It’s remarkable how much more strangeness you can get away with if you incorporate your madness into an art form. In fact, although you might not put it on your resume, occasional periods of dramatic brooding or frenetic bursts of creativity might help you on your career path. Certainly they’re no barrier to making high-priced art, playing in a rock band, writing award-winning novels, starring in TV shows, or, as I pointed out before, even being the creative director of a small ad agency.
By the time Dante was forced into exile, he was a well-established poet, essayist, and politician. It must not have been all that much of a surprise when word began to filter back to Florence that he was working on “something big.” But if he had been able, or later chosen, to return, he could probably have blended back into society with relative ease.
Instead he was out there. Somewhere. Doing something that could make folks back home a little wary. (Think of politicians in the Soviet Union wondering what Solzhenitsyn was writing during the 20 years he lived in an obscure Vermont town. Or the entire New York literary world wondering what J.D. Salinger was doing right across the river in an equally tiny New Hampshire town.)
Back home, the exiled creative may be able to retain a special kind of romantic mystique.
On the road, however, without the support of his family and community, the reality isn’t always as romantic. Because, in addition to the uncertainty about his living situation, he has to wrestle with his creative angels and demons all on his own.
If Dante wasn’t afflicted with at least a touch of depression before he left Florence, it’s hard to imagine him escaping it after he left. I see him at his writing desk, looking out the stone arched window in the home of his current patron. I see him envisioning Hell in his memories of the politically restless streets of Florence and Rome; envisioning Purgatory in the November days of gray pouring rain; envisioning Paradise in the shifting colors of a spectacular sunset over a grove of olive trees. All while wondering if he can ever go home. Wondering, more importantly, if he will ever be able to complete his masterpiece. Wondering, most importantly, if he is truly worthy. Worthy of paradise. Has he really paid his own dues? Has he really expiated his own sins? Is he really strong enough to transform his own earthly passions into heavenly bliss?
I’m sure there were days in which he had doubts. Many days. I’m sure there were days when he didn’t put a single word on paper. Many days. I’m sure there were days when he wondered how he could possibly go on. Many days.
If Dante wasn’t afflicted with at least a touch of mania before he left Florence, it’s hard to imagine him escaping it after he left. I see him waking in the middle of the night in some strange bed in some strange villa, having finally caught a glimpse of that rhyme he’s spent days looking for; thinking, perhaps with a devilish grin, of the perfect person to put in that level of hell; remembering a really good Augustinian one-liner that might untangle an unruly philosophical puzzle he’s been wrestling with. He’s wide awake now, writing until dawn. Which comes, it seems, only moments later.
I see him riding along back roads, under a Tuscan, Lombard, or Reggiano sky, hurriedly getting off his donkey and rummaging in his saddlebag for something to write with and a scrap of cheap paper (they’d invented some rough stuff by then); only to realize later that day, when he’s back with a glass of wine by his side, pen poised over vellum, that the canto in question still doesn’t hold together.
Writing was as much about memory as craft back then. Dante certainly didn’t have to have as prodigious a memory as Homer’s. But neither did he have access to the kind of written references Shakespeare had. Or, for better or worse, the seemingly limitless editing and reference capabilities we modern writers have. He had to carry an extraordinary amount of material in the back of his mind, while working on rhymes in the front, juggling and jostling those words into place … only writing them down after they’d clearly earned the right to see the light of day.
In one important way, however, the relationship between writer, words, and vision has never changed. Just as I suspected that the labyrinth Wendy and I made was actually already fully formed, waiting for us to lay branches upon it, I suspect that Dante could see many cantos ahead in his mind’s eye, but had to struggle mightily to imagine and remember the words that were supposed to fill them. Sort of like doing an entire New York Times crossword puzzle—the Sunday one—in your head. No cheating.
That’s the real power of hypomania. It’s not the stream of one-liners that zoom across your neural pathways—it’s the speed and transcendence of connections. The way that thoughts tumble over each other and fit into place in ways that feel so right while, simultaneously giving birth to new ideas that explode faster and faster in more and more directions.
The “suffering” of mania, particularly in times when it’s fueling the creative process, is that it all happens so fast that you can become frantic that if you can’t keep up with your ideas, you’ll “lose them.” It’s probably not true. Those labyrinthal patterns are still firmly in place. But that fear can make you, well, crazy.
We assume that mountain climbers write their memoirs after they’ve come down the mountain, that prisoners of war write their memoirs after they’re freed, that lovers write theirs after the romance has ended—or at least have the decency to wait until the next morning. It’s as if their memories, their ability to “relive the moment” can be trusted. But we have an image of depressives—poets and artists in particular—hanging on to sanity by a thread (if at all), creating powerful, elegant, revelatory expressions of their experiences in real time. As if anything less would lack authenticity.
Rest assured, our experiences are as seared in our minds as they are in the minds of mountain climbers, prisoners of war, and lovers. We can revisit them at will. Our “authentic voice” may now be different from one that spoke to us during our madness. But, in retrospect, that voice often sounds one dimensional. Maybe that’s why Beatrice made Dante forget what he’d seen in order to write about what he saw. He needed the wisdom of the entire experience before he could write page one.
