'Lisboa, 1957' by Gerard Castello Lopes
“Silence emerges from the sound of the rain and spreads in a crescendo of grey monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building façades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what to think or what I am. All the pent-up bitterness of my life removes, before my sensationless eyes, the suit of natural happiness it wears in the random events that fill up each day. I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I’m always sad. And the part of me that realizes this is behind me, as if bent over my leaning self at the window, as if looking over my shoulder or even over my head to contemplate, with eyes more intimate than my own, the slow and now wavy rain which filigrees the grey and inclement air.” –Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Which is a book that’s stolen my life for the last 24 hours. Well, as much as a book can. Pessoa is known to have many different ’selves’ and authored all his documents from the variety of selves he felt within him. The selves were so distinct that he could site differences in horoscopes, biographical history and philosophies between the personalities of his psyche. After his death, his writings were found and then constructed into a book (The Book of Disquiet) that is depressing, beautiful, brutally honest and psychologically frightening. Frightening perhaps because of the immense similarities I’ve drawn toward someone whom the back of the book jacket all but outs as being clinically schizophrenic.
The descriptions of depression are not only realistic and accurate, they are things of revelation. Many authors–maybe most authors–have tried in their own ways to describe the sensation of ‘depression.’ Depression is as common as love–if not more so when you consider the juxtaposition commonly used in order to describe romantic sentiments. For instance; unrequited love, the death of a significant other, or the betrayal on behalf of a character’s cherished paramour.
Of course, it would be difficult to describe a sensation that is entirely subjective, yet (to a degree) universally understood. For exactly this reason, it can share a shelf with the ideology of love. In terms of writing the experience of either, it is hard to do so without sounding trite or somewhat amiss.
A common means of depicting depression is the utilization of drugs or violence and the subsequent removal of emotions from the narrative. The character thus becomes apathetic and realizes the emotions he or she is without. But this doesn’t accurately describe the darkness or depths of it. If apathy were depression, than I’d suspect that every deft person in the world is suffering from it and the condition itself poses little threat to anyone’s well-being, just the progress of humanity; for if no one is driven by their passions, I imagine nothing will get done or evolve. Flat-lined; that is the common means of depicting depression. Which misses the mark. In fact, when I think of flat-lined I imagine a person who has been over-medicated for similar mental processes, whether it be depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc.
What makes Pessoa’s frequent descriptions of depression authentic is the fact that he hadn’t sought out to have the documents, that would later become his book, published. I infer that what he had written was something to be seen and experienced only by himself. And what’s the use in lying to one’s self? It’s the knowing that the presence of others will soon be there, sometime in the future, that waters down the accuracy of all topics taboo.
Things become trite and unrealistic when you enter a bookstore and walk a path around a rounder of new novels. Pick up a book with a grey or blackish cover–something with ‘dead’ in the title or a picture of an industrial building with an ominous thicket of fog clamouring at its bases (trust me, there are a lot of these). There is a whole new genre of books that deal with this dark, depression-type writing, but are much less satisfying because the level of their descriptions is 0ne that hovers just above the well that depression emulates.
Depression literature or ‘downer-lit’ is something that’s been popular maybe forever. Depression is something that can be traced back presumably to the first human (or maybe second if you subscribe to the ‘hell is other people’ mentality that would allow you to only view yourself as being depressed in relation to others’ perceptions of your moods, behaviors, etc.), thus it’s no wonder the popularity of this type of writing ceases to lessen throughout time.
However, the newer novels surfacing in today’s bookstores, both virtual and tangible (yes, there are still a few), are just boring when it comes to emotional components. I am a huge fan of detached narration, apathetic characters–in fact the majority of my writing consists of nothing but this, but there is something markedly unsatisfying about this writing to the reader.
I suspect there’s an element of fear. And so, not wanting to call anyone a coward but myself, I will admit that when dealing with things like suicidal, homicidal, anxious or depressed characters, I practice a great deal of caution and resistance. And, because I like blaming people, I could argue that this is a reflection of the current state of mental tolerance in society.
Depression and suicide are things no longer considered as crazy as they have been in the past, but they are by no means things to talk about over dinner. Actually, they can’t even be talked about with therapists–the very people one pays in order to sort out unsettling feelings. While it is possible, and encouraged, to tell a professional that you are severely depressed or suicidal, doing so will assuredly land you under strict suicide-watch conditions and perhaps into a facility that could better orchestrate this than your frightened family/close friends/neighbor/what have you. So, on an interpersonal level, one’s involvement with their own depression and their confiding of it to another trusted individual is limited so as not to scare people. For instance, it isn’t atypical to watch a movie or television show where someone alludes to suicidal thoughts or bouts of depression to which, usually an optimistic character, will say something like, “Bobby, you’re scaring me.” Which could be construed as passive-aggressive talk for ‘Don’t talk about real feelings again, ever. Freak.’ Real healthy for the mental fragility of the depressed. But it’s the way it is.
Taking this into account, I suppose it’s no wonder that descriptions of depression barely place a big toe into its waters, merely using bleak words and descriptions more of horror than of painful sadness to express intent to the reader. Even the most twisted books I’ve read of late have left me unmoved. The tortured soul is something no longer prominent in literature. It is sited as a detached metaphor or a sarcastic remark that serves more as a peephole for a deep-seeded emotional disturbance than throwing back its lid and exposing it in all its unabashed reality.
And as a writer, I should be asking myself why this is the case; why I don’t just forget the Panopticon of society as I’d wish to and get authentic. I suppose first one has to see the problem before tackling it. There’s always the risk of over-doing it: which is just as bad as under-doing it. Both instances are unrealistic and will send books from the rounders into the cardboard boxes and back to the publishers to be stripped and destroyed/recycled. Surely this problem can be best addressed and rectified in literature. As was eroticism and political dissidence in times of oppression on both fronts. Surely Miller and Beckett weren’t sitting at their desks, flinching at the possibility of accurately depicting their humanity. Or maybe they had, and did so in spite of themselves. Which, it would seem, was the thing that served them success.
…I also like the books they recommend for Books of the Year. The last one I read via their recommendation was Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land. Which was very good.
