I only know how bad a depressive episode has been when I emerge from it.
In the last two months, I receded into a physcial cave setting-- one of almost full sensory deprivation, social isolation, self-hatred, writer's block, and a bitter anti-establishment attitude to justify it all.
When people claim to be prisoners of their own mind, I say that's the understatment of the century in terms of a major depressive episode.
Something in my brain blocks my ability to feel any kind of sensory pleasure. The best way to describe it is to say that everything looks, smells, sounds and tastes the same. I could be eating road grit or duck confit and would experience no more pleasure from either of them.
Yesterday I used an in-shower moisturizer that smells like vanilla musk, and for the first time in weeks, though I'd used it failthfully a priori, I could actually smell it-- that is, it pleased me when it entered my nostrils, and moreso that it was all over my skin.
I once saw an episode of "60 Minutes" where they profiled a new kind of depression therapy where doctors actually physically put a probe into the brain and tinkered with the frontal lobe. The woman was kept awake, was a major depressive, and when certain parts of her brain were stimulated, she nearly exploded with wonder that she was noticing "the color of things (!)", which had been there all along.
Similarly, I watched a prison special on MSNBC not long ago where a man who'd been incarcerated for over thirty years was released. The cameras followed him to his mother's home, to where he returned, and he delighted in the wonderful colors of a modest dwelling and the different-sized rooms of the house (something normally inconsequential) because he'd been in a place where the spaces were all equally sized and colored various shades of stone, and everyone wore the same outfit-- either orange jumpsuit or guard uniform.
This all reminded me that in many areas of nature there is the same kind of spatial congruity as in a prison-- the linear recurrences in beehives and seashell spirals for instance, the formula for which is called the Golden Ratio in mathematics, reduced further to the Greek symbol "phi." There are innumerable examples of symmetry in leaf patterns and in the human body.
Still, difference is how we define everything in this life, from the different ancient symbols on cave walls to the platforms of our elected leaders. Alphabets are each a closed world ruled by a unique pattern of differentiation. I've understood and believed this since I first read de Saussure and Derrida as an undergrad. It seems to me that nature's propensity is toward order and uniformity-- the rough opposite of difference, because where there's similitude there's no difference.
So what is that state which exists completely outside of difference? During my depressive stint, as always, I devoured books on varying opinions regarding that question. The Buddists believe it's enlightenment. Eckhart Tolle calls it simply "Being." For me, though, it seems to be...depression.
The kind of dependence we have on symbols and difference would be the kind of attachment which the Buddists claim one must fully shake to leave the realm of suffering and to maintain the highest state of peace and oneness with the universe. Why is it that when my brain chemicals rob me of my sense of difference, the opposite happens to me? Why do I feel like I'm in jail, or in hell?
At one point during my depressive episode, a good friend called and asked me what it was, why do I feel so bad, and all I could answer was, "I'm dead. I feel like I'm dead."
If symbology and structuralism and difference are all man-made mental constructs, why is it that when I'm forced into a seemingly natural in-difference (a la Derrida), I suffer terribly?
My first answer, the obvious answer, would throw the blame on society. As soon as I lose my sense of difference I can no longer function in a milieu which depends upon it.
Then I turn on the news channels and observe the Democratic primary race. The party is damned near split down the middle over the two candidates, and much time is spent trying to ferret out (mostly insignificant) differences between the two. "Vote for us," says the Clinton campaign, "because we don't have an 'anti-American' church Pastor." "Vote for us," says the Obama campaign, "because we've been unwavering in our dissent toward the Iraq War."
Like alphabets, politics is just another closed world dependent on difference for definition, and with a code all its own. In the same way and in a sense, I think that's completely unnatural.
I do not care about Senator Obama's affiliation with Rev. Dr. Wright. I believe what Wright said in the Moyers interview was correct-- I'm unable to find the excerpt quote at the moment-- that essentially Wright and Obama are speaking to different audiences.
Wright addresses his congregation which is self-proclaimed as "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian." An article by Eudora Smith in this weeks' Nation describes the context of the Black Liberation Theology preached in Wright's church. Says Rev. J. Bennett Guess: "Trinity's preaching is very much in keeping with African American and United Church of Christ traditions, which is to be publicly engaging-- challenging goverment, challenging systems, challenging structures."
Why would African Americans have any impulse to challenge these things? Because they were and are prisoners of difference, the longtime victims of an outward social depression where they're told that difference doesn't matter, all men are created equal-- outward because the moral code claims there is no difference, where inherently they ARE different, treated differently in nearly every social facet.
I feel tthe same during one of my depressive episodes: If difference doesn't matter, and is seemingly unnatural anyway, why do I feel so goddamned sequestered from the decisions which govern my happiness?
One need only look at unemployment and poverty and health statistics to see that African Americans have every reason for not only acknowledging their differences (despite the society which might call them racist for it, or blame them for their own misery) and turning them into something to be celebrated-- together-- because they have so very little control over the brain which governs the body.
Further, no scholar or spiritual teacher ever denied the necessity of symbol and difference in society. States of "Being" which exist outside of difference are limited ideas within the mind of understanding. There is no real physical way to manifest them as tools of liberation. We return then to the arena of the political for that.
Call me earthly, but I cannot free myself from the desire to avoid unnecessary human suffering, for any cause. For me the Iraq War, with its 4,000 American and ungodly 200,000-1.4 million Iraqi casualties is a MAJOR source of unnecessary suffering, and it's my personal belief (and I don't think I'm alone) that it's being done in the name of rapacious capitalism and greed-- not as its proponents claim, for freedom. I find it difficult to understand how wiping out roughly 1/30th of a country's population can be done in the name of freedom. In the United States that would be akin to wiping out the combined populations of Iowa, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
There is a difference between Obama/Hillary and John McCain, though I'm for Barack Obama. At the very least, McCain can justify the continued suffering in Iraq in the name of "getting the job done." I see no difference between that reason, and the reason of "freedom" at this point. The job will never be done. Though I don't buy into "flip-flopping" as weakness (I think it's human to change one's mind and make errors in judgment), I still begrudge Hillary for her "yea" vote on the Iraq invasion because of the inevitability of mass innocent casualties with the casting of that vote.
Compared to the numbers in Iraq, a mere 30,000 people were exterminated in Argentina's "Dirty War" from 1976-1983 by Videla's military government, which was later condemned by the national court as genocide and crimes against humanity. Videla called it a "National Reorganization Process."
In terms of Iraq and Argentina, and Bush and Videla, I say, What's the difference?
Call me simple. Please. Because I happen to think that we're all naturally governed by very simple desires: to be fed, kept warm, and not to be murdered in the name of anything.
The justification of murder requires difference. It requires the killer to say, You are different from me because I deserve to live and you deserve to die. At the very least, when Obama cast his "nay" vote on the Iraq invasion, I'd like to think that he opted not to differenciate himself from any civilian man in Iraq.