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.

Chapter Forty
Stories