The Limits of My Language E-Book

Eva Meijer

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A beautiful and moving study of depression, in which the author draws on her personal experience of mental illness as well as her deep knowledge of philosophy, to show the issue in a new light Much has been written about the treatment of depression, but relatively little about its meaning. In this strikingly original book, Eva Meijer weaves her own experiences and the insight of thinkers from Freud to Foucault and Woolf into a moving and incisive evocation of the condition. She explores how depression can make us grow out of shape over time, like a twisted tree, how we can sometimes remould ourselves in conversation with others, and how to move on from our darkest thoughts. The Limits of My Language is both a razor-sharp analysis of depression and a steadfast search for the things great and small - from philosophy and art to walking a dog or sitting quietly with a cat - that make our lives worth living.

Leseprobe

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THE LIMITSOF MY LANGUAGE

EVA MEIJER

Translated from the Dutch by Antoinette Fawcett

PUSHKIN PRESS

CONTENTS

Title PageIntroduction 1:On the seeping away of colour and death at the dinner table: a brief history2:On crooked trees and the shaping of the soul3:On healing and the benefits of madness4:On the wisdom of my feet and the memory-body5:On steadfastness and rooting yourself in the world: by way of a conclusion NotesAbout the PublisherCopyright

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INTRODUCTION

An ending. An encasing, a world within a world (a self inside a self), thoughts that thrust themselves into a nest of other thoughts and ruthlessly push out their healthy foster-brothers and sisters (like baby cuckoos), an everpresent shadow (even in the light), a confirmation, a truth, an illusion, heavy sand where the shore turns to sea, a fungus that manages to worm its spores into everything, static noise, fading away, a greyness that sucks up every colour, until all that’s left is the memory of colour.

Depression is like mourning, and mourning can cause depression. It’s like grief and fear, too, generic terms for what happens when you lose something, or are afraid of losing something; for when you fall, or have already fallen. But depression is also different: it’s coupled to another kind of loss—the loss of reality. Life-changing events make you see the world differently—when you fall in love, you gain a whole new world; when you lose someone, you lose a 8world too—and such events can make you feel that you’re a completely different person. Yet you’re still involved in the world; you’re rooted in it, even if you can’t recognize it for the time being. You’re still yourself. But depression makes you doubt the connection between yourself and the world: it’s not only that you no longer feel at home in it, but also that you realize there’s no such thing as a safe place, a home. Depression can affect your brain and the meaning of your life, like a rot eating into your days. After the first episode of depression you have a more-than-average chance of a second episode, and after two periods of depression it’s more likely than not that you’ll get depressed again, and in this way it can become a part of your life.

Around the end of 2017, during an argument, my partner chided me for being sad so often. This surprised me, because I didn’t feel particularly sad at that point: the melancholy that goes along with my life was there, but not more than usual. And I certainly wasn’t depressed. I’m absolutely sure about that because for part of my life I have been depressed. Not long after the argument I read a book in which the writer, someone who has a physical disability, said very clearly that she wouldn’t want to live without it, and I wondered what my own take on this was. For a long time I thought my life wasn’t worth living because the unhappiness often weighed so much more 9than the happiness. I don’t mean that there’s never been any beauty in my life—the opposite, in fact—but for a good part of it my spirits have been well below par. That is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. At the same time, the experience has enriched my view of the world and I’ve developed a good work ethic. I live inside my work. I don’t know if depression has given me more empathy and imagination, and made me more sensitive: it could also be that these qualities preceded the depression, and that they are a part of the cause. At any rate, these events set me thinking.

This essay is the result: a brief philosophical investigation into depression, in which I use my own experiences as material. This is not so I can lay myself completely bare, without holding back a single detail, as Rousseau says he will do at the beginning of his Confessions. I don’t want to make a completely faithful picture of my own life up to this point, or to create a self-portrait; I’m using my life as a lens to investigate the structure and significance of depression. This is just a fraction of all I could say about myself (and deeds that are put into words always diverge from the underlying events). Nevertheless, depression is an important aspect of my life, and something that has strongly shaped me.

I don’t think that a better understanding of what depression is can cure people. But it does have value. 10Depression is more than a chemical problem—the questions that occupy someone with depression are fundamentally human, and they touch on other philosophical questions that concern language, autonomy, power relations, loneliness, and the relationship between body and mind. But this essay is also about the other side, such as animals, trees, others, art: about consolation, and hope, and the things that can give life meaning.

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1

On the seeping away of colour and death at the dinner table: a brief history

May 1994 was unusually warm and sunny, as I remember it.1 My classmates sat around on the grass every break time, making daisy chains and playing the guitar—the world glowed and life was full of promise. But as they skipped merrily through life, each step I took made me sink further and further into deep, invisible mud. It was as if the force of gravity was too strong, as if the earth was dragging me under. I was fourteen and that feeling of bleakness was something I’d long known.

On my eighth birthday, for example, one of my aunts took me to a toyshop where I could choose a present for myself. I picked a plush dog in a basket, which had little puppies with it. I thought it was really sweet, but at the same time I had the feeling that I hadn’t chosen well, 12that I should have picked something more sensible. My birthday wasn’t pleasant; there was an argument, and a strange grey atmosphere crept into the day. I sensed something wasn’t right—so how could other people pretend it was? That feeling kept coming and going throughout my childhood, until that month of May when it came into the foreground and pushed other things further and further back.

