#2 On melancholia, and going out to buy an envelope.
DISCUSSED: Especially Bad Days // medical model of "mental health" // artists and suffering // 'farting around'.
After you subscribe to my newsletter (grazie), I think you should also subscribe to
’s newsletter, Art Dogs. Through the story of their relationships with their pets, Richardson offers enchanting, deeply human profiles of artists of all kinds. I have started looking forward to them every week. I am most moved by how each of these brilliant and prolific people navigate the suffering that arises in their everyday lives.Can you be called a happy person?
What do you mean by “happy”?In other words: do you live in harmony with yourself?
No, not in harmony.Looking at you, that’s hard to believe.
I would live in harmony if I didn’t have to deal with this whole nightmare.
- Yuri Norstein, via Art Dogs
In describing their pain, these artists are not engaging in the exhausting, boring, contemporary dance of “normalising mental health issues”, but rather, matter-of-factly describing their negotiation with what they know to be an ordinary aspect of life. They are also, by definition, creative, and more open to inventing a way of being than therapists, who (if they have trained in the current school of clinical psychology) get their start in the highly conscientious memorisation of previously validated solutions.
Psychologists are often invested in the notion of solutions - a walk, a bath, talking to a friend, Lexapro, self-care. When one is wracked with depression, for example, therapists seem especially intent that one should get out of bed. Writer and poet Charles Bukowski, on the other hand:
“I just go to bed for three days and four nights, pull down all the shades and just go to bed. Get up. Shit. Piss. Drink a beer now and then and go back to bed. I come out of that completely re-enlightened for 2 or 3 months. I get power from that.”
People who have lived for a long time with a melancholic heart have stopped seeking remedies within the medicalised system we currently use to think about mental health. Under the reign of the medical model, we have a concrete ‘illness’, we pursue a finite ‘treatment’ and then we become ‘well’. It’s almost funny, especially to those who fall outside this trajectory, despite having often pursued every course of treatment. Many people who have had access to skillful, long-term therapy and care of all kinds find they are not spared from waking up in that most familiar way, as they have so many times, with a dark, heavy, terribly disappointing cloud hanging over them once again.
For these folks, for whom life simply includes Especially Bad Days, the following may be more useful.
Consider that you suffer not because you are insane, but because you are actually very sane indeed.
Melancholy, rather than being an adversary, can be a sacred, generous, and patient messenger who arrives to inform us that, despite whatever grandiose ideas we have developed in her absence about everything being Totally Fine Now, there is in fact, something out of balance or ignored within us or in the system around us. Are we overfunctioning? Are we deeply angry about something we are not permitting ourselves to acknowledge? Are we broken-hearted over something we have been violently insisting to ourselves should not be so important? Is the world around us actually totally fucked? It is not simple to translate all her messages, but in the meantime, the belief that we are not glitching, but instead functioning as a barometer of some hidden truth may offer some meaningful solace.
Do not make any attempt to cheer yourself up.
Please, for the love of God, do not look on the bright side. Do not be grateful. If you must do something, relish in a wholehearted audit of how awful things truly feel. Our melancholy suffers greatly at our hands and the hands of others when we and they find devious and heavily disguised ways to attempt to cheer her up. Call a friend, but only if you have one who knows how truly monstrous and excruciating life can be.
Similarly, do not do something nice.
I recently acknowledged after many years that my personal melancholia (therapists, like artists, tend to be a sad bunch) fucking hates doing something nice. Surrounded by flowers, with a nice flat white and freshly pedicured toes (or whatever), she often finds that she is still filled with doom, and that means in her mind that she is even more monstrous and hopeless than she imagined when she first awoke, because even nice things do nothing to help her.
The reason I believe this strategy fails is because it is a failure of empathy, a failure of joining. Nice things vibrate at a frequency higher than the melancholia and in that sense, they are entirely irrelevant to her, and cruel to parade in front of her while she suffers. Unless something happens first to dip down to where she is, barely vibrating in a muddy puddle, to scoop her up and bring her along on her own terms, nice things are about as useful to her as a piña colada to someone drowning in the ocean. Any rescue mission must first involve a statement or action that comes over and meets her where she’s at, even if where she’s at is a gross sad terrible place no one would want to go. Without this first and essential step, she could win the lottery in a ballgown at a surprise party thrown in her honor and still see no goodness in the world.
Instead, do something extremely mundane.
My favourite Art Dogs profile is the one with Kurt Vonnegut, which I highly recommend you read in its entirety. He is at once, a grand master of melancholia, having suffered greatly throughout his life, and equally masterful at finding beauty in doing ordinary things (or what he calls ‘farting around’). His description of the miracles that befall him when he goes out to buy an envelope is not a lofty, cheerful, positive-psychology-driven undertaking, but a soft and humble expression of what it is to be human.
Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, ‘Where are you going?’ I say, ‘Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.’ And she says, ‘You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.’ And I say, ‘Hush.’
- Kurt Vonnegut, via Art Dogs
The mundane - particularly things that create a gentle interface with the outside world, like running errands, being in the garden, or getting a few groceries - do not hold in their frequency the estrangement of doing something especially nice. Instead, they allow us to stay with our forlornness while creating the possibility of a spontaneous encounter with some tender aspect of life that can more gently welcome us back from the brink.
Perhaps a stranger holds the door open, or an escaped dog runs through the gate and greets us cheerfully; perhaps we will be forced to return the waylaid soccer ball of a friendly child, or we will find a ladybug hidden amongst the tomatoes. If none of these things occur, nothing is lost, but curiously (and at the risk of sounding too cheerful), something always seems to. In the words of David Whyte, one of my favourite artists, to feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
And if not, one can always do a Bukowski and go back to bed.
In love, and the humble pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,
Kate