Beneath This Sea Lies Sea

On Art and Unhappiness

Lately, I have not been feeling well. I don’t mean physically, although there are things in that arena I need to keep an eye on; I mean mentally. Psychologically. And by lately, I mean since about 2020 or so. I know, join the club. In what I intend to write about here, I do not mean to separate myself from the crowd. We’re all dealing with something, or many things. There is no separation from the crowd, no matter how much we might believe it to be so, or even wish it to be so. But each life is its own thing, and the effect the weight of that life has on the one living it can vary dramatically. Perhaps in my own case, what can seem to me at times to be the pulverizing nature of that weight is the result of a certain weakness. Of will, of mind. I’m not about to praise myself for my deep well of emotional strength, nor am I interested in beating myself up for a perceived, by me, shallowness. Things hit you the way they hit you.

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The last few years have been rough for me. I said this has been the case since 2020, but the rough times that I would consider unique to me really began in 2022. Some of this I have talked about on social media (about which more later). For example, I had a heart attack in August of that year. I didn’t expect to have a heart attack, but who does? I was just trying to watch Chopped. If you’ve never had a heart attack, first of all, don’t. Second, when you have one, and you’re home alone, and you call 911 (if I’m going to give myself any credit at all, it will be for dialing that number; prior to that day I had been, if anything, and to put it mildly, flippant about my personal health), you might find your home, as I did, suddenly awash in up to six people in uniforms carrying large pieces of equipment. One of them noticed a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on a table by my chair (I’d had some mild problem the night before), and sternly asked me about it. I wondered if Pepto-Bismol can cause heart attacks. Evidently not, so the reason behind that sternness of tone eludes me to this day.

But those men, and the doctors and nurses at the hospital, saved my life, so when I think of them now, I think nothing but good thoughts (my cardiologist at that time, and for months after, I recently learned has moved out of state, something I was not pleased to discover). And I have to say, despite my general personality, infected as it is by rampant anxiety and pessimism, I took it all pretty much in stride. Admittedly, when an old man came into the room, shortly before I was taken away to have stents put in, and introduced himself as the resident pastor, a certain alarm crept into my mood. He was there mainly to be with Kathryn, my wife, and I can’t imagine the fact of his presence, no matter how soothing his words to her, whatever they were, sat with her too comfortably either. Anyway, I got through that one okay. That shit hurt, though, and regardless of what I said elsewhere in this very paragraph, the whole thing scared the daylights out of me.

About a month later, in the middle of a second and unrelated health scare — again, I was in the hospital, this time with C. diff — my wife, who had just left my bedside to go to work, called me on my cell to tell me that my brother, Dan, had died. This was both a shock, and unsurprising. A nurse happened to see me weeping shortly after I hung up with Kathryn, asked me what was wrong, and I told her. To my knowledge, she is the only hospital employee who cared for me at that time who knew what had happened. My mood, at least outwardly, settled back into the relative calmness I had thus far exhibited. But it’s been almost two years, and the fact of Dan being gone has not withdrawn its strength. It still punches me in the mouth every day. I have not “dealt with it.” I have not “accepted it.” Not least because, probably, my relationship with him had become rather fraught in the previous three years. I also can’t help imagining certain things about the day he died. These things could be true, could have happened, or, just as likely if not more so, they could just be the dark, false thoughts of someone (I’m talking about me here) who can’t turn it off. If some people, like some hyperactive comedians, are always on, in the sense that they’re always frantically grasping for a laugh, I’m always on, in the sense that I never think anything good will happen, or that awful things are even worse than I already know them to be. The result being that while I had a lot of good times with my brother, who I loved and who loved me, even during those fraught years, when I think about him, which is constantly, my mind doesn’t usually take me to those memories. Often, my mind throws me off a cliff. I become angry, frustrated, depressed. I become immobile, a lump in a chair.

I know. Join the club.

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There’s very little for me to do about any of this, but it has nearly paralyzed me (fine, that’s an exaggeration, but it doesn’t feel like one) for two years. I no longer drink. This is after years of long periods of sobriety that inevitably ended with me not so much falling off the wagon as leaping from it. Yet I am beyond confident that it is now finally over (and for the record, this is not a matter of being newly sober; it’s been quite some time now). I suppose you’ll just have to take my word for that, but my wife knows, and that’s all that matters. I’ve suffered enough at my own hands. Even if the very thought of drinking again didn’t exhaust me, I can hardly afford to fuck up that badly again.

I also don’t smoke anymore. As long as it’s been since my last drink, it’s been even longer since my last cigarette. Perhaps that’s why I miss cigarettes more. Also, my health never suffered due to smoking — I was never that heavy a smoker — so I sometimes think, well, start it back up. What could go wrong? But I know that’s a tremendously stupid attitude. I also lament that when I quit smoking for good, I had not yet grown my beard, and I believe that now that I have, I would look a lot cooler with smoke drifting out of my face. This, I realize, is even stupider, but the thought remains. I’m not going to do anything about it, though. I may be dumb, and I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid.

