Writing
Through the Dark Night:
talking about creativity and depression
with novelist Tim
Farrington
by
D. Patrick Miller
© 2010 D. PATRICK MILLER. Smashwords Edition. All Rights Reserved.
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Blake, Lord Byron, Tennyson, Woolf, Poe, Sexton, Plath, Kierkegaard, Pound, Roethke, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and David Foster Wallace… the ranks of notable writers and other artists who have suffered from depression, too often fatally, seem infinite. In fact, a 1995 Scientific American article by Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist and writer who has chronicled her own struggles with depression, summarized a number of studies suggesting that “artists experience up to 18 times the rate of suicide seen in the general population, eight to 10 times the rate of depression and 10 to 20 times the rate of manic-depression and its milder form, cyclothymia.” These statistics would seem to verify the historic popular association of artistic creativity with madness. But in recent years a countervailing opinion has surfaced among both artists and scientists, particularly in the work of psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer, who argued in his 2005 book Against Depression that this malady has no more to do with creativity than, say, arthritis, and that both are simply painful, pointless diseases that can and should be treated with the most effective medications we can develop and prescribe.
Tim Farrington is an accomplished novelist who adds a spiritual dimension to the discussion of depression and creativity in his recent short book A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul. For Farrington, who has been hospitalized for clinical depression, the tension between madness, creativity, and enlightenment began early: “I spent my senior year of high school in Honolulu listening to the darker songs of the early Elton John, cutting calculus class to read D.T. Suzuki, slipping away to the Buddhist temple halfway up the Pali, and in general letting the warp and woof of my tidy American future unravel.” He remembers that his first significant bout of depression was not incapacitating, and raised a significant philosophical quandary:
“Was I truly depressed or just awakening to the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, the insight that samsaric life is misery? My melancholy seemed like simple realism; if you weren’t depressed, you obviously didn’t know what was going on. I was becoming conscious of what Gurdjieff called ‘the horror of the situation.’ And so I took long walks and thought about death and the suffering of innocents. I wrote bad poetry. I did not go to Stanford.”
Instead, Farrington went into and out of a couple of other universities while pursuing his own independent study of Western philosophy, “living on cornflakes and macaroni and cheese” and briefly considering the possibility that he was an extra-terrestrial whose diurnal cycle just didn’t sync with the Earth’s 24-hour rotation. Eventually he got deep into Buddhist and New Age philosophies, lived ascetically in an ashram and later in an urban commune which posted a sleeping schedule to help everyone keep up with the rotation of sexual partners. He married and divorced, cleaned houses in San Francisco while writing several novel manuscripts that he threw away, and eventually moved to Virginia Beach to teach Sunday school for a while and focus on his growing body of work.
I like to say that I “discovered” Tim Farrington when I read an early short story of his in THE SUN and recommended it to a literary agent. His first published novel, The California Book of the Dead, was a charming and humorous portrait of West Coast New Age culture, and was followed by the popular philosophical romances The Monk Downstairs and The Monk Upstairs. He ventured into mystery writing under the pseudonym Frank Devlin, and most recently garnered critical acclaim for Lizzie’s War, the story of a Vietnam-era wife and mother that draws deeply on Farrington’s own background as the child of a military father. In his fiction as well as the extended essay A Hell of Mercy, one is most likely to be struck not by a mournful outlook, but by writing that’s often so damn funny you’d never guess the author had spent a fair amount of time looking for himself and some kind of ultimate meaning down there in the depths of the human condition.
Indeed, Farrington claims that he is “by no means an expert” on depression. “I’m more like a veteran, I suppose: a guy whose ass has been on the line, just one more guy with some stories from the front, someone who kept his head down as best he could and did what he had to when the shit hit the fan.” Nonetheless, as he reveals in the following candid conversation, Farrington is both erudite and refreshingly plain-spoken about the thorny paradoxes that invariably crop up in the discussion of creativity, madness, and the soul.
You’ve struggled most of your life with depression. How would you define it?
FARRINGTON: Dryness, emptiness, hopelessness, helplessness, pointlessness. A loss of the juice of life, a loss of the energy to engage life, and a loss of any joy or pleasure in that engagement. In deep depression, it seems useless, and even painful, to lift a finger. It is a catch-22 state: we are aware of our incapacitation, and aware that we are making our life worse through neglect and inertia, but any effort seems pointless at best. The American Psychological Association manual lists nine diagnostic criteria for a major depression, at least five of which must be present during the same two-week period, representing “a change from previous functioning.” These range from “depressed mood, most of the day, nearly every day” through anhedonia to fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation. I think everyone has a basic intuitive recognition of depression as a morbid state that’s beyond life’s usual downs. The main feature of depression for me, the thing that distinguishes it from other low moods like sadness and grief, is the sense of hopelessness – that this is it, there’s nothing I can do to change this misery or get out of it. There is hope in purgatory; we can suffer and believe it has meaning in a larger movement of life and soul. In depression, hope seems gone forever, and the suffering seems pointless.
