I daresay that sometimes in deep winter, melancholy can strike. I have been rather melancholic as of late and am doing my best to embrace it. I enjoy reading what Tom Hodgkinson says about melancholy in The Freedom Manifesto (go here for an earlier post on this book). Chapter 17, “In praise of melancholy,” explains:
For guidance on the vexing issue of melancholy, depression, black bile, we must turn to the world expert, renowned scholarly reflector and gentle intellect Robert Burton who, in 1621, wrote that most cheerful and cheering of books, The Anatomy Of Melancholy.
That the book was a big hit should come as no surprise, because it came out during a miserable period in history. Merry England was dead or dying. Burton’s book, 78 pages of the most delightful misery, was published roughly halfway between the Henrician Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, those two major disasters for lovers of life and liberty. The old religious festivals had been banned by Cranmer. Merry-making on Sundays was attacked. The fun was being drained from national life. The book is also almost contemporary with Shakespeare’s study of isolation, Hamlet, and Marlowe’s study of ambition, Dr Faustus.
The meat of Burton’s book is thousands of quotations on the subject of melancholy from classical sources. This would suggest that the Ancient Romans and Greeks suffered from melancholy, too, which doesn’t surprise me, because the Romans, particularly, lived in a rapacious, warlike, exploitative oligarchy, much like Britain and the US today. It may also be true that, aside from external factors, melancholy is just a fact of life. There is no escape. Even the wise, lucky and prosperous, Burton says, suffer from melancholy: deal with it.
Among the causes of melancholy, Burton lists bad diet. Among his solutions is merriment: “In my judgment none so present, none so powerful, none so apposite as a cup of strong drink, mirth, music, and merry company.” He calls music “a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul”. This is the power of jazz, or rock’n'roll, or dance music.
Today, gone are good company, good cheer and good beer as cures. Melancholy has been professionalised, commodified, industrialised. It has been transformed into a “condition” with a costly chemical cure. These pills make the most gigantic profits for their dealers, the drugs giants. Depression is big business.
No one ever suggests, of course, that the fault for your depression may lie not with you but with the things that you are expected to do in our hyper-competitive, meritocratic, money-based, godless society. However, rather than change yourself, you could change your world. Quitting your job, refusing to vote, not taking pharmaceutical drugs: these are acts not of apathy but of a radical re-engagement with society and with your own self. Once you disengage from the structures that bind you, you find that you begin to recreate a life of self-reliance. And self-reliance, rather than the sticking-plaster method, will help you to come to terms with your melancholy, rather than trying to banish it with drugs.
I think that even simply renaming depression “melancholy” can do a lot to disarm it. Keats, in his Ode On Melancholy, advises not getting wasted (which he calls Lethe) and not taking anti-depressants (which he calls wolfsbane and nightshade). Instead, he suggests going for a walk and gazing at the flowers and recognising that melancholy is a sister to joy and must be embraced.
Amen. Hmmm…bad diet? And music as “a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul”? Indeed. This is precisely why J had me jam chords (albeit awkwardly) on his electric guitar on Sunday afternoon, and why he insisted I eat more often. The winter blues may strike, but I am trying to take the energy and channel it productively — and I use productive loosely. Creatively might be more appropriate. Or get out of the house, go see some jazz and have a pint (and if you’re in the Portland, Maine area then consider dropping by One Longfellow Square tonight for some live jazz by The Chameleons).
