Past Reason Hunted, or Living with Sonnet 129
by Sidney Burris
Iwent to a therapist once who told me I was depressed. I had to take an exam with questions like, “Have you lost or gained fifteen pounds in the last six weeks?” and “Have you thought much about the past or the future?” Elaborating, she said that I had been clinically depressed—her adverb—for a couple of years, and that I had been suffering from mild depression for over two decades. But now a clinical depression. My very own. I’d always thought I’d get this kind of news in January, rain changing to sleet, streets treacherous, only the clinically depressed behind the wheel, everybody else happy in warm coffee shops, looking wistfully across the table at someone they loved. Instead, I got red and gold leaves and a blue October sky.
I don’t know what it is about this word “clinical,” except that it’s become a shibboleth for those who want to seem in the know about the treacheries of the human soul, and the term shows up at cocktail parties with hushed solemnity: “He’s clinically depressed,” someone will whisper, “and has been for years.” But why aren’t the clinically depressed in those clinics? And what are they doing at cocktail parties?
Here’s the problem, or part of it anyway: I once lost confidence in a marriage counselor who told me my marriage was suffering because, while a lot of people had looked over the edge of the cliff, I’d looked over the edge and literally jumped off. No need to explain why he thought I’d “literally jumped off the cliff”; it was the misuse of “literally” that bothered me. All I recall doing literally at the time was sitting in a green naugahyde captain’s chair and paying literally a lot of money to hear a man mangle the language. Linguistic elitism of the worst sort, of course, which makes everything in life a little more difficult than it needs to be. So maybe my concern about the clinical nature of my depression fell into the same category. Maybe my therapist, the one who diagnosed me as “clinical,” only meant that my sadness had become a habit, acute, and that it had begun to manage my life, like an animal trainer doling out commands: Don’t look forward to the future, my sadness barked, or Lower your self-esteem. Not so much clinical depression as habitual sadness. A language problem. Anyway, that’s how I dealt with it.
I also did some reading on the subject. I’ve been around books long enough to know that depression, or habitual sadness, or melancholy, or whatever you choose to call it, is an ancient malady that has traveled under a variety of names, and so, as any book lover might, I had a go at Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1628). I figured the historical dimension might lessen the gravity of what I was feeling, and besides, the editors of the edition I got from the library said the book was “always the delight of the wise and the curious,” and with my self-esteem bottoming out, I took pleasure in thinking of myself as wise and curious. And delighted too—delight was something I hadn’t experienced in a long time.
The book is lengthy—the edition I consulted ran over 1,000
pages—and it is, as advertised, very anatomical in its dissection
of melancholy. Bit by bit, piece by piece, melancholy is rendered,
dissected, plucked, and analyzed, and much of the antidote of the
book lies in the massive accomplishment of its prose style. But
there’s a kind of organizational mania that pushes the syntax
at times, even beyond what you might expect from the seventeenth
century. It’s a compulsive book, too. One of its unspoken
assumptions is that it might be possible to defeat melancholy by
classifying it to death. So I found Anatomy unhelpful, partly because
I don’t have the same faith in schemata that Burton did. I’m
not living on the verge of the European Enlightenment and I’m
not frantically excited by scientific inquiry in the way that Burton’s
era was, and even though I don’t hold that against him or
his era, it’s still one of those quiet little tragedies that
closes the work off to me, no matter how much legwork in the secondary
literature I might undertake. I gravitated toward the poetry that
Burton quotes from liberally—I like that about the century;
its writers still believed that poetry proved something—but
then I realized he wasn’t reading the poems the way that I’d
want him to read them, or the way, for example, that John Milton,
roughly contemporary with Burton, would’ve read them, and
so I lost faith in him as a reader and started being uncharitable
toward the book in general. At which point, as therapy, it began
to fail—a book that no one would have recommended as therapy
anyway.
Except this. When he talks about sorrow, which he rightly calls
one of the inseparable companions to melancholy, Burton offers up
a paragraph that stopped me dead in my tracks. There I was, laid
out in some detail nearly 400 years ago, one of the melancholics:
now
in bed, they will rise, now up, then go to bed; now pleased, then
again
displeased; now they like, by and by dislike all, weary of all;
now they
desire to live, and now to die, saith Aurelianus, but most
part they hate
life; discontent, disquieted, perplexed, upon every light or no
occasion,
object: often tempted, I say, to make away themselves: they cannot
die, they will not live. . . .
Me too. I had also logged a lot of time in bed, or rather, a lot
of time getting in and out of bed, finding either station—huddled
under the covers or wandering around the house—equally miserable.
