Melancholy... A Necessary Evil

MY PAPER
In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not./And what you do not know is the only thing you know/And what you own is what you do not own/And where you are is where you are not. - T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot has been speaking to me; in fact, Eliot has been speaking to me for a long time. At first, he spoke to me through a fellow English major talking excitedly about her idea for a new tattoo.
'I've always wanted a tattoo but I don't know what to get,' she said. 'I want The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock tattooed down my spine.'
'Like, the entire thing?' I asked incredulously.
'Yeah, the whole thing. It will hurt like a bitch.'
Funny now to think that one of my first experiences with Eliot came in reference to something 'hurting like a bitch', but such has been my experience in the English Department of Montana State University. Eliot came to me again three years ago in a basic level class for British Literature, telling me to give, have compassion, and have self control in The Wasteland. His words resonated so loudly with me I tattooed them on my forearm. They tell me to push forward; they tell me to be kind. Most importantly, they tell me to take control of life when there is opportunity for control, because most of the time it will be like spinning out with nothing to grasp on to.
Only months ago, Eliot told me that 'to arrive where you are not, to get from where you are not/You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy'. Three years ago, I never would have understood the gravity of Eliot's words or the direction of his musings, least of all how much they pertain to my life and the events which have led me to this time and this moment, a graduating Senior at Montana State University. In a few short words, Eliot describes a state of melancholy one must be consumed with in order to reach an elevated level of being and a deeper understanding of ones circumstance. Often in life and literature, the state of melancholy gives rise to some of the most epiphanical and realized states of consciousness a human being can experience. Little did I know my own moments of melancholy, space in time spent in total darkness, would not be in vain; I would cultivate the melancholy and move to a place of heightened understanding.

Deployed In Constellated Wars
I smiled. I waved. How many times do we smile and wave in a lifetime? So many things can exist in a smile, and I was smiling this time to assure my mother everything would be alright. The truth was, I did not believe it myself. Everything was not going to be alright. Three semesters of college had elapsed and already I was giving up.
'I am just taking a break,' I told my parents. 'It's just for now until I get everything straightened out. I don't feel like I'm in the right place to focus on school.'
And I wasn't. I was only in the right place to do exactly what I had wanted to do from the beginning; immerse myself in ridiculous levels of intoxication and hang out with my friends. I was officially a college dropout, and looking forward only to the next party and having a job to support my habit. Where was Roethke when I needed him? Roethke would have told me to 'learn by going where I have to go' instead of where I wanted to go. We had yet to become acquainted, but I could have used him then.
My habit became dangerous, and for a while it seemed relatively harmless. In my attempt to take 'control' of my life and do exactly what I wanted to do, I was alienating everyone and everything in my life. No matter. Days began to float by as if they never existed; my feelings toward life became something of nonchalance. Motivation to move in any direction except for toward the nearest drink ceased to exist and I was floating. I thought I was doing great, but I was only spiraling to hopelessness.
My intention for leaving school was guided by the my preoccupation with 'getting better'. I knew indulging in alcohol was affecting everything in my life, and only moving away from Bozeman and away from college was going to fix it for me. Moving away from Bozeman only made me miss friends there and freedom to be away from the watchful eye of my parents. The right people to drink with can always be found in a small town, and I found my way to them before anything else. To make matters worse, I was barely speaking to anyone in my family. It was suffocating and liberating all at once.
Without even realizing it, I had reached my lowest point of despair, and now I am grateful for and also horrified by the memory. During this time, I fell into an abusive relationship and lost all control of my life. My family was in ruins, I was addicted to a person who was never honest or kind, and I had enrolled in and quit school for the second time. Words are given to describe a moment, a feeling, an emotion; I still have no words for this period in my life. I was exhausted.

The Laughter In the Garden, Echoed Ecstasy
I was fidgety. Nervous, even. I sat in a small chair by the door clutching my bag, trying to breathe but finding it incredibly hard to without shaking. Inhale, exhale, I thought, smiling as I was reminded of an old Jane Fonda workout video I used to watch incessantly as a kid. What am I doing here? Waiting. My mind raced back and forth between Jane Fonda and the books on the wall. Volumes of poetry, so many volumes of poetry. I love poetry, I thought. I love Eliot. She was teaching us a lot of Eliot this semester. I rubbed my palms on my pant legs and looked at the door, biting my lip. Where is she? She told me to go wait in her office and she would be up in a minute. That clock is too loud, I thought. Obnoxious ticking. Voices. She's here! I feel like I'm going to vomit.
Kimberly Myers stepped into her office and shut the door, turning to me with a familiar, welcoming smile.
'Alright,' she said, sitting down and swiveling her chair toward me. 'What can I help you with today, Rian?'
Oh god, I thought. I could feel my face starting to flush red and my body temperature rising without warning. Is that window even open? I can't even feel a breeze.
'Well,' I stammered, trying to situate my thoughts but finding it hard to focus. 'I just wanted to tell you that I...I...' I couldn't finish. Tears were running down my cheeks in waves and I found myself in a situation I never thought I would find myself in until that day. I was crying in front of a total stranger; having a nervous breakdown in front of my beloved Professor in her office. How embarrassing.
Looking back, I know I was having a surreal moment of epiphany. I had just spent nearly two years in a state of melancholy so bleak I thought I would never return, and now I was crying because I had reached a level of understanding I thought was impossible. As every struggling author needs inspiration for the book that is their own life, Kimberly Myers was my inspiration and the thing that pulled me out of my desperation. My epiphany with Kimberly Myers was seen and felt. I realized all that I had lost and let myself lose before I came back to college and realized all that I wanted to gain. I truly wanted to turn my life around.
On a break from MSU later that year, I visited a place called Vadar, Washington, and the home of Sharon and Leroy. Leroy was a retired English professor and had this incredible writing studio, a little cottage behind the home he occupied with Sharon. In it, there was a desk with a small lamp and all the essentials for a writer, though incredibly out of date, something I thought was charming. Above the desk hung a poem by Theodore Roethke and in that poem Roethke was telling me to 'learn by going where I have to go'. He was not telling me to go where I wanted to go, or felt like going, or even where I desired to go, but where I had to go. You must, he was saying to me. Why? Because you must. I felt like I was having an out of body experience being in that atmosphere with those words giving me some sort of direction. I was only able to learn where I was supposed to go because I had been utterly consumed with melancholy and despair, was still able to find strength and solitude, and out of the muck I was able to rise like T.S. Eliot's lotus.


