A Lane To The Land Of The Dead

Happy summer solstice, everyone.

I know I'm a little late to the party here, but I spent most of yesterday struggling not to fall asleep. Changes in medication can be quite the experience. I probably wouldn't have remembered at all -- all of my calendars are set to April, still, which I've only just noticed -- if a Catholic friend hadn't left me a message. So there are some cosmic points for interfaith tolerance there.

I don't have a problem with long days. Depression and dissociation have always gone hand-in-hand with short days. Time gets sticky: you get trapped at ten in the morning trying to get your mind to work, your body to work, and by the time you struggle free everything around you has fast-forwarded to dark and late in the evening. As Agent Cooper says, I only have time for coffee.

W.H. Auden wrote As I Walked Out One Evening, a poem I read early on in college that came, for me, to speak to depression. The imagery is bittersweet, becoming solemn, even ominous:

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

And, later:

'O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you've missed.

But the stanza I wanted to address, the one that has followed me around over these past few years, is this one:

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

That last line resonates. It draws months of stuck, exhausted illness into its roots and turns out one gesture of summation: that all things come to represent death. Not loss, precisely, but death itself, finio, cessation, the great and terrible end.

Before I started taking medication, my own death lived with me. It was a conviction that at the end of the forseeable future I would simply cease to be: that my suicide was imminent, inevitable, and -- perhaps worst of all -- comforting. I would get through these vague, disconnected ideas, finishing class, finishing college, and then pull off my famed disappearing act. What people don't understand, I think, is how fundamental this conviction becomes. Suicide ideation joins your atoms, becomes a part of you. You may not even want, really, to die: thinking of my suicide had always brought a sense of distant sadness, even desperation. But you're going to, and soon.

Marina and the Diamonds produced a song on her album Electra Heart about this entire dreadful phenomenon, aptly entitled Living Dead. I didn't quote Auden's poem in its entirety and I don't plan on quoting Marina's song word-for-word, although I encourage everyone to take a look at it. I found this song about halfway into the worst of my illness, and it was validating to hear another human being voice the exact thoughts I had been struggling with myself. It still is:

Everyday I feel the same,

Stuck, and I can never change

Sucked into a black balloon,

Spat into an empty room

Was it really worth it?

Did I really deserve it?

And then:

Got bubble-wrap around my heart

Waiting for my life to start

But everyday it never comes

Permanently at square one.

I've gone on long enough, and I have a doctor's appointment to get ready for. I'll finish with this: the best metaphor I have ever found for escaping depression is the concept of exhumation, the recovery of a body from the ground.

It's the time of the summer solstice, though. The most sunlight, the longest days. If there was ever a time to try to be alive, this is it.

#depression #mentalillness #WHAuden #MarinaandtheDiamonds #suicide #summersolstice