Federico Garcia-Lorca wrote that ‘at the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy’. Melancholy ……….a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.
He was writing as a poet, but any number of blues musicians would probably agree even when their lyrics spoke of specific causes such as relationship breakdowns and unfortunate lives. Probably, the likes of Munch and any fin de siècle artists might also agree in the visual arts to say nothing of the ruminations of the Expressionists who searched in some instances for their souls and in others for an always out-of-reach understanding between their sensory input and what might be termed a universal answer to the mystical ways in which organised paint adheres to canvas. Or perhaps, all of humankind lives with melancholia as identified by the Church as thoughts of the loss of Eden, snakes and trees of knowledge align to remind us of how far we’ve come down the path of independence or at least, non-dependence. Whatever the cause, Garcia-Lorca considered that ‘great’ art needed such melancholia [who knows about non great art], and a minor key with which to express it.
Others of a more psychological background might consider that the antithetical pairings of peace/war, love/hate, happiness/sadness are at play in that to understand one means to know the other. Artists have been reminding us of just this since the Renaissance with only a shift from universal misery/happiness to the personalised versions of an alcohol-induced Hell of Pollock and de Kooning to show the way. Whatever they were searching for was steeped in melancholy and they were only ‘happy’ when being overwhelmed by its contemplation. The ‘great’ art part was left to others to assess in that few were satisfied with what they produced and hoped that the next canvas might resolve the impasse.
On a more scientific level, that the moon affects the tides is not in dispute. It’s effect on humankind and dogs is more mythical than anything else. The moon appears, waxes and wanes into oblivion marking the passage of time and assuming an often female persona – at least from a male perspective. Humankind has been looking at the moon forever and even with recent ventures to re-land on it and proposed follow-ups by NASA as a stepping-stone to interstellar travel and oneupmanship, its mystique remains. No matter how many astronauts/cosmonauts and the Chinese/Indian equivalents might be, that the moon continues to reflect light from the sun and pass through our night skies in predictable cycles is a continuing source of amazement. Melancholic? Who knows. If we as a species arrived on the tails of comets then a distant, unspecified longing for a homeworld is entirely possible. If we are the product of alien genetic experimentation, as outlined by alien conspiracy theorists, then even more so. The source of all our unspecified melancholia might well be that we simply don’t know who we are or where we come from, and artists might be the link between past and present.
This week the moon was at Standstill. Well, not literally but at the end of its orbit where it ‘hangs’ just above the horizon seemingly motionless. I haven’t seen much of it this week given the extensive cloud cover but nevertheless it has invaded my consciousness again and if folk lore is to be believed, driven dogs to distraction and human minds to a form of insanity as bodies of water, both internal and external, are dragged inexorably in a counter-clockwise direction and released at tidal apogee. A certain measurable madness accompanies this inexorability. Dogs know it – but then dogs seem to know and understand far more than humans anyway. While it takes a whole scientific community backed up by governmental infrastructure to tell us that Covid is present, dogs pick up the signs in a matter of milliseconds through their ultrasensitive noses. But then again, they recognise danger long before their human masters, can detect drugs, explosives, changes in the weather and human melancholia, specified or unspecified, as a matter of course. Dogs howling at the moon – noted in history at every full moon – along with irrational insanity on the part of humans, some of whom turn into werewolves while others commit acts of violence as their internal oceans are disturbed, is noted in fiction. How it might affect people standing on the moon is a matter of conjecture, but I suppose that looking back at our blue planet with a certain nostalgic longing may well induce some of Garcia-Lorca’s melancholia. We’ll know where we came from for certain – the planet next door – but with the magic removed. We know the Earth. We know its problems. We tolerate its human inhabitants. So many pieces of celluloid fiction have been devoted to a search for a lost blue planet as some sort of nostalgic Eden that we have come to recognise a potential source of melancholia. No matter what we have done to the planet, memories of its perfectness will prevail over reality. The artists of the film industry continue to explore this Garcia-Lorca precept while pushing humankind further into the reaches of space in search of cause and origins….or a spare Earth amongst the billons of possibilities that may or may not sustain life.
While I will never travel into space and probably never produce ‘great’ art, my particular ‘no obvious cause’ revolves around regret for decisions made or not made. The inexorable passage of time affects artists in different ways with turning points only obvious well after the event. If only we knew at the time that on a particular day, at a particular moment, an epiphany would occur we might do more to savour it instead of wallowing in its loss and non-recognition at some time later and we might all be happier – whatever that means. As it is, it is those moments that haunt us with that unspecified sense of loss. But then again, as a group, artists have always been a disturbed, misunderstood lot and probably always will be so maybe the only causes of melancholia can be ones without obvious cause.
Footnote: if great art is the result of melancholy, then the world must be full of very happy average artists.