Comfort In Melancholy

[oldnoname12]

Still I age, despite always thinking my self awake or aware in the moment.

What does it mean to be comfortable?

Not this, surely.

To be comfortable... To be void of disconcerted emotions? To appreciate them?

I propose a theory.

I have been upset in love, upset out of love, upset traveling, upset staying.

We face a forever struggle.

Is this what life is meant to be?

If so, what a cursed world I have been thrown into.

[Redbeck]

My dear oldnoname12, welcome back to the Oracle Forum after many, many moons it would seem. Or have you been melancholic in the reading room only?

I too have been away laptop-less in the homeland of Johan Julius Christian Sibelius, who had a way with music that could place a person in a state of comfortable melancholy.

We are endlessly nostalgic dwellers in the past: lost lives, lost families, lost friends, lost loves, lost possessions, foggy memories they all pile up like crumbs on a shag pile carpet, but because we knew so much about them we extract a certain comforting pleasure from the associated melancholia of loss. Being wildly happy all of the time, normally arises from chemically induced mental imbalance or the use of narcotics, prescription or otherwise, it is a fragility of condition which can just as easily swing into acute depression, as can be evidenced by the rapidly increasing numbers of humankind who have been mentally destroyed by extreme stress of varying types.

Perhaps melancholy is a balance to laughter. For instance I love the colour of the leaves in autumn, the fall, whatever seasonal description you choose, yet their imminent departure from the trees fills me with a predictable melancholy. Yet the memory of having awoken after a night on the tiles beneath a duvet of fallen leaves in the beery dawn, starring in some bizarre hommage to Hansel and Gretel makes, makes me belly laugh to this day.

In other words, a reasonable supply of comfortable melancholy may serve to ‘keep our feet on the ground’ in terms of sustainable sense of life balance and simultaneousyly act as a conduit to the laughter arising from amusing times associated with the subject of that melancholy.

Redbeck



To Autumn
John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.



Hansel and Gretel returning home on the Swan by Jen Corace published 2008

[hope]

Welcome back from your travels Redback, you have been sorely missed....

[Whiterabbit]

When you become lilluminated Hope, all of these emotions and the desires to be comfortable become obsolete.