October goeth, December cometh
October goeth, December cometh
to everything, turn turn turn
October is a magical month. Never mind that its festive themes incorporate supernatural entities like ghosts and witches. Look to the trees, the air, and the sun. Green and brown monotony began to crack open and an abundant palette, the ambrosia of natural color, tumbled forth. The afternoon light positively sparkled off the trees. A leaf’s crunch was electric. Everything is breaking down, coming apart, going to sleep, and yet it feels like anything is possible. Into October, God breathed the breath of life.
If it sounds like I have my wires crossed—aren’t you thinking of spring?—consider whether it feels better to climb or descend on a rollercoaster. In terms of the rate of change of daylight hours, we’ve passed peak velocity, and in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re going down. Actually, “how would I feel at this point on a rollercoaster, if the rollercoaster were a plot of daylight hours over the year” is a decent proxy for the seasonal variation in mood that events and other rhythms impose themselves over. Winter is unsettling and unpredictable, spring is oddly drudgerous, summer tends toward a relaxing loft, and a good fall is a delight that borders on transcendence.
My cyclic misery comes mid-March, when the daylight hours increase most rapidly. The other equinox, in other words. How to describe March…an empty grey plain, or worse, an empty grey plane. March eludes description because one’s heart leaps not to characterize a single thing. March is floating alone in outer space, if space were ugly, if Saturn was a hungry god that ate its own children instead of the stately marvel we know so well. By April I start shaking off the suffocating nihilism of the winter-to spring turn, but March is the nadir of it—senseless, meaningless, seemingly endless.
Dr. Muir of The Frontier Psychiatrist wrote about his own seasonal patterns just last week1, and the circadian, seasonal, rhythmic nature of bipolar generally. His pattern would seem to be the partial invert of my own:
Like clockwork, every fall— I would have a depressive episode. Winter usually brought mild mania in my first 24 trips around the sun. Summer could have symptoms of mania as well. Spring would have another depressive episode. The real “clockwork” time for severe depression was the 2nd and 3rd weeks of October. I felt it coming. I was not alone. I noticed a pattern of low mood…
Why it is the case that bipolar people have unique seasonal patterns despite consistent responses to blue-light blocking (anti-manic/pro-depressive effects) and bright-light therapy (anti-depressive/pro-manic effects) is a fascinating question that I cannot answer. As to why the variation at all, let me breezily suggest that your society needs to be enthusiastic about both the plant and the harvest, the sowing and and the reaping, and that both tendencies can get whoopsed up to 112. But summer-manic/winter-depressive (I call it the SAD+3 bipolar variant) seems to predominate.
If my good readers are concerned, I’m just having some hyperthymia over here, expected and managed, not a ‘real one’. I sleep well4.
The force of this pulse is already fading. Here we are, and it is already November. November is a bit of an interregnum with variable character. There may be more pulses, of greater or lesser amplitude, or there may be a smoother ride down. It doesn’t preside over a special mood as these two do, but leads down the darkening, hallowed path to December. December, what is December? December is midnight; candles and stars, quiet and low, cold and vast. The height of agape and the moment it twists into terror. If summer is full and fleshy, December is spare and structural; the idea of itself.
When a thing—a chunk of existence—becomes some particular thing, it stops being able to have been anything else. A chair could make you cry because it’s not a table or even a slightly different chair. It’s this chair, clogging up the flow of possibility with its insistence on existing as-it-is. All other options are foreclosed. Summer warms these distinctions away; being is the thing, lush and continuous. But in high winter, the things are the things, and it makes sense to grieve one thing for not being another.
If summer is lived in the moment, December carries constantly the awareness of death. Death is a clean thing here—just the end of your line, one-dimensional, easily plotted. Summer is full of time, but winter abstracts time out of life and onto paper, rendering death at once imminent and infinitely far away. In summer it is sensible to distinguish between the young and the old; you are in touch with processes, with the unfolding of being. But the long night invites you to feel that, if death does not knock tomorrow, it may as well.
I do love it, though. When I was younger, those long December nights were more more “spectral wonder” than “specter of death.” We’d sing the most beautiful hymns at Midnight Mass5 holding our candles together in the dark. I’d feel the promise of religion—communion with the sacred—realized on those nights. Not always in the pews; often after, looking to the sky. Snow is one thing to hope for, but with a clear sky on Christmas night, you can imagine the comet that heralded the birth of the child of a divine being. A long night affords a long look into the crisp purple-black dome overhead, and a search for the gods that speak by painting on the sky.
But it is still fall. There is some magic left in the light, and there is time for reaping.
Being inspired by another writer is no grievous crime but this post was mostly harvested from my back catalog—hence the tonal whiplash, sorry. I’ve known that my mood tracks the derivative of daylight hours for awhile.
I’m fond of the fitness-cliff hypothesis of severe mental illness; I find it intuitive and also the only satisfactory answer to the question of why such debilitating conditions stick around the population. This is also why I think you shouldn’t try to CRISPR your babies into super geniuses by flipping all known alleles on a polygenic trait into the GO position.
SAD as in Seasonal Affective Disorder, and I’ll eat a shoe if SAD does not turn out to share some of its etiology with BAD (Bipolar Affective Disorder, not that anyone calls it BAD).
Although my tracker has started reporting that I’m getting less sleep than I know that I am, and that I’ve been getting hardly any deep sleep, for ~1 month, suggesting some changes in sleep architecture might be happening beneath the surface.
Neither held at midnight nor technically a mass