PASSAGES

Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense … for their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain, it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but to what avail! We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today! We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for ‘realities’ we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing, we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin realities.Friedrich Nietzsche.  (1974).  The Gay Science.    New York City: Vintage, cited in Dylan Trigg (2006).  The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason.  New York: Peter Lang.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin (1969) ‘Theses on the philosophy of history', Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books..  p. 257

Left overs, remainders, hold within them small universes of loss.  The departure of things, of wholes, of lives, of loves, leaves the pain of residual stains, ‘stranded objects'. [1]  Inhering within remnants these are the phantom presences that prevent closure.  The phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb' is one well-documented within psychology, the ache that resides in an absent arm or leg, an amputation.  An existential conundrum if ever there was, begging the question, am I, after all?  The remains bear the loss, with bear as both witness and burden.  The phantom limbs of landscapes ache in all places of departures, of lands abandoned, aftermaths, downfalls.

Such strandings serve to exhibit the familiar, making them strange, amplifying a melancholic out-of-placeness, where their awkwardness induces pangs of poignancy.  The paradox is thus that it is absence which becomes palpable, echoing Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky's statement on art, that it serves to undo habituation such that we might again feel the sensation of life, a heightened, phenomenological, encounter.

Above: The Australian Monument to the Great Potato Famine, at Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney.  Designed by Hossein and Angela Valamanesh. 1999.    Photographs, Jacky Bowring, 2006.

[1] ‘Stranded objects' is Eric Santner's term, who in turn attributes it to a colleague who provided it unknowingly. Eric L. Santner.  (1990).  Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany.  Cornell University Press. 

The photographer, like the painter, contributes to the rendering of the visible, the moment of melancholy, evoked in Hubert Damisch's declaration,

It is no accident that the most beautiful photograph so far achieved is possibly the first image Nicephore Niepce fixed in 1822, on the glass of the camera obscura - a fragile, threatened image, so close in organization, its granular texture, and its emergent aspect, to certain Seurats - an incomparable image which makes one dream of a photograph substance distinct from subject matter, and of an art in which light creates its own metaphor.[5]

This resonates strongly with Jean-Luc Marion's revelations regarding the painter of ‘authentic' images, "He deepens a seam or fault line, in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible."[6]   Melancholy is infused with memory, and the poignancy of loss, of the unattainable presences of the past.  Tonino Guerra, remembering travels with Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky through Italy, wrote "I remember when we entered the little church on the edge of the water-filled square, where the mist rising from the water gave a sense of distance to the landscape of ancient houses.  The warm light that morning streamed through the dusty windows and came to rest on faded decorations on a wall.  He surprised me sitting on a pew, as though I were just the right shadow to accentuate the caress of the sun beyond my dark body. These images leave with us a mysterious and poetic sensation, the melancholy of seeing things for the last time."[7]

Andrei Tarkovsky, Bagno Vignoni, (1979-1982) from Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrey A Tarkovsky (eds),  Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids  (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 9

[1] Giorgio de Chirico, The Memoires of Giorgio de Chirico (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 61.

[2] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Fontana, 1984.  Originally La Chambre Claire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980), 80.

[3] Ibid., 79.

[4] Chris Marker, Immemory, (CD ROM) (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2002).

[5] Hubert Damisch,  "Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image,"  October, Vol. 5, Summer (1978): 70-72, 72.

[6] Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 25.

[7  Tonino Guerra, ‘A Fond Farewell', in Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrey A Tarkovsky (eds),  Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids  (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 9.

Charles Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes (1887)[1]

he paradox of a beauty founded in sorrow, a love of loss, of longing, is melancholy's gift to aesthetics.  Despite the potency of this bittersweetness, melancholy has been largely marginalised within architecture and landscape architecture, overshadowed by the supposedly nobler aesthetic conventions of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque.    Society clamours to suppress all signs of sadness, and the design professions aid in this denial, offering buildings and parks that act as all-pervasive sedatives, numbing and desensitizing.  This aesthetic anaesthesia is manifested in such seductions as the virtual, the architecture of happiness, and an avoidance of subjectivity.  Even memorials shy away from the beauty of sorrow, offering instead a distancing, a detachment, through such strategies as focussing on the arithmetic of tragedy, the numbers of losses, the volume of debris, dates, lists of names.    

Throughout history, melancholy's eternal recurrence infuses philosophy, art, literature, and medicine, from Aristotle's Problem XXX, I, which concerned the paradox of melancholic genius, through to the re-investigation of melancholia by Freud in 1917, an event which Giorgio Agamben asserts "testifies to the extraordinary stability over time of the melancholy constellation: the withdrawal from the object and the withdrawal into itself of the contemplative tendency."[2]  Slavoj Žižek positions melancholy, and its concern with loss and longing, at the very heart of the human condition, that, "In this precise sense, melancholy (disappointment with all positive, empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) is in fact the beginning of philosophy."[3] 

Melancholy's terrain, its topological formation, is complex, at some times a physical manifestation, and others psychical.  Fear of the dark connotations of melancholy make it vulnerable to the incursions of pharmacy upon its richly mythic domain, attempting to drive out its demons, and with them the very soul of things.   The shadowy qualities of melancholia are sublimated, happiness comes in a packet, the very denial of the conundrum of melancholic genius.   

[1] In Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 151.

[2] Girogio Agamben,  Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L. Martinez)  Theory and History of Literature, vol 69. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 19.

[3] Slavoj Žižek,  Did Somebody say Totalitarianism?  Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion.  (London: Verso, 2001), 148.