For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic — it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.
The opening of Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun fades quickly into the background as we begin our journey through her philosophical taxonomy of the abyss. But it is nonetheless here, in the opening paragraph, that she registers a truth often lost to the trick of writing.
Writing is a trick in that, at the moment the written is being read, the writer is announced as someone who knows. It is a horrible weight to bear at times, because it is an illusion and a lie. To write and then publish is only to elongate that always fleeting moment when one has enough assertiveness to say: “This is what I have come to know.” Of course, one likely knew little, or not enough, when the writing began. When the writing stops, it will soon dawn on the writer that they knew all too little at the end as well, and so the writer starts to write again.
When I write, or have written — especially in those bouts of manic productivity I have become well-known for — I generally do not know what I think or what I feel when I begin. I write, but the meaning of what is written is not predetermined. More often than not, meaning is entirely absent, or meaning is lurking somewhere unseen, making oblique suggestions from behind some heavy curtain as to how I might begin its (re)construction. It’s a form of possession, this search for meaning — although whether I possess meaning or meaning possesses me, I’m not sure. Meaning and I are equally silent until we bumble our way into each other. Even then, like a pair of hapless ventriloquists, too much time is spent rummaging around nether regions in the hope that one of us might make the other speak.
This is the truth that resonates outwards from Kristeva’s book on depression. “For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia.” Meaning is a treasure, and melancholia is rarely a source for meaningful writing because melancholia registers an absence of meaning. To be melancholic is, in my experience, to succumb to the overbearing pressure of having no point or purpose. It takes great strength, and even a bit of contrarian madness, to try to fill the void that melancholia opens up in the soul with anything.
I last tried to do this in 2022. On this blog’s archive page, you will find a section titled “The Time I Spent Having a Very Public Mental Breakdown and Manically Writing a Lot About Writing”. It is aptly named… I was exceedingly open about the suicidal depression I was living through and all the crises that emerged from my emotional chaos. I remember receiving a concerned email from my publisher in the midst of things, suggesting I give the outpouring a rest. Perhaps it seemed like I was leaning into the madness. Many months later, we had dinner in London and an alternate reading was proffered: perhaps the writing is what helped.
To this day, I think it did. It was better to write manically every day than give in to the pull of an eternal silence. No matter how unbecoming it can be, writing is how I have learnt to survive. Other periods of productivity have less obviously had their source in my depressions, perhaps because I’ve managed to sustain the illusion that I have something specific to say, but it is always the case. Productive periods of writing are how I keep the demons at bay.
To write about writing itself, however — as I have had tendency to do since the pandemic, whenever I do not have anything in particular to write about — brings its own challenges. It is to latch onto my own tail and try to find some new purpose in an aimless process. Sometimes I wonder what purpose writing could have beyond this. (That is the melancholy talking.) It is humbling to hear occasionally from readers that things I have written have inspired them as they move through the world, but I am painfully aware that I have spent half my time writing only to document a search for something to live for. Perhaps that something is not to be found in writing itself. Perhaps now is the time to log off and do something more than write. Perhaps it would be better to stay silent. Right now, these are the questions that occupy me.
I turn to Susan Sontag, writing on the aesthetics of silence:
Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric.” Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.
Still, one cannot fail to perceive in this renunciation of “society” a highly social gesture. The cues for the artist’s eventual liberation from the need to practice his vocation come from observing his fellow artists and measuring himself against them. An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he acknowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence. (That the artist can persevere in the interrogation of his art until he or it is exhausted scarcely needs proving. As René Char has written, “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.”)
There is an egotism to this sort of silence in Sontag’s view. An aestheticism that gives way to an asceticism. Writing can so often feel undisciplined — for me, it is certainly an outpouring, an abandon. I’m sure it is for many. Not to write is perhaps to signal you are in better control of yourself (than others are). But to stop writing and stay silent — I can’t imagine it, even when there is nothing much to say. I start to write as soon as I feel the desire to stop, precisely because it is a way to forestall the void of melancholy getting any bigger. As soon as I begin to question what any of this bullshit means, that is the moment I force myself to provide an answer.
Silence beckons like death. The writing ceases when meaning has been rendered inert and inconsequential. It is what seems so counterintuitive about Adorno’s infamous declaration that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”. It is a statement preceded by his observation that “[t]he critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism”. Auschwitz was the ultimate act of barbarism. Culture lost, and since critique of culture is still culture, then what’s the point in writing at all?
I do not wish to ascribe to Adorno’s grief the mere pallor of a creative melancholy. How can anyone begrudge him this devastation after the Shoah? And yet, what strikes me today is that, whilst we might likewise claim that “to write a poem after Gaza is barbaric”, I recognise how so many people have written poetry because the only alternative to writing is death. Decades-worth of Palestinian poetry is a resounding testimony to the contrary of Adorno’s (nonetheless understandable) defeatism in this regard. So too is the prison poetry of Charlotte Head, and others who have conjured beauty out of carceral misery in this country over the last few years. They announce that there is something where there should be nothing, and they have produced it defiantly.
