Self Exposure

I have mentioned that I spent 10 years in psychoanalysis. One of the treasures of those 10 years was my analyst telling me of D.W. Winnicott's statement (I'm quoting from memory, so it may be paraphrase):

It is a pleasure to be hidden; it is a nightmare not to be found.

Burton opens his introduction, "Democritus Junior to the Reader," imagining the reader wondering who in fact the author behind the pseudonym is. His response:

Seek not after that which is hid; if the contents please thee, "and be for thee use, suppose the Man in the Moon or whom thou wilt, to be the author"; I would not willingly be known.

But Burton was found out during his lifetime, and the book's popularity drove him to publish 4 new editions (with a 6th edition published after his death based on his revisions).

Obviously, I am not Wyatt Gwyon.

Wyatt – like every true mystic, alchemist, and magician before him – searches for a window on that transcendent state where suddenly "Everything [is] freed into one recognition." 

And, as my love of the quote from Winnicott might make apparent, I have throughout my life played games I intended as methods to deterimine whether someone or other cared enough to seek and find my hiding place.

Perhaps I am playing one now. Or perhaps I am playing more than one.

One, of course, is the use of the pseudonym on this blog. I do not expect that my identity can be guessed by means of autobiographical clues. I am genuinely, as Burton perhaps disingenuously describes himself, "insignificant, a nobody, with little ambition and small prospects." I suspect, however, that a determined person using technological tools I am vaguely familiar with might be able to track me down. I have, however, made some attempt to cover even those tracks. More importantly, however, I cannot imagine that given my status as a nobody anyone would even bother to try. Or, having tried, care about what he has found.

Nevertheless, autobiography is inevitable (and yet so ordinary as to constitute no real threat to my obscurity). I must confess what brings me to this work now. I have, as what I suspect is by now a cliche would have it, found myself at the midpoint of my journey through life in a deep, dark wood. It is dismal here. Not only dark and far from anyplace I have previously found myself (in a life not lacking in Journeys), but cold and lonely. I am terrified as I may never have been before. It is difficult, however, to judge the relative intensity of melancholic episodes. Each has its own particular horrors.

I am between jobs for far longer than I would have believed would happen. My wife (whom I love madly and with whom I have 2 very young children) has recently announced to me that she has come to question whether she wishes to continue our marriage and that she is trying to figure that out. In the meantime, she is remarkably unhelpful about what she wants me to do except to point out that despair and terror are remarkably unattractive traits in someone being judged as a potential life companion.

I have for the first time since I began the SSRI I have previously mentioned seriously thought about methods of suicide. Fortunately, perhaps, I have been a witness to the remarkable destruction suicide wreaks upon the suicide's family. I could never, ever leave my sons (3, the 2 above mentioned and an older, dear, dear boy from an earlier and disastrous marriage) with such a burden. I could not leave my wife either with any belief that she had been the cause. And she wouldn't have, notwithstanding my utter disbelief at her current coldness and failure to express herself. So I have started my research into methods of suicide that would result in what would appear to be natural deaths. There are ways that would work.

But I seriously doubt I will commit suicide. First, as I have said, I have witnessed the consequences of suicide among those who loved the dead one (am I one of the casualties?), and I can state without hesitation that I have seen nothing (not insanity, not devotion to a religious cult, not martyrdom to a pointless military enterprise, not freak accident in the prime of life, not terminal cancer in a young and shining child, not sudden death in the immediate wake of happiness found after an arduous and uncertain Journey, and not death on 9/11) that causes such profound and unfixable dysfunction.

Second, I am chicken shit. I am scared to death of the experience of death. I do not fear being dead at all. I am sufficiently certain that it is an utter erasing of any consciousness to believe that it would be an enormous relief from the pain I am feeling. (And it is pain. Real, palpable pain that courses through every nerve and that causes me to wonder why my heart doesn't simply burst from the pressure.)

And if it isn't an utter and complete erasure? Ah, then it it is the dream we wonder of perchance, and it is then one more stop along a Journey that has proven itself sad and beautiful and therefore more likely a stop more beautiful than the deep and dark sadness in which I currently find myself. I do not, in short, have any fear at all that there awaits some torment resulting from my undeniable inadequacy in this life.

