I haven’t written anything for Substack in a while. I took a hiatus in November as I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and I found myself tired of writing by the beginning of December—I wrote roughly 98,000 words over that month, and the thought of looking at a word processor sounded like torture. Of course, the holidays occurred, and life got busy; I haven’t been writing. Let’s change that.
Another reason I’ve struggled to return to writing is that I began taking a new antidepressant at the end of December. Lexapro, specifically. As those who take SSRIs can attest, it makes things worse before it makes things better, and I felt a loss of passion and interest the past few weeks.
It was deeper than my usual depression. I felt spiritually cut off from the world, from my religious convictions, and from my artistic or academic impulses. I’ve only recently started feeling better.
While I was in my Lexapro-induced daze, I gravitated toward film. For me, film feels like a passive medium. I’m sure many cinephiles will disagree with me here, but in my experience, film is an art that happens to me, rather than one I actively push to experience. I witness film, and even if I don’t fully comprehend it, I am still able to experience it.
With film being the only media I could find the energy to engage with, I used these past weeks to catch up on the filmography of a beloved director who I’d never watched: Andrei Tarkovsky.
I’ve almost completed his filmography. I watched it backwards, partially by accident. The Kanopy account I have only streams his final two films: The Sacrifice (1986) and Nostalghia (1983). After I finished those, I decided to keep the trend going, and I watched Stalker (1979), Mirror (1975), and Solaris (1972). I have yet to watch his first two films, but I’m excited to watch them when I get the chance.
Tarkovsky’s work is possessed with a deep longing for transcendence coupled with a rejection of a modern, disenchanted materialism that he felt sucked the life out of things. He dives into the subjectivity of memory and dreaming while grappling toward belief in something beyond the world.
This becomes increasingly dramatic throughout his filmography. What starts as an impulse to free ourselves from disenchantment in Solaris (a scientist at one point muses that the problem with humanity is that we’ve forgotten how to sleep, and therefore dream), becomes a violent conviction toward what would seem absurd to a modern, materialist audience. A religious fanatic self-immolates in front of a baffled crowd in Nostalghia. A philosopher burns his home down in order to save his life from nuclear holocaust in The Sacrifice. In Stalker, the protagonist laments that neither the writer nor the academic believes in anything.
Tarkovsky is clawing toward some transcendence or beauty that feels impossible in a disenchanted world. He tells his stories through stunning, pondering shots of nature as well as tedious, desolate shots that point toward this disenchantment.
In the days following my first few doses of Lexapro, my sense of transcendence disappeared. It always tends to come and go in waves, as all religious feelings do, but this period felt more extreme than usual. I was confirmed into the Episcopal Church only a few months ago, filled with a deep sense of conviction, and yet at that moment the change in my brain chemistry brought about a deep absence. This sense of absence played a big part in me leaving the faith a few years ago. That same absence also brought me back. The longing for transcendence when transcendence seems imperceptible is what killed and revived my faith, and it continues to cycle back and forth.
As esoteric as he may be, Tarkovsky made a lot of sense to me these last few weeks. I felt this same lingering sense of doom and absence that he seems to be revolting against in the bizarre, Kierkegaardian acts of faith that his characters indulge in. Throughout the past few weeks, the world has felt like it was ending, and Omicron updates compounded this feeling. The threat of nuclear holocaust in The Sacrifice can be a stand-in for many other realities we face today: climate change, the pandemic, the threats of war, etc. In light of these crises, the religious fanatic in Nostalghia, who believes he can stop the end of the world by crossing the waters of a mineral pool while keeping a candle lit makes some sense. Is it superstitious and irrational? Of course, and yet something resonates deeply with this madly enchanted perspective.
This disenchanted world seems to hang at the brink of destruction, and there’s nothing that I, as an individual, can do. Why not try to cross a pool with a candle?
Human life is supposed to be enchanted. Humans are imaginative, dreaming creatures oriented toward transcendence. This is a statement that I cannot defend with any empirical evidence outside of my own experience, but it’s something I believe deeply. We are not built to live in a world devoid of meaning or magic or belief. Depression, as I experience it, is the emotional state of disenchantment. It is the absence of meaning or imagination.
It has become more and more common to openly and honestly discuss depression and anxiety. This is a good thing, but it has pitfalls. One of these pitfalls is to view mental illness primarily in individual terms, seeing it as a result of our own personal struggle, our own personal brain chemistry, or our own personal trauma. Of course, everyone’s struggles are their own, but they are also communitarian concerns. If one person in every million had depression, we could see it as some odd matter of brain chemistry, but the reality is that a grand majority of people have depression. We are societally depressed.
In a sense, this is a collective stripping of imagination, a collective sense of disenchantment, and a collective experience of absence. And while we can turn to SSRIs or therapy, we can’t ignore the collective side. By all means, we should use these tools to drag ourselves out of the personal rut—obviously I and others need medication to even function—but these are individual remedies for a broader crisis and a broader sense of longing.
There is a comradery in the realization that our individual mental problems are collective. We are not alone. While the subjects in Tarkovsky’s films are individuals rebelling against an uncaring and disenchanted world, we do not have to be alone. This crisis is mutual. This sense of loss is held by most people. The world is not the baffled audience watching a self-immolation because most people sense that something is wrong right now, and they similarly long for conviction and meaning.
It is difficult to believe in things. It is difficult to dream. It is difficult to hold convictions. It is difficult to imagine a better world. It feels absurd and pointless. But Tarkovsky invites us into this Kierkegaardian leap of faith. He asks us to believe in something. The only caveat I will add is that this leap of faith should be done together.
I know that’s a rather vague conclusion, but right now it’s what I have. It feels silly to cross a pool trying desperately to keep a candle lit, and yet it enchants the world again. It felt silly, last Sunday, for me to walk into church and sing hymns and kneel, and yet I found hints of beauty and transcendence in that moment. It feels absurd to protest when change seems impossible, and yet we must find beauty in that. Our only hope is to enchant the world again and to defiantly believe in something.