And although I’d recently dreamed that I shot myself behind
our toolshed with my dog in attendance, I was convinced that I really
couldn’t die of my own hand, that I didn’t have that
implosive power within me. I worried about it because my father
had killed himself, and my namesake, a distant relative on my mother’s
side, was said to have done the same thing, so I wondered if I’d
inherited a suicide gene. It was kind of like the four-minute mile:
no one figured it was possible to run faster until Roger Bannister
did it, and then everybody started doing it. My namesake had made
suicide a possibility, and then my father, and then . . . But even
if I didn’t really think I was capable of killing
myself, I wasn’t living productively. A kind of limbo, in
the popular jargon. That was where I was living.
I’d always been described as moody, a trait that seems to
have descended from my mother’s side, although my father was
a very heavy drinker, which leads me to wonder now if there wasn’t
a bit of self-medication going on there as well. I began to have
seizures in my late twenties, big ones, the kind they call grand
mal. The seizures were always connected with drinking too much,
and left me bloodied, exhausted, beaten up, and depressed. Most
oddly, they left me hungry for reading and possessed of a peculiarly
intense power of concentration. I had my last big one several years
ago, and a couple of months passed before I’d fully recovered.
During that time I read things on seizures, on epilepsy, on depression,
on alcoholism, and on health concerns in general: physical, spiritual,
psychic, dietary, the whole nine yards. I also reread William Styron’s
treatise on his own near-fatal depression, Darkness Visible:
A Memoir of Madness. And then I read it again. And several
times more. It was published in 1990, and I had seen it then as
a happy reminder that I’d at least avoided his degree of debilitation,
although the early symptoms of Styron’s illness I certainly
shared. My symptoms, however, had gradually disappeared—which
is fairly typical, as I learned from my reading.
So when my therapist told me I was clinically depressed I found
myself reading Styron again, going through the mental checklist.
Worse in the morning than in the evening (though Styron’s
case was oddly reversed): check. Disruption of normal sleep patterns:
check. Positive and active anguish: check. General absence of rational
thought: check. And on and on, right down the list, stopping just
short of rearranging my will in anticipation of taking my own life.
So even though my therapist was on to something, I still hadn’t
reached the depths that Styron had reached—he’d checked
himself into a clinic, immobilized—and, against the advice
of some of my friends, I read the book yet again, entranced by it,
an old friend, as I had been the first time that I encountered it.
Styron claims that the disease is essentially indescribable, which
complicates its diagnosis and treatment, but he came close to getting
it right, and its rightness was therapeutic, particularly for someone
like me who more often than not would confuse happiness with powerful
phrasing: “pouncing seizures of anxiety,” “smothering
confinement,” “merciless daily drumming,” “poisonous
fogbank”—the catalogue could go on and on, but clearly
the disease, its simple description at least, was well served by
a writer of Styron’s caliber. The modern version of Burton’s
massive treatise as well as an authentic anatomy of the illness,
Styron’s little book forced me to acknowledge that I was indeed
being visited by my own version of this simmering madness. And acknowledgment,
of course, is the first step toward fashioning a remedy.
Everyone who has suffered from depression can point to a run of
days when the illness seems to gather its forces for a final assault,
like a hurricane gaining strength. The peculiar thing about depression,
though, is that because it’s not typically recognized as the
kind of illness that justifies telephoning the office and claiming
your sick leave, sufferers are continually incapacitated by the
situations they have to confront. They are comparable to what Styron
calls the “walking casualty of a war, thrust into the most
intolerable social and family situations.” I remember lying
in bed one morning after a brutal and sleepless night. It was around
this time that I’d dreamed of my suicide, and I’d been
spending the coherent hours of the day preparing a lecture on human
sexuality and the legal community that was to culminate in an examination
of Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895. I would’ve been a bit
nervous about giving the lecture in the best of health, but as the
hour of my performance approached—it was an early lecture—and
as depression began its morning ritual of suffocating me, I felt
for the first time that I might not be able to fulfill even the
most fundamental requirement of my job, a requirement that, having
prepared as thoroughly as I’d prepared, I would normally have
undertaken with pleasure.
I don’t remember walking to the lecture hall, nor do I remember
delivering the lecture. A colleague with whom I teach the course
sat in the front row, and I recall looking at her once or twice.
She appeared to be very far away, as if I were peering at her through
the wrong end of a telescope—the visual component of depression’s
power to isolate. My next memory is of sitting in my office—a
five-minute walk from the lecture hall—utterly exhausted and
numbed, listening to a student, again as if from a great distance,
tell me how much she’d enjoyed what I had to say. To manufacture
coherence from behind the podium, in front of sixty-five of the
brightest students in the college, with that howling vortex in my
head, had been a feat of debilitating accomplishment. I’d
spoken for an hour and twenty minutes without knowing I was speaking.
