PRESENT TENSE
Chapter Thirty-Nine
True to her word, Rose brought Jack her
psychology textbook the next day. He thanked her and set about reading it, immersing
himself in the material. So fascinating did he find this new course of study
that he stopped complaining about boredom and instead used the time to learn
more about the workings of the mind—his own and other people’s.
After reading the section on psychiatric
disorders, and their causes and symptoms, he gained a greater understanding of
what he had gone through. As he had been diagnosed at the mental health clinic,
he had been a victim of clinical depression—but in his case, it was brought on
by a combination of head trauma and stress, rather than by chemical imbalances,
as was the usual cause.
Many of the symptoms he read about were
painfully familiar—the sadness, the sense of hopelessness, the loss of interest
in life, the feelings of guilt, the sleep disturbances, the disturbed thinking—and
worst of all, the suicidal feelings. He had lived in his own personal hell for
nearly two and a half months, and it was only Rose’s determination to help, her
refusal to give up on him, that had finally pushed him to take the necessary
steps to overcome it. He learned, from his studies, that some people existed
for years in the twilight of depression, and he wondered how they found the
strength to survive. He had barely been able to function, and it was only
Rose’s intervention the day he had tried to end his life that had enabled him
to survive. The physical disease had been only part of it; the greater part of
his trouble had been in the shadows of his own mind.
It was a normal, necessary part of being human
to live in these mind shadows part of the time; a person would lose their
humanity without them. But when a person sank so deeply into them that they
could not escape, or rather, when they existed in that twilight part of the
psyche, where the individual could see and remember the light, but could not
reach it, they lost something essential, and the mind could not continue to
exist on a normal human plane. The person sank into their own hell, a twilight
world of shadows and despair, like an unending day of cold, rain, and clouds.
And yet, when at last the darkness became light, it brought its own blessing, a
sense of relief and joy that could not otherwise be measured, as though an
endless winter had ended, and spring had come at last.
Jack was fascinated by the many aspects of
the psyche, and began to delve more deeply into them. After reading about the
work of various psychiatrists and philosophers, he found himself most taken
with the ideas of Carl Jung, whose work on the different facets of the unconscious
mind revealed a great deal about what it meant to be human. Called archetypes,
these dimensions of the mind were consciously expressed in many different,
subtle forms, and Jack recognized some of them in his own artwork.
He had never consciously thought about such
things, but they were there nonetheless, and learning of them allowed him to
recognize things deep within his mind, to understand them, and soon he began to
deliberately include them in his art. Tommy and Helga were puzzled by his
fascination with archetypes at first, Tommy wondering out loud if this was a
new symptom of something being wrong with Jack. Rose, however, understood much
better, having been through some dark times herself and having developed a
better understanding of herself and others because of them. She and Jack talked
about what he was learning, and though she didn’t always understand this new
dimension to his artwork, she liked it, telling him that it had truth, but no
logic—just like the workings of the mind, as she understood them.
Looking back, Jack recognized all of the
things he was now conscious of, things that he had often seen and put down on
paper without ever being completely aware of them. Like many artists throughout
time, he had a deep, if unconscious, awareness of the underlying dimensions of
life, those not always recognized as an everyday phenomenon. So powerful were
the works of some that they were ridiculed, and at times even banned, or worse.
Looking through his portfolio, he saw many of the symbols in his older work,
unconsciously drawn from the depths of his mind and applied to what he saw
around him. He had always been perceptive, capable of understanding what was
truly going on with another person, but this ability had been sharpened,
magnified by his own ordeal—and as his understanding increased, he began to
think of new ways to use this knowledge, ways in which he might help others who
were going through the same misery he had experienced.