This one is taking longer than usual, and that's saying something. My thoughts surrounding this issue -- for which I haven't yet even found a name -- have been coming together slowly. Too slowly, to paraphrase the old Westerns. This either means that I'm onto something genuinely profound, or that I'm simply once again lost at sea. It's not clear. For instance, I had some kind of flash last night (no, I don't do those kinds of drugs) that caused me to note down what you see in the title slug, above. I need to think a bit more about what it may mean, if anything. I'll be back soon with whatever thoughts I can dredge up, but meanwhile, here are the three basic elements I've been working with, plus HighBeam clips re the first and second.

you're in the pit the snakes begin to writhe but help is here I throw you down a line

from: Myths of the Blues by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
source: U.S. News & World Report, 23 May 2005
via: HighBeam™ Research

Peter Kramer has been called "America's best-known psychiatrist," and for good reason. The Brown University professor has written five popular books, including the 1993 bestseller Listening to Prozac, and he hosts the public radio series The Infinite Mind. He arguably deserves his fame simply for coining the phrase "cosmetic psychopharmacology," by which he meant the power of antidepressants like Prozac to make people feel "better than well." Kramer describes his new book, Against Depression, as a "polemic" that seeks to finally separate the painful and life-threatening illness of depression from appealing traits like sensitivity and creativity. Kramer attempts to distinguish depression as a personal medical affliction from depression as a cultural idea and argues emphatically that the world's No. 2 killer cannot be allowed to be romanticized despite its artistic and historical link to creative genius.

And then there's this...

from: Books: Journeys into night; Tragedy gives us hideous tales of death and despair - and it does so with huge, life-affirming energy. Jonathan Dollimore asks why the worst events we can ever imagine generate our greatest art by Jonathan Dollimore
source: The Independent (London), 17 August 2002
via: HighBeam™ Research

Hamlet, the most famous tragedy of all, is also one of the most difficult to pin down. What is Hamlet's problem? Who is he? From one point of view he's the most fascinating of all protagonists, and one with whom we can't help but identify. As someone once said, "everyone thinks Hamlet was written for them. I know he was written for me." If his appearance coincides with the emergence of modern individualism, it's also the case that he displays all the symptoms of individualism gone wrong - a dysfunctional depressive who simply can't get his act together.

A larger question has never been adequately answered. Why do the greatest expressions of the tragic vision seemingly coincide with the heights of cultural achievement, even of optimism, as with the Greeks and the Renaissance? Across two millennia, the most famous philosophers and critics have failed to define tragedy adequately. The best that can be done is to propose criteria which illuminate even as they fail. Isn't it something to do with the way we die rather than the way we live? Yes, but only certain kinds of dying count. To die in real life by falling off the toilet isn't going to constitute the tragic fall, not even if you're one of the Great Men of history (such as Elvis Presley). So heroic noble death is the order of tragedy? Yes, except that some tragedies are about being condemned to live, Beckett's Waiting for Godot being the most famous.

Yet this inability to pin down tragedy hardly matters because, from Aristotle to Hegel, failed attempts have become philosophies in their own right. When, in the modern period, the tragic vision became almost a surrogate religion which offered a higher wisdom removed from the allegedly shallow, materialist vulgarity of modernity, writing about it became even more significant. Books such as Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy and Raymond Williams's Modern Tragedy have also been compelling expressions of contemporary concerns, and searching critiques of our cultural past.