Three Things I Did Not Write

These are three moment in literature that I have found tremendously helpful and healing. None of it is...cheerful. People might cry "Macabre! Depressing! Why are you reading this stuff!? Here is a nice book about puppies and rainbows, it's much better for you." But people rarely understand that one of the worst sufferings of mental illness is how unnameable and unutterable the sensations and emotions can be, even within oneself, let alone in beginning to describe or share them with another person. Each of these writings names some emotion in a way that heals me to read. And so I read them and read them, because I am in need of healing. So I read them over some more. And then I copy them into my blog just in case somebody else could use them.

One:

From A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diaries, Virginia Woolf. This entry always stuns me with its graphically, technically detailed, accurate description of a few moments in the life of a depressive.

Wednesday 15 September

"A State of Mind. Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh its beginning its coming - the horror - physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart - tossing me up. I'm unhappy unhappy! Down - God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling like this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes, I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises). Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I've only a few years to live I hope. I can't face this horror any more - (this is the wave spreading out over me). This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vauge. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking Dadie for the week-end, tacked on. At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people and unhappy. I brace myself to shrove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid and straight, and sleep again, and half wake and feel the wave beginning and watch the light whitening and wonder how, this time, breakfast and daylight will overcome it; and then hear L. in the passage and simulate, for myself as well as for him, great cheerfulness, and generally am cheerful, by the time breakfast is over. Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? It is the cause of much waste and pain in my life."


Two:

From The Essential Rilke, trans. Galway Kinnell. Every woman closest to Jesus was named Mary. And the name Mary means "bitterness" or sorrow. The sadness and wholeness and wistful longing and love in this poem smooth something out inside of me that usually prefers to stay twisted.

The Quieting of Mary With The Resurrected One

What they felt then, is it not
above all other mysteries the sweetest
and yet still earthly:
when he, pale from the grave,
his burdens laid down, went to her:
risen in all places.
Oh, first to her. how they
inexpressibly began to heal.
Yes, to heal: that simple. They felt no need
to touch each other strongly.
He placed his hand, which next
would be eternal, for scarcely
a second on her womanly shoulder.
And they began
quietly as trees in spring
in infinite simultaneity
their season
of ultimate communing.


Three:

The Only Animal by Franz Wright. Especially if you are identified as depressed, people really freak out about poems with first lines mentioning suicide. But this is not a poem about suicide. It's a poem about the gift of life, the most forgiving poem I've ever read, a poem that God must have written first and then passed on to Wright, a poem I come to again and again and again whether I need tears or hope. It's visited this blog before, and it will probably visit it again. I'll probably have something from it carved on my urn. I love this poem, have you noticed?

The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.

The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth—

Somewhere

the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.

And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I’m never coming back
and yet

this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry

strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret something to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.