with Derrida in the school of restlessness

When I was 13, my grandmother thought that I was constantly high because she couldn’t tell the différance between barbiturates and depression. Although I can’t blame her. I didn’t know what it was either, I just knew this way of feeling was normal. And I also knew that I was not taking anything to feel this way. 

            My depression is always existential. Maybe it’s different for others but mine is always driven by meaning. Depression strips the meaning out of the world. Without meaning, there is no joy. The mechanism it uses is the morbid curiosity of deconstruction. (Derrida and Foucault are the unknown heroes of depressed teenagers everywhere.) Deconstruction is the ability to take a thing apart believing that understanding the smallest unit will allow meaning. But the paradox of understanding how each piece fits together negates meaning because the smallest piece is meaningless by itself.

            For example let’s say I want to understand how a bicycle works.  I grab a wrench and a screwdriver and begin taking off parts of the bicycle and setting them neatly aside categorizing them as I go. I start with the chain and the pedals and grasp how forward motion takes place. Next the handle bars and the wheels – now I know how steering works. Next the body. Then I take all of those pieces and break them down into their simplest parts. Now I look at the thoroughly disassembled bike and believe that I know what it is. 

Nothing.

Just a bunch of meaningless pieces. And now that I know this, there is no desire to put it back together and ride it. Because it doesn’t mean anything to ride a bike. Because starting from meaninglessness can’t produce meaning. It is a horrible feeling to have a bike sitting in front of you, fully understanding the potential of what it can do and having no desire to enact that potential.

            If you don’t like that illustration, video games work even better. Ones and Zeroes at the base producing an illusion on a screen. 

            What I need to get through my day is a story bigger than myself – an overarching narrative (where a bike is more than the sum of its parts) and goes somewhere. I need hope. I need to believe that right and wrong are real things and injustice is something that will someday be made right. I need to believe that the silent witness of the night sky to a thousand atrocities will not be lost when the universe gives up its last bit of energy. That what we do here matters in a grand transcendental language game.

            The last words on the archway of the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno are “Abandon All Hope You Who Enter Here.” Depression is hopelessness. Depression is hell. Hell is meaninglessness which is sad because bikes are fun to ride.