Hello. My Name is Kris and I am a Melancholic.

Portrait of the author as a melancholic child.

My name is Kris and I am a melancholic. There. I said it. For my entire life I have lived with an emptiness that has an insatiable hunger to consume whatever joy I attempt to experience. It sucks, but you know what? Its me. Its who I am. I have to accept it and see what I can do to make it work for me. My life's beginnings hardwired a world view that has been a struggle to reverse. 

My saturnian outlook on life is rooted in abandonment, a pebble in a placid pond that has rippled continuously throughout my life, only to finally reach itself in this thought. It takes on many forms. First and foremost, it has manifested an utter distrust of humans in general. Not any culture or race, gender or creed, but all of humanity. Although there is a small nugget in there, firmly nestled between doubt and exasperation. A nugget that humanity is not inherently evil, but conditioned by millenia of oppression and exploitation. We are adaptable creatures, capable of many beautiful, kind, creative and altruistic gestures, but I feel too much negative profiteering has evolved us into a creature that is too self serving, too greedy, and too ignorant to see otherwise. A part of me wants to believe, to allow myself a fractured ray of hope that we will pull ourselves from it and live in the world we have always dreamed of. I used to believe that life exists to destroy itself and be reborn in a different configuration, a phoenix from the ashes, but now I think the mechanisms at work are not negative, but it is her greatest achievement (in this solar system anyway) that cannot continue on its current course of self-destruction.

Secondly, I tend to expect the worst in situations that involve people. Do I enjoy this? Not really, but it has served me well in certain circumstances. In others, not so much. I really wish people could get a "Being John Malkovich" view of how difficult it is to manage. This constant battling back and forth between a mind that defaults to negativity while fighting to be positive can be crippling. I have heard the phrase "paralysis by analysis" and I am guilty as charged. I will ruminate and analyse a situation into neutrinos. I used to hide behind a deluded notion that expecting the worst sets you up for feeling good when anything else happens, but the fact that there is an inkling of negative emotion there to begin with sets the whole practice up to fail. 

Thirdly, ah fuck it. There are a hundred heads to this hydra that we can cut off, but now methinks it be better to focus on the positive and what I can do to nurture my withered and grey little blessing. That's what I like to picture my melancholic muse as. A withered and grey old lady. Kinda like a Hans Bellmer doll come to life. So I began following the Dali Lama and trying to adhere to some of his teachings. I find him to be a refreshing case of "Keep on the Sunnyside". I also use my music as a means to express these emotions that can be suffocating to endure. Music and melancholia go back a long way. All the way back to ancient Greece. In Robert Burtons treatise "The Anatomy of Melancholy" written in 1621, he states, " But to leave all declamatory speeches in praise of divine music, I will confine myself to my proper subject: besides that excellent power it hath to expel many other diseases, it is a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself. Canus, a Rhodian fiddler, in Philostratus, when Apollonius was inquisitive to know what he could do with his pipe, told him, "That he would make a melancholy man merry, and him that was merry much merrier than before, a lover more enamoured, a religious man more devout." Ismenias the Theban, Chiron the centaur, is said to have cured this and many other diseases by music alone: as now they do those, saith Bodine, that are troubled with St. Vitus's Bedlam dance." I prefer sad music, I can't help it. Would it be bizarre to say it makes me feel good? Like Burton states above, "a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy..." Music is usually the first thing I turn to in a mental crisis and often helps me expunge the pain away. So I turn to composing music, writing poems, and studying the history of a planet that birthed a man with no history.


Anyway, I'm rambling and I am sure getting through this has been an arduous read, but I will leave you with this poem by John Keats.

Ode on Melancholy

By John Keats

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
       Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
       By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
               Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
       Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
               Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
       For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
               And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
       Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
       And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
       Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
               Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
       Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
               And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
       And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
       Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
       Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
               Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
       Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
               And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Hopefully it will become easier to manage in the future, but this is me. It is who I am and anyone who bitches about it can simply not talk to me, because in the end that's probably what I want anyway :)


:K