Sorrow can feel soft and comforting. It's the thing we love to wallow around in as adolescents when we are exploring the rawness of new feelings. It's the emotion that comes and goes as we get older and is an appropriate response to normal life events. For some people, I say, because this is me, it's an underlying feeling that's been present always. Actually, this might be true for everyone - maybe we can choose to acknowledge it or dismiss it, I'm not sure. Not everyone wants to talk about it. Everyone is surely aware of the inherent sadness of life alongside the joy, but "healthy people" are able to keep this awareness of sadness in a quiet place in their psyche so that they can get on with living an energetic and full life. After all, life is short. We should try not to miss the joy and bliss it brings along with the sorrow.
I only came to acknowledge in later life that sorrow was the undertow of my life's current and that for some reason, I felt that this was the main truth of life, believing that all other "positive" emotions were false, illusory, to be indulged in for a time, but that the sorrow was the true thing to return to.
Some of this may have been in response to witnessing other peoples' sorrow I think. In particular, my nana, who became increasingly melancholic with age to the point where she did not speak. Family members would pretend that it was due to the pain of being arthritic and this was partly true, but we all knew that the true underlying cause was the sorrow of her life. She had lost fifteen members of her family in a bomb blast that destroyed their house in the second world war and her husband died of a stroke soon after, which left her to scrabble around for whatever low paid work she could find. I know that she managed to be happy for many years because I remember her singing and in particular, singing to me whenever I would cry as a child. I do have many happy memories of times with her when she was quick to see the funny side of things, especially calamitous situations. The best memory of her is on holiday in Pwthelli, the whole family in a sea front flat, where we shared a bedroom. One night a huge storm whipped up and blew the bay window of our bedroom in so that the rain was lashing in through it as we lay in the double bed together. Unperturbed, she chuckled and began to sing Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head in her sweet, high voice. I joined in. My mum, dad and uncle, summoned by the racket, me laughing and nearly shouting the words, stood at the bedroom door, stunned initially, then beginning to laugh with us.
It was the passage of time, I think when hopes and dreams gradually fade, loved ones die and reconciliations with those we have have become estranged from seem to be beyond hope, together with the pain that stopped her being able to move around and look after the home, bore down upon her until she withdrew deep within herself and became lost to us.
I do believe the sorrow that we all feel can go hand in hand with the joy, of course I do. I understand yin and yang. Without darkness there can be no light. Getting the balance right is the key, but for some of us, whose sorrow has come bubbling up to the surface, ruining all the joys and beauty of life like a putrid flood, we must attend to it. We have to clear it away carefully, noting its source and not stemming it's flow so much as gathering it, ladelling it, drawing it up to be poured back into that source it welled up out of, hoping it will settle into a still pool once more.
This is a messy process. It feels complex and arduous. People you encounter when in the midst of this task may be drawn to you - this is what they are doing or need to do now also - or repelled - they have done with that already or they will do it later, when ready.
Art, music, books and poetry in particular can provide great solace. As can walking and, for myself, getting high up so that you can see the land going far into the distance, in any weather. Also going out as it gets dark and into the night to see the moon and stars when visible, the clouds otherwise can help give you a better sense of perspective and sometimes your sadness can seem to flow outwards from you here. Anything that feels older, more enduring gives me a sense of peace in which the sadness diminishes. Having to attend to what may seem like petty concerns exacerbate and amplify it.
Mark Rothko spoke of his wish to create art that filled the spiritual void of modern people. If you sit in the Tate and contemplate his Seagram murals, you are looking at paintings created in a deeply contemplative way. He was attending to the need to look inwards and his intention was that they should provoke this mood in the viewer. He had visited the Laurentian library in Florence where Michelangelo had deliberately created a cloistered space in order to provoke inward contemplation and Rothko wanted to emulate this effect.
It is a wonderful thing when an artist dedicates his/her life to the pursuit of truth. I have to hope that contemplating Rothko's work can assist us both to enter the pool of deep sadness within ourselves and also rise up from it. His death really leaves us in charge of how to do that.
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in particular has the effect of creating the empty but charged atmosphere with the right amount of poignancy, humour and absurdness. Maybe the visual equivalent of this is something for me to look out for.
