The poetry of melancholy
Photo: Lorna Sim
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine…
-John Keats, Ode on Melancholy.
Melancholy is an old-fashioned word—it is rarely used in common parlance in our times. And it is an old-fashioned sensation, many centuries older than its breathtaking invocation by John Keats, one of the greatest voices of the Romantic era of poetry. The Romantic era was the last period, at least in the west, when the divinity and intelligence of this sensation was perceived as the foundation of beauty and aesthetics.
Today we tend to speak of depression almost as a substitute for melancholy. And loneliness, which is a dimension of melancholy, becomes something to be feared and “cured”. This is not to deny the reality and seriousness of both depression and loneliness. Rather it is to invite how, in different contexts, an experience such as melancholy offers a connection to our soul and its poetic sense of beauty, as Keats recognises in his poem.
There is something powerful about the melancholic cosmos in philosophical reflection. It is almost impossible to truly attend to the quest of one’s soul without this doorway of melancholy. In Rasa philosophy of dance, the word for this sensation is Vishada. I will henceforth mostly use this word rather than melancholy, as the latter holds a great weight of fear in our times.
Vishada is a multi-dimensional constellation of disappointment, sorrow, aloneness, and confusion. One of the greatest archetypes of Vishada is the archetypal warrior, Arjuna. It is his Vishada that births the Bhagavad Gita, the Divine Song of the deity Krishna’s teaching about the soul’s quest for authenticity. Arjuna’s Vishada emerges when confronted by the prospect of having to wage a decisive battle against his own family.
Arjuna finds that all his existing knowledge and conclusions about family, right and wrong, duty, morality and even the Divine, lie in ruins at his feet. The reality that confronts him is not matched by anything he has lived by up to that point. After an extended discourse in which he draws on philosophy, spirituality, politics, morality and several other paradigms, he finally decides he must renounce his life and retire to the forest to meditate.
Arjuna’s predicament offers one of the greatest narrative examples of melancholy or Vishada. In Rasa philosophy of dance, we are provided more intelligence about the subtle movement and unfolding of this sensation. In dance we inquire into Vishada as rising from a situation where our expectations are shattered. This is bigger than just at a personal level—it pertains to the shattering of the very foundations of one’s world views. Just like Arjuna, it arises from the extinguishing of all narratives of reality which we have been offered as meaning-making paradigms.
In this Vishada dance, we begin with searching for solutions, advice, and expertise. We return to the very sources which have proven to be inadequate in our desperation for answers. This is inevitable when we hold the structure of problem solving as the basis for our approach to Reality. In many of the paradigms we are offered, Reality is a problem waiting for us to solve.
As we run around from one source to another, the futility begins to dawn upon us. However, the ancient habit of the mind to analyse and problem solve is fiercely enduring. So, we now revert to our own analysis, weighing the various knowledge options, comparing and contrasting ad nauseum. As J Krishnamurti said, this is the “analysis paralysis” state of being.
As we continue in the movement of Vishada, the mental turmoil becomes unbearable and maddening. This results in running hither and thither, now without even the purpose of seeking solutions. It becomes activity simply to escape the paralysis of the mind. We lick the corners of our dry lips. Even the mind becomes absent in this chaos.
Tired of running helter-skelter, we come to the Arjuna moment of seeking any way we can to escape our own torment. Hidden in the heart of this torment is the aloneness of Vishada. In those moments when all our treasured and trusted “truths” about life fail to meaningfully account for what is happening in front of us, we are utterly alone.
Nobody wishes to come with us to the cosmos of un-narrated Reality. No matter how incongruous, most of us will fall back on whatever meaning-creation narratives are available to us rather than face what may appear to us as “meaninglessness”. In these retreats into what we know or what we are provided as Reality, we silence our soul’s experience of Truth.
