Melancholics

We are not enslaved - but are lost in our freedom.
We are not hurt - but are angry.

Our eyes see too much - we prefer the twilight.
Our ears hear too much - we relish the silence.

We deliberate engagement - life is distracting.
We are quick to understand - but slow to act.

We rest - that we might remember the good.
We return - that we might hear our hearts beating.

We care - that people hurt and love each other.
We hear - the discourse of souls around us.

We marvel at much - but are fainthearted.
We are paralyzed - to decide our own care.

We are made strong - but not enough.
We do not break - but suffer in our introspection.
In earlier times the god/planet Saturn was considered the ruler of melancholy. These experiences were not to break us but to make us.

Aristotle in Problema wondered why genius tended to be melancholic, citing Socrates as an example. The Greek Ideal was understood as the middle ground of possibility, and melancholy was clearly an imbalance. He thought this Saturnine imbalance was the "remarkable gift" that from it's non-centered restless perspective, was more able to notice and consider matters, than those living in the satisfactory middle.

The Alchemist was the medieval inheritor of this perspective. Engaged in a constant quest for understanding he was portrayed in a brooding attitude - always hoping, always defeated - entangled in a complexity of themes - between the light and the dark.

Joseph Campbell thought that madness was a sea in which the ancients swam and we moderns drown. Thomas Moore notes that we try to cure depression whereas generations before considered it a part of life. We were not to resist times of melancholy, nor to accept them, but rather to consider them.

                                                    (Isaiah 35:4): "Say to the fainthearted: Take courage and fear not."
   -    1journey.net     jan 2007   elias