After her return from the Soviet Union, Gilda seems to have fallen into depression. Her friend Babs Lake took her on an Atlantic Cruise to break her from its chains. During that time, her spirits lifted significantly. She was reading Moby Dick, and this was found folded in her hardback copy of the book. It is a fascinating peep into the things she was thinking at the time and that later would inform her fiction. It is believed by most Trillim scholars that this was written about two days into the voyage.1
Here on a hollow deck. Of a hollow ship. On a hollow ocean. Gracing a hollow planet. Circling a hollow star. Secondary qualities without substance. Appearance without essence. Surface without depth. Is it real, or just me—falling into a slippage of self, a dysfunction of my brain, twisting reality into a caricature of a line drawing abstracted from something richer into which I cannot tap?
What if it’s not me? What if this deep melancholy is natural? A response to a disease of sorts. Not something deviant or masking realities, but rather something embracing them? Attending to them with clarity? What if this depression of spirit is not a sickness of self, but of community? What if this deep detachment is a call to others, to draw the community’s gaze to that one member who can no longer carry her self-imposed load? Like a fever. A signal to the village that something is not right within. A muster! A trumpet blast to rally the tribe. Quick. Run to her! Grab her. Hold her with your strong arms. Convince her by your swift attention that she belongs. That she belongs whether she can carry her load or not. Tell her: You are ours! The community calls, we will not let you go! What if in her struggles to get away she were told, you cannot go away, for you are ours. You are ours. I am unworthy, she weeps and pulls away, runs away whispering, I cannot carry the load. It is too much. But the village comforts, we will carry both you and your load. See our arms? Are they not strong? Come one. Come all. There! Heave ho. Shoulder her burdens. You are ours! You are ours! See! We have your cargo. It is light for we are many and we can hoist it with ease. All your loads are secure. We will not drop them. Rest your mind, for we’ve got them, and we are holding all that you love tight. Do not worry; we will not let them fall. They are yours, and because they are yours, they are ours. Let me go, she cries. I no longer belong. Leave me alone. Leave me to be. Alone.
But we will not. We will not. We cannot. She is ours.
What if melancholia is natural? What if it is not broken brain chemistry, but broken networks of care? In a mythical time, call it the time of the cavewoman, call it tribal, call it the age of awareness, when we walked with others more closely, when we could read another’s mood and contribution and tune ourselves to their comportment and disposition, could we then heed the call more keenly? Could we sense the community’s ailments and disarrangements with more regard? Apply what medicine was needed with more fine-tuned dosage? Granting the magic necessary to attend to the broken community, in which a despondent member is but a fever of sort? A signal. A broken pulse beat in networks of care?
See my neighborhood now. Compartments of the lonely. We dwell alone, or in island families, staring through singleton houses lined up like rows of prison cells carved from the landscape, masking and dividing what community is still not ravaged by the sharp blades of modern life.
Or this metaphor. Our modern networks are like a spider web blasted with a stream from a garden hose: the shreds of the web remain, creating a mere semblance of the structure that once stood securely. Networked with solid moorings and tightly moored joints that could withstand what winds blew in the night. Not now. Now under the pressure of the focused liquid beam from the water hose, it has been shred to the point that the lattice is a sparse and threadbare rag.
We boast about our individuality and hold up our independence like a plucked bird bragging that now without the weight of all those feathers it will be able to soar higher than its fellows. And the sickness grows. For what individual can carry the weight of existence? And in a thousand lonely isolation chambers we scream for help. We wander in a depressive fog and shout for aid, waiting for a community to rescue us. Yet like fledglings whose mother has fallen broken from the shot of a hunter’s gun, we peep in the deserted branches waiting for a sustaining worm that will never appear.
And so in darkness we lie on the analyst’s couch while he plies us with pills manufactured as blunt alternatives to the arms in which we long to be carried and think it natural to return to the individual cell, or our family’s individual cell, to the hive of fragmented connections. We have become corporate. Industrial in our individuality—filled with efficiencies that care less, or sloppily Band-Aid severed relations, and ignore the organic roots that once nurtured and healed us.
Grab her? Hold her? For she is ours? We’ve forgotten how. And the we-will-not-let-her-go is lost in a palliative of duty, casseroles, and platitudes.