Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 18: Melancholia
Posted By Randy on October 18, 2022
Persistence of Memory, 1931 by Salvador Dali
Money’s like a crop that can
Be sown and reaped anon.
Time is as a bottled dram,
That, once it’s drunk, is gone.~ Waste Not Your Dram ~
(Excerpt)
Pissing your life away and regretting it in your dotage is a recurring theme in both art and life.
Three seasons ago I placed a Dark Sentiment before this august assemblage with the title Hier Encore beginning thus,
“The melancholy ballad from which tonight’s Dark Sentiment draws its title was written by Charles Aznavour and released in his 1964 album of the same name. Translated literally into English (always a mistake, but here we are), it means “Yesterday Again”, and you may know it best in the English translation by Herbert Kretzmer from which it was recorded by Aznavour himself, as well as such notables as Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Shirley Bassey, Mel Torme, Dusty Springfield, Glen Campbell, and Roy Clark — Yesterday When I Was Young.
“Messrs. Campbell and Clark recorded the song to great success, but with a slight though meaningful change from the standard English Lyrics, replacing “… alas …” with my preferred “… to last …”, and so to be sung:
“The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned
I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.”
And then there’s Those Were the Days, an incredible ear worm that was a hit in 1968 for Mary Hopkin —
Naturally none of us here tonight stares at the horizon in despair over time wasted, and in fact some of have other ideas. but none of that will arrest the enjoyment to be found in tonight’s feature. At a little over four minutes, it’ll be time spent you won’t regret later.
Melancholy is deeply Slavic. My father’s side are Croatian and so are almost genetically attached to it!
I myself have this sort of gene based appreciation of melancholy, and so I can feel through it to the other side; if you’ve lived through enough tough times in life you can then “decipher” melancholy feeling itself and find the dark humour in the melancholic -> you know how much things hurt because you’ve been through them yourself, and you know it’s better to laugh than cry if you want to keep moving forward. And in so doing you (can) laugh away your personal demons. This is Kuki Taisho in Japanese martial terminology. The Japanese see the Sakura (cherry blossom) time as both beautiful and terrible: the blossoms on the cherry trees are very pink and at their most lively, but at this peak they die and fall to the ground. The warrior taste of both death and life at the same time: melancholy
Thank you Zac.
In The Price of Spring, Daniel Abraham wrote,