Review: The Depression by Mathias Svalina and Jon Pack

Reviewed by Thomas Sorensen

ISBN: 978-1-951628-02-4

124 pages

Release Date: February 17, 2020

Publisher: Civil Coping Mechanisms

         Kafka died too young, and The Depression, a collaboration between poet Mathias Svalina and photographer Jon Pack, picks up where he left off. Kafka wrote fables about the alienation of the modern subject under capitalism; Mathias Svalina writes fables about the alienation of the modern subject under capitalism. And these fables are, in Svalina as in Kafka, eerily dreamlike: absurd, yet evocative; illogical, but only to observe the deeper logic of the unconscious. Svalina might even approach Kafka’s own fluency in this strange idiom. He certainly has a lot of job experience. No, he’s not a psychoanalyst—psychoanalysts only interpret dreams. Svalina is more ambitious: he makes new dreams out of whole cloth. Since 2014, Svalina has run a Dream Delivery Service. Subscribers receive personalized dreams delivered just before dawn. 

         An unusual credential, I admit, but still: I find it comforting. Surrealism always risks the “great danger,” in the words of W. H. Auden, of “confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.” It’s just too easy to smuggle in cheap shocks under the dubious imprimatur of the cutting edge. But when it comes to the uncanny symbolism of dreaming life, Svalina is, quite literally, a professional. His absurdities come carefully curated and profoundly evocative. They may not always hammer out into a coherent interpretation, but neither are they discouragingly obscure. They reside in the twilight of revelation, suggestive and hermetic. Svalina swears to tell the gist, the whole gist, and nothing but the gist. And the gist rewards the hasty reader just as well as the slow. The only difference is that the slow reader savors longer and more deeply. 

         Perplexing, unconventional books often contain sly hints about how readers might best approach them. A few pages into The Depression, an unnamed speaker encounters a crashed airplane, still running, in a ditch. The propellers suck up an unlucky bird—but nothing comes out: no blood, not guts, no meaning. The speaker is just as perplexed as we are. They throw in, first, a frozen chicken and, second, a deer. Still no gore, still no explanation. They decide to take their experiment to the next level, dropping their backpack to the ground, slipping off their shirt—and that’s how the fable ends. You too will encounter whirring anomalies in this little book. You too will toss things at it—interpretations, associations, observations. And you might be a little disturbed when no sense or matter comes out the other end. But if you keep at it long enough, eventually you’ll find that you have untangled something more impenetrable than any fable—your prejudices, your habits of mind, your assumptions, and all the other detritus that makes up a self.

         But it’s okay—you’re very likely better off without a self in any case. Identity is present in The Depression as a malignant symptom. Two parents decide to defer naming their child until he’s an old man. Then, as a teenager, he encounters his name at a party. They fall in love, and one night they have “sex so right” that they fuse “into one, half-boy & half-name.” The fable ends in twisted success: “They woke the next morning, sent out resumes to all the corporations, got all the jobs they applied for, & accepted every job.” I can’t think of a more succinct satire of the self-help ethos. The journey of finding oneself, invested as it always is with a quasi-spiritual halo, pervades everyday life and binds us into an exploitative cycle of labor and consumption. Television, video games, the fashion industry, supply a sort of “build your own” model of self-fashioning with an increasingly diverse hoard of media-manufactured images. And it would be easy to pass all this off as innocent fun if the whole process were not so successful at dictating what consumers buy, what careers we pursue, and even sometimes how we vote. 

          A darker variation on the same theme follows a man who is “so worried his shadow would abandon him that he never [takes] his eyes off it.” One night, while he sleeps, his shadow hunkers down with another shadow in an abandoned house, “where they could deceive themselves that they were not shadows.” The man wakes up and searches for his shadow everywhere. The last place he looks is an old pocketwatch. He flips it open, and “all the time that had been stuck in the pocketwatch [comes] rushing out like a burst dam & drown[s] him in eddies of time.” My shadow, my identity, is not me. I get a little jealous of what I think I am, and like any jealous partner I guard my identity, obsess and worry over it, constantly. But my identity also limits me. These limits give me form. They allow me to be someone and to know who I am, and so I love them. Yet when my limits lift, when identity detaches in an experience of misery or revelation, I experience the horrifying freedom of infinity.

