The Fourth of Few

As you may have noticed, this place of being has been rather neglected over the past few months. All those thoughts that were promised to be given the care and attention they might deserve have been left to wither by the proverbial wayside. (Or more to the point, I rather hope, invested in other people and other places; so sorry to you two who actually read this. I still love you.)

This alarmingly immediate decline is perhaps, in part, (the other being --avert your eyes all those currently surveying my curriculum vitae for employability-- a humongous lack of Time Management Skills) because another place of being has been rather busy of late. In September I moved down to London; a move that I found rather more difficult than I'd anticipated. Mostly because I tend to vastly overestimate my capacity for adaptation. I'm not much of a city-dweller, see. I like to be able to see stars. It was fine for the first couple of months because I nipped back and forth from Sheffield to bridge the gap between myself and the magnificent people I've left there. But gradually, as these visits petered out, I came to realise that I actually LIVED in London rather than going on weekly holidays to the capital to see the sights, do a little studying and engage in general Good Times in the City. This was quite a shock. Another shock came in the course, which isn't entirely what I was expecting. Wonderful, but unexpectedly disorientating and intimidating. The long and the short of it: I have been busy. (yes, I did just learn how to put a link in, aren't I clever? Next thing I'll be EMBEDDING things.)

Anyway, I hope that is satisfactory in explaining why I've been so neglectful of you. --Gentle reader, please forgive me. Thanks.

A post in the near future will be on the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (not Wichtenstein, as I've been calling him for the past few weeks.) I want to formulate a few thoughts on him because, as you may have gathered from the previous, I know nothing of him. His name gets bandied about a lot on our course by students and tutors alike so I think it about time I made the effort to make his acquaintance.

But enough of the past and the future: on to the present!

We're just starting a new course: Down: Melancholy, Depression and Regeneration. I'm approaching this one with a degree of apprehension, despite being more than eager to be back in London, studying things. My anxiety stems, I think, from the extremes that talking about mental illness, especially depression, tends to elicit. I find it difficult when conversations swing wildly from sentimentalised complete avoidances to sweeping generalisations that suggest that people should bloody well stop feeling sorry for themselves and get out of the house more. I can't help but get frustrated: I remember a particular a conversation with a friend (one of my best) who was of the (a bit paraphrased) opinion that everybody gets sad and that people with depression essentially need to pull themselves together. I definitely find it difficult to talk and write about depression, never having experienced it myself. That's not to say I haven't been very sad, there have been times I've felt like I've been a bit teetering on the edge of something consuming that might be something of depression but it's (and I'm very grateful for this) always passed. I'm certain, though, if depression were a case of just getting out of bed that the people whose lives have been very much affected by it (whether directly or indirectly) would probably have worked that out by now and would be skipping out of bed each and every morning. But I'm quite sure it's not. I really think, at this moment at least, that I'd rather take a step back and just talk about the things I've been reading...This might be me affirming the continual avoidance that surrounds depression but I'd rather have a better think and say what I really mean rather than boshing something out unconsidered, like.

It's hardly surprising that melancholia elicits such extreme, and often oppositional, responses. Melancholia has been considered since the late Middle Ages to to have 'stood in some special relationship to Saturn, and that the latter was to blame for the melancholic's unfortunate character and destiny' (Klibansky, p. 127). Not that we believe any of that astrology gubbins any longer. Associated with black bile, Saturn and in turn Kronos, who is 'distinguished by a marked internal contradiction or ambivalence' (Klibansky, p. 134), melancholy has been the site of much conflict and, for Freud, ambivalence. Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia' was on our reading list for this week and, reading it, I was surprised at how compelling I found it, having read only The Interpretation of Dreams prior to this. And I'm not going to lie to you, I rather struggled and straggled through it, got thoroughly lost and eventually drowned in a bog. (Oh, I AM enjoying this!) Maybe it is time for a revisit. One of the things that surprised me most were the metaphors of economy and exchange invested in libidinal attachment and energy. I suppose it's a metaphor that makes sense, and is easy to understand but I help shake that it goes somewhat deeper. Although obviously Freud could not have predicted the pharmaceutical  companies' profiteering their ways through mental illness, but it rings quite soundly. Freud seems to figure libidinal energy or attachment as entropic: when replacing a lost love-object, in normal mourning, the severance of the libidinal attachment is 'so slow and gradual that by the time it has been finished the expenditure of energy necessary for it is also dissipated'. Dr Ronald Pies, I have read today, suggests that 'we might say that depression is to sorrow as falling is to leaping'. To me this seems, again, to be verging on an entropy of mental health, which I think, though I'm not sure, is troubling. The inherent negativity of falling --down, descent-- and all its connotation --hell, lessness,-- is set up in direct dialectic with its opposite, leaping (up, ascent, heaven), which is inherently (though years of semiotic build-up) positive. All of the latter require energy to be put into the system in order for them to occur, suggesting an excess, a surplus and, consequently, strength and betterness. Falling is more passive, easier, requiring less or no energy input into the system (in a system where gravity happens) and is so considered weaker somehow. That depression is associated with this more passive, entropic (yes, I'm quite sure that's not an adjective, and even if it is I'm not quite using it correctly. Well, I'm the one with the keybard and the 'Publish' button.) notion of existence perhaps accounts for the idea that people should just pull themselves together.

This has been rather hurried and cobbled. The next one, I promise, will have much more strength and betterness.