state of the cultural nation
6 Jan 2009
The Thinking Man's Curse
Creativity and depression seem to be two sides of the same coin. Stephen Orr ponders the life of the artist in a society that spruiks happiness at all costs
Every job has its risks. In Eastern Java men work on the crater of Mount Kawah Ijen mining sulphur for a living. They are surrounded by poisonous gases that eat away their lungs and lead to an early death. They carry baskets of sulphur up and down the slopes for $2 a day. The sulphur is sold to factories and used to process rubber and manufacture pesticides.Writers, too, pay a price for plying their trade. Nothing as horrific as bleeding lungs or mercury poisoning, but sometimes just as final in its outcome. There's a price to be paid for inventing, analysing and dissecting human beings and the society they inhabit.
A quick search of the internet reveals a list of 400 writers who have committed suicide. We can assume there are hundreds of others who did themselves in without being noticed by the wider literary community.
The list goes back as far as Seneca the Younger, Nero's tutor, who (on Nero's orders) committed suicide by severing his veins and submerging himself in a warm bath. Nero suspected him of plotting a coup he probably had nothing to do with. Overcome with grief, Seneca's wife also cut her wrists but was bandaged up before dying. There follows a list of writers from every nation who over the years have hung, poisoned, overdosed or shot themselves.
It goes to show that a little bit of insight can be a dangerous thing. Somewhere in our evolution, it seems, the brain just got too big too quick and started coming to non-useful conclusions that (although probably true) were just too depressing to live with.
I'd like to know if there's a connection between the process of deep thinking, melancholy, depression and in some cases, suicide. I'd like to know if melancholy is natural, discrete, or a transition stage on the way to depression. I'd like to know if depression itself is symptomatic of our age or whether it dates back to Neanderthals staring into a fire and wondering why they bother hunting. I'd like to know if suicide is something you're born to face, in time, or whether it's a form of learned behaviour.
Having spent a few years as a writer of literary fiction, columns, essays and short stories, the revelation that deep thinking might be bad for you is fully dawning on me. We all know that Virginia Woolf drowned herself in a creek, that Hemingway blew out the back of his head with a shotgun and that Charmian Clift overdosed. We know about Sylvia Plath and her oven, John Kennedy Toole, Hunter S Thompson and maybe even Yukio Mishima, a writer who committed ritual suicide in 1970. We guess that they either took things too seriously or that, in many cases, they suffered from depressive conditions such as bipolar disorder.
On 12 September this year the American essayist and novelist David Foster Wallace walked out to his back patio, strung up a length of rope, put it around his neck and ended a long battle with depression. He had been taking an antidepressant called Nardil. Having come off and back on to this medication over time he found that it was no longer helping. It seems that for Wallace there was no lightness of being, no hope and ultimately no point living
Wallace was a tortured soul, and there was nothing forced or put on about his "deep-thinking-writer" persona. When he was interviewed on television he always looked down, apologised for sounding stupid, was uncomfortable with the questions and (you got the feeling) surprised that anyone would want to hear anything he had to say.
Wallace wore a trademark bandana and he once said it was to stop his head exploding.
I wasn't really surprised when I heard that Wallace had killed himself. Referring to people who do commit suicide he once said, "All these people have already killed themselves, where it really counts ... when they ‘commit suicide' they're just being orderly."
It was almost as though he was saying that suicide is not so great a tragedy for some as others. For the family left behind, of course, it is devastating, but was Wallace arguing that for some it is a release? And was he saying that this is because depression comes well before a single word is written on a page, painted on a canvas or scribbled as a song lyric on the back of an old gas bill?
Is depression triggered and encouraged by the world we live in? Does it begin with melancholy or is melancholy a natural, positive, warm-hearted condition? I believe the best diagnostic tool for human melancholy is to quantify a person's sense of irony. Ironic people are always melancholic, obvious people generally aren't.
Melancholy is the ability to see sadness in things other people think are ordinary, funny, unremarkable. Zoos have this affect on me — animals out of context, being watched by people who don't see this as a problem.
Melancholy has always been with us. In 1889 Adelaide's Register newspaper reported on a vaudeville put on by an act known as the American Midgets: "General and Mrs Mite, the smallest people in the world, made their bows to an Adelaide audience in the Town Hall... Having been introduced they promenaded amongst the audience, shaking hands and conversing as they moved around." The General sang songs and recited Hamlet's soliloquy and Mrs Mite joined him and they rode a Rudge convertible bicycle around the stage.