Our Only Health is The Disease
What of life without despair? What of experience without disillusionment? To such literary characters as Shakespeare's Hamlet, life without despair would only be disillusionment, as life does not exist without desperation. Hamlet spends nearly four acts of the play focused on melancholy and the evil inner workings of the world, elevated only by his sense of sarcasm and wit that triumphs over nearly every brutal situation. Brutal events leading up to Hamlet's mental breakdown only allow the prince to spend more time seeing the world from a larger perspective, exclaiming:
“How weary, stable, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of the world!”
(I. ii. 133-34)
Human beings often operate under the common misconception that life is inherently good, people are good willed, and a mortal life can be lived without suffering. Hamlet begins to live when he discovers life is not like the proverbial 'bowl of cherries'; it is brief and absolutely filled with suffering, and the detached Hamlet portrayed in part of the play is transcended by the melancholy Hamlet in the next half. At the very least, by immersing himself in his own state of melancholy, Hamlet recognizes the necessity to participate in the world, even if that participation stems from a forlorn and disquieting vantage point. Despair cannot be discounted just as suffering cannot be ignored; existing within the realm of both states is never a choice and darkness, just like lightness, is an undeniable state of being. Hamlet's outrageous and often dramatic view of life is both wonderfully sad and enormously smart.
Characters throughout literary history have given human beings insight on the great inner workings of life, and as the characters all have a story, so do the authors of the great poems so cherished in the literary canon. Kimberly Myers, my beloved professor, never hid her love for the 'melancholy' poets. To her, the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, and Browning, among many others, was the stuff of genius because it emphasized one of the most important elements of life and literature; melancholy. To John Keats, her favorite, it is far more beautiful to find life in situations where the soul should die rather than flounder in them. In many of his pieces, Keats encourages the reader to find some beauty in a place of sorrow, a place where there is no sweet melody or landscape to drown the sorrow, only the chance to delve deeper into the sadness and find what beauty lies in the abyss. He knows the position; he has been there before. Rather than die in emptiness, a person can always live in sweet sorrow. Keats, like Hamlet, found the ability to exist in something even if that something was dark. The melancholy poets always tell the reader to cultivate the melancholy, and go to a place where that cultivation is possible.
Exemplifying Keats preoccupation with melancholy, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci” uses the intricate life of a lily and a rose to portray the fading vibrancy of the face of his constructed knight at arms. Lilies and roses are both, both willful flowers, each require sunlight and an area with abundant moisture in order to blossom and grow to full potential. The knight in question seems to be a man who needs sunlight himself in all facets of his life, and when faced with a bit of gloomy weather is ready to give up. Keats speaks of the flowers fading in accordance with the spirit of man fading. The flowers expressed are finicky and will die in the midst of a storm, and the poem urges the man not to die like the flowers but to look to something beyond grief, something that will make grief seem beautiful in order to keep his garden in bloom, his sanity intact. Keats also may have been using flowers in reference to the man's face to convey that his soul and brain are a garden to tend to.
Halfway through the poem, Keats changes the focus from the knight he is speaking to over to himself. He sympathizes with the man in question, “alone and pale loitering”, because he has been in a similar situation before. He speaks of meeting a woman, a beautiful woman who captures his heart, speaks of her love for him, and then leaves him suddenly alone. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” means “The Beautiful Women Without Mercy.” After the woman leaves him, he talks of himself walking along the waters edge, though nothing beautiful is growing there and no birds are singing, as if to tell the knight he too has seen this place of despair.
Although Keats has been in the same place as the Knight, the place where nothing beautiful grows and hope is just a glimmer in a very far off distance, he still asks the Knight “Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms,/Alone and pale loitering?” (1.1.899). He knows full well the position the knight is in, but is still asking him why he is allowing his spirit to die in this position.
Where does a person go to be sad? Is there something to gain from going to that place, and, most importantly, can a person return once they've gone to the place of no return? Great authors tell us to imagine the most beautiful thing we have ever imagined in moments of despair to create some sort of comparison; the stark beauty will be a great contrast for the stark ugliness. Sometimes, allowing oneself to be consumed with misery or melancholy can come to a violent and destructive end. Robert Browning, another of the melancholy poets, expresses this violence in his poem 'The Laboratory', a grand illusion of the painful delusion unrequited love can cause.
The woman portrayed in 'The Laboratory' is obviously a woman in distress, so much that she has sought out the help of a chemist to concoct a deadly elixir to poison the mistress of the man she loves. She talks of seeing them together, saying:
He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them! ----I am here (2.5-2.8)
Only the bleak existence of a scorned woman could paint a picture such as this. It is in this state of mind that some of the darkest places can be entered and frightening behavior can develop, edging on the cusp of insanity. It is frightening because the woman knows well the man she loves just as she knows the woman or women he has been with. It is she who keeps a watchful eye on the pair, and in this state of mind, she thinks almost that the two are together entirely to watch her descent into depression, as she speaks candidly about thinking the two are laughing at her, and blaming them for her state of mind.
There is a place where some minds can relapse if what they long for is unattainable. The lady in question has obviously been thinking about how to get back at the man she wants, but in a gruesome way. She no longer wants to get rid of the woman he is with in order to be with him again, but wants to kill the woman in order to make the man feel the pain she has been experiencing. The feeling of the poem is cold, the woman's movements and wishes calculated.
The most chilling part about the poem is the calm and collected way the woman executes her plan. She talks excitedly about the time her rival will die after receiving the poison, a point in the poem she she is obviously exuberant. Although she seems overly exciting in saying, “Soon, at the King's, a mere lozenge to give/And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!” (6.21-6.22), she is also very cool about it, telling the chemist “grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste/Pound at thy powder, - I am not in haste” (3.9-3.10). Throughout the poem, her urgency can be felt, but the reader can also feel her sense of calm in plotting the murder of another human being, which is in itself a bit disturbing.
There are few things in life that can have the emotional toll unrequited love can have. When love develops with deep passion and cross the line into obsession, things can get dangerous. Fixations cause human beings to lose their sense of identity, sense of self and confidence, and their sensibility altogether. Some say in this frame of mind we are not responsible for our actions, that insanity has taken over our bodies. It is like a drug that causes the human mind to hallucinate, a painful delusion that is hard to overcome.

