David's Inferno (35 page)

In the hours that followed—while trying to ignore troublesome thoughts about my love life and images of campus dogs who had a disturbing tendency to turn into man-eating wolves—I'd have insights that connected many of the most important ideas in the assigned books with seemingly relevant facts from the realms of current events, historical trivia, existential philosophy, avant-garde French movies, and quantum mechanics.

After a fitful sleep and a few cups of coffee, I could usually put together an “A” paper. Seriously. I was already a good writer, and by then, ideas were mere playthings.

I tell this story not to encourage anyone to follow my example. (Which is more likely to lead to dismissal than high honors [sic].) But it's important to point out that for many people in my generation, Dante's deep, I daresay, hallucinogenic attempt to encompass all of the known and unknown universe in one vision made what he was trying to do as revelatory as the words he ended up using to do it.

There's a comprehensive and insightful history of LSD called
Storming Heaven
. The title alone explains why many of us took hallucinogens. In large part, we did not use the drug “recreationally” (unless you parse the word as “re-creation-ally.”) Instead, between being taught to dive under our desks to avoid nuclear attacks, watching Kennedy get assassinated on TV, and seeing our contemporaries disappear into the quagmire of Vietnam, we were afflicted by a profound hopelessness about the future, and willing do whatever
it took, regardless of the cost, to figure out what the hell we were doing on earth, a.k.a., the meaning of life.

LSD seemed to offer a way out of this earthly hell that we'd somehow been born into. For a few bucks, we could explore the limits of Dantean cosmological insights, complete with visuals worthy of William Blake. We were only in our late teens or early twenties, but we were storming heaven and hell-bent on unlocking its mysteries.

Still, within hours or days, the drug usually dumped us unceremoniously back in the darkest of woods. While a few found themselves in disassociated—yes, insane—states from which they never recovered, many of us ended up dazed and confused but deeply, urgently, curious.

And so we began a lifelong search to integrate what we'd seen and sensed into our ordinary lives. Deep study, meditation, and other spiritual practices—frequently accompanied by long periods of depression and even addiction—often played significant roles in our purgatories.

Our generation forced its way into parts (and configurations) of the brain that are rarely explored. We went all the way out to the limits of our individual and group consciousness in order to find our way into the limits of our being. We learned to walk into the labyrinth and then out of the labyrinth. Into the labyrinth and then out of the labyrinth. Realizing and releasing attachments and gathering insights along the way.

In some traditions the result is often called “crazy wisdom.”

In our tradition, it's usually called one or the other. Or sometimes, “creativity …”

Major depression and/or mania—frequently accompanied by serious indulgence in drink or drugs—are often associated with creativity. Baudelaire, Dickinson, Van Gogh, Nietzche, Woolf, Plath, Rothko, and a host of rock and roll stars. I mean even Bert on Sesame Street has mood swings.

From manic visionary biblical prophets to brilliant, stark-raving-mad artists to tragically suicidal writers, the mentally ill have
a prominent place in the cultural history of humanity. And their treatment—whether it involves being worshipped, ignored, put in straightjackets, burned at the stake, or given Pulitzer Prizes—speaks way more volumes about the society and times they lived in than it does about the creative people themselves.

It's remarkable how much more strangeness you can get away with if you incorporate your madness into an art form. In fact, although you might not put it on your resume, occasional periods of dramatic brooding or frenetic bursts of creativity might help you on your career path. Certainly they're no barrier to making high-priced art, playing in a rock band, writing award-winning novels, starring in TV shows, or, as I pointed out before, even being the creative director of a small ad agency.

By the time Dante was forced into exile, he was a well-established poet, essayist, and politician. It must not have been all that much of a surprise when word began to filter back to Florence that he was working on “something big.” But if he had been able, or later chosen, to return, he could probably have blended back into society with relative ease.

Instead he was out there. Somewhere. Doing something that could make folks back home a little wary. (Think of politicians in the Soviet Union wondering what Solzhenitsyn was writing during the 20 years he lived in an obscure Vermont town. Or the entire New York literary world wondering what J.D. Salinger was doing right across the river in an equally tiny New Hampshire town.)

Back home, the exiled creative may be able to retain a special kind of romantic mystique.

On the road, however, without the support of his family and community, the reality isn't always as romantic. Because, in addition to the uncertainty about his living situation, he has to wrestle with his creative angels and demons all on his own.

If Dante wasn't afflicted with at least a touch of depression before he left Florence, it's hard to imagine him escaping it after he left. I see him at his writing desk, looking out the stone arched window in the home of his current patron. I see him envisioning Hell in his
memories of the politically restless streets of Florence and Rome; envisioning Purgatory in the November days of gray pouring rain; envisioning Paradise in the shifting colors of a spectacular sunset over a grove of olive trees. All while wondering if he can ever go home. Wondering, more importantly, if he will ever be able to complete his masterpiece. Wondering, most importantly, if he is truly worthy. Worthy of paradise. Has he really paid his own dues? Has he really expiated his own sins? Is he really strong enough to transform his own earthly passions into heavenly bliss?