If I'd been in the Adelaide Town Hall on that night I would have been "melancholied" not only by the Midgets' spectacle but by the applause and laughter (I suppose) that accompanied this "clever exhibition". You could argue that this is a modern perspective on an old problem, but I disagree. Sad is sad.
It's a similar feeling to sitting watching mid-morning infomercials on commercial telly. The scripted host and his scripted guest. Fake smiles. In this case it was a handbag with a "hidden secret". This accessory, the presenter insisted, was about to start a fashion revolution. Not only did the bag have a special mobile phone holder ("isn't it frustrating when you search your bag for a ringing phone?") and a lippy holder, but it came with special "changeable shells" that allowed you to have three bags instead of one, all for the amazing price of $99.90 + $12.95 postage and handling. Of course, there was a 30-day money back guarantee but the marketers had probably worked out that anyone lazy or stupid enough to ring wouldn't have enough energy to repack the classic-black-crocodile/brick red/ leopard skin bag, take it to a post office and send it back.
Non-ironic types try to manufacture happiness. There are dozens of books available that will help cleanse you of your irony/melancholy. These are a how-to guide for attaching changeable shells to your personality. But there are no money back guarantees. These books argue that it's bad to be sad, and especially to cultivate and encourage sadness. They are an Original Hits compilation (As Seen on TV) of emotional retrojunk. But they sell, and sell, and sell.
Take, for instance, Richard Carlson's You Can Be Happy No Matter What! (The exclamation mark's mine). Says Carlson, "Once understood these principles allow you to feel happy and contented regardless of your problems — really!" (The exclamation mark is his). Really!
Carlson promises 24/7 happiness, in the same way the K-Tel announcer Bob Washington spent his career promising amazing, life-changing items such as the Record Selector, Micro Roast and the Tote-a-Tune portable stereo. This view of the world makes me feel ultra-melancholic, almost depressed, but I have a valve that limits my exposure to John, Richard et al. Perhaps Wallace had a faulty BS valve, and perhaps this is what kept feeding the darkness in his head. Maybe this noise, this colour and whirr of images overloaded the free-flowing electricity crossing his synapses.
Recently my wife came home with a barbecued chicken with a "Reduced to $3.99" sticker on the bag. I found this depressing. To think that this six-week-old chicken with its throat freshly cut and its feathers freshly plucked could be sold off for the price of a bus ticket. She pulled the chicken apart. It was small and the meat fell easily off the bone, as if it had been engineered to help us eat it quicker and more efficiently. I wondered if the chicken ever felt melancholy as it tried to move in its cage or in the few centimetres it had to live out its six weeks. The small pieces of meat made me feel sad, and they didn't taste like anything — just some pressed, dyed and coloured protein supplement. Hardly anyone thinks about chickens, and I'm a hypocrite for eating them, I suppose. But life is shit for chickens.
You have to have an irony/melancholy filter or else, like Wallace's head, you might explode, constipated with indignation. This filter may account for our selective rage over certain issues. Why, for instance, does a politician's taxpayer-funded junket annoy the hell out of us while we ignore the thousands of kids in the world who die every day from preventable disease? Why do many people respond to the present economic downturn by buying cheap real estate? Why not give more (or something) to charity?
The reason may be, as Darwin explained (and I paraphrase) that we're just arseholes worried about our own survival, and now survival has come to mean plasma tellies, imported four-wheel drives and three-way handbags. If this is the case, things may be irretrievable for us humans. As the resources dwindle we buy, fight and rage. And there's another reason writers kill themselves — it's like Popeye discovering that Olive was just a cartoon character. So we accept our present reality. We watch A Time for Drunken Horses and feel sad that crippled orphans die early through lack of medicine, but like the $3.99 chicken, we realise that life is shit for Persian orphans.
Some of us wonder if there will be a more radical shift in human consciousness in the next 100 years, but I think not. According to Richard Carlson (and his millions of readers) even Persian orphans and starving African babies can be happy — no matter what! I have an acquaintance who's not bothered by any of this since she knows God is returning soon to save selected members of the human race. She tells me how she speaks to Him about this and how nothing can make her sad anymore. I quickly work out that as an atheist I'm damned to rot in some hell of 24-hour infomercials as she gets to collect flowers. I'm itching to tell her what a complete bitch/idiot she is but my parents brought me up to be nice to everyone, regardless of their lack of irony.
