On Undercurrents, and assorted rushed fragments

Tags

Depression, Martha Manning, Memoir

1

From Undercurrents: A Life Under the Surface, by Martha Manning:

Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.

For nearly two years now, this quote has been kept in my moldering cell phone’s drafts folder. I brandish Manning’s words when only defiance can save me, or if I am in particular need of a ready, smug response, albeit borrowed. Here are the words. They are not mine. I wouldn’t say that, no, but this will have to do.

2

I found this book by accident. I recognized the spine without me knowing that it was of a book I’d wanted for a really long time.

3

It’s a strange thing, approaching literature dealing with depression when one has, for months now, felt confident that one does not currently have depression. Or, well, not as present a depression. I have dysthymia—I will always have this; the woman in light green spoke of wavelengths—and I have been wary of anything triggering the depression’s strengthened presence. Will reading this make me sad? is the question to every book that involves a character who is so much more than sad. I must not invite sadness. And when some sadnesses come unannounced, they must be scrutinized: a moment of extreme solitude in a roomful of friends and supposed joys—even boredom, the inability to hold a book until its end, those moments upon waking when you dread having to function. I give myself passes: You are allowed to skip work today; that commercial was so schmaltzy, of course you’d cry; there are too many people on this train, you’re allowed to feel unbearably weary; this book is so tedious, not even the prospect of lacerating it with snark proves exciting for you; you can go back to sleep, yes, you can.

4

A few months ago, I started The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon. I went into it the way some people would religion. This was going to be a bible. This was going to hold the answers. Or it would hold my hand. Or it would prepare me. I would simply know more. Do I do that with every book about depression that I encounter? Yes, I believe so.

5

This copy of Undercurrents has a child’s scribbles. The heavy press of pencil, the graphite grooves gleaming. Aimless: just lines flashing and pointing. I, of course, imagine that a mother must have read this. Her toddler must have disturbed this book from its place, trying to control a stub of pencil. Mother must have rescued the book, panicked at the defacement—or a sharp object so close to her child’s too-soft skin. Or maybe the child must have soon walked away, and the book drifted shut, to be found much later beneath the living room center table, when it was time to move out, and things no longer needed must be put in boxes and dropped into chainlinked stores.

6

In my third year of college, my Ethics professor’s assistant killed himself. The starchy Jesuit spoke of bravery, of courage: “Suicide isn’t cowardice. It takes supreme courage to stand up to life, to say that you rid of it. To take the choice away from Death.” The glasses folded on the table. Our Foucaults and Platos shut. The next weekend, the class planted trees. I don’t remember this dead boy’s name, but I remember how he died, I remember the Jesuit’s speech. Whenever I’d pass the plot of land, I’d tell whoever I was with, We planted trees for the dead boy. And they’d be in awe of the Jesuit’s heart.

“The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.”

Tags

Books About Books, Depression, Essays, Excerpts, Jonathan Franzen

Note: The following post shall be more of depository for random oohs and aahs and quotables than anything else. So, if you want the summary: Yes, I liked this book a lot. Hee.

“The first thing,” the author writes, “that reading teaches us is how to be alone.” To be alone. To read. To get lost in a book, purposefully or unconsciously. “Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in the pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.”

I suppose I can safely say that I like Jonathan Franzen a lot. There was a time that wasn’t cool, but bah. His chunkster The Corrections swept me away, and I’m waiting for the right alignment of the planets before I get into Freedom. It was while I was reading The Corrections that I got myself his books of essays How to Be Alone [in my post about the former, I also discussed the essay “My Father’s Brain,” which shed a lot of insight into the narrative, the characters, the whole meat of the novel].

[Ah, The Corrections. How difficult it was for him to get over that book. Not only with the daunting task of having to follow it up -- but, well, how its acclaim resonated too long and too intensely, and how it crippled him. He seems so haunted by the success of that novel. A lot of these essays feel like he’s taking deep, calming breaths. And I know now, with the praise heaped upon Freedom, that I’m genuinely happy for the guy.]

The essays are so Franzen-esque. I don’t know what that means, really, it’s just that it’s right that he wrote those essays the same way that it was right that his fiction, to me, is so awesome. So. The essays cover a wide range of subjects: politics, sociology, culture, history, literature. I was particularly curious about his views on that last one — on the reading and writing of literature. I wanted to know if his poetics were as complex and meaty and true as his fiction was, or whether it would be spare, to-the-point, firm. I wanted to know if his essays would make gasp and giggle and scratch my head and curse the way his novel did. I just really wanted to know more about Jonathan Franzen.

