“Man grows wings in melancholy, not in order to enjoy the world, but in order to be alone. What is the meaning of loneliness in melancholy? Isn’t it related to the feeling of interior and exterior infinity? … The interior infinitude and vagueness of melancholy, not to be confused with the fecund infinity of love, demands a space whose borders are ungraspable…. Melancholy detachment removes man from his natural surroundings. His outlook on infinity shows him to be lonely and foresaken. The sharper our consciousness of the world’s infinity, the more acute our awareness of our own finitude. In some states this awareness is painfully depressing, but in melancholy it is less tormenting and sometimes even rather voluptuous.”
E M Cioran (1934) On the Heights of Despair
At times like this I wander. Just in my mind, mind you. But very far afield. So there I was suddenly amongst the brooding structures of the astronomical observatories at Jantar Mantar in India. Their forms evidently a colloquy with the cosmos. Massive sun dials, achingly beautiful arches, dishes that gather in the metaphysical signals. Somehow impossible. Or improbable.
Jantar Mantar, India, Photographer Unknown
Giorgio de Chirico (1913) Delights of the Poet
And amidst this reverie, the oneiric echo. The brooding Indian forms somehow elide with the streetscapes of de Chirico and the wandering picks up pace. De Chirico’s inhabitation of the memory plays games, since these are scenes that sit on the edge of my consciousness. They are fragments of the surreal part of a real journey - the tour as mentioned previously in writing on arcade-ian beauty. But no, not India. I have never been there. Yet the structures are as fully palpable in the dreams … enough to live on, for now, but fuel for a yearning to visit … a pilgrimage …
Browsing through the old scientific journals of the Royal Society of New Zealand, reawakens the urge to become a natural history artist, the dream of previous years to be a botanical artist, a recorder of detail, of enigmas … curiosities. Perhaps it is becoming a lost art … and all the more reason to take up the fine task of, in this case, drawing teeth …
Lower Jaw of the Ziphid Whale,
Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 3, 1870
Or, maybe it is dawn. Maybe dawn is the most melancholy hour, not twilight. Or, more specifically, that moment just before dawn, when the light is barely up. I set off early this morning, very early, for a flight out of town. And that hour brings back many such hours, in other places. A time of taxi rides to meet other flights. Of the most loneliest and desolate of feelings. Driving with me this morning was Rainer Maria Rilke, gently intoning “Solitude” …
Solitude falls like rain in that grey doubtful hour
when the streets all turn into dawn
And later, the rain did fall, in another city. Different rain, heavy mournful drops. As though the dawn had presaged such a thing. Do taxi drivers feel this melancholy? Those who seem most steeped in this time. Ferrying home those still finishing off the night before, with their spirits slowly melting … the moments of regret … the poignancy of anticipation … of what is to come, or never to come …
When those who are hopeless and forlorn and sorrowfully alone,
When all men, who hate each other, creep
together into a common bed for sleep
while solitude flows onwards with the rivers
The arcade is one of those neither/nor spaces, a space of threshold, of liminality. Neither buidling nor not-building, the arcade hovers as an interstitial no-man’s land, between things. A kind of twlight domain. Beloved of the flaneurs, it became the emblem for Walter Benjamin’s never completed project, the Passagenwerk. The arcades of Paris resisted both time and place. They endured amidst the change all around, and persisted as what Benjamin thought of as fairy grottos. And spatially they resisted the inexorable drive of modernity, to maximise space, to commodify every square inch.
In Italy too, the arcades represent some of the most delicious spaces. Lingering between being in a building or being in the expanse beyond, the arcades proffer a kind of ‘prospect-refuge’ experience, to use Jay Appleton’s term. A memory of being in Bologna returns, it was a sombre time … the end of November, early December. One thinks of Flaubert’s November - where the books title symbolises the poignancy of the season, of an autumnal gloominess … a seasonal twilight, ”not dark yet, but getting there,” where the arcades present themselves as the twilight of built form…
(from my sketchbook c.1992)
An image I carried in my mind on my Grand Tour in the early 1990s, was of Christchurch painter Doris Lusk’s Arcades series. The fabric awnings suffused with a patina of age, and of agelessness, capturing the light amidst that diaphonous space of the arcade.
Doris Lusk (1976) Arcade Awning, Saint Mark’s Square, Venice (7)
“How poignant the late afternoons of autumn! Ah! poignant to the verge of pain, for there are certain delicious sensations which are no less intense for being vague and there is no sharper point than that of Infinity.”
From Charles Baudelaire (c.1931) ‘Artist’s Confiteor’ in Paris Spleen
An encounter with Infinity Itself, Wanaka, March 2008, JBowring
Hugo de Folieto, a monastic theologian from around the 12th century, wrote that black bile “reigns in the left side of the body; its seat is the spleen; it is cold and dry. It makes men irascible, timid, sleepy or sometimes wakeful. It issues from the eyes. Its quantity increases in autumn.” And so autumn begins, and brings with it a shift in mood, a tiring fluey cold, and a certain introspection. Perhaps more than any other season it provides those Proustian triggers, and small films start to play inside the mind. Films with no titles, no credits, but occasionally with a sound track. They have that flickering quality of film - of celluloid, of the pre-digital era. More often than not monochromatic, like the films we watched as young kids in primary school … a small tin shed with a concrete floor … watching films like Wayleggo - a 1960s film about sheep stations high in the Southern Alps (’Wayleggo’ being one of the instructions that shepherds use for their dogs, meaning something like, that’ll do boy, come away), a memory of vast landscapes of waving tussock. Sometimes we were allowed to watch a film backwards, as it spooled back onto its original reel, and certain quirks of motion revealed themselves, a defamiliarising moment, a little ostranenie in 1960s small town New Zealand…
And that cerebral cinema? Now playing: a memory of seeing a wild boar hanging in our woodshed, having also seen at some stage around then, a rifle, and realising with a great sense of gravity, how those two moments connected. Innocence pulled suddenly backwards, like a receding wave, with all of the seething sound that accompanies it. And another filmic fragment, like an out-take from Steven Spielberg’s Duel… of driving home down the coast road in the pitch black that can only occur far, far from civilisation. And realising that something was following us in the dark. It was barely discernible. We’d slow down, it would slow down too. Eventually my father stopped the car, and It stopped too. Another car, without headlights, was following us closely, like a blind person holding the arm of a sighted person, through the treacherous winding road, where we seemed so very far away from every single thing ….
The coast road, Kaikoura, in the 1930s. (Christchurch City Library)
“In short, what melancholy obfuscates is that the object is lacking from the very beginning, that its emergence coincides with its lack, that this object is nothing but the positivization of a void or lack, a purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself. The paradox, of course, is that this deceitful translation of lack into loss enables us to assert our possession of the object; what we never possessed can also never be lost, so the melancholic, in his unconditional fixation on the lost object, in a way possesses it in its very loss.”
Slavoj Zizek (2000). Melancholy and the Critical Act.
Theo Angelopoulos The Weeping Meadow Music: Eleni Karaindrou
