On Melancholy

Music, Memories, Dreams, Thinness

Two albums transport me to the same stretch of Route 1 in South County, Rhode Island. One, I remember listening to when I was young, when my parents and I lived there and drove that road often, the other was released in 2022, thirty years later.

It’s hard for me to think of a band that embodies the beauty of melancholy more than R.E.M. I would have first heard songs from their 1992 album Automatic for the People on WBRU (the legendary indie station out of Providence) or on cassette in my parents’ car. I have a distinct memory of listening to Man on the Moon and Nightswimming on a hot summer day my mom and I drove north on Route 1, maybe to the beach, possibly to the Fantastic Umbrella Factory. I remember a curve where two roads merged, the bright hot sun on skinny trees full of foliage swaying in the breeze, and Michael Stipe’s somber voice singing through the speakers in our Toyota.

My YouTube algorithm recently fed me Find the River, the last track on Automatic for the People. It instantly made me think of that stretch of highway. The song itself was familiar but not as much as some of the other songs off that album. It felt like recapturing a long-lost memory. It felt like seeing a ghost. I listened to it again and again while my daughter was in her highchair, and I moved around the kitchen preparing dinner. The lyrics tell a story of someone in traffic, speeding toward the city to a life they do not dream of.

Hey now, little speedyhead
The read on the speedmeter says
You have to go to task in the city
Where people drown and people serve
Don't be shy, you're just dessert
Is only just light years to go

Me, my thoughts are flower strewn
With ocean storm, bayberry moon
I have got to leave to find my way
Watch the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes
And nothing is going my way

It crushed me. The somber music, the poetry, the mood. I looked up the lyrics and sang along over and over as I fed my daughter on that hot summer evening. The song quietly builds toward a point of surrender, to a dream of a life more like a river feeding an ocean than that of a highway feeding a city.

The river to the ocean goes
A fortune for the undertow
None of this is going my way
There is nothing left to throw
Of ginger, lemon, indigo
Coriander stem and rose of hay

Strength and courage overrides
The privileged and weary eyes
Of river poet search naïveté
Pick up here and chase the ride
The river empties to the tide
All of this is coming your way

There’s no period of time I associate with melancholy more than the 1990’s. It’s not that I personally had deep a sense of melancholy all throughout the 90’s but I do wonder if there was more time for more subtle moods, such as melancholy, without all of the technological distractions we have now. Is melancholy only possible when time and space are present? I think this is what Michael Stipe is saying. These sentiments of longing for another life seep in and take hold only as the song’s protagonist is in a liminal state, speeding in a trance somewhere between home and their destination. Suspended between past and future.

The first time I listened to Aoife O’Donovan’s Age of Apathy, I was brought to that same stretch of Route 1. I still can’t explain exactly why. Maybe it’s the familiar minor chords or her somber longing vocals. Aoife and I are close in age, maybe we share cultural references or memories of a childhood in New England, of light, of seasons, that she somehow captured and wove into this album. This alone felt profound but it wasn’t until the first track, Sister Starling, was playing in our home and my dad who was visiting said, “This reminds me of Rhode Island. Of the Umbrella Factory,” that I was blown away.

I find this so fascinating. It’s one thing, one beautiful thing, to hear R.E.M. and slip into a memory of first hearing it. I feel fortunate to have a vivid full-sense memory that allows me to feel like I’m there. But, Aoife O’Donovan’s song somehow transported two people to the same time and place, 100 miles away, thirty years prior.

Sister starling's on the move, she's going down
Watch the iridescence fading from her crown
She looks up when she hits the ground
Broken wing, feathers all around

I pick the starling up and bring the bird inside
Fashion her a bed of needles and rawhide
She sleeps with unblinking eyes
I watch, another morning dies

Apples and oranges don't make lemonade
But I press and I squeeze anyway
Life gives you gin, you make something
I'll do anything you say
I'll do anything you say

Try to find her in the elements at night
Took out my diving mask and underwater light
I can go deep looking for a fight
She stays out of mind out of sight

Makeshift magazines now blowing in the wind
I remembered all my dreams way back when
I'd wake up reach for a pen
Can't catch her now couldn't catch her then

Some may consider melancholy to be a negative emotion, but I believe it’s an essential mood for understanding and growth. How would we change without longing? Without pausing? How would we imagine without melancholy?

The idea of melancholy has evolved since the ancient Greeks believed Melancholia to be a condition caused by black bile from the spleen seeping into one’s body. While this has of course been disproven, I do believe they were right about the way melancholy behaves. It seeps. It drifts and settles like fog.

Fog is believed to be a sign of thin places in Celtic myth and culture. In her book, Thin Places, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, describes them.

"Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.”

I wouldn’t have immediately thought that a random stretch of state highway in Rhode Island would be a thin place but who am I to say what place is or is not thin. When I think of the big meaningful profound places in my life, so many others come to mind before that one, but the truth is, my mind slips there often. Perhaps melancholy is a sign of thinness, or thin landscapes induce melancholy.

My inner landscape feels thin, porous, memories and moods, imagined and not, constantly drifting through like fog carried by a breeze.

For years as a child, I had a recurring dream in which I would walk through the upstairs hallway of the first house I lived in not far from this stretch of Route 1. Behind each door was a memory. Through one, I’m at the North Stonington Fair riding the Ferris wheel with my dad. In another, I walk through a city of glass skyscrapers and into a hospital. One of the rooms is filled with water and neon lights, like a giant fish tank. In yet another, I fly through the sky in a hot air balloon like the Little Prince. On and on.

Even thirty or more years later, each is still so vivid. I remember thinking just afterward that not all of the “memories” behind each door were actually memories. Some were real, some were not, or I should say, some really did happen, but my mind catalogued them as real events and to this day, they flitter through my consciousness like any other memory from any other time. 

I’ve come to think of my memories as ghosts. Some are bound in place to the landscapes they were formed while others drift untethered. And they drift through my inner landscape in ways I don’t fully understand. 

It has been decades since I drove that stretch of road, yet the feeling of being there seeps in often. As beautiful or mundane as it was then or is now, my experience moving through that landscape was formative. I’m sure it’s lined with ghosts. Maybe some combination of the vibrations of the car, the wind rusting the foliage of the trees beside the road, and the minor chords of R.E.M. lulled me into one of my earliest states of melancholy.

Of course music has long been one of our greatest tools for changing states of consciousness and moods. Maybe it’s as beautifully simple as the variations of E minor, present in both songs, inducing a feeling of melancholy and transporting me to one of the first places I experienced it.

- Caleb