David's Inferno

by David Blistein

  In early November, our daughter was sworn into the bar at the Vermont Supreme Court. I approached this important event with a certain trepidation. While breaking down in tears could be mistaken for relief that the law-school loans were in her name and not ours, it would have been a tough sell. Obviously, this day was about her. I would have felt guilty if my emotions were in any way a distraction. Turned out there was nothing to worry about. I was able to enjoy the ceremony—even the part that involved standing in a crowded room for a half hour or so—unencumbered by emotional baggage. I was just a guy who was proud of his daughter. And loved her a lot.

  Even on my annual Thanksgiving walk with my brother—our once-a-year, no-holds-barred download about parents, wives, children, jobs, health, and the fate of the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles—I cavalierly described my recent depressive/dysphoric episode with the confidence of one who had worked his way down a fairly treacherous slope. Someone who’d figured out where the rocks were loose and likely to give way, where a hidden spring could send you ankle deep into the muck, or an inviting branch could lend a hand but might not hold.

  I’ll never be that cavalier again.

  FOR A GUY ON THE PATH TO DIVINE RAPTURE, DANTE SEEMS mighty opinionated, if not outright malicious. In the course of descending through the nine circles of Hell, he condemns former friends and enemies, popes and princes, the famous and infamous—with a degree of vindictiveness that should earn him a prominent place in his own Fifth Circle of Hell, where the terminally angry mix with the sullen, slothful, and despairing.

  Inferno is a young man’s book. He isn’t even forty when he first puts quill to paper, and he’s been thinking about it for several years before that. At that age, your angers still feel justified … your frustrations of other people’s making. All the major and petty inconveniences of your life are caused by external events, not your own inability to transcend them: If only she loved me. If only they paid me what I deserve. If only they’d change that law. If only he’d stop sabotaging everything I do.

  And so Dante badmouths Cleopatra and Helen of Troy for the sin of Lust with as much hell-fire-and-brimstone passion as would any repressed soul (especially one who’s in exile, continually exposed to temptation while separated from the wife he doesn’t really like). He condemns three contemporary popes for fraud and a whole lot of faceless clerics for avarice with the same self-righteous indignation of a modern voter saying we should “throw the bums out.” He unceremoniously tosses a former acquaintance into the Circle of Gluttony for no apparent reason other than it lets Dante use the guy to predict the results of political intrigue in Florence after the events, thereby painting the poet’s actions in the best possible light. And he shamelessly scatters others he disapproves of into whatever hellish realm he feels is appropriate for their perceived sins of commission or omission.

  Dante tries to pin these judgments on forces way beyond his control—including Virgil, St. Augustine, and the entire foundation of medieval Christian theology. He even throws his beloved Beatrice under the bus—claiming that the only real reason he’s being allowed to witness these things is that she wants him to come back and tell people what awaits them if they don’t shape up.

  But the book is written in the first person. There’s no way Dante can escape the fact that he chose the examples. The fact that one of the most judgmental people in the history of the world should get a “Get out of Hell Free” card defies logic.

  There are, of course, two sides to every story—in Dante’s case a whole lot more than two. He knows full well where his epic journey is heading. In fact, one of the most amazing things about The Divine Comedy is that he’s able to carry this spectacular holographic vision in his head for twenty years—like a warrior who learns to run with a mouthful of water and not lose a single drop. Sure, the basic Hell-Purgatory-Heaven, sinner-penitent-saved storyline has been around for centuries. But the comprehensiveness of his vision and the vividness with which he presents it is unlike any attempted before. And he knows it.

  It’s a little prosaic to point out there’s at least a little lust, gluttony, avarice, anger, and fraud in us all. And there is no way—I’m throwing down the gauntlet here—that you can write that intensely about the entire spectrum of human experience without embracing it in yourself.

  Having your mind spin wildly out of control makes that a little easier. You begin to appreciate how other people’s strange behavior may be rooted in similarly random brain chemistry. You may not approve. But you understand.

