Depression – The Coming of the Toads

Only the Lonely

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the United States Surgeon General, has declared loneliness a national health crisis. It’s as if the Pope questioned the doctrine of transubstantiation. The pioneer spirit feels a needle puncturing its balloon. It reads like a headline in the Onion, a bad joke.

Loneliness is epidemic, Murthy says, crosses and affects all sociodemographic boundaries and classes. There are no distinctions. The loneliness virus can infect anyone. Murthy recently traveled around the country, and everywhere he went, he talked to folks who questioned their self-worth, their connections to family and friends, the value of their very existence.

We might jump to an explanation, our personal predispositions and assumptions slipping into gear. Apparently, a trip to Walmart to stock up on beer and chips for the big game on TV is not enough to fill the void, but then neither is driving to Rodeo Drive in your Rolls Royce for a new dress. In church, one feels pewed-in, and the kiss of peace lacks true touch. And the more Mega, Meta, or MAGA one gets, the worse the symptoms of loneliness.

Loneliness looks and feels much like depression and anxiety, a lost in the world feeling, made worse by the vast numbers of people surrounding, none of whom one might talk to. One’s old drinking buddy is on the wagon. One’s ex (spouse, friend, religion, school, job) is full of the need for schadenfreude gotchas. One’s pronoun choices come up short. One feels a need to be a verb, as Buckminster Fuller said, only to have one’s grammar or usage corrected. And in one’s own home, one might feel like a direct object, put upon by a subject, or a noun without a verb.

I’m sorry I don’t have a cure, but Murthy has proposed a plan. Might be worth Googling (or see link below). Meantime, I’m reminded of the old Roy Orbison song:

Only the lonely
Know the way I feel tonight
Only the lonely
Know this feeling ain’t right

https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/connection/index.html

Notes on the poem “Summer and Winter”

Yesterday’s poem, titled “Summer and Winter,” might have reminded readers of a couple of famous poems: Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Spring and Fall” (written in 1880 but not published until 1918), and William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” (the title of a book of poems published in 1923).

The first poem in “Spring and All” (the poems are numbered, not titled) begins: “By the road to the contagious hospital.” Williams was a doctor (Hopkins was a Jesuit priest). Williams’s poem seems so much more modern than the Hopkins. Note how he has copied his title from Hopkins but has dropped the F – Fall becomes All. For Williams, the fall of man is countered, or balanced, by his ability to visit the sick, while for Hopkins, fall is “the blight man was born for.” Hopkins, of course, concerned with spiritual fall, and Williams with physical fall.

Williams maintains the serious theme, but somehow manages to forge a more positive, if not hopeful outlook. On the contrary, “Sorrow’s springs are the same,” Hopkins says. That we can’t hold to a present (Hopkins wrote his poem “to a young child”) – it hides a seed of despair even as the happy feeling of spring stirs us to song. We can’t seem to completely enjoy something we know isn’t going to last. One reason the Williams poem might seem so modern is its reminder today of how contagious contagions remain. The Williams poem came from his experience doctoring those sick with the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920.

Weather is an outcome of the season (to put it in business plan terms). And we are today reminded of the weather and the season absurdly often, via weather apps, news breaks and warnings, prolific pics of the most recent storm catastrophe. It’s hard to take it easy, roll with the breezes, feel the cold as it feels good to remember just three or four months ago we were crazily cranking the AC units to high modes and the fans in the house sounded like jet airplane engines.

And the extreme weather conditions are often today attributed to the global warming crisis, about which some say we are now too late to do anything about reversing the trends. No wonder, like Hopkins, we feel the fall so hard and desperate, and, like Williams, we feel infected by the weather, sickened by it, rather than feeling invigorated or simply challenged to meet it head on:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thun-der,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Act 3, Scene 2.

Wouldn’t it be something to hear your nightly television news weather person to wax similarly throughout the forecast.

What we might often feel, whatever the season, happily warm or shaking cold, is the impermanence of it all. That feeling creates impatience, anxiety and worry, and even depression. Though to stop, to hold still, can mean only one thing. It’s the constant motion we might enjoy, knowing otherwise can only mean to be becalmed, rendered motionless, on the open sea – now that would be cause to feel misery.

And we do find resilience, hardiness, in every season, and within ourselves, the coping thermostat self-modulates. But we need to recognize the symptoms. Then we know how to dress, how to handle, the cold, the heat, the blowing winds. All around the world we see evidence of our ability to withstand, to make it through, to celebrate the season. The signs of depression, like the signs of impending doom of a gloomy weather forecast, can be met with Lear’s mad outcry – it’s ironic, isn’t it? In any event, if we can sense and identify, we can control and change the temperature of our close environment.

The Bananafish

A popular fish in some schools the deep
sea swallower called the bananafish:
Sansjawdsalumpigus.
Though it lives on the floor of the aphotic zone,
it is not bioluminescent; in fact, it’s invisible.
Rising to the surface with changes of tide, mind,
and mood, it’s worse by tens than the burbling
Jabberwock. A bananafish is never caught;
it slips you, and you are capsized.

The bananafish sees without eyes things
that disappear, hears sounds in the depths
of silence, lives on even when squished
or peeled or baked into bread or spread
in undigested seeds. They live in clusters,
but it only takes one to upend your plans
for a day, a week, or a lifetime. Nevermind
the Jabberwock; beware the brilliant
brainy glare of the bananafish.