* * *

“How could I not feel estranged? I was a reader,” Franzen says. “My nature had been waiting for me all along, and now it welcomed me. All of a sudden I became aware of how very hungry I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world. How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the “real” world? I didn’t need curing, and the world didn’t, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding — without a sense of belonging to the real world — it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.” Ah, but I sought a cure. Depression was an impediment to living. It’s a draining of the ability to care that I possessed in me an impediment to living. Perhaps it’s more selfish, more trivial — that I sought a cure because, as much as I would like to, I do not just read and write through life.

How open he is about his depression — first, how central it is to his The Corrections, and now, in his essays, how seamlessly he weaves the presence of that black dog in his life into his literature. Brave enough to put it in fiction, admirable still, from this viewpoint, to write about it under the contract of “Dear Reader, this is all true.” See:

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community of print requires solitude, after all. But the estrangement becomes much more profound, urgent, and dangerous when that virtual community is no longer densely populated and heavily trafficked; when the saving continuity of literature itself is under electronic and academic assault; when your alienation become generic rather than individual, and the business pages seem to report on the world’s conspiracy to grandfather not only you but all your kind, and the price of silence seems no longer to be obscurity but outright oblivion.

I hope you are well, Mr. Franzen.

* * *

I know that what I like best about Franzen is how in love he is with the art, how much he respects it. And, well, how strongly I agree with his views on the subject: “Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves.” And also: “Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.” Writing is serious business with this guy. I love him all the more for that.

His appeals speak of this: To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: Isn’t this enough? Isn’t this a lot? Why write fiction? Why bother, indeed? Who cares anyway? And even as we ask this, why do we feel that there is so much at stake? Why read it?

[Don de Lillo and Franzen are penpals. Great. In a letter to Franzen, de Lillo wrote: “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”]

* * *

Franzen distinguishes between the Status Model and the Contract Model of literature — particularly, fiction — that is, how the text relates to its audience, as manipulated by the author. So, basically, the relationship between writer and reader through the written word.

The Status Model, where: “the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it’s because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel exists independently of whether people are able to enjoy it . . . it invites a discourse of genius and historical importance.”

Meanwhile, the Contract Model, where: “the novel represents a compact between the reader and the writer, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing this entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group . . . Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader’s attention only as long as the author sustains the reader’s trust . . . The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection.”

Franzen is quick to say that these models are highly subjective, and that there are books that straddle both types — both a work of art and a deeply personal experience.

Franzen is both. For a writer to tell you, “Think of the novel as a lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time, just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it,” and for you to experience the embodiment of these words first-hand — the application of that belief, of his poetics — wouldn’t you attest, however sheepishly, I suppose I can safely say that I like Jonathan Franzen a lot.

marginalia || Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron

Tags

Depression, Excerpts, Memoir, William Styron

A few moments after I carefully peeled the protective plastic off William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, I wrote in my notebook: I feel like this is going to put me in the wringer. Odd to hold a slim book in your hands and think, “This is going to beautiful that it might just cause me a lot of pain.” And, as with very good books, I forgot to take notes after that–Merely frantically sticking Post-Its to many of the book’s pages.

Yes, a beautiful book. Yes, a lot of pain came with it–the kind of hurt that comes from being witness to something so dark, so true and earnest. Almost plain-spoken, and all the more profound for it. Best book on depression I have ever read, and I’ve read quite a lot–All the more impressive, since it’s a short book. The focus, the honesty, the disarming lyricism, that constant rueful sadness–and, yes, redemption. There isn’t any attempt to glamorize or romanticize depression–Styron even reflects on centuries of artists who seem to be inexplicably blighted by the disease. A mix of personal defeats, friends, the writing life–and how one’s existence is just permeated with the darkness. And not once does Styron get whiny or uppity or all those other traps depression-memoirists seem to fall into [I am looking at you, Elizabeth Wurtzel]. Oh, there’s just so many things I want to share, to discuss–I want to point to a page and say, “Yes, that’s true,” and then to another, “He’s right.”

I cried, yes, I did.

. . . [A] fascinating aspect of depression’s pathology . . . This concerns not the familiar threshold of pain but a parallel phenomenon, and that is the probable inability of the psyche to absorb pain beyond predictable limits of time. There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits super human endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain’s demands- to accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to the alleviation, whether it be through sleep or tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body’s capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience- one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devistation would by lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.

When I reached the author’s bio at the inside back cover, there was this profound regret: He had died in 2006. Haphazard research tells me that he died of pneumonia, at age 81. I felt an intense, troubling loss; midway through the book, I had already planned to pen a letter to Styron–Thank you for writing this, or I hope you are okay; know that you have saved many lives, including mine–but then, no, he was dead. I had missed something I had not even realized was so vital until it was too late.

