Storied Mind

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A friend sends out a poetry email every Monday, and here’s what he sent this week.

Pablo Neruda, toward the end of his life, was invited to read in Caracas, Venezuela, in the great national theater there.

The theater was filled with people celebrating him as the icon and the conscience and the voice of much of Latin culture.

He read for quite a long time, then asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to hear?”

Someone raised their hand and said, “Would you please read the last love poem in the book Twenty Love Songs and A Song of Despair?”

He said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t bring that with me” (a book published in 1924 when he was 20 years old.)

Then 400 people stood up and recited the poem to him.

What a culture to have the voice of the poet in the hearts of so many people!

The poem filling the theater that night follows.

—————–

TONIGHT I CAN WRITE

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, “The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

by Pablo Neruda, from Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair,
translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin, 1969.
Caracas story from interview with Jack Kornfield.

Just a note to let you know that I’m starting a series about men and depression at Health Central’s depression site.

I know it’s controversial to talk about differences in the way men and women experience depression. It’s always easy to let stereotypes take over. But the influence of social roles seems to me inescapable, although it’s an overlay on so many other characteristics of each individual.

Let me know what you think – and have a look at the comments too. They bring out a number of additional points.

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(Note: This is adapted from an unfinished novel of long ago that turned out to be a lot more therapy than fiction. I’ve changed the writing a little so it will make sense without its earlier context.)

Depression takes away of lot of life. I’ve been so lost I felt no strength to stop it and no method to uncover a buried self. Everything alive was invisible, all I could see were dead ends, all my failings and uselessness. And there was no hope, no realistic belief that I would ever get out of this despair. No way, that is, except in dreams. And that’s the worst trap of all. Down with dreams – at least, depression’s dreams.

I’ve had a phony dream of becoming myself again, of recovering the whole person I once was. But what does that mean? My golden age? I never had one. Depression is my heritage. I grew up with it. I’ve always lived with it. Sure, I’ve had my years when I outran it for a while – thank God for those years! But it’s always caught up again. I’ve never been completely free of it, so who’s this great person I think I can recover? That’s one kind of dream – imagining my future will resemble a past that never was.

But there’s another one, worse because it pushed my misery onto everyone else. That was the dream of filling up this emptiness by becoming someone I never was, trying a career I didn’t really want because it would justify my staying alive. I’d fix everything by showing the world what I could do – and I did. I worked hard and did pretty well – for a while. But I was still the hollow man, all feeling blunted, convinced I had only pulled off a trick, a successful illusion that everyone found so believable. I knew better. Depression never went away. Read the rest of this entry »

Sherwin Nuland is the best-selling author of How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter and many other books. As he says in this video, he had never before disclosed the experience behind the spiritual dimensions of his writing until presenting this talk at the TED Conference in 2001. Everyone’s reaction will differ, of course, but for me this is one of the most moving stories of recovery I’ve ever heard.

I want to offer a caution or two. In the first part of the video, Nuland sketches a quick history of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and the many earlier treatments that stimulated convulsions as a way of shocking people out of mental illness. ECT elicits strong reactions from many, including me. He doesn’t disclose up front where he’s going with that overview of the technology, but at 7:14 minutes in, he starts the story that puts ECT into the setting of his own devastating depression. If you prefer, you can jump to that point in the video, though it’s well worth it to hear about ECT from a point of view you may not agree with.

Given the short-attention span the internet encourages, this is a longer video than most you see on blogs. It’s worth 22 minutes of your time. But the length also means it takes a while to download, and it’s much faster if you click on the You Tube logo, at the lower right corner, and watch it there.

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I’m blogging twice a month now at MyDepressionConnection.com, one of the many sites at Health Central devoted to specific problems.

Here’s where you can find my posts. They’ve seen fit to dub me a Depression Expert, which sounds fine, but it’s still just me without any gilded initials after my name.

I’d like to give a huge thank you to the wonderful blogger who signs in as Merely Me. She’s the Community Leader at the depression site and the person responsible for getting me over there.

I hope you’ll drop by for a visit.

If you would like to subscribe to my posts, you’ll have to register for the links to work. Then go to Meet our Depression Experts page. Scroll down to my box, and you’ll find an RSS button and an email subscription link.

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So that was Christmas … and what have you done … It happens every December, the moods of so many darken in the midst of the season of joy, and bloggers write about how to survive the holidays. Depression is the Grinch who wraps for you a perverse present of guilt.

It feels so wrong to be lost in the isolation of this illness and yet so impossible to match the glow and warmth that seem to be everywhere. So guilt tops off the other miseries. All the more reason to look for help – what can I do just to get through this?

The season seems to concentrate both happiness and sadness, the way a magnifying glass focuses sunlight in a tight pattern so hot that it can start a fire. But in depression, it’s darkness, not light, that is intensified, and the fire is cold.

Now, I’m going to say some things here that might sound at first like I’m rubbing it in, making you and me feel even worse and guiltier than ever about being so out of it. I don’t mean to get too far removed from the reality of not even wanting to get out of bed or the misery of being completely alone.

The fact is I’ve felt comfort in a time of reminders that life keeps coming back, no matter how ugly the mood or how much I’ve thought about cutting out of a life I believe is hopeless. I’m trying to get at the fallback, the base of being human, whether I know it or not, believe it or not, or even feel certain I’ll never really be part it. For me it’s the start of finding purpose in staying alive.

Everything comes together, from the cosmic to the personal, and people are telling me it’s all about hope and renewal – even salvation. There’s the universe’s freebie of the winter solstice. The sun itself starts coming back from its annual decline. Light and life are renewing. Whether or not I’m a believer, the message of all faiths is not just happiness but joy – they say there’s hope from the spiritual world.

Family bonds are celebrated – at least symbolically – through feasting and gifts. And there is that unmistakable feeling of expectancy and energy that flows through crowds and is felt at no other time of year. In that atmosphere, most people feel the personal hope that things can be better in the new year.

But then there we are, the depressed ones, even more self-conscious than usual about not being able to share all the good news.…Another year over … and a new one just begun. Read the rest of this entry »