Descent: A Memoir of Madness Read online

  A bland and sullen downtown pall. Anyone not despondent, I believed, was wearing blinders. The rightness of unhappiness was obvious and clear. The only reasonable response to the world was an overwhelming and excruciating sadness; everything else was willful delusion. And now I couldn’t gaze on innocent humanity, and wanted to hide my face. I wanted to curl in on myself. The pageant around me appeared like a charade in which the players were ignorant of their artifice, and of the pathos they elicited in their audience of one. There was nothing to do but shrivel and surrender, because the sham and tragedy of everything was, moment by moment, and at every turn, hideously too much to bear.

  * * *

  Home meant being differently mired and newly incoherent. Though I divulged my condition to my wife at our doorstep, there was no deliverance in this confession, and my strained description of disequilibrium succeeded mostly in frustrating me, as if words were a rudiment devised for the purpose of obscuring intended meanings. (“I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning,” wrote Stevie Smith, in an apt summation of the problem.) Meanwhile, my wife was not disabled and my children—ages eight and up—were making plans for recreations. A September stillness sat on our house, punctuated by rushes of autumn wind, and the young whips in the orchard appeared anemic. The pond was low, and deer had chewed inroads against our garden. The many and various pastoral concerns that had comprised for some time my afternoon palette now seemed false, hackneyed, and onerous. And on my desk a fat pile of mail tilted, it too exhausting in appearance. For my work as a writer I had no brainpower, but for hysteria there were boundless synapses, however frayed, available for firing, and I spent them at the altar of the World Wide Web—between long bouts with CNN—feverishly indulging my host of paranoias: looking for hideaway banks in Australia, criteria for Canadian citizenship, Tasmanian real estate, conscientious objector exegesis (I had two sons of draftable age—never mind that there was currently no draft), water purification treatises, anthrax esoterica, analyses of Russian nuclear security, and excerpts from the Al Qaeda terrorism handbook that might yield clues to my future. Complicated, labyrinthine spelunking, but the Web is the paranoid hysteric’s supreme enabler, and its deep interstices and eerie connectivity extend the reach of the psychotic temper, lend insanity the power of corroboration, and provide strange provenance for every obsession and confirmation for every delusion. Clicking and scrolling, I elbowed outward, until truth was shaped by my consciousness (it was a little like playing with a Ouija board). I had merely to start a search engine to make of my sick mind the universe.

  I now suspected that my packet of symptoms went by some clinical name. There’s a bank of drawers in one wall of our bedroom and I had taken up counting them repetitively to confirm their existence in sets of twos, a practice that never yielded satisfaction, one counting always leading to the next and producing fresh uncertainties. The lumber in the ceiling needed counting too, but shiplap in expanse can seem like op art and this girded my deep insecurity regarding the number of boards overhead; mightn’t some have blurred together? They wanted recounting with a sharper eye, but still I couldn’t be sure. I counted and the rhythm of counting was robotic, or like a child reciting times tables—a silent voice mysteriously impelled but not crowding out my doomsday thoughts; it insisted on itself in parallel.

  The air felt viscous, and it was difficult to act. My sloth was so great as to make dressing ponderous. Gravity lay heavy on me; nevertheless I was urgent, always, to wrestle with my condition. Compelled to it by a dire panic, I called my doctor and told his receptionist that I needed to see him as soon as possible regarding a troubling stomach pain, a deception that seemed to me entirely necessary as a means of avoiding humiliation.

  My doctor is competent, sturdy, gracious, and has a trace of Kentucky in his delivery and manner. He had tapped on my bare chest at intervals past and taken the measure, apologetically, of my prostate, but despite these intimacies he seemed now appalled to hear that I’d succumbed to madness. I made a number of bereft confessions regarding the depths to which I’d sunk and described myself as “behind glass.” My doctor, meanwhile, sat stoically on a wheeled stool in his perpetually pill-less woolen sweater-vest and registered my symptoms with an air of tragedy and with a disconcerting haplessness, as if my condition were Ebola or a brain tumor. He sighed more than once, his shoulders caved in, and his hands stayed folded against his khakis. The modulated certainty evaporated from his voice as he fumbled in an effort to prescribe something soothing and urged me in the direction of psychiatry.

