# Melancholy
Sun 22 Aug 12:44:10 KST 2021
I've been experiencing moments of melancholy and nostalgia over the
past months. Nothing too intense, just notable. It's an old,
familiar feeling, but one I hadn't felt in a long time.
It's not difficult to diagnose its source - I will soon been moving
back to Ireland from Korea. I'm probably not alone in feeling
melancholic during periods of life-transition. When I feel sad or
melancholic about leaving, it's not only Korea I think about, but
all periods of my past life that I miss or long for. I think the
first time I noticed those kinds of feelings was when I first left
home to go to university.
Melancholy is typically understood as a failure to properly
mourn - to become too attached to or desiring of the lost
object/person/place, rather than accepting its loss in a healthy
way. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek, however, points out that
melancholy shouldn't be compared to the work of mourning like this.
Melancholy doesn't represent an 'unhealthy' desire (for a lost
thing), but instead represents a recognition of the /absensce/ of
desire (the loss of the subject themselves):
Say, a person who, all his life, was used to live in a
certain city and is finally compelled to move elsewhere, is,
of course, saddened by the prospect of being thrown into a
new environment - however, what is it that effectively makes
him sad? It is not the prospect of leaving the place which
was for long years his home, but the much more subtle fear
of losing his very attachment to this place. What makes me
sad is the fact that I am aware that, sooner or later -
sooner than I am ready to admit - I will integrate myself
into a new community, forgetting the place which now means
to me so much. In short, what makes me sad is the awareness
that I will lose my desire for (what is now) my home.
=>
https://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=28 Source of the above quote
at lacan.com
The lost object (a city, person, time) is not 'gone'. It is still
possessed by the melancholic (through memory, etc.), it's just that
the desire for the object is gone, or will soon be gone. This is
why we feel sad or disappointed.
This description reminds me of something from Kafka's Blue Octavio
Notebooks. Actually, I haven't read them, but sections from them
are read aloud in Max Richter's Blue Notebooks album. Here is the
text:
When Thomas brought the news that the house I was
born in no longer exists
Neither the name, nor the park sloping to the river
Nothing
I had a dream of return
Multi-coloured
Joyous
I was able to fly
And the trees were even higher than in childhood
Because they had been growing during all
the years since they had been cut down
In this fragment, the narrator longs to return to their, now
totally destroyed, childhood home. The fantasy of return brings joy
(indeed, melancholy and nostalgia are often perversely joyous, just
look at Vapor Wave ), but is also marked by the curious detail that
the trees are even taller now, in the dream, than they were in
childhood. Contained within the very wish to return, to traverse
time, is the recognition that time doesn't work like that. The line
is both uplifting and sad. The trees continue to grow, even in the
fantasy-space, nothing is ever at rest.
Even though there is something sad about this passage (perhaps it's
because it is in the context of a very sad/melancholic album),
there is also a sense of acceptance and delight. The subject is
lighter now (he was able to fly). The absence or loss of attachment
is also a moment of freedom. The destruction of the childhood home
is an opportunity for things to continue to grow, even after they
have been chopped down.
This is what melancholy feels like to me, a recognition that there
is no rest, no stasis in life. Even memories and the past are
victims to the effects of time. It's a scary and sad feeling,
especially since we are generally taught that we are always working
toward some kind of fixed 'goal' - the perfect career, the perfect
family, a stable financial situation, heaven (if you're religious),
etc. We are always promised rest, stasis, stability, but, in my
experience at least, life isn't really like that at all.
Still, you don't have to look far to find joy and intrigue in the
ever-changing nature of reality. Philosophers like Heraclitus,
Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, etc., all demonstrate this. These
days, I try to think of melancholy in the way that Catherine
Pickstock describes the identity of the person. Throughout our
lives, our identities, personas, etc., shift and transform. What we
call a 'self' is just a loosely held-together frame around these
transformations. Our movement through these transformations follows
the pattern of a snake - in order to move forward, the snake first
turns slightly backward, then turns forward again, then backward,
etc. This 'serpentine motion' is mirrored by us in moments of
nostalgia and melancholy. We look backward, longingly, and with
heavy hearts, but this backward-looking is also a way of propelling
us forward.