Sometimes, I will confess here, to the shock and outrage of all, I will occasionally ingest the kind of gummy that at one time was illegal in my state, and now no longer is. I don’t do it very often — as of this writing, it’s been a while — but sometimes I need to relax, goddamnit, which is something that has never come easy to me. The results have been mixed anyway, and so far, I have not found myself thinking “Well, maybe heroin would be a good thing to try.”

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I have not yet been able to convince myself that writing this is a good idea. I also, as of this second, haven’t decided if I’m going to publish it. Maybe it’s enough to just dump it all out of my head. They say that if you want to be a writer — which has always been my goal, my dream, but which I am unable to believe is part of who I am, not in any serious way, because I rarely do it at all, and at best I am only, and barely, a semi-professional — anyway, they say that if you want to be a writer, you have to be willing to put it all out there on the table. The most personal things, the least flattering things, about yourself. About others, even, though I’m not going to do that here. I’m also not telling you everything about these past three years. I’m keeping some of the bad news to myself. Part of the reason for this is that in some cases, I don’t believe these things are mine to talk about publicly. Another part, even a bigger part, is that I simply don’t want to. So if part of my goal with this piece is to convince myself that, no it’s okay, you are a writer, well then I guess I’ll just go fuck myself because, at least according to the accepted wisdom, I don’t have the nuts to really be one. So be it, is what I say.

I also wonder about my own motivation. This sort of confessional, if done poorly, or if done by me at all, often strikes me as a desperate signal, a plea to be noticed. Don’t you just feel so bad for me? I seem to be asking. As implied, though, I don’t think this if I’m reading one of these by someone else, unless it’s bad. If it’s bad, then almost no other kind of writing could be more loathsome. Same goes for if it’s by me. But the idea, and urge, to write this has been bouncing around in my skull for so long, and with such force, that I worry if I didn’t write it, my cranium would end up being irreparably fractured. Whether or not I hit “publish” is another matter entirely.

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But I’m tired of bad news. Obviously, I’m not speaking of “shit, they say it’s going to rain” kind of bad news. It’s one things if that bad news is spread out over, say, a decade. It’s another thing if it piles up like a multi-car freeway accident in a matter of months. I said before that the thought of drinking again is exhausting. That’s nothing compared to the exhaustion I feel several days a week, every week. It gets into your bones, into your marrow. Any energy you feel could, on good days, be funneled into something productive, or at least not damaging. Or it could rip out any filters you have in place to conduct yourself in a socially reasonable way.

Speaking of which. I’m writing this during a break from social media. I know, hooray for me. Is it possible for one man to be so brave. Well, no, and yet. I’ve done this for a couple of reasons. One reason, to be quite frank, is because too much of what I read on such websites truly disgusts me to my core. I read so much that is morally vile, proudly incurious, viciously smug, undeservedly arrogant, and unforgivably stupid, that my already roiling insides seem to be about to boil out of my eyes. And the people behind these words are so confident in their own righteousness, so sure that their own warped understanding of how the world works, and how those they’ve dubbed their enemies think, and behave, and believe, that I want to take a hammer to my phone and laptop. Probably a good idea, to be honest.

A worse problem, for me, is that it’s not just them. Or, if I’m being totally up front about my own thinking, Them. More and more since my life turned into a parade of calamity, I find myself in heated online encounters, or even just comments by me not made in direct response to another person, that, upon reflection, force me to realize that I’m the asshole this time. It’s happened too often for me to ignore at this point. And if I let that rancid weed spread, the results will, I believe, have a catastrophic impact on how I think about myself. Too much of what I think is good, or at least all right, about myself, would dissolve into hypocritical blathering. Not worth spit, and I have to hold onto something. Still, don’t get me wrong. I have gone after people and ideas online that I despised then and despise now, and I feel I am right in doing so. But becoming too sure of yourself is death. Believing it’s fair and correct to shit on anyone you disagree with can, and should, lead you into a moral and ethical quagmire. The best-case scenario is you’ll realize this has happened, and you’ll reckon with it. The worst-case scenario is that you won’t.

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If I seem to be taking social media too seriously here, I guess maybe I am, which is another good reason to take a break from it. So what am I going to do in the meantime? Well, there’s always Chopped, for instance.

On the other hand. Recently, there was a prompt on Twitter (never X) asking what music and which musicians do you think of as therapy. I don’t think of any art or artform as therapy, but I certainly draw a great deal that is positive from the art that matters to me, that hits me. And it doesn’t need to be comforting. Often, in my case, and I imagine in the case of many others, it’s exactly the opposite. Not long ago, against all reason, I revisited the Kenneth Lonergan film Manchester by the Sea. I’d seen it before, more than once, but somehow I was unprepared for the scene in which Casey Affleck — an emotionally fucked drunk whose brother has recently died, and who is telling his nephew why he can no longer personally take care of him — says “I can’t beat it.” This time around, that line hit me in much the same way as the shock of bad news does. When I’d seen the film before, things hadn’t happened yet.

