It is worth reading it.
And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue:
Some psychiatric patients- plus a certain percentage of people who've
gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the
chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches
way down deep into the soul's core systems- these persons know firsthand
that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.' One kind is low-
grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia280 or simple melancholy. It's a
kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or
attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his
league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The
gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sud-
den to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife
and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden,
as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of
depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting
and ... well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic
state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff
that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and
take for granted as full and fleshy- happiness, joie de vivre, preference,
love- are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They
have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still
speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of
feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping
anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than
concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become sche-
mata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate,
but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA,
Unable To Identify.
It's worth noting that, among younger E.T.A.s, the standard take on Dr.
]. 0. Incandenza's suicide attributes his putting his head in the microwave
to this kind of anhedonia. This is maybe because anhedonia's often associ-
ated with the crises that afflict extremely goal-oriented people who reach a
certain age having achieved all or more than all than they'd hoped for. The
what-does-it-all-mean-type crisis of middle-aged Americans. In fact this is in
fact not what killed Incandenza at all. In fact the presumption that he'd
achieved all his goals and found that the achievement didn't confer meaning
or joy on his existence says more about the students at E.T.A. than it says
about Orin's and Hal's father: still under the influence of the deLint-like
carrot-and-stick philosophies of their hometown coaches rather than the
more paradoxical Schtittllncandenza/Lyle school, younger athletes who
can't help gauging their whole worth by their place in an ordinal ranking
use the idea that achieving their goals and finding the gnawing sense of
worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of psychic bogey, some-
thing that they can use to justify stopping on their way down to dawn drills
to smell flowers along the E.T.A. paths. The idea that achievement doesn't
automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstrac-
tion, rather like the prospect of their own death- 'Caius Is Mortal' and so
on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive carrot as the grail. They're
mostly going through the motions when they invoke anhedonia. They're
mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any sort of sub-16 exchange
you hear in the bathroom or food line: 'Hey there, how are you?' 'Number
eight this week, is how I am.' They all still worship the carrot. With the
possible exception of the tormented LaMont Chu, they all still subscribe to
the delusive idea that the continent's second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels
exactly twice as worthwhile as the continent's *4.
Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary.
It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally
happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small
children) know it's more invigorating to want than to have, it seems.
Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.
Hal lncandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put
his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove
Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn't because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal
himself hasn't had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since
he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in
rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy
everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human
being- but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his
troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril lncandenza believes she knows
him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that,
when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His
Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is
him, and this makes Hal feel'the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is
lonely.
It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennia! U.S.A. treat
anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of
the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness
or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by
world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger
people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool,
hip -and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and
cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so
Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No?
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great
transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once
we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit,
be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion.
A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at
a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of what-
ever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us
from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated na·ivete. Sentiment equals na-
ivete on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things
sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. 0. lncandenza's The
American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that
naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennia! America.
And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively,
it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz.
that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually
exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what
passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear
of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptual-
izes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and na'ive and goo-prone
and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile,
some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically
around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey
drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he
despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, inconti-
nent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty
mask, anhedonia.2s1
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick's main and famous key-
image is of a piano-string vibrating- a high D, it looks like -vibrating,
and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little
thumb comes into the.frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with
disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corn~rs, small and unlined,
clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the piano string the high sweet
sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. Later
in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following,
we're back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high
sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow,
as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath,
there's something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the
one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting
purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds
we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing
and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.
Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness
isn't the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a rem-
ora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain.
Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depres-
sion or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a dead-
ening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as
she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many
names- anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yev-
tuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression- but Kate Gompert,
down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we
know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature
but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that
pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the
cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and
animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and
antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates
around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an
almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which
means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert
describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double
bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency-
sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or
dying- are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate
Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clin-
ical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically
depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any
other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral
part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything
except that pain,282 a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any
other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting
her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It
is a hell for one.
The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel
especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two
people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric
current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric
current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The
screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the
outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable
amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically de-
pressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see
that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appro-
priate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are
undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit:
the current is both applied and received from within.
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself
doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that
life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems
suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a cer-
tain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will
eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake
about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a
great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing spec-
ulatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of
falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's
flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the
slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the
flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling
'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have
to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror
way beyond falling.
But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a 'Suicide
Contract' some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house makes her
sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person
only until the exact psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary
in the first place assert themselves, invisibly and indescribably. That the
well-meaning halfway-house Staff does not understand Its overriding terror
will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.
One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know
at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his
fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains -like from
Lionel Trains Inc., etc.- for which he erected incredibly intricate systems
of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife
brought photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and track into the
locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from
psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had
had no reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning
hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago
he had slipped on a patch of 3-In-1-brand oil from his model-train tracks
and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in
Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond
all human endurance, and stayed that way. He'd never once tried suicide,
though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His
wife was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She
was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass
when he was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job
and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when
the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was
some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They'd
tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake
Inhibitors,283 the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They'd scanned
his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not
even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases
of depression are beyond human aid. The man's case gave Kate Gompert the
howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and
building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feel-
ing anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond
her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man and
his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-
chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at
the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in
the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total except for the
sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the
man's head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming
for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.
The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a
place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurg-
ery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic sys-
tem, which is the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The
man's fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death
in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that
Kate guessed still gave the man's life enough meaning for him to hang onto
the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled
from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and
she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to
be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.
The couple had gotten Kate Gompert's mother's address and had sent
Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of
Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and wishing her all
available joy. Kate Gompert doesn't know whether Mr. Ernest Feaster's
limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The
Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives
on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of
times, which the present was not.
