his core. Truth is denied. Either one goes on the depressive route, and shuts down to the world; or one creates one's own world, the world of psychosis. I still wish to believe that had a retreat been available to me the night Klemens hospitalized me, I might have progressed further through that healing. I had already turned to the necessary matter of organizing my life, when Michael announced his fast and I accordingly felt unsafe. Even my father, whom I spoke to the next day, was not averse to my plan of camping. In the end it didn't work out. I was able for a time to learn very rapidly in those days. I taught myself the Greek alphabet, and re-taught myself the Russian alphabet, by notating information I wished to have in those alphabets. The key to learning, it seemed to me, was to make it urgent. When, down in Plymouth, I found the bathroom at the Dunkin Donuts unspeakably unclean, I went next door to the small grocery store, and found there an opportunity to "learn to shop", and also found myself notating the playlist on the speakers in Greek. I then had to learn how to pack my car, occasionally wandering around the parking lot teaching myself balance, by pretending that the white lines of the parking spaces were cliffs. It got late; 911 was called; I dealt with the police without any great trouble; but then I set out into the night with more things to learn. Perhaps I would set out to Provincetown, and find in one of the bars there, by congenial conversation, how sexual abuse in prep schools is hushed up and maintained; then, on the way back, I thought to learn the lesson which David Gonsalves required: how to find a place to urinate. When that led to questions, I figured I'd face hospitalization and triumph over it. And that time, I did: I recovered the nightmare I had had in high school, and which I wrote to you----the boy stuck eternally living on poison gas. Then Covid struck, and I felt unsafe with Michael: and it ended up being too much. What did I learn then? It seemed to me at the time, that I would not have been able to figure out my hypothetical royal ancestry without being in a mental hospital, and without being on Lithium, when I came to believe that one of my possible ancestors was none other than Rasputin.......but now, what can I say? What was the worth of being, so I thought, in the maw of history? I am left with a more enduring lesson: of the folly of retreating from open communication, and thinking a person inamenable to any reason. I might have tried to state my concerns forcefully to Michael; all I did was hint. And I never did get around to telling my friend from Burning Man that I was not happy with how things turned out, and I accordingly never got a cent from him in recompense. I see a succession of these fractures in my life, of finding a situation impossible and retreating from it, and starting anew in other places with other friends. I am not sure I have it in me to do such a thing again. I find myself puzzling also, at my overwhelming compassion for David Gonsalves, but negligible compassion for my parents. The last turning point before my hospitalization, we had gone to Whole Foods to buy provisions for my stay up in New Hampshire. I went into the store, thinking it a very great danger for Covid, and using my intuition to buy what I thought we might need for three weeks or so. I was unwilling to break the sense of flow by calling them, as they waited in the parking lot, to tell them I would be longer. (I did break the flow enough to complain to the manager about the distracting music: surely in a time of peril, they could shut music off so shoppers could concentrate? She looked at me with hatred.) I told them I'd follow them up to Portsmouth, but I ended up detouring to the apartment to pick up one thing, and then the next. I was afraid by then that Michael would begin destroying art, and so I tried to pack a few objects to take back with me. Suddenly it became late; the hours ticked by through early morning. When I left the hospital I found an email from my father at 3 am, wondering where I was. I cannot actually remember what happened between then and ending up in your kitchen, speaking to Klemens in much the same way I had spoken to you; and ending up in the hospital. * There was a moment some time in January when I thought I had acquired what Socrates called the "divine sign". I had been wasting time on something, and I briefly saw the image of your face and blue eyes. From that moment I got a strong feeling in the gut telling me what I could and could not do. It seemed that I was running the rapids of mania. I went back to being able to sleep a normal amount. I would stay busy all day, and then hit my bed and fall asleep immediately. The next day I would wake up after eight hours' sleep with sure knowledge of what I needed to do next. Every conversation I had was stimulating; people seemed to wish to talk to me; everything in life meant something. I regarded you then, and I regard you now, I suppose, as the greatest mentor I had ever had. For me, the early months of this year, for all their chaos, were full of the promise of reforming my mind. Now you say I must take my medications, which were prescribed by doctors who never inquired into my circumstances, never inquired into what side effects I was having. It is a world apart from an idea which has been foundational to me, that non-ordinary consciousness is not an illness per se, but the attempt of a constrained mind to heal and be free. It had been a great source of hope for me. And now that notion, too, is fractured and alienated. Must I believe or half-believe that I am doomed unless I take medications that cut off a large portion of my mind, that disconnect me from my body, that curtail my musicianship, and that have even, as we have seen, retriggered a terrible illness? I wander through the thickening day, look forward to sleep and oblivion, in doubt of all. * When I took David Gonsalves to the hospital, and tried to obtain help for him, I wished to witness close at hand the destruction the system there wrought upon him. Now it has happened to me. Aside from learning to eschew the kind of fracture I had with