         “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture,” Iris Murdoch wrote halfway through the twentieth century. Perhaps, Svalina suggests, we don’t make our own pictures anymore. Perhaps our pictures are assigned to us out of some vast bureaucracy. Perhaps they don’t express us so much as we express them—with the animation of our breath and time. And so Svalina writes about a cult that has no members, a murderer who hasn’t murdered anyone but knows that he’s going to because he is, after all, a murderer. These are truths that depressed people know better than their healthy, well-adjusted peers. With the estrangement, alienation, and depersonalization of extreme depression, identity exposes its seams too nakedly to ignore. And so depressed people often feel as though they’re acting, as though nothing they do is quite real.

         Thankfully, Svalina and Pack do not call their book Depression, but The Depression, which of course brings to mind the great depression. Capitalism too has its ups and downs. Capitalism too estranges, alienates, and depersonalizes. No wonder depression rates are so high. Svalina and Pack perform a sensitive, chilling investigation into the link between capitalism and mental illness. “The rocket never knows what to do on days off”—maybe because capitalism has made him too much of a rocket: too steely, too sleek, too goal-oriented, too caught up in the sheer momentum of production, to enjoy life for its own sake. Leisure makes him anxious. As long as he isn’t doing something, he feels the encroachment of some vague horror, represented in the “dull hum of a lake restraining itself, keeping itself a lake.” This is an image of peace, wholeness, and equanimity, but also of death. If you had unlimited free time, if you could live only for yourself, what would you be? Something dark, perhaps, and shapeless as a lake. The rocket flees to the soothing routine of labor: “when the rocket is called upon to be a rocket the fret & fear vanish. He is slid into position. He can ignore any lilting, any constraint.” He’s exploited, yes; he spends himself, uses himself up entirely for the purposes of someone else; but this way he is, at least, a rocket, and nobody can question that. Where do we find ourselves, Svalina asks, between the stark alternatives of lake and rocket, between the meditative oblivion of nirvana and the mechanical oblivion of the daily grind? 

           Svalina cultivates a clipped, journalistic style carefully purged of voice and cadence. Plangency would go against the bleakness of capitalism. He limits himself to a fifth-grade vocabulary. His sentences are short. He even cultivates a certain awkwardness of syntax characteristic of children. When children tell stories, they often join clause after clause after clause together with a monotonous chain of “and’s”: “And then his transmission seized on Rock Creek Parkway & I unscrewed the license plates & took them with me & left.” Svalina retains repetitions and redundancies that any other writer would smooth out. For example, “No one was sure when they’d died, but all of us had died” ends two clauses in a row with the same word. Svalina could easily have written “All of us had died, but no one was sure when” or, even smoother, “We had all died, but nobody knew when.” But Svalina doesn’t want his sentences to be smooth. He wants them jagged, awkward, juvenile. 

         I have focused on Svalina’s writing, and this is mainly a bias of familiarity. But it is the photographs that receive the last word in The Depression, and so I’d give them the last word here as well. Pack successfully captures the emptiness of capitalism. He distills the affectless suburban sprawl, the homogenous modern environment, into a series of bleak snapshots: run-down convenience stores, quintessentially institutional interiors, unmanned construction sites. Capitalism evacuates places of distinguishing features, of everything that gives them character, and leaves us alienated from our environments as from our labor and ourselves. People generally think of atmosphere, of ambience, as a superficial luxury, like frappuccinos or vanity plates. But The Depression testifies to a more urgent significance. Maybe atmosphere has something to do with mental illness. Maybe depressed, depressing places make for depressed, depressing people. 

Thomas Sorensen is a recent Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Western Ontario. His criticism is forthcoming in The Arizona Quarterly Review and The Wallace Stevens Journal, and his poetry is forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review.