circulation within my skull

“ Depression has been described as a pathology of responsibility: you feel intensely responsible for the state you are in. The excruciating paradox is that, while you feel that only you can get yourself out of depression, the condition consists precisely in an inability to act. There’s more than an analogy with the political hopelessness and fatalism that have characterised capitalist realism. Depression, after all, is a pathology which involves a sense of realism (indeed there’s a phenomenon called depressive realism): the depressive thinks that they are being realistic, that they have perceived the real star of things, denuded of illusion. This describes the post-utopian tenor of capitalist realism perfectly…

“ The statistically prevailing form of the ‘disease’ is “atypical depression”. Less common and more deadly is “melancholic depression.” But whatever family name a given case of depression goes by, it has the same effect of: sabotaging the network of emotions that make it seem as if you and your world mean something in some meaningful way. It is then you discover that your “old self” is not the inviolable thing you thought it was, nor is the rest of your “old reality”. Both are as frail as our bodies and may be perforated as readily, deflating all that we thought meaningful about ourselves and our world.

“ This is not to presume to speak on their behalf; that would be to draw them into the symbolic order in such a way as to silence them even further. Indeed, if there is anything that the melancholic cannot abide, it is this very act of speaking for others. We are striving to remain faithful to the no-count’s particular status as the traumatic object of the political: that which has fallen out, and which continues to fall out, of any social and political calculation.

“ When one loves life, one doesn’t read. One hardly goes to the cinema, even. That is to say, access to the artistic universe is more or less reserved for those who are a bit troubled. Lovecraft was a bit more than a bit troubled. In 1908, at the age of 18, he was the victim of what we might describe as a “nervous breakdown”, and sank into a lethargy that was to last for a dozen years. At the age when his old classmates, impatiently crossing the bridge of childhood, threw themselves into life like a marvelous adventure into the unknown, he cloistered himself in his home, did not speak to his mother, refused to get up all day, shuffling about in his dressing gown all night.
What’s more, he hadn’t even started writing yet.