in the hall of mirrors

Fortress Persona

Distance, limits, boundaries: I seem especially concerned, even tense and anxious, these days around the connections between myself and other people. This, of course, after ages of lamenting that I am too alone – but perhaps partly as a result of that, I'm struggling not to experience other people as painful chores, as demanding and hopeless, Sisyphean, tasks. As though everyone wants things, and yet they are never satisfied: and the echoes that I get back seem especially unfulfilling for me at the moment.

Perhaps this is simply the larger resonance of such things as being an introvert, being too long alone, living in a place whose colors are naturally across the dark grays (because of the weather here). Not to mention a simple response to the pressures of new classes, new students: despite the admitted masses of time that we academics get to ourselves, the times when we must engage do tend to be high-pressure ones: all those young people, all their emotional demands, all the need to get everything right.

It's such a cliché, to quote lyrics that resonate with one's own mood, but – Porcupine Tree again: 'Buying New Soul' –

I still wave at the dots on the shore
And I still beat my head against the door
I still rage and wage my little war
I'm a shade and easy to ignore

White wall, I had to paint a door
I always find that I've been through it before
Close it up and throw away the key
Break the code, how happy I could be

I suppose I do wave at the dots on the shore; but with the half-felt hope that they won't notice me....

Panic

I am startled – and discomfited, and somewhat embarrassed, but I suppose also intrigued – by discovering, while doing this cognitive behavior therapy for depression, that underneath the depression is a wide pool of anxiety, nerves, fear. Anger and hostility, insecurity and defensiveness. Hysteria. Panic.

It's a bit weird, really. One of the things about depression is it's sort of, well, cool – it's not embarrassing or ridiculous; pitiable perhaps, but fairly dignified. Anxiety is not at all dignified, and panic is certainly not.

The past two weeks: acid reflux, acid stomach; a throbbing pulse in my ears at night; occasionally a twitching muscle in my left eyelid; odd aches and unpredictable drops/surges in energy. Not a lot of those things, not constantly, but enough of them to startle me, and make me feel their barely concealed importance. The presence of all this – what is I suppose best termed anxiety – does make perfect sense, of course, as it explains the very existence of the depression as a covering strategy, not to mention its stability; but the anxiety remains a surprise. And, unlike balloons and birthday cake, it is not my favorite kind of surprise.

Therefore tonight, when a suddenly homeless, divorce-threatened friend – no, let's be accurate: acquaintance – wants to sleep on my couch, I have refused to allow him to stay for more than one night, and I have been entirely inhospitable: I just don't want this guy around, I don't want to hear his story, I don't want to help him talk through it. And therefore I feel embarrassed and angry at myself, and angry at him, that I can't be nice about this, that I am a Bad Host. At one point he came in where I was working to say: I just got the most abusive text message (implicitly, of course, from his soon-to-be-divorced wife), and it says... but I barked at him: This is exactly what I can't deal with right now: just stop.

Heartless, of course – what kind of human being am I not to help this guy out? – well: I'm a human being under stress. And although I know that there are human beings under a great deal more stress than I, I am, more precisely, a human being who is determined to handle some of his reactions to stress – to end up with different patterns over the next couple of months, different levels of self-management. So I simply can't accept his problems, talk about the miseries he's going through – a bit of overbalancing of my emotional life, and any prospect of really changing myself will go out the window.

It is embarrassing. Not impressive. Not dignified. But somehow necessary – so necessary I have thrown all politeness and hedging out of the window, even with this guy, who is frankly perfectly nice in his own way. But I find myself unable, or more accurately absolutely unwilling, to be, even for a moment, normally kind, pleasant, helpful.

Appalling behavior, in everyday terms. But, I think: entirely appropriate....

Helpful books

There is a television show on, with Joan Didion (whose work I love so much) talking about her book The Year of Magical Thinking, about the year after her husband and daughter died. I was a bit surprised, however, when she said that part of why she wrote the book was because she couldn't find anything to read about grieving and loss that she thought was helpful.

That surprised me; there are a lot of books that do this brilliantly, and that help – C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed; James Agee's A Death in the Family; Alvarez, Ariél, and of course Spurious' Blanchot. There are anthologies – the best being Mary Jane Moffat's lovingly constructed In the Midst of Winter, a collection of writings across a number of cultures and literatures that she wrote after the death of her own husband. Then there are so many poems that help one get through – aside from all of the famous ones I know that I get a lot from Hoffman's anthology of Japanese Death Poems; and then of course all of the books about suffering, like the various AIDS memoirs and novels, or Renate Rubinstein's brilliant journey through having MS, Take It and Leave It.

Perhaps she just meant none of these writings seemed quite to mean anything to her, which of course makes sense – she had to tell her own version of the story.

I remember seeing Jane Chambers' wonderful play Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, about a group of lesbian friends who share a cabin at a country lake – but one of them dies of breast cancer between acts I and II. They used Cris Williamson's music beautifully – deeply felt, deeply sad 'womyn's music'. It was in San Francisco, some time in 1984, after Reid's death (December 2, 1983 – that's one of the few dates in my life I never need to look up, I always know that one). I'd been depressed a lot in previous months, but hadn't really cried I think: I still remember coming home from seeing the play to my studio apartment, sitting down in the chair next to the bed, and completely disintegrating – that amazing feeling of collapsing into crying that is way beyond tears, that is sniveling, choking, where you're amazed at your own body's reactions, and a part of your mind sets itself aside to watch and make sure you can still breathe.

