I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object…And so it is with our own past.
Marcel Proust, 1913, The Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)
Herbert Bayer, 1959, In Search of Times Past
These liminal seasons, Autumn and Spring, are infused with poignancy. Autumn’s melancholy is unproblematic, nostalgic, revealing time’s passing, revelling in loss. It is legitimate lamentation, admissible misery, where the passing of Summer’s effusiveness can rightfully be a cause for sadness, an evanescent senescence. Decay, mould, collapse. Dead heads. Autumn’s poignancy is so-called ‘proper mourning’, where the subject accepts the passing of the object, and is able to resolve this loss, accepting that it “no longer exists”.
Yet, what of Spring’s melancholic tinge? It is via one of melancholy’s most convoluted and tortuous ‘equations’ that this vernal paradox can be derived. Melancholy is inherent within joy. Giorgio Agamben describes how, “melancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.” (Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1992, p.20) This convolution is revealed in a meteorological metaphor, recalled by Slavoj Zizek as the “old racist joke about Gypsies,” that “when it rains they are happy because they know that after rain there is always sunshine, and when the sun shines, they feel sad because they know that after sunshine it will at some point rain.” (Melancholy and the Critical Act, Critical Inquiry, 26(4), 2000).
Spring thus presents the enigma of melancholy as distinct from mourning, as diagnosed by Freud. Summer is perhaps Spring’s petit objet a, its object of desire, and thus Spring’s melancholia is a pre-emptive mourning of Summer’s forthcoming passing. Like the Gypsies, Spring knows the anticipation of Summer means only its loss, and the longing for that loss. And that imminent loss keeps the wound forever open for Spring, as Summer’s golden days, the very objects of longing, witness how “[t]he shadow of the object fell upon the ego [and] the loss of the object had been transformed into the loss of ego.” (The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips, London 2006, p. 316). Thus both ego and object dissolve in the yearning for the Summer, who’s passing is already a focus for grief before it has even arrived …
