Poetics Of Melancholy.

POETICS OF MELANCHOLY.


Sermons do not nourish me
Vacant eyes do not flourish me
Dialects do not merge me
Power legends do not surge me.


Joy embraces the land of known but melancholy ventures into the unknown because it has no attachment to either fear or happiness.

Our logic dictates that goal of all life is happiness for the majority of mankind and thus the politicians, scientists and lawmakers have that end in sight (or pretend) and for which they strive for in all their honesty or dishonesty as to further their careers.

Hedonism is the common lot of humanity, in its outward aspect, both religion and the common man gravitates towards the same goal. The common man clings to happiness through dinks, drugs, gluttony and sexual preoccupations and you may notice that most people follow the dictates of the religion on similar grounds, which promises them a blissful paradise, or an oblivion for eternity.

It is obvious that driving force in our lives is a search for happiness and we are always searching for that kind of antidote, which will cure us of all our unhappiness and sufferings. People often seek it in work, drinks, drugs, and sex or even in the religions, which give us a hope of artificial paradises to come.

It matters not how these are achieved but somehow we become geared to any available means of hedonism.

We are all familiar with the poetry of hope, which uplifts us, and thus we often use poetry, as other arts, as a process of ‘therapy’, which will get rid of all our stored painful memories.

Is the function of poetry simply being therapeutic? Is that all the poetry amounts to? I doubt it.

Human mind (or our consciousness) is a complex thing and the role of the poetry is to deal with life in all its aspects, both sunshine and shadows and a poetry will be far less profound that dealt only with the sunshine. As life is mostly sufferings, a poetical consciousness comes forth to give expressions to all modalities of our existence otherwise it will not be worth its salt, being a gross distortion of our genuine experiences and life.

Happiness builds its castle in a land of plenty, in a rose colored landscape and avoids dark corners, whether it is found in mind or body and so gives us only a partial interpretation of human life. Melancholy builds its humble abode in dark lands and sometime even amidst the territory of its enemy, happiness.

What has been, those precious moments of happiness and sadness, that seemed to have been lost in the crevices of time bygone, are suddenly restored to us in a reverie of poetical trance and when transferred into black and white hieroglyphic on a rectangular blank page (which no amount of thinking can do) and suddenly the past is restored, protected under an umbrella of melancholy. We are out of the prison of our past regrets and happiness. An agony-full of present it may be but an authentic mode of being, disclosing to us the secrets of our withered heart or of the vast universe.

It is no wonder that Baudelaire wrote ‘ A man must have fallen very low to believe himself happy. You are happy, so you are easily satisfied? I am sorry for you. I have got sound reasons for feeling sorry for a man who does not like death.’

Looked at in this way ‘melancholy’ becomes a spiritual phenomena and a stepping-stone for a creative phenomenology and of poetical intensity.



THE SUNSET


Sinking the sun will drown in its own blood
Touching
With last conscience its oozed out blood
Fingering
Bine stemmed branches of oak tree
Evil
Stormed by good twin present everlasting
Companioned
On high pinnioned seas.

Shrunk shriveled the heart
Shudders in tentacles of willow trees
Touching not the fervourless spirit
Resting unwearied for nothingness
Plumed and ruffled
By bird songs of no avail.

The death lament winded not
In wilded plains
Stormed downwards the reddish glow
Shining
With all the despaired
Brained and eyed
Ever felt by the human touch.


Durlabh Singh©2014.