What bites but has no teeth?
What smells but has no nose?
What swims without fins,
goes loopy if left to shelf,
barmy as the froth of beer?
Ans: the double-dealing
bluff bunko, the sly hoax
of Sansjawdsalumpigus,
commonly called the bananafish.

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“Therapy”: A Kierkegaardian Sitcom

Tubby is into therapy. On any given day, he might drop by his aroma therapist and get a concoction of essential oils rubdown while inhaling infusions of lavender and such to improve, for example, his virility. Or Tubby will go in for a bit of acupuncture. One of his problems is with a knee.[1] Or Tubby will pay a visit to his behavioral therapist. Or he’ll meet his friend Amy for another installment of pretend paramour therapy. Amy is into psychotherapy, so she sees only one therapist, but goes every day.

Tubby’s behavioral therapist has suggested he keep a journal, writing therapy, and he does, and the result is David Lodge’s therapy, a novel titled “Therapy.”[2] Reading is another kind of therapy.

Tubby discovers Kierkegaard, and is struck, somewhat fancifully, by what he sees to be the resemblance of Soren’s issues to his own. Judging from his symptoms, Tubby appears to suffer from depression.

This is the sort of thing that catches his eye in Kierkegaard, from “Either/Or”:

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”

What does Tubby relate to here? He’s not a poet. He’s a television sitcom writer, a very successful one. He has a lovely wife, Sally, and two grown children successfully out on their own. He lives in a nice country house with nearby club, and also has a flat in the city, and owns a custom car his daughter has nicknamed “The Richmobile.”

Tubby is free to come and go as he pleases – etcetera. But he has no rest.

It’s not even that he’s not happy. He’s able to enjoy the fine things his money can buy, but enjoyment seems something different from happiness. He contributes to charities. He’s a nice guy. He sticks up to the cops for a street urchin camped out on the stoop of his urban flat.

Tubby appears to be depressed, though depression’s close friend, anxiety, does not come along for the ride. Tubby finds in Kierkegaard someone who understands his problem, a soulmate. Again from “Either/Or”:

“In addition to my numerous other acquaintances I have still one more intimate friend — my melancholy. In the midst of pleasure, in the midst of work, he beckons to me, calls me aside, even though I remain present bodily. My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had — no wonder that I return the love!”

Tubby loves Sally, but he’s no longer able to listen to her, and when she tells him she’s leaving, he doesn’t hear that either.

The themes of “Therapy” are Kierkegaardian: angst and dread, though both wear a smile in the novel; the seducer, hapless but caring; repetition, particularly the attempt to recover first experiences and to reclaim; commitment, the idea of the aesthetic interest, competitive interest (which may include ethics), and religious interest illustrating three layers of involvement, an analysis that might be applied to just about any pursuit; the absurd (and what better way to illustrate the absurd in contemporary life than the sitcom?), and the pilgrimage.

Lodge has adapted Kierkegaard to the situation comedy, blending references to Soren and his writings into Tubby’s story in unobtrusive ways, but both implicitly and explicitly. “Therapy,” Lodge’s novel, is a situation comedy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get or don’t appreciate Kierkegaard; the casual reader may still find Lodge’s book an engaging and entertaining reading experience, in spite of its existential crossings. There is within it a playful sense of form and voice. Plus you learn about the making of sitcoms, from an insider’s view.

But about that engagement analysis. The book ends, wildly enough, with a pilgrimage, and Tubby uses a Kierkegaardian commitment analysis to explain the various types of pilgrims he encounters. He glosses “the three stages in personal development according to Kierkegaard – the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious,” applying them to the pilgrims making their way toward Santiago via the Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James).

The first pilgrim, “the aesthetic type,” is on the road for enjoyment, to appreciate the views, the air, the exercise. The second pilgrim, the “ethical type,” is concerned with propriety, the rules of the way, procedures, and may be critical of those pilgrims who don’t see the way his way. The third pilgrim, “the true pilgrim,” like Kierkegaard’s true Christian, embraces the absurdity of the non-rational – indeed, that is what calls her to it; passion supersedes commandment. There is no reason to do this, and that becomes the reason for doing it.

“The aesthetic pilgrim didn’t pretend to be a true pilgrim. The ethical pilgrim was always worrying whether he was a true pilgrim. The true pilgrim just did it” (“Therapy” 304-305).

Taking philosophical propositions and turning them into templates is probably a philistine idea, but one that might possibly result in effective therapeutical analysis. To use the three stages as a template, substitute any aim, belief, or disposition you’d like for the word pilgrim in the quote above: hipster, poet, professor, or politician, for example. Or try your own selfie identifying word in place of pilgrim.

[1] I’ve never been to an acupuncturist, enculturated as I am to believe health care is synonymous with medicine; but this week, walking in town, we happened to pass a sidewalk sign advertising group acupuncture. How does that work, I asked Susan – they skewer you like on a kebab?

[2] “Therapy,” by David Lodge. Penguin Books, 1996. I had picked up Lodge’s “The Art of Fiction” for a project I was working on. I liked his appeal to the casual reader, and looking at his other books, decided to try “Therapy.” Ethical type Kierkgegaardians may find it merely quaint, but true Kierkgegaardians might enjoy the humor. As for me, I’m not a Kierkegaardian at all, but thanks to “Therapy,” I do know now how to pronounce his name. Maybe that makes me an aesthetic Kierkgegaardian?