re: lit, life I
When I was young – say, around eight or nine – I had terrible insomnia. I wasn’t the kind of elastic kid that stretches and snaps out of their parents’ grip, rubber balling down the hall trailing a marker along the now graffitied wall. But I did drive my mom and dad mad by being just interminably awake. At three or five in the morning my parents would pound and curse at their pillows knowing that my two marble eyes were wide open, scrolling the pages of some smuggled picture book. And as it goes in parenthood, while I stayed up there’d be no rest for them either. Eventually my mom found that if she played cassette tapes for me I would at least assume all the usual positions of sleep (lids shut, two hands under the head and a gentle curling up of the legs). So I got my own boom box, hand-me-downed from a relative who once hit the streets equipped with mixtapes (which he kept in a tie-dyed fanny pack) and the conviction to bring the noise to the people.
Clearly this was a tool of immense magical power, decked out as it was with all the levers and knobs that an autocratic audiophile would demand out of his weapon of choice. And it did take me to other worlds – weird ones at that. I assume my parents trolled some bargain bin for my soporifics because they ran the gamut from the story of some Polish immigrants’ adventures in turn of the century New York – set to the tune of Swan Lake, of course; to a time-travelling tour of the Paleolithic, narrated by none other than David Suzuki.
My most memorable adventure, though, came when my folks asked an unwitting neighbor to babysit me for the night while they rushed my older brother to the hospital (I can’t remember what for, let’s make it interesting: hyper-atrophied cerebral contusion). My hapless guardian’s only instructions: for the love of God bring a tape! And this wise man carried to the manger a bootlegged recording of Lenny Bruce’s legendary Carnegie Hall performance. That’s right, the dark comedian whose critical re-evaluation of the stand-up form had viciously spliced together politics, religion, sex and all things underground came knocking on the bedpost of a pre-pre-pubescent babe in the woods. And I was changed forever. First: The Voice. Like the devil’s advocate trying to sell Moses car insurance. Equal parts shoe polish and slightly sugarcoated obscenities. I maintain to this day that my need to make words dance to the music in my head is a direct product of my having heard, in my formative years, Bruce’s inbred Yid-rhythms and the jazzy intonations of his slang arsenal.
But maybe more importantly that tape inscribed in me a deep affinity for forms of expression which function as illicit act. A hunger for art as border-hopper, as flight of refugee thoughts from one beleaguered subjectivity-state to another, and not necessarily through traditional channels of dissemination. I have always been fascinated by the mythology of the found text. Namely: how we come into contact, almost haphazardly sometimes, with the artistic work that moves us most deeply. The writers that I respond to in the profoundest way are those that deal in emotional data as if it were a prison-yard shiv: carried secretly under baggy clothing until that fatal moment of impact. “Ooo you got me!” Those writers that disturb me in meaningful ways do so by sustaining a sweaty tone of impending revelation, distending previously unrecognized feelings of loss until they reach a clicking-point, in which our deep-gut, often-glanced-over pain is reinvented as a better understanding of one’s place in a larger schema. This process, in which the damage dealt to us becomes our greatest link back into the world, gestures towards some unseen method of being healed, if only because it proves that in some ways we can communicate those private insecurities which strive always towards silence.
Sidebar: One of the hardest parts about selling people on traditionally “difficult” art is that it’s not easy to talk about why it’s great in non-sadomasochistic terms. I swear you don’t need a whip-fetish or a sweet tooth for cherry red ball gags to enjoy Gravity’s Rainbow, but then again, it couldn’t hurt. In any case the art that cooks with me (thanks again to Lenny Bruce) helps to qualify our feelings of absence from this world as a friction between the self and everything else, because it goes without saying that life is always being lived elsewhere, elsewise and with else one. What changes is our ability to reconcile that gap. It is a particularly violent understanding of human creativity, and one that relies on a kind of barnstorming bravura from its artist figures. Bruce Springsteen once described first hearing Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” as the sound of someone kicking open the back door to your mind, and this is a close approximation of what I once thought artists were for — to shock us into our senses, to force a summit between our illusory conception of the world and some more essential, “real” experience. And my willingness to fall back on this argument got me into some deep shit, developmentally speaking. How, exactly, you might ask. Well…
By my senior year in high school, I was engaged in a Felix Baumgartnian style descent. Except that instead of free falling out of a Red Bull brand flight capsule, it’d be more accurate to say that I was plummeting back into space. Unrigged from gravity’s tender mercy and left to unspool myself out into the chilly draw of the dark universe’s dormant imagination. I’d gotten sick, like really sick, like: every morning; how could you; why me-type sick. I had an ongoing debate with the toilet bowl as to how long I could keep my food down. He usually won by betting low but I was always man enough to hug his pale porcelain sides as I drooped. To save myself from your pity I’ll just call this illness the unnamed. And under its influence I broke up with my girlfriend, quit my job, became the barest whisper of my former self and spiraled into a monstrous depression.
