Bereft of purpose, void of use

Depressive poet James Thomson

Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can life still live on?..
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.

           From "The City of Dreadful Night"
                      Section II
                      1874

I wouldn't say this passage from Thomson's (perhaps better known as "B.V.") long poem "The City of Dreadful Night" describes the effects of depression as universally as Antonio's speech in The Merchant of Venice (See: Such a want-wit sadness makes of me); but...sometimes...  Born in Scotland, he was for a time a schoolmaster in England, where he did most of his writing. He suffered from what in those days was called "constitutional melancholia." He was addicted to opium. But he was an interesting poet, sometimes called a British Poe. He wrote a book about Walt Whitman. He may have influenced Melville. He died homeless, two years after "City of Dreadful Night" was published. (See also: Line from poet James Thomson, aka B.V.)                                                                              

Such a want-wit sadness makes of me

In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn:
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself...  

                     The Merchant of Venice  
                     Act 1, Scene 1 

Shakespeare knew.

These are the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice, in which that very merchant, Antonio, describes his condition to his friend, Salerio. It is a perceptive description of a certain kind of depression, with which you feel a thing like sadness but which isn't actual sadness - you have nothing in particular to be sad about. (Although this condition often causes you to mine thoughts and memories that increase your sadness, it tempts you to inflate things or deflate things as necessary, to see the bad as worse and the worst in everything.) As Antonio says, the feeling wearies you; you are sure it wears on your friends and family, your co-workers and your neighbors. Certainly it wears you down physically and emotionally, but you cannot trace its origins in any very satisfactory way. Whatever it is and wherever it came from, it clogs and slows your mind, robs you of whatever spirit and wit you might formerly have possessed, and just makes you feel generally dumber than you used to feel. 

Shakespeare being Shakespeare, surely he was capable of describing this condition perfectly without ever having experienced it. However, it's what ensues that makes me think the author may well have suffered himself from depression. As the scene progresses, Antonio's friends try to cheer him up, despite his suggestions to them that it's futile, that "I hold the world...a stage, where every man must play a part,/ and mine a sad one." Still, they keep trying. "Let me play the fool," says Gratanio, "with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come." 

Again, Shakespeare might have understood or imagined, accurately, that this is what happened with certain sad people who cannot be roused from their condition. But it has for me the feeling of lived experience. Because it is what happens. Loved ones and other kind people see you in what looks like sadness and try to help you. They want you to feel better and so they do for you the things that for them would lift them out of a bad mood or a melancholy day. But it doesn't work the way they had hoped it would.

Antonio's friends try to show understanding, try to help him make sense of what he is feeling. They suggest to the importing-exporting merchant from Venice that he is worried about his ships at sea, laden with his goods. But he tells them he is not worried. Only Salerio, inadvertently, says something that rings true. "Your mind," he tells Antonio, "is tossing on the ocean." Salerio means that Antonio is imagining his ships in peril. He's wrong, but as a description of Antonio's state of mind, probably he is not far off the mark. One way or another, Shakespeare knew.

Lines from R.S. Thomas' poem "The Belfry"

The poem by R.S. Thomas ends with the possibility of faraway hope, but some days, today for example, I can't get past these lines:

 
                 There are times
When a black frost is upon
One's whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb. 
     - from "The Belfry" by R.S. Thomas 

       (More from R.S. Thomas)


 

Psychache in the Life of John Kennedy Toole

There's a new, interesting and sensitive biography of John Kennedy Toole out. It's called Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Or coming out. Not sure if it's out yet. Toole wrote the great comic novel in the Sixties, while stationed at an Army base in Puerto Rico. It was never published in his lifetime. Cory MacLauchlin's book traces the labyrinthine path the manuscript took to publication and fame. Walker Percy enters the story late, but figures as a hero, along with the Toole's mother, for their roles in the novel's publication. Toole killed himself, and the author of the bio considers very realistically,  with insight and compassion, the possible causes of his suicide. Here he summarizes the conclusions of Edwin Schneidman, who studied suicide and those who commit it. It's an accurate elucidation of the conundrum of living with pain but no visible wound.

Foremost suicidologist Edwin Shneidman described suicide as an incredibly complex event. He coined the term "psychache" to express the intricate and complicated condition leading up to suicide. After years of studying suicides and interviewing people with suicidal tendencies, some of whom ultimately carried out the act despite his efforts to help then, Shneidman determined that suicide is not reactive, but rather "purposive." In his definition, it is a "concatenated, complicated, multi-dimensional, conscious, and unconscious 'choice' of the best possible practical solution to a perceived problem, dilemma, impasse, crisis or desperation." And before arriving at the decision to kill oneself, Shneidman argues, the person is in excruciating pain; the pain may have no physical manifestation but still relentlessly tortures the subject. To the person suffering from this "psychache," the pain is just as potent and troubling as the ghost pain riddling the body of an amputee. They cannot point to the wound they feel, but they feel it intensely. In this context, suicide is not a moment of weakness, but rather a final attempt to take control of the pain, regardless of its origin.

                                                                                                 - Cory MacLauchlin

                                                                                                   Butterfly in the Typewriter