Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Teaching/Depression"
(page 4 of 6)

In every religious tradition I know of, though, there is at least one stream that is heading somewhere different from this. In Buddhism you could paraphrase it thusly: It's better to have good karma than bad karma; but the best thing of all, the most liberating and skillful thing, is to have no karma.

I should probably add that, at least in mystical Buddhism, no karma doesn't mean no action. Instead, it's the figure without karma, the bodhisattva, who is able to perceive and be perceived clearly enough that the things they do are efficacious - and no more than efficacious.

It seems inevitable that, for us karmic individuals, even the invocation of non-karmic possibility will be karmically overdetermined: it will have all too many uses, too many causes and too many effects. Clearly it can function as evasion, the way the notion of the Aesthetic is now seen as functioning. You might even see it as overdetermined by our depressiveness itself and by our pedagogical neediness. At any rate, that these elements can be closely proximate is clear. To me, though, apparently a vision of non-karmic possibility, however subject to abuse, at least opens a window to give air and light onto scenes of depressive pedagogy.

Dream - meat counter and pile of tiny, colored, dead, adorable elephants - Without magical thinking I imagine the world would be gray, no colors, air pushed out of it, like a pile of dead little elephants - the horror was in how cute they still were -

At first I thought I'd know when therapy was successful because I'd stop feeling the want of being dead.

But, I finally say to Shannon, "This is such a deep, old fact about me that it could be a terrible index of what might change. If I waited for that . . . !"

I'm wondering now what else might be different and better - even for someone who remains convinced, with the ancients, that it would be best not to be born.

Yes, Shannon says. He too has assumed this is a likely scenario: many other things changing but the one thing not changing. Also, he says, if such a thing did change it would probably do so imperceptibly slowly.

Then he produces an apparent non sequitur. A story about a patient of his long ago, someone with "not exactly multiple personalities,

but I would say that
the parts of her were only
barely holding hands,"

who after many years - in fact long after the end of therapy - woke up one morning and found she no longer had multiples. Just that suddenly.