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About the blues
I’ve been reading Shaw Hang’s “Outline of Disintegration” lately, and when I read this little paragraph about melancholy I realized how apt and concise he described it.
Melancholy is a disease of “self-cannibalization” and causelessness that lacks a specific object.
According to Xiao Hang, when a person is unable to free himself from his own ego, he takes pleasure in eating himself. Melancholy is essentially a “dream state of the selfish mind”, which has no objective object other than the self, and no clear reason for love or hate, but only a repeated fall in vague sorrow. For the depressed For the depressed person, it is a disease without a cause, and one feels as if one has been punished without having committed a crime.
>What does it mean? I understand that it means deliberately emphasizing one's own uniqueness, thinking that "everyone is drunk, but I am alone", "no one really understands me", "my taste is unique", and so forth. And so on. We use melancholy to create an artificial gap between ourselves and others, trying to maintain that illusory sense of superiority by playing the role of a lonely sufferer.The melancholic’s fear of “being cured” and the loser’s pride.
Melancholy is not just passive suffering; it even draws vitality and strength from the “toxins” that corrupt it. Shaw points out that the pain of melancholy, for fear of being cured, is afraid that its dissolution and fluctuation will be limited. Underneath the beautiful name “melancholy” lies the “pride of the defeated and the wail of self-loathing”.
>Why does the "landmine girl" habitually change her flower knife to self-mutilation? When pain and pathology are the only identifiers of a person's life, she actually draws monstrous vitality from this destructive "toxin". For them, being cured is a threat because it means depriving her of her unique identity as a "sufferer", meaning that she has to fall into the mundane and vulgar normalcy of life. They do not want to lose this morbid privilege. >They do not want to lose this morbid privilege.Melancholy provides an “aesthetic experience” that transcends the physical world.
Shaw describes melancholy as an “elevation” that is not driven by pride or mere despair. Through deep contemplation and dreamlike states, melancholy allows one to transcend the physical world and gain a unique sense of solitude and space for reflection. It provides the individual with a purely aesthetic experience, transforming the despair of the great gap between man and the infinity of the world into a kind of “morbid beauty”.
>It's like a "third perspective quiz" that I unconsciously turn on in my brain when I'm "emo" late at night. In this state, it was as if my soul was out of my body, and I was looking at myself with a cold eye, even "torturing" and interrogating myself almost cruelly. But the marvelous thing is that this kind of extreme inward contemplation brings a sense of abstraction, allowing me to gaze at the psychological wonders I have created.``<b>Melancholy is a deep resonance between the subjective inner world and the objective world</b>
Melancholy is not total isolation; it shapes the soul and resonates between subjective experience and objective existence. It reveals the strong contrast and tension between the inner turmoil of the individual and the vibrant world outside, making one acutely aware of the outwardly expanding yet extremely isolated sense of alienation, even when one is in a bustling square.
``>You're special, you're different from all the boys I know, you give me a sense of detachment.