Free Descent by David Guterson Page A

“fixed in slime,” doleful, bitter, and trod underfoot while the wrathful duke it out?
    And what’s more, their “litany they gargle in their throats as if they sang,” but always, they lack “words and pitch.”
    That I get. I hear the words and pitch of these beleaguered dead as “the broken surfaces of those water-holes / on every hand, boiling as if in pain.” I see their meanings not as what they mean but as a roil festering the surface of the Styx where few pass by to look or listen. There the sullen suffer their wordlessness, and pour their garbled litany into an eternal absence. They can’t get the words out, and it makes no difference. There’s no one but two traveling poets to hear them, even if they could.
    “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain,” wrote David Foster Wallace in his story “The Depressed Person,” “and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”
    After that horror—if you’re lucky enough to have an after (Foster Wallace wasn’t)—the pain might be gone but the language won’t come; there’s no translation for it. Gesture as you might across the divide, what’s over there remains visible only to those who, like you, have already been there.
    To put this another way, my words here recede from lived experience. But in the end there’s too much reproach and ignorance—depression as a cause for disgrace and contempt—for me not to write them anyway. Words, after all, remain, in this world, an aperture through which might appear some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.

David Guterson
    Descent:
A Memoir of Madness

    David Guterson is the author of the novels Snow Falling on Cedars (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award), East of the Mountains, The Other, Our Lady of the Forest (a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year), and most recently, Ed King ; two story collections, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind and the forthcoming Problems with People ; and a work of nonfiction, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense . A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Washington State.

ALSO BY DAVID GUTERSON
Ed King
The Other
Our Lady of the Forest
East of the Mountains
Snow Falling on Cedars
Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense
The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind