by Mark Doty
Despair is, in a way, an appropriate response to the world; how else to face the corrosive power of time, how else to accommodate the brevity and frailty of the self?
Life without an element of despair in it would seem an empty enterprise, a shallow little song-and-dance on the surface of experience. Despair has about it a bracing sense of actuality. Emily Dickinson says, darkly:
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true—
Even if it were possible for the psychopharmacologist to engineer our chemical workings away from the experience of despairing, it wouldn’t seem wise to do so; what good is a happiness founded on denial? The capacity for despair is probably equivalent to the ability to experience joy; such depths in the self are required in order to make possible the mounting of the heights.
But despair and depression, of course, are not the same thing. Depression is nearly always the consequence of despair, a despair one cannot feel one’s way through in order to emerge from the other side, a despair that will not be moved. Sometimes such pain—perhaps especially when it has been known for a long time, and all one’s resources are used up, depleted—takes hold in the self; it becomes the climate in which we operate, a daily weather. Depression—simply the state of being exhausted by despair?—takes up residence in the desk drawer, the pile of shoes at the bottom of the closet, last night’s unwashed dishes tumbled in the sink. Despair is sharp, definite, forceful; it is a response to experience. Depression accumulates, pools, sighs, settles in; it is the absence of a response. It does not make things move. Consider our tropes for it: a cloud, a shadow, a weight. It lingers, broods, sits heavily; it replaces the sharpness of grief (which no one can bear to feel for very long) with the muffling emptiness of fog. Except that I love fog, with its veils and secrets, its lusters and atmospheres. Depression, more precisely, is a kind of dirty haze, and dims everything without adding mystery. It obviates the possibility of surprise. It slows and conceals and stills the circulation of the air.
I’m going to the library, on a spectacularly fine September morning. It’s the second day of my new fellowship there, a period of support that will allow me to work on a book, granting me a sustained time to read and think and compose. I’m a little nervous about joining this new community in an unfamiliar setting, which is why I decide I will go ahead and take the train uptown to Forty-second Street, despite the smoking hole in the top of the north tower, that strange, distant shape visible from my intersection on Sixth Avenue. I call Paul on my cell phone. He’s home, drinking coffee in our new apartment on Sixteenth Street, getting ready for a faculty meeting at Sarah Lawrence, nervous about his new teaching job—we’re both a little wound up about starting something new. I say maybe he’d want to come down to the corner and see.
At the library, everyone’s gathered around a computer monitor, watching the BBC news, which has a live camera trained on the towers and is broadcasting the scene over the Web, and that’s when the second plane flies into the south tower, and everyone in the room understands that the world we inhabit has changed. On the screen, a pixilated image of the smoking columns of glass and steel. Word of other planes still in the air. Attacks in Washington, in L.A., what else is coming?
And then, one of the twin images on the screen begins, it seems, to consume itself, from the top down, the smoke billowing out only a little before it is sucked down into the great earthward rush and roar. Well, no roar, on the computer screen: a silent, shimmery column of smoke climbs down itself, in a few seconds’ time.
Unthinkable thing.
I try to call Paul, but the phone only buzzes; the entire city of New York is trying to make sure somebody’s okay, ask what on earth is happening, make a plan, figure out how to get home. The contained city that is the great library at Forty-second and Fifth is pouring out the doors of the building, into the greater pour of people filling the streets. Already the entries to the trains are closed, nothing running.
Even people, bless them, are not running, as if it has been tacitly agreed upon that what is required now is any semblance of order we can make. We will exit Midtown together, get out of here without harming each other. Did someone say get away from the shadow of the Empire State Building? A great mass of humanity is walking down the sidewalks of Sixth Avenue, where I come to understand something I’d never imagined about the end of the world.
