THE long stretch of January and February is a time when some of us, somehow affected by the season, are prone to melancholy. Sometimes, it’s manageable; sometimes, not. In my own experience, when “the black dog” — to borrow a phrase that Churchill, in turn, borrowed from Dr Johnson — is approaching, or waiting in the dark just beyond the firelit circle of one’s winter comforts, he can neither be driven away immediately nor entirely ignored; but the thing is not to let him get on your back and drag you down.
What’s to be done? For a start, it’s good to know that one is in good company: “The Black Dog I always hope to resist, and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me.” So wrote Johnson to Mrs Thrale in 1783, little knowing that his frank acknowledgement of melancholy would itself be a real help to others.
Sometimes, when I sense the black dog’s presence, I find that the best thing is to sing to him, to take up the words of others that acknowledge him, but also to keep him in his place. At this time of year, I find myself vividly recalling songs, and singing them in my own mind, which might seem depressing, but which, as with so much art and music, alleviate the very sadness they express.
These past few days, it’s been the songs of Lindisfarne, the Tyneside band to whom I listened to obsessively in the seventies. “His life is passing by behind his tired eyes Like the colours in the January sky” puts it well in their “January Song”. Or these lines from “Winter Song”:
When winter’s shadowy fingers
First pursue you down the street
And your boots no longer lie
About the cold around your feet. . .
Those lines are a perfect inner soundtrack as you start to feel the cold on a winter’s walk. But each verse is followed by a call to look beyond yourself:
Do you spare one thought for the gypsy with no secure position?
Who’s turned and spurned by village and town
At the magistrate’s decision?
When winter comes howling in.
There’s something very satisfactory about the way in which Alan Hull sings those last lines in a frayed voice, putting everything into the word “howling”.
Most things are better for being expressed, and I would warrant that the songs of Leonard Cohen and even the novels of Kafka have sustained more people through melancholy than they have depressed people who were otherwise feeling fine.
And the black dog, when he is bearable, is maybe a wise teacher, too. I love the great passage in Richard Hooker’s “Sermon on the Perpetuity of Faith”, in which he points out that faith persists, even when we think, in the fog of melancholy, that we’ve lost it: “Men . . . are through extremity of grief many times in judgement so confounded, that they find not themselves in themselves. For that which dwelleth in their hearts they seek, they make diligent search and enquiry. It abideth, it worketh in them, yet still they ask where? . . . No; God will have them that shall walk in light, to feel now and then what it is to sit in the shadow of death. A grieved spirit therefore is no argument of a faithless mind.”