One bright, sunny winter morning in 2006, I sat in front of the large Palladian window in my cabin. Five inches of heavy snow had fallen the night before, transforming even the most ordinary surfaces into shameless exhibitionists. The evergreens were having a friendly competition to see who could hold their snow weights the longest. The hemlocks easily outlasted the white pines. I wrote:
There have been two 5″ snowfalls in the past few days. And very little wind. The hemlocks hang laden with snow, like tired old handmaidens with brooms attached to billowing aprons. A large puff of snow makes a slow motion swan dive from the top of the tallest pine, setting off mini white explosions as it floats through lower branches to the ground. Snow dominos.
What’s particularly … humiliating seems too strong a word … about depression is that I’m looking at what has to be one of nature’s most amazing little performances, and all I can see is darkness.
Five years later, I can still vividly remember … I can feel … the guy who wrote those words. I remember exactly where he was sitting, exactly what he was seeing, and exactly what he was feeling. I’d like to tell him to stop equivocating. I want to tell him to put the pen down, drop the pad to the floor, and curl up into the little ball he feels like inside. Humiliating was not too strong a word. Humiliating, frustrating, overwhelming, tragic … none of them would have been words that were too strong.
If you’re cold, sick, and starving, melancholy makes sense. I wasn’t cold, sick, or starving that day. I was just disconsolate. It made no sense then. It makes no sense now. Depression always trumps the mind’s ability to reason with it. But not the mind’s ability to be aware of it.
As a friend wrote me back then:
Those that have never felt those states … you can feel how they do not quite get it, even though their concern is welcome. And even those of us who do feel those states, can, between episodes, wonder what all the fuss was about.
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Sometimes while writing this book, I’ve been concerned that my attempts to wrestle these elusive feelings into submission may actually give me too much distance from them … as if this all happened to him, not me … that I’ll become one of those people who now “wonders what all the fuss was about.”
Then a morning like this one—years later, here and now—will come along. A morning when I’m doing just fine and enjoying what I’m doing. A morning when, at the same time, the memory is right there, hovering over my right shoulder like a forlorn angel looking for a home. Fortunately, I don’t have to give him one. But he can stay right where he is. He can keep me honest.
I did do a lot of writing while in the depths of depression. Mostly turgid. Occasionally sublime:
Next to the woodshed, I have this huge, knotty, maple stump. I refuse to stop trying to split it—even though I’m burning twice as many calories trying to do so than I’ll ever get burning it in the stove. I just keep going at it, hoping a seam will open up so I can stick a wedge in and start blindly whacking away some more. You’d think I could choose a path of lesser resistance … just roll the thing back down the ravine and find something more suitable for the woodstove. But I can’t escape the feeling that if I could just get through it. Dear God, if I could only just get through it.
My cabin has become little more than a projection of the abyss itself …
I also did some writing while in the throes of hypomanic, melancholic agitation. Mostly chaotic. Occasionally inspired:
I keep writing. All these years. Sometimes it seems brilliant. Sometimes it seems banal. Almost like thumb wrestling. You put your thumb down. It’s a trap, of course. But the more you relax it, the more you’re ready. Blink and you’re caught. Fly fishing at its best. Catch and release. And so I settle into a riff that feels real profound. I’m thinking I’m saying things that really have never been said before. And yet, a moment later, I’m claiming that I’m this bumbling, self-deprecatingly amused 21st-century guy, who, through no “fault” of his own, has become a messenger of the divine. In between, one-liners fly off my fingers trying desperately, urgently, eagerly not to telegraph who’s who … and just as hard to blend one voice with the other. (There is no other.)
People want you to be something. Fast? Slow? Despairing? Delirious? Make up your mind, Dave. I know. I know. I appreciate that. It’s just that I am not something. I’m this mercurial bundle of energy that can travel in a heartbeat from unfathomable despair to equally unfathomable ecstasy faster than a speeding bullet. And just when you think, you know, ahhh … there he is; he’s gone. I’m neither proud nor not proud of that. But I know it’s who I am and no longer feel there’s any need to apologize for it.
So you work on something for years and years and maybe the whole point is just that it’s reminded you and evolved you to be you. That it’s a mirror you’ve been carrying around to remind you who you are. And good hologram that you are, and the world is, a person could read one page or hundreds upon hundreds of your pages and be equally enlightened. And so you walk into a Barnes & Noble or a Borders and you say oops, did I just walk into a recycling center? What is all this stuff? Give me a cappuccino, maybe two, and get me the hell out of here; thinking about the days when a new Vonnegut or Updike or Oates or Kesey or Lessing or Pynchon, or Styron would come out and it would be an event. Dylan, particularly Dylan, or the Beatles or the Stones or the Dead would come out with an album and it’d be an event. And you’d stare at the back of the album cover while listening to the music and wonder: “Who are these people?” “What do they know?” Because if they knew something that could lead you to heaven, you wanted to know it. You wanted to know it so badly, you’d put on those old Koss headphones, take all the drugs you could find, and listen to it as loud as you could in the desperate hope that it would catapult you to a place where there’d be no more pain of unknowing.
