Sunset Ennui

So recently I haven’t been going to church. At all. This is unlike me – hence the absence of excessive blog writing. I don’t know: I guess I thought that my inaction, inattentiveness maybe, was due to an extreme case of writer’s block connected to exorcism-paper-composition. Those demons do get pretty routine after a while, you know; they all start to blend together in a goopy, rather hot soup. I would not recommend choosing that item from the menu, btw.

Aside from this, some random events in my life seem to have collided rather nicely. For one thing, I’ve been channeling the great Dr. Johnson by reading Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” a 17th century ‘medical text’ that has been described as “One of the maddest and most perfectly paranoid, obsessively organized, etceterative assaults on the feeble human powers of concentration ever attempted” (Angus Fletcher). The sheer gargantuan amount of book this man has written comforts me, because I at least know something that I’ll be doing for a good long while.

Thusly, Burton has described melancholy as a result of habit, a lot of which has to do with idleness – in fact, the author claims to have written this massive treatise as a means to keep busy and avoid melancholy himself. Clever. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps my habits aren’t contributing to my general state of ennui. I mean, just because everything from preparing proper food to exercising feels oppressive doesn’t mean I should actually have stopped doing those things. Hopefully, a more rigid schedule will help me get back on track. Fortunately, school starts again soon. Problematically, I’m not taking any actual classes. Let’s hope I can find some more God-centered reasons to get up and about every morning (and also not to survive mainly on bread and jam…).

Meanwhile, colliding with this is my manic re-reading of the Harry Potter series, which is still as compelling as the first (or whatever) time through. Woohoo Harry Potter! I guess what depresses me is that I wish I was out following some mission and conquering evil as part of my school-days, or really any of my days at all. Not that I wish excitement would fall on me in the form of the most dangerous dark wizard of all time being hell-bent on killing me: that would not be ideal. But maybe that somebody – anybody – would give me some sort of meaningful job to do. God would be nice. But really anyone pointing me in some kind of direction would be greatly appreciated. It’s the feeling, after all, that there’s something wrong with my life, that I’m not doing what I’m supposed to. Perhaps the Dementors are too close?

So that’s me, pushing the safety limits on medication dosages waiting for it to kick in, which does not seem to be the case. *sigh* But seriously, this is a real problem that seems not to be getting better. Blech.

In closing, here is a poem by Sylvia Plath, “Ennui”

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.