February 13, 2008
Wednesday

She scanned the shelves of her life . . . Bits of things swam up to her, but what made them come? Why for instance did she remember the terrace at Versailles where she’d visited only once, or a pair of green and white checkered gloves, a photograph of city trees in the rain? It only demonstrated to her all she would forget. And if she did not remember these things, who would? After she was gone there would be no one who would know the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down . . .
                          — Susan Minot, b. 1956, American fiction writer
                              from the novel Evening

Today is the ninth anniversary of the first post to what has become Markings. I called the journal My Letter to the World then, and would go through several more names before settling on Markings: Days of Her Life. I called the first post “Keeping and Holding the Rapture,” a reference to the declaration by the seventeen-year-old Sylvia Plath about why she wanted to keep a diary. “And we all know what happened to Sylvia,” I wrote.

What happened to Sylvia, her suicide by oven gas in the kitchen of a house that had once belonged to William Butler Yeats, happened on February 11, 1963, the middle of a particularly grim and cheerless winter, weather-wise, in London. Much has been written about Plath’s complicated psychology, most of it by people who did not know her and did not examine her clinically. One diagnosis, given in 2003 by Brian Cooper, M.D. in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, after studying all the anecdotal evidence available in her writings and those of others, is that she had “recurrent depressive disorder, severe (without psychotic symptoms)” or “major depressive disorder, recurrent, in the setting of a borderline personality disorder.” Her depression was endogenous and, in that bleak winter, reactive as well.

I took a look today, for probably the first time in these nine years, at the material I was writing in my paper journal in the weeks before and after I went online. It’s clear I was walking around in both an endogenous and a reactive depression. I was in my first year out of the classroom, still trailing the anger and sadness at the situation that had led to my leaving, trying to find a new purpose in this world. I cried a lot and slept a lot and I know that on the day in early February when I fell into the world of online journals I was lonely, depressed, and terribly confused about who I was and what I wanted to be, now that I was no longer a teacher. 

I wasn’t writing much, only 35 pages and 24 posts over the five months between November 1998 and April 1999 when, for reasons that aren’t clear, I started a new notebook. “‘I’ve neglected my paper journal,’ say on-line journallers sometimes,” I wrote, “as if any kind of journal writing were an obligation. I’ve not been writing in here [my own paper journal] but I have in the OLJ and in e-mails. I could assemble the ‘word-trail’ of ‘me’ but what purpose would that serve? How important is documenting me and what will I do with it in the future?”

The quotation from Susan Minot can be found on page 17 of my Notebook #8, for January 23, 1999, a Saturday. I was reading Evening and The Best American Short Stories 1998 and Sleeping Preacher (poems by Julia Kasdorf), copying out passages and using them as writing prompts, recording certain details of domestic life such as thirteen-year-old Lynn’s first attempt at chocolate chip banana oatmeal cookies and my efforts following a boys’ basketball team captained by the son of an old  friend.

This morning I wrote to the end of p. 30 in Notebook #25 (begun on December 26, 2007), an indication that my production and possibly my self-absorption have increased. I still consider myself to be living inside a winter depression this year, but I am far from the blankness I felt in 1998. And, mirabile dictu, I am still here, about to post the 600th essay to my online journal.

I thank everyone who is reading this now, both the regular and the casual, the ones who see my announcements at NaBloPoMo and Holidailies and Three Way Action and Facebook, those who will arrive here from search strings using such keywords as “depression,” “chocolate chip banana oatmeal cookies,” “mustard plaster,” “homeless guy Satellite,” or “future of Bishop McDevitt,” even the reader or web-crawling spider using Limelight Networks in Tempe, Arizona who has accessed every single page more than once (and if you’re a person, I’d really like to hear from you).

I’ve re-upped my domain name for another nine years. Thank you for reading so much, so often.

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