Melancholia

Melancholia

Meghna Maiti

Have you listened to faint sound of muezzin at the hour of dusk when cicadas quietly buzz around the street lamps in dark alleys? What do you feel when you see afternoon sun glinting off the sea along the harbour line? Or, it could be the feeling when you are trying to look at the world through rain-splashed window. The outside world seems strangely unfamiliar, black, empty and inadequate and what we essentially feel is ‘melancholia’. 

Melancholia is a state of mind, a deep sense of spiritual loss, a musical problem, a dissonance, a feeling that we live to suffer and only through suffering we realise the most intense of pleasures and joys.

 Orhan Pamuk in his book ‘Istanbul', has described this particular feeling of pain as huzun. He said we suffer because we know we have not suffered enough. Pamuk said Islamic culture hold ‘huzun’ in high esteem. It is central to their culture, poetry, music and everyday life. It is also a sort of spiritual affliction, a sense of groundless fear, a feeling that something is tearing inside you all the time.

I have been experiencing this sense of ‘melancholia’ from my childhood and I know it for a fact it is as life affirming as negating. It is positive in the sense; melancholy paves the way to happy solitude, to my own rich inner world, fantasies, imaginations that give me immense amount of joy. It is an aching feeling that keeps the soul alive.

Yet the darker side is killing too; it renders a black mood, it means living in a constant state of terror, a sense of insupportable loneliness, torturing memories and a dread of some strange impending doom. And when I am consumed by such dark passions I just like to lose all sense of probity, reason, logic.

There is no cure for melancholia. While it is something some of us are born with, it has sort of shaped our worldviews, our perspectives, our likes and dislikes. It also often gives us the strength to embrace failures, defeats, indecision, heartbreaks.

ENDS