My friend and colleague Bill Peace has written a post on his blog Bad Cripple entitled “Anatomy of Melancholy: A Post for my Good Friend Stephen Kuusisto” and my melancholy selves are honored.
I live in fear that Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue. (The expression is Auden’s, the fear is general.)
When I was a kid other boys taunted me for being blind. Some threw stones. Melancholy isn’t sadness. It comes later and steals up on you from within. Today we call it depression but like everything else with our language it doesn’t capture the nuances and tinctures of melancholy which are composed of love and desperation and something akin to crying for the moon. But whatever its recipe melancholy started for me that day in 1960 when the boys threw stones and sang a song about me and I retreated to the unoccupied spaces for the miserably identified—places oh so familiar to children and adults with disabilities. Oh I’ve squeezed some poetry out of those attics and bomb shelters. Melancholy may not be the muse but she’s got her number. And melancholy loves anyone who cries for the moon.
I take 40 mg of Citalopram (Celexa) per day. It helps me get out of bed. Nowadays its part of a conversational song though I don’t sing it, only arrange it in my head. I won’t share it. Melancholy has her dignity. The anatomy of M is highly articulated like the skeleton of Joseph Merrick. The full song would take a long time to sing like a sea chantey. But the song has a line: “look yonder, there’s melancholy rock.”
Planet of the Blind 