  Next door I endured embarrassment again when my kindly pharmacist of many years handed me a bottle of Xanax pills and quietly said, “I’m so sorry.” I prevaricated in the face of this drugstore affront, claiming the prescription was for use judiciously on future airplane journeys. I also yearned for an anonymity my neighborly world couldn’t afford. Knowing nearly everybody in my neck of the woods, which had heretofore seemed for the most part pleasant, now seemed like an unnavigable morass and demanded of me convoluted perjuries. Yet try as I might to wear my old face, my eyes were telltale windows into darkness, and everybody seemed to look right through them, and sadly, to see how I’d declined.

  At home my pretense took punishing forms—an excruciating pose of normalcy over dinner, or staring down, for the benefit of my children, the bleak news emanating from the television. The Xanax made me mildly sleepy but otherwise provided no ameliorative boon, and surreptitiously I called my brother—a psychiatrist—to discuss the remedy my doctor had meted out, this call made with the bathroom door locked and the door to the shower stall closed, me inside.

  My brother asked diagnostic questions, cautioned me regarding the addictive quality of the entire class of benzodiazepines, applauded as appropriate and widely standard my doctor’s choice, and dosage, of Xanax, then reminded me that a stock explanation for certain kinds of creative output—for example, the writing of stories and novels—was a latent mental illness. In fact, the writing is the illness, the illness expressed as words instead of illness, with the punishing symptoms waiting for the stories and novels to finally wane over an inner horizon and descend out of the way. Something like that; I didn’t quite follow. In my agitation I couldn’t comprehend. I probably misrepresent my brother, but I don’t misrepresent my confusion about things, there in the shower stall.

  Hemingway, London, Woolf, Borowski, Shelley, Plath, et cetera—writers go mad (and kill themselves). The relationship (“inspired madness”) is widely embraced, a reading discussion group or classroom commonplace, sometimes conceived as a riddle or code—a poem deciphered as a portrait of madness—this is what some students take away from lit courses and biographies of Anne Sexton. On the other hand, there’s also science in corroboration of this, with numerous studies establishing a link between creativity and serious depression. One says that artists are eight to ten times more likely than others to suffer from a major depressive disorder; a second stops at seven; a third, undertaken at Brown University, that 50 percent of those in the creative arts get depressed.

  But I find I doubt all of this, or at least deeply quibble with this use of “major.” Can it really be that half of all writers meet in this particular grim library? A place that is not just the blues exponentially but something altogether different? (The word “depression,” Styron wrote, prevents, “by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.” If he’s right, then adding the word “serious” to it merely makes things graver in the wrong realm.) I imagine these studies conducted by people who don’t know the questions to ask, and therefore—missing the point completely—extrapolate from their own brand of melancholy. Otherwise, every other literary memoir, from among those credible and discernibly forthcoming, must fill me with empathetic horror. They don’t.

  * * *

  I began to spend my time doing nothing, but the nothing can’t be described as boring; it was instead a white space rel
entless, of silent grappling and ordeal. As static and listless as depression might look, it is inwardly and essentially a dramatic condition, like being battered aloft on a storm or cast into an abyss. The sensation of being unmoored, I can attest, isn’t lacking in interest, but taking everything into account I would prefer the most stupefying normalcy.

  My depressed routine had no starting place or morning and I seemed to exist in an endless nowhere like a character from Waiting for Godot. Strangely at first, but then with a cold logic, everything but me faded far into the background. A bulwark of dense and watery glass, of shifting convexities and veering concavities, stood between me and the world. People were distant, as if among the living while I’d joined the dead; whatever they said, or did, was at a remove. From my post in bed—a slug, shriveled—I now and again registered my wife in the room, pulling back a curtain or opening a closet, but feeling regarding her presence was dulled, about which I felt only vaguely guilty, awash as I was in self-obsession. Appalled, she treated me as the invalid I was, and persevered.

