Let’s start with this picture. I often talk about autumn light: “I am attracted to this light the way I'm attracted to that melancholic state just before depression, that feeling of reflective calm that isn't quite happiness, but is a stillness. It's precarious of course: which is why I associate this time of year (in the past) with falling in love and horrible breakups, creative exuberance and self-absorbed intoxication.” (http://www.jimshedden.com/500-people-places-and-things-that-define-jim-shedden/2018/10/2/23-autumn-light)
The light today has some of the qualities of autumn light, but it isn’t quite that. It’s not sharp enough. It’s nice and windy, and there’s a warm breeze, but I’m not quite experiencing the stillness, the push-pull of melancholy and reflective calm. It’s something like that though. Perhaps it’s just a weird weekend coming at the end of a very weird six months. The light is cooperating, though, making it impossible to feel entirely sad or depressed, but those feelings are present, in a bit of a dialogue with bliss.
The picture was taken in my mother-in-law’s condo in Waterloo, where I am for my first time since COVID19 measures were announced, and the first time since my father-in-law Dave passed away. That was in May of this year, and we are just now burying him, and celebrating his life. We all say “celebration of life” now, but isn’t that better than all that dour mourning which, at many of the funerals I attended over the years, consisted of a lot of shoe gazing during painful sermons, followed by awkward sorry-for-your-loss encounters with the survivor, and then a few rounds of Wonder Bread sandwiches. Bring on the celebrations of life.
Still, I remember enough of reading Freud (I was under his spell throughout the 80s), to recall Mourning and Melancholia, where he argued that these are two similar but ultimately very different responses to loss. Mourning is considered healthy because it takes place in the conscious mind, whereas melancholia is where we delegate the process to the unconscious mind, where it tends to fester and mutate into various toxic behaviours.
That was Freud. Today I associate my melancholia with my quite conscious awareness that this weekend Meredith goes back to Oakville, where she will form a new bubble with a small group of Sheridan musical theatre students, and who knows when I’ll see her next? It also means her new cat, Bob Fosse (still a kitten really), will move out of our lives for some time. Christmas? The successful dissemination of a vaccine? Anyhow, I am melancholic, not mournful, because I don’t really know what I am feeling, mixed as it is with optimism and excitement about the year ahead for her, despite being, really, the weirdest and most frustrating year possible for anyone who has committed their lives to the performing arts.
I am melancholic. Is that even the word? Is it gloomy? Lugubrious? Doleful? No, I think it has to have the suggestion of reflection, and of possible insights. That’s my twisted idea of the word, of course, because technically speaking, melancholia is pathological. I will continue to say that I am melancholic.
It is the light, the shortening of days, the wind (warm, but getting cooler), and the changes ahead for everyone. Did I Iook forward to school? For the most part, no. When I was younger, I got horrible knots in my stomach, wondering who was going to bully me that year, and wondering why that girl that I had a crush on wasn’t assigned to my class, and wondering how the hell I was going to survive phys. ed., it always, without fail, resembling the gym class in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life without any of the humour. I still get knots in my stomach that remind me of being bullied, and remind me of gym class (frequently one and the same of thing), the bad years of boy scouts (there were good years), when it was just “gym class by other means”.
Once we were past all that, I would be lifted from my despondent state by whatever we were reading in English, and whatever we were studying in History. Everything else was hit and miss, even music, which I loved but I just wasn’t a very good musician, so there were many moments of guilt, remorse and shame, and all that got pushed underground to the terrain of melancholia. French, hit or miss (I liked when we read Paul Verlaine). Mass Media, an optional course taught, but which I loved because I got to make super-8 films, work with a Sony Portapak, and write a big essay on Bruce Springsteen, “the saviour of rock ’n roll” (1979!). Geography should have been great, but was not. Shop class was torture, aside from a few rare moments of zen bliss in Drafting, but the rest was fear and intimidation.
I actually have some pretty positive memories from high school, mainly because of some friends I made that, thanks to various internet technologies, are friends again and I’m reminded that I was lucky to connect with that small cluster of people that helped me deal with the other 2800 people, and with my general sense that I was a loser one day, a superior being the next day, but most importantly that they we were all freaks and geeks, punks and mods, tragically hip all the way.
I have tended to fall in love this time of year, whatever “falling in love” means. I find it hard to remember the specific feelings I felt for this person or that, just a memory of the the fear that gripped me, the nausea, the excitement, the disappointment, and knowing that each unrequited love state, and each breakup, and each breakup after the breakup, was the end of the world. I can’t understand how life goes on the way it does. Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry?