I’d kept the uncivil energies of my depression quarantined
from my civilized performance, and the psychic energies that I’d
unconsciously devoted to that task had left me weakened, broken,
cooked. When the student left, I closed the door to my office, cut
off the lights, and sat there for the remainder of the afternoon,
some three hours, in the dark.
As my eyes adjusted to the cave light, I noticed a copy of Shakespeare’s
sonnets on the table. I don’t know why, but I picked it up,
and the book opened to 129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in
a waste of shame / Is lust in action”), a famous one, all
about passion and lust and the deep attraction of passion and lust,
the huge price they exact from those of us who fall in their throes.
It’s a sonnet full of advisory, storm-warning kind of stuff
until the final clinching couplet: “All this the world well
knows, but none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to
this hell.” With those two lines, mostly the brassy, mocking
inevitability of them, I was suddenly back in Styron’s world,
a victim of the “pouncing seizures of anxiety,” and
noticing for the first time the deep analogy between “lust
in action,” as Shakespeare’s phrase went, and the “pouncing
. . . anxiety” of depression, s Styron had written. The simple
helplessness that Shakespeare had felt as he faced the forces of
lust, and as he realized that he would lose this battle, was precisely
the same helplessness I faced as I tried to stare down my depression.
Lust and depression, two emotional states seemingly far removed
from one another—yet the victims of each, if they compared
notes, would see both states for what they are: predators of human
sanity. I read the sonnet continually throughout the afternoon,
sitting stock-still in the dim light of my office.
Then I decided to memorize it, which upped the ante of my relationship
to the poem, because now possession was the thing—every syllable,
every word, every line I intended to commandeer and file away in
my Interior Chamber of Memorized Stuff, hoping that the essential
order of that Chamber would be modified or energized, if ever so
slightly, by the new addition. I don’t know why I decided
to do this, except that as I sat there mumbling through the poem
the burden of the mumbled lines on the lip and tongue felt good,
a pleasing weight, a physical pleasure that was drawing me out of
myself. A sign of life, a literal embodying of the poem that issued
directly from possessing the words and forming their sounds with
the mouth, the lips, the tongue, the teeth.
As the days passed, I became familiar with the disease’s fundamental
pattern of attack and formulated my defensive strategies accordingly.
Depression is implosive, it’s all about destructive inaction,
about systems gradually shutting down, and in its initial stages
this period of implosion—recall the slow-motion films of a
large building being destroyed by synchronized blasts—yields
a pleasing predictability, a time during which the emotions seem
channeled downward into darkness. Resigned to the coming depression,
I was deeply stilled, as anyone might be when facing an unavoidable
cataclysm, and I became more focused, even laser-like, for hours
at a time, until the depression arrived in force and paralyzed me.
With all the other cerebral engines stalled out, the one left blinking
with life, the one I used for reading, was for the time being greatly
strengthened—the kind of compensation that occurs in those
who lose their sight, for example, and find their hearing greatly
improved. I read more perceptively, more intensely, during these
periods.
I knew that this intensity would soon be lost and that I’d
be left stranded in the bleak weather of depression until it moved
on, which it would invariably do—another lesson I’d
learned through experience. But these intense bouts of concentration
were the only boon that I associated with the illness, and because
depression typically follows a circadian rhythm, these intervals
of hyper-attention were typically available every day. I wasn’t
ready, however, for what happened next: as the afternoon wore on
in my office and my concentration intensified, and as I read the
sonnet through this lucid interval, I gradually began to feel as
if the poem possessed a certain knowledge of my depression and the
way it had structured my life.
Of course I wondered if this wasn’t simply a depressive reading
of the poem, pinched for time as I was, reading deeply, frantically,
my perceptions intensifying while I awaited the fog that would render
them impossible. The weight of the sonnet’s tradition, the
old finery of Renaissance English as Santayana once called it, seemed
gradually to smother the spontaneity of my responses as the afternoon
proceeded. But still rumbling around somewhere deep within me, a
suspicion began to take shape that the poem’s essential structure
mirrored that of my illness. Depression might well produce a legitimate
way of reading this poem, I thought, a methodology founded on the
simple rhythm of the lucid interval—an ebb and flow of attention
tied to the deeper revolutions of my body’s chemistry. And
maybe my depressively aligned neuro-chemical radar was picking up
a blip from the poem, the faint signal of a sympathetic structure
within the sonnet. Clearly I was throwing my body at this poem by
memorizing it. I think this accounts for the physical sensations
I experienced when first reading the poem in my office. And these
sensations became more pronounced as I committed the poem to memory.