  By the time Dante is working on Paradise, he’ll be in his fifties, no longer a young man by the standards of those days. Unfortunately, copies of the Inferno and Purgatory will have already begun circulating. He has to endure the curse of all writers—he can’t take it back. He’s stuck with those judgments. He’s still stuck with them 700 years later. It’s the price he has to pay for planting the seeds of a new vision without alienating contemporary readers and patrons.

  Still, he’ll manage—particularly, later in Purgatory—to hint at the most glaring inconsistency in the entire Judeo-Christian vision: You can’t get into heaven with duality boots.

  It’s all well and good to say that on the Day of Judgment, Christ will take the good (and appropriately penitent) with him to Paradise, while the evil remain in eternal Hell.

  But who are we to judge what Christ or God or the Cosmos will ultimately do? How can we experience unconditional love if we put conditions on it? How can infinite mercy be so finite?

  I understand that, for centuries, theologians have made careers of dissecting these points—frequently getting stuck, if not impaled, on them in the process. All I know is that a guy like Dante—a guy who so deeply understands the struggle to simply be a human on earth, a guy who knows both depths of despair and manic visions of rapture, a guy who knows the struggle between good and evil within himself (and how hard it is to reconcile them) would have never condemned anyone to suffer in eternal Hell.

  He knows that he hasn’t really been sent to put all these people in their place. He knows that, as the famous quote at the start of this chapter implies, the more he can experience and share their grief the more perfect we all become.

  “Follow me! Follow me!” I hear him calling. “We’ll get through this!”

  The Church may have wanted those sinners out of the way for all eternity. But there was no way Dante would have abandoned them down there.

  He wasn’t going to abandon me there either.

  Looking for Traction

  You have to navigate your own personal catastrophe.

  —ANONYMOUS

  BY JANUARY 2006, I was completely back in the belly of the beast. Establishing a pattern that held, with occasional brief remissions, for more than a year:

  At 4 A.M … 5 at the latest, I’d awake in a panic. My throat and heart vibrating. Racing. Sometimes in my solar plexus, too. I was still exhausted but couldn’t go back to sleep, although with enough sedatives I might get another hour or two. When I did get up, I’d get outside as fast as I could. Sometimes I strapped on snowshoes and headed for the woods. Usually I’d just go out the front door and start walking. Walking. Walking. Walking. Exactly a mile and a half down the road to where it forks, and then exactly a mile and a half back. Fast. Real fast. Sometimes breaking into a run. Back. Shower. Maybe ending with a blast of cold water. Coffee. Yeah, I know, but while physically stimulating, it was emotionally comforting. Usually decaf. But sometimes the real deal. Some days, I had places to go and people to meet. Which I managed to pull off with various degrees of success. All professional depressives have their own techniques. For me, it took a combination of careful planning (where I’d be and when), occasional rehearsal (oh yeah, this is how humans are supposed to behave), fairly constant dissembling (even to myself, if possible), and, when all else fails, enough willpower to fake it until you’re alone again. Or at least back home. Where there was no need to pretend otherwise. Around 9:30 or 10 every night, having sta
ggered through another day, I’d go to bed. My mind comfortably numbed by a drink or two and an hour or so of empty TV.

  I’d sit up for a while against the pillows, listening to Wendy get ready for bed, knowing that for at least a few minutes my emotions wouldn’t be a burden to either of us. I didn’t want to read—it was too hard to focus anyway. I’d just sink into the luxurious sensation of knowing I could now rest from the battle, no matter how briefly. Like a piece of chocolate you keep rolling around on your tongue until the last taste bud releases its hold, I’d roll around in that drowsy state as long as I could—exhausted, but knowing that the demons were done for the day. They had no fight left. I could drift off whenever I wanted. As hypnagogic images arose, I’d rouse myself enough to enjoy a few more seconds of conscious relief. Those moments were delicious.

