Mist and Faith

So, thinking analytically about things dispels the mist. Feeling your way through gathers it. Feeling secure in a life shrouded in mist is having faith.

That's the aspect of having faith that always made sense in a religious context. Of course, dishonestly tied to it was the less sensible notion of accepting a very particular dogma, much of it to do with ethics that had little to do with what made intuitive sense.

What does faith in the misty life really entail? What does Daoism "require"? One of the recurring motifs is the need to emulate the Dao of heaven rather than the Dao of men. It's the differenc e between "going with the flow" as conformism and believing in a meaning to life that justifies and defuses inconvenience and discomfort. The postmodern atmosphere we live in makes people uncomfortable with concrete talk about "meaning", but pretty much everybody believe in the transcendence, so to speak, of self-respect, or love, and the sacrifices that are obviously worth making for their sakes. If we venture a little further out, the braver might agree on self-expression too.

All three of these things entail a show of faith that is not necessarily logically sound, or at least one that does not live up to the standards of strict exercise of criticism otherwise expected of educated and intelligent people. It's a question not of intelligence but of courage; not of weeding out lies but of asserting truth.

 

Faith implies a conviction that it is worth it, one way or another. Without knowing where the chips will fall, without even knowing you're in the right. Frankly, the combination between the critical attitude towards ideology and the uncritical towards emotions, people and myself confuses me, and the confusion is a large part of what frightens me. These attitudes do bleed into each other, though I undoubtedly err on the side of criticism more often. Becoming secular probably didn't help.

It's always depressing to hear of artists joining causes with reactionary forces - like Dali and Fascism, or the Romantics and nationalism. Anybody and religion. I think it might have to do (well, sometimes) with a feeling that, again, this darkness retains more room for expression and emotional vitality than the stale and conformist rationalism of political correctness. I have no idea how to wrap this up. I'm experiencing trouble not making the opposite mistake. Fascists are too scary.

The Dark Recesses

It occurred to me that it is not an obvious choice of words to call these things dark. They're painful, frightening, different, sufficiently new so as to be as yet unknown. They're real - they're violently alive - but they're darkened.

Exploring darkness is exploring the forbidden. The desire to escape light is the desire to escape this repression. It's an attempt to escape and to some extent subvert emotional orthodoxy.

In principle I think things should be done independently of their shading, but it's difficult these days to feel the value of the accepted. It feels like it's corrupted by its association with conventions. I feel like I'm drowning in this fucking light far more than I am engulfed by darkness. The whole focus of the attempt at healing seems distorted. Psychiatric help is meant to bring your emotions back in line with your life, but it would make much more sense to bring your life in line with your emotions. It would make perfect, intuitive sense to everyone if this concept of a "diseased" emotionality did not exist. You can't have wrong emotions. Having wrong emotions is like being the wrong person. You can only have a wrong way of relating to yourself and to the world.

And the world can have a wrong way of relating to you. The darkness is imposed by it, inspired by it. The next step after acknowledging and living in darkness is to turn the lights on. When you look at what you don't understand without preconceptions, you see not darkness but the unfamiliar. I guess I need to rely on people to accept me as such, and it doesn't seem like too much of a safe bet.

Life is scary at the moment because it exposes me, inasmuch as it is lived. Clinical depression is not an ideal time to start being emotionally expressive. These emotions are even more challenging than the usual. I'm not used to being failed, to finding out for certain people are shit. Getting out there without any role-playing feels tantamount to a declaration of war on a frankly unknown mass of people. And the fact is I've never understood how people could feel secure that their lives won't fall to pieces without appropriately calculating their moves. How far is the distance between a social paranoiac and a legitimate pariah? In a world that manages itself so stupidly and arbitrarily, where are you supposed to get genuine self-confidence from?

Darkness Invisible

A few months ago I picked up Styron's Darkness Visible. It's a short book, but I'm a slow reader, so I was surprised to find myself reading it through in one sleepless night. I was disappointed. It's a succinct, no-nonsense account of an abrupt, extreme, psychotic and suicidal depressive episode experienced by an apparently unsentimental as well as "accomplished" old writer, and as such might serve as a good counter-argument to people doubting the validity of clinical depression in general or their own experience of it as a serious disease. What it conspicuously lacked, in its irritatingly laconic prose, reminding me of how bored I was reading Hemingway, was a vision of darkness.

More recently I tried to read Paradise Lost. I got bored of that pretty quickly. Pretty much as soon as I came across the phrase "darkness visible" and saw that it wasn't likely to play a major part in the poem. I've got Dante's Inferno lying around somewhere, so we'll see how that goes.