In both cases, the images are powerful. And, appropriately, there are four times as many words in the manic piece as in the depressive one. But if I’d written this whole book while in either state, it would have been less accessible, less multi-layered.
Whether melancholically “profound,” or “brilliantly” rich, first drafts are like falling in love. In the thrall, they feel so all-encompassingly, solipsistically rich. But, by the light of day, they don’t stand the glare of scrutiny; the glare that our human nature eventually shines on everything, stripping it of its mystery long enough to make sure you’ve truly captured that thought, that feeling, that moment. I’m certainly not suggesting that rapture needs editing. You don’t have to burn those love letters you wrote when you were 16. But, down the road, there’s nothing wrong with a little maturity. I mean, without Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet would have just been two kids in love.
Still, imagine how suspicious I was when my psychiatrist assured me that medications wouldn’t dampen my creativity … they’d make it more mature. Mature? For me, that implied a lack of intensity. A medicated distance that people are always warning you about. Imagining my creative life without at least some profound contemplative melancholia was like imagining I had different parents. It’s not that I wanted to be depressed all the time. I certainly didn’t want to end up committing suicide like a shocking number of the people mentioned before. It’s just that I was concerned that I’d … well … get a little vapid. Surely, as a serious writer, I still needed to spend a respectable amount of time stumbling blindly in the darkness, questioning my very reason for being.
But, while I still loathe using the word “maturity” in relation to myself in any context, he was right. I know that, for many bipolar and schizophrenic patients, medications replace wildly creative visions with lethargic stupor. I’m one of the luckier ones. They haven’t dampened my waves of creative thought or my enthusiasm for getting them down on paper. They just make the torrent of words easier to manage, arrange, carve, and shape. They help me listen to the reader as closely as I listen to myself.
Peter Kramer, the well-known author of Beyond Depression, goes a few steps further to argue that people suffering from one or more flavors of mental illness would have been more creative without suffering them in the first place. He says that since the relationship between melancholia and creativity has been ennobled since ancient times, we can’t imagine life (especially the arts and philosophy) without it. Kramer can imagine it. Having seen so many of his patients’ creativity emerge after years buried under the chaotic thinking of depression, he turns our whole understanding of what it means to be a profound creative thinker inside out … with depression definitely on the out.
As usual, I come down firmly on both sides. I’m curious about the implications of having never been depressed. But I’m not yet ready to tell my fellow dysfunctional manic melancholics to find another line of work. In terms of creativity, we’re just here to serve: to reflect the world as we experience it. In a way, it doesn’t matter what that world is or even how we experience it. Our job is to just keep polishing our own particular mirror.
Creativity isn’t limited to one particular state, medium, or reality. As far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier. The emotional arc from deep depression through everyday emotional balance to psychotic mania is so seamless, I defy anyone to determine what it means to be in a “creative state.” The fact that, over the last twenty years, we’ve unsuccessfully tried, through text messaging, to reduce human emotions to a few hundred emoticons is a testament—a welcome one, in my opinion—to our infinite complexity.
Writing, music, art, dance come from the whole of us … whoever we are, wherever we are, whatever time we live in, whatever medications we may or may not be taking.
Creative spirits play the hands that are dealt them. They couldn’t have it any other way even if they wanted to.
At the very end of Paradise, Dante appears to give up: “O how my power of speech falls short of my vision.” A moment later he’s smote by the “love that moves the sun and the stars.” As we said, having
been charged to reveal all the secrets of the cosmos, when Dante finally gets to the punchline, he claims that his words fail … that even his creativity is subsumed in the light of pure Love.
But the story has actually just begun. Beatrice didn’t send Virgil down simply to lead Dante to this pinnacle purely out of the goodness of her heart. She needs Dante. She needs him as much as he needs her. God needs Dante as much as he needs God. Because, although Dante might not dare make a big deal of it—he’s only the second human in Christianity to ever be sent back down by God Himself to show humans out of the darkness.
Words give Dante power. A power that, in some strange way, even God doesn’t have (at least without some kind of human intermediary). A power so great that Dante’s words are still resounding and evolving in human consciousness; still, as Bob Dylan says, “glow like burning coals.”
The philosopher Jacques Derrida says, “writing captures only what has happened, not the eternal unfolding present in which the reader can experience exactly what the author experienced.” (Especially, you’d assume, when what the author experienced was God.)
However, it’s too easy to say that when push came to shove in those final explosive cantos, words failed Dante. That’s not what happened. Actually, he failed words.
Fortunately for us, it was only temporary. Even though Beatrice had him cleansed in rivers that washed his memories away … even though God rendered him speechless, Dante’s remained a writer. Seven hundred years later, he’s still a writer. That’s his place. Not even God can take that away.
Depression and Spirituality
Someday you’ll look back at the experiences that you are having now and say, “May I never have to do anything like that again, but if it’s what it took to get me here, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
David's Inferno Page 22