Michael, I have learned to question my tendency to explore on thin ice, so to speak----to reach out into the world when my own affairs are not in order. One must be prepared for reversals; I was not. But the lesson has been unbearably costly. Might I have come by it with a few nights' sleep, without a month and some excess having my life dismantled by a psychiatric hospital? In those days I thought I would have plenty of time to set things right. The week before Easter I had finally set out on that task. Tomorrow is July 4. I wonder where and who I will be next July 4. I cannot help wondering, also, how many more July 4ths our country will celebrate. Am I merely a broken madman, or have I borne witness to the brokenness of our country? My love for David Gonsalves was perhaps the key factor in the dissolution of my life, and you were right to warn me of the peril I was in. Must I be ashamed, however, of saving a man's life? And what can I say about what I saw: how the State pays immense amounts of money on futile emergency care when it will not manage to get a man a place to live, or even a pair of glasses? Time and again, the hospitals discharged him to the streets, where he was unable to find a place to urinate, knowing full well they had prescribed for him medications that required frequent urination. Should we spend a thousand a month for housing, or tens or hundreds of thousands for emergency care? Who benefits by all of this? And, returning to my own story: how can mental distress be healed by stuffing many such people in a locked ward, with no or minimal access to fresh air, good food, and exercise; with no therapy, and only such human contact as one can by one's own initiative obtain from bored patients or busy nurses; with one's life dictated by psychiatrists who have little time to talk to their patients? Which psychiatrists prescribe medications that are difficult to stop, without warning of or asking about side effects? A number of authors (I'd cite particularly Joanna Moncrieff, a psychiatrist, and Robert Whitaker, an investigative journalist) have pointed out that the dogma of "staying on medications" may originate in large part from the withdrawal effects occasioned by stopping them, a reasoning procedure that would, in another context, seem to dictate a lifetime of heroin use, for instance. Few people nowadays encounter the mental health system without being put on medications; but the fact that they encounter difficulties and even a worsening course after stopping them does not demonstrate that it was a good idea to begin them in the first place. Many of the studies in favor of, for instance, neuroleptics, only observe short-term outcomes on the order of weeks. Moncrieff has written about a similar problem with Lithium, as well. I was able to maintain a long remission from ulcerative colitis, during which I had an intuitive sense of what I had best put in my body, and what I had best not. When I was obliged to put something in my body that I was not comfortable with----Lithium----which, moreover, severed me from any sense of connection to my body----the game was up. It is a great source of despair to me that I may now face a lifetime of chronic illness, which until June I seemed to be free of. Every antipsychotic I was put on caused horrible akathisia, with the exception of Thorazine; and after repeated use it, too, grew unpleasant, and I would find myself lying in bed involuntarily kicking my legs. It was not restful at all. I have encountered quite a few people on long-term medication, many of them doing very poorly, and few doing especially well. Indeed, this was my own experience after my first encounter with psychiatry in my twenties. Here, then, is a very great fracture in my life. I trust you and respect you, and thus when you say I must take medications, it carries very great weight, and makes me anxious about what should happen if I disregard this advice. But the means by which these medications were prescribed was utterly indifferent to my selfhood and my well-being; not to mention the great corruption pursuant to pharmaceutical advertising. A system that demands as much obedience as the mental health system demands of patients should make at least a pretence of being trustworthy. I find it not at all trustworthy. It is the same system, after all, that addicted and killed so many hundreds of thousands of people to opiates. (The British sold opiates to China; Americans have gone one better, and sold opiates to our own countrymen.) I started on this course many years ago, when I read a vile book in college, "Driven to Distraction". It suggested that my concentration problems had a simple solution: take amphetamines. The case studies were sunny and optimistic. There was no warning of the downsides: the increasing tolerance and escalating dose, the obsessive symptoms that might crop up after some time on the medication, even, eventually, and as happened, mania. For a time earlier this year, it seemed also that my concentration problems were solved: I had something like a forty-hour attention span. My interpretation is that during the period of adapting to a new ability, I made inevitable mistakes. I have wished to learn from those mistakes, and do better in the next instance. The world, though, assures me I have a sick mind. It is hard enough to imagine a future, without having an idea of who you are. N.I.C. On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 10:51 PM Ernst Meyer wrote: Dear Nikola, This is nothing more than a note, in order to keep in touch. I hope that you are reasonably well and are taking good care of your parents. I find my 90th year no different from the 89th. I've completed 61 Sonnets to Chronos. I enjoy reading them. Whether they are any good is a moot question, since there is no one else to read them. Meanwhile I've gone back to editing, revising my opera libretto about the Rescue of the Toads (Krötenrettung). There are many problems both of content and of style that seem insoluble when I first face them, but with which I enjoy wrestling. If and when you feel like it, please let me know how you are doing. My very best wishes to you and your parents. EJM