But what was drawing me to this sonnet? I memorized it without knowing
what the poem was really about, because I was treating it more as
a musical score than a poem. This, I believe, was another symptom
of my illness, and it created yet another way of reading that derived
from depression. Maybe music—fluid, flexible, whether coming
from a poem or a popular song or a symphony—could make inroads
through depression’s gauzy filter more quickly than the spiky
bulk of verbal reference, which required analysis and interpretation,
the very same attention to meaning that required such an effort
as the window of lucidity began to close. Perhaps the music of the
poem bypassed all that and was being recorded unconsciously by the
reptilian part of the brain that lies below depression, below rational
thought, in the soup of human evolution; and maybe by keeping that
reptile alive, by feeding it with Shakespeare’s music, I was
resuscitating an essential energy that would eventually heal me.
I don’t know. But I had Sonnet 129 memorized before I understood
what it meant. And when I finally cruised the poem for paraphrasable
content, I got a jolt.
What concerned me first was the sheer speed of the poem. Here’s
the sonnet in its entirety; lines three through twelve are the ones
that flew by at breakneck speed:
Th’
expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is
lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and so sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe,
Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows yet none knows well
To shun the heavens the leads men to this hell.
I remember feeling that afternoon in my office that the central
part of the poem assaulted the dignity of the opening lines and
necessitated the arch solemnity of the closing couplet. But it was
the rapidity of the lines’ assault that impressed me, the
acceleration of a vision sandwiched between two stolid statements
at the beginning and the end of the sonnet. Hyper-sensations of
speed and clarity sandwiched between slowness and torpidity—this
was the structure I associated with my daily interval of lucidity
and depression, and I was finding them represented in a 400-year-old
poem. My initial suspicion was correct: the poem’s structure
mirrored the structure of my illness.
I know, of course, that Sonnet 129 is not about depression. Yet
when I began to press the sonnet beyond its music and into a tangible
meaning, I found that I had begun to consider my own spasms of high-pressure
clarity in the same way that the sonnet considered lust and love-making:
as intensified bouts of human communication—one with a book,
the other with a lover—that arrived mysteriously, and just
as mysteriously departed, leaving its prey depleted, habituated
to its rhythms of coming and going, and looking anxiously
toward its next arrival. Lust, according to Shakespeare, followed
its own tortured rhythm of advance and retreat, as did my sanity
and my reading.
I remember how I was caught up short that afternoon by the fitness
of the phrase “past reason hunted,” how it got just
right the victim’s sense of being pursued by an unrelenting
lust beyond the realm of reason and clarity. But the phrase also
described my depression, pushed as I was beyond rationality, beyond
stability. The more I read the poem, the more I became aware of
its palimpsest, its shadow theme of despondency: exhausted lovers,
stalled readers, waiting anxiously for the arrival of their consummation,
and waiting dejectedly. Again, the speed of it all. What happens
at the beginning of the second quatrain, and runs from there through
the twelfth line, seems to me to defy rational analysis. Those eight
lines are the particle accelerator of English verse, propelling
their themes along the poem’s corridor at breakneck speed.
Here is the entire blueprint of lust, from its destructive pursuit,
through its annihilating capture and satisfaction, to its lacerating
self-disgust, all of which—the hunting, the feeding, the hating—occurs
“past reason,” a place I was coming to know well that
afternoon, hidden away in my office, pursued by my own demons, and
reading as if my very life depended on it.
Flatness, torpor, ennui pitched to the level of a general malaise:
these were the symptoms I wrestled with—except during those
daily intervals when I’d turn to my books with an unprecedented
and scouring attention. Again, I sensed that depression or melancholy
lurked in the sonnet as a kind of shadow theme or mirror image,
and that as soon as lust’s storm had passed, the melancholy
associated with its passing would arise again. Nightly, as the depression
dropped its veil over my eyes, I found myself by degrees unable
to concentrate, incapable of understanding what I was reading, until
in the early hours of the morning a sedative would release me to
sleep. But as the melancholy lover of the sonnet lived for those
intervals when his lust would be given free rein, so I, in my depression,
greedily anticipated each short spell of lucidity and the books
I would devour. I gradually constructed a relationship between the
lust that drove the sonnet and the single-minded focus that drove
my reading. To my depressed mind, reading was a way of entering
a vigorous and healthy mind, a way of finding wholeness through
union with another. Reading had become erotic to me, the act, really,
of bringing my body, torn with weakness, to the reading table. “In
place of a hermeneutics,” Susan Sontag cried out in 1964,
“we need an erotics of art.” I knew what she meant—I
hadn’t realized the extent of my depression until I found
its essential structure, its bodily form, mirrored in the sonnet.
