Maybe that is what is melancholic about music, this reminder of the other music, which would have fulfilled us completely, and which gives us that insatiable need, like an auditive abstinence: a need to hear more, hear more, and not the least: to hear it again and again, the same piece. Yes, I believe it is that which is the melancholic quality of music, and which can be experienced as a sweet, joyful disharmony: the inconsistency between what we hear and what we really would want to hear. Within each piece of music there is another piece of music, and that is the piece of music that we truly want to hear, and that is the piece of music we will never get to hear, and that is the piece of music that binds us to the music we hear, because it brings us into an unbearable almost-contact with what we yearn for, that which we, as we listen to the music which almost is, but which nevertheless is not, can’t bear the thought of being without.

In a rational world, these questions remain unanswered: How can it be that we are ready to enjoy something sad? How is it possible to delight in being in a state of melancholy? Why do we also see beauty in disharmony, not just in harmony, in asymmetry, not just symmetry, when it ought to be only the evenly balanced and harmoniously proportioned things that appeal to our aesthetic sense, when it is only the well-placed, not the ill-placed, that ought to awaken our satisfaction with form?

Because, I believe, disharmony and asymmetry correspond to a disharmony and an asymmetry within us, because we ourselves are not whole, or complete. Because we are never fully and completely ourselves. Because our lacks, our weaknesses, and our fears make up an essential dimension within us. Because our wounds are meant not only for healing, but also the opposite, to be kept open, as a part of our receptivity to that which is around us and within us. And because there is also relief in this, not to be healed, not to be cured, melancholia satisfies us by preventing us from reaching satisfaction, it calms us by keeping our anxiety alive, it gives us peace by prolonging the state of emergency, the state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind...

 

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