Melancholy

Melancholy:

The Blues has got me. There’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather...

I stand by my window, look out at October-tinted gardens, winds sweep around corners, color-drained leaves are tumbling to the sodden ground or are blown about by autumnal maelstroms in whirling, whirring cascades across the lawn, trees point with skeletal branches in desperation to dark brooding skies. 

Melancholy. This bittersweet, gentle pensiveness, this feeling somewhere between sadness and reverie, a bit wistful maybe, a bit mournful, but not miserable, no, not miserable: that is melancholy. A huge space for silence, a calm refuge, a soft warm cloak, a great potential for creativity. Not bad at all. 

As the romantics knew, in Melancolia, this dark temperament, this tranquil, accepting awareness, despair and ingeniousness lie close by. Those typically circular musings of the melancholy mind often lead to unknown, clairvoyant spaces of thought.

Through the filters of melancholy we often get a glimpse of solace, a feeling that yes, life, the world, everything, might appear just now not so ultimately good and promising, but that is really just a passing state: there is hope, there is pleasant anticipation, there is the promise of a joyous future. Because the melancholy mind knows of the suffering of the world, suffers together with it empathetically, it also knows of an alternative world which it then creates and derives hope thereof, leaving despair behind. There is a deep unquestioning Ur-trust, in melancholy. This makes it one of the more pleasant things in life. 

Some of our best artworks have been born out of melancholy. Poets like Byron, Shelley, Keats, Novalis, excelled in it. A good deal of classical music, opera, Jazz, Pop, the Blues, the Fado, the Chanson, they all are born from this bittersweet longing, this mournfully sad, yet hopefully trusting sentiment.

Melancholy lies down gently on space and time, calming all. 

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