Writing and Sadness: Reflections on the Creativity of Diminishment

How hard it is, as a writer, to let go of my sadness! (And how strange that I don’t really want to!) Yet in some ways, wanting to hold onto it makes perfect sense. For that constitutional disposition—also known as depression, for which I have been on medication now for 32 years—seems at or near the center of my writing. But who says I have to get rid of it? 

(Writing and Failure.)

I remember my favorite English professor, Peter Manning, once saying that poetry—he was talking specifically about English Romantic poetry (and later became my dissertation director for a thesis on that same subject)—poetry was where you could have your cake and eat it too. And I remember thinking, how great that there is a place in life, called poetry, where you can do that: Imagine an ideational world, yet carry it around with you in the real world, to repair to when you needed it. 

And I guess that’s kind of like what I want to do with my sadness, too—the remembered sadness of my 13 years of widowerhood (2004-2017). It is now a thing of the past, over and done with, and I miss it. I want to keep the memory of it close to me, like a piece of cake I can still have, even after I have eaten it. I’m remarried now. I fell in love with Julie, and moved to Seattle from Long Island (on Groundhog Day 2017), and left my Long Island life behind. Yet part of me doesn’t want to leave my sadness behind. Why is that? Why don’t I want to let it go? 

I think it’s because the sadness is part of my memories of Diane, my first wife, who died 21 years ago. That sadness was with me for 13 years, waxing and waning, while I lived—almost always alone—on Long Island after she died. “A poor thing, but mine own.” (The phrase is proverbial, and said to derive from Shakespeare’s As You Like It; but I know it from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.) And in leaving the sadness behind—in having left Long Island and let go of my sadness—I feel I am letting go of Diane, and my life with her. Not only my life with her while she was alive (we were together for 23½ years, 1981-2004), but also after she died—for those 13 years after she died, while I was a widower, before I got married again. The 13 years of her afterlife, so to speak, when she was still with me. Our afterlife, actually.  Because it was my afterlife, too, that I was living—the leftover part of my life, after half of it was gone. A half-life, you could say. 

I still had my son—our son, Zack—who lived with me another two years after his mother died, before he went off to college. So to call it a half-life is maybe a bit melodramatic. But it certainly wasn’t a full life, for either of us. Zack had lost his mother—a loss never to be redeemed. I am still, and I suppose I always will be, trying to get my mind around that one: What it was, what it is, what it meant and means, for my son to have lost his mother at the age of 16. I mean, she was my Diane; but she was his mother. She will always be his mother. And he will never have his mother again.  That cake has been eaten, and can never be had again. And it is important to know, and to always remember, that whatever I can say about my own loss, I can never speak for him. Which only adds to my sense of the inadequacy, and maybe even the irrelevance, of my words.

That sense, though, will not keep me from speaking, if only to give my side of the story. My side of the sadness, which I don’t want to give up—in spite of my recognition that I already have given it up, in that I have left behind the place of that sadness, Long Island—the place where Diane’s death, from cancer, was coming for four and a half years after she was first diagnosed (1999), and then came, and then was lived with by Zack and me, and was sort of gotten used to—as most terrible things, or so they tell us, can be gotten used to—and even became sort of dear to me, as sad things will do. As anything will do that becomes a part of you. So that when you leave the sadness behind, you feel you are leaving part of yourself behind, too. And you are.

And not just any part of yourself, but something authentic and irreplaceable. Something dear, in a way that happy things can never be dear. For happy things are not acquired in the way that unhappy things are; or if they sometimes are—some happy things, anyway—if the suffering that we sometimes pay for happy things with, through work and disappointment and frustration and sacrifice and deferral of pleasure—if that suffering is comparable to the suffering of loss, the two sufferings at least leave very different marks on us. The suffering we incur on the way to tangible gain does not, I think, touch the soul. Whereas the suffering we incur through unrequited loss—and failure, and the bafflement of hopes—very much touches the soul. And not only touches it, but forms it, and authenticates it. Loss and suffering and soul and authenticity are all intertwined, and indispensible.

To talk about the loss and retention of sadness is to talk about process—a natural process, which took place for me in nature (two things the English Romantic poets were also big on: process and nature). In as much of nature as could be found, anyway, in the suburbs of Long Island. In my neighborhood of Huntington Station, to be exact, not far from the shore of Long Island Sound. But it was enough nature for anyone who needed it, and was willing to look. I did, and I was. I had the sky, and the clouds, and the trees—full in summer, bare in winter. Ah, the somber, dignified beauty of bare branches in winter! The simple, diminished winter trees. The beauty of diminishment—including my own. The diminishment of the Minor Period, which is what I call the period between when Diane died and when I left Long Island for Seattle, to live with Julie. The Minor Period was and is dear to me, as things and times of sadness can be. 

