THE EROS OF MELANCHOLY
The conundrum with melancholy is profoundly metaphysical, and in some religions it becomes expressed as a type of divine ecstasy. Melancholy's foundation in ‘present absence' is theologically based, as the outcome of a detachment between ‘this' world and the divine world, place of salvation, giving a sense of being beyond recovery. This predicament is the concept of deus absconditus, that Christ, a historical figure, is dead and no longer present. It is a melancholic relationship, and is expressed through devotional works, such as as love poetry written to the Divine, of imagined moments of engagement and separation with this absent god.
Phenomenology dances with metaphysics, so that spiritual longing might become palpable. There is sense of sensuous alchemy that takes place in the felt connections, providing a place for melancholy to move. The very conundrum of melancholy needs space, it needs to have an engagement with desire, but one that is always held at bay, for to have desire fulfilled is to lose that very thing, as the longing is no longer. An unrequited love for something intangible sits at the core of melancholy, a desire to long for it but never achieve it, to imagine the desire that is at the heart of such a relationship. The paradox of intimate infinity is aroused, like Gaston Bachelard's "immediate immensity" of the day dream, or perhaps the "carnal echo" as Maurice Merleau-Ponty phrased it, between self and space.
Melancholy shares the space inhabited by Eros, as described by Carson,
"Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you' and ‘I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive. [...] Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out the same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole." (Anne Carson. (1986). Eros: The Bittersweet - An Essay. Princeton University Press, p. 30).
The hole is the expression of such present absence, the very thing which drives melancholy, which begs for that ache. Phenomenologically it is essential to begin to imagine an architecture of sadness.
