12/1/2024
Writing Through Despair
This is number eighty-nine in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“BLESSED ARE THOSE who expecteth nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.” –Hezekiah 3:15.
I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or mental health worker of any sort. In fact, I find it is all I can do to maintain my own mental health. I care about yours, but I can’t do anything about it. So, please do not take anything I say in this post as more than my personal outlook on life and my way of surviving in this absurd world we live in.
I’ll come back to that word, ‘absurd,’ in a bit.
I asked last week what else Papa Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and David Foster Wallace had in common. If you have not looked up the reference, you may still know that these are among the many authors who have committed suicide.
Was that because they were depressed? I don’t believe so. You see, I think depression is a normal state for human beings. Oh, it comes in various degrees and certainly some people are far more depressed than others, but everyone has it to some degree or another. I believe what distinguishes that from the motivation to kill oneself is despair. And despair is a different matter altogether.
Despair, in my limited intellectual grasp, evolves from the loss of hope.
We have been given to believe in this mystical thing called hope. The sun will come out tomorrow! A better day is coming. If all else fails, God will still take you to heaven. And the hope of a future reward—especially one we don’t actually have to do anything to receive but believe—is what I think ultimately causes people to despair.
So, what did all the famous authors despair of?
I wasn’t there, so I don’t really know, but I guess they reached a point where their writing no longer sustained their hope for a better day. Remember, I’ve said several times that I don’t write for a living; I write to live. So, what happens if I no longer have any words to give? For myself, I think that is just one of the absurdities of life.
When I sat down to write City Limits in 2017, I had a very distinct question I wanted to explore in the character of Gee Evars: Are we as individual humans nothing more than the collected memories and experiences of our lives, or is there something inside us that makes us who we are?
Please understand that I recognize people go through extreme trauma that affects how they respond to life, but does it change who the person is inside? I don’t know for sure. I explored the question with Gee Evars by stripping him of his memory and identity. He remembered his name. He could read and write and do math. Occasionally, he found talents for crafts or nature. But he couldn’t remember who he was. So, in trying to settle into a new and unknown place, he has to discover who he really is inside.
And stripped of all he could remember about himself, he still did not despair. He recognized that he was still wholly himself. He went through every day with a sense of the absurdity of life. That he should be here with absolutely nothing, and still be able to be satisfied and happy.
City Limits and the sequel Wild Woods ebooks are available on Bookapy. Paperbacks are at many online vendors.
As we have already seen that there are many depressed writers who have lost hope and slipped into despair and killed themselves, I am not going to suggest that all you need to do is write to get through the despair. What I am suggesting is if there is no hope to lose then there is no despair.
I consider life to be a kind of absurdity. According to Albert Camus, the Absurd results from the confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. But Camus also holds up humanism as a fundamental character of humanity. He does not fall back onto the response of suicide because there is no despair. Suicide is the renunciation of human values and freedom.
In my own words, there is no hope to look forward to. If something comes up after you die, be delightfully surprised. People are born and they die. Between is all the reward and punishment we can possibly handle. Even when I am crying in pain with a failed heart, I am laughing at the absurdity of the situation.
I live alone and I know what loneliness and isolation are like. I take little things and make large stories out of them, and that is how I entertain myself. It is how I deal with the absurdity of life. Is every day a gift? No. Some days are a pain in the ass. But not every day.
Some time ago, I met a young woman who was very interested in my erotic writings. She wanted to know how I developed them and what I used for reference. All I could profess to was my sometimes rather weak memories of what those feelings of newness and discovery that propel the sex scenes of a story forward are like.
She surprised me by telling me she would be my subject for ‘primary research.’ We have become very good friends, and I have spent many pleasant hours exploring her physically and mentally, discovering her likes and dislikes, finding out about her life and her loves and her challenges. She has opened many doors in my mind.
I have not had sex with her and I have no hope of ever succeeding in that endeavor. If one day it should happen—like life after death—I shall be pleasantly surprised. But I don’t hope for it. I am happy with the absurdity of our relationship.
Writing is my go-to for adding meaning to my life. Yours may be reading. Or it may be gardening or volunteering with children or painting or music or cooking casseroles for the church supper. They are all part of the great absurdity of life.
And hence my opening quote that was made up as part of a pseudo-Bible that has no official publication and to which you might add your own adages as verses. “Blessed are those who expecteth nothing for they shall not be disappointed.”
Truly, what better than a life without disappointment?
I promise to find a lighter subject for next week. I will be looking back on November Noveling and seeing how my new work progressed.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
