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Depression is about loss. Loss of someone or something, or the love of it, that makes you fear for another loss... and another...and another... for all your life.
It's as if you are encapsulated in time: better said, in the past. The present is unbearable, there's no future. This may be more than depression, it can be melancholia, a Greek word meaning black bile. The Greeks knew it had to do with humour and Aristotle thought it could help creativity. Great thinkers, poets and artists, he used to say, are usually prone to melancholia bouts.
Some say that melancholic people have an ideal within themselves so strong that their ego cannot ever reach that perfect model and keeps punishing itself.
The thing is: how can there be such a strong omnipotent and tyrannical ideal that makes you crawl whenever you feel you are not corresponding to its demands? Think about it and the extraordinary power you might have given to someone or something.
The photo is quite a depressing one. It's a bunker from WWII part of the so-called Atlantic Wall that the nazis built on the Atlantic shore. Many of these huge and ugly constructions can still be seen there. Paul Virilio published a book on them (http://www.infoamerica.org/teoria/virilio1.htm).
I am familiar with the atlantic wall (I'm not going to caps any nazi-originated thinguammy - ever) and with blocks in a more general sense - as well as in a personal, have been diagnosed with clinical depression but have yet to be "treated" effectively for it - when this entry (posting? who cares? I do get so bogged down in and by semantics) suddenly seemed to respond to a need I have. I would call it, self-centered and egotistical being that I am, a need to "survive". Overcoming it or coping with it might do the trick as well. The trick of bringing about some changes in my *I-am-one-of-the-living-numb* situation. Or can it just be a frame of mind? Regardless.. I thought that I could perhaps get someone to help me other than myself or my surviving friends & relatives who have certainly been keeping me in a sort of stasis of depression at a level of their own choice which they feel they can cope with. I no longer believe as I did once upon a trauma long ago that they can or even have a remote insight(idea/inkling of what it is like to be alive and yet so vey... not.
ReplyDeleteKudos for the whole blog, sorry for the egocentric comment and if anyone can or feels like helping me I'm at a very non-descript m@il address.
P.S. sorry for taking up so much space please fell free to ignore all of the above
Hi AntipodeanPt
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to know someone is living in Alentejo with his eyes wide open (as in opposition to eyes wide shut). Speaking of what, I'm sorry to say one does not really overcome depression. We all have to learn to live with it. And be thankful if it's not melancholia.
This said, the important thing is being able to get something from life while we are here. Be able to connect, enjoy people and thinks, create, work. I can see you are a writer and a translator, traditore though:)
I had a glance at your blog and saw some nice poetry. Would you like to post something with us? Be my guest. And be egocentric as you like. We all are and maybe it's a good thing. Although some people live in denial of that and other things.