Apocalypse is narrated, continuously, seemingly endlessly; narration surrounds and encompasses, in layers of sound. People on cell phones—those that still work—are describing what they see, what’s in front of them, giving their version of the news. Television sets have been dragged to storefront windows, and the talking heads are delivering their reports while the images of the towers flicker and change. There’s a car pulled over by the curb, with its doors open and the radio on loud. People are talking to each other, reciting the versions they know. Someone’s talking on a payphone, then stopping to repeat whatever he’s hearing to the people gathered around; the news is coming through headsets and boomboxes, repeated and called out. To move down this sidewalk is to be caught up in a desperate symphonic layering of talk, reportage, certainty, speculation, questions.
Which ends, at Thirty-fourth Street, as I am in the middle of the intersection, at a spot where you can see down the avenue the blunt shape of the north tower, which suddenly seems to descend itself in that same implosion of smoke. Everyone stops moving. I have my hand over my heart, involuntarily; some people have their hands over their mouths; all at once, it’s completely quiet.
The Wind didn’t come from the Orchard—today—
Further than that—
And if that wind flings a steeple?
There, when I open the apartment door, are Paul and Arden—did I think they’d be somewhere else? It’s a solid, startling relief, the embrace, and then, of course, we start tumbling out the telling of what we’ve seen.
Our place is so new there’s hardly anything in it—a round wooden table, two chairs, a block-patterned needlepoint rug, all black and gold. Our voices echo. No television yet. We don’t know that this morning, the air over the sidewalks on West Street was filled with a mist of blood, from those who leapt from the towers. We don’t know how many perished, don’t know if the hospital we hear they’ve set up on the West Side piers will fill with the wounded. Don’t know, don’t know. We decide we should buy groceries, the first thing people do when a panic begins; much of New York, those who’ve made it home, are quickly occupied with stacking canned goods squarely between ourselves and apocalypse. We fill up gallon jugs with water. We listen to the radio. In the afternoon, we go out to Sixth Avenue; our gym’s become a rest station for people exhausted from walking. Down the block, there’s a corner restaurant that never closes, not even for the end of the world. Everybody there seems plainly grateful for coffee, a sandwich, something vaguely normal. Except for one couple, European kids in stylishly battered clothes, who complain about the restaurant being out of whipped cream. The waiter responds, “Do you know New York was attacked today?”
Back home, we listen to the strange sonic texture of the streets: first, endless sirens, then the traffic slows and stills. So many people walking, walking home, walking downtown to look for someone—by evening, there is no sound at all but the voices and footsteps of people walking by. And then, eventually, not even that. Utter quiet.
The next day, trucks begin to rumble and fly up Eighth Avenue, in the wrong direction, carrying rubble from downtown; they’re hauling stuff away as they look for survivors or bodies. The trucks are uncovered; a white ash blows out of them in clouds, a grit that coats the street, our faces and hair. Ash of—what all, exactly? The trucks blare sirens, to warn anyone out of the way, the sound Arden hates most besides gunshots, and I’m grateful he’s grown a little hard of hearing, though not enough, it seems, to allay his anxiety.
Anxiety that gets worse, over the coming days, how could it not? When the wind’s right, I can smell, myself, the smoke of w
hat the reporters on our new television—we’ve hurried out to find one, needing, with the rest of the world, to watch the images of our pierced city on the endlessly repetitive news—now call Ground Zero. How long will it burn? Arden can surely smell the nuances and dimensions of what seems to me the scent of burnt plastic. Can he feel not just our nerves but the city’s great human unease?
The faces of the missing appear on mailboxes, phone booths, lampposts, walls, shop windows. At Saint Vincent’s Hospital on Seventh Avenue, they fill an entire corner, and the crowds stand to read them. In the Union Square subway station, the white-tile walls are a gallery. We start to recognize particular faces. There are identifying details, sometimes oddly intimate things—a birthmark on a thigh, a hidden tattoo—announced in the texts. The faces themselves are copied, reproduced endlessly, growing further from the original but weirdly more poignant, the more they’re duplicated, the longer they’re posted.
Every rumble, shadow of a plane. Every shout in the street. Of course, we’re shook to the quick. We’ve taken water and sports drinks, cash, and supplies to the spots where one can donate things; we’ve gone to Union Square for the vigils that are beginning to be held there, but other than that we feel helpless and immobilized. We are afraid of more attacks, afraid of the response our own nation will make, afraid of the repercussions of the day, the ramifications.
