“Depressing,”
because, according to the article—well,
here’s a quote:
At
any given point, 22% of the population exhibit at least one symptom of
depression and the World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression
will have led to more worldwide disability and lives lost than any other
affliction, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, accidents, and even war.
Well, I
turned to the review, and was stopped in my initial tracks by the first
sentence:
“Depression
is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals,” legendary psychologist
Martin Seligman observed in his essential
treatise on learned optimism.
Yeah?
So who is Martin Seligman,
legendary though he may be? And what the hell does he know about depression?
Has he ever been trapped in a toilet stall, has he ever had a crying jag he
couldn’t stop, has he ever sat at a computer and looked at the screen and felt
his mind turn to mush and realize that his thinking has slowed so far down that
his thoughts can’t make it up to the surface? So that email that he has to
write? He can’t concentrate, he can’t focus—all he can do is sit there numbly
and mutely and hope that, in some way, the governor will sign the reprieve.
Because, let’s be clear—there is no chance whatsoever that anything he does
will affect in any way how he is feeling. Why? Because he is not
feeling.
Or
is he? Because he’s been crying, sobbing, and he’s been ruminating.
Maybe
you don’t know….
Ruminating
is not—not where he is—pondering a problem deeply. No, ruminating is the
incessant—shouldn’t it be incesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssant?—repetition of a single thought. Today
it’s “I want to die.” Yesterday it was “I can’t think.”
Sure,
Styron did it better
than anyone—myself included—in his book on depression Darkness
Visible.
But don’t think that he or I or anyone can get this one right. Why?
Because, by its nature, depression defies description. It’s a black hole, where
any light shone into it is lost, consumed. And when, at last, the master of the
universe relents and you’re out, the very memory of it has been consumed as
well.
So
the legendary Martin Seligman has pronounced himself on depression—how very
nice! At best, it accounts for one and only one of the many depressions.
Because when I went from 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams of one drug and began
to take 15 milligrams of another, guess what? I began humming to myself as I
rode to work.
I’m
lucky; as I understand it, the serotonin reuptake
inhibitor basically floods all of the brain, and all the receptors, with serotonin. And some of those
relate to mood, and some relate to other things having nothing to do with mood.
Which means that some people get lots of side effects and remain depressed; the
lucky ones like me get relatively few, but a blessed lift in mood.
So
do I come down on the side of chemicals, medicines, physiology? No, because
what you do with your life changes your brain. That I learned one afternoon as
I saw a group of people wearing new clothes—and really terrible ones, at
that—waiting to be photographed by a clearly professional photographer.
The
“models,” however, were just-as-clearly not professionals. But who were
they, I wondered, as I pondered them standing around on the beach under the
palm trees? And where was I?
Lolling
on my back in the water, after a day of writing and playing music and taking a
walk and listening to Monteverdi. I hadn’t made a dime that day, but I was
happy. And the people on the beach? They were Wal-Mart employees, who had been
chosen to be the models in the newspaper advertising insert.
I
had worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and for many of them I was lethally
depressed. I was laid off; I went into crisis. I got out of the crisis and put
myself on a schedule, a schedule I still follow. And I was at that moment
splashing in the blue Caribbean waters, watching a group of prisoners from a
prison I had escaped.
“Escaped,”
because merely being laid off would have been “paroled” or perhaps “released.”
But the prison I had escaped from wasn’t Wal-Mart—I had escaped from a brutal,
decade-long battle against myself. I had willed myself to go to the brink of
madness, to stand on the precipice and grant the Gods permission to push me
into it.
It
wasn’t a psychiatric crisis—or perhaps it was. I had been an angry, impossible
steward for a man who had been given great gifts. I had raged at myself,
scolded myself, belittled myself, bitten myself….
But
wait—it wasn’t “myself.” Because I had had nothing to do with it—I could no
more write a book or play the cello than I could scale Mount Everest. My job
was to feed him and give him as much water as he needed and exercise him and
put the cello into his hands and sit him at the computer and then GET THE HELL
AWAY! He’ll play perfectly well on his own.
Wrong—he’ll
play infinitely better. Because you know all that criticism for all those
years?
Sorry—but
it was shit.
The
person you see occupies a middle position. I came to know a presence, which to
me was the wind. And from this presence, which I call Domine, the cellist gets his
talent, and the writer as well. My job is to get him in front of computers and
embracing cellos.
I
take him to the dentist—just as I brush his teeth. At the end of the day, I
read what he’s written, or I listen to him play. ‘Where did that come
from,’ I wonder. ‘He’s so good,’ I tell him. ‘Wow!’ I say.
I
had made my life a koan, which, for the benefit of my red-squiggling computer, I will
define, via Wikipedia:
A kōan (公案?)/ˈkoʊ.ɑːn/; Chinese: 公案;
pinyin: gōng'àn; Korean: 공안 (kong'an); Vietnamese: công
án) is a story, dialogue, question, or
statement, which is used in Zen-practice to provoke the "great
doubt", and test a student's progress in Zen practice.
What
is the music of a mute cellist?
What
happens when the music goes away?
Should
it matter if he plays better without the instrument than with it?
None
of these fanciful statements are true. I was simply holding on to a small
thread of faith, which I could only grasp by observing with agonizing detail
how I went about my life. I lost the ability to use a computer, and then stared
at my fingers until I could connect my right first digit with an icon that was
on my dock.
I looked at the icon, absorbed the blue, noted that the downward slash of the
small part of the “W” is superimposed over the upward slash. But am I supposed
to do a double or a single click?
How
many Word documents had I opened before?
And
why was I doing it?
I
wanted to change something so fundamental about myself that I required a reboot. “Put the detergent on the
sponge,” I told him. We were doing dishes—which he generally did by wasting
water, slopping water all over the floor, and not paying attention. Now, I had
to tell him how to wash the dishes—first you put the soap on the sponge; then
you lather, as it were, the coffee cup; then you place the cup with soap still
on it on the side of the sink; proceed to the next cup.
The
important thing?
There
was no abuse in it. Just patient directions—completely explicit, clear,
detailed. He didn’t know how to do prosaic stuff, and had been too impatient to
learn. And I had berated him for decades about the stuff he really could do.
I
blew it a few times; so did he. He was holding on, too, to the thread. Perhaps
more than I, he had heard the wind through the palm trees, heard the fronds
stir to life, appreciated the swaying green against the constant blue, felt the
hand caressing his brow, smiled, looked up, and said…
…Domine.
