Mr Magpie

My birthday’s come, and I’m drained of delight,
gnawed by a secret, growing fear–
what have I done with these years?
My God, why have I squandered my life?
– Arseny Tarkovsky – ‘June 25, 1939’ (trans. Philip Metres and Dmitri Psurtsev)

September 27th used to fill me with dread like no other day of the year. September 27th is my birthday. 

When I was very young my parties were, I know from photos, often themed and well-attended. More recently they’ve tended to take the form of small gatherings of family friends, most two to three times my age, and friends of mine, the number of those dwindling noticeably to near-none over the years. At these gatherings I would find myself confronted with love, company, kindness, and processed sugar – all the things which make life worth living, and which also made life acutely painful for as long as the party lasted because at the time I could only see them in relief, in relation to their usual absence in my life. Outside of my family, I had little love in my life; I had sloughed off most of my friends and acquaintances as an aging house sheds shingles; I was dogged by a deep feeling of aloneness, most especially at times when I was not alone. I was, obviously, depressed.

Depression imposes, upon those it visits, a hyper-sensitivity to time. As Andrew Solomon writes in his essential account of depression The Noonday Demon, “When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.” You feel as though you are adrift in the doldrums of a vast ocean, in the horse latitudes: floating, unmoving, unmoored. The past lies endlessly deep beneath you, threatening suffocation and regret, and the future seems as inaccessible as the sky above. You only hope that some miraculous wind will sweep you across this dull and empty sea to the distant shore where your life might be waiting.

Depression can cause you to lose track of the days, which is a source of some comfort, insofar as it sustains an illusion of movement toward that shore. Birthdays, with their imposed cultural significance and requisite lighthearted celebrations, are like buoys. They jolt you awake when your dingy bumps into them, breaking the daze and reminding you, by way of their silly banality, of the absurdity of your situation. Buoys mark the mouths of bays, and while it may have seemed–or you may have convinced yourself–that you are braving the high seas, or trying to, at least, they remind you that you have hardly left the shore, that you have, in fact, been sailing in a circle all this time, only to come back to the same self and situation from whence you had wished to depart.

One effect of depression’s seeming permanent-ness is the nullification of achievement. There may be some immediate satisfaction in writing an essay, graduating from university, or landing a job, but depression relegates these to the dead past almost as soon as they have happened, making them feel meaningless. Future accomplishment seems impossible. Birthdays require you not only to mark time, and its loss, but also to mark what you have made of it, which always feels like nothing, especially if you happen to be an ambitious, self-motivated person who abhors the waste of time and self-imposes high standards. When you have grown up, too, in a family which emphasizes the importance of contributing to the world, and when you are a person who reads the news each morning, you cannot help but feel ashamed of your selfishness, the empty safety of your own small, self-absorbed sadness. You should have, you feel, trained to be a paramedic, become a social worker, or joined disaster-relief efforts overseas. Instead, this year you have ventured nothing, created nothing, felt, experienced, become nothing. After a while, whether out of shame for your self-perceived cowardice or sheer boredom, you begin to feel that a wreck would be most welcome. Disaster might, at least, justify these disproportionate feelings. 

Solomon writes that “depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance”. When you are young you understand the world through cause-and-effect, and when there is no apparent cause–when these feelings simply appear like evening shades at noon, incongruous and unappeasable–it is tempting to go looking for one. I think that this explains, to some extent, the gravitation of some adolescents and young adults towards drug habits and suicidal tendencies. Of course certain people are genetically predisposed to these things, but some engage with them on an almost aesthetic level, trying to mold their behaviors into a reflection of their emotions (this same motive underlies many habits of self-harm – trying to make the body a mirror of the mind’s pain). It can be much easier to understand or treat, and is actually possible to physically see, an alcohol addiction, or a razor scar, than an inexplicable void of feeling. It feels better to be distressed by thoughts of suicide than by, seemingly, nothing at all. 

