Melancholy

Perhaps I gave this photograph its title precisely because I distrust it. “Melancholy” offers a ready-made explanation for a state I cannot actually recognize here. What I find is less definite: an attention withdrawing from immediate demands and beginning to follow its own paths. I know that movement well.

My mind often works that way. One idea can lead to another, which leads to a third, until some insignificant association carries me far from the question I started with. I may be thinking about something and, all of a sudden, find myself in Narnia, on Mars, or following the absurd path of a bee that happened to fly past. When I come back, I do not always find an answer. I find a changed question, a less rigid certainty, a direction that did not exist before. I also learn about myself through these detours.

Taking a shower concentrates this way of thinking. It is one of the few moments when I can give myself completely to whatever is going on inside me. I think, sing, pray, cry. I do not know when I learned to turn that moment into a meeting with myself. I only know that my thoughts can wander without having to arrive at a conclusion. Sometimes I come out with an answer. Other times, I come out with nothing more than a better question.

That is why I do not try to explain what was happening to the man I photographed. It would be easy to read sadness, worry, or any other story into his expression and use it to complete the image. That ease would erase precisely what interests me. I do not need to know what another person is thinking to recognize a way of thinking I know intimately.

Perhaps the melancholy lies less in the person photographed than in the distance between what we think we understand and what we can never know. The image does not need to resolve that distance. It can simply place it before us and return each of us to our own inner journey. That is where I recognize myself: not in the story of the person before me, but in the experience of losing myself along some path and coming back with something I still do not know how to name.