Where no one looked
we were there
far from the day and lost in the night
where the echoes came far away and were lost in an old silence
we were there
on a wire in the balance
watching the others fall
and the proud wobble
equilibrists of the absurd
and everyone knew that we were there
but no one knew the place
everyone looked and looked at the concrete
but no one breathed the power
and we always remained there
in the whiteness of winter and in the heat of summer
to the flutes of spring and to the violins of autumn
until even getting out of it would not have had sense
even when we left, we were there
by Aral Gabriel. See http://www.youtube.com/watch
v = 9lrAAuVW-vc
This poem is written by Aral Gabriel, convicted of the murder of his parents. According to the judges, the murder would have matured as a reaction to the discovery that the boy had falsified the university book, making it appear that he had finished his course of studies and was close to graduation.
Beyond the news, the poem contains some very suggestive elements of a depressive feeling. First of all, the strangeness, the feeling of being outside, on another floor, slower, more opaque, more underground, like those under the stairs that have windows with a view at street level, and from which one can see the footsteps of others without seeing them. heads, and without being seen. A position between the hidden and the buried, in which it is not known whether in fact one has been buried by the indifference of all or one has hidden away out of a sense of bewilderment and fear.
There is more, a kind of irony about being buried and hidden, when it is said that others know it, the world knows that the victim is buried or hidden there, and yet he pretends nothing has happened. Maybe he doesn’t want to see him, or he considers him cowardly and waits for him to react alone, or again and cynically indifferent. It is a common feeling, especially in the so-called atypical depression , that of anger or in any case of disappointment towards the whole world that neglects, does not help, does not care about those who are depressed, does not offer a rope to get out of the swamp.
Obviously it is a depressive point of view, which wraps around itself as the world usually passively ignores (i.e. it does not notice and does not imagine) rather than actively ignoring (i.e. knowing but neglecting the person’s suffering). The vision of depression as a circle of hell, in which everyone can look no further than the earth, “the concrete”, and no one “breathed the power” … in this there is almost a biological flavor, the life of depression becomes almost a smell, a taste, a very primitive sensation that is missing, that is too far away, an unattainable perfume. In fact, the emotional seat is close to the centers that regulate these sensations of taste / smell, so to connect the mood to a state of lack of taste and smell and an almost “anatomical” image.he no longer feels the difference between the pleasant and the unpleasant, the difference in temperature, between the silence and the noise, the drying up makes him concentrate only on his own suffering. Your suffering is silent, blind, cold, but above all it no longer moves in any direction, it no longer allows you to make comparisons or measurements. It is something absolute and without measure, even without time. Those who are depressed could have been there for a minute or for years, they have the feeling of a deprivation of time, of the passage of time. Life no longer moves in any direction, it stagnates. Anxiety
_and one like the sink drop that continually remembers this anguish, but not enough to shake. The evolution of depression from the simple feeling that spoils the days to the real change in the way of thinking about oneself and one’s future can be read in the closing of the poem. The most serious depressive symptom enters, which is the lack of hope: the person begins to think, in an inexplicable absurdity, that getting out of it is now impossible, because even if he could go back, he would now be imprisoned in an underground, invisible and dark destiny. Being well for a severely depressed person is no longer anything, it is not how he feels but not even a possible condition for the future.
Hence the tendency not to care, not even ask for help, to live one’s destiny as a sentence, whether just or unjust (in the end, even this doesn’t count anymore). It is in these circumstances that the person stops complaining, or shows himself apparently active, so as to divert the attention of others from himself, while harboring the feeling of “no return”.
Clearly this poem represents at least in appearance the reality of the prison, of confinement, of the lack of freedom which, continued for years, forces one to close oneself in a desolating inner world. Perhaps prison itself is a way to represent depressive feeling, and incommunicable pain.
Fortunately, in psychiatry it is not always necessary to communicate in words, to give a name to what you hear. The eyes, the way of speaking, the chosen words, the facial expression and even the phrases that recur as if they were depressive “slogans” allow the observer to recognize a depression without confusing it with sadness or demoralization, and without going to look for hypothetical causes that often do not exist (this is one of the incommunicable elements, being depressed without a reason).
