Le NeoSpleen de Paris

I have yet to meet a person who has not suffered a major/minor depression after having lived two years in Paris! Paris, the city of love, promises to many way more than it can offer sometimes creating in individuals a delusional acute state known as the  Paris Syndrome. Japanese tourists, dreamers, cinephiles, wanderers are only few amongst many susceptible to the Paris Syndrome. However, people that are destined to Paris for more than a couple of years experience the city and its people differently. At the beginning, Paris' inhabitants may experience an overwhelming child-like appreciation of the beauty of every street, cafe, or park, sometimes to the point of experiencing a Stendhal Syndrome. With time, however, this beauty fades as we cement our images of Paris,  even of the Paris we have not explored. We assume many places are reincarnations of others and we are so convinced that our perception is biased to prove our intuition right regardless of what new places might offer. This slowly leads to anhedonia, the loss of pleasure, and perhaps existentially and morally towards nihilism.  And based on our genetic and environmental predisposition to depression, this eventually leads to mild and long depressions, such as dysthima or major acute depressions that are all vicious and bottomless circles that are only curable with enough will power and support from family and friends. I shall call this last phase "le mal de Paris" which hints to Baudelair's "fleurs de mal" and almost every poet's and artist's "mal de vivre" althought perhaps I could just update Baudelair's "Spleen de Paris" by calling it  "le NeoSpleen de Paris" such that it accommodates a century of human progress or regress.

Le NeoSpleen de Paris, is contagious! You might get it in the metro when nobody is smiling, not even musicians as they play or kids as they don't. You might get it on the streets whether from the homeless beggars or from fellow inhabitants that have so much convinced themselves of being busy to avoid the void, or you might as well get it in restaurants when your waiter does not expect to be tipped or rewarded and has been already suffering that NeoSpleen for years!

It is only after the second year that you become aware of the NeoSpleen epidemic and the options to cure it are expensive and limited:

- You are suddenly convincing yourself that alcohol/drugs are inevitable to calm you and many of your alcoholic/drug-addict "friends".
- Your friends have talked you into medication for depression or seeing a shrink
- You decide that Paris is not for you and pack your bags and try to settle elsewhere
- You spend the money you would have spent on alcohol, drugs, medication, or shrinks, traveling back and forth to always see Paris as a child sees candy, and I am talking about forbidden and rare candy!

I am guessing you have already made up your mind. If you happen to have chosen the last one, I might see you tomorrow in RIO de JANEIRO!

 

Introspective physiology

I have observed that my life can be reduced into long and empty intervals of time separating heart breaks. I have equally observed that during those heart breaks, my body can be reduced to a few organs, namely a nose, a larynx and a heart that Biology must have always confused with lungs.

I am vaguely aware of anything besides the air entering my nose and flowing to my lungs or heart through the larynx as I breath my present existence. More precisely, I sense an infinitely thin thread puncturing my larynx all the way to my heart. More than a piercing in my heart, I feel an entanglement possibly by the very thread therein.

An invisible weight hibernates at the bottom end of my heart as if chained with and suspended from the thread entering my larynx. No matter how hard I inhale or how much air I try to fill my lungs with, I feel a lack of oxygen as if there was a hole in my lungs (or heart). While the hole hypothesis is ridiculed by science, I adopt the alternative hypothesis claiming that my lungs must be filled with tiny men breathing my oxygen into their own lungs, that are perhaps filled fractally and recursively with tinier men and so on and so forth (see below). The lack of oxygen induces an inner pressure that is often unbearable and analogous to an ever-going implosion.

Heart breaks are not only the product of  personal relationships but a myriad of existential events and encounters such as personal, professional, and intra-personal achievements, disappointments and life-decisions. Personally and professionally, I have put my heart on the (thin) line separating arts from science and that very life-decision, with all its bells and whistles, exhibitions and conferences, ups and downs, breaks my heart chronically.

But how much worse are those long and empty time intervals with pointless invisible walls and no notions of time and space? When not heart broken my perception is perhaps more pathetic as my self is extended and contained in all that I see. I become all I see with my eyes and imagine in my third eye that is including the people, animals, places..etc around me and those not around me. The latter might defy the laws of physics, however, it is known to science and to most men that we are all made of atoms and more universally even sung with a twist of wording towards us coming from stardust. All this empty wholeness makes me feel as if my heart was floating in liquids of unknown substances and unpredictable properties. This puts me under more pressure and makes me anxious to the point of desiring what is to eventually break my heart, over and over...

Love letters to Anhedonia

Dear Anhedonia,

Please understand that my desire for our relationship to end in this last letter I write you is not dictated by my own passion that you have slowly and coldly sucked into what defines you and your friends of the DSM jargon. You have inspired in me a sense of satire that has eventually ridiculed my own thoughts to embrace ones of nihilism paired with a desperate search for the impossible.

Not that this really matters, but I have never betrayed you with your cousin, Dysthymia. You both come from a wealthy Greek family but I have no interest in your Greek names nor in your submissive games.

Forgive me if my admiration for the dead languages ever gave you the impression that our affair was one to outlast me for your own sake of shining amongst my family and friends.

Good bye,
Al