Reverie on Melancholy

 I am a metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistencies mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”

                       ― Kilroy J. Oldster

It is no surprise to anyone who knows me personally that I write about Melancholy. That Melancholy is more than just sadness, though many of us are sad people. I am mostly happy, but I have this side to me that is very serious, aware, and full of melancholy. I started studying Melancholy when very young, because I was sentimental and attracted to Romantic literature, mostly Poe, Coleridge and Shelley. Then I moved on to the Rossettis and later to modern poets, and all of them were pretty melancholic. Also because my mother and I both suffered from it at times. And I wanted to know how and why. When I discovered Placebo in late 2018 and began listening to their songs, by summer the next year, I could see Melancholy all over Brian Molko's work, his interviews, his very public story.

Perhaps that was always my attraction to Brian Molko and Placebo, his sadness, his suicide ideation, his sense of isolation, his loneliness, his despair. The flip side of all those was his anger. He could be very angry. I have often said that no one does "bitter better than Molko." People see comments like this analysis as judgment, but one does not have to be psychologically introspective or even attempting to read interiority to hear a song and know what it is about in general, especially if one has read thousands of songs, thousands of novels, thousands of poems. And spent hundreds of hours in therapy or in Psychology classes.

Brian Molko is that obvious, even in his attempts at ambiguity. He doesn't use ambiguity to hide it. There are other reasons for his vagueness. There is never any ambiguity about his melancholy. And it is not a judgment of his character. Much of his music is pure Melancholic aesthetics. That said, he is not a Goth. It's more a snapshot of his experiences. Today, in Psychology, we have various forms of sadness labeled, but Melancholy is really a mood disorder and that leads us to Major Depressive Disorder. There is no cure for this mood disorder. One simply learns how to control it or to mitigate some of its issues. Pharmaceuticals help sometimes and well, at times, they complicate everything. There is no perfect medicine. Many people with mood disorders turn to drugs and self-medicate, which is the description that Brian Molko has described personally about his own life. The fact that he writes about it, talks about it openly, is really a blessing. Addiction is a disease. It complicates the lives of people who suffer from mood disorders. It can even make MDD and related issues worse. Related issues of MDD are insomnia, chronic boredom, eating problems, and yes, some conduct issues. People may become paranoid and even hallucinate under the right circumstances. Just how many times has Brian Molko used the word "bored" or talked openly about it and insomnia?

I have both cognitive and emotional empathy for anyone who suffers from Melancholy. I, myself, suffer from Depression and often rely on Prozac. And I have spent years and years of my life trying to understand it, to expose it, and to normalize it to a certain degree. As a person who also studies Romanticism and Folklore, I see Melancholy all the time. In a painting. In a paragraph in a book, in the melody of a song. In the words of a song. I recognize it. In a fairy tale or a myth. In symbols. In metaphors. Even iconography. Just look at Victorian Tombstone Art. 

Melancholy is all around us.

In closing this post, I suppose, in the end, this does make me see Brian Molko and Placebo a bit differently than the typical cultish fan. That's all right.