Ramification is one of those words that we’ve almost forgotten is a metaphor—it means, literally, branching, consequences of an event branching out from their source. Already we know 9/11 will branch into so many aspects of our lives, into the culture of this country and of the world, in ways we can’t even begin to see. We wish that some of those ramifications might involve an understanding of what it has been to live in most of the rest of the world, a clearer sense of how America is seen and what we have wrought. We wish the event itself might be understood in part as a consequence of fundamentalism, a position that chokes off empathy and discourse, stands in the way of community, both abroad and at home. But we’re afraid, of course, of where the other branches of that morning will lead.
Sometimes the subway train just stops, and it’s dark for a few seconds, and a cold panic seizes my breath till the lights come on. From my desk in my cubicle at the library—I have my own, fluorescently lit, glass-enclosed space, with Venetian blinds to close for privacy—I can feel the distant rumble of the subway beneath Bryant Park, and when that shaking begins, I hold on to my desk every time, my heart racing a little before I remember what it is. A panic that doesn’t really fade until the rumbling ends and I’m sure that it was just the subway again.
Despair: how else to accommodate history? Our new millennium began, and it seemed a little bit possible—though surely if we examined the thought too closely, it would evaporate—that a brighter time might be ahead; we have, after all, the round, clean slate of the new number, the row of zeros after the initial digit in 2000. Then the airplanes fly into the great towers, and suddenly it seems that either the twentieth century never ended, with its absurdity of violence, its wild divisions between the privileged and the damned—or else the new isn’t a fresh-scrubbed site of possibility after all, but simply an opportunity for a further turning toward brutality, for any sense of civility to further erode.
Arden—like how many citizens of New York City?—has episodes of what seems to be panic. He sits and looks at us, panting, and slaps at the floor with a paw, and won’t stop. He wanders, breathing heavily, and sometimes gets in a corner of the apartment, his head against the wall, and just stands there. We wonder if something’s happened, back during the days of his high fever, something in his brain? We wonder if it’s the smell in the air, the anxiety thrumming in the atmosphere. We try to console him, calm him down. Brushing and soothing helps a little. When we go out, he behaves destructively. There’s a set of andirons near the fireplace, which swing if he butts them with his head, and he knocks at them till they fall over. And the heavy folding screen we’ve put in front of the radiator—one day, he must have butted at that, too, as we come home and find it flat on the floor. Lucky, he’s not underneath it.
Then there’s anthrax; threats about the mail, fear of mass poisoning. One day, Paul and I go downtown, just because we’ve heard that the businesses open there are utterly languishing, starving for customers; we’re going to do our bit. On the train, we notice that someone has actually sprinkled white powder all over the bench opposite us. People start to sit down, notice it, then walk away.
But, pretty soon, someone else comes along, sets down a shopping bag, starts to move away, then thinks better of it, sighs, sits down. Soon a whole line of travelers and commuters seem collectively to have decided, The hell with it. We’re sitting in the goddamned white powder, spores or no. This is New York City—and before you know it the whole car is laughing.
At the library, I close myself in my cubicle, close the blinds, and turn the big, humming computer on. I read my mail. I write long, detailed e-mails, working for as long as I can. Then I’m done. In a little while, I have my head down on the desk. Outside my door, I hear my colleagues arguing politics, discussing the news. I might go over to my friend Andrea’s cubicle, where she is busily not working on her novel. Maybe I’ll take a walk, go out for coffee. Maybe lie down on the floor between the desk and the wall, even if it feels a little foolish, to be resting there where I’m supposed to be working, where I’m lucky enough to have the privilege to work. Every now and then, I think about the treasures in the building around me, which seem far away somehow, the books I don’t have the energy to read. My mood settles around me, a wool coat that seems to grow heavier with the months in which I accomplish very little—and then, since the coat is too heavy to allow movement, accomplish nothing at all.
