Email
PrintFrom the howls of anxiety
Some characters burn themselves into your imagination. I’m thinking of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) in Woody Allen’s Match Point, staring out from the screen with a bewildered look after murdering his girlfriend, Nola Rice, played to perfection by the dazzling Scarlett Johansson. The killing is over his position in society, his lucrative career in London banking and his soulless marriage to a high-placed society diva, all threatened by Rice, a failed actress who is pregnant with Wilton’s child and relentlessly insistent on him leaving his wife.
In the film, luck is the metaphor Allen uses. Wilton isn’t arrested, though a detective is sure he’s the killer. I won’t say more and spoil the plot. But the film is an ingenious meditation on luck.
Luck brings good fortune or terrible adversity, and I’ve had my share of both. I was born into a family of scientists and I had a splendid childhood playing stickball and football on the streets of New York. I had your standard tormented adolescent passions and tried on more than a few masks. But around the time I was 18, a certain melancholy came over me. I went off to college in Massachusetts, and the melancholy stayed, inhabiting a permanent place in my psyche.
It was the beginning of a depression that would rob me of much happiness. I want to say I lost my “fair share” of happiness, but then who is really owed a fair share of happiness? Who is owed anything, except perhaps respect, if that’s even deserved? For these days, we know that many “moods” are inscribed in the genes of each of us. And luck has everything to do with it. But blind luck doesn’t mean the world is accidental. Rather, luck plays a role in life.
I make no special claims for my depression. It progressed in a classic manner. It robbed me of self confidence and left me shattered and lonely, wandering the college dorm halls at 3 am, reading Camus and T.S. Eliot, wondering what I would do with my unfathomable pain.
Since I couldn’t concentrate on college studies, because I couldn’t sleep, I dropped out for a semester and went to Europe. The despair miraculously disappeared. When I came back to the states, I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where I struggled with academics, bought a guitar and channeled my efforts into learning the instrument.
Back at my parents’ house, my younger brother worked the knobs of the reel-to-reel tape deck and recorded some songs I wrote. I had a voice reminiscent of James Taylor, I was told after people heard my pop songs. With blues, I aimed for, but never came close to, Muddy Waters. My father beamed when he heard my first recording. He and my mother said my talent was there and encouraged me to go for it.
I played clubs and coffeehouses in California. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I ended up transferring, I divided my time between hiking the massive redwood forests surrounding the campus and learning how to sing three-part harmony. But I realized I was no John Prine or Richard Thompson or Ry Cooder, three musicians I held myself up to for the sake of comparison. I had to admit I wasn’t prolific, either. I scaled back my dreams and the depression came back. One thing about depression: Denying its presence only increases its appetite. But as luck would have it, I had a girlfriend for a time and the despair receded.
My father suffered from depression, too. And though his had a later onset, it was more ferocious. He killed himself in 2006, three years after my mother died on the operating room table undergoing a heart valve replacement.
In college, I wrote poetry as a way to cut through the glacial despair, but I recently read it and it’s all dismal. Depression doesn’t kindle creativity, it suppresses it. When you’re depressed, anxiety howls from every direction. The interior world of budding imagination collapses. The steps you take to think give way to chaos. You want to scream, but the small voice inside you crumbles behind the effort. Artists suffer from this in disproportionate numbers. But what comfort is that?
Yet all is not for naught. From the struggle, I learned to heed a wounded voice inside. Creativity came from fighting depression, from being a survivor. Depression taught me to cherish the times with my kids and to seek the doors of light wherever they are.
So I look for beauty. The other day, an unusually mild afternoon in late summer, I went with my daughter to the Park of Roses at Whetstone Park and, after taking in the fading majesty of summer, I started to sniff the petals to see which ones were aromatic. My daughter thought I was crazy, but so much is locked inside the fragrance of a flower. After sampling a dozen or so plants, I found the group of red roses, a little bedraggled, but dense with intoxicating aromas. My daughter came over to smell them, too. For a moment, I felt like Proust with his madeleine, unlocking the floodgates of memory.