The problem, of course, is that these behaviors quickly outstrip their usefulness and end up causing physical consequences far more immediately destructive and permanent than the emotional anguish they initially seemed to alleviate. They are also habit-forming in a way that depression itself is not. There are people who smoke one cigarette and become addicted. I have smoked exactly three, just to see if I am one of them, and have found that I am not. I have absolutely no desire for another. There are some people who cannot imagine and to whom it would never occur to consider suicide, and others who, from the first time the thought enters their mind, can never quite let it go. 

For a long time I convinced myself that I would die before I turned thirty, whether by my own hand or by way of what Solomon terms “para-suicidal” behavior (he cites his own Russian-roulette style engagement in rampant unprotected sex with the intention of contracting HIV; for me this manifested mostly in increased risk-taking while rock climbing and very aggressive jaywalking). I settled on thirty because A) twenty-seven was cliché; B) it was a nice round number and neither so imminent as to prevent me from accomplishing something, at least, before I died, nor despairingly distant and C) I was a fan of Danny Brown’s album XXX (30), which deals explicitly with his self-perceived failure at the age of thirty and wide-eyed embrace of drugs as his para-suicidal behavior of choice (he is now forty-five and sober). Deciding this was a great relief. It was as though lightning had seared through the leaden dome in which my mind was interred and, in its dying flash, illuminated everything, leaving a crack in its wake through which light fell like rain down a well, reminiscent of that famous line from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”. Of course, as Doris Lessing puts it neatly in The Memoirs of a Survivor, “the other side of this thought, its shadow, is dark indeed”. After the lightning and light came the rain – a steady stream of suicidal thoughts drip-drip-dropping down into my mind. No doubt their way was made easier by all those missing shingles, the people I had let fall from my life. I started to notice rooftops. 

There is a bit of dialogue right at the beginning of Cormac McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited-a philosophical kitchen table conversation between the characters Black, an ex-con fisher-of-men, and White, a disillusioned professor-when Black, who has just brought White to his apartment after yanking him back from his leap into the path of an onrushing train, asks White why he decided that “today was the day. Was they somethin special about it?” he asks. 

“No”, White replies. “Well. Today is my birthday. But I certainly dont regard that as special.

Well happy birthday, Professor.

Thank you.

So you seen your birthday was comin up and that seemed like the right day.

Who knows? Maybe birthdays are dangerous. Like Christmas.”

They were dangerous for me for a while, at least in thought, and often numbered among the nadirs of a given year.

Imagining your own unintentional death is actually quite difficult. The leading causes of death are things like heart disease or cancer, in which death is usually parceled out over a relatively long period of time. It isn’t much easier to imagine something more sudden, though: try to imagine, in detail, a fatal traffic accident of which you, a pedestrian, are the victim. Because car accidents involve other people, you inevitably get tangled up in all of their attendant particulars and absurdities. Envision, for instance, which make of car would strike you dead in the crosswalk. A Honda Civic? How boring. A tinted Benz? The ruling class strikes again. A Cybertruck? The horror. And that’s before you try thinking about exactly who would run you over.

Suicidal ideation is free of such distractions. It is utterly personal, and so allows you, in theory, total control. Whereas death steals from behind the curtain and whisks you offstage and out of the world, probably in front of an audience, suicide allows you the illusion of privacy, suggests that you might enter a space–a blackbox theater, let’s say–and vanish alone, when you choose, and as you wish. The blackbox is silent, still, and empty. You may furnish it with props and plots, even people, as you like. A great many artists–maybe most–have at some point in their life envisioned, sketched, or written works for this theater. Many have even gone on to perform then. Needless to say they are all tragedies. 