Maybe we can do a few things to ease the pain. Unfortunately no one can write a user's guide to irony as that itself would be too ironic. But we could encourage the study of ironic texts in our schools. All of the great suicidal writers could be studied. Imagine that, 12 years of The Bell Jar and For Whom the Bell Tolls. And we could encourage comparative irony. Students could read texts by Virginia Andrews and Kathy Lette and compare them to Dostoevesky and Kafka.
On average 5.4 Australians kill themselves every day. For every person who's successful there are 10 other attempts. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded 2098 suicides in Australia in 2004 but there were probably many more not recorded as suicide. In a society that promises anything for anyone, this is an ironic statistic.
What might be done to stop or slow this loss of life? All of our antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs can't stop the problem. But maybe without drugs and psychotherapy things would be a lot worse. I'm no expert, I can't offer clinical solutions, all I can think is that we need to teach our kids balance between happy and sad, hopeful and realistic, real and imagined. We have to teach them that no one's coming to save them from themselves.
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Now I’m depressed.
I have to wonder if there is a gene for irony, as I know plenty of people who have access to the same information as you or I yet maintain a positive outlook about the future of the world and our species.
Interestingly they are the ones making things bumble along, buying their televisions, having parties and generally inviting me to buck up. I have a sneaking admiration for these folk, despite my sense of superiority with regards to what I see as a lack of insight.
Yet where does our insight get us? We maintain the fight for the awful truth to acheive what end? The ‘simple folk’ I patronise are at least living out the truth of humans as a species. I, on the other hand, yearn for a world that appears way beyond our reach. As a kid I found these other, better, worlds in books.
I am sure a lot of depressed writers did the same. I think some of the depression arises from a feeling of being cheated by these stories. There is no God, flying cars, perfect girls or friendly aliens. The tiny perfect world in a novel is a Faberge egg, we can never crawl inside and live in the jewelled splendour.
I remember as a young man hearing kids described as ‘sensitive’. Often this meant gay, but also I think it was recognised that some people just don’t share a blind enthusiasm for society with their peers. Is it depressing to be this way? Yes. Would you swap it to be able to live happily? I doubt you would.
Our ability to conceptualise is the greatest human strength. It makes almost any human life worth living. This is denied the battery hen of your story, but I would argue that the Persian orphans are priviledged to live, to experience hope, sadness and if they are really lucky, irony.
The Buddhists seem to do alright in an often brutal world. In pondering the connections between all things they find beauty in all things. In this context even our wild and dangerous human race between ability and understanding has a dazzling beauty about it.
Thanks for an interesting and thought provoking article.
Is there a cure for slit wrists?
Amputation of the arms?
I think for me, activism, being effective, and being part of thoughtful (especially intentional) communities of social change agents (especially when you have great discussions) makes me happy, and helps a lot with depression.
Also, taking responsibility for my actions- being honest, frank and assertive always gives me a feeling of control over my world.
Being mindful- appreciating little things, and reflecting on things such as what i eat, and how other people feel (being empathetic rather than in my own self absorbed world). I think a lot of writers kill themselves because they are often self absorbed- in their own worlds which become prisons.
And you can’t go past community gardens for giving joy.
Thanks for a thought-provoking article and comments. Living in a state of peace with the way things are in this world is a very hard thing to do indeed, particularly without the aid of mind-altering substances, or genuine or deliberate ignorance. I have to constantly fight off feeling saddened by shopping malls, TV ads and trash magazines (both of which I try to avoid), the news, violence, the signs of inequality and disadvantage in our society, and by reflecting on the environmental and social costs of my lifestyle… the list goes on.
But for me, the inequality, greed, cruelty, bigotry, exploitation and hypocrisy (especially my own) that is everywhere if you choose to see it and that can paralyse you - or worse - is counter-balanced by the joys that can come from other people (particularly children), from good relationships, from practising paying attention to the good things in the world, and from continually thinking about and trying to do what seems to be the right thing. The things I do that are not right (e.g. consuming more than I need, eating meat, not giving enough of my time, money or ideas to organisations that are trying to also contribute to the greater good) vastly outweigh the things that I do that are right, but like anneenna, I just keep trying to be mindful in general, honest with myself, and to make changes when and where I can. Also accepting sadness, and acknowledging that it is often the emotional response that makes most sense.
