Melancholy

[In my courses this term we explored the spiritual qualities of melancholy. Many people in the classes shared with me how relieved they felt at the nuanced wisdom of melancholy as a sensation. Melancholy is in essence a poetic cosmos, best experienced through the nonlinear beauty of poetic intelligence. In dance it becomes the tender and meandering Rasa of Vishada which is the birthplace of Divine revelation. So here is my poetic reflection that emerged from the recent invocation of the Rasa of melancholy, Vishada.]

My loneliness is not like yours

or psychologies or pathologies that define

the indefinable depths where creatures live

who perish in light.

My loneliness separates me from knitted banality

we call community

but in reality

made of cheap polyester threads of no poetry.

Your loneliness is not like mine

or the thousand talking heads

experting

spurting

theories about genes, cures, and gods.

Your loneliness covers you with merman’s scales

that shimmer in the depths

of the sea of melancholy.

Alone in loneliness I cannot escape

the million untruths that are the sands of life

endless falls into crevices

ruins of scaffoldings upon which I pinned my skin

and once displayed myself

like a mannequin in a two-dollar shop.

You and I are not together in our loneliness

but we may have an ocean in each heart

or a river behind our eyes

waterfalling in an undiscovered forest.

Or an ancient dance that moves our hips

in those many hours of contemplating our feet

in a cave with flickering lamp-lit Goddesses

who only birth in the fecundity of melancholy

and its fresh-dung scent of sorrow—

untainted by the psychology of happiness

and its attendant chorus of children

playing with gadgets that vacuum

eyeballs, hearts, intestines, marrow

and fling it on screens in lurid art

like Narasimha’s garland of entrails.*

My loneliness and your loneliness

when honoured

and scented with rosewater and sandalwood

expressed in dances unseen by you and me

bathed in my tears and your tears

ochre painted in my terror and your terror

is closer than my death and yours.

-Padma Menon

*Narasimha is the man-lion form of the deity Vishnu. He emerges when his young devotee Prahalada is challenged by his father (who is the ruler of Earth) when Prahalada claims that the Divine is immanent, even in a pillar. When his father demolishes the pillar, Narasimha emerges and disembowels him. The archetypal implications of this story are manifold. In this context, the disembowelling is the attention to our primordiality which is located in the lower abdomen of our Body (between the hips in ceremonial dance). Narasimha is the consciousness beyond duality that is necessary to experience the Divine rather than the simplistic and objectified “seeing” that Prahalada’s father demanded. This revelation requires the "death" of our habitual lenses of duality and mastery.