Art’s affair with mental illness and suicide is abiding and eternal and I have nothing unique to offer in the way of its history (for that, I highly recommend Kay Jamison’s book Touched With Fire), nor do I wish to offer anything further in the way of a personal account beyond what I’ve already written above (this essay has already veered too close to the too-personal). Plenty of artists have described their experiences with suicidal ideation more or less explicitly, the former having peaked, perhaps, with the confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s. My favorite poetic assessment of art and suicide actually comes from Mary Oliver, a poet known mostly as (and often unjustly reduced to) an Emersonian exponent of the solace to be found in nature. ‘Members of the Tribe’, from her 1986 collection Dream Work, is a clear-eyed assessment of her relationship, in youth, with art and her mind and the art and minds of others, and envisions the troubled artist mythos as a lineage with which she is inevitably entangled but with which she is now, much later in her life and work, reluctant to identify. 

“Ahead of me
they were lighting their fires
in the dark forests of death.
Should I name them?
Their names make a long branch of sound.
You know them…
I was, of course, all that time
coming along
behind them, and listening
for advice.”

“Poetry”, she writes in A Poetry Handbook, “is a life-cherishing force”; in another interview she declares that “poetry saved my life”. And yet – so many of the poets and artists whom she worshipped–Schumann, van Gogh, Keats–had either taken their own lives or tried to, or driven themselves so determinedly, whether physically or mentally, and often both, towards death that they might as well have (that para-suicidality again).

Oliver was troubled too: she came from an abusive home and later spent time in an asylum, finding, as she put it, that healing itself “had nothing to do with laying down a path of words”. Words, music, paint: they can convey something of life but they cannot themselves constitute a life, and so cannot, by themselves, save one. How to reckon, then, with this death wish that seems so often intertwined with artistic excellence, productivity, and originality; that seems to most enrapture and doom those who most want and need art to save them?

Oliver’s poem ends by noting that “the man who merely / washed Michelangelo’s brushes… lived to be a hundred years old”. While this may be true, it is of neither much comfort nor use to those who cannot help but paint, make music, or write. She knows this, of course. Art demands sacrifice, and sanity is never assured, whether one is an artist or not. The real intention of ‘Members of the Tribe’ is forgiveness. “I forgive”, she says 

“them
their unhappiness,
I forgive them for walking out of the world.
But I don’t forgive them
for turning their faces away,
for taking off their veils
and dancing for death –
for hurtling
toward oblivion
on the sharp blades
of their exquisite poems, saying:
this is the way.”

When I first read this poem years ago I was not able to forgive, only to follow. For so long I could read it only as a litany. The words are the same, of course, but their meaning has changed. Medication and purpose and shifting life circumstances have largely driven the death wishes from my door. They come around much less often now, and I usually know when I can expect them to arrive and how to shoo them away. I am beginning to understand, and aspire to, the unique sort of forgiveness that suicide requires. I have, in the past, shut out people who expressed their own such thoughts to me; I would like to think I can do better now. I had not forgiven myself; the cliché that you can only love others if you love yourself seems to be true. That “good, human work” is difficult, but it can, and must, be done. In beginning to do it, I have realized that I have others besides myself to forgive. Like Oliver, and almost every other artist who has ever lived, I have been and am being formed by the work and lives of so many others who have gone on to take their own lives. 

Their work cannot altogether be separated from their death. Every piece of beauty or truth I have been able to peck out of the works of the members of the tribe with which to fill my own void and patch over the sundry deficiencies of my own self, has contained within it a little grain, a trace amount, of suicide. They are like the little bits of microplastic in fish, often so cloaked in the beauty of the writing or the painting or the song that I didn’t even notice them, or if I did–even if it was glaringly obvious–I hardly cared, starved as I was for some kind of solace. Plastic does not break down in the body and suicide festers in the corners of the mind. The more you consume, the more it accumulates, causing significant damage before you become aware of what is happening. It does not help that depressing art is often the only palatable kind when you are in the throes of it, and therefore the least able to protect yourself.

