Growing Melancholy (I)

A paean to the fantastic, the banal, and every annoying thing in between: Enter Father Depression.

It was Grandfather's watch and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

— David Foster Wallace, The Depressed Person

Dear beloved reader, I shall attempt to relate to you a memory—a fading, prickling memory of which I presently have little to no sufficient apprehension¹—and in spite of myself, endow it with a rhetorical flourish in such a way that I hope will elicit a certain sadness affinitive to your own situation, dearest reader, for we indulge in the same metaphysical immiseration and the slow ruination of all physical things, both of which are grounded in the all-too-familiar notion we sometimes call Human Experience. What we all possess in common is the kind of maudlin sadness that is so intoxicatingly human we tend to carry it subconsciously within the breadth of our every sentence uttered or murmured.

Every once in a while, this surfeit of suprareality makes itself known under the guise of mental disorder: Father Depression. We are embarrassed, I believe, to be sad; our repressive culture’s inability to express sadness properly has led to a self-constituted alienation, to which we are bound until death intervenes and extends to us her mercy. The depressive is flagellated and shamed for not wanting to buy into the seemingly reality-conforming promise that her ‘condition’ is in fact a condition and therefore diagnosable, most likely a product of her fancy; and in time, the depressive is reassured, she can be cured of this delusion completely. But the depressive knows better than her doctor. She knows that in the world of medicine, there exists no such panacea. In a way, Father Depression is the spiritual embodiment of her doctor’s false hopes and misguided beliefs. The doctor has to reaffirm his commitment to cure because he is, quite literally, her doctor. It is a contractual obligation that has warranted such boldness, but depression still persists in the same way it always has.

Depression is a fact(icity), a vastness that overwhelms judgment. We feel melancholy because we often try to understand and conceptualize (to no avail) this vastness, this self-expanding nullity of meaning, or rather, the kind of non-meaning that keeps pestering us, finite beings who know in their hearts of hearts that they will have to die someday. It is the good old Freudian death drive, plus infinity.

The great voyage of Human Experience, once embarked upon, is difficult to keep track of, quite impossible to chart its errant course, for it is a smooth and unmarked progression akin to lifelong somnambulism, punctuated only by reflective moments of hurt and disappointment. Depression is indeed the firewater that befuddles the mind. Sinful creatures we are, for we are unrepentant, oblivious, and hesitant to come to terms with the rudimentary nature of our being and crudely dismiss it as a ‘disorder’ as if our predicament were somehow logically ordered in the first place. Depression, I contend, is the ultimate sum and manifest form of Human Experience in the fullest sense; it cannot exist non-experientially or outside the frame of mind considered human. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. This is not to say that cats and dogs are incapable of being depressed. However, their depression is radically different from our Father Depression; the latter, in contrast with mere depression, exposes what’s lurking underneath the given appearances of the banal.

Here is what I wrote in May about my condition, on a different weblog:

There is no depth to depression. Harder to grasp than its dimensionality is perhaps its nature. What is it doing here, inside my head? Each day it belittles and dehumanizes me, reducing me to a blithering idiot who yelps and cries but doesn’t articulate. Depression is what has pulled me out of everything. It is the grand disillusionment that discourages me from going on living, a sobering impasse of which I cannot make heads or tails. What is its purpose? It does not explain anything to me, nor can it be explained by anyone. It is driven by nothing but itself, an irrational force of self-destructive compulsion and pure infinite action. Suicide, suicide, suicide. Please kill yourself already, it implores me. Can’t you terminate this while we are ahead? I am hollowed out completely and what is left of me is this queer little thing, a deluge of nonsense, consuming my being as though I have always been its object. The subject-object relation is turned topsy-turvy, and now I’m viewing the external world from the standpoint of a man who walks using his head, his ears hearing nothing but the sound of a head walking.

Either it means something or it doesn’t.

I wish to pontificate no further without an example. Now let me tell you a tall tale, my most patient reader, about my misadventures at three different hospitals, and about my time as an exchange student who almost got sent back to his own country before the due date on account of his growing melancholy, world-weariness, and creeping realization that he was a stranger unto himself. This was quite a long time ago, but my depression has always been with me. I cannot live without it at this point; it is the terrible struggle that continues to define my life. It started back in 2017, and it has never stopped since. One step forward, two steps back, as the saying goes.

[To be continued.]

1. Unless I try to extricate this particular memory from the sentimental murkiness of my own doing and bring it under rational scrutiny, I’m afraid I will never truly understand it.