In spite of myself I feel a need to apologise for the apparent morbidity of this preoccupation, but I'm going to acknowledge the feeling rather than act on it. I think darkness is a major unacknowledged feature of clinical depression, disappointingly absent from my admittedly non-methodical ventures into its literature. A drive for darkness, I should say, because as well as being an overwhelming and almost unendurable reality, it also becomes a seductive promise and almost an object of yearning in its too complete disappearance or withdrawal. I think much of the widespread rumination about death has to do with this aura rather than (at least rather than exclusively) exasperation with life. I'm convinced that the tendency to stay in bed, to neglect yourself, has to do with some kind of suppressed fantasy of hitting rock bottom and thereby achieving some kind of release from the vapid mundanity of brightly flashing everyday fakery.

I'm vaguely familiar with a Freudian concept of a "death drive" but I really don't think this is it, at least not at its core. I think it's to do with an acknowledgement of an underlying and pervasive feature of reality as well as an appeal to mystery.

In a post that it almost three fucking years old and makes me feel like a dinosaur, I suggested that the appeal of the Greek Gods, to which from this distance I can also add that of the wrathful, fairly ruthless and terrifying Old Testament God, had exactly to do with the apparently paradoxical moral ambiguity, with the sense of danger and dark secrets. If nothing else, it suggests a human need to cultivate this kind of sinister adventurism, to tell creepy German fairy tales to shocked and exhilarated little kids.

In fact, we don't need to go very far to find evidence of this need. We can see it in black humour, in the strange fact that so many people willfully seek out movies that will make them scared or sad, in the fact that so-called more discriminating viewers will derive immense pleasure from such deeply dark and pessimistic TV shows as The Sopranos and The Wire. It helps explain to me why I get so irritated (and sometimes a little depressed) by the loud, aggressive chirpiness of all those anonymously worry-free sitcoms hatefully and eternally emblemised for me by my mortal enemy "Friends" for some reason.

It's alluded to absolutely brilliantly, I think, in Dexter's "Dark Passenger", which must be hidden at all costs if he is to stand a chance of fitting into society. It's echoed in the new Doctor Who's Doctor's shady and tragic (and suppressed) recent past. It's exemplified in Hamlet's bearing, despite all the moralising. The war on personality is also a war on darkness.

Much of this darkness revolves around the amoral. One obvious contrast with my life is that I'm a nice guy. I'm quite okay with being a nice guy, and I intend to keep on at it, and don't particularly want to hurt people, though I probably am a little overly anxious to avoid hurting them. On the other hand, much of morality is a crock of shit. There is no essential difference between the dynamics of the adult citizenry condemning a criminal for wrongdoing and the teenage group condemning a kid for the wrong haircut. I know because I had the educational privilege of growing up around a strangely deeply shallowly religious peer-group where to swear or smoke or dress immodestly was considered uncool.

If I wanted to create a representative image of this phenomenon, it might be of a group of Texans of deep moral conviction, draping their white bodies in white robes and pointed hats, off to lynch a black guy for sexually contaminating a pure member of their community in a love affair. It's all an infantile, obstinately simplistic conflation of colours and images, designed to keep everything as much the same as possible by means of any available sophistry and intimidation. The end result is all-around dehumanisation.

Part of the mysterious seduction of depression is that its darkness does not represent nothingness exactly. It's heavy to carry around, a kind of vacuum - occasionally it reminds me of The Nothing in The Neverending Story - it's a piercing hollowness that screams of the absence of something else, something meaningful that exists but is not at hand - that is at risk of not having any room for itself around and between all the buckets of bullshit that flood your insides.

It's not a question of overcoming depression. It's a question of integrating its lessons. I think depression, in its very sabotage of "functioning", is a cry out to be recognised as a person for your emotions rather than for your productivity; for your capacity for truth rather than your ability to satisfy others. A sad, thoughtful, and meaningful life is better, I am convinced, and ultimately happier, than a cheerful, mindless and insipid cruise towards death. It all hinges on the question of ultimate meaning. I can't say that I know what it is but I do feel it exists. And I feel that the attempt to limit my emotional horizon is robbing me of my opportunity of pursuing it.

It's probably significant that darkness and pain are where creativity comes from. Something happens, in that act of creation, of uncompromising truth. It's worthwhile giving it credit, rather than deciding you're smarter than your emotions and trying to engineer them towards winning some meaningless competition. I don't want to fucking play.

The Front Lines

In what is strangely but indisputably a step forwards, my social anxiety from adolescence is back. I remember, in my more extreme periods of social withdrawal, how deciding to accompany my mum to the supermarket would represent a significant triumph over this tendency, and would be reserved for my more courageous days. Lately, I've begun to feel very keenly again the strain going to the supermarket has apparently never stopped causing. Asking questions in class also is a newly exacting ordeal. I will raise my hand in class and when the teacher lets me speak I will feel a massive stutter coming on, and it will take about 7 seconds of everybody wondering if I'm okay for me to be able to swallow it and somehow start my sentence. Talking to people one-on-one I'm oddly giggly and slow to understand what they mean, and when volunteers are sought to read out passages in Middle English or Classical Chinese as is my awesome new weekly routine this semester, there's an interlude of unmistakable blind terror while I do intense battle with myself trying to get myself to take a shot until somebody else casually or within the saner bounds of nervousness does it instead.

