INDIAN SUMMER
I have been walking to Portobello in shorts and T shirt in temperatures hovering around 28 degrees centigrade, today it is forecast to reach 29 degrees, as I write this the sun is rising over the city, a great orange ball, this at the end of September!
There is something rather wonderful about all this, a sudden surprise package, a defiant dying burst from a summer that did little to entertain during the summer months. It has stirred in me memories of an Indian summer long ago, producing in me, leaving to one side joy and certain kinds of happiness, one of my favourite emotions, always accessible in autumn, a reflective melancholy. Melancholy a wonderful old English word, possibly popularised by Robert Burton in his wonderful book ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ published in 1621. Despite numerous attempts to capture it for the pseudo sciences of psychology and psychotherapy melancholy continues to exist, free and independent despite the best efforts of the DSM IV.* Melancholy is not to be confused with depression or despair, melancholy represents a deep, delicate, sometimes sweet tasting sadness, mixed with perception, insight and reflection, though melancholy comes in many shades and some can be very dark. There is the melancholy of loss, lying in the sun I was taken back to the beach at Sinemoritz at the end of the season, inhabited only by the ghosts of the thousands of sunbathers I had seen come and go throughout the season, watching the beach bar be slowly shuttered up as the waves crashed inexorably to shore. Sinemoritz could sometimes be a very melancholy place.
The melancholy of lost dreams and aspirations, or dreams attained but clutched too tightly, crumbling like rose petals in the hand. Then of course there is the deep melancholy of things that never were, disappointments, rendezvous that never happened, conversations never held, or the deeper melancholy still of philosophical contemplation, the reflection that life is short, happiness fleeting.
‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.’ **
Melancholy however allows for these reflections without the bitter taste of despair.
And so I lie in the sun memories turning in my head reflecting that, “the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.”# memory mixing with memory, clinging on to the heat of a sun out of season.
*The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric association and bible of mental health services. The jungian James Hillman calls it the dull ans stultifying manual.
** Ernest Dowson They are Not Long.
#W H Auden
There is something rather wonderful about all this, a sudden surprise package, a defiant dying burst from a summer that did little to entertain during the summer months. It has stirred in me memories of an Indian summer long ago, producing in me, leaving to one side joy and certain kinds of happiness, one of my favourite emotions, always accessible in autumn, a reflective melancholy. Melancholy a wonderful old English word, possibly popularised by Robert Burton in his wonderful book ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ published in 1621. Despite numerous attempts to capture it for the pseudo sciences of psychology and psychotherapy melancholy continues to exist, free and independent despite the best efforts of the DSM IV.* Melancholy is not to be confused with depression or despair, melancholy represents a deep, delicate, sometimes sweet tasting sadness, mixed with perception, insight and reflection, though melancholy comes in many shades and some can be very dark. There is the melancholy of loss, lying in the sun I was taken back to the beach at Sinemoritz at the end of the season, inhabited only by the ghosts of the thousands of sunbathers I had seen come and go throughout the season, watching the beach bar be slowly shuttered up as the waves crashed inexorably to shore. Sinemoritz could sometimes be a very melancholy place.
The melancholy of lost dreams and aspirations, or dreams attained but clutched too tightly, crumbling like rose petals in the hand. Then of course there is the deep melancholy of things that never were, disappointments, rendezvous that never happened, conversations never held, or the deeper melancholy still of philosophical contemplation, the reflection that life is short, happiness fleeting.
‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.’ **
Melancholy however allows for these reflections without the bitter taste of despair.
And so I lie in the sun memories turning in my head reflecting that, “the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.”# memory mixing with memory, clinging on to the heat of a sun out of season.
*The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric association and bible of mental health services. The jungian James Hillman calls it the dull ans stultifying manual.
** Ernest Dowson They are Not Long.
#W H Auden