I did wonder, though: When the depression knocked on his door again, no matter the intensity–When the depression manifested itself after this book was written, I wonder if he felt some burden, a responsibility he had placed upon himself to not succumb, to not die of his own hand. Because here is the book, the proof: It is conquerable, he himself wrote. I wonder if he wanted to take his words back, but knew that he couldn’t, because there it was, this book, a text, something concrete, a truth now.

Wherever you are, Mr. Styron: Thank you. I shall return to your book often–not as manual, not as Bible, not as inspiration. It shall be a reminder that we need not suffer our solitudes, that despair can be kept at bay, that many out there feel the same darknesses that I have and have expressed this so eloquently. Know that I will return to you when the darkness is rising, when the darkness is at its most visible. But I will return to you even on “good” days. I will return to you often.

* Picture of gray book taken on gray bed, beside rather gray and baffling doodles, erm, sketches by Robert Motherwell. I so like a theme, don’t you?

marginalia || It’s Kind of a Funny Story, by Ned Vizzini

Tags

Depression, Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Ned Vizzini

There are characters you “approve of” or admire as an element of the craft, there are characters you’d marvel at if they were ever real, there are characters who become human. And then there are those characters that you identify with, whether this damns you or not. Craig Gilner, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini is one of those damning characters. Craig’s a wonderful guy. He’s young, he listlessly overachieves, and he’s got depression. One night, it’s all too much, and Craig nearly kills himself.

“I don’t know how much of it is really chemical. Sometimes I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.”

It’s a funny novel. Which is not to say that it mocks or ridicules depression. It’s just that Craig knows some things are just funny. Craig lets himself laugh. He doesn’t make fun of depression or the other patients in the psychiatric hospital he checks himself into; some things are just really weird about his situation, and he’s smart enough and witty enough to notice that.

“You’re going to be fine, ishkabibbles,” she says. I look at what she’s typing on the screen. Under “reason for admission,” she puts SUICIDAL IDEATION. That would be a good band name, I think.

I like how there’s no attempt to pinpoint a singular “cause” for the depression, and even the sharing of his symptoms didn’t ever feel self-conscious in the revelation. Even his childhood, or the narration of the days leading to his admission, it was never pointed out–explicitly or otherwise–that Hey, this is what’s wrong with me. In a way, it makes depression concrete for readers all over. And, more importantly for this reader, it made me go Yes, I know exactly what you mean.

“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”

There has to be a comparison between this novel and the other novels/memoirs on depression that I’ve read. Off the top of my head: Prozac Nation, which was crap. Heh. [Before I get lynched for this, I have read the memoir twice, and each time I was struck by how unreal it was. How selfish. Yes, selfishness is a significant thing with her depression, but--and this is a drunken theory--the memoir was something non-depressives would laud for "vivid, unflinching" writing. I've spoken to about three or four depressives about the memoir. They thought it was crap too.] And then there’s The Beast by Tracy Thompson, which my mother found for me in a BookSale, and I keep turning to it whenever things are bleak and hopeless and dark and Meh. That‘s the kind of novel that makes you want to hunt down the author and personally thank her for sharing her story—it’s not meant to inspire, just show, This is how it is. I’ll always love Thompson best; it’s helped me so much. But It’s Kind of a Funny Story holds a special place now. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my black, black heart.

Actually, this is the highest praise I can think of: C’mere, Craig, lemme give you a hug.

We lock eyes. I’m waiting for her to say something profound–I always am, even though it’ll never happen. I’m waiting for her to say “Craig, what you need to do is X” and for the Shift to occur. I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, and witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise, and I had incredible promise, and I spoke up in class because I was excited and smart about the world. I want the Shift so bad. I’m waiting for the phrase that will invoke it. It’ll be like a miracle within my life. But is Dr. Minerva a miracle worker? No. She’s a thin, tan lady from Greece with red lipstick.

Good book. It’s up there with Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, me thinks. It’s definitely up there somewhere. [Oh, and since I just watched the movie Kick-Ass last night, I'm definitely seeing some echoes. That's a good thing.]

marginalia || Shopgirl, by Steve Martin

Tags

Depression, Excerpts, Fiction - Novella, Steve Martin

I thought I wouldn’t finish reading Shopgirl by Steve Martin this soon, but there’s nothing like a procrastinator’s heart coupled with a pile of (school) required reading to get you through a book, fast. More importantly, this book charmed my socks off. I liked it. A lot. And that’s amazing because I thought I wouldn’t.