May turned to June and everything grew greyer, like in a cartoon film in which colour gradually seeps from the surroundings until everything is black and white. Then, in the black and white that followed, the contrast faded: the white became less clear and finally the grey just bled into grey. The world around me became a different world, in which things wouldn’t simply turn out well, in which it was actually more likely that they’d never turn out well again. While my body was being taken over by that weight, my thoughts clumped around a single theme: it would be better if I didn’t exist. For many years afterwards I detested May, the smell of spring, the green and the growth, and I still don’t feel happy at the first signs of summer—unlike some people, I can’t look forward to what is on the way.

Around that time I first read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea,2 in which the main character, Roquentin, has exactly the same feeling of pointlessness. I found it a very frightening book. It was as if what I was feeling, and what Sartre 13described, touched on a barren truth, a desolation, which now that I’d discovered it would never go away. For Sartre, that barrenness isn’t purely bad: it’s also the starting point of freedom. According to him human beings aren’t simply bodies, we are also consciousnesses, and to rise above our physical situatedness we must confront the absurdity and emptiness of existence. This shouldn’t be camouflaged with the idea of a god, the illusion of consolation, or by wanting to fulfil other people’s wishes: you have to will yourself free. It is by making your own choices and taking responsibility for them that you can achieve self-realization. But I didn’t know about that freedom then. I read about Roquentin doing his historical research in the library, about his increasing sense of alienation and his consequent realization that this has nothing to do with him, but is simply what the world is like. His nausea is not a reaction to random events, but is a symptom of his growing understanding of existence. Those who believe in goodness and beauty, like the Autodidact, who is often in the library as well, are simply naïve and gullible. And we’ll find nothing behind the bad things; don’t fool yourself.

Teenagers and existentialists understand something true, something bleak about life. Perhaps children don’t live in a safe world—it is already the real world, a world where cats are killed by cars, animals are eaten, and other children experience war (or they themselves, in many parts 14of the world)—but often they haven’t yet acquired the hardness of adults, or the habituation of the adult to that hardness. Their world is magical and alive, everything is still possible. For the adolescent, however, the world presents itself with full force. Falling in love for the first time can create a sense of limitlessness; feeling is something that flows out from you, in every direction. Life’s lack of meaning can present itself in this way too: this is how it is, this is the truth about life, and everyone who simply enjoys it is labouring under an illusion.

I thought things would never get better, that I’d always feel that way, and in addition to the various feelings of guilt I had, I was constantly thinking about death. Death, my own death, acquired a shape in those days, like a shadow that was always at my side. My plans weren’t concrete, but at the same time they were constantly present. I talked about it, with my friends and at school, and with various therapists who thought that things would sort themselves out. In those days I liked wearing bright clothes and that was one of the reasons why I wasn’t taken seriously by all the different psychologists and psychiatrists I consulted. One of them literally wrote that it couldn’t be all that bad, because I was wearing a green woolly hat with a butterfly on it, instead of just wearing black, and anyway, according to him, I was gifted in all sorts of ways. I drank a lot, skipped school and argued with my teachers, and 15I sang. That all helped a little, and just managed to carry me through the days. I didn’t have the feeling I was ill: I thought I was bad, and the things I did were aimed at getting rid of that feeling, or setting it aside. Night after night, I sat by the window smoking roll-ups and listening to music, while I wrote poems and songs, and letters, which I sometimes burnt. Everything whirled around a chasm: this is how it is, I am alone here, everything I do is wrong—and then again.

Philosophical and concrete suicide

In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus wonders whether understanding that life is meaningless should necessarily lead to suicide.3,4 According to him this question, whether or not we should commit suicide, is the fundamental philosophical problem. Life is chaotic and arbitrary and absurd: we ask, and the world is unreasonably silent; it does not give us the meaning or purpose we long for. You could respond to this by believing in a god who has shaped the universe in his or her own image and invested it with order and purpose. Or you can accept that life is meaningless and make the leap into death, because its lack of meaning makes life not worth living. There is, 16however, a third option: to embrace absurdity. In a world in which absurdity prevails we, as humans, can choose to confront the absurd, as well as the contradiction it brings: wanting to fight against it, wanting to break free from it, although this is also absurd. If we do this, then suicide isn’t the solution, but rather choosing to live as broadly and richly as possible: like Don Juan, who pursues his passions pointlessly, but with whole-hearted conviction; like the actor who lives through countless human lives; like the artist who doesn’t attempt to give meaning to absurdity, but represents it exactly as it is.

Camus is right, of course, when he argues that we should embrace absurdity. That life is absurd is also a source of joy, and humour is one of our best weapons against its lack of meaning. But this is also one of the areas where things can go wrong when you’re depressed: you can no longer appreciate the value of that absurdity, or its fun. Relationships lose their meaning, and so does art; you become cut off from yourself and from the world. I had good friends during my first depression, who knew what was happening to me, but that didn’t help at all, because I thought I’d finally understood that I was alone and that was why I really was alone. My thoughts isolated me. And everything was grey; I was completely grey, just a husk for the feeling I had. No one else could see that everything was grey now, or how I really was—anything sweet that 17others did for me only confirmed my own self-hatred. And there wasn’t any prospect of things changing. Sometimes my mother would say that your school days are the best days of your life.