We, Content At the Last
T.S. Eliot told me to immerse myself in that which I'm not; Roethke told me to 'learn by going where I have to go'. Keats has given me the most beautiful elements of tragedy, melancholy, and despair, while Browning introduced me to some of the most anguishing and horrible. Above all, I have given myself the gift of emergence; I have allowed myself to become re-submerged into memory and the melancholy experiences of my past in order to create a future for myself, and have emerged a much more enlightened, confident, and steady character than the one I was before. I reached a point where I thought I was in my end and would never return to a driven path, but Eliot taught me that 'in my end is my beginning', and there never really is an end. Life, the good and the bad, the light and dark, is cyclical, and every being moving within that cycle is born and born again. For so long, it seemed I was fighting against myself and deliberately pushing down into a tunnel, butting my head up against something hard and never figuring out that all I had to do was turn around. Well, I feel I have finally turned around. Now, my experiences of despair and travesty do not seem worthless; rather, I know these experiences have only pushed me to be the person I am today. I think differently, feel differently, and acknowledge things differently than I did before, and without my melancholy moments, I may never have developed these things I actually like about myself now.
Beryl Markham, a female pilot and brilliant writer, once wrote:
'A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change. It is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not resemble every yesterday.'
Regret is a wasted emotion; life is not a bowl of cherries and never will be. It is, by definition, short and hectic and over sometimes before it has had the chance to begin. Realizing every experience, even the terrible, is important and inherent to human existence is an enormous undertaking; still, it can change one's outlook on life dramatically. I used to be a lot of things before life happened, and now I am a new set of things because life happened, and I don't regret it. Sometimes I miss being very naïve and viewing the world without any criticisms, judgments, or cynicism, but I value the knowledge I've gained and the experiences that have made me who I am. I can never say I have enjoyed or valued the melancholy, the heartbreak, and pain; I would give it all back if I could, but giving it back would mean denying that life exits with these components, and that would be like not living at all.
Roethke once told me to 'learn by going where I have to go', but he also revealed how infinite life is, and how seemingly finite capsules only reveal more infinitude. For him, the world should be seen as a divine play in which we are only lucky enough to participate. In 'The Far Field', Roethke recognizes the beauty of experience and 'the pure serene of memory in one man/a ripple widening from a single stone/winding around the waters of the world'. We are what we experience, and experience is specific to each person; there is no one exactly similar interpretation, in art and in life. If Roethke wants me to learn from going where I have to go instead of where I want to go, I will follow the words of the poet who speaks to me and will continue on the path. I will go with wisdom and experience and be challenged by the thrill of knowing I will never be the person I used to be, but will always be the person I am.