  Unlike Hamlet, it was the sleep of sleep I craved (not death), but he nailed the feeling:

  …by a sleep to say we end

  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wish’d.

  My sleep would be light. But that was okay. I also loved waking up … as often as possible … in the middle of the night: midnight, 1, 2, 3; the sweet realization that I could fall back asleep before the jitteriness again reared it’s chaotic head in the early hours of dawn. Which, inevitably, it did.

  Even though an unexamined life might not be worth living, an examined one can be too painful. One warm-ish day that winter, I sat on the screened-in porch in the back of my cabin, drinking a cup of chai tea, very spicy, a lot of cardamom. Trying to generate some inner fire. I went in to get my laptop and sat there, forcing myself to write … to dissect the moment, as if that would give me some power over it. Instead of cowering, I’d look it right in the eyes:

  The soundtrack is the steady just-above-freezing and even-warmer-in-the-sun drip drip drip of snow melting off the roof.

  A nuthatch is working upside down on the almonds in the cage-like feeder. Carefully avoiding the slightly rancid oat-cake cookies. The chickadees have taken over the platform feeder like they own the place—as if squirrels were figments of their imaginations. They wish.

  I got my best bird feeder for $2 at a tag sale. I had to turn it around so I could see the birds better. This means they have to fly right at the window, stop, hover, and do a 180° turn to get at the food. At first, there were a few minor window collisions—no harm done. But now they do it gracefully.

  Two or three chickadees work the feeder at a time, bickering a little as they make space for new arrivals. Drops of melting snow drip off the roof onto their heads. They don’t seem to notice. One just scooted the nuthatch away to see what the problem is with oatcakes. Hmm. They don’t taste all that bad. Well, on second thought, sunflower seeds are better.

  Birds don’t dwell on the fact that perfectly good bird feeders have been turned the wrong way by some oblivious human; they don’t ask why any self-respecting bird would ever want to eat rancid oat cakes. They’re sort of like ancient storytellers. Comedy. Tragedy. Whatever. There’s always a good excuse to burst into song.

  The sun is prism-ing some purples and blues through wispy clouds. It already seems a little higher in the sky. Maybe that’ll help. Maybe. I doubt it.

  I’ve been looking for some traction. I’ve been looking for some ground. I’ve been looking for a pill I can take or a thought I can have. Something that will last more than half an hour or so.

  The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s inspiration. Having your ideas and energy pour forth, instead of sitting there, stagnating, cut off from the world. The angels ascended and descended on Jacob’s Ladder. Circulating the energy of creation. Being unable to even put your foot on the first rung is, is, is …

  The scariest thing about Hell is that it’s the same old same old. We may not remember exactly what those poor souls did to deserve being frozen in whirlwinds, whipped by horned demons, or dunked in boiling blood—let alone having their heads screwed on backwards … a punishment I consider particularly savage. But, whatever they did, it’s the fact they have to endure their torments for all eternity that really gives me the heebie-jeebies. I mean even being enveloped in the arms of your beloved (see Second Circle of Hell—Lust) or eating maple sugar candy (see Third Circle of Hell—Gluttony) could get old after a while.

  I don’t mean to romanticize the state. There’s nothing romantic about it. Our fascination with our own or other people’s suffering is always a little prurient or, to be generous, like that of a child who is fascinated by something scary … in large part to reassure him or herself she won’t be similarly afflicted.

  Sometimes I’m concerned that, by writing this book, I’m “profiting” (wouldn’t that be nice!) from my own pain. But when I ask Wendy whether, in retrospect, I’ve been overstating my symptoms, she says that, if anything, I’ve been understating them.

  In the Fifth Circle of Hell, the sad, depressed, and gloomy are eternally mired in the swampy mud of the River Styx. While I knew the feeling, I managed to cling to the assumption—then belief, then desperate hope—that my condition was temporary. While I’d never experienced this intense an episode of crazed instability before, I was confident that some medical intervention—Western, Eastern, Northern, Southern … who cared?—or act of cosmological mercy would soon end this particularly virulent journey into my personal Hell.

