The Anatomy of Melancholy

Introduction

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The inspiration for this blog has been scurrying around the gloomy recesses for some time now. Partially though not exclusively related to: questions about futility, questions about courage, questions about placing one foot in front of the other when the gathering storm feels like it will be insurmountable; if not this time, then surely the next.

What makes us go on, what mechanism does that?

Originally, I thought I’d place some kind of viewer discretion advisory here — Warning: this blog contains bleak, existential disquiet and hopeless despondency, that kind of thing — but, no, if you read the poem by W.S. Merwin (after a line of which this blog is named), it captures that sense of near inexplicable faith in all its rousing sorrow. And when I say faith, I mean it in a secular, agnostic sense, since religious faith is something quite different, I think. No, I’m interested in that human spark we call hope or faith or trust in the face of daunting odds, maintained with no attendant promise of redemption or reward, such bewildering yet moving optimism. A thing that seems barely sustainable.

Anyway, a couple of things came together in the last few days, pertinent enough to kickstart this blog. First, I was reading online about the book after which this post is titled: The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Without attempting to divine or even discuss a book that I haven’t yet read, let alone a work so immense in scope, it’s enough for now just to quote from the Preface since Burton’s (tongue-in-cheek?) motivation mirrors my own in starting this blog:

I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.

It’s worth noting that the “melancholy” of which he speaks is closer to the contemporary psychiatric concept of depression than the slightly twee and poetic air the word suggests nowadays, although I think I want to merge both senses of the word here. Prone to depression, I welcome the diversion of thwarting that dismal intruder by exploring the dekes and feints I (we) employ once it embarks on its insidious campaigns.

Coincidentally, while the blogging imperative grew stronger, I learned last night of the death of David Foster Wallace. Now, he is by no means my favourite writer or even someone I’ve thought about a great deal — the often bloated, occasionally baroque, generally brilliant Infinite Jest is by a fair distance the best book I’ve never actually read, having been stuck somewhere in the vicinity of page 328 of the soft cover edition for the last two years, in a kind of exasperated hiatus — but it struck me that his relative youth, his success and his obvious literary virtuosity (bordering on genius, frankly) ought to have mitigated against any such stark an act as wilful self-destruction. Yet it didn’t. I know nothing of his story, but I’m truly sad that it didn’t. I wish he could have found that spark, the spark that seemed to ignite his complex, layered writing, the spark that made him create furious whirlwinds of fizzing light and sprays of exuberant heat amid the cold blackness, the spark that must have deserted him at the end. I don’t fully love what I’ve read of his work, but I do love the mind that could counter the grey march of banality that contemporary life can so often be, its courageous denial of same through levels of detail and rumination and structural pyrotechnics not seen since, I don’t know, Gravity’s Rainbow even?

And I’m scared that one moment of inattentiveness, perhaps, was all it took to let go of the spark, to be plunged into utter darkness, to succumb.

So, then, a blog inspired by two works, masterpieces even, one of which I’ve never read and the other only partially. Not the most auspicious of starts, then. And yet, all being well, it will serve as my own spark, a constant reminder, my unfathomable thank-you to the unnamed, unknowable void in the face of the world’s jeers and jabs, my negation of Burton’s pessimism:

Now desperate I hate my life,
Lend me a halter or a knife;
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so damn’d as melancholy.