  On I went. In daylight anthrax traveled through the mail and the magazines wondered which death-dealing pathogen was most easily introduced into drinking water; at night I lay shivering in bed beside my wife—cold no matter how warm the night and curled tight with my head beneath a pillow—in a state of pathological torment. The content of my thought, while various, was predictable: I moved from insoluble existential dilemmas—death, evil, suffering, God—to intensely detailed scenarios for action such as moving to New Zealand, burying cash, doubling my capacity for propane storage, and devising alchemies to make pond water potable. Night was by some minuscule degree preferable to day, since in the dark hours I was released from the necessity to sustain my facade of only slightly more than normal 9/11 consternation. Xanax made me feel like I’d taken a roundhouse punch, but didn’t provide a technical knockout, so I alternated in bed between drugged misery and bouts of lucid, tremulous anxiety. At night the brevity of life was tangible; so was the eventual suffering of dying. I lay there mentally experiencing my annihilation and felt crushingly aware that, in cosmic terms, this event was just around the corner. Eternity seemed long, the crypt terrifying, getting there even worse. I was also convinced that the whole business was a riddle and that with sufficiently sustained and terrified cerebration, and with an extraordinary quantity of inner strife, I could, with life’s wretchedness, make peace. Yet I knew simultaneously that this wasn’t so, even as my mind, of its own accord, continued the violent exercise.

  Finally, in a panic, I dragged myself to a bookstore, where I found myself conspicuously vulnerable to the spirituality section, particularly to the shelves merging right with philosophy, left with psychology and alternative medicine, and down with mysticism and the Gnostic occult—I stood in front of them in the recognition that depression is a consumer mode, too (thoughts in this vein, so prelapsarian, embracing the world outside my spell, were like Morse code messages from my old self). I also discovered here the Brown study’s mad half, because in every other book these scribblers acknowledged the hell that had forced me to them. Here were my comrades, redeemed or rehabilitated, from suffering ascended to the heights of clear vision and quality hardback publication, and since I’d lost all power of literary discernment, I perused a lot of them with greedy intensity, mustering none of my former cynicism for the inward journey and mind work.

  I also took aim at some legitimate heavies, spending myself against William James (whose depression was famously the bona fide version), Kierkegaard (ditto), Marcus Aurelius, Saint Augustine, and Jung. But reading while depressed is not really reading, and I cycled as I turned these hallowed pages between hope for an epiphanic enlightenment and dread that there was nothing to be taken from them beyond confirmation of my current metaphysic. And confirmed I was. Aurelius’s stoicism seemed thinly transparent, Augustine’s redemption was a self-imposed ruse, Jung’s mysticism was a house of cards—in short, the deep thinkers were right to be unconsoled, the bitterness of pessimists was the only true vision, the highest truth was dark. Tolstoy, nearing fifty, reached an impasse I recognized:

  I questioned painfully and protractedly, and with no idle curiosity.… I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself—and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing that was leading me to despair—the meaningless absurdity of life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

  But my biggest mistake, by far, was Ernest Becker, whose The Denial of Death should only be read by those well-dosed with Wellbutrin or otherwise immune from the psychic torture in its pages. Becker’s scholarly and exhaustive contention is that the depressed penetrate to a rational mortal fear, while the rest of us—my undepressed self included—devise elaborate and neurotic identities to drown out death’s deafening scream. Heroism in particular is undressed in this fashion—we each construct our myth as a shield, our ego as an atmosphere, argues Becker, lest mortality descend entirely on us, and not just in our spare bad moments, to drive us away from sanity.

  Could I ever go back to my pre-Becker days? I’d read him twenty-five years before and passed the interim immoderately happy, but these were facts I dispensed with conveniently; depressed, I read Becker and emerged deeply panicked and possessed of a truth best framed as a question: Why isn’t everyone depressed?

  Spurred to it by madness, I’d eaten from the tree of knowledge, and now there was no return from exile.

