Island Nineteen The Isle of Tristitia and Morbid Ennui

(Extract from: Muse of the Long Haul Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination)
Copyright, Dr Ian Irvine, 2013 all rights reserved. All short extracts from the texts discussed are acknowledged and used under fair usage related to review and theoretical critique under international copyright law.

Image: Engraving by Gustave Dor for an 1876 edition of the Rime of the Ancient Marinerby Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This image is in the public domain.

Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This piece is published at Scribd as part of a series drawn from the soon to be print published non-fiction book on experiential poetics entitled: Muse of the Long Haul: Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination.

Island Nineteen The Isle of Tristitia and Morbid Ennui

How bitter what we learn from voyaging! The small and tedious world gives us to see Now, always, the real horror of the thing, Ourselves that sad oasis in ennui! Must one depart? or stay? Stand it and stay, Leave if you must. One runs, one finds a space To hide and cheat the deadly enemy Called Time. Alas, some run a constant race. 1

Although Coleridge is seen as the archetypal Romantic poet, this reading is based mostly on the two or three poems he is best known for, as well as his prose work the Biographia Literaria. Though Id always loved Kubla Khan and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, by 1994 I was more interested in the details of his life after writing these poems. This is because he lived a fairly precarious existence suffering occasional bouts of severe melancholy, the spleen or what in my PhD thesis I eventually termed creative ennui. I chose my PhD topic to address the unfinished business of my young adult yearsalienation and chronic ennui as sociocultural phenomena, rather than merely individualised illnesses. Early in 1994 I became reacquainted with Coleridges The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and identified with the poor Mariner in his cursed state. My sense of failure as a distant fatherwith accompanying remorsehad been gathering since the split with my previous partner and her return to New Zealand in 1991. Although by early 1992, after a year of upheaval, I was in love, and happy with the general direction of my life (in particular I felt on track with my career) it is a fact that optimum mental health is based upon healthy relationships with a range of significant peoplenot just one or two. The day to day absence of my children was starting to take its toll. I remember many miserable early mornings at Melbourne Airport in the 1990s and early 2000s. Inevitably, after every access visit they had to return to their mother in Auckland for school etc. On the two hour trip back to Bendigo I always felt immensely empty (no doubt many separated parents identify with this experience). The curse aspect to Coleridges Rhyme acquired new dimensions of meaning for around that time. As discussed in the chapter on wounded remorse, I was being forced to live the consequences of my past relationship failures. It felt like a long-term curse that only lifted, to some extent, after the kids became young adults. Returning to 1994, I think it was probably the year it became clear to me that living in different countries was making me miss important parts of their childhood. However, I didnt really identify as a New Zealander and there was no option to transfer my scholarship and teaching opportunities to Auckland. I had to settle for frequent visits to Auckland to see them. Later, they also had many trips to Australia. I also wanted to allow my former partner get on with building herself a new life. Thankfully, my parents were still living in Auckland at that time and I usually stayed with them during visits. They were a real life saver during those years since they had weekly access to the kids making the kids feel more connected to me in the long-term. Though there were enough good things happening in my life to allow me to avoid depression, I never-the-less identified with poems like Dejection, an Ode, Work Without
1

Baudelaire, 'The Voyage' (1993, p.291).

