Depression & Things Left By The Wayside

I have suffered from many bouts of quite severe depression over the course of my life. Things are going pretty well right now (well, better than they have been), on that front, but they haven't always been that way, and as some may have inferred from my lack of posting this year, it hasn't always been so good recently. One of the common symptoms of depression is a cessation of doing what you once enjoyed, and over the years, my hobbies have diminished, and each time as I emerge from depression, while I tend to take up a few new hobbies once in a while, so many of the things I lost in the bout of depression stay gone. 

I've just been rummaging through old notebooks and diaries, of which I have quite a few - even before blogging I've often documented myself, not for the gaze of any readership, but as a way of preserving the memory events when my own memory is unfortunately rather fallible, and has been since childhood. I have lost so many memories of my own life, faded away too soon, so now I try and document it digitally and in more old-fashioned ways.  I've re-read accounts of photography expeditions to beautiful ruins, music practice logs detailing a 4hr to 7hr a day practice schedule, the book in which I would carefully staple the poetry I wrote on receipt scraps while working in a supermarket, the daily diaries I wrote, etc. A lot of that is currently missing from my life, and I often complain of being bored and miserable - no wonder! I no longer do a lot of what I enjoyed. 

I will try and take more photographs - and write notes once more in the lined hardback book which contains snippets of technical knowledge I have since forgotten. I will try and keep a diary each evening, as every day has some element of interest to it, however minor. I will try and practice music for at least an hour a day, and write it down in my practice logs (once carefully written in different coloured inks for each instrument I learnt, with a breakdown of what I did during practice and what needed work, and what had improved, with notes of duration of practice and a daily tally), I will try and write poetry again, however awful, and revisit old poems with a view to improving them, etc. 

There are other things that have left my life - I don't do as much archery as I did (and never photographed the quiver I made!), I don't paint or draw half as much as I did, or write as much music. I will also try to live more of a life that is worthy of being written down in ink into my (leather-bound, black, embossed, classic) diary and illustrated in quaint cartoons and hasty sketches,  rather than one that is repetitive and introspective and lived so inwardly. I need to do more, have a few more adventures, and find ways around being bound by transport and funds and lead more of the sort of life that reflected who I was and the creativity that currently remains latent, dormant, and needs waking up. 

Forcing myself to do things rather than remain in my cocoon is something I have to do. It feels easier and safer to dither away on the internet, or sit quietly in the corner and read, or even watch television, but it doesn't help - all it does is add to the guilt that I am wasting my life on not being productive. If I do something, even something as small as writing this, at least I feel that I have been at least a little bit productive, and that makes me at least a little bit happier, and the happier I am, the more enthusiasm I have to do more stuff! 

Dark Romanticism and Goth

I'm more aptly a 'dark Romantic' than a Goth.

Photograph by Raven, Editing by the HouseCat

Maybe I've always had a broadly Romantic attitude, but one that was not really cultivated into anything productive until I started reading about the philosophy and literature of that time period. I started finding that I agreed with a lot of it and that the rest of it was taking me down new and exciting avenues. Some of these ideas became building blocks of my personal philosophy (which constantly evolves) and some of them fell by the wayside, but my way of thinking and my creativity were far more influenced by things that happened over  150, even 200 years ago than by what happened in the 1980's. My head was full of Clare, Keats, Wordsworth,  of Beethoven, Paganini, Weber, Liszt, Chopin, etc. long before it was full of Ian Curtis, Siouxsie Sioux, Robert Smith, Andrew Eldrtich, Patricia Morrison and Dave Vanian. Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, etc. were my transition between the two, with a large dash of Arthurian poetry and art, Pre-Raphaelites and Tolkien. 

Photograph by Raven, Editing by the HouseCat

Romanticism informs far more of my world-view than Punk thinking - even my tendency towards anarchism is rooted more in centuries-old political philosophies than 1970s political philosophies. My search for experience is core to my way of life, to the point where I think the purpose of life is to experience as much and as richly as possible. A lot of my art is based on direct inspiration from nature; I see strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, with a decidedly Gothic emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, including the feelings that come around contemplating the inevitability of our own demise and decay. Awe, to me, is the emotion upon which I build inspiration, especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublime glory of untamed nature - the awe experienced while looking into the raging storm, or at wild currents of a river's rapids - and I'd go storm-chasing at white-water rafting if I could. On one hand I embrace medievalism, Gothic revival architecture and Arthurian myth, and on the other I look to the exotic (relative to my culture), to Japanese culture and ancient ruins. I empathise with William Blake as he talks of 'dark Satanic mills" in reference to early industrialisation, and see it continue in the smoke-stacks of coal fired-power stations, and in the seemingly unstoppable increase of materialistic consumer culture and all the factories thousands of miles away that feed it. 

Photograph by Raven, Editing by the HouseCat

In feeling like an alien amongst mainstream society I went looking for philosophies I did agree with - somewhere other people had to see things the way I did, and it did not seem that I was mad - and unfortunately found them to be an anachronism in relation to modern life, but then, as I read and experienced more about the various counter-cultures and subcultures from Arts & Crafts and Pre-Raphaelite era women in 'artistic dress' through Hippies and Punks to Goths -especially Goths- I saw the ideological tendrils that began with Sturm und Drang and revolutionary France were still bearing fruit. I did not set out to become a latter-day Romantic, albeit one with a fondness for black and the macabre, it just suits my personality down to the ground. 

Photograph by Raven, Editing by the HouseCat

My interests are broader than the Goth subculture, my perspective has not grown out of punk or of rock, but out of philosophy, literature and art, and I'm often a bit of a walking anachronism in more than just my fashion choices. Talking of fashion choices, stylistically I am fascinated by an aesthetic, not a subculture, and will wear things from Visual Kei, Elegant Gothic Aristocrat, Lolita and other Japanese styles as much as I'd wear Goth things, and will also wear vintage things or "hippie" things, or whatever else takes my fancy. I am more interested in anachronistic styles, luxuriously textured fabrics and an almost theatrical appearance than in what particular subculture you could attribute a garment to. My eclectic approach to fashion is not something I disguise, and where possible, I do try to accurately describe my various subcultural influences. 

Photograph by Raven, Editing by the HouseCat

My not-Goth interests predate my interest in the Goth subculture, and have not really wained in interest, only in time to spend on them. I am into the music, the fashion, the broader creative endeavours and the attitude that comprise the Goth subculture, but that only represents a small facet of who I am, and I feel that "Dark Romantic" encompasses a far greater amount of who I am than "Goth". Goth is still part of my identity, I still think the label applies to me, just it does not cover everything.