So. This is what the blurb tells us, because we don’t want to undergo the excruciating experience of me trying to write a summary:

One of our country’s most acclaimed and beloved entertainers, Steve Martin has written a novella that is unexpectedly perceptive about relationships and life. Martin is profoundly wise when it comes to the inner workings of the human heart.

Mirabelle is the “shopgirl” of the title, a young woman, beautiful in a wallflowerish kind of way, who works behind the glove counter at Neiman Marcus “selling things that nobody buys anymore…”

Slightly lost, slightly off-kilter, very shy, Mirabelle charms because of all that she is not: not glamorous, not aggressive, not self-aggrandizing. Still there is something about her that is irresistible.

Mirabelle captures the attention of Ray Porter, a wealthy businessman almost twice her age. As they tentatively embark on a relationship, they both struggle to decipher the language of love — with consequences that are both comic and heartbreaking. Filled with the kind of witty, discerning observations that have brought Steve Martin critical success, Shopgirl is a work of disarming tenderness.

I found this on a book-digging stint in BookSale last Saturday. That is, I gave in and bought it. I admit to being iffy about it because, well, it was Steve Martin. I’d suspected that this was a vanity-ish kind of book, the Big Celebrity playing at being Published Author. But I found that Steve Martin (the Steve Martin I don’t even find that funny, hehe) could write, and he could write well. I was surprised. By the seventh page, I knew I could settle comfortably with this book. Halfway through, the Post-It flags I’d stuck to the passages I found particularly–for lack of a better word–cool, well, it was a fiesta.

His prose is straightforward, almost plain-spoken. With passages like:

To Mirabelle, the idea of being an object of obsession is alluring and presents a powerful love. She fails to understand, however, that men become obsessive over beautiful women because they want no one else to have them, but they fall in love with women like Mirabelle because they want a certain, specific part of them. (p.26)

He knows that he loves her, but he cannot figure out in what way. (p.119)

His language, reading this book, brought to my attention yet another bewildering facet of the reading experience. I can imagine workshop panelists and mentors all over saying, “Show, don’t tell”–I mean, hell, it’s a cliche, that advice against cliches, and I know I’ve used it myself over the years. But, lately, strangely, I am liking it. I am liking this “I am telling you, Reader, what’s what.” I felt the same thing, reading The Fiction Class by Susan Breen. It wasn’t annoying, it didn’t feel lazy. There are writers who manage to imbue the simplest of sentences with a fluid, charming lyricism. And I daresay Steve Martin is one of them.

I am partial to Mirabelle, shy and flawed Mirabelle, depressed Mirabelle. Depression is a tricky thing to talk about (my hatred of Prozac Nation shall be saved for another day), and I like to think I know something about this, because I suffer from it.

Locked in the darkness of her car, with the wipers set on periodic, she feels uneasy. The night scares her. Then the uneasiness gives way to a momentary and frightening levitation of her mind above her body. She can feel her spirit disconnect from her corporeal self, and her heart starts racing. She had felt its calling card months later, this unwelcome visitor in her body, who seemed to fly through her and then was gone. This time it is stronger than before, and it stays longer. It is as though her body is held down by weights and her mind is being methodically disassembled. (p.81)

She closes her eyes, and the depression helps her sleep. Sleep, however, is not relief. The depression does not go away, politely waiting to come back in the morning when she is refreshed. It stays, and tonight it works on Mirabelle even as she sleeps, poisioning her dreams. (p.81-2)

There are, of course, some problems. One, there’s a fairytale-ish quality to the whole thing (artist/wallflower stuck in a deadend job, the millionaire older man, blah blah), but I think that’s deliberate. A few pages to the end, Martin’s control of his language slipped, and Ray Porter’s ruminations had an In Conclusion feel to them. Also, in page 101 (so easy to remember), we have one character, Lisa, shaving her legs in the bathroom–Lisa dips the razor in the toilet to clean the blade for the next swipe. WAT. The whole scene didn’t feel ironic, just silly, as though Martin had always thought this was how women shaved. Okay, people, if anyone here dips their razor in the toilet when they shave, well, e-mail me. Because my paradigm going a-shifting. :|

Still, those were minor distractions.  A word to the wise, though, this isn’t a “carefully plotted” book, not in the conventional blurb-sense of the word. We’re following Mirabelle and the characters around, there’s no cosmic bang at the end. This is just it–relationships, the many misconceptions, the careless things we do and say that break another person’s heart.

I’m always giddy when a book shakes things up.