"And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars."

The words from Dante's long poem, both in Italian and English, are drumming on my mind like the rain has drummed outside on the windows. But not only his uplifting words...the words as well of The Cure's lyrics to the song 'Lullaby", which a former lover freakishly played while requiring that I succumb yet again to his sexual addictions. I hear the strains of 'Lara's Theme' from "Dr. Zhivago" interspersed between The Cure's melody. It is like a very wierd movie in my mind. Only when I go to look up the lyrics to 'Lullaby' do I find myself leaving the state of curiosity and moving toward a black rage:

"On candystripe legs the spiderman comes
softly through the shadows of the evening sun
stealing past the windows of the blissful dead
looking for the victim shivering in bed
searching out fear in the gathering gloom and suddenly
a movement in the corner of the room!

And there is nothing I can do
when I realize with fright
that the spiderman is having me
for dinner tonight!

Quietly he laughs and shaking his head
creeps closer now
closer to the foot of the bed.
And softer than shadow and quicker than flies
his arms are all around me and his tongue in my eyes.
'Be still be calm be quiet now my precious boy
don't struggle like that or I will only love you more
for it's much too late to get away or turn on the light
the spiderman is having you for dinner tonight.'

And I feel like I'm being eaten by a 1'000 million shivering furry holes
and I know that in the morning I will wake up in the shivering cold
and the spiderman is always hungry."

I think of stories in Konstantino's "Gothic Grimoire", of spells to control the thoughts of others, of Black Tantra, of Raven Digitalis' tongue-in-cheek depiction of the musical taste of MopeyGoths, and of William Styron yet again:

"Near the end of an early film of Ingmar Bergman's, 'Through a Glass Darkly', a young woman experiencing the embrace of what appears to be profound psychotic depression, has a terrifying hallucination. Anticipating the arrival of some transcendental and saving glimpse of God, she sees instead the quivering shape of a monstrous spider that is attempting to violate her sexually. It is an instant of horror and scalding truth. Yet even in this vision of Bergman. (who has suffered cruelly from depression) there is a sense that all of his accomplished artistry has somehow fallen short of a true rendition of the drowned mind's appalling phantasmagoria. Since antiquity - in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus - chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. Through the course of literature and art the theme of depression has run like a durable thread if woe - from Hamlet's soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Dostoevski and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In many of Albrecht Durer's engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursor's of the artist's plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinged the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:

'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovari per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

'In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.'

"One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of it's meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no ther configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul's annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease - and they are countless - bear witness to what is probably it's only saving grace: it is conquerable.

"For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known it's inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward out of hell's black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as 'the shining world.' There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.

"' E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
'And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.'"

Like the storyteller in Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire", I am listening to my mother's music box, hoping that if I let my personal demons have their say, that they won't drag me like Persephone into Hades' realm again. But if they do, the breadcrumbs I will leave on the path back for myself will be this music box playing 'Lara's Theme' and Yogi Bhajan's Apple Kriya. I have so many apples in my refrigerator. In case the dark winds blow and the monsoon comes, I am prepared. And I know all too well how to smile through the pain, but this time, if a Dark Night of the Soul comes, I will do all I can to stay as light as possible as I embrace it and dance with it like dancing with David Bowie in "Labyrinth", like dancing with death and making friends with it. In Nachiketa's pose after Bound Lotus, I know the boons I will ask from Yama, the God of Death in the Katha Upanishad.