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....
Comments