Le Soleil Noir de La Melancholia
ELEMENTS OF STEPPENWOLF DREAM THEATRE
Depression is a disabling illness that darkens the world and often prevents both ordinary and constructive work from taking place. In its softer versions, it can be referred to as melancholy, a state experienced as a weight and a graying of any joyful tones.
But some thinkers, such as psychologist James Hillman, think that melancholy can be an important teacher, who understands the lessons of winter, of suffering and mortality, of darkness rather than light. Instead of running fearfully from melancholy or suppressing its voice, we should listen to what it wants to show us.
The French Symbolist poet Gerard de Nerval spoke of “Le Soleil Noir”(1854), the black sun that rules the kingdom of dreams and subterranean fantasies. He would use opium and hashish to make further explorations of whatever his melancholy was whispering to him. The English poet Coleridge would work in a similar way and his poem “Kubla Khan” (1797) owes much to this work with opium and dreams.
De Nerval eventually lost his battle with depression and took his own life in 1855, but his poetry has remained influential among poets, musicians, and painters. In him they see a figure who refuses to give in to debility and inertia, who creates images that not only capture the struggle for lucidity, but also provide inspiration and an aura of mystery to what might otherwise seem as mere eccentricity or weirdness.
What are some examples of influence? The American sculptor Isamu Noguchi with his “Black Sun” (1968) that resides in Seattle’s Volunteer Park; or Damien Hirst and his “Black Sun” series of paintings (2004) made of flies and resin; or Ales Arrecchia and his projections of a huge black ball that smashes repeatedly into the side of the Nasdaq building in New York. Those are three among many examples.
Or, among films, “Black Sun”, by Korreyshi Kurahara, a movie about a jazz-obsessed Japanese drifter and a black American soldier in Tokyo. Another film, a doc “Black Sun” made by Gary Tarn about the criminal blinding of Hugues de Montalebert, and how he coped in an often savage world.
Sylvia Plath wrote poetry almost entirely influenced by her black sun inspiration, and, more recently, the British poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas with his controversial “Black Sun” and its unafraid references to madness, fascism, and violence rendered in a distinctive lyrical voice.
“Black Hole Sun” (1994) by the group Soundgarden is one of many musical examples.
Working with depression is a two-pronged affair. Get healing, but also accept the gifts of melancholy.