But the Minor Period, it seems to me now—and I think it seemed so even then—was a time not only of sadness, but of a certain peculiar authenticity as well. The authenticity of sadness. (Does this imply that happiness cannot be authentic, at least for me? And is this true? Or is it only part of my depressive illness?) In any case, it was a time of feeling that I had no choice but to make the best of a period of diminishment, of diminished possibilities and expectations. After Diane’s death, the idea of having possibilities and expectations, while not entirely eradicated, was radically tempered and diminished. My possibilities in life were less now, because they were no longer shared with her; and therefore my expectations must be less, too. But in a sense, those possibilities and expectations were also, in their diminishment, rendered more valuable and meaningful. Their diminishment paradoxically concentrated and enhanced them; the old “less is more” paradox.

Hope—the possible grounds for hope, in the face of loss, loneliness and desolation—became much more important to me. Indeed, the possibility of hope became all-important, and the sky, the clouds, and the trees became objects—and even companions—of that hope. To be out and about on a walk under the elements was vital. I subsisted on hope, and on all the feelings and things that worked to buttress hope, and counteract hopelessness and despair: the emotionally succoring power of clouds, of the sea (especially the Long Island Sound, for some reason, more than the open ocean, which I also had access to, not that much farther away than the Sound; but the effects of the ocean were much different—also sublime, but in a different, less “contemplational” way, to coin a term), the power of trees, and of the horizon. The horizon was a big deal during the Minor Period, too. There are no mountains on Long Island; all is flatness, unrelieved flatness, so the distant horizon became a receptacle, as it were, for my vague but insistent intimations of hope and expectation; the distant horizon became “expectational”, to coin another term. That is to say, it gave me the sense of something to be looked forward to, though I couldn’t say exactly what. It gave me a mild excitement, a vague sense that something was in the offing.

And along with the horizon, during the Minor Period I became much more conscious of the idea of the weather over the Sound. (The actual weather over the Sound, while pleasing to me, was somehow less compelling than the idea of the weather.) Even when I wasn’t by the Sound, though, I was thinking of what the weather must be like over it. I had a picture of it in my mind; and the somberer, the better. The thought of somber, dark, cold, inclement weather over the Sound filled me with an expectational happiness. I cannot say why. And the fact that I can’t—and couldn’t—was part of the happiness. The whole imagined tableau—clouds, storm, rain, coldness, overcast, all of them over the distant Sound—served as a kind of emblem for me. An emblem of happiness and—perversely, counterintuitively even—security. Maybe it was because inclement weather implied, also, a process of sheltering—repairing to a cozy redoubt to “seek shelter from the storm.” Maybe it was the thought of a cozy redoubt that made me happy. The cozy redoubt was the antidote to my sadness and loneliness—or at least a refuge from them. But I think it was more than that, too; I think the thought of heavy weather itself brought me happiness. And again, I cannot quite say why this was.

How I miss all that! How I miss not only having but imagining the clouds and heavy weather and darkness over the Sound. Because I live by a sound now too—Puget Sound—and yet how different! How different and strange this new geography is. Here there are mountains on both sides of the Sound: the Olympic Range to the west, between the Sound and the Pacific Ocean; to the east, on the other side of Lake Washington and Bellevue, the Cascades. And to the south, there is the Fuji-esque glory of Mt. Rainier, solitary and majestic in the distance. But none of this drama, either geological or meteorological—for there is serious weather in Seattle, too; months and months of drizzle and damp, and cloudy skies (riches for this Southern California boy, raised in the sun)—none of Seattle’s natural, elemental drama has much meaning for me yet. None of it, you see, is saturated.

Nature in and around Seattle is beautiful—no doubt more beautiful, more picturesque, more dramatic than nature on Long Island—but it is not saturated. Saturated with what? With sadness, of course. My sadness. Sadness, and memories, and memories of sadness. Even the happy memories of Long Island—getting my tenure-track teaching job at Dowling; moving there with Diane and Zack; getting tenure; going places with Diane and Zack: into the city; out to the beach; to the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival every summer—even these happy memories have an ostinato, a ground bass, of sadness. For they are all backgrounded by the biggest memory of all, the biggest sadness—the only sadness, in a way—which is the memory of Diane’s illness and death, and its aftermath. Its afterlife.

And I miss that saturation. I miss that sadness. I even miss the afterlife—both our afterlives. And I don’t yet feel at home in Seattle. Because Seattle, you see, holds no sadness for me. The light, when the sun is out—as it is in the summer—is bright, clear, white, and rather harsh. It reminds me more than a little of the LA light; there is a starkness and heartlessness to it. But no sadness. So different from the Long Island light, which is gentler, more golden. More eastern. (The Hudson River School of painting got it just right.) I miss the light of the East.

There is a passage at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native, having to do with light and setting, that has always spoken to me, ever since I came across it during my first depression, 37 years ago. It describes the scene in a place called Egdon Heath, shortly before twilight, in November. The Heath is growing darker by the minute, but there is still a white light in the sky:

"It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this…. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the façade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the façade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged."

