David's Inferno (36 page)

I also did some writing while in the throes of hypomanic, melancholic agitation. Mostly chaotic. Occasionally inspired:

In both cases, the images are powerful. And, appropriately, there are four times as many words in the manic piece as in the depressive one. But if I'd written this whole book while in either state, it would have been less accessible, less multi-layered.

Whether melancholically “profound,” or “brilliantly” rich, first drafts are like falling in love. In the thrall, they feel so all-encompassingly, solipsistically rich. But, by the light of day, they don't stand the glare of scrutiny; the glare that our human nature eventually shines on everything, stripping it of its mystery long enough to make sure you've truly captured that thought, that feeling, that moment. I'm certainly not suggesting that rapture needs editing. You don't have to burn those love letters you wrote when you were 16. But, down the road, there's nothing wrong with a little maturity. I mean, without Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet would have just been two kids in love.

Still, imagine how suspicious I was when my psychiatrist assured me that medications wouldn't dampen my creativity … they'd make it more mature. Mature? For me, that implied a lack of
intensity
. A medicated distance that people are always warning you about. Imagining my creative life without at least some profound contemplative melancholia was like imagining I had different parents. It's not that I wanted to be depressed all the time. I
certainly
didn't want to end up committing suicide like a shocking number of the people mentioned before. It's just that I was concerned that I'd … well … get a little vapid. Surely, as a serious writer, I still needed to spend a respectable amount of time stumbling blindly in the darkness, questioning my very reason for being.

But, while I still loathe using the word “maturity” in relation to
myself in
any
context, he was right. I know that, for many bipolar and schizophrenic patients, medications replace wildly creative visions with lethargic stupor. I'm one of the luckier ones. They haven't dampened my waves of creative thought or my enthusiasm for getting them down on paper. They just make the torrent of words easier to manage, arrange, carve, and shape. They help me listen to the reader as closely as I listen to myself.

Peter Kramer, the well-known author of
Beyond Depression
, goes a few steps further to argue that people suffering from one or more flavors of mental illness would have been more creative without suffering them in the first place. He says that since the relationship between melancholia and creativity has been ennobled since ancient times, we can't imagine life (especially the arts and philosophy) without it. Kramer can imagine it. Having seen so many of his patients' creativity emerge after years buried under the chaotic thinking of depression, he turns our whole understanding of what it means to be a profound creative thinker inside out … with depression definitely on the out.

As usual, I come down firmly on both sides. I'm curious about the implications of having never been depressed. But I'm not yet ready to tell my fellow dysfunctional manic melancholics to find another line of work. In terms of creativity, we're just here to serve: to reflect the world as we experience it. In a way, it doesn't matter what that world is or even how we experience it. Our job is to just keep polishing our own particular mirror.

Creativity isn't limited to one particular state, medium, or reality. As far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier. The emotional arc from deep depression through everyday emotional balance to psychotic mania is so seamless, I defy anyone to determine what it means to be in a “creative state.” The fact that, over the last twenty years, we've
unsuccessfully
tried, through text messaging, to reduce human emotions to a few hundred emoticons is a testament—a welcome one, in my opinion—to our infinite complexity.

Writing, music, art, dance come from the whole of us … whoever we are, wherever we are, whatever time we live in, whatever medications we may or may not be taking.

Creative spirits play the hands that are dealt them. They couldn't have it any other way even if they wanted to.

At the very end of
Paradise
, Dante appears to give up: “O how my power of speech falls short of my vision.” A moment later he's smote by the “love that moves the sun and the stars.” As we said, having been charged to reveal all the secrets of the cosmos, when Dante finally gets to the punchline, he claims that his words fail … that even his creativity is subsumed in the light of pure Love.

But the story has actually just begun. Beatrice didn't send Virgil down simply to lead Dante to this pinnacle purely out of the goodness of her heart. She needs Dante. She needs him as much as he needs her. God needs Dante as much as he needs God. Because, although Dante might not dare make a big deal of it—he's only the second human in Christianity
to ever be sent back down by God Himself
to show humans out of the darkness.

Words give Dante power. A power that, in some strange way, even God doesn't have (at least without some kind of human intermediary). A power so great that Dante's words are still resounding and evolving in human consciousness; still, as Bob Dylan says, “glow like burning coals.”

The philosopher Jacques Derrida says, “writing captures only what has happened, not the eternal unfolding present in which the reader can experience exactly what the author experienced.” (Especially, you'd assume, when what the author experienced was God.)

However, it's too easy to say that when push came to shove in those final explosive cantos, words failed Dante. That's not what happened. Actually,
he
failed words.

Fortunately for us, it was only temporary. Even though Beatrice had him cleansed in rivers that washed his memories away … even though God rendered him speechless, Dante's remained a writer. Seven hundred years later, he's still a writer. That's his place. Not even God can take that away.

W
HILE
The Divine Comedy
can be seen from the perspective of manic-depression or creativity, it is best known as a glorious spiritual journey. Indeed, many people who consider religion or spirituality to be a major focus of their lives say that their quest began when they became lost in their own version of Dante's dark wood (or “dark night of the soul,” as St. John of the Cross put it in the sixteenth century). Even Eckhart Tolle, the author of the best-selling
Power of Now
books tells the story of how he experienced his spiritual awakening after years of alternating depression and anxiety.

That's why I suggest, only partly in jest, that some kind of emotional breakdown may be as direct a path to the experience of enlightenment as six years under a fig (bodhi) tree, forty days and nights in a desert, seven-day
sesshins
at a Zen Center, three-day vision quests in the middle of nowhere, and/or beating yourself up by trying to put your attention on the NOW.

The role that deep depression often plays in spiritual or personal transformation has led many people to suggest that we should
meditate
, not medicate away the pain … that those dark nights are part of being human—in fact, one of the most meaningful parts of
being human. Whenever I read words to this effect, I wonder if the writer knows (or remembers) what major depression really feels like. It hurts. Okay? It hurts.

To be fair, meditation can be an excellent therapy for anxiety and depression—whether it involves following your breath, chanting, repeating a soothing mantra, reciting a heartfelt prayer, watching a sunset, or just lying on the ground and looking up at the clouds. However, few would recommend withholding medication from people with headaches, broken legs, heart disease, or cancer, arguing that if they'd just suck it up and transcend the pain, they might reach some kind of enlightened healing. But, for some reason, we're worried that madness, meditation, and medication don't mix?

During my twenties and thirties, I spent countless hours (actually, probably only ±4,000, now that I think of it) sitting with my legs crossed, watching my breath, and trying to still my mind. In the process, I frequently had moments of madness and transcendence—occasionally simultaneously.

So, at first, I believed that I could handle my breakdown with a kind of equanimity that most people couldn't even dream of. That, even in the midst of my darkest night, the Real Me would remain detached, fully aware of its own True Self, like a Zen master sitting on his meditation cushion in the midst of a hurricane. But as I learned early on, you can't get up from the cushion and walk away from agitated depression when the bell rings.

This inability to calmly bear witness to my mixed states just intensified my feelings of inadequacy. When a fellow traveler kindly and curiously asked why I didn't just “sit with it,” in the way we'd both been trained, I wrote back:

As strange as the “uselessness” of my traditional spiritual practices were in all this, those whom I turned to for what I considered a bigger picture—one in which enlightenment is just one aspect of spirituality—weren't much more encouraging. I wrote: