lukas and post partum depression and big trouble and last full measure of devotion and postpartum virtue loss

This essay completes my thoughts. The point I am making is really a simple one, that creative expenditure of energy, where the whole person is sucked up into the enterprise, not simply tires you or drains you, but may suck the will to live from you. It does so, as I will show below, by planting certain notions in the mind that you cannot escape. Let me illustrate the point I want to make by one more brief story.

A Writer Friend

Last year a friend of mine completed a full-length biography of a notable federal judge, to be published in 2006. My friend had been working on it for nine years, about the standard time for a thorough biography. In the year since then, he has, by his self-admission, not been productive. He putzes around with this or that little project, travels a lot, visits with the grandchildren, and can't seem to put his pen to paper (or his finger to the keys). He is a most even-tempered and mature person, who is able to ride out waves that would send most of us crashing into coastal rip-rap. It was not until just last month that I observed to him that he was suffering from "postpartum virtue loss" (my own biblical/psychological category). I talked about Lukas, whom he knew well. He seemed to understand my point immediately. I think he is ready for his next book, even though he admits it will be "lighter" than the biography.

Reflecting on Postpartum Virtue Loss (PVL)

I think that the phenomenon of postpartum depression, felt primarily by women (though their partners may also feel it to an extent) is mirrored by a postpartum virtue loss that artists/creative people feel when they have written or produced a monstrously-huge project. This might be more of a "male" problem, even though some women artists might be susceptible to it. It is as if the Creator in his wisdom has decided to shower equally on the sexes the torment of creative living. But the question that interests me is not so much which medications are helpful to "balance" a person so suffering or which chemicals might be out of whack in the person's body (is chemical imbalance the latest phrase, which will be replaced by something else in a decade, to try to describe what we really can't understand?). What interests me instead are the games the mind plays with a person who has just extruded his/her last measure of virtue. I think the games are of three kinds.

1) You Really Did Not Do A Very Good Job

That's it, in a nutshell. A massive effort leaves you tired, vulnerable and aware of your own shortcomings. A massive effort usually means lots of pages. As you establish even an inch of distance from those pages, you begin to see a word you would change, and then a thought, and those words and thoughts become like a proverbial hanging thread from a sweater that you just have to yank in order to make all the threads "even." But as you pull on it, the entire project begins to unravel. So, you don't tug on it, but you begin to think that what you have done, the best effort of your life, is really not a very good job. It is, in fact, a mess. And, you do not have the energy or insight to fix it. And you don't trust anyone else, such as an editor or friend, to know how to fix it. You see it each day, and this most blessed gift to the world becomes, in your eyes, a dirty, unattractive and even fetid thing. And, you feel guilty because you look at it this way.

2) What You Have Here is Really Just the Beginning

A second thought that washes over you is that this most creative effort of yours, this explosion of energy, this life-sapping production is, in fact, only the first mini-step of some larger project that has to be done. From the perspective of postpartum depression, it is the realization that birth is the beginning only, and you have no energy, will or power to commit yourself to that long term. You have given so much energy, and all it leads you to is the beginning. The child is dependent. It is now a life's preoccupation.

A spent author/artist feels the same way. The effort, regardless of how thorough, can only be a little step, a baby step, a first effort at understanding a phenomenon that is so much larger than you have limned in your book. For only you know that for every detailed paragraph in the book, honeycombed as it is with footnotes, there are footnotes to those footnotes, and more texts to probe, and minutes to read and biogrpahies to write, and towns to understand and people to interview. The cascading thoughts overwhelm and you see your work then as less than a beginning. You despise your work because it is so little. And you think that because you spent your best effort on something that is so incredibly little, you must be miniscule indeed. Why not simply end it all and disappear. After all, you feel so small anyway.

3) You Have Betrayed Your Creativity

The third thought, malefic in its effect, is that ultimately by doing this most stellar work you have betrayed yourself. You wanted to do a good job, a complete job, the best job of your life, but what lies before you is a shambles. It is as if you wanted to build an ornate building, with elegant cornices and entablatures, with friezes and acanthus-laden pillars, and all you have are shards lying around. You know that it is incomplete, partial, inadequate, worthless and you are too exhausted to do anything about it. And, you have spent your whole life committed to being thorough and doing a good job. The dissonance of those sentences is too much to bear. You have betrayed yourself as a writer, an artist, a human being. No one can tell you differently. No one can redeem you. You are an unredeemed captive, an irredent of the worst sort.

Conclusion

Is postpartum depression real? As real as postpartum virtue loss among artists or writers. Let the doctors and professors try to come up with the remedy for the condition. Certainly they will get awards for it, and many lives might be saved in the process. But I am drawn to the way the mind works when you have expended that last full measure of devotion, as Lincoln would say. There is great humanity also in understanding that.

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