Again and again, the wild screams of dancing cicadas, the red clouds above the city gather silence as the sun enters the darkness and embraces the night. As the warm moonlight of summer echoes silently, in the honorable depths of my soul, who knows in which chests of my dark pits. Sleep and death are inseparable. The border of nothingness with zero and non-existence with existence. The sad embrace of the golden arms of the night and the stars, the freezing waves inside me. I feel the silent gaze of nothingness in the inner seas of my infinity today... Am I a little melancholic today?

Melancholy is the human's feeling of incompleteness in the face of the outside world, the effort to be human in the process of existence, a normal abnormality, or a virtuous state of discomfort and an effort to question. All the works that we can see and hear in this world are the work of melancholics. From Van Gogh, who cut off his ears and painted, to Democritus, who blinded himself by putting silver plates in his eyes, to Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Da Vinci. All extraordinary personalities, whether in philosophy or politics, poetry or art, are melancholic. They are all extraordinary personalities by nature. It is this pathos, this healthy state of abnormality, that is the fundamental driving force at the core of these extraordinary personalities. It is the desire to determine one's own destiny, the desire to direct one's own life no matter what the cost, the ecstasy, the turning inward, the renunciation, the feeling that a wrong life cannot be lived right.

Sometimes it is the feeling of being thrown away on a planet where they do not belong, sometimes even the feeling that the body's clothes are too tight and the desire to be thrown away. As Mevlana said, "The day of my death is the day of my wedding, the day of my reunion with the greatest lover". The melancholic is the one who lives on what Heidegger calls the border of nothingness and absence. Ordinary and daily life has no meaning. Here, the unity of micro and macrocosm and the dance of being and nothingness dance together. The "holy madness" and "noble alienation" advocated by Plato are the lifestyle of melancholics.

Virtue, sadness, doubt, wisdom, ecstasy are intertwined in melancholic people. They belong neither to this world nor to the other. According to Plato, if the souls of these virtuous people had wings that would enable them to reach the self-source, the idea, the sky, they would fly to this eternal idea without a moment's thought.

According to Albert Dürer, in melancholia, the way of life of the outside world and the flow of time are not the same. It is as if the melancholic has a different way of life, another dimension of time within himself, different from the outside world. Sometimes it is as if time has stopped and even breathing is impossible. The past no longer exists, the future has not arrived, the present is frozen in all its petrifiedness.

Ficino, on the other hand, describes the state of sleep-wakefulness and the confusion of day and night in melancholics, and the emergence of creative effort and creative personality through this process of subjectivization and liberation and the fear that the castle of the soul might fall.

Melancholy, which was seen as a mortal sin in the Middle Ages, has always been understood as an inward withdrawal and an inner migration, as a rebellion and unusualness, even though it was not accepted as a way of life. Although it was sometimes considered a sad laziness, sometimes pride and anger, and sometimes the beginning of all sins, much later Cicero would glorify melancholy by saying; "I am never melancholic, so I can never be a creator".

Thomas More, one of the most famous melancholics, was known to be cheerful, smiling and joking, but his life story is full of mysterious suffering. One can always sense the presence of pain and sadness behind this cheerful image. In order to be close to the girl he loved, for whom he abandoned the monastery, the priesthood and all his values, he married her sister. In tribute to More, who defied the king, was sentenced to death in the castle of London and guillotined, Erasmus wrote the book "In Praise of Madness", describing More's insanely melancholic existence.

2800 years ago, Homer described in "The Thinking Man" the presence of anger, doubt, fear and ecstasy in himself, the intuition that he was other than others, and although he did not call it melancholy, although Hölderlin was silent for 36 years without speaking a word in his room called the Hölderlin Tower, although Leibniz dreamed of a room without windows, the longing for serenity in the imaginary space of nothingness is something special only for melancholics.

I should end my article with the last sentences written by Serol Teber in "Melancholia", from which I was seriously inspired while writing this article.

"Living in extremes and contradictions, the melancholic can dream of hope even in nothingness. It can be seen that some seemingly negative deficiencies, which do not depend on any system or dogma, are sometimes virtuous excesses in the face of the normals who have adapted to society. One might even ask, in the barbarism of everyday life, where existence becomes a mere formality, what (a)normality allows the conformed normals to live without reacting."

Mukaddes Pekin Başdil

Researcher-Author

Source: Denizli Haber