The assembled guests chase down oblivion

I mean no disrespect. Being cracked myself, I tend to have an affection for those who are similarly afflicted. I also find much of the policing of language around the ways we talk about mental health more than a little bit tedious, and probably counterproductive. At this point, I prefer being called crazy to being called anything as lazy as bipolar. “Bipolar” suggests that the etiology of this condition, whatever is taking place in the relationship between my mind and my brain, my body and the society in which it has been placed, manic depression can be dignified by being understood as primarily organic, and that the organic is somehow more real than the affective. It is a somewhat clumsy way of ignoring the problem by making it into something that can be managed by the grand designs of pharmacology. It is also a particularly handy way of absolving manic depressives of blame: we did not do anything to deserve this, there is nothing we can do about it, just wait for the pill to kick in. It does not work like that. If it did, the crisis before us would not be so daunting. We did not do anything to deserve it or to cause it; this does not spare us the burden of it, or the inevitability that eventually we will have to work with it, and that maybe working with it, or trying to decipher it, is preferable to the alternative, which is the pretense that one can overcome it. Americans are big believers in “don’t dwell on it, move on,” a prescription that is itself suffused with the misplaced hopefulness of the settler and the frontier. Moreover, even as we claim not to, that the best solution is that we not dwell on “it”--whatever “it” may be–we dwell on “it” constantly, we talk about “it” constantly. Most of what we say is not particularly useful because it is designed for the confessional: we curate our sins so we might be absolved through the grace on offer from the other. But most of the time we usually tend to leave out the really juicy parts. This is one of the reasons I do not particularly like the word “trauma”. As it has come to be deployed in our post-Millennial cataclysm, the word has come to do entirely too much work, collapsing a wide range of emotionally peculiar or troubling circumstances into a single explanatory paradigm, often conflating the most banal forms of distress with the most terrible. From one angle, the fact of birth is traumatic; we call that trauma life, and it is the one thing we can never hope to recover from, the thing that sets us on the path to an impossible reparation, which is another word for desire. Grouping all difficult circumstances within a single descriptive frame does a disservice to the infinite variety of human experiences, overloading the sheer commonality of many of those experiences with undue liability for explanation or redress. With respect to wellness, whatever that is, saying “I have trauma,” or “I have been traumatized,” is about as useful as saying “I am bipolar”–it offers a most general description of a set of symptoms as if the description alone is curative, as if being aware of the symptoms is tantamount to recovery, as if there is nothing to be gained by an exploration of the symptoms or, as if there is someway all symptoms might be tallied. The actuarialism here is punishing. A therapist once asked me, “Have you ever asked yourself why you are depressed?” It was all I could do to restrain the acid rejoinder. “Do you really think I’ve gotten this far in life without wondering why I’m like this?” I wanted to say. “I’m a highly functioning, highly educated, manic depressive neurotic who displays certain minor symptoms of hysteria. Have I thought about why I am depressed? No, it never occurred to me to wonder. Does it not occur to you that the attempt at explaining myself to myself might in fact be part of the underlying problem?” All that being said, my great-grandfather was somebody who almost certainly came back from the war suffering the effects of war trauma. He was, of course, never diagnosed as such, and it does not seem that anyone around him really bothered to connect the dots. The only contemporary of my great-grandfather who left a written account of the man (outside of the obituary composed by his eldest son and namesake) describes Edward Grady as stern, unsmiling, and irascible, completely lacking in the buoyancy characteristic of his brothers and sisters. The Irish propensity for gallows humor, that occasionally remarked upon demonstration of a joyous fatalism, was completely absent in his person, and in his personal interactions. “From his childhood and on through the years, he made a great effort to isolate himself even from his own family….What unknown reasons were part of his decision to isolate himself, I do not know. His choices seemed to say, ‘Please leave me alone; I feel better within myself.’” This brief account of my great-grandfather and his personality was recorded by his nephew, Joseph L. Grady, who wrote a compendious history of the family stretching back to Clare Island, to County Mayo, to Kilgarvan, Kilitmagh, and Killarney. By and large, the Joseph Grady account does not dwell overlong on any single person or speculate on their motivations for the choices they made or how they did or did not choose to live their lives. Every life is singular, but in the written history of the family, pretty much everyone seemed to be cast from similar molds; where there was variability, it was not worth accounting for. Which makes Joe’s account of my great-grandfather all the more striking, as is the implicit denial that there might be anything behind Edward’s eccentricities. Ed was just like this, Joe tells his readers–most of whom would likely have been family members–no one knows why, it is just how he was. Joe does mention that Ed had a distinguished record of service in the war, but makes no gesture to connect his more inscrutable choices–his decision, in 1919, to become a homesteader on land that was long-settled and extensively developed, for instance–speaks to the ruination that stems from the silences, from a Catholic trust in the power of absolution as endlessly ameliorative. I have a modest proposal, or is it an addendum: Edward Grady was not well. One cannot know this for certain, and one cannot blame him for this if it is a reasonably correct assessment of his person. Indeed, it does not need to be correct; it needs to be truthful, which is a more precarious business, all around. In a nation that has never not been at war, somewhere, in some capacity, the fact that we have been able to evade the question for so long–What has all of this done to us? What is it doing to us?–is perhaps the clearest evidence we have of our boundless capacity for misrecognition, for the impossibility of self-recognition in the Socratic sense. Our culture was forged in war, and in the desire for redemption, to know that one is redeemed. Confronted with the injunction to know ourselves, most of us respond with Bartelby, the implacable emblem of the national soul: “I prefer not to.” As is generally the case, the silence that clusters around traumatic circumstances only serves to compound the original injury, as the person who has been traumatized seeks some form of redress by dividing up the circumstances of the injury and distributing them to those who are trapped in his orbit. Joe Grady’s account is marked by this unwelcome dispensation, and it carries it forward, neatly sidestepping the dangerous fact of Edward’s illness by taking refuge in the heartwarming trappings of late immigrant romance, of hearth and family and achievement, of celebrity and sport as synecdoches for working-class ambition, and substitutes for the achievements born through social solidarities. “Reaction among his family and friends to his announced intentions was just plain amazement. Why would he pursue this course when the times and change had made it unnecessary?” A reasonable question, one to which the author attempts no reasonable answer. Instead, what we get is this: “I have a memory of that woods,” Joe writes, “for it was there among those majestic oaks, ironwood, butternut and some poplars, that a large family picnic was held on July 4, 1919, the day that Jack Dempsey won the world’s heavyweight boxing title from Jess Willard….I remember well the sumptuous feast of homecooking that was in progress when someone arrived from town with the news of the outcome of the fight. It had just come over the wire to the Monona depot.” Close your eyes and think of Dempsey; let your misplaced pride be a salve. It bears mentioning that, in Joe’s account, the world goes missing yet again. The woods, the farm, the food: these constitute the physical shape of my great-grandfather’s silence, a silence that will haunt my grandfather and his siblings, my mother and hers, and–in some portion, in some way that I have only started to consider, myself, my sister, my cousins. I speak for none of these people except myself, and I can barely speak for myself, for some of the reasons I have already outlined. For now, let me point out, in this brief account of immigrants and the children of immigrants, the new home takes shape in the undignified quiet that is the lot of the old. Ireland disappears. Its recent history, its present history, the fields and the famine, the Easter and the uprising, the relationship of a place once so dearly held, so vibrant, so well cherished, is conveniently forgotten as, through food and fighting, the assembled guests chase down oblivion.