I think the Buddhists definitely have it sorted, but renouncing desire is a task that can take a lifetime, and I’m not up to it yet. Finally, now that I have kids I worry enormously what they will make of this world, and what price it will extract from them. I think the best I can do for them is to help them see things clearly, have courage, empathy for others, and to build their resilience so that they can survive the ride.
I was at a play that depended on that ‘midgets are inherently funny’ factor. It was deeply depressing. As is the fact that every now and then someone sends me Awake! magazines (say, do you think Carlson! is a JW?). I too am itching to tell her what she can do with them but I don’t
Ah yes the ultimate question, why live?
I don’t know the answer to that one. Life is sad and meaningless. I used to sprinkle Zoloft on my Weetbix but now I just laugh and say, ‘ha ha Fortuna, you scallywag!’ and go about my absurd existence with a funny skip
Can’t understand the common equation of depression with creativity (or often more broadly intelligence) it might make those of us prone to depression feel better but it’s a totally unsupportable myth which is busted pretty quickly with a trip to any public psych ward.
I know depressives who aren’t artists and artists who aren’t depressives.
The art-gene isn’t related to anything else on the DNA strand, as far as I can tell. Neither is the healing-touch gene. I’ve known people to have that who radiated kindness, and others, also to have that gift, who radiated anything but.
The conceptual problem here is the need for an easy analysis.
DFW, by the way, could write non-fiction, but not fiction, while on his meds, and fiction was his necessity.
It has been said that behind every clown, every great comedien/nne is a very sad soul. That the artificial facade masks a plethora of unhappiness that stays locked behind closed doors; locked because of the stigma surrounding the word ‘depression’. That when the unhappiness reaches it’s peak there is some release in humour or the creation of humour.
It is but a respite that puts the melancholy on hold, in limbo if only for a short time because some measure of happiness is better than no happiness at all. In a creative thinking person it can be easier to achieve because the drive overtakes the need to give in; to succumb to an all-consuming misery that would take over if it was allowed. The need to push one’s self into that world where they are supremely confident, to exude a bubbliness they can still draw on and show to the world who are none the wiser for the turmoil going on inside the tortured soul I describe.
Stephen questions where melancholy and the compulsion to commit suicide comes from. I can answer that quite categorically since I have been touched by both.
I believe that there is a reason for feeling down and even though some depressives will often say they don’t know why, it is usually because of an event or series of events, over a short or prolonged period of time, that the psyche shuts out. The thought of facing the memories associated with these events is in most cases too painful and the old crutches kick in.
Those crutches being whatever makes that person feel better: a creative profession that keeps the brain and the body so active that there is no time to dwell or experience flashbacks of what led to the depression in the first place.
Also, writers have a tremendous capacity for invention. Ws in any world we can lose ourselves in any world we create, where our imagination is the limit, where nobody can touch or taint what comes from our soul. The expulsion of creative energy is a form of catharsis, an elixir, a lifeblood that is sated only by that fix; that desire to create and achieve.
One of the drawbacks of course is writer’s block. The need to write and the energy to do so but the ideas won’t come. When that thought process is depleted so is the will to keep creating and this in turn leads to a sense of failure.
One of the things I learned through personal experience is that a sense of failure can be so deeply implanted and ingrained that if you have the determination to succeed, you will set out to prove that person/s wrong no matter what it takes. Sometimes it can take years. That purpose is there to strive and succeed and it becomes a driving force, a passion, in some cases, almost an obsession. That need to bury any negativity in something positive and something you are good at.
The one amazing thing about that is, even with no or very little positive reinforcement forthcoming, that strength of character is determined and willing and able.
It is when that self-worth is undermined in any way to a depressive person, that the inferiority kicks in and the need to wallow in melancholy is surpassed by the need to prove your worth.
I believe when the time arises that you are no longer able to do this, to prove what you are worth, that some people see no other way out than to take or try to take, their own life. I have been touched several times by suicide and the reasons for both differed slightly.