  Over the first few months of 2006, I tried just about everything. Acupuncture, amino acids (SAM-e seemed to help a little—the others seemed to just make me more jazzed), B vitamins, Bach Flower remedies, t’ai chi, some yoga, avoiding caffeine, avoiding sugar, eating more protein, avoiding carbs, and so on. They all seemed to help and then not. Like my system couldn’t get any traction. I was still spooked by the idea of going back on meds. All I wanted was a little light at the end of the tunnel. Moments of feeling normal would trigger irrational optimism, followed by heartbreaking crashes.

  When you’re in that state, rational thought seems incredibly naive. The world is riddled with minor glitches, each of which is just waiting to build hurricane-like into a Class V disaster: elevators whose doors pause a second too long before opening, people whose names you’ve forgotten walking toward you, appointments you’re five minutes late for, checkbooks that don’t balance.

  Your car doesn’t start? Forget it. You’re toast.

  Every few days I’d crack completely. Utter hopelessness. Crying jags. I’d scream my bloody head off. Play squash as hard as I could. Sit in the sauna too long and then go into the shower and turn on the cold water full blast. Anything to earn me a few minutes of peace.

  All I remember is trying to act normal; trying to act normal; trying to act normal.

  By early spring, however, it became pretty clear that my uninvited emotional tenants, whom I’d been trying to evict using those various medications and therapies, had signed a long-term lease, were beginning to rearrange the furniture, and had no intention of being evicted. It was time to get out of Dodge.

  Road Trip

  Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.

  —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  DRIVEN BY A LITTLE BUSINESS and a lot of mania, I got into my 1990 VW pop-top camper in March, 2006 and started driving towards southern California. I harbored secret hopes that some warm weather and spring sunshine would cook the agitated depression out of my system.

  I was neither Jack Kerouac nor Neal Cassady. I was fueled by neither cigarettes nor amphetamines. I just had to keep moving. As if, in some kind of Einsteinian thought experiment, if I could drive as fast as my brain was racing, it might appear that the latter was standing still.

  I typically drove 500 to 600 miles a day, during which I’d try to settle … settle on anything: which radio station to listen to, where to eat, when to eat, what to eat, where to pull over to nap, whether I could nap. When to call Wendy. If I should call Wendy. If I’d be able to call anybody with
out my agitated unease spilling over and drowning us both. Usually, I’d stick to emails at the end of the day. So I could edit out the more pitiful parts. Not that I was fooling anybody.

  As I drove, I’d occasionally dictate random observations into a digital tape recorder, obsessively transcribing my words each evening. If only to feel I was accomplishing something, anything.

  I think about people with PTSD. What do I know about their suffering?

  I think of friends who have been incapacitated by drugs or mental illness. What do I know about their suffering?

  I think about my own last 6 months, during which stringing together a few moments, minutes, or hours has been such a relief. Only in those moments—after maybe a week of constantly dealing with this physical anxiety-without-object—do I realize that I’m in pretty deep myself.

  March 15, 2006: Dummerston, Vermont to Morgantown, West Virginia. 637 Miles. Beware the Ides of March. Snow flurries. Blue sky. White, puffy fair-weather clouds incongruously threatening. The sun rising over New Hampshire hills as I round the cloverleaf onto Route 91 South. Wind blowing hard enough to send a warning shot of adrenaline as I cross the bridge over the West River.

  Sometimes I’m dealing with the agitation. Sometimes I’m breaking down in tears. Sometimes I’m just happy to be here … and a little concerned for my sanity. It’s a fine line.

  The speedometer breaks shortly after I entered Pennsylvania. Can’t go over 62 miles per hour. That’s not fast enough.

  The labels … this is mania, this is depression, this is agitation … just make it more difficult to get out of the boxes they’re slapped on.