It feels like some kind of coordinated attack. What it is, I think, is me, genuinely resolved to not fake self-confidence, and not contrive to gain the approval of absolutely everybody everywhere, realising that this way I cannot be sure to have their approval. I have stopped trying to engineer it without ceasing to consider it important.

It is a strange time with strange moods, but there is truly something frightening especially about going to the supermarket. It feels like a harsh, duplicitous, loveless arena, where people are crowded in together like the products on the shelves, forced into zombie-like interactions, expected to deal with the overwhelming information around them and distill out of it some kind of workable household collection. That doesn't actually make it sound that much less strange, but it's definitely got something to do with expectations. When you come into direct contact with people, you have to be able to deal with the likely reality of disappointing them.

I'm used to being able to weasel my way out of being disliked by people I don't like myself. Probably many of us have this ability, but presumably most of us show more discrimination in utilising it. I'm trying to start on a road of more complicated and strained relationship with others for the sake of an easier relationship with myself. In spite of myself, I keep feeling like I have a lot to lose in this exchange. It's the difference between being a good religious devotee and being a good person and a good me. Every time I come to a point where this decision has to be made I feel like I'm facing down the entire religious-normative-moral establishment and demand that it dismantle for my sake. I really don't know how to deal with people who think you can demand or expect of someone to do anything besides being a decent person who tries to be fair with others, and in the absence of role-playing, I feel naked. How do you deal with being under attack if you have no idea how to hit back?

Sadness as Homosexuality

The more I think about this analogy, the more complete it seems. One day, a comprehensive study may find that all of us appear somewhere on the sadness scale, with, say, 15% categorised as full-blown sad. Some time down the line, sadness will be permanently removed from the list of undesirable social phenomena, and it will become politically incorrect to regard it as a setback.

I am deliberately using the term sadness rather than depression, because the word depression is itself a kind of negative value judgement. Its apparently commoner meaning is a kind of casual and belittling appropriation of "clinical depression", signifying a momentary but undramatic deflation, but the meaning it's ripping off is that of the melancholic mental disease. I'm comfortable with calling it that, when it's active, but it's curious that we have no middle ground between a debilitating and life-threatening disease of intense sadness and the condition of being cheerful. To not toe the emotional line, like not toeing the sexual one, is to be a deviant, and to be either accused of perversion or compassionately pitied, and have earnest attempts made to cure you. Until, one day, someone will figure out that what you "have" is just a thing, like hair colour, and it's completely harmless, and if left alone we'd as soon forget to get excited about it.

It's not "psychiatric", or psychological, as much as it is political. The monotheistic world didn't want homosexuals, and it had them more or less forced upon it, because that's what reality eventually does. They screwed up its teleological paradigm. Sad people screw up somebody else's grand vision of what the world is supposed to be. My theory is that it's a conception of the world as rightfully static. Sad people, represented as a demographic most conspicuously by artists, are the ultimate subversives. They are the ones who take a look at the world and have a visceral reaction of "fuck this".

You can level the same accusations at sadness as at homosexuality. You can say it's unnatural, or unsound evolutionarily. You can worry that if left unchecked it will start to infect the populace, that your children might turn sad. You can say that you don't mind people being sad, as long as they don't "act" sad. You can point to their dubious emotional habits, and to the preponderance of emotional diseases among them. You'd have to be a callous dipshit and possibly an idiot, but it's not like that's stopping people now.

Nobody has to bother with any of these things now, because the sad are hiding in the corners, ashamed of their existence and of their emotional urges. You have some fronting rock bands like you always had gays fronting drag shows, but for the non-exhibitionist, or for the somewhat timid, which is something that seems to come with the territory, it's of only limited encouragement. For every Kurt Cobain defiantly screaming "Rape me" there are a million smiling-nodders terrified of being ostracised and humiliated if they ever lose their guard and express themselves.

I don't know what the price is that gays pay for living in the closet. I'm kind of curious to know. For sads, I'm fairly sure it results in clinical depression.

The Artistic Temperament

In the past few days, possibly because I'm studying for an exam in French Literature, I keep coming across these people whose mental illnesses appear to have played a major part in their creativity – which is to say, in their identity and their life.

You hear this said about these Van Gogh types sometimes – they were brilliant, but they were miserable, or their misery would contribute to and be assuaged by their beautiful creations. It always seemed a bit off to me, because what was the point of devoting yourself to art, if it had nothing to do with happiness?