Would you compare depression to a fever, that is, a symptom indicating something is wrong, but not what it is exactly?
FARRINGTON: That’s not a bad metaphor. There is a huge range of causes for fevers, all of them indicating some underlying condition, so it’s often impossible to immediately figure out what’s causing a fever. The fever itself is part of the body’s attempt to heal itself, by mobilizing the immune system and creating an internal environment that’s too hot for many infectious elements. Left to run its natural course, a fever will sometimes correct the initial problem. But of course a fever can prove fatal, too. The parallels with depression are easy to draw: you may experience the occasional moderate depression that serves as a wake-up call to change something in your life. Or the depression may pass without you ever understanding where it came from.
More intense and prolonged depressions, like high fevers, demand more urgent attention and are progressively more incapacitating. It becomes much more important to address the underlying condition or, failing that, to bring the psychic temperature down. And this is when you have to decide whether to let the fever run its course, in the hope that it will accomplish its original effort at healing, or take medication which might help you “cool down” and function normally. Just as too high a fever can actually cause brain damage, recent studies seem to be showing that prolonged depression may also have long-term effects on the brain’s physical structure and chemistry.
When I lived in an ashram, we used to talk about “burning” as a state in which our inner crap was burned up in the fire of the spirit. If you know what you’re doing, that’s one way to go, but it can be risky.
Many spiritual practices talk of overcoming the ego or surrendering to God. Is there a point where surrender or the shrinking of the ego brings on the symptoms of depression? Is a depressive state a necessary stage in the spiritual path?
FARRINGTON: Dealing with the ego is central to any spiritual practice, but so many of the practices we undertake to overcome, shrink, extinguish, or otherwise move beyond the ego are too easily co-opted by the ego. We can end up feeling holier-than-thou pretty quickly. On the other hand, we can also become more capable of recognizing subtle ego agendas as we deepen our spiritual practice. You could see it all as a kind of spiritual arms race: for every soulful insight that frees us of the ego’s control, there is an answering psychic intrigue by which the ego finds a new way to co-opt each bit of awakening and steer it back toward the same old self-serving patterns.
The crisis comes when we begin to realize that all our spiritual efforts are suffused with ego, and that there is no way out of that bind. The classic Zen koan is one of the most obvious techniques to precipitate this crisis; a koan is a question for which there is no ego-answer. When the ego finds itself stymied, it tries all of its tricks and strategems, and when they all fail, then the structure of the ego itself begins to fail in various ways. This bafflement is akin to the creative crisis of unknowing, and the same dangers come into play. Confronted with the loss of certainty and a terrifying experience of helplessness, we are teetering over depression, and it doesn‘t take much to fall in. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that depression is a necessary stage in the spiritual path, but it seems to me that the path always travels through a territory where there is a high likelihood that our mental instabilities are going to be exacerbated, according to our particular natures. And that ain’t gonna be pretty.
I honestly don’t know if it is possible to avoid depression as we move into the cloud of unknowing and learn to live on new terms there. I do know that it is possible, eventually, to live in genuine surrender, with faith, humility, and a realistic trust in the divine, without depression. But for me that is a fruit of a long, intricate process that cannot be hurried or manipulated. Given the psychic stakes, and basic human feebleness, that process will always be risky and prone to disruption and despair. Jesus prayed hard to have the cup of his suffering taken away, before he surrendered to it; he fell three times on the way up the hill, and felt a sense of abandonment on the cross. It took him three days to get out of the tomb, too. Of course, he was faster than most of us.
What you’re calling a cloud of unknowing can also be called the “dark night of the soul.” But that phrase is sometimes used so casually that it’s difficult to take seriously. What does it actually mean, especially as it was originally defined by St. John of the Cross?
FARRINGTON: John of the Cross was a Carmelite monk in the 16th century who wrote a couple of books. One thing to remember is that these books were written for nuns and monks, mostly nuns, of the Carmelite order. He was a partner in the Carmelite reform movement with Teresa of Avila, who was the powerhouse behind the nunneries and monasteries he was involved with. So his books were really written for committed monastics. Most of us are not getting up at 4am to begin chanting the liturgy of the hours throughout the day; we’re not in the classic monastic context of work, prayer, and worship. So John is assuming a certain kind of enclosure that’s far from our ordinary lives when he writes about the dark night of the soul.