Probably the best depiction of this “good, human work” in literature is embedded in what is ostensibly a children’s book. Antoine de St-Exupéry’s Little Prince lives alone on a small, grey, barren planet in the midst of empty space where nothing much grows. He spends most of his time tending to the two little volcanos over which he cooks, and so sustains himself, and weeding. For his planet is host to an infestation of baobab seeds which, if they are allowed to grow, threaten to choke it with their roots, crushing the fragile soil and making the planet uninhabitable for the Prince. “A baobab is something you will never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too many, they split it in pieces…”

One day a rose sprouts from the dust, and suddenly his life expands to include beauty and love. Depression robs us of our capacity for love, yet love is also the most effective antidote for it. Solomon writes, “Love forsakes us from time to time, and we forsake love. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.” It was a relief to discover, in the midst of depression, that art mattered, and that I could love it; that art could to some extent sustain me. I had proof that I had not always been, nor would I always be, incapable of loving or being loved. If within me still beat the capacity to love and nurture these small pieces of truth and being which some long-dead someone had left behind, in the hope that they might mean something to some future someone, then perhaps I could, by extension, one day love someone again. The miracle of the rose became newly possible, and so, in some sense, was, is, already real.

One assumes that the appearance of the rose must have spurred a special urgency in the Prince’s weeding. Its possibility has certainly done so for me. It is well enough to neglect or be indifferent to one’s own safety and sanity, but not so when you have someone to lose, someone who would despair at losing you (this includes family too, of course, and so here I ask for the forgiveness of my mother who will probably not have enjoyed reading this). It does not matter how much you nurture the rose if you neglect to root out the baobabs; both are acts of love, and the work of a lifetime.

Both of these processes are typically undergone privately (perhaps for the best). Since, however, I seem to find a great deal of meaning and purpose in treating the former as a more public practice by writing these essays (albeit for all of ten people to read), it has occurred to me that it might be possible to treat the latter in the same way. Perhaps doing so might eventually help someone who is in the same boat feel less alone, thereby making work that is ultimately personal and self-preserving, and therefore selfish, a little less so.

It has taken me a while to figure out a way of doing this that I can live with; a form that would not be mired in miserabilism or a clomping retreading of old ground. Jamison has already written an excellent study from a more clinical perspective, and Oliver’s poem is written from the relative safety of retrospection. Perhaps what I may be able to offer is an account of my own relationship with these artists as a still-young writer in the midst of the formative years, during which such influences tend to be most affecting: from the eye of the storm, as it were. 

What I’ve lit upon is the idea of writing a series of what I have decided to call ‘Birthday Letters’. The title (lifted from Ted Hughes’ book of poems of the same name written to his deceased wife, Sylvia Plath, and otherwise having nothing to do with that man, thank you very much) is a bit misleading, as I do not intend these to be reach-beyond-the-grave Ouija board weepfests written in direct address, but rather a series of personal essay-criticism-biographic hybrids which might, if I can do what I hope to do, also achieve some of the casual intimacy of the letter. 

To be honest, I feel some trepidation about embarking upon this series. Even as things have gotten, for the most part, much better, my writing, essay and fiction alike, is still drawn as if by gravity towards depression and suicide, so much so that these subjects, which I had thought inexhaustible, are almost beginning to bore me. My psyche is such that I sometimes hyperfixate, and occasionally let the line between life and art get a bit porous at times (this essay being an excellent example). More and more I think that when most of your life is wrapped up in art the whole ‘art-imitates-life’ thing cuts both ways. Which makes me just a wee bit nervous. 