But the actual prelude to and experience of death itself is something I fear perhaps more deeply than I fear my present circumstances. And, dear readers (if you in fact even exist), I am terrified. If my wife decides to leave me (and her current behavior leads to believe that she has in fact decided to do so but has not yet determined how), I will be alone without any genuine prospects of ever being otherwise, I will have failed again as a father for the 2d and 3d times, and I will still be unemployed, deeply in debt, and with a resume remarkable and yet so unusual that it must set off alarm bells that compel every single H.R. person in the world (yes, the search and my qualifications span (to this point) 4 continents) to put me into the reject-on-first-review-of-resume pile.

In short, an utter failure. When compared to what might once have seemed my prospects (and not that long ago), it is a particularly appropriate object lesson for anyone who believes he  can rely on credentials and prior accomplishment. It is a beautiful world, but it is very sad and pathetic in many ways. One can be filled with energy and brilliance that are utterly unseen by the people in the place he finds himself. And at that point he is up shit's creak.

So I come to The Anatomy of Melancholy in deep need. It is not as if I have any belief that the textual monster that gushed forth from the pen of some Renaissance monk holds out any hope for relief from my desperation. I am grasping at straws. I understand it is a sad and funny book that continually surprises each reader and each age. And so in the meager time between the many other things I feel are more demanding of my attention I will both bring my attention to this book and ttry to set forth for whomever might read these words what I think.

Got to get behind the mule in the morning and plow

Visible Tom Waits, Jim Lockey

The last post reminds me of Tom Waits, who reminds me that one reliable strategy is to simply take the next step, and then the one after that, and then the one after that, and not to think of anything other than the very next step. Often I find that somehow that single step followed by single step eventually builds a momentum that pulls me out of the depths. The steps can be literal. I've run 4 marathons. But it might just be getting my ass off the couch and cleaning all the dog shit off of the grass in the back yard.

It is a sad and beautiful (and funny) world

On the one hand, Gass in his introduction tells us that Burton's willingness to consider any report he's encountered regarding melancholy seems strange; on the other, he acknowledges that the rapid development and transformations he and we have witnessed in contemporary understandings of melancholy might make the very variety he surveys seem a useful reminder to open minds:

What the  present reader may find strange is Burton’s eager allowance of hearsay and  observation, myth and science, superstition and  common sense, to help him in his hunt for  causes, and provide more than cosmetic in the makeup of his explanations: not merely citing heredity, disease, dotage, and personal loss as sources of melancholy, while displaying a skepticism as ardent as his faith; but blaming God, evil angels as well as devils, a bad  balance among the four humors, the discoveries of chiromancy and physiognomy, indurate dishes and sharp sauces, unsuitable parents, odors of the  earth, even the stars themselves. 

What may strike one as quaint and unfashionable at one time may be the latest wisdom to  another. When I was first engaged to Robert Burton’s book (my copy’s flyleaf says Dec. 1944), the mother’s womb was sturdier and more insulated than it is believed to be now, so,  when I read that if the mother “be over-dull, heavy, angry, peevish, discontented, and melancholy, not only at the time of conception, but even all the while she carries the child in  her womb . . . her son will be so likewise affected,” I thought the risks overstated; for wasn’t the moat of amniotic fluid about the baby nearly unswimmable?—what else was it there for?—but I would not think so now—now everything, including noise, gets through, and, unless it is the music of Mozart, wreaks havoc.

And minds do change. When Gass wrote 11 years ago, the Mozart Effect had those up on the latest parenting advice buying classical CDs for every newborn; now it is far more hip to consider the entire matter an urban legend cooked up for marketing purposes.

But anyone who has endured depression and enjoyed varying levels of success in overcoming it -- no matter how impermanent -- is always on the lookout for new explanations and new strategies to adopt. Even what to call the condition -- and I feel certain Burton will discuss various forms and names -- might always be subject to reconsideration. It never occurred to me until well into adulthood that my periodic wish for death might even be depression. It took a particularly black time for me to try living as if it were, to accept help purposely directed to treat depression. I felt by then I had no choice. I would either kill myself or do that. I saw no other alternative.

