The Noonday Demon and A Christmas Letter

I've begun reading Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon. It's a bit overwhelming, sort of like depression itself. Confusing and long -- attempting to organize itself over and over according to the idea of the day. Several reviews are enlightening. Joyce Carol Oats picks up on the author's love of his own depression,  a phenomenon I have noticed in myself.

Yet paradoxically, and here is where the foreignness of mental illness is most pointed, those afflicted with depression are often ambivalent about it, as no one is ambivalent about physical illness: ''It was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul,'' Solomon declares. And, even more rhapsodically, in the concluding pages of the book's final chapter, ''Hope'': 

''Curiously enough, I love my depression. I do not love experiencing my depression, but I love the depression itself. I love who I am in the wake of it. . . . I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery.''

 
I could write my own depression a song that would strangely resemble an advertisement for bologna. "My depression has a first name," which is unfortunately the same as that of my husband's boss, and (thankfully) also the name of a spectacular painting by Jay DeFeo, "The Verónica."

Here's a link to a slightly brighter photo of the painting, on Flickr. It's a staggering painting, tall and thin. Dodie Bellamy, in her 2010 post on SFMOMA's  Open Space blog, talks about the queasy feeling the painting inspires. "In its prettiness The Veronica is more subversive than Incision, which announces something deeper, intense is going on. The Veronica’s creepiness sneaks up on you. Femininity flails its pretty neck and grows monstrous, out of control." (She also elaborates on St. Veronica, who wiped the perspiration off the face of Jesus as he walked to the cross, and how the image of his face appeared on the cloth thereafter. Definitely a mind trick.)

But I digress.

Every year I write a holiday letter. I should call it a Christmas Letter, because that's the genre. But I want to include, and celebrate, and certainly I don't want to exclude, so I say Happy New Year (!) instead. But I am a devotee of the Christmas Letter form, and that's what it is. This year's needs to be short and I'm considering mentioning that I've been struggling with what Solomon calls "the noonday demon."  Depression has been my constant (if fickle) companion for over two years now, but I am not sure this reference belongs in a celebration of light and new. We'll see what the husband says. 

I'm going to be reading Solomon's book for a while. In the meantime, my own personal Veronica has left the building. Or, at least, seems to have her hand on the Exit.

The Most Beautiful Song About Being Depressed Ever

Go ahead, push you luck, find out how much love the world can hold,
Once upon a time I had control, and reigned my soul in tight.
Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled,
But I held the evil of the world,
So I stopped the tide,
froze it up from inside,
And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then,
You catch your breath and winter starts again,
And everyone else is spring bound.

And when I chose to live, there was no joy,
it's just a line I crossed,
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost,
So I was not lost or found.
And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell.
And so I traveled down a whispering well,
To know myself through them.

Growing up, my mom had a room full of books, and hid away in there,
Her father raging down a spiral stair,
Till he found someone, most days his son,
And sometimes I think my father, too, was a refugee,
I know they tried to keep their pain form me,
They could not see what it was for.
But now I'm sleeping fine,
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance,
I am the daughter of a great romance,
And they are the children of the war.

Well the sun rose with so many colors,
it nearly broke my heart,
It worked me over like a work of art,
And I was a part off all that.
So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me,
We will push on into that mystery,
And it'll push right back, and there are worse things than that,
Cause for every price, and every penance that I
could think of,
It's better to have fallen in love,
Than never to have fallen at all,
Cause when you live in a world,
well it gets into who you thought you'd be,
And now I laugh at how the world changed me,
I think life chose me
after all.

Dar Williams, songstress extraordinaire. From her The Green World cd, 2000. I couldn't listen to this song then, without weeping, and many days I couldn't listen to it at all. My husband was furious, but it wasn't about not loving the music. I think it's a measure of how much 'better' I am that I can listen to this song so happily, even eagerly now.

I'm not sure about the line breaks, but that's kind of the way it is in a Dar song.

Handing Down Depression

Stanford University School of Medicine has dedicated its entire new spring issue of their magazine Stanford Medicine to Children's Health. There is a beautiful and hopeful article about the research currently being done into why teens become depressed, and how to prevent it before it can begin. I also love the illustration of the woman, with black clouds under her hat.