The specific example running through my mind is of Robert M. Pirsig. After many years of persistent nagging, my younger brother has finally relented and begun reading his quasi-autobiographical Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Today he pointed out, quite rightly, that its protagonist wasn't really very Zen.

Which led me to think that what he is, actually, is an artist. Even before writing his two books, while he was a technical writer and university teacher and whatnot; he was an artist simply by virtue of his wanting to do things properly – critically, non-conventionally – in an insistence that put him at odds with society. Giving up this struggle, this criticism, to try and fall in line with convention was what made him bitter, torn, deadened; engaging in it essentially just made him rejected.

Rejection is unpleasant, and a much bigger deal than the platitudes would have you think in any case, but I don’t think it can hold a candle to the experience of being subjected to industrial processing.

Both experiences count as mental illness, in principle. If you stray too far and if you suffer too much you're a whack job, but in both cases your experiences would make fascinating fodder for aficionados if rendered properly.

William S. Burroughs seems to have considered his homosexuality and drug-addiction equally parts of this, as maladaptive and invigorating aspects of his life and personality.  One more piece in a long chain of evidence that seems to suggest that if you want to not suck, it is inevitable that you get into quite serious conflict with those who do.

Art is an arena, or institution, where this antagonistic conduct is relatively tolerated; sometimes more or less encouraged – which may be why those are the weirdos and freaks we remember and revere, but it's fully possible that the forgotten others, in less obliging professional circumstances, led tense but fulfilling lives as well.

Sometimes, of course, art doesn't seem to have ultimately been enough. Van Gogh really seems to have been pretty comprehensively miserable (do does Cobain, who for some reason I keep thinking of when I think of Van Gogh); Flaubert, if the introductory note I read about him can be believed, on top of everything else gone wrong in his life, in the tyrannical self-discipline as well as the unpleasant subject matter involved in writing Madame Bovary, made himself so miserable he grew to resent its success.

On the other hand, there are these Zen monks, and Taoist types, presumably, who claim to be happy through a different kind of non-conformism. So what is the Zen way to maintain your motorcycle? It doesn't have to be about calm – because who the fuck is ever calm anyway? - but if you're doing things properly, I think you should be able to feel the exultation that comes from being free of bullshit, even if people around you are calling you names. Or hospitalising you. 

Friction

My life no longer feels lubricated. With a massive effort, I have managed effective detoxification. It's like childhood is back now, and things that happen in my interactions with people actually mean something.

When I was a kid the stakes seemed quite high. It didn't require much for you to annoy people out of liking you. The rejections seemed so arbitrary I couldn't figure out what set apart those that happened from those that didn't. Wherever there was tension, I would assume there could be a split, and would proceed only as far as my self-confidence and principles would justify it.

Here in grown-up world, at least theoretically the stakes are much higher. If I'm not careful, I might just find myself forced to drink hemlock for corrupting the youth. Self-confidence varies almost daily, ideology is confused and self-contradictory, and rejections seem as random as ever, possibly even more so, as people these days actually have brains that they could technically use to settle what's acceptable and what's pariah-material. Operating without lubrication and feeling like a human being, I find myself having trouble pinpointing exactly when friction becomes explosion.

Very possibly, you can't preclude explosion, and it's a serious risk you must be willing to regularly take, like getting into a car. Still, you should have an idea of where the car is supposed to be, so you don't drive on the wrong side of the road, or through a park, even if you're in a justified hurry.

It's a bad example because unlike cars, being eccentric is not something that is likely to kill anyone, or even harm them. But it can place you sufficiently out of people's comfort zones for them to not hazard treating you like a person. On the other hand it's an appropriate example because it's not limited to my wanting to do things differently; I also think that I'm doing things right and everybody else (well, most of them) are doing it wrong - which is a problem, because it's a little like the equivalent of being the only guy driving on the right side of the road.

Car crashes, explosions, executions - I'm sure there's a saner way of expressing disagreement. I see it all the time. People roll their eyes at each other, shout at each other, fucking denounce each other sometimes, and then go on being friends, which is a phenomenon I kind of remember from childhood, but it's been so long that it's getting a little fuzzy. What sets these clashes apart from those understood as demonstrating ultimate incompatibility? And how much compatibility is absolutely necessary? How much advisable?

I suspect that if I do what people sometimes tell me, and ignore arbitrary conventions and expectations completely, I'll get fired, and alienate and embarrass my friends to the point of insulting them. There's a certain degree of respecting people's arbitrary expectations in wanting to be their friend. It doesn't seem inherently unreasonable, but the question is where should I not have this flexibility, and where exactly are these red lines, in terms of other people. The main question is, I suppose, where is it almost definitely not an issue, and it's just me seeing explosions in regular life-sustaining friction?