  * * *

  It was a relief to me daily when my family left the house. This is an especially bleak state of affairs—preferring to endure one’s suffering in solitude, and finding the presence of those one loves unbearably difficult and demanding. It’s a loneliness not exactly volitional, but neither is it unwelcomed or contested; on the contrary, the depressed person feels in utter aloneness a strange and appropriate consolation. My preference was to squeeze my head beneath my pillow; despite this, and in the name of my children, I struggled against my inclination to disappear completely. Mounting what felt like a colossal effort, and marshaling some shadow of my former energies, I made a dutiful appearance each morning to feed the dogs and light the fire, take a nodding interest in everyone’s itinerary, and generally enact the unremarkable persona of a man about his a.m. affairs. Granted, I was mostly unshaven, ill-dressed, and poorly kept, but none of that was unexpected of me—a buzzer going off, a red flag or clue—and for my children, I hoped, it was just their father. I think that for the most part I distracted or fooled them—post 9/11 it was reasonable to be glum, and so I had that contextual advantage—but doing so was such a strenuous farce that when all had left in pursuit of their business I fell, each day, into bed again. In contrast to my road insomnia, I now slept long with drugged conviction, as this was the only means at hand to negate an otherwise grueling insanity that in waking life was unremitting. I had only one thing to look forward to, and that was the forgetfulness of sleep.

  I took as second best hiding in bed with the sheets drawn across my head and the door to the bedroom shut. If that sounds pathetic, it was.

  My wife sought to coerce me outward and I complied like a helpless and obedient child—and with no objectivity for what might be redemptive—but these forays abroad were uniformly disastrous. Out and about in the world at large, tagging along behind the grocery cart, I saw fellow shoppers from my watery distance while acutely aware of their Beckerian defenses and the transparency of all their enjoyments. Why would anyone pick out a cheese with any interest in the matter? In the grandstands at a high school football field, on a Friday night bitten with autumn chill, I could hardly care which team was which; my awareness stayed fixated on the fans around me and their meaningless enthusiasm for the contest. This was what stood between them and death—third down, three yards to go—and the thought of that seemed so tragic as to inspire in me retreat. In fact,
the mere existence of human beings was enough to induce morbidity in me, so it was preferable not to see them at all.

  There was also the matter of canceling engagements, a duty that left me guilt-ridden. I had to tell the Key West Literary Seminar that I wouldn’t be coming to participate in panels on the subject of American literary landscapes. The show was going on, according to an organizer: the airports were empty and therefore convenient, and not a single registrant or invited writer had canceled citing recent events. (Again I’m put in mind of the Brown study. Here was a seminar presenting twenty or more writers: Shouldn’t at least half be going off the deep end?) I imagined attendees in wall-to-wall sun, accoutred in things floral and swilling margaritas, sipping champagne at the Audubon House, trading witticisms on deep verandas or skiffing the flats after permit and tarpon—sociable meals of stone crab and beer—while out here I cowered under my blankets, counting the drawers in the bedroom wall at three in the afternoon.

  The morning came when I was conscious of the fact that I had a Remington in close proximity that might put a cap on this nightmare. (My most recent novel, East of the Mountains, was about a man who had decided that faced with mortality there was no better choice other than his shotgun.) The notion was abstract but not transitory in my thoughts, impossible but also revelatory, and when I heard from afar this siren call of suicide—a song I wouldn’t admit to my wife—I felt a cold and potent upwelling, a seafloor current, of terror. This is the depressive’s surpassing, final logic—that there is nothing to live for, that life is unendurable, and that death is preferable. After all, everything that once brought happiness, everybody you’ve ever loved, now just occasions pathos. I saw my children and imagined their deaths; my desk I pictured rotting in a corner in some decade hence; my work shredded or lost in a gloomy archive; my wife reduced by time to bones and then to dust and nothingness; everyone I know turned nameless and forgotten; the Earth combusted; the universe cold; my aged self dying tempestuously for days; then death as a long stint of nothing. It makes sense to me now, in the face of all this, to eat a peach and savor it, but depressed it made sense to skip the peach and go straight to annihilation.