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.