Who is Eric G. Wilson? I want to have his babies. Of course, that can never happen, but that's great--it's a source of melancholy! A source of "luminous gloom [and] terrible beauty." Of "frantic poems."
Eric G. Wilson is an English professor at Wake Forest University, as it turns out. If he's partnered--sorry, Mr. or Mrs. Partner, for couching my admiration in such terms. But I'm sure you of all people can understand my joy at finding his eloquent defense of melancholy.
Basically, Wilson is creeped out by the American pursuit of happiness. Not only that, he's creeped out by the stunningly American degree of success we appear to have achieved in said pursuit.
"How," he wants to know, "can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe--not only the collective and apocalyptic ills, but also...those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns?" (He keeps breaking into poetry. I love it.) "I...am concerned," he continues, "that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic..."
Americans do desire only happiness. I once read a pointed indictment of our culture in that regard. I wish I could remember who it was by. I think it was in a review of a Japanese film about a ghost. It said (I'm paraphrasing): "We have the ugly habit of referring to people who have been disappointed by life as 'losers.'"
The dirty little secret, of course, is that we're all losers, and none more so than the golden girls and boys who strive the hardest to hide it. According to the Medieval Etiquette Manual Rule (what we collectively tell ourselves to do is what we don't, and what we tell ourselves to be is what we aren't), all our books and articles about how to be happy therefore reveal that we are totally miserable. So Mr. Wilson can relax.
Except for the nagging problem that we feel we shouldn't be miserable.
Wilson himself is not immune to that pressure. In a sidebar, he confesses, "American happiness is a temptation, one to which I've succumbed on several occasions." As if at some AA meeting for the happiness-addicted, he lays bare his efforts "to get out of my dark house and away from my somber books and participate in the world of meaningful action."
Except for managing to snag that university English professorship, however, Wilson's efforts did not stick, leaving him, like a crash-dieter, fatter (sadder) than he was before: "The road to hell is paved with happy plans."
But if your desire is to embrace melancholy, then that road to hell is what you want, isn't it? You pretty much can't lose.
Wilson makes the standard disclaimer: "I'm not romanticizing clinical depression." To him, depression is marked by apathy; to me, it's marked instead by an inability to fight your way clear of horrible confusion, constriction, inner fragmentation, exhaustion, incoherence, and inhibition in every sense of the word. You can't show up for yourself the way you most need to--and you can't, with Keats, "glut thy sorrow on a morning rose" (Wilson talks about Keats a lot). It wouldn't make sense. Your sorrow is of a totally different kind.
You can, however, read a quote from a Roman philosopher about forgetting "the brief and troubled dream of life" with a yearning that most people reserve for that fantasy of Alan Rickman de--
Excuse me. Through some hideous rent in the universe, Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance" has come on my radio. No offense whatsoever to Ms. Womack, but her song, which many love and if you're one of them more power to you, represents everything Wilson is complaining about and generally threatens my survival and I have to make it go away.
--Okay, I found Metallica's wondrous cover of "Am I Evil" elsewhere on the dial. I can now continue.
So: You can read a quote from a Roman philosopher about forgetting "the brief and troubled dream of life" with desperate joy. (Speaking of Metallica, "Fade to Black" makes good listening at those times too, for entirely the wrong reasons.)
If and when you crawl past that, though, and realize what it's cost you--for no reason at all, for no purpose, to no greater understanding whatever--THEN you are ready for Wilsonian melancholy. THEN you are ready for Keats. THEN you are ready to "glut your sorrows on a rose" (because the rose is lovely, and must die).
And weep with sad joy over babies. When my girl was 2 months old and had to get a shot, the nurse looked at her and said "Poor little thing, you don't know what's comin', do ya?" Exactly.
Yes, we should all get healthy enough to feel this beautiful pain.