I was amazed at all this: and almost incredibly comforted – that I felt so strongly, that I could hit that emotional wall and keep going into it. Although I remained a bit fragmented, depressive, schizoid, as I still am today; and though I actually tended to respond to everything, ever after, as though I were some kind of widow(er), in a way that was too despairing, too wounded, and not particularly healthy; it showed me that I would, in a strange way, be all right – that I could really grieve....

Uncharted landscape

My blogging has sort of slowed to a halt since mid-August – apologies (especially to those of you using neither RSS nor Bloglines, who have to actually bring up this page to see if there's anything new engraved on it – that must be a bit like switching channels and seeing only reruns). Have felt both complicated and dull, with flashes of change – none of which seemed terribly interesting from outside (i.e. from your side), nor terribly comfortable for me to write about (nothing really weird is going on, it's just, well, personal).

Being two weeks into the cognitive behavior therapy for depression/anxiety, I am struck with two things: one is how vast and how unknown my internal world of thoughts, feelings, and reactions is – whole huge stretches of a strange landscape that it seems as though I've never seen; which seems very peculiar, given how self-oriented (or, if you prefer, self-centered) I am, and how much therapy I've gone through, and how much of my professional work has engaged with my own reactions and emotions.

But no matter how much work I ever do to explore this internal landscape, the reality is so much vaster, its boundaries invisible beyond the horizon: it feels as though the choices I've made, the identity I've chosen, is just a few small fields scattered across this land.... no wonder we hold on to our identities so strongly: the vertigo of possibility is daunting.

The second is how flexible, how fragile, how unreal – ultimately, how contingent – my own thoughts, reactions, habits, are: how easily changed, how lacking in any essential or concrete nature. This is good of course; it means that perhaps I can change, from the rather hopeless and dull and too quickly aging person I've become, into – who knows what.

But, for the same identity reasons, it is disorienting: I'm certainly not wedded to my self as I am, but it's simply hard to get from moment to moment without the illusion that one's identity is 'real' – how do you make decisions, how do you think anything at all?...

Perhaps it is a blessing to experience myself as this uncharted landscape. I've always been interested in such landscapes – my work on the more elusive and bizarre aspects of high modernist music, poetry, literature; my fascination with the more outré tangents of psychology, language, and so on....

Perhaps I can even get interested in my self, again.

P'tit soleil noir

An elaborately Barthesian pleasure at reading the first pages of Julia Kristeva's Black Sun, her book on the psychoanalysis of depression. I giggle, recognize myself, nod understandingly, make comments...

"For those who are wracked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia."

You're right, I won't believe a word you say if you aren't yourself depressed – sympathy will win you nothing, my dear, I cackle.

"I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself."

A well-constructed sentence, a clear painting of what it is like: all right, I'll (experimentally) trust you. I don't feel like that right now, but I have felt like that – rather a lot in fact; although I don't know whether it is plausible for me now, the me sitting up in a comfortable bed with clean sheets and a window open onto the pleasantly warm night, sticks of orange-scented incense misting the room, my laptop on my lap (obviously) and next to me your book, held open by my workbook for cognitive behavior therapy for depression; that me who is post-bath, so obviously pleasure-oriented, hedonistic, and obviously can't be depressed then, to launch into this discussion. But all right, I'll try.

"Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present."

Active versus passive: and you may use those words however you wish to. (I can't help feeling that some of the 'alternative' meanings of those words are central to my problems, but heigh-ho.)

"Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic, it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable."

How true, and put a white violet in the book at that point, as Dorothy Parker would say. No, really: it does seem bluntly obvious, a fact that only someone with a rather silly flowery need for life to be Happy would not be able to absorb.

"Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me...?"

Ah now she's got me, a science fiction metaphor. But I can't quote the whole damned book, Knopf will have me by the balls. Her next points: some trigger takes me there – yes, having my promotion refused, then later Vanessa's death; but I assume she gets that 'there' was a place that already existed? – well she seems to be getting to that assumption. Some gorgeous writing on p. 4, that makes perfect sense to me, about the nature of what is lost; but rather more fun is the end of the third long paragraph:

"Absent from other people's meaning, alien... I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being..."

ah yes, arrogant. Or merely proud: the kind of pride that could be transformed into an imagined alter ego associated with a god of Death – Nachiketas, of course.

But it is too hard to read, and type quotes, and comment: and it is late, and I am sleepy... perhaps I shall read more: but without you, Dear Reader....

Insults for the new century

Patrick has invented a new insult for our age:

"He has to pay people to read his blog."

He thinks we need a word for that kind of person, too – blogstitution? no, that's not it.

Perhaps this is in line with Anne's complaint earlier this evening that her students were unpleasantly startled that she has an iPod – as though it's so weird that 'Granny' is up-to-date (or, as I said, she is a Hep Cat). There must be an insult one could invent for that situation? –

suggestions will be gratefully received.

Sullen

Sorry I haven't written...

Continuing irritable, depressed, at a bit of a loss; plus intermittent unexpected headaches, and a chaotic gastrointestinal tension that seems, capriciously, to react badly to whatever I eat.

Summer is now technically over, we're on the verge of masses of work for oncoming students; three days ago a student, after apologizing for bothering me, proceeded to run through his own manic concerns, leaving me exhausted and actually angry at him.

Which somehow transformed into real rage in my dreams, remembered anger, the rage of the youngest of the family, who can't fight back....

On the other hand: tomorrow is my first appointment for cognitive behavior therapy for depression. Probably a good thing, and not a minute too soon: although I'm experiencing all kinds of resistance – not wanting to feel the way I do and yet not wanting any change, any disturbance in the hypnotic round of television and sleep and oblique misery.

Dysfunctional, I know. Aren't you grateful that I haven't been writing about it?...