DEPRESSION

  
In a recent issue in the Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 30, 1998) Mark Micale in discussing David Healy's The Anti-Depressant Era raises a series of existential questions. "Is the key to the age-old quest for human happiness really selective serotonin reuptake inhibition? Should all our moods be construed medically, and what are the risks of pathologizing an ever wider range of our actions? Does the drive towards 'scientific psychiatry' ignore the crucial subjectivities of psychological suffering? More specifically, is depression a disease, illness, syndrome, or symptom? If depression is caused by an event or circumstance, should we seek to deaden it with a drug? And couldn't many cases equally be regarded as common unhappiness, spiritual angst, existential brooding, the winter doldrums, a bad case of the blues? Should we expect psychiatry to cure the human condition?"

DESIRE

Lorca is, indeed, a poet of desire, but he is, ultimately, the poet of an intense yearning to be free from desire. his tragedies, though conventionally read as attacks on sexual repression, are more truly protests against the condition of sexual longing. For Lorca was Spain's last great Catholic poet, though his Catholicism was soaked in Surrealism. He honors the poet who "gives up dreaming and gives up desiring. he no longer desires. He loves." The aspiration toward love beyond desire is Lorca's reply to the Surrealists' workshop of desire, and the spiritual stillness that he sought approached a kind of oblivion.
--Lee Siegel

Every human life is a ritual dance around the brilliant mistake of desire.

-- Jan Lauwers

DREAMS

An unexplored dream is like an unopened letter from God.

--Carl Jung