I'm sure there were days in which he had doubts.
Many
days. I'm sure there were days when he didn't put a single word on paper.
Many
days. I'm sure there were days when he wondered how he could possibly go on.
Many
days.

If Dante wasn't afflicted with at least a touch of mania before he left Florence, it's hard to imagine him escaping it after he left. I see him waking in the middle of the night in some strange bed in some strange villa, having finally caught a glimpse of that rhyme he's spent days looking for; thinking, perhaps with a devilish grin, of the perfect person to put in that level of hell; remembering a really good Augustinian one-liner that might untangle an unruly philosophical puzzle he's been wrestling with. He's wide awake now, writing until dawn. Which comes, it seems, only moments later.

I see him riding along back roads, under a Tuscan, Lombard, or Reggiano sky, hurriedly getting off his donkey and rummaging in his saddlebag for something to write with and a scrap of cheap paper (they'd invented some rough stuff by then); only to realize later that day, when he's back with a glass of wine by his side, pen poised over vellum, that the canto in question still doesn't hold together.

Writing was as much about memory as craft back then. Dante certainly didn't have to have as prodigious a memory as Homer's. But neither did he have access to the kind of written references Shakespeare had. Or, for better or worse, the seemingly limitless editing
and
reference capabilities we modern writers have. He had
to carry an extraordinary amount of material in the back of his mind, while working on rhymes in the front, juggling and jostling those words into place … only writing them down after they'd clearly earned the right to see the light of day.

In one important way, however, the relationship between writer, words, and vision has never changed. Just as I suspected that the labyrinth Wendy and I made was actually already fully formed, waiting for us to lay branches upon it, I suspect that Dante could see many cantos ahead in his mind's eye, but had to struggle mightily to imagine and remember the words that were supposed to fill them. Sort of like doing an entire New York Times crossword puzzle—the Sunday one—in your head. No cheating.

That's the real power of hypomania. It's not the stream of one-liners that zoom across your neural pathways—it's the speed and transcendence of connections. The way that thoughts tumble over each other and fit into place in ways that feel
so
right while, simultaneously giving birth to new ideas that explode faster and faster in more and more directions.

The “suffering” of mania, particularly in times when it's fueling the creative process, is that it all happens so fast that you can become frantic that if you can't keep up with your ideas, you'll “lose them.” It's probably not true. Those labyrinthal patterns are still firmly in place. But that fear can make you, well, crazy.

We assume that mountain climbers write their memoirs after they've come down the mountain, that prisoners of war write their memoirs after they're freed, that lovers write theirs after the romance has ended—or at least have the decency to wait until the next morning. It's as if their memories, their ability to “relive the moment” can be trusted. But we have an image of depressives—poets and artists in particular—hanging on to sanity by a thread (if at all), creating powerful, elegant, revelatory expressions of their experiences in real time. As if anything less would lack authenticity.

Rest assured, our experiences are as seared in our minds as they
are in the minds of mountain climbers, prisoners of war, and lovers. We can revisit them at will. Our “authentic voice” may now be different from one that spoke to us during our madness. But, in retrospect,
that
voice often sounds one dimensional. Maybe that's why Beatrice made Dante forget what he'd seen in order to write about what he saw. He needed the wisdom of the entire experience before he could write page one.

One bright, sunny winter morning in 2006, I sat in front of the large Palladian window in my cabin. Five inches of heavy snow had fallen the night before, transforming even the most ordinary surfaces into shameless exhibitionists. The evergreens were having a friendly competition to see who could hold their snow weights the longest. The hemlocks easily outlasted the white pines. I wrote:

Five years later, I can still vividly remember … I can
feel
 … the guy who wrote those words. I remember exactly where he was sitting, exactly what he was seeing, and exactly what he was feeling. I'd like to tell him to stop equivocating. I want to tell him to put the pen down, drop the pad to the floor, and curl up into the little ball he feels like inside. Humiliating was
not
too strong a word. Humiliating, frustrating, overwhelming, tragic … none of them would have been words that were too strong.

If you're cold, sick, and starving, melancholy makes sense. I wasn't cold, sick, or starving that day. I was just disconsolate. It made no sense then. It makes no sense now. Depression always
trumps the mind's ability to reason with it. But not the mind's ability to be aware of it.

As a friend wrote me back then:

Sometimes while writing this book, I've been concerned that my attempts to wrestle these elusive feelings into submission may actually give me too much distance from them … as if this all happened to him, not me … that I'll become one of those people who now “wonders what all the fuss was about.”

Then a morning like this one—years later, here and now—will come along. A morning when I'm doing just fine and enjoying what I'm doing. A morning when, at the same time, the memory is right there, hovering over my right shoulder like a forlorn angel looking for a home. Fortunately, I don't have to give him one. But he can stay right where he is. He can keep me honest.

I did do a lot of writing while in the depths of depression. Mostly turgid. Occasionally sublime: