A few weeks ago, for a couple of days, I felt like nothing. That could be called an improvement over other days on which I feel like less than that.

If someone mentions a future event I have to sooth the tiny panic lurking in my guts — panic at the possibility that I might not live to see it or any future event. I have no specific reason to think that my immediate future is in peril. Apparent facts are not relevant. The platitudes of daily life are erased, leaving nothing to support the flimsy obliviousness to life’s futile march. These mornings the strength to craft a simple thought is like doing push ups on two broken arms. The weight even angers me. If you tell me I need to cheer up then you do not what you are talking about.

My life would be incoherent without these episodes. Depression and the singular physical sensations it produces (pain, numbness, a feeling that something is genuinely falling apart) make more sense to me than life’s fatuous illusions. I would argue that this capacity for consummate discomfort with the shell of life allows for a more realistic view of the world.

The panic takes many forms. During this bout I opened a book of Li Po poetry. A sentence in the introduction describing the Tang dynasty as “a most brilliant era of culture and refinement, unsurpassed in all the annals of the middle kingdom” did not uplift or inspire. It humiliated me as an example of how much knowledge I will never possess or even comprehend. Time has no future, only the wasted past. The sound of laughter fills the air, but the laughter is at me, and the laughter comes from everything. Cars drive past outside, like patient breaths, self-satisfied and eternally remote. The sound of running water cackles, heaping disdain on me as it passes down the drain. Every drop of water is a century. The sound is cruel, I feel it should stop, but it pressures and destroys my ability to think.

I’ve been writing a poem about a place in which the evolution of human knowledge marches toward nonexistence. What passes for knowledge is front-loaded into the young while the elders have nothing and say little. Tiered levels of communication based on age endure out of the earthly excuse that wisdom is shared among peers.

At present I call this poem “The Library of the Living.” The library is a Borges-ian structure housing the books and writings of every living human. One could never find the beginning or the end of the place, but as with the specter of nonexistence one would never so much as contemplate it.

At the Library of the Living
the authors sat at tables
near their books.
This structure housed
no published works,
no books by the dead,
no works stinking of
immortality.
The young had filled more pages then they had read.
The shelves of the elders were nearly empty.
Maintaining the earthly lie of wisdom
a few elders had slim notebooks
of lightly littered pages,
a few sheets in a drawer.
As the supreme elder I had nothing.
No stories, no poetry,
no waste of the written word.
My pages had
evaporated into the silent present.
As I aged I made fewer spoken utterances,
my last spoken words an obscure tomb,
untranslatable glyphs of breath
decrying the coercive relationship among
words written, spoken, and unknown.
Through translation earnest and fearful,
my words were passed among the others:
Thought
is made trite the
moment it is uttered.
No words are immune to banality.
All words signal
a disdain for the shell of life.
By my decree:
To live is to fail
the ancients were dismissed.
But the dead responded with fire.
Fire.
Fire.
Lianas of angry fire
raced through the stacks,
mad snakes of lightning
snapping up books like
rain washes chalk from a sidewalk
leaping from room to room
wrapping shelves of books,
incinerating them.
Some tried to escape but
most looked to me
as I welcomed the flames.
Too wise for panic but firmly terrified
they listened and reported to those who fled:
This is how the story is told.
The young put it crudely, but heroically:
If the building burns then so do we.
The Library of the Living vanished
so the dead could survive.

I do not know if this poem is going anywhere. I lack depth of knowledge in Lacanian linguistic theory and Taoism, the magic combination of specialties that might give me more guidance. I don’t know why I make myself the supreme elder in this poem, except that I had a dream a few weeks ago which evoked a similar setting.

I read William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” a few years ago after a friend described it as the seminal book of our time on the subject of depression. It may seem strange but I found that book irritating to read. I don’t blame the author, who I suspect would understand my reaction. The overlay of story-telling seemed pretentious, and when I read it those years ago I felt the author used blame, anecdotes, and drugs as salves to obscure his own free will.

My clearest memory of this book has little to do with its content. In August, 2005, I woke up in a cemetery with “Darkness Visible” lying on the ground in front of me.

The sun, rising over on an already 90-degree morning, burned my eyes. I had not been asleep there for more than a few minutes but I had been up all night, passing 32 hours without sleep. When the sun started coming up I drank half a bottle of cheap wine left open overnight.

As Hemingway might have said: The wine was rancid. I drank all of it. Then I went outside.

That is a long and torrid story, though, as the many pages of text to follow would have proven had I not just erased them.