One was a young man of 25 whom I worked with in the early days of my radio years. He was from a broken home, a bit of a loner and felt for most of his life that he didn’t fit in; that he was inferior; even though he was well liked among his colleagues and close friends. He was gifted creatively but his home life got the better of him and one night he just made up his mind, as it emerged afterwards. There was not a hint to his friends whom he spent most of his last night with; in fact, they said he seemed happy; contented even.
A few hours later he took his own life.
A woman of similar age whom I worked with had insurmountable life and financial issues; family loss and saw no other way out either. She did the same thing but took her two young sons with her because she couldn’t trust annother family member to look after them when she was gone.
The point is, if we are born with a predisposition to depression, it takes outside influences to nurture the psyche and make us feel good about ourselves. I also strongly believe that a lack of affection plays a very big part in why people suicide. If they feel unwanted and unloved they no longer feel the need to fight the urge to go to a place where they will no longer feel that overwhelming sadness.
Most true suicides will just do it. No warning. It is a decision they have made and it gives them peace.
The ones who botch the attempt are the ones who are crying out for help.
While a maudlin subject, this is by far one of the unseen devils of our society. It is so often repressed and left undiagnosed because people fear ridicule. Even by today’s standards, that stigma is still there. There is a sense of shame and embarrassment that they are not ‘normal’. Of being laughed at and mocked and shunned for admitting it.
Some people who suffer the dreadful effects of melancholy have developed a strategy for dealing with it. They just go with it. They just need to keep to themselves, find something distracting that gives them pleasure; music, writing, walking, movies, driving…anything that can distract as well as entertain. Something that can switch off their minds without withdrawing completely.
In short, they just need to be left alone. To allow the melancholy to take it’s course, to go with it and then after a period of time, it subsides. It is a mtter of finding a healthy means of escape.
Thinking too much and being alone too much manifests unless there is something creative to immerse one’s energies in and find that one activity that makes them overflow with confidence.
The only trick is, to keep that ball rolling.
Stephen, bravo for having the courage to bring this subject up. It is indeed, the thinking [wo]man’s curse.
Deep thinking is a curse, especially if you’re the kind of person who also craves happiness in Life. KNOW WHAT, you can’t have it both ways!I wasted nearly six years of my early youth trying to "figure out" how things run in this universe (I’m 26 now). From learning about the Illuminati and a whole bunch of New World Order conspiracies, to understanding the rituals of Satanists and Scientologists to following what folks like Plato, Che Guevara, Nietzsche, Newton and Seneca had to say, my puny brain has become a storage dump of useless, junk information. I finally took a decision, TODAY -to quit deep thinking permanently -for once and for good, never again to "swim against the tide" that I enjoyed to do all these years. I need to discover true happiness in my life - I deserve every bit of it.
From now on, the only reason I exist is because I WANT TO BE HAPPY. Even though I have no friends (who would have wanted to befriend a deep-thinking philosopher anyway? In fact, I alienated myself from plenty of childhood friends because my "ironical" side used to feel the world is too phony and thus, doesn’t deserve my concern). Today, I regret it and realise I could have always PURSUED happiness instead of blaming others and living in the false illusion that I can actually do without it.
I’m my own person and the world isn’t going to change just because I feel distressed about the condition of sex slaves, child labourers, handicapped people. A girl I met at a brothel told me her story on how she was trafficked from her native village in Uzbekistan. That story gave me a lot of pain. But, I can’t do anything for her even if I wanted to. Someone else will come and take her place if I rescue her from her present suffering.
Clearly, there is some mysterious force at work in this Universe that is trying to prevent us "stupid intellectuals" from realizing our full potential and making us conform to established rules of this pretentious world. A majority of people I see around me are shallow-thinkers and never take the pain to look beyond the surface -including my own family (I don’t know how I received this defective gene of deep thinking). And, it works for them -they’re happy. Whereas, I, as you rightly mentioned here -it sometimes feels like my "brain is about to explode".
I highly recommend you a book called "The Sorrows of Satan" by Marie Corrieli. Read it if you haven’t already. Trust me, if there is one single event that radically transformed my outlook towards life -it was this book. Every word written in this book struck me like lightning. I now know how wrong I was before.
Forgive me if I sound a bit arrogant (you can’t understand the enormous joy I find today because of this newfound freedom from the curse of deep thinking), I wouldn’t have really posted all this except I thought maybe, if you’re like me, you can take my advice and save yourself as well.
With this post, this is positively the last time I felt like indulging in deep thinking. Take care.