Today, the word ‘melancholy’ has an airy ring to it. It’s technically a negative emotion, but the weight of its negativity is somewhat mitigated by the romanticism associated with it. Protagonists in Victorian novels, with noble intentions and insurmountable obstacles, were melancholy. Our modern sorrow tends to be framed as more anxious--we have FOMO, or existential angst. There’s nothing romantic about FOMO. (Of course, this raises the question of whether sadness, while experienced, is ever romantic, or whether it is always in the transposition of emotion to story about emotion that makes it so).
There is also an aspect of the word melancholy that suggests a statehood rather than a passing emotion. One doesn’t ‘feel’ melancholy so much as ‘is’ melancholy. Perhaps this too is a romantic concept to the modern feeler, whose emotional journey tends to be characterized by constant crests and troughs. Melancholy is quiet. It’s a woman at a window, waiting. It is passivity in the face of tribulation. It’s a sorrow frequently associated with heartbreak. Not etymologically, but in sense, it has kinship with nostalgia. Both are states of longing. (Read more about longing here).Â
Given its lofty associations now, the etymology of melancholy is surprising. It comes from the Greek melas (black) and khole (bile). Melankholia literally meant sadness or an excess of black bile. To the ancient Greeks, sadness was the byproduct of an overactive spleen, which produced black bile and was understood to be one of the four ‘humors’ which form and maintain a healthy body, when balanced.Â
Let’s take a step back to really think about the ramifications of this definition. In this understanding, physical and mental health aren’t so much two aspects of one organism but rather conjoined: physical health is mental health. If one is sad, one simply has too much black bile in the system.Â
In a way, we’ve come (almost) full circle in our thinking about mental health. For much of history, emotions moved on to be characters in and of themselves--objects to be controlled, shaped, and manipulated. They certainly were not understood as the simple by-product of a physiological imbalance. This placed responsibility on the individual as the owner and creator of their emotional reality: in a blunt sense, it was up to us to be happy, and our fault if we weren’t.Â
With the advent of modern medicine and an ever-growing understanding of biochemistry and things like dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, we’ve ended up in a sort of no-mans’ land of emotional responsibility. On the one hand, we advocate (rightly) for the importance of mental health and increasingly understand as a society that brain chemistry isn’t created equal. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel quite correct, intuitively, to hand over all emotional agency to chemicals. If sadness is just a by-product of under-active serotonin production, then happiness logically would simply be the proper production of serotonin. We would be utterly victim to the predetermined structure of our brains (rather than spleens). We know this not to be the case. We know that we do have some power over what we feel. But how much? What standard should we hold ourselves to? What standard should we hold others to?
I would like to bring up a final point to mull over. Would depression feel as personal if the biological processes involved with it were actually located in the spleen? What I mean is this: how much more complicated does emotional responsibility become now that it is correlated to the brain, where we also tend to associate selfhood with?Â
Imagine a world in which swollen fingers could be blamed as the causal reason for anger, or a stomach-ache as the reason for anxiety. Would this cause more of a mind body divide, a war of the pristine, mind-based self against the unruly body? Or would it lead to the opposite, to an understanding of self as more holistically integrated in body?
Words - Finnegan Shepard www.finneganshepard.com
Photography - Mischa de Stroumillo www.mischadestroumillo.com