December 21st, 2015 - Kara Dorris

A Lot of Sorrow

Ten years ago on December 21^st I am at the Modern Art Museum with my mother. We have always shared depression and distance, and, at the time, I thought museums could bring us together. Any outing seemed better than none. Maybe I just selfishly loved museums and wanted a partner. Looking back, I realize I only gave our silence a different backdrop for a few hours. 

But that day, I walk into Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance-based work A Lot of Sorrow. On screen, The National perform their song “Sorrow” on repeat for six hours as the artist films it all, captures the band and the audience as they cycle through alert crispness into numbed fatigue, the stage lights burning so bright against the night it could have been smoke. The band appears as if in a trance. The lyrics seem to put me into a trance as well.

“Sorrow found me when I was young. Sorrow waited, sorrow won.” 

I sit on the uncomfortable museum bench, my short purple and orange print dress riding up while my mother trails somewhere behind me like she always does. The wide-open, hushed space invites distance. Now I wish we had held hands or walked each art piece together pointing out what we loved or didn’t understand or couldn’t forget. 

Maybe I thought small talk at our Cracker Barrell lunch would make up for it, but that is just another kind of silence punctuated with familiar anger and regret about a marriage that should have ended decades ago. We don’t speak about the depression we have been experiencing for years. Instead of listening, I defeat the peg game and offer patronizing advice about patience, useless apologies, and excuses of he didn’t really mean it—didn’t mean to yell, to blame, to hurt. I try to fix what isn’t my place to fix. It isn’t empathy. The presence of that marriage still lingers.   

I don’t sit on that museum bench for six hours, but I sit long enough to feel my mother’s presence. I always feel her presence. In The National’s performance, Kjartansson wanted to create the presence of sorrow, a ghost that would linger long after the music had ended, turning melancholy into catharsis into the absurd. To dive into your sorrow, to celebrate, to refuse to let it go. Depression is that song on repeat: the melody is always recognizable but chords and timing change when fatigue sets in. 

I see depression as my foundation, the pillars and insulation, the cracks and uneven baseboards when I hear the lyrics “I live in a city sorrow built.” I remember days when my mother called in sick to work. Or in high school when I skipped five weeks of class just to read in bed but I would cry, say I was in pain when anyone urged me to return to school. My mother calls it a bad day. When I call and she finally picks up the phone or calls back days or weeks later, she’ll say she had a bad day and apologize, saying she doesn’t want to be a burden. I tell her she isn’t unwanted weight, not quicksand or a bottomless pit or a pocket full of rocks. But for too long, depression has been banned, chained to silence. When we are ashamed and can’t embrace our depression, on any level, we don’t seek help and we can’t celebrate our full selves. 

“Don’t leave my hyper heart alone on the water. Cover me in rag and bone sympathy. Cause I don’t want to get over you.” 

Now, with access to therapy and treatment my depression is manageable, so I don’t want to get over it. I’m not saying artists should suffer for their art or anyone should suffer needlessly. I’m saying we should embrace a life of struggle and rebellion rather than simply denying that our sorrow exists. I want my mother to stop apologizing for who she is. I want the same for myself. 

“Sorrow’s my body on the waves. Sorrow’s a girl inside my cake.” 

The closest I’ve come to that six hour “Sorrow” replay is ten years later listening to the song while I shower, make scrambled eggs, answer emails. While I write this essay. I never sit with the song without distraction, without escape from sorrow’s presence so it becomes an echo, background noise. For six hours, those musicians are always in the middle, the beginning, and the end until sorrow’s presence, like depression, persists as if vibrations under your feet long after you’ve left the subway. 

“It’s in my honey. It’s in my milk.” 

We talk about habits as if they are unchanging but the mere repetition of something changes it. Habit as elastic not static. As time goes on, our relationship with depression evolves—we can fight, embrace, ignore, or hide, but it is always present. Like performing the same song for six hours, fingers slip on microphones and drumsticks, words slur. Eyes close, a hand loosens on a guitar pick. And then a drink of water, a towel across a forehead wipes away the sweat and a surge of energy takes over. And when it all stops, the body still hums, the hands still strum. You can feel what was ending just waiting to become again.

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Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024), Have Ruin Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks, including prose chapbook Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Nine Mile, DIAGRAM, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, Waxwing, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.