That time, those high school years were also defined by my part-time jobs and some great people I met there. And, just as I fell in love more times than is useful back in high school, I also fell in love a lot at Mother’s Pizza Parlour and Spaghetti House, and Town and Country Buffet Restaurant. Same mix of unrequited love and awkward, painful breakups followed by reconciliation and not with a bang but a whimper breakups. I fall in love too easily. I fall in love too fast. I fall in love too terribly hard, for love to ever last.
(Actually, I fell in love with Shellie in the autumn of 1993, or maybe it was earlier, but I was certainly going through a bit of melancholia for a while there, but then we were too busy having a good time living life to notice.)
People who know me know that I have a number of challenges, and that the major ones have something to do with this unhelpful amount of reflective lowness. I am an alcoholic/addict (same thing to me) in recovery, clean and sober for almost 13 years. There are moments in one’s recovery where joy and ecstasy are clear and present but most people I know in recovery, still have this edge, a bit of negativity maybe, cynicism but a well-behaved variety. Anyhow, I certainly have it. I don’t have the desire to drink or use drugs, but I haven’t entirely replaced the role that they used to play in my life. I don’t enjoy being around people who are drinking or high, even though I went a number of years where that didn’t bother me. Finally, my recovery was interrupted by this whole covid19 etc. time. We have meetings on Zoom, and that’s really helpful, but I’ve lost the more subtle human to human connection that helped keep me sober all those years. All of this is making me sad and tired.
I am also manic-depressive (technically “bipolar II”, but I liked the descriptive language we used to use). I am increasingly aware that my primary treatment for this, the venerable lithium carbonate, which pushes my moods into a narrow bandwidth that is usually not manic, for which I am so grateful. I get glimpses of my past behaviour from time to time, small shadows of the out of control brain activity that wanted to kill me. Lithium also helps me from falling too far into the depressive abyss, but I find it less effective on that score. I seem to have two primary emotions: flatness and detachment, and then melancholy. I don’t feel that any of these feelings are dangerous, but there are moments when I wish I could experience the exuberance, the exhilaration, the manic energy that used to be define me. That thought is dangerous. That’s why people like me stop taking their medications, or switch lithium out for Adderall or cocaine, and then end up committing suicide. So I’ll stick with the program.
On the other hand, what is most debilitating right now is a chronic neurological condition that possesses my body, especially at night, totally fucking me up and sometimes flipping me into a bit of a manic state. Not one that has caused me to be delirious or anything, but not happy either. I guess this doesn’t cause me to be melancholic but it definitely hijacks any serenity I have.
Back in high school I read a lot. I loved books with a melancholic tone, at least what I perceived then to be a melancholic tone. I’d have to re-read them, because I find that every book I go back to seems totally different. But I loved Camus, Hesse, DH Lawrence, Margaret Laurence, Dostoevsky, Hamlet, King Lear, and on it goes. I also got into poetry, and that led me to a lot of great places but, once again, I loved the dark, brooding Keats (But when the melancholy fit shall fall/Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud/That fosters the droop-headed flowers all…), the French Symbolists, the Beats, Jim Carroll, Patti Smith (of course).
But music mattered the most and still matters. I find with music I am permitted to return to previous melancholic states, often getting in and out of them in three minutes. When I am in my flat, unemotional state, music reignites my emotional side, sometimes giving me a little blast of exuberance, and sometimes allowing me to feel with, and deal with, any melancholia I’m experiencing.
I repeat: I know that I am perhaps using the term melancholia wrong. What does this sound like?
All Tomorrow’s Parties - Velvet Underground
Pale Blue Eyes - Velvet Underground
You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - Dylan (but I also like the Miley Cyrus version)
I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You - Tom Waits
Happiness is a Warm Gun - The Beatles
Atlantic City - Bruce Springsteen
When We Were Young - Adele
If We Only Have Love - Jacques Brel (Mort Shuman version)
The Amorous Humphrey Plugg - Scott Walker
Back to Black - Amy Winehouse
Love in Vain - Robert Johnson (Rolling Stones version)
Memory Hotel - Rolling Stones
No Woman, No Cry - Bob Marley
I Believe - Buzzcocks
Alison - Elvis Costello
Redemption Song - Bob Marley/Joe Strummer/Johnny Cash
Sunday - Stephen Sondheim
Summertime Sadness - Lana del Rey
Take this Waltz - Leonard Cohen
Misty Blue - Dorothy Moore
Kind of Blue - Miles Davis
The Ballad of Lucy Jordan - Marianne Faithfull
Blue Bayou - Roy Orbison/Linda Ronstadt
Suicide is Painless - M*A*S*H soundtrack
Windmills of Your Mind - Noel Harrison (Michel Legrand, composer)
