Art in a Time of Normalized Despair

“There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.” — Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Last night I discovered the meaning of life. I woke from the dream with an urgency to write it down, but my conscious state retained only rumors of peace in a half-remembered stillness of knowing.

My waking rhythms have synced with the sun’s path, mentally mapping how my walls and windows attract, diffuse, and refract daylight as it arcs the sky. I trace shadows to their source, documenting boundaries and contours defined by light’s shifting qualities. The temporality assures me that the planet still spins forward even as life seems at its deadest end. And in this 13th week of life turned inward, each dawn feels miracle-adjacent.

I used to go out to make photographs, seeking places that weren’t about me—if only to impose myself in their imaging. What is photography if not an act of psychological transference? We find the capacity to reframe an unfathomable world through cameras and lenses and filters, lingua franca to communicate with strangers about strangeness.

When outside became a space of virus and vectors, we retreated. The not yet born will ask what these early days of pandemic were like. Survivors will bear witness in their own ways, alternately emphasizing isolation, political polarization, the shock of vulnerability, a revolution centuries in the making, a nation’s depression.

It’s a challenge to gauge emotions when smile and frown lines are masked. When we do manage to communicate our shared struggle through long looks or furtive glances it occurs to me that I feel less alone than I have in years. This despair that I feel — that we feel — is normal.

My photographs have turned inward, too, from that morning when my nest of unmade bed linens struck me as a living document of sleepless nights.

My domestic space — slowly, quietly — revealed its subjective potential in light and shadow, muted tones of intimacy and estrangement. We curate our homes to reflect our beliefs and aspirations, and they tell stories about us in turn, what we hope to project, or forget. My wife viewed these images and mused, “This is not our house.”

Much is hidden in shadows and underexposed peripheries.

Depression fires when its trigger is squared: root potential x activating event. For many it fired decades ago and feels all too familiar; others sense its slow creep now but might not identify it in such clinical terms. We struggle to reconcile the rare soul not presently gripped by an ineffable sense of loss.

I’m more adaptable than I thought. Managing mental illness means letting go of control, certainty, even freedom in the most dire states. I’ve learned that expectations are lies we tell ourselves to keep going, as sitting with abstraction is too unsettling.

My personal philosophy is that at life’s end we get a fleeting moment in which we understand with perfect clarity what it meant. The revelation will be unique to each, yet we will all find peace in the stillness of knowing. In the meantime, we live with the shadows that make light beautiful.