It has been noted that in her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’, Sylvia Plath consciously identified a pattern of suicide attempts (“I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it-“). This self-admission, along with a note which she left for a neighbor on the day of her death requesting that she call Plath’s physician, has been taken as evidence that Plath did not actually intend to die: rather, she felt some inner compulsion to attempt suicide as a way of forestalling it, of renewing her ten-year lease on life. Such conjecture is pointless, because whether or not she fully intended to die, she did, leaving her children motherless. (Her son went on to die by suicide as well.) Her suicide (as well as that of her friend, the poet Anne Sexton, with whom she swapped stories of suicide attempts “in sweet and loving detail”) hints at the potential for art to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The writer Al Alvarez, another friend of Plath’s who had also attempted suicide and discussed the subject with her, literally wrote the book–The Savage God–on the relationship between suicide and art. Its prologue is an account of his relationship with Plath and an attempt to reckon with her death. In it, he relates Plath’s poetic fixation on depression and suicide to Freud’s idea of the ‘repetition compulsion’, the purpose of which “was to attempt to contain… this death instinct. By obsessively repeating the trauma again and again the sufferer was, Freud thought, trying to gain control over it.” Alvarez, as well as Hughes in Birthday Letters, suggests that to some extent Plath was overpowered by the force with which her own psyche burst forth in the poems that constitute Ariel, which she finished at lightning speed in the last months of her life. She had wanted for so long and worked herself to the bone to become a great poet, and had finally lit upon the poetic power she sought, and knew it. Using it would require her to harness and unleash the hollow dread at the core of her self, the thing that was trying to kill her. She dedicated her life to pursuing poetic greatness; in order to finally achieve it, she made the ultimate sacrifice. Or so the story goes. Alvarez writes, “I suspect that in the end she wanted to have done with the theme once and for all. But the only way she could find was ‘to act out the awful little allegory once over.’” She did not want to die, she wanted to write, yet found that she could, all too often, write only about death. 

Most of us, even if we are creative in some way, are constructed just as much by the art we consume as the art which we make, perhaps even more so. In an article for Salon entitled ‘Reading Sylvia Plath and My Dead Friend’s Instagram’, Lilly Dancyger describes rescuing her friend’s copy of Ariel from her apartment after her suicide and probingly questions the pervasive creep, verging on ubiquity, of “the sad girl aesthetic”. Especially in this time of cultural overproduction and overstimulation, it is possible to forget that art really does affect us. That’s not to say that we should be force fed Pharrell Williams on loop, but I do think there is real danger in habitually dwelling in darkness. Sometimes you have to put the pen, book, or laptop down, and go stand in the sun for a while. 

But this is easier said than done when the sun fails to warm you. “Suicide”, wrote Mark Fisher (who wrote often about depression and to whom one of these letters will be dedicated) “has the power to transfigure life, with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its disappointments, its unfinished business, its ‘waste and fever and heat’ – into a cold myth”. I wrote above about the inexplicability of depression. We have always used myths to explain the inexplicable–the weather, the cosmos–and to comfort ourselves against the inevitability of death. Suicide is a particularly attractive, almost ultimate myth because it seems to offer agency over death itself.

Dancyger’s article highlights the real danger of lionizing or sanctifying the tragic figure of the suicidal artist, a figure who is in a certain sense mythological, unreal. In reality, it is almost impossible to produce good or coherent work when under the kind of strain that leads people to take their own lives. van Gogh could not paint during periods of extreme illness and it took him much time to work his way back to full productivity; Virginia Woolf often had to convalesce for long periods of time during which she could hardly read, let alone write; etc. It is possible, but possible in much the same way that it is, as we know from the story of Flight 1549, technically possible to land a jet liner on the Hudson River after double engine failure without anyone dying. Plath’s Ariel is the quintessential example, and undeniably brilliant, but her death soon after its completion is proof enough that such efforts are not sustainable. Ditto for Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis which, while an incredible depiction of the suicidal mind, was not performed while she was alive, as she took her life shortly after finishing it. It is true that Plath could not have produced Ariel while happy and sane, but I would rather a world without Ariel and with a Plath who lived to be seventy-five and publish a dozen volumes of poetry during her lifetime, rather than the single one which she actually did. If an artist’s life is not held to be more valuable than their work, art loses all of its moral value and meaning. 

The suicidal myth can, if swallowed whole, as it regularly is, by young people, become extremely damaging and difficult to root out. The practice of writing explicitly about sadness and depression is so common nowadays–as Erica Wagner notes in the introduction to Ariel’s Gift, her book on Hughes’ Birthday Letters, “We have grown accustomed to confession”–that it seems almost a prerequisite for being impactful or interesting as a writer. It is not. Nor is it necessary to engage in self-abuse because you ‘have nothing to write about’ or ‘haven’t suffered enough’. Even boredom can be interesting if you make it so, and anyway there is just so much life to live, and to write about. (I say all of this because I need to hear it, too.)