LA was always “a place too smiling for my reason”, and when I read this in the fall of 1980, when I was 26, and going through my first (and worst) depression, in the house in Pacific Palisades where I grew up and had now returned to, it struck a chord with me. The chord of noble sadness, of depth of feeling. Of authentic being.

The chord, it is also possible, of my own delusion—the delusion, to quote another favorite text, that “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth.” The house of mirth, too often, is a shallow place, whereas the house of mourning is a place of depth and true feeling. As though feelings of mirth were somehow not true feelings, or at least not as true as feelings of sadness.

Balderdash, you say. Romantic balderdash!

But the thing is, I believe it. I have always believed it. In my heart, I have always believed that Romantic balderdash. I have always believed that the deep truth is not only inexpressible, even unknowable, but also sad.

Click to continue.

Or is it more that I just want to believe this? Because believing it would make me—what? More “authentic?” Not the privileged, candy-ass son of a screenwriter from LA that I am, but rather someone else less privileged, and therefore more authentic? Because I believe also that there is an inverse relationship between privilege and authenticity. Or rather, I both believe this and I don’t. I don’t believe it because three of my favorite writers—Proust, Henry James, and Lord Byron—were highly privileged as well, yet were no less writers—and no less authentic—for all that. But then they were also geniuses, and I, Senator, am no genius. And for non-geniuses, privilege is the kiss of death.

Probably all balderdash, too. But the truth remains that I still feel more “anchored” when I am sad than when I am happy. I know not why this is, but it is. Maybe that’s what the Biblical verse is hinting at too—that the house of mourning is better than the house of mirth because it is more anchoring. After all, you are doing something worthwhile when you go to the house of mourning. You are comforting people. And comforting people, besides being the right thing to do, is also anchoring. Exposing yourself to sadness, and comforting people, anchors you more in reality than partying does. Plus, happiness passes, but sadness remains. The poor you have always with you.

But the Buddha says that both sadness and happiness are passing appearances, and impermanent. Change and flux alone are real. Fair enough. Maybe it’s just that sadness has a certain cachet for the Romantic because, due to the peculiar orientation of the Romantic psyche, it feels more tethered to reality when it is sad than when it is happy.

Or maybe it’s all just a matter of neurochemistry. For the depressive, the default state is sadness. Yes, I know there’s an important distinction that is always made here: Sadness is a normal response to an external reality, whereas depression is a pathological condition. That’s the standard psychiatric line, anyway, and I’m not challenging it. What I’m saying is just that I recognize that my cultivation of and attachment to sadness are partly Romantic thinking, and partly neurochemical destiny, and partly, also, a kind of creative superstition. I feel that sadness—at least my sadness of the past 21 years, since losing Diane, and probably long before that, long before the Minor Period; probably way back into childhood, the more I think about it—sadness has for a long time been associated, in my mind (and not only my mind, but in the popular imagination as well), with creativity. That too is part of what another professor of mine in graduate school, the great Romanticist Jerome J. McGann, called “The Romantic Ideology.” (He was using “ideology” in the Marxist sense of false consciousness.)

But I can be more precise than that. At least in the Minor Period, I think I associated sadness with a certain kind of creativity. I will call it the creativity of diminishment. In the Minor Period I wrote three books, three memoirs: Failure: An Autobiography, The Widower: An Afterlife, and Shame: A Transgression. So in a sense you could say that the Minor Period is chronicled—or at least the interior vagaries and vicissitudes of the Minor Period are chronicled—in those books. And those books, along with the various sadnesses they chronicle, are dear to me, too. They are the tangible products of the Minor Period. They came out of my sadness, and they make me—paradoxically—happy. It’s no wonder that I should be attached to them, and to everything that enabled me to produce them. For all of that I am grateful—authentically grateful. (Gratitude also makes for authenticity.) Those products of the creativity of diminishment are dear to me.

So it is not merely sentimental of me, I think, to be attached to my sadness. And also to be somewhat apprehensive about what the outliving of my sadness will mean for me, creatively speaking. Will happiness cast my creativity into darkness, never to be heard from again? Can happy people write anything good?

Here I am reminded of an exchange Diane and I once had about the folk singer John Gorka, whom Diane had discovered on the radio back in the early 90s, and whose mostly sad songs really spoke to us. But then he got married, and came out with a new album that we didn’t like nearly as much. “What happened?” I asked, and Diane replied, “He got happy.”

And I confess I am rather apprehensive about all of this—call it the delicate ecology of sadness and creativity in the post-Minor Period. (I now call it the “Julistic Period”—the period of Julie, and Julistics, which is the study of Julie.) I am no longer alone, but married again, in a different city, in a different state, on a different coast, with a different light. The little plot of new, unfamiliar happiness I am beginning to cultivate here in rainy Seattle—that too is “a small thing, but mine own.” With Julie, I got lucky for the second time in my life, and for that too I am grateful. For the time being, at least, I seem to have lost my sadness. I will not go looking for it right now. But not to worry: It is safely enshrined in my past. It is not going anywhere. It is the cake I have eaten, and will always have.

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