Traveling thoughts

Today, while riding on the CTA, I wrote the following two first drafts of potential essays. It seems to be a somewhat metaphysically tinged day:

Getting ready for the day

Not unlike a machine of familiar kitchen necessity, I seem to only have two settings: clean or off. If I wake up in the morning and decide to present myself fresh and gleaming to the world, I do all that is possible to clear away the sleep, sweat, and imperfection from the day and night before. I scrub, moisturize, powder, and apply meticulous eyeliner. After these ablutions, I select clothing that suggests both non-chalance and polish. There is no turning back at this point. I must carefully pluck off lint, a stray eyelash on the cheek, and other unacceptable foreign objects.

As I stand at the drizzily train station, I firmly draw the top of each leather shoe against the back of alternate pant legs, sloughing off unwelcome rain water and flecks of gravel from the streets.

I fight the law of entropy, hoping that, in a few hours, I will win and look as clean as I do now. I may very well succeed, I determine, silently assessing the potential progress of the situation from my interview, to the CTA commute, to dinner at Wicker Park with my friend Laura.

I secretly hate that I care that, once prepared, I cannot allow myself to become rumpled. I am not like the sky blue plates in my kitchen, which come out of the dishwasher, are checked for remnants from previous use, and placed in dark cupboards. I venture to meet the world, one which leaves its indelible mark on you, no matter your pristine efforts.

On board with Keats

Nearly every literary personage who is worth his or her salt has recognized the reality of suffering in human existence, regardless of time, place, or economic circumstance. However, not all pay homage to the heightened pleasure of joy that is experienced after a particularly menacing bout of blackness. While I am no author, I join with the doomed Romantic poet, Keats, when his eternal pen scrawled the following lines:

"But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine..."

-"Ode to Melancholy" by John Keats

Once one has experienced the swirling, all-consuming, confusing black hole that is depression, the light at the end of the tunnel shines all the brighter. Perhaps that is why some who struggle with the stigmatized illness become manic for a few weeks in between the descending curtain of mental darkness. Damn. Who wouldn't stay awake for weeks, painting, singing, working in the garage to salvage and hoard bits of life before they are plunged back into self-hatred, listlessness, and acceptance of a dusky lens upon the outer world of normalcy?

I have been so fortunate as to not know the threat of unending cycles of sadness. One round was enough for me. The emotional intensity of those few weeks mimicked electroshock therapy to my brain. It has now been trained to vomit back all absurd feelings of worthlessness. I no longer allow them to penetrate past the first door in the long and twisting hall of my psyche. Quite honestly, I have known enough of depression to not care if the thought of having nothing to offer is true. I would rather delude my neurons with past successes and memories rife with overly inflated self-esteem.

The sheer joy prompted by such mental gymnastics transforms my vision until, may Ezra Pound rest in peace, I don't merely see "petals on a wet, black bough" in a rainy train station. It is as if I flick back an opaque second eyelid, similar to an amphibious reptile, like a frog or crocodile, and see the world for both its beauty and ugliness. I see other passengers on the journey we all must take, waiting to get somewhere, see someone, and savor the sweet aloneness of a slow trip along the rails. The rain that falls steadily today is intended to drip through the dirty floorboards of the platform and quench the thirst of the soil beneath the bare trees on the street, the solid wooden beings whose limbs burgeon spring leaves, flowers, and the promise of home to small birds returning after their escape from the harsh, frigid Chicago winters.