Entr’acte
Serotonin
At a writers’ conference, I’m speaking on a panel on writers and therapy. At the question-and-answer time—which is, of course, more typically the make-a-statement period—the usual folderol is being tossed about: how writers shouldn’t have therapy because it might “interfere with the source of their creativity.” “Listen,” I want to say, “can you imagine running out of conflicts? Are you serious?” Then someone stands up and says the alarming and predictable thing: “Well, if van Gogh had medication, we wouldn’t have all those masterpieces, would we?”
I can’t help but reply, “I think we’d have a lot more of them.”
Which, I guess, is a way of saying that a little serotonin reuptake inhibitor seems to have saved my life. It became clear, in those dire days of dragging myself to the library, that I couldn’t get out of the slump by myself. And truly I don’t care if this is the placebo effect at work or not, the moment when suddenly I feel a change: I’m standing at an intersection on Eighth Avenue, waiting for the WALK sign, and I feel a shiver up my spine, and the sudden impulse to hold my head up, to stand up straight—how long has it been? And something within me looks around at the world and says, “Oh, right, here I am.”
Do I look a little like the lost Arden, called back to himself when those benevolent strangers called his name?
Here, on a low dose of Celexa, turns out not to be a muffled place at all—rather I am able to feel highs and lows instead of that self-protective interior cloudiness that keeps everything dim, turned down, because the low is just too dangerous to admit. The drug is neither a numbing dose of bliss nor escape from conflict, by any means. Those who’ve needed and benefited from SSRIs understand that they do something else, which is to provide a kind of platform, figuratively, on which the psyche can stand; they keep you from sinking to an untenable depth. If Dickinson felt when “a Plank in Reason, broke”—then serotonin seems to be what puts that plank back in place underneath us, that bit of safety. Which isn’t to say you aren’t then sad, or overwhelmed by the world—only that you are capable of feeling something besides numb. The right dose means I’m out of the joyless pit, that I can go back to feeling what Freud called “ordinary
misery.”
All my life, I’ve possessed a certain buoyancy, an ability, in difficulty, not to be held under, to rise back up—my head above the waters, like Mr. Beau swimming the Great Salt Lake. But now that seems to have deserted me. Age? Exhaustion? Something as apparently simple as the death of a golden dog? It seems a miracle to find some version of that spirit of lightness in a small, pink, ovoid tablet.
To that, to that marvel, all praise and gratitude.
And if, in fact, we didn’t have so many van Goghs? The painter himself, given the choice, might well have preferred to live.
Chapter Thirteen
West Forty-sixth Street is the outer edge of the theater district, slightly on the skids, permanently referring to a brighter past. But energetic, nonetheless: these old brownstones have been hollowed and tunneled into piano bars and cabaret rooms, and in their intricate warrens persists the stuff of another moment. We thread our way through the fizz and bustle on the street, taxis arriving, steam funneling up out of a hole in the pavement, dissipating in shreds in the air like bursts of stage fog. Barkers hawk their shows, and glossy photographs of singers are glassed in little boxes, surrounded by strings of lights. No one seems to pay any attention to any of them.
Paul and I have come to see an old-fashioned drag performance, a man who becomes Judy Garland, late on Saturday nights, in a basement cabaret. Through the padded black vinyl doors, we enter a narrow, extremely loud piano bar, packed with people practically shouting the lyrics to some old party tune. They seem to be working alarmingly hard to have fun, and it’s a relief to wind our way out of their jostle to the dim hall at the back that leads to the cabaret room. We’re asked by a slight, fey man behind the red velvet rope, who might be the ancient keeper of a temple, if we have a reservation, but our lack of one doesn’t seem to be a problem. We’re led to a table right near the front, and seated inches from two women in similar black pantsuits and elaborate blond coiffures. Somehow, they remind me of a pair of chandeliers; it must be the sculptural upsweep of the hair combined with their high degree of collective sparkle: rings, pins, sequins, necklaces. The friends are ablaze, their eyes lit by cocktails. I notice the one beside me is wearing black silk pants embroidered with dozens of tiny martini glasses.