In the end, though, I succumbed.
Prozac has a lengthy interim to onset—two to six purgatorial weeks—and also doesn’t work for millions of people—antidepressants are effective about half the time—so it was possible that I was waiting to discern, maybe as late as by Christmas Eve, that K——’s intervention had me cycling in place; there was no way to know and in the meanwhile I languished in pharmaceutical limbo, uncertain of my stasis or was it my progress—was I moving or not moving like the astronaut looking puzzled in the textbook cartoon meant to clarify relativity? And if indeed I began to move, if I began to notice that, yes, I was moving, would I recognize the manner of this moving as familiar, and more, would I still be me?
Nothing changed and I remained in bed; it rained and winter felt imminent. TheAir Force caused some collateral damage by bombing a clinic in Kandahar; it was said Argentina was defaulting. There was talk of adding, to the federal cabinet, a Department of Homeland Security, and of anthrax released into skyscraper ventilators; the airlines were doomed, the stock market was dead, an airplane crashed in Queens. I dreamed of K——ensconced in a wheelchair, seated in the lotus position, old but not dissatisfied. Much of autumn had already passed with me butting my head against depression, but still no chink could be spied in its armor. I felt like the prisoner-for-life with his spoon, scratching at the walls of the Bastille.
On I pressed against the dying of the light, but beyond autumn’s equinox now and crawling into winter, against and in accord with my will.
* * *
The Jungian analyst K——recommended was a woman who, in the fashion of a Merlin, practiced her art in a study overstuffed with grave and esoteric books. In the foyer of her dark warren of rooms she appeared pallid, diminutive, and owlish, like somebody in hibernation. Her study was small but the chairs were arranged as to provide for maximum distance. I regaled her with certain fables of my youth, but equally germane, it seems to me now, were the simplest rituals of my weekly visit, the practical minutiae of Monday afternoons. I rode a bus to her, taking note of fellow travelers engrossed in their various movable feasts—Ken Follett or The Gurdjieff Journal —and felt vulnerable and claustrophobic. Say our bus was boarded by terrorists with AK-47s and checkered kaffiyehs: Was this bookish band of mass-transit riders up to a counterattack? Disgorged in front of a sandwich shop, I listlessly purchased soup or a pickle—neither of which I wanted to eat—and while seated in a corner felt penetrate through depression’s fog some vestige of the comfort I’d taken once in places such as this one. (“I am of those who like to stay late at the café,” Hemingway’s waiter explains in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.” To which Raymond Carver’s weary baker adds, while breaking open a warm, dark loaf in “A Small, Good Thing,” “Here, smell this.… It’s a heavy bread, but rich.”) Nothing was thwarted, but I did recall sanctuary. I remembered the solace of people nearby. Abstractly, and from across a divide, I recalled that I’d once taken pleasure from places where people gathered while it rained outside. This was a spare and economical shop frequented by regulars often in a hurry, where the exchange with the cashier was gracious but quick and the sandwich maker endearingly tattooed. It was cramped and nicely dilapidated—a sloped and fissured concrete floor—utilitarian but clean. On one wall, photos depicted the vicinity of the sandwich shop in past eras: horses, rails, clapboards, shake roofs, and men dodging puddles in tight serge suits (all of them dead now, my mind observed, the busy citizens in those flaking, daguerreotypes painfully expired and forgotten). The tables were
Prozac has a lengthy interim to onset—two to six purgatorial weeks—and also doesn’t work for millions of people—antidepressants are effective about half the time—so it was possible that I was waiting to discern, maybe as late as by Christmas Eve, that K——’s intervention had me cycling in place; there was no way to know and in the meanwhile I languished in pharmaceutical limbo, uncertain of my stasis or was it my progress—was I moving or not moving like the astronaut looking puzzled in the textbook cartoon meant to clarify relativity? And if indeed I began to move, if I began to notice that, yes, I was moving, would I recognize the manner of this moving as familiar, and more, would I still be me?
Nothing changed and I remained in bed; it rained and winter felt imminent. TheAir Force caused some collateral damage by bombing a clinic in Kandahar; it was said Argentina was defaulting. There was talk of adding, to the federal cabinet, a Department of Homeland Security, and of anthrax released into skyscraper ventilators; the airlines were doomed, the stock market was dead, an airplane crashed in Queens. I dreamed of K——ensconced in a wheelchair, seated in the lotus position, old but not dissatisfied. Much of autumn had already passed with me butting my head against depression, but still no chink could be spied in its armor. I felt like the prisoner-for-life with his spoon, scratching at the walls of the Bastille.
On I pressed against the dying of the light, but beyond autumn’s equinox now and crawling into winter, against and in accord with my will.
* * *
The Jungian analyst K——recommended was a woman who, in the fashion of a Merlin, practiced her art in a study overstuffed with grave and esoteric books. In the foyer of her dark warren of rooms she appeared pallid, diminutive, and owlish, like somebody in hibernation. Her study was small but the chairs were arranged as to provide for maximum distance. I regaled her with certain fables of my youth, but equally germane, it seems to me now, were the simplest rituals of my weekly visit, the practical minutiae of Monday afternoons. I rode a bus to her, taking note of fellow travelers engrossed in their various movable feasts—Ken Follett or The Gurdjieff Journal —and felt vulnerable and claustrophobic. Say our bus was boarded by terrorists with AK-47s and checkered kaffiyehs: Was this bookish band of mass-transit riders up to a counterattack? Disgorged in front of a sandwich shop, I listlessly purchased soup or a pickle—neither of which I wanted to eat—and while seated in a corner felt penetrate through depression’s fog some vestige of the comfort I’d taken once in places such as this one. (“I am of those who like to stay late at the café,” Hemingway’s waiter explains in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.” To which Raymond Carver’s weary baker adds, while breaking open a warm, dark loaf in “A Small, Good Thing,” “Here, smell this.… It’s a heavy bread, but rich.”) Nothing was thwarted, but I did recall sanctuary. I remembered the solace of people nearby. Abstractly, and from across a divide, I recalled that I’d once taken pleasure from places where people gathered while it rained outside. This was a spare and economical shop frequented by regulars often in a hurry, where the exchange with the cashier was gracious but quick and the sandwich maker endearingly tattooed. It was cramped and nicely dilapidated—a sloped and fissured concrete floor—utilitarian but clean. On one wall, photos depicted the vicinity of the sandwich shop in past eras: horses, rails, clapboards, shake roofs, and men dodging puddles in tight serge suits (all of them dead now, my mind observed, the busy citizens in those flaking, daguerreotypes painfully expired and forgotten). The tables were
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