In Praise of Melancholy

I just finished reading this very nice article by Eric G. Wilson a Professor of English at Wake Forest University. in his article, In Praise of Melancholy the Professor suggests that by focusing too much on simple happiness as an indicator of mental health, Americans (He writes as an American, about his nation.) are losing an important dimension to their being, the dimension of recurrent sorrow, also known as melancholy. By losing the capacity to feel sadness, these "Americans" of Prof Wilson's essay, are foreclosing on their capacity to feel Joy. By sticking to the middle ground, a neither here nor there kind of generalized contentment, there is no acceptance for the bigger, (okay fine transcendent) emotions.

Wilson writes:

Melancholia pushes against the easy "either/or" of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the "both/and." It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to the ability to play in the potential without being constrained to the actual. Such respites from causality refresh our relationship to the world, grant us beautiful vistas, energize our hearts and our minds.

Indeed, the world is much of the time boring, controlled as it is by staid habits. It seems overly familiar, tired, repetitious. Then along comes what Keats calls the melancholy fit, and suddenly the planet again turns interesting. The veil of familiarity falls away. There before us shimmer bracing possibilities. We are called to forge untested links to our environments. We are summoned to be creative.

What's he going on about there? You wonder. Well the basic premise is that one who suffers from melancholy is made aware, consistently via their sorrow, of the fragile boundaries that divide life from death. For many of us who have grieved a loss come upon the perplexing realization, that during an episode of grief one sometimes becomes painfully (and I literally mean painful, when this happens to me, my heart actually seems to hurt) aware of the beauty of things. The only way I can think to describe it is: "This thing I am experiencing becomes all the more fine, when I realize you cannot be here to share it with me, as it becomes so very fine my heart pains me all the more." It's a kind of chicken and egg thing, does the (cliched I know) beautiful sunset become more beautiful and also melancholic when you realize you are watching it alone, or does the fact that one is alone, render the sunset that much more beautiful.

But why, Wilson asks, do people ( myself included) want to escape this kind of sadness? If being melancholy occasionally gives me access to greater joy, why would I be willing to trade it in? Wilson devotes the coda of his essay to answering this question, and in doing so creates a complex and pretty moving call for a more joyful experience of the world, one that embraces paradox instead of trying to make life as uniformly 'enjoyable' as a trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond,

The answer is simple: fear. Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grins, then we won't have to encounter the insecurities attendant upon dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn't know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer. We don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise to protect us from the abyss.

To foster a society of total happiness is to concoct a culture of fear. Do we really want to give away our courage for mere mirth? Are we ready to relinquish our most essential hearts for a good night's sleep, a season of contentment? We must resist the seductions of mindless happiness and somehow hold to our sadness. We must find a way, difficult though it is, to be who we are, sullenness and all.

Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: We are forever incomplete, fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures — we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials — make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be only a fragment is always to strive for something beyond ourselves, something transcendent. That striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous — it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors — it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.

So, I sent this essay to my therapist, ( I know I am such a suck-up ;)), because yesterday I think I hit my first wall. Actually, more like I put the wall up, spent a bunch of time talking as if it weren't there, and then the therapist basically said, "We can keep talking about this unimportant stuff, or we can get back to the real issues we were talking about two weeks ago. " Of course in a much nicer way. As soon as she said; " Hey nice wall you put up there kiddo," I started to cry.

Okay here's the weird thing about walls that I learned yesterday. I always thought when I put them up (sneaky like a Ninja, you would never know I had just put one up - because it looks just like a regular conversation, in fact sometimes I barely know the difference myself) it was because I knew what was behind them, and didn't want to talk about it. However, as I sat there crying and the nice Doctor (who I'll be honest I didn't like very much in that instant- although I do like her in regular circumstance) looked at me patiently and said; "We don't have to talk about it this session, but I would be remiss if I didn't bring it up, there's a door open here and I want us to keep it that way." I just cried and cried, because I realized that I had no idea what the wall was covering up. Something was there, obviously because I was crying so much, but I'd been talking about nothing for 45 minutes because all I knew how to do is to talk around things and hide them behind other ideas, and pretend that I can understand myself without having to feel anything negative.

So yeah,that's the mystery for this week, maybe next week (now that I know this is how I function) I'll just try not to let my brain fill up with other topics, even if I go in and say absolutely nothing, it's better then making shit up.