Hope and Limbo at that time. It was no longer even an option to drop out of civilisationjust seeing my children was expensive and the task of finding a vocation that suited my peculiar personality became an imperative. Externalising my feelings in poetry, music and my PhD research on ennui also helpedthough I also addressed other themes. In late 1993 just before leaving for overseas and straight after handing in my Honours thesis I wrote the first draft of a dystopian futuristic novel (eventually published as Dream-Dust Parasites). Again the theme of fundamental alienation figuredthough the main character, Sam, is a very different person to his author. The point is I was writing, to some extent, out of the ancient humour of saturnine melancholyand it is fair to say that my birth as a professional writer began with a swim in the ocean of tristitia. There were times in the mid-1990s when: Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount where streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! Bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without hope draw nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.2 It was the Mariner, however, that better summarised my situationin part because he was a storyteller-poet. He told fabulous tales as a means to settle some kind of personal score with his own version of fate: He holds him with his glittering eye The Wedding-Guest stood still, And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. and God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus! Why lookst thou so?With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS. The Mariners eventual capacity to pray frees him, to some extent, from his curse: And from my neck so free/ The Albatross fell off and sank/ like lead into the sea. Ever after, however, he is condemned to retell the tale of his terrifying otherworldly experience. It is also worth noting that the Mariners tale is a journey story with strong metaphysical elements, and thus it shares common features with the imrams, echtraes and epics weve been discussing periodically throughout this book. The completion of my honours degree in late 1993 resulted in another kind of journeya round the world trip beginning in Indonesia, moving on to the UK (where I introduced Sue to my extended family), then the US where we stayed with Sues father, Peter, before ending the trip in Auckland where we had time with the kids and visited my parents. Id been working to save up cash for the trip through evening work in a local recycling plant (the
2

Coleridge, 'Work Without Hope' (1951, pp.84-85).

smelliest job I have ever done!) whilst completing my Honours. I was particularly excited about returning to the UK after ten years awayI was very keen to see my ageing grandparents, my brothers in Wales, as well as many other relatives in Scotland and Yorkshire. We rolled up in Bali in mid-November 1993. Id submitted my Honours thesis and Sue and I had placed all our property in storage after giving up our two bedroom flat in Race Street. Although we were on holiday I had no desire whatsoever to read books. The year had been stressful for most of the Honours studentsI remember in particular a class on Medieval healthcare delivered by the then unknown Australian fantasy writer Sara Warneke (Douglass). She showed us a succession of bizarre images depicting large rusty implements that she said had been used in surgery and midwifery during the Medieval period (also some images depicting Medieval chastity belts). Somebody said They look more like agricultural tools! When another student quacked or snorted his agreement the entire class burst into hysterical, ghoulish laughter for almost ten minutesincluding Sara who had a robust sense of humour. For some the laughter turned to tears. After this bout of mid-year collective catharsis the class continued as if nothing had happened. I studied a number of fourth year units that year: Theology and Philosophy (in the Medieval Period); Rome and Classicism and The Humanities in a Scientific Age. All three units involved copious amounts of reading and we were expected to write 6 essays of around 5,000 words each (30,000 words). Given my thesis on Gravess The White Goddess (which involved reading over a hundred books and articles) was over 30,000 words long I was, to say the least, sick of reading by the time we arrived in Bali. After I handed in the thesis I thought: I can write a book after a year like this! Discussion of the relationship between creativity and travel will take place on another island, suffice to say here that since I had never spent significant time in a majority world country prior to 1993, our six weeks in Indonesia (mostly island hopping between Bali, Lombok and Java) were world changing to meespecially given we travelled as back-packers and thus lived in fairly basic accommodation among ordinary Indonesians. I remember vomiting my way through most of the Indonesian leg of the trip howeverculminating in a particularly severe bout of something icky and malign in Jakarta on Christmas day. It was a day or so before we were due to board a Garuda jet for London. I remember throwing up violently in bushes outside a Jakarta restaurant wed just eaten in with Jingle bells/ Jingle bells/ Jingle all the way ... playing full tilt in the background. Although I was sick frequently I still loved everything about Indonesia. In mid-December, whilst sipping fruit drinks in Ubud, we received a message from Win (Sues mother) back in Melbourne. There was a letter addressed to me from La Trobe that probably needed to be opened. I rang and listened nervously as she opened the letter and began reading. As expected Id received a high grade for the thesis and thus for my Honours year generally. The best news, however, was that La Trobe were offering me what turned out to be a three and a half year tax-free stipend to study toward a PhD in the humanities. There was also the chance to tutor under Sara Warneke (Sara Douglass) and Al Gabay in the History department. I was ecstatic and relievedwith that letter my financial woes disappeared for the foreseeable future. Just as importantly, for the first time in my life I would actually be paid to research and write. The rest of the trip should have been sheer pleasurebut I had bought a strange little statue in a tourist shop near a northern Balinese beach (more about Tuyul, however, on another island). Sue and I returned from our round the world trip in early 1994 in a state of shock. Sue had been