At the time, I chose psychoanalysis, and I am grateful beyond words that I did. It not only saved my life, but also deepened it in ways I could not imagine now living without. Which isn't to say that I haven't ever since suffered some terrible times, that I haven't continued to this day to keep my senses tuned to any sign of any sort of help. It took 10 years of analysis before I was willing to try drugs; and it was an important 10 years, the period during which first Prozac and then other SSRIs hit the market. Now, depending on my particular emotional weather, I take one SSRI and sometimes one or 2 other drugs. Since I began this particular SSRI, there is an emotional baseline below which I haven't fallen. It is the first decade of my life I haven't seriously contemplated suicide.

So I am open to ideas, ready to see what Burton throws up against the wall to see if it sticks at all for me. I'm not going to start believing in evil angels and devils, but the the free association of psychoanalysis and the sensitivity it inculcated to the resonance in symbols of all sorts are perhaps the strongest motivations driving my (likely foolish) public effort here to make my way through this monstrous and obsolete tome.

But it's also supposed to be a very funny book:

Although it gave expression to the pains of the  people (always a kind of comfort), his  Anatomy recounted so many sorts of follies that most of them had  to  have  been  performed or be- lieved by others rather than ourselves; we could then happily send  a hearty guffaw  around the  common table like  a pitcher of  ale,  and  drink to  the  dunces who  had  so  deluded them- selves  as to think thus, do such. When the mind enters a madhouse, Burton shows, however sane it was when it went in, and however hard it struggles to remain sane while there, it can only make the ambient madness more monstrous, more absurd, more bizarrely laughable by its efforts to be rational.

And, finally, it's very vastness is appealing to me. One of the very most important strategies I have adopted is to revel in my curiosity, to find deep gratification in what I happily once found described as "a sad and beautiful world." Gass concludes:

Be prepared to proceed slowly and you will soon go swiftly enough. Read a member a day; it will chase gloom away. The late section on religious melancholy has been particularly ad- mired. I also have a special fondness for Burton’s pages on museums and libraries. But above all, it is the width of the world that can be seen from one college window that amazes me; what a love of all life can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair; and Robert Burton’s unashamed display of his lust for the word—his desire to name each thing, and find a song in which each thing can be sung—is a passion that we might emulate to our assuredly better health.

Will this blog become a commonplace book about a commonplace book?

William Gass wrote the introduction to this edition. (You can access a pdf of Gass's introduction here.) He makes several interesting points. First, that Burton, who lived between the years 1577 and 1640, was very much what one might call "pre-modern." That is, Burton had cast off belief in many of the certainties that had sustained the medieval world but had not yet imagined casting many others off. First and foremost, he never questioned his belief in Christianity.

Nor is Burton's intellectual outlook empirical. Rather, he still occupies a world in which Truth is embodied in texts, Authorities. Thus, the book constitutes to an enormous degree a compendium of earlier writings. But Burton's style isn't entirely medieval; these "'authorities' now include not only the textual authorities of Christianity but also all the classical authors [he] had the opportunity to cite."

This dependence on and endless reference to other authorities, however, may make Burton more contemporary than one might at first imagine. Although Gass does not say so explicitly (perhaps it was too early when he wrote the introduction in 2001 to be as obvious as it is now), The Anatomy of Melancholy resembles a post-modern, intertextual, web-based compendium. The explication of other texts

show[s] generosity in the "loan" of the resources of your library and by your "readiness to spread the word," just as you also took good care to gather books and manuscripts, diligently copying passages from volumes [much as I, Wyatt, am here] from the volumes which had to pass through, rather than remain in, your hands. Guided by a genius, the pages of a commonplace book could be transformed into an original and continuously argued text . . . . 

It is not uncommon at all by now to describe blogs as contemporary commonplace books.

So will this blog become a commonplace book about a commonplace book?