It is too often ignored that much of these artists’ bodies of work is possessed by great love and lust for life. Even Plath’s most morbid poems contain within them a spark of joy: her exhilaration at riding full clip on her horse Ariel as depicted in the poem of the same name, her triumphant tone at the end of ‘Lady Lazarus’. I think of the beautiful, sensitive intricacy of Woolf’s sentences, the joyous yellows of van Gogh, Kane’s extremely dark yet mischievous humor, Fisher’s insistence on finding reasons for hope and action. As Alvarez writes of Plath, “the myth of Sylvia as a passive victim is a total perversion of the woman she was. It misses altogether her liveliness, her intellectual appetite and harsh wit, her great imaginative resourcefulness and vehemence of feeling, her control. Above all, it misses the courage with which she was able to turn disaster into art.”

There is no sense in wading out into the sea of depression in order to find out if you can write, paint, etc. Tragedy and trauma will find us all; we do not have to go looking for them. I did not wade out very far, even, but it was far enough to know that I do not want to drown; I want to live, and write, and the two are not mutually exclusive. I also know that I do not want, in writing these little letters, to be sucked out to sea again. As many have noted, writing about something does not save you from it, and can in fact do the opposite. Alvarez writes in The Savage God that “for the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him. The result of handling it in his work may well be that he finds himself living it out. For the artist, in short, nature often imitates art. Or, to change the cliché, when an artist holds a mirror up to nature he finds out who and what he is; but the knowledge may change him irredeemably so that he becomes that image.”

Arseny Tarkovsky says much the same thing in his poem ‘The Word’ (trans. Metres and Psurtsev):
If you’re a poet
and have no better path
in this tangled world,
don’t describe too early
battles or the trials of love.
Refrain from prophecy,
and don’t ask for the grave.
A word is only a skin,
a thin film of human lots,
and any line in your poem
can sharpen the knife of your fate.

Solomon writes, in the opening of The Noonday Demon, “I was frequently asked, as I wrote this book, whether the writing was cathartic. It was not… Nonetheless, the idea that I was doing something that might be useful to others was uplifting; and my increased knowledge has been useful to me. I hope it will be clear that the primary pleasure of this book is a literary pleasure of communication rather than the therapeutic release of self-expression.” I feel the same. Words cannot themselves make you kill or save yourself. But if a line of poetry or prose, a product of the imagination, can possess the power to sharpen the knife of your fate, then it can also have the power to be the lifeline that fishes you up out of the well.

There is so little that is within our control, but the way we order words or apply paint and, most crucially, what we choose to write about, or paint, or draw, is. In writing about these people who have taken their own life, I do not intend to dwell on the death wish, but rather to deny it. To celebrate and express gratitude for the work that these suffering people did; to mourn what could have been; to repay infinite debts; to do that “good, human work”. Lately it seems that there is a great trend towards hosting ‘celebrations of life’ when people die, rather than wakes or funerals. I love this, and would like these letters to be in kind. As Nick Cave sings on the Bad Seeds song ‘Joy’, “We’ve all had too much sorrow / Now is the time for joy”.

“The final argument against suicide”, says Alvarez, “is life itself. You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest, outside the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business… Most of the time, they seem enough. They are, anyway, all we ever have or can ever expect.”

Life itself. The ultimate gift. A life in which I can wake up on my birthday, again–on the shore, with my heart beating in my chest, the sound of the waves (or here, where I’m writing this, of the parkway that runs beneath my window) being thrown up into the unreachable sky, the light moving, my roommates going about their business outside my door–and be, for a moment, grateful and alive. Even, perhaps, happy. This life, this year, this day. Happy twenty-three to me!