Keats writes about melancholy’s deeply humanising poetry of transience. When we dance Vishada, that cosmos of aloneness right in the middle of the busyness of life, it is akin to an encounter with Death. I was reading a book the other day where someone speaks of how, wishing to reconcile with their impending death from a terminal illness, they spent a few days walking around as if they were absent from the teeming of life around them. And the humbling poignancy of transience was all too evident to them during this experience. Life goes on even as we disappear. And this is also the taste of aloneness in Vishada. The moment of our Truth is not a communal event but an intensely personal one encountered in the death-like aloneness of the reality of the meaninglessness of most of our enduring meaning-creation structures.
At the same time, it is something in that experience of the ruins of our expectations that births the insight to attend to the taste burst of “Joy’s grape” against one’s palate. And that person, as Keats goes on to say, shall have a soul that can “taste the sadness of Her [Melancholy’s] might”. The paradoxical cosmos of Truth where pathos and Beauty, and sorrow and strength, co-exist is the landscape of the soul’s poetic and archetypal intelligence.
The “tasting” is the central quality of experiences of the soul. The word Rasa (pertaining to the Rasa philosophy of dance) means “taste”, and, like Keats’s use of the word “taste”, it signals the intimacy as well as the visceral and embodied nature of this experience. We taste those experiences beyond words and our word-created reality. Melancholy is a doorway, but it does ask of us to contend with transience, even of “truths” we hold as permanent and absolute. Truth here is the aloneness of the soul in a garden that may, as Keats says, be filled with “droop-headed flowers”. It is the humility and innocence to weep and “glut” our sorrow on a “morning rose”.
This is no easy invitation. Even Arjuna was tempted to flee from this loneliness, and the renunciation alone in a forest appeared more appealing to him! To dance in melancholy is sometimes more terrifying than Death. The loneliness of an unaccompanied landscape of Truth is unlike any other loneliness. The moments when the noise of the known empties and we can scent our soul are also moments when the cosmos is inhabited by only one person—You.
And so it is in the dance that we flee this suddenly empty cosmos towards “dhyana” or meditation. Even the withdrawal requirement of meditation appears less alone than Vishada or melancholy.
This is not to state that aloneness is the permanent state of being for self-inquiry. It is to suggest that aloneness or Vishada or melancholy is a necessary domain in self-inquiry. When we hold the narrated truths by which we live in the context of our soul’s Truth, we find a way of expressing our authenticity in our everyday lives. There is no rejection or valuing in terms of a duality seesaw of community and aloneness, rather it is an expansion of the realm of Reality itself to include space for the soul’s expression and wisdom.
The most important aspect of Vishada for me is the poetic intelligence of its nonlinear cosmos. Keats, and many other Romantic poets, expressed this as the poignant power of Beauty. Indeed Keats famously said “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”. In our times we have denigrated Beauty which has lost its poignant, transient heart. Keats invokes Beauty that births in the “cloudy” touch of the Goddess of melancholy which allows us to find the impulse to “feed deep deep” upon our lover’s eyes and hold their expression of anger in our poetic gaze. Beauty is the humanising force and it is the aesthetic manifestation of our soul and not an externally determined set of principles. This Beauty, as in Keats’s poetry, is archetypal, poetic, melancholic and uniquely expressed in each of its expressions. And this is because each of our souls is unique and worthy of its celebration in a cosmos inhabited only by itself. This comic manifestation does not render us self-obsessed, on the contrary when we free our soul, we experience how it is at once an experience of seamless connection with the vast and diverse soul of the cosmos.
When I lived in the Netherlands, I noticed that many buildings were painted in neutral colours of white or grey. I remarked on this to a friend saying that it would make more sense to have bright colours to balance the ubiquitous grey skies. He told me that it would hurt the eyes to do so and that there was something fragile and delicate about enjoying the nuances of the sky and the clouds in a less loud palette. It changed the way I experienced the Netherlands—when I felt suffocated by the interminable greyness, I would look at the sky with his eyes.
Melancholy or Vishada is like that more delicate palette that allows us to sense the poetic call of the soul amidst the chatter and loud Hubris of our mind-created tumult we call reality.