Complete Melancholy, Incomplete Joy
By melancholy, I understand a vast ocean of
solitude. Perhaps an idealistic man, living in an urban civilization, has no
other destiny than to become the bondslave of melancholy. Urban society itself
is a kind of illusion-machine. Some of these illusions drag a man forward like
the wheel of a treadmill, forever spinning. This horse-race continues through
life. Like the midnight summons of a ghostly call, it swallows him whole,
devouring him unawares. He does not notice when, in half-sleep, he unlatches
the door and wanders outside—only to be discovered near the pond at dawn,
half-dead.
The intelligent one, however, bolts his door at night in fear of that ghostly call and throws the key out the window. He does not belong to melancholy. Likely he dwells in the crowd—perhaps a government clerk or a paunchy tradesman. His life never wanders beyond the threshold of his house. Most people of the world fall into this group.
In my childhood school, there was an old-fashioned teacher, Shubhendu Babu. He often said: “What use is it teaching you? What profit for me? For this society? For this country? For this world? You all only desire half a kingdom and a princess. That will benefit you, your family, your parents, your wife and children. But what of anyone else?”
At the time, I could not grasp his words. Now I see clearly what Mastermoshai meant. He was speaking of those who live confined within the narrow circle of their own household. Those who belong to the house are not of melancholy. Then must they belong to joy? Perhaps they do. Yet when I turn to the opposite of melancholy today, I do not see joy—I see revelry. Brutal, sensual revelry. Amid this clamor, in modern urban civilization, the merchants of melancholy are but a handful. Let us open their satchels for a little inspection.
A strong human being generally has two sides. First, the material; second, the spiritual. On the material side lies one’s working life. On the spiritual, one’s life of love.
Work-life, as defined nowadays, is something even a feudal lord would have blushed to hear. By “work,” in our present-day world-city of capitalism, is meant production value. That is, an act is called work only when it yields some coin. And coin is that conjuring-trick which alone permits the purchase of wine, lust, and clay.
Suppose a man climbs a mountain and practices austerity for years. Through this austerity, a power awakens within him—the power, say, of knowing himself. We will not call this work. Yet, if that same man were to use the strength of his austerity not for himself but for others—foretelling their past and future—we would gladly buy tickets at high price to see him in an auditorium. We would then hail his life as a life of work.
From this we learn that it is only the charlatans who seem to be always at work. The idealists, meanwhile, eat a little rice and salt and snore away in sleep. Bertrand Russell, in his In Praise of Idleness, elaborated this very view. Against all philosophies, a counter-philosophy.
Now let us turn to love-life. When love comes to mind—when we speak of the very presence of love in human life—religious institutions arise first. In our lives, the bond of human love is consecrated in a religious establishment. Why is this so? Is there truly any opposition between worship and love? Or are the two one and the same—the one offered to God, the other to the flesh-and-blood beloved? What is given in worship is also what is given in love. Hence the connection between religion and love is intense.
Some say atheism is hostile to love. They cite the secular, egalitarian society of Marx’s vision—where love was exiled. Russell’s teacher, George Santayana, warned us: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we do not learn from the past failures of secularism, what shall we do?
In romance, the hypocrisies of past secular doctrines linger on into the twenty-first century in both religion and irreligion. This demands reconsideration. Within traditional religiosity, the lover’s self is never absent. When the form of God is denied, the devil makes his nest in the mind. And who does not know that alongside the lover’s self, man harbors a rapist’s self as well? In the absence of God, that rapist-self gives birth to Satan. Lucifer is its name. In that kingdom, there is no love.
This question gnaws at me: In modern life’s machinery, in Godlessness, in disbelief, in pale secularism—does love yet live? Or has it turned into the production-value of blue pornography? Love, in its true sense, or its bodily form within marriage, is no longer Made in Heaven; it is now determined by the value of production, apportioned by worth. What once was the path of sacrifice has ended in melancholy. Thus the idealists retreated to the island of melancholy. Their aim was joy. And every obstacle in the pursuit of joy bore the name of melancholy.
The Bible tells us the path of life is narrow and straight. Few reach it. This is the very path of melancholy. The narrow and the straight. In the crucified face of Christ we sense that intense melancholy; in the face of Charlie Chaplin it returns again; in the strange, sorrowful smile of Sri Ramakrishna; in the image of a youth lying in the open field at dusk, face turned to the sky; in the desolation after finishing Samar Sen’s Bibor (The Abyss) in a single breath; in the fleeting glimpse of an eighteen-year-old girl hanging from the ceiling fan of the next flat—all these I take to be the narrow and the straight path.
Then I long to say: O Melancholy, it is you who have made life great. My vessel of life is filled only with your feeling.
At the end of this path there may be joy. In search of it, let one walk drowsy, indolent. Or, in the course of self-knowing austerity, let one gaze in wonder at flowers—at their blooming and their withering. The process by which fragrance fades from flowers is the very process of life, the very process of melancholy. Within it, somewhere, is a glimmer of love, a trace of incomplete joy.
The man who stays far from both fundamentalism and atheism sometimes tastes this love. This love is the ghost perched upon the neck of the idealist. The moment incense is lit, the process of its extinction begins. The path of incense is the path of melancholy.
The process of life is such: some are born, some die. Yet there is another group. They know not, nor do they submit. They do not die. They only fade—slowly, gently, scattering fragrance.
