ZombieKitten said:

thankyou

Anxiety said:

Did you want it to be grey?? I'll re-edit!

could you please edit your second last comment Kristy? I would like this discussion to continue and be civilised and mature from this point onwards. Thanks!
[Edited 10/24/07 20:41pm]

xplnyrslf said:

and your point is what?

xplnyrslf said:

i don't care. "god's grey earth" is a zappa-ism i've always thought was clever. do what you will with my posts - what the hey, the world is my editor.

Anxiety said:

did he really say that? I think it is apt

ZombieKitten said:

i forget in what context or in what song, but yeah, he coined that phrase. it's classic cynical zappa, i think.

Anxiety said:

"SOME PEOPLE... SOME PEOPLE LIKE CUPCAKES EXCLUSIVELY, WHILE I
MYSELF SAY THERE IS NAUGHT NOR OUGHT THERE BE NOTHING SO EXALTED ON
THE FACE OF GOD'S GREY EARTH AS THAT PRINCE OF FOODS... THE MUFFIN!"

ZombieKitten said:

nice!

ZombieKitten said:

that sounds about right

Anxiety said:

you know all this time I thought he said GREAT, grey is very clever

Let's start from the beginning:

Melancholy

how do people deal with it where you live?

Do people let sad people? be or try to cheer them up (because it makes others uncomfortable)

If you are sad, do you appreciate other's attempts at cheering you up? would you prefer they let you get on with your sadness? or that they support you through it without impatience?lick my button

To answer the question.....
I don't know where one lives, matters. Human nature isn't regional.
I try to cheer up friends who are sad. There are some situations where it simply is inappropriate. Like a death in the family, where mourning and grief are needed.
If I feel sad, or bad about a loss, I prefer to deal with it myself. Life goes on.
Whether anyone is patient with me, or impatient, doesn't matter, either.
It's temporary.

ZombieKitten said:

Done.

xplnyrslf said:

I suspect attitudes can be culturally dependent. I suspect there are nations that are so affected by depression on a grand scale, that to a point it becomes a variation on normal. Like if a lot of people are melancholic - is there a more unquestioning acceptance of it?

Anxiety said:

I changed it back.

Any more edits anyone???.....I'm on a roll.....

ZombieKitten said:

i don't think its a matter of acceptance. I think its a matter of being immune to it and seeing it as the norm instead of seeing it as a form of illness that needs treatment on certain levels.

heybaby said:

you're probably right, not seeing it as a problem.

ZombieKitten said:

Melancholy: from wikipedia

The cult of melancholia
During the early 17th century, a curious cultural and literary cult of melancholia arose in England. It was believed that religious uncertainties caused by the English Reformation and a greater attention being paid to issues of sin, damnation, and salvation, led to this effect.

In music, the post-Elizabethan cult of melancholia is associated with John Dowland, whose motto was Semper Dowland, semper dolens. ("Always Dowland, always mourning.") The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a "malcontent," is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet, the "Melancholy Dane." Another literary expression of this cultural mood comes from the death-obsessed later works of John Donne. Other major melancholic authors include Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor, whose Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Holy Living and Holy Dying, respectively, contain extensive meditations on death.

A similar phenomenon, though not under the same name, occurred during Romanticism, with such works as The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe.

In the 20th century, much of the counterculture of modernism was fueled by comparable alienation and a sense of purposelessness called "anomie."


[edit] Melancholy in Arab culture
The Arabic word found as ḥuzn and ḥazan in the Qur'an and hüzün in modern Turkish refers to the pain and sorrow over a loss, death of relatives in the case of the Qur'an. Two schools further interpreted this feeling. The first sees it as a sign that one is too attached to the material world, while Sufism took it to represent a feeling of personal insuffiency, that one was not getting close enough to God and did not or could not do enough for God in this world.[7] The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk in [7] further elaborates on the added meaning hüzün has acquired in modern Turkish. It has come to denote a sense of failure in life, lack of initiative and to retreat into oneself, symptoms quite similar to melancholia. According to Pamuk it was a defining character of cultural works from Istanbul after the fall of the Ottoman empire. One may see similarities with how melancholic romantic paintings in the west sometimes used ruins from the age of the roman empire as a backdrop.

As a parallel with physicians of classical Greece, ancient Arabic physicians also categorized ḥuzn as a disease. Al-Kindi (c. 801–873 CE) links it with disease-like mental states like anger, passion, hatred and depression, while Avicenna (980–1037 CE) diagnosed ḥuzn in a lovesick man if his pulse increased drastically when the name of the girl he loved was spoken. [8] Avicenna discuss, in remarkable similarity with Robert Burton, causes like fear of death, intrigues, love, and food and treatments combining medicine and philosophy. Including rational thought, morale, discipline, fasting and coming to terms with the catastrophe.

The various uses of ḥuzn and hüzün thus describe melancholy from a certain vantage point, show similarities with Female hysteria in the case of Avicenna's patient and in a religious context it is not unlike sloth, which by Dante was defined as "failure to love God with all one's heart, all one's mind and all one's soul". Thomas Aquinas described sloth as "an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing". [9]

[edit] Notes


Melancholy seems to have different meanings throughout time. Everything from religious connotation to association with death.
Are there any examples of nations where it's a norm?
[Edited 10/24/07 21:31pm]

I read all that before posting this thread.

"Anomie as individual disorder

The nineteenth century French pioneer sociologist Emile Durkheim borrowed the word from the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau and used it in his book Suicide (1897), outlining the causes of suicide to describe a condition or malaise in individuals, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values (referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for good or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This is contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person's life and their subsequent depression.
In Durkheim’s view, traditional religions often provided the basis for the shared values which the anomic individual lacks. Furthermore, he argued that the division of labor that had been prevalent in economic life since the Industrial Revolution led individuals to pursue egoistic ends rather than seeking the good of a larger community.
Robert King Merton also adopted the idea of anomie to develop Strain Theory, defining it as the discrepancy between common social goals and the legitimate means to attain those goals. In other words, an individual suffering from anomie would strive to attain the common goals of a specific society yet would not be able to reach these goals legitimately because of the structural limitations in society. As a result the individual would exhibit deviant behavior. Friedrich Hayek notably uses the word anomie with this meaning."
(wikipedia)

This could be the thing I think I am talking about!

heybaby said:

In wartorn or poverty stricken regions, I'd guess a large percentage of the population would certainly be diagnosed depressed (if they had had the luxury to be worrying about themselves ), yet that isn't an issue since nobody is expected to be happy.

ZombieKitten said:

So you think you're being restricted by limitations in society?

xplnyrslf said:

is that a rhetorical question?

xplnyrslf said:

absofuckinlutely!

post some examples.....

xplnyrslf said:

that would take me all day

how about this, society's expectations of me as a mother, and motherhood not living up to what I taught to expect
society's expectations of me as a woman, and my "failure" to be one
society told me that getting an education, getting a job, working hard, paying off a house, getting married and having kids is WHAT ONE DOES and I should now be complete and fulfilled.
etc.

and yes, I would call those expectations "restrictions"
because now I am stuck with it

heybaby said:

There's something specific going on here.....

xplnyrslf said:

you mean like me reaching my epiphany that 1000s of theses have already been written about?

ZombieKitten said:

What is it you're stuck with?
maybe your expectations of yourself, are too high.....

xplnyrslf said: