Descent (8 page)

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Like many fellow travelers who’ve crossed the Styx and returned, I view the itinerary as transformational. On the one hand, I won’t join that cohort claiming gratitude for their time in hell; on the other, I can say that in the wake of my depression, I’m pierced by other people as I wasn’t before, that I waste less time entertaining myself, and that I hear my thoughts with a useful attention to their tenor, fairness, and sanity. I feel equanimous most of the time, and have a strong impulse to give. My life has become, if you will, intentional, in a way it might not be if I hadn’t made my plummet.

William Styron died in 2006. During the last third of his life, after the publication of
Darkness Visible
, he became a mental health advocate. I’m among those aided by his account, who found in it succor, but I’m also mindful of complaints such as those in Joel P. Smith’s essay “Depression: Darker Than Darkness”—that Styron was depressed for months, not years; that he was never alone; that he had the best of treatment; that he stayed in a hospital “as comfortable as they come”; and that he didn’t have to rely on radical remedies like electroshock therapy: all of this to say that Styron didn’t plumb the depths and can’t represent the depressed, and neither can I. Others have and have had it worse. For them, depression never yields or lessens. For them there’s no rising into the light of day, no edifications, and no gains, nothing but the wish to be dead, which is, after a marathon of untenable suffering, granted.

“E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. / And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars,” with which Styron ends
Darkness Visible
, also ends Dante’s
Inferno
. In that epic account of a trip through hell, Dante, having already met the virtuous heathens, the lustful, the gluttonous, the avaricious, and the prodigal, comes on a “dreary swampland, vaporous and malignant,” where the Styx spreads out into a noxious marsh, and where the wrathful, naked in this brackish muck, assault one another viciously. Underneath them, submerged in foul water, are those who lived, on earth, in sullen despond, and who mired now in bottom mud must endlessly repeat—in John Ciardi’s translation—“Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun; / in the glory of his shining our hearts poured / a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun; / sullen we lie forever in this ditch.”

A modern sensibility can’t countenance this torture. For us, while sullenness might be morally problematic, it’s never a sin, whereas for thirteenth-century Christians,
apparently, to be sullen (tantamount to rejecting creation?) meant a one-way ticket to hell. Otherwise what are the sullen doing here, droning on in regretful chorus, drowned, “fixed in slime,” doleful, bitter, and trod underfoot while the wrathful duke it out?

And what’s more, their “litany they gargle in their throats as if they sang,” but always, they lack “words and pitch.”

That I get. I hear the words and pitch of these beleaguered dead as “the broken surfaces of those water-holes / on every hand, boiling as if in pain.” I see their meanings not as what they mean but as a roil festering the surface of the Styx where few pass by to look or listen. There the sullen suffer their wordlessness, and pour their garbled litany into an eternal absence. They can’t get the words out, and it makes no difference. There’s no one but two traveling poets to hear them, even if they could.

“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain,” wrote David Foster Wallace in his story “The Depressed Person,” “and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

After that horror—if you’re lucky enough to have an after (Foster Wallace wasn’t)—the pain might be gone but the language won’t come; there’s no translation for it. Gesture as you might across the divide, what’s over there remains visible only to those who, like you, have already been there.

To put this another way, my words here recede from lived experience. But in the end there’s too much reproach and ignorance—depression as a cause for disgrace and contempt—for me not to write them anyway. Words, after all, remain, in this world, an aperture through which might appear some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.

David Guterson

Descent:
A Memoir of Madness

David Guterson is the author of the novels
Snow Falling on Cedars
(which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award),
East of the Mountains, The Other, Our Lady of the Forest
(a
New York Times
Notable Book and a
Los Angeles Times
and
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Best Book of the Year), and most recently,
Ed King
; two story collections,
The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind
and the forthcoming
Problems with People
; and a work of nonfiction,
Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense
. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Washington State.

ALSO BY DAVID GUTERSON

Ed King
The Other
Our Lady of the Forest
East of the Mountains
Snow Falling on Cedars
Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense
The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind