Here is what I recall.
My dreams are nightmares, and the waking moments are filtered through these experiences. I forget how to dissociate, and it makes me wonder at what point and in what way does a child learn the important lesson: sanity is preserved through the periodic dissociation of reality. I do not want to say definitively that the world is brutal and ugly but these qualities tend to reveal themselves if you focus on something long enough. I wish I could cry and that would be the end of it, a mutual adjustment, a certain output to befit a certain input. Alas the world does not conform to my clever syntax.
Long ago I knew what depression was, and then I forgot it, and now I remember it. There is a huge difference between the nominal and actual understanding of something like an emotion, it really is absurd to talk of them in any sterilized sense, as components of a clock. Perhaps there is something like emotional intelligence, if so, I feel properly versed having taken the emotions to the brink in the past and returned with some key piece of knowledge still intact in me. I can ‘understand’ this existential pang as just that, rather than causally link it to some outward plausible source. A doctor will probe your body and ask what hurts and perhaps there will be a localized pain that you can point to; doing the same introspectively, I localize this pain around the faintest of things: a person eating alone in a restaurant, the false-start uncertainty of a person struggling to communicate, a drunk watching 300 in a Future Shop. I try my best to let the feeling pass, to dissociate, and I realize the fault in others when they rush to worship the sadness, to make a drama of one’s life until the drama envelops them. Who am I kidding, that was me. But I am wiser now, and I know the stakes this time, and so what I want more than anything when I feel the sadness overwhelm me is to find a way out.
A healthy mind can do this effortlessly, it anticipates the problems and changes gear, thus keeping perspective to thwart all fanatical impressions. When healthy, I take a certain pride in my ability to adjust to the circumstances and resist the autocracy of emotion. When that capacity is suddenly gone, and the well fills up and overflows, and the pang sets in, I feel vulnerable to whatever the world wants to present to me. I am Alex from A Clockwork Orange with my glazzies held open. I feel very afraid of what is coming next. This is me before real tragedy strikes.
For anyone who is undergoing some form of depression during this holiday season, I feel for you. It is almost unfathomable what human beings are capable of living with, and of the variety of ways they cope. I think we all live multiple lives, each traumatic event shifting us to some new perspective. Perhaps your depression is a means to an end that without which you would never achieve. Not consoling in the least, I know.
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It’s just past 6 PM here in this suburb of San Francisco. I’ve spent the last hour laying on my bed feeling dusk transition to dark, listening to bleakly beautiful, icy electronic music.
I woke up depressed today. I often feel a stab of acute depression upon entry into the waking world. For some reason shame and guilt are the first emotions that present themselves. Why this is the case, I haven’t been able to figure out.
I thought I had dispelled the bleak mood by being productive at a coffee shop later this morning, but the mood returned by noon. Then I went for a long 5-6 mile run, which left me in a much more energetic, positive mood. And yet, by 4 PM the depression was back.
This past fall I attended a two-month cognitive behavior support group for depression. I learned a lot, and I now know a bunch of things I should do instead. Laying in bed during the day achieves nothing. It makes my mood worse. I did just that all summer, often laying in bed until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and it achieved nothing. But for whatever reason, the pull is too strong, and there I was again this afternoon.
All this speaks to melodrama, but to my mind the more accurate description of my experience of depression is a thick layer of banality and boredom wrapped tightly around a core of pain. My pain seems to stem from shame and guilt, though I know for others it is anxiety, anger, disappointment, or grief.
My recurring mistake is to assume that some kind aesthetic therapy will puncture the banality and let me deal with the pain armed with the tools to transform it. To get lost in that beautiful prose, to seize on the right philosophical idea, to hear that gorgeous sequence of sounds- my heart tells me that these experiences are the only ones capable of dealing with the fierceness of the depression. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I came the closest to feeling suicidal this past summer at exactly the same time that I was taking a class on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The class and readings left me spellbound at seeing the world in a fascinating new way, and yet this wonder did not deal with the underlying pain.
I’ve come to know on a certain level that the depression, at least for me, hides in the aesthetic realm. Ideas and art do wonders for the healthy soul, but their powers are limited when dealing with a maimed one.
What kills depression is the social. I would be better off calling friends, seeing family, throwing myself into the world so as to become caught up in the larger narrative playing out beyond my personal drama. But for the life of me (cliche intended), I can’t make myself believe this in my soul. I don’t like parties, I get bored easily in bars, and often find it hard to get up the energy to be a lively companion for excursions. But I know if I am serious about feeling better, I need get out of bed and into the presence of others.
It is to be hoped that this mood will dissipate with the return to work tomorrow after two weeks off. (The benefits of being a school teacher.) I also hope that in the New Year I will be more active at the Pagan Agenda. It’s good to be back.
Hey Nate, good to have you back! feel free to write something… I am on holidays in Arizona for another week so will not be around until after that.
where are you taking the class on Hiedegger… I have been listening to a lecture podcast from Berkeley on Hiedegger… fascinating stuff and Hubert Dreyfus is a solid teacher.
I’ll have to check out hat Berkeley podcast. I took the class through Stanford’s Continuation program, in which professors teach classes to adults in the community in the eveining. I had an excellent professor named Andrew Mitchell. His classes were less lectures and more explorations, because there is a lot to Heidegger that is disturbing and perhaps misguided, but his approach to philosophy is truly unique. I think he more than Wittgenstein is the most compelling philosopher of the 20th century. Of course, I’m not an expert, but reading and slowly grasping Heidegger’s thinking was a bewitching experience. I really think you have to read his texts to get him- he cannot be summarized in ways that might work for other philosophers.
You can hear my professor interviewed by Robert Harrison, a Stanford professor of Italian and French, on the podcasts at these links. The first show is about his general philosophy, and second one is about Heidegger’s approach to art and poetry. I recommend both very highly.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/fren-ital/opinions/mitchell.html
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/fren-ital/opinions/
You might also enjoy Harrison’s whole show, Entitled Opinions. He interviews interesting professors and authors.
I will be trying out another Stanford course this winter titled “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky: The Crisis in Meaning”, though for reasons mentioned prior, I’m a bit concerned this kind of thing won’t be good for me. But I’ve never really delved deeply into Nietzche, nor read anything by Kierkegaard.
Enjoy your vacation.
There is an excellent Berkeley podcast by the same professor, Hubert Dreyfus, on Existentialism which looks at in detail those three thinkers and even better he assigns three films to the topics and looks at how those philosophies manifest in them. Essential viewing for understanding Kierkegaard is Hiroshima Mon Amour. it was that podcast which got me thinking about Karamazov in my last post on that subject.
Dostoevsky puts the dilemma pretty succintly in Notes: What is better: cheap happiness or noble suffering? It is a sincere question and I think it can take a lifetime to really come to terms with an answer. your mention of the social as the key to happiness, for me anyways, feels like cheap happiness, distraction really. and I can agree that some of the best times I have had had been in social situations… but I hold out hope that there can be genuine enlightenement from the solitary introspection.
my interest right now is to be healthy… to detoxify from everything that is adverse to being able to think clearly and act with conviction. Nietzsche makes mention of the fact that climate can have a lot to do with your capacity to do some things… all the little physiological factors need to be in place before self-actualizing (Maslov’s theory I believe). I think it takes a lot of small steps to get somewhere uncloudy. there are so many distractions along the way, but I think there is something worthwhile to find through introspection… depression is a potential effect of the pursuit, but not neccessarily the inevitable conclusion.
I will check out these podcasts… and if you are on facebook look me up.
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