Similarly, when I saw Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers earlier this year, Andrew Scott, asking his deceased parents — who have inexplicably returned, as young as they were when they died — when it’s clear their unaccountable time together is now over, if they can’t stay just a little while longer, well… I miss my parents, too. Put it like that.

Songs now destroy me in ways they never have before, and I want them to. I do not consider this attitude to be perverse. Nor do the songs need to be soft, or gentle, or affectionate. They can have edges, real ones that cut. In the Nick Cave b-side (he didn’t even put it on an album!) “Steve McQueen,” I don’t smile with bittersweet knowing at these lyrics:

Because someone's gotta sing the stars
And someone's gotta sing the rain
And someone's gotta sing the blood
And someone's gotta sing the pain

Watch out you fuckers
I've got my six shooter and my housefly on a lead
I'm Burj al-McQueen
And I'm coming to make every last one of you bleed
God is great, chances are
God is good, well I wouldn't go that far
I'm Steve McQueen: the atrocity man
With my strap-on blood bomb dream
But mostly I curl up inside my typewriter
With my housefly and cry
I tell my housefly not to cry
My housefly tells me not to die

What all of that means, I couldn’t quite say, but it’s still painful, and bracing, and I’m obsessed with it.

I can’t listen to Johnny Cash’s version of Billy Joe Shaver’s “If I Give My Soul.” It’s too much for me. I listen to it all the time.

There are a hundred different reasons why a work of art, in whatever medium, can make itself matter, can prove its importance to you. I can’t say I’m thrilled that my own tastes lean to the sad and the dark. I think sometimes my life would have been easier (I know, woe is me, but please cut me a little slack here) had it been otherwise. Although the truth is, this mostly applies to my life as a reader. Comedy, good comedy (bad comedy enrages me) is one of the most important things in the world to me, but I rarely turn to it in prose. Why? I don’t know. I’ve read P.G. Wodehouse, I know how good he was, but I have a whole shelf of his books, sitting there unread. When I do turn to humor in print form, I drift towards books whose humor is mean, acidic. Dismissive of others. About the irritation of others. I’m a big Kingsley Amis fan, in other words. Then again, I’m also a big Charles Portis fan. I mean, a guy’s gotta live.

As for the rest of what I read, where would I be had I never read the last three paragraph of They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell? The book is about a family of four, two sons, a father, and a mother who has recently passed away. The novel’s first section is told from the point of view of the youngest son, the second focuses on the older brother, and the third on the father. The last three paragraphs — and apologies for spoiling all the twists and turns in the plot of They Came Like Swallows to anyone who hasn’t read it — which are about the father, thinking about his wife who is no longer there, go like this:

Without their noticing it, they had changed the direction of their walking, and it now brought them straight toward the coffin. They stepped up to it, together, and it was not as James had expected. He did not break down, with Robert beside him. He stood looking at Elizabeth’s hands, which were folded irrevocably about a bunch of purple violets. He had not known that anything could be so white as they were — and so intensely quiet now with the life, with the identifying soul, gone out of them.

They would not have been that way, he felt, if he had not been doing what she wanted him to do. For it was Elizabeth who had determined the shape that his life should take, from the very first moment he saw her. And she had altered that shape daily by the sound of her voice, and by her hair, and by her eyes which were so large and dark. And by her wisdom and by her love.

“You won’t forget your mother, will you, Robert?” he said. And with wonder clinging to him (for it had been a revelation: neither he nor anyone else had known that his life was going to be like this) he moved away from the coffin.

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It would probably be wise to end it there. I know I can’t do better than that. But it’s worth mentioning, I think, given how much this is tangled up in everything else I’ve been talking about, that I am an agnostic, but a very religious one. At a relatively early age, though my parents and most of my family, had faith, I couldn’t quite make it work. I wanted to, and I still do. As a result, I read horror fiction by Thomas Ligotti, who I consider possibly the best to have ever done it, whose stories assert with the force of a religious zealot, that not only is there no God, the very fact of existence is not merely a mistake; it is an attack, an evil act, that procreation is the vilest of atrocities. At the same time, I seek out the religious bliss of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Ordet (he was an atheist, unless I’m much mistaken) and the bleakly hopeful anguish of Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Or, for that matter, the fiction of Shusaku Endo.

Outside of immediate family and cherished and valued friends, it often seems to me that art is all there is, all that’s left. The fact that our current global culture wants to dilute it, or crush it, sap it of individuality and passion and anger and offense, even of talent (which, as the late Martin Amis once said, is all that matters, and he’d know) is one of the things about this age we live in that I hate the most. It’s also why my bookshelves are packed to bursting. You can’t remove from the culture what I already own. And I need it, so you can’t have it.

So what is there in the meantime? I’ll be back online — probably, knowing me, sooner than all of the above would suggest — but until then I’ll sit here with my wife and my three cats and I think I’ll probably read a lot, which is the thing I like doing most in this world. Having those things is not nothing.