robbed in Indonesia which affected our time in the UK, the US and NZ (producing visa and passport difficulties as well as money-insurance issues). We also got caught in the 1994 Los Angeles earthquakeit hit a few hours after our (rescheduled) jet touched down. I recall waking up to a loud roar as the walls and ceiling of our bedroom began moving in different directions. We leapt out of bed and took shelter in the closest doorway as the huge rollers beneath the building rocked back and forth for what seemed like an eternity. Certain I was about to die, I remember thinking, ridiculously, that I didnt want to be naked when they pulled me out of the rubble of that ten storey building. I had a strong urge to try to put on some jeans before my journey to the other world. On the next leg to Auckland our Air New Zealand jet was almost shaken out of the sky over Hawaii due to a nearby typhoon. I remember beefy American footballers in the seats behind us squealing hysterically as luggage from the overhead racks crashed down all around us. Next to me sat a middle-aged lady completely un-phased by the gathering drama. When I asked her how she was doing she said simply, I dont die herethe tarot cards were emphatic! Thankfully her tarot cards were spot on and we all survived. However, the worst was not yet over for us. A day or two before our flight out of Auckland (bound for Melbourne) we were phoned by Win and told that a friend had just been murdered in central Bendigo. We arrived home to police interviews (at that stage the murderer was still at large) and mass media interest in the funeral. I also learned immediately that Goyas Child had moved on without me. Everything was different at La Trobe as wellmany of the students Id gone through my studies with had moved on. Besides, I was no longer a student but a member of staffthe carefree student life was over (if I wanted to keep my scholarship and job). It turned into a hell year on other fronts as wellevery time we picked up the phone someone we knew had died or was dying. So it went for the year, concluding on New Years Day 1995, when a bush fire tore through our 40 acre block off the New Boort Road near Wedderburn. Sadly, it completely destroyed the home of our friends who lived on a block directly behind ours. Our own land was also devastatedmany of the trees never recovered due to the ferocity of the flames. As we walked the land surveying the damage, I also recall seeing a massive, obviously burnt, goanna high up in a fire-blackened gum-tree. I had to count my blessings that year! I came home to a PhD scholarship and a year of paid history tutoring. I finally had something approaching a real job and as a consequence paying maintenance for the kids in NZ became easier (likewise the paying for the constant airfares). So began a four year epic for me that in truth had begun many years earlier at Auckland University after reading Franz Kafkas The Castle. Id already written an honours thesis on the other major inspirational topic of my young adulthood, Gravess The White Goddess and that work had earned me the scholarship and vital tutoring experience. On the career front all the news was good. I also had the first draft of a novel completed and occasionally I took breaks from the PhD work and tutorial preparations to work on the novel or prepare material for a series of guest lectures on Celtic literature and mythology at the invitation of Rod Blackhirst. In retrospect my PhD on chronic ennui is a distinctly modernist documentthere are strengths and weaknesses to such a perspective. I realised early on that though my four years of study at the University of Hogwarts Bendigo campus (in truth the Humanities department had a strangely gothic feel) had given me many new skills, I needed to take another step up and quickly if I wanted to produce work that would pass a PhD examination. The lecturer who most