And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue:
Some psychiatric patients- plus a certain percentage of people who've
gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the
chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches
way down deep into the soul's core systems- these persons know firsthand
that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.' One kind is low-
grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia280 or simple melancholy. It's a
kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or
attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his
league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The
gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sud-
den to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife
and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden,
as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of
depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting
and ... well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic
state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff
that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and
take for granted as full and fleshy- happiness, joie de vivre, preference,
love- are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They
have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still
speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of
feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping
anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than
concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become sche-
mata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate,
but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA,
Unable To Identify.
It's worth noting that, among younger E.T.A.s, the standard take on Dr.
]. 0. Incandenza's suicide attributes his putting his head in the microwave
to this kind of anhedonia. This is maybe because anhedonia's often associ-
ated with the crises that afflict extremely goal-oriented people who reach a
certain age having achieved all or more than all than they'd hoped for. The
what-does-it-all-mean-type crisis of middle-aged Americans. In fact this is in
fact not what killed Incandenza at all. In fact the presumption that he'd
achieved all his goals and found that the achievement didn't confer meaning
or joy on his existence says more about the students at E.T.A. than it says
about Orin's and Hal's father: still under the influence of the deLint-like
carrot-and-stick philosophies of their hometown coaches rather than the
more paradoxical Schtittllncandenza/Lyle school, younger athletes who
can't help gauging their whole worth by their place in an ordinal ranking
use the idea that achieving their goals and finding the gnawing sense of
worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of psychic bogey, some-
thing that they can use to justify stopping on their way down to dawn drills
to smell flowers along the E.T.A. paths. The idea that achievement doesn't
automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstrac-
tion, rather like the prospect of their own death- 'Caius Is Mortal' and so
on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive carrot as the grail. They're
mostly going through the motions when they invoke anhedonia. They're
mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any sort of sub-16 exchange
you hear in the bathroom or food line: 'Hey there, how are you?' 'Number
eight this week, is how I am.' They all still worship the carrot. With the
possible exception of the tormented LaMont Chu, they all still subscribe to
the delusive idea that the continent's second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels
exactly twice as worthwhile as the continent's *4.
Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary.
It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally
happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small
children) know it's more invigorating to want than to have, it seems.
Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.
Hal lncandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put
his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove
Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn't because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal
himself hasn't had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since
he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in
rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy
everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human
being- but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his
troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril lncandenza believes she knows
him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that,
when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His
Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is
him, and this makes Hal feel'the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is
lonely.
It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennia! U.S.A. treat
anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of
the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness
or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by
world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger
people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool,
hip -and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and
cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so
Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No?
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great
transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once
we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit,
be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion.
A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at
a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of what-
ever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us
from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated na·ivete. Sentiment equals na-
ivete on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things
sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. 0. lncandenza's The
American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that
naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennia! America.
And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively,
it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz.
that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually
exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what
passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear
of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptual-
izes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and na'ive and goo-prone
and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile,
some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically
around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey
drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he
despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, inconti-
nent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty
mask, anhedonia.2s1
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick's main and famous key-
image is of a piano-string vibrating- a high D, it looks like -vibrating,
and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little
thumb comes into the.frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with
disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corn~rs, small and unlined,
clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the piano string the high sweet
sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. Later
in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following,
we're back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high
sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow,
as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath,
there's something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the
one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting
purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds
we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing
and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.
Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness
isn't the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a rem-
ora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain.
Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depres-
sion or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a dead-
ening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as
she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many
names- anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yev-
tuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression- but Kate Gompert,
down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we
know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature
but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that
pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the
cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and
animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and
antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates
around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an
almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which
means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert
describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double
bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency-
sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or
dying- are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate
Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clin-
ical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically
depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any
other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral
part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything
except that pain,282 a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any
other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting
her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It
is a hell for one.
The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel
especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two
people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric
current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric
current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The
screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the
outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable
amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically de-
pressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see
that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appro-
priate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are
undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit:
the current is both applied and received from within.
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself
doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that
life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems
suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a cer-
tain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will
eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake
about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a
great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing spec-
ulatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of
falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's
flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the
slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the
flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling
'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have
to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror
way beyond falling.
But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a 'Suicide
Contract' some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house makes her
sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person
only until the exact psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary
in the first place assert themselves, invisibly and indescribably. That the
well-meaning halfway-house Staff does not understand Its overriding terror
will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.
One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know
at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his
fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains -like from
Lionel Trains Inc., etc.- for which he erected incredibly intricate systems
of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife
brought photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and track into the
locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from
psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had
had no reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning
hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago
he had slipped on a patch of 3-In-1-brand oil from his model-train tracks
and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in
Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond
all human endurance, and stayed that way. He'd never once tried suicide,
though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His
wife was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She
was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass
when he was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job
and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when
the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was
some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They'd
tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake
Inhibitors,283 the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They'd scanned
his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not
even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases
of depression are beyond human aid. The man's case gave Kate Gompert the
howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and
building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feel-
ing anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond
her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man and
his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-
chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at
the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in
the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total except for the
sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the
man's head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming
for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.
The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a
place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurg-
ery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic sys-
tem, which is the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The
man's fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death
in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that
Kate guessed still gave the man's life enough meaning for him to hang onto
the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled
from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and
she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to
be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.
The couple had gotten Kate Gompert's mother's address and had sent
Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of
Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and wishing her all
available joy. Kate Gompert doesn't know whether Mr. Ernest Feaster's
limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The
Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives
on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of
times, which the present was not.
