Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s No Good Word For It

We have no word for this condition. If indeed it is a single condition at all. More likely each case of this mental malady is unique and can’t be properly categorised in general terms. ‘Depression’ is a medical euphemism for a complex constellation of human suffering. Not even the highly articulate William Styron feels he can describe his own experience adequately.

All the pros agree that something has gone wrong chemically in the brain. But beyond that they can only guess at the pharmacological fix that might alleviate symptoms - sometimes with disastrous adverse effects. They have no idea what psychological or physiological events might trigger wonky chemistry or when such aberrations might occur in one’s life.

The state of being Styron, and so many others, experienced is not one of feeling low, or the blues, or being down, or any of dozens of other euphemisms. It is a state of total incapacitation. The malady attacks the body only indirectly through the attempted destruction of the Self. It is the ultimate auto-immune disease and wages war on existence itself. And it frequently wins that war through suicide.

There is no permanent cure, no immunity. Drugs might work temporarily but they are not a preventative vaccine. Recovery therefore is only into a recognition that the beast can strike again, and again. There is no way to reduce one’s vulnerability. As Styron says, the genetic roots of the malady are now beyond question. Against our genes we are essentially defenceless.

The malady is particularly associated with artistic talent. Whether this mitigates or increases its tragic consequences isn’t clear. Perhaps the “weather inside one’s head” is necessary for creative imagination. Perhaps, as implied by Styron’s own account, artistic expression is a way of forestalling the war against oneself. If so, it may be that the search for the personally unique right word is an important part of keeping oneself alive.

While reading Styron, I was struck by the memory of a piece by Maurice Blanchot in his A Voice From Elsewhere. Commenting on Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, he writes “Through the blessing or fault of Hegel, we feel that what now seems so alive required the already dead. This is what Lyotard calls melancholy, and others call ‘nihilism.’” That is, truly creative artistry, or for that matter authentic living, requires almost the continuous restorative death, killing really even if only metaphorically, of the existing person in order to free the spirit from its inherited constraints. Could it be that there is a meaning to this mysterious illness that we have yet to grasp?

Blanchot quotes the poet Samuel Wood [des Forêts]:

“Tell yourself that at both ends of the journey
The most wrenching pain is that of being born
That lasts and clashes with the fear we have of dying,
Tell yourself we aren’t done with being born
But the dead, the dead are done with dying.”

Could it be that this is a clue about the therapy that is really necessary, the telling of our most intimate stories in a way that feels like it will kill us? Styron might agree. The trick, I suppose, at least according to Blanchot, is not getting stuck on the one story, that is, to keep being born.

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