For their sake, waves still rise in the world. For their sake, the mad wind of a rainy day brushes our skin. This nectar of melancholy—this taste is eternal. To drink it, there remain but a handful of men who can forever strike their sticks against the rear of Mammon’s empire.
The intelligent one, however, bolts his door at night in fear of that ghostly call and throws the key out the window. He does not belong to melancholy. Likely he dwells in the crowd—perhaps a government clerk or a paunchy tradesman. His life never wanders beyond the threshold of his house. Most people of the world fall into this group.
In my childhood school, there was an old-fashioned teacher, Shubhendu Babu. He often said: “What use is it teaching you? What profit for me? For this society? For this country? For this world? You all only desire half a kingdom and a princess. That will benefit you, your family, your parents, your wife and children. But what of anyone else?”
At the time, I could not grasp his words. Now I see clearly what Mastermoshai meant. He was speaking of those who live confined within the narrow circle of their own household. Those who belong to the house are not of melancholy. Then must they belong to joy? Perhaps they do. Yet when I turn to the opposite of melancholy today, I do not see joy—I see revelry. Brutal, sensual revelry. Amid this clamor, in modern urban civilization, the merchants of melancholy are but a handful. Let us open their satchels for a little inspection.
A strong human being generally has two sides. First, the material; second, the spiritual. On the material side lies one’s working life. On the spiritual, one’s life of love.
Work-life, as defined nowadays, is something even a feudal lord would have blushed to hear. By “work,” in our present-day world-city of capitalism, is meant production value. That is, an act is called work only when it yields some coin. And coin is that conjuring-trick which alone permits the purchase of wine, lust, and clay.
Suppose a man climbs a mountain and practices austerity for years. Through this austerity, a power awakens within him—the power, say, of knowing himself. We will not call this work. Yet, if that same man were to use the strength of his austerity not for himself but for others—foretelling their past and future—we would gladly buy tickets at high price to see him in an auditorium. We would then hail his life as a life of work.
From this we learn that it is only the charlatans who seem to be always at work. The idealists, meanwhile, eat a little rice and salt and snore away in sleep. Bertrand Russell, in his In Praise of Idleness, elaborated this very view. Against all philosophies, a counter-philosophy.
Now let us turn to love-life. When love comes to mind—when we speak of the very presence of love in human life—religious institutions arise first. In our lives, the bond of human love is consecrated in a religious establishment. Why is this so? Is there truly any opposition between worship and love? Or are the two one and the same—the one offered to God, the other to the flesh-and-blood beloved? What is given in worship is also what is given in love. Hence the connection between religion and love is intense.
Some say atheism is hostile to love. They cite the secular, egalitarian society of Marx’s vision—where love was exiled. Russell’s teacher, George Santayana, warned us: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we do not learn from the past failures of secularism, what shall we do?
In romance, the hypocrisies of past secular doctrines linger on into the twenty-first century in both religion and irreligion. This demands reconsideration. Within traditional religiosity, the lover’s self is never absent. When the form of God is denied, the devil makes his nest in the mind. And who does not know that alongside the lover’s self, man harbors a rapist’s self as well? In the absence of God, that rapist-self gives birth to Satan. Lucifer is its name. In that kingdom, there is no love.
This question gnaws at me: In modern life’s machinery, in Godlessness, in disbelief, in pale secularism—does love yet live? Or has it turned into the production-value of blue pornography? Love, in its true sense, or its bodily form within marriage, is no longer Made in Heaven; it is now determined by the value of production, apportioned by worth. What once was the path of sacrifice has ended in melancholy. Thus the idealists retreated to the island of melancholy. Their aim was joy. And every obstacle in the pursuit of joy bore the name of melancholy.
The Bible tells us the path of life is narrow and straight. Few reach it. This is the very path of melancholy. The narrow and the straight. In the crucified face of Christ we sense that intense melancholy; in the face of Charlie Chaplin it returns again; in the strange, sorrowful smile of Sri Ramakrishna; in the image of a youth lying in the open field at dusk, face turned to the sky; in the desolation after finishing Samar Sen’s Bibor (The Abyss) in a single breath; in the fleeting glimpse of an eighteen-year-old girl hanging from the ceiling fan of the next flat—all these I take to be the narrow and the straight path.
Then I long to say: O Melancholy, it is you who have made life great. My vessel of life is filled only with your feeling.
At the end of this path there may be joy. In search of it, let one walk drowsy, indolent. Or, in the course of self-knowing austerity, let one gaze in wonder at flowers—at their blooming and their withering. The process by which fragrance fades from flowers is the very process of life, the very process of melancholy. Within it, somewhere, is a glimmer of love, a trace of incomplete joy.
The man who stays far from both fundamentalism and atheism sometimes tastes this love. This love is the ghost perched upon the neck of the idealist. The moment incense is lit, the process of its extinction begins. The path of incense is the path of melancholy.
The process of life is such: some are born, some die. Yet there is another group. They know not, nor do they submit. They do not die. They only fade—slowly, gently, scattering fragrance.
For their sake, waves still rise in the world. For their sake, the mad wind of a rainy day brushes our skin. This nectar of melancholy—this taste is eternal. To drink it, there remain but a handful of men who can forever strike their sticks against the rear of Mammon’s empire.
Comments
Post a Comment