Depression comes in two stages — the numbed antidepressant "planet" versus the active agony of the Bad Thing —…
echoes
From: The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing
- Early text: The planet Trillaphon is a numbed, sleepy, electrically
humming state where "the hairs on your arms will stand up and a chill will go
through the big muscles in your legs and your teeth will vibrate"; distinct
from it is the Bad Thing, which the narrator insists is not ordinary sadness
but the thing his doctor names "severe clinical depression," a condition in
which "you are the sickness yourself" [Amherst Review pp. 29, 33].
- IJ echo: Kate Gompert's "It" (scene 135, pp. 692-698): the novel's
insistence that "dead-eyed anhedonia" is only "a remora on the ventral flank of
the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" — the deeper condition ("It")
being a positive agony, not a numbness.
- Weight: prefiguration