The overly-clichéd, but nonetheless ever-present and valid intra-psychic storms, less politely known as mental clusterchucks (which becomes even less polite if you spell it correctly) that attend any kid coming up in a world where your expectations skew jarringly away from the reality of the situation (qua the adult existence which you are ineluctably careening towards is not the stable well-oiled machine that it had always appeared to be, but instead just a vapid, less-passionate double of your already disconnected and transient lifestyle – essentially you + rent), is reason enough to lose your mind if the numbers don’t crunch quite right. And in any normal situation the ingestion of certain shady (why skirt the issue, exact status: illegal) substances would be the norm for curating these monstrous depress-ogres into some more tame natural exhibit.
But of course the unnamed requires significantly larger doses of neuro-dimming materials. Specifically an injudiciously prescribed major tranquilizer, which, relatively speaking, is the inter-continental ballistic missile to the child’s cap-gun of over the counter Advil. The overall effect of this pill being that instead of acting like a janitor, shutting off the lights of my brain room-by-room before going home to a warm meal and a lumpy bed, this megaton hammer (the pill) shut down the whole cerebral construct like that last scene in Fight Club, where a city block of commercial towers just instantly collapses, raining shards of glass onto the streets below.
It is probably one of those incredibly rare universal truths that any drug use is an act of role-playing, even down to the most domestic brands.” I’m a fully certified court-stenographer when I’m properly caffeinated, adding footnotes, with off-branching addendum to the bottoms of my notebook pages. And the crowd that’s asked to carry the weight when I crowd surf at concerts might be gratified to know that Marcus Creaghan, esquire, would never dream of imposing his body weight on other people without alcohol’s helping hand. But the danger comes from not knowing what role you are playing and why you feel this deep-set need to inhabit a character and a costume that you would otherwise never feel comfortable wearing. And to explain my situation to you I need first to say that you’ve been lied to. Because the traditional narrative of depression defines it as a kind of stasis, a scrunching up, a sitting still as the scary world storms by. But really the experience is more like an endless dynamic friction inside of you, like the deep note in Hans Zimmer’s Inception soundtrack, that wants out but which finds no avenue of escape. It is a roughshod plane of limits, and the worst part of it is the humiliating feeling that you have well and truly lost control.
In a sense it all comes down to movement. Depression creates a stark division between inner and outer worlds. And once the spaces of the outer world lose their context; once the constellatory logic, mapped out by the out flung positions of each individually lost star, drop out of the sky, leaving you with a black, suffocating drape, you’re left with no choice but to turn inwards. Which in itself forces you to redefine motion as a journey through self instead of space. But this interior motion, this tidal influx, can only be a dance of swords, in which you tear apart your insides looking for fertile earth to till. What this pill allowed for then, was a kind of circumscribing of the borders of my existence. It let me draw a circle in the sand where I could call myself king — a place from which to take the power back. If the rest of the world was drifting away like dirt thrown into running river water, then at least I could control the motions of my dulled mind. But of course this left me in a quiet room, alone, with the unnamed.
And if my inclination when it came to art was to be critically distant, to connect only when the artist was able to bridge that gap with their own mad, bad and dangerous creativity, my habits as a sick man were even more defensive. Every morning I’d slip, almost out of panic, into some gross caricature of a former, stronger self. I became a person untouchable by kindness, or humor, or sympathy. And this is how I was when I started at Carleton. Completely isolated and scared out of my mind, but also incapable of really understanding how much I was imposing this upon myself.
One of my favorite things about 80s action movies (abrupt left turn, I know, but stick with me for a second) is that they portray cab drivers as, essentially, just wayward mercenaries. Throw them a wad of bills and they become an impressive jack-of-all-trades, playing the part of your arms dealer/getaway driver/all around good-time buddy. They apparently carry an indispensable and endless cache of skills just waiting for a dead president’s apathetic grin to awaken them. In fact, I have the sneaking suspicion that the team of marines that killed Bin Laden was actually just a group of highly paid cabbies, eagerly watching the meter as they flew over Pakistan. Swooping down with air fresheners and foam dice around their necks instead of dog tags. What I like about this film trope is that it assumes that at a moment’s notice we can reinvent ourselves. That if the camera pans over our idle frame, we have the chance to rise to the occasion.
In many ways our lives are lived as narratives that breathe in the telling. But, sometimes, there lies a small slit of opportunity to change ourselves before the account is codified into myth. There may not be any real way to exorcise love’s lost demon, or to repair the damage done by the blunt unfeeling motion of life’s moving plot. And looking back only helps us to define the moments in which we still had the chance to be otherwise. But there’s a kind of blitzed out and dazzling happiness that comes from knowing you’ve cheated history. That the pieces were all in place to have you play the part of the villain’s sniveling and chronically underappreciated sidekick, but that you slipped backstage to pull an eleventh hour costume change. Because there’s one thing that all the chaos of creation can’t account for, which is that you’re the author of this story.