I wonder what might be produced next, if anything, on this page. Earlier this week, my partner and I began to compare our archives. They too have been in prison for their Palestinian solidarity, and between us, we must have sent and received hundreds of letters, poems and drawings over the six months they were inside. From the outside, however, it may have seemed like silence overwhelmed us. At times, it threatened to. Maintaining communication across our disconnection was often a painful process that could have easily been given up on. Our energies were defiant at times and subdued at others. It was only during the last week or so of their incarceration that the writing slowed for me. Admittedly, I had begun to feel defeated. For six months prior, I refused to be so.
Above all else, I refused to stay silent. Even when silence might have been preferable, even when I was speaking only to myself or to one other person, I couldn’t help but write. A running motif in my writing arose, borrowed from a letter by Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, which was to apologise for “the too-much of my speaking”. I spoke in much the same way as I have often written in a crisis. I spoke to speak meaning into existence, even as I routinely felt a melancholic burnout creep over me, since the too-much of my speaking failed to manifest any sustained stability. But my purpose was not to conjure meaning only, in some aesthetic sense of a sublime knowledge; it was to preserve a life — our life. That is truly how it felt. That life has now made a shocking return, and I find myself rocked by the sudden change in circumstance. It is everything that we have been fighting for, and I am overjoyed by their return, but now I find myself without purpose, because I no longer have to worry so desperately about the person I love most in this world. It is surprising to me, just how painful that is.
What should fill the void left by an absence anxiety? I wonder if I might find new comrades to write to. I wonder who has the energy to write and who does not. I wonder who has the desire to write but cannot. It must be said that this mode of silence, which is struggled against, threatening to engulf all those isolated by prison, is not the same as Sontag’s silence. This silence should be in no way aestheticized. But it should be politicised. To accept silence like a noble aesthete may well be an acquiescence to the death drive of a suicidal system that wants us to generate value but not meaning. To refuse this is always political, because it is survival.
Grief is still afflicting all of us, and in moments where grief is felt, a Mount Eerie refrain returns on cue:
It’s dumb
And I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you
Phil Elverum sings of ‘Real Death’, whereas I feel like we have had a near-death experience. This may sound hyperbolic, but it does not feel so. If death, like melancholy, like disappearance, like destruction, is a voiding of meaning, I have felt like meaning was almost lost. Prison inculcates a culture of devalued existence. It follows a plantation logic that dehumanises inherently. Within it, meaning is evasive. It kills people.
“When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb”, Elverum sings, perhaps echoing Adorno, whilst singing anyway. A new dialectic emerges here, which Adorno may have failed to grasp, or rather, which may have simply failed him. There is certainly no guarantee of success. It is a dialectic that S.A. Karpukhin distils into a credo to be carried forward always:
When voicedness in art is tied to vulnerability in life, exposure — and not evasion, denial, and declarative muteness — ensures survival.
From prison, you can’t blog. You can’t post on social media. You have the community of those who are inside, and you have whoever might wish to commune with you from without. Although I’d like to claim that my entire life as a blogger and writer can be summarised according to Karpukhin’s credo, never had it felt more poignant than in this six-month fight to sustain a vulnerable voicedness for myself and the person I love. At times, it felt unflattering to give into a familiar compulsion to self-expose, but the exposure did ensure survival. It is an exposure that needn’t always be so public, of course. In private too, to be seen and heard by loved ones is to ensure one’s own survival. But we live in a nightmarish world where strangers are deserving of a reminder as well.
I remind myself of where I am, in my heart and in my body, wrestling with the disorientation that lingers after a traumatic six months. Is trauma ever over? Not until the traumatic event has been provided its narrative place in whatever sense we give to our own lives. That process of narration takes work, and writing helps.
Nevertheless, it is strange to be back here, in this strange dialectic, between voice and a void that surrounds it. Kristeva names the void as “an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief” that threatens to make us “lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself.” But all the more integral here is the act with which it is coupled. “I am trying to address [it]”, she writes.
On that basis, I sense I might be writing here a lot again over the coming weeks and months. I will write not because I have anything certain to say. I will write because, in this moment, all writing is dumb. Dumb, in the sense of an inability to speak. The writing does not speak, or rather, it speaks for me, who has nothing to say. This is the writerly dialectic that I find most affirming — precisely because life has been and remains anything but firm. But the trick of writing, obliquely announcing oneself to the world as someone who knows, is doubled here. Writing might just trick you into believing in meaning for yourself anew. It is a dialectic in that this sort of dialogue, even if it is with oneself, seeks a self-overcoming. It seeks a militancy in its determination to go the miles. No matter how temporary the validity of what is inscribed here, the words provide a path down which to walk. We will keep walking.