assisted me in acquiring the requisite higher level skills was Dr Harry Oldmeadow, these days an internationally published academic writing mostly on Eastern religious traditions, Perennialism and film theory. He was also a patient and thorough copyeditor who taught me a great deal about structuring arguments. The focus of the PhD was the emergence of the problem of chronic ennui as a mass cultural phenomenon in the two hundred years after the French Revolution. Early on, however, Roger Sworder told me that I needed to ground the modern descriptions of the malaise in ancient descriptions of taedium vitae, acedia/tristitia and saturnine melancholy if I wanted to better understand the disease as described by later poets, novelists and philosophers (e.g. Pascal, Coleridge, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Dostoyevsky, T.S. Eliot, Herman Hesse, Camus, Thomas Mann, Sartre, Lessing, etc.the list was long indeed!). In short, I had to read a lot of ancient theological and philosophical material as well as numerous post-18th century French and German novels and poetry collections. Despite a somewhat patched together later chapter outlining a possible cure for the malady (which I deleted from the published version entitled The Angel of Luxury and Sadness when it was published around 2001) I remain proud of the eventual manuscripteven though I now hold to different perspectives on some key points. The thesis was passed with only minor alterations in early 1999 and I felt an immediate sense of liberationafter all Id spent much of the previous year engaged in endless, dreary copyediting and reference checking! In the same year I was asked to coordinate (as chief lecturer) the second and third year Medieval World unit usually taught by Sara Warneke (Douglass). Luckily she assisted me by generously gifting all her notes and resources. It was never-the-less a baptism of fire I had only one month to prepare prior to the first class and the students were expecting a renowned fantasy author (but got me instead). By 1998 Saras fantasy novels were starting to sell in large numbers, hence her ability to resign from La Trobe to concentrate on being a full-time author. Despite having handled the responsibility of teaching the unit across three campuses, I finished the semester where Id begun (whered Id been since 1994), i.e. as a casual teacher. There were, as usual, no guarantees of ongoing work and I would not be paid over the four month summer period. Thankfully, I was offered teaching work at Bendigo TAFEin the Koori (Aboriginal) unitaround this time which I instantly accepted. The scholarship had ended and I needed work. Indeed the second half of 1999 was all about teaching. Some days I might step out of a morning BRIT Koori unit class into a one oclock Medieval World lecture up at La Trobe. Other afternoons I would walk out of a Medieval World lecture to two hours tutoring and mentoring 10-12 year olds at the Bendigo Koorie Homework Centre. It was a busy, surreal time after years of hermit-like study, but I was pleased to be teaching others after so many years absorbing information. (Around the same time Sue became pregnant with Kara). The most interesting chapter in The Angel of Luxury and Sadness is probably the chapter on postmodern forms of normative ennui. It was eventually published in the Canadian literary journal The Antigonish Review for $160 Canadian dollarsanother threshold moment. The most quoted chapteralso published in Humanitas, a US Humanities journalconcerned the medieval vices of acedia, tristitia, siccitas and sloth, all seen as forerunners to modern forms of hyper-boredom and alienation. In the mid-2000s I learnt that it had been debated at an international monks retreat in the USall the monks had to read it online before attending. The exploration of the Archipelago of Modernism that began in the 1980s when I encountered

key Expressionist, Surrealist and Existentialist works continued with my PhD research on morbid ennui. I became familiar with many more key Modernist and Postmodern texts and learnt that inexplicable melancholy (particularly when contracted in creative form) can be inspirational to writers and creative artists. My 4 year visit to the Archipelago of Melancholy ended as the millennium was ending. To be truthful I was very relieved to hoist the anchor, set the main sail and exit the harbour for more open waters. Its many Isles had been strange and gloomy places, potted with existential vacuums, dying Gods, remorseful suicides, war-torn cities and feverish plague-ridden populationsindeed, all the nerve wrenching bric-a-brac, all the corrupt addictions and diversions, that are the lot of people living in the modern metropolis. Nevertheless, I came away with many treasures, in particular the experience of feeling a heavy weightBaudelaires chimera perhaps, though more likely a badly preserved albatross leave me as I wandered on stagedressed in a parrot-red cloak and bizarre blue hatto receive my doctoral qualification. Id just turned thirty-five. Sue was in the audience, as were my parents, having flown across from New Zealandthey perhaps felt some mixture of pride and relief. I was also thinking of my two children, Lena and Marcuscontributing to their upbringing had been a fundamental motivation behind my academic efforts since 1991.

Author Bio (as at May 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), as well as in a number of Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.