As I fell under the sonnet’s spell that afternoon, its rhetorical
figures slammed like a wrecking ball against my disease. The poem’s
flow seemed to mimic the blitzkrieg advance and retreat of depression’s
darkness and clarity, which deprive the victim of any measure of
free will. Like lust, the lucidity that daily visited me when I
was depressed was unrealistically intense; it moved me with equal
efficiency and speed well past reasonable limits. I devoured and
felt I deeply understood whatever I read: Nietzsche, Woolf, Shakespeare
I loved without reservation, and so I found myself striking a lover’s
bargain, content to wade through daily moroseness if given a regular
taste, at least, of this super-attention to my books. In fact, these
lucid intervals, continual and soon enough expected, became a
sine qua non, and this was one of the illness’s victories,
that it forced me to live under its expectations, planning on a
future with depression as my sidekick in return for a few hours
of preternatural clarity every day. It was a bargain I very nearly
accepted.
Because the sonnet mirrored for me the structure of my depression,
it also allowed me to externalize this elusive sickness and see
it whole. Although it appeared seamless and all-encompassing, closer
scrutiny revealed its joints and couplings, its own figures and
patterns of debilitation, its own structure, its own limits. Its
own limits—that was crucial. Observing the structural
tensions of the sonnet from the inside, losing myself within its
world, I felt strangely able to look back at my own illness as if
it were another place, another environment,
as those who land on the moon are able to look back at the earth.
Swamped by the poem, I paradoxically saw the illness, and its simulacrum
within Sonnet 129, as an artifice, a made thing—a product
partly of some deep inner conflict, perhaps, but a product all the
same, and therefore produced, artificial, and, like all made things,
impermanent. There are of course biochemical imbalances that reading
poetry cannot right, and I ultimately had to attend to those, but
a conceptualization of the illness was crucial to my decision to
seek help. Encountering my depression through this sonnet showed
me the great mass of the illness, its off-the-scale specific gravity,
its deep cunning. So that I knew I would need allies to defeat it.
I memorized the first two lines and the closing couplet almost immediately—they
contain the decelerated, catechized pith of the poem. I think of
them now as the two lighthouses on either shore of the treacherous
passage that lies between them. I have navigated this passage, and
nearly lost sight of the beacons. Anyone who has suffered through
this illness knows of these moments. That I had the most difficulty
memorizing the intervening ten lines comes as no surprise now—these
were the lines of my life, mimicking in aesthetic form the deepest
and most troubled motions of my interior
world. The thing about aesthetic form, though, is that once it is
achieved, no matter the horror of its manifestation, the demon impetus
has momentarily been stilled, and once it is stilled, renovation
can begin. Even to conceive of an aesthetic form of depression will
seem abominable to those who have suffered from it, but the illness
is very like a living pathogen that will fight for its own destructive
life when confronted with a curative force. In my case the curative
force was partly creative, and penetrating those ten lines by memorizing
them was tantamount to understanding them, telling them, in effect,
that they and the illness they represented would someday be comprehended
and their difficulties resolved because I had come to recognize
their innermost workings. I believe that the sickness within me
resisted my efforts at committing these lines to memory, to stability,
to comprehension, because this, symbolically at least, signaled
a limit to their mysterious endurance.
As I write, our town is under siege from the north: low, gray clouds,
muscular winds gusting to 40 mph, temperatures diving into the single
digits and below, snow and ice already fallen, with a dire promise
of more on the way. Dire, because that’s not what we’re
used to here in Arkansas ten days out from Christmas. It seems years
since I first learned of my very own depression on that ravishingly
gorgeous October day, and now that I’m beginning to feel the
first signs of its lifting, the weather seems small-minded and vindictive
to settle in with such abnormal ferocity. Perhaps attending to such
things signals my returning health. It’s too soon to tell.
But even with the wind pounding the eaves of our house, making a
horrible ruckus, I just heard the wind chimes that we hung on one
of those eaves when we moved here back in July.
It occurs to me that I hadn’t noticed their delicate music
in a very long time.
(AGNI 62)
Sidney Burris has published two books of poems along with a book of criticism on Seamus Heaney’s poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Five Points, and elsewhere. He has also had work reprinted in Best American Poetry. The current essay is part of a book-length manuscript that chronicles the many ways reading has shaped his life. (10/2005).
