The Kinks’ “Misfits” As Melancholy

Welcome to From Insults to Respect.

My previous post utilizes the Kinks song “Low Budget” to sympathetically discuss how our money woes can take a bite out of our feelings of respect for ourselves and others, while suggesting some helpful approaches to deal effectively with such challenges. The positive feedback that I received led me to see if I might utilize another Kinks song, partly just for the fun of it, but also as a way to explore some issues relevant to respect.

On this blog, I have on several occasions (see HERE and HERE) made the case for the value of transforming periods of depression into the more helpful experience of melancholy. It just so happens that the Kinks song, “Misfits,” offers us a wonderful opportunity to further enhance this pregnant idea.

After the first introduction verse, Ray Davies sings,

You say your summer has gone
Now the Winter is crawlin’ in
They say that even in your day
Somehow you never could quite fit in
Though it’s cold outside
I know the Summer’s gonna come again
Because you know what they say
Every dog has his day

These words suggest Ray is singing about you, the listener, but as I interpret it, he’s also singing about his own feelings. He’s feeling emotionally chilly with the way things are going for him. He has a desire to comfortably fit in socially, but he’s not there. You, the listener, might feel this way from time to time as well. Within this emotional state, Ray seems to be seeking to turn his attention to a more hopeful future, with the return of a warmer weather, happier period.

The chorus then goes on to say,

You’re a misfit, afraid of yourself, so you run away and hide
You’ve been a misfit all your life
Why don’t you join the crowd
And come inside
You wander round this town like you’ve lost your way
You had your chance in your day
Yet you threw it all away
But you know what they say
Every dog has his day

Here, Ray sees his difficulty is made worse by running away and hiding from it. He’s also bemoaning that there were actions he could have taken back in his day but failed to do so. Still, he seeks to bolster his spirits with the hope his day will come.

The song’s bridge tells us to,

Look at all the losers and the mad eyed gazers
Look at all the looneys and the sad eyed failures
They’re giving up living ‘cos they just don’t care
So take a good look around
The misfits are everywhere
La la la la la la

We see here Ray throwing the typical insults at those with the shortcomings and feelings he and the others are singing about. At the same time, he recognizes they are not alone; there are folks all around us having similar feelings, and they are giving up living. This giving up doesn’t sit well with Ray, so he launches into the next verse that seeks to lift our spirits:

This is your chance, this is your time
So don’t throw it away
You can have your day
‘Cause it’s true what they say
Every dog has his day

In the song, we see Ray using two approaches to deal with how he is feeling–insulting himself, and trying to lift his spirits with hopeful, positive words. On this blog, when people are singing the blues and insulting themselves, we say they are experiencing depression. One type of approach to kick yourself out of depression is to focus on some positives, such as the fact that you have company with what you are going through and keeping hope alive for a more positive day. But there is a dramatically different alternative for dealing with the blues than these two, an approach I refer to as melancholy.

Consider how musician and song writer Joni Mitchell described melancholy in her beautiful song, “Hijira.”

There is comfort in melancholy where there is no need to explain, it’s just as natural as the weather in this moody sky today.

She sees melancholy as a comfortable state and natural.

At another point, Joni tells us such experience “can be the sand that makes the pearl…. Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in the mire, of an epiphany.”

In a New York Times article titled “The Case for Melancholy” we learn from American writer Laren Stover about her own personal experiences. After telling us of her weariness of all those folks on the internet promising to show us how to be delightfully happy in just a few short steps, she writes:

“Whatever happened to experiencing the grace of melancholy, which requires reflection: a sort of mental steeping, like tea? What if all this cheerful advice only makes you feel inadequate? What if you were born morose?”

Laren continues to weave her creative images of melancholy with such words as:

“Sadness has a bad reputation. But I soon came to feel that melancholy — the word itself is late Latin from the Greek melancholia — is a word with a romantic Old World ring, with a transient beauty like the ring around the moon.”

Here’s how the great psychologist, William James, viewed the subject at hand. He wrote that many so called “healthy-minded” individuals believe that those who worry are “morbid-minded” and “diseased,” but it may very well be true that “the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.” He, himself, learned to appreciate these visits of melancholy as something of extraordinary value, and stated that,

…there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Although the pharmaceutical industry has spent millions seeking to convince us that these types of experiences are pathological, a sickness, requiring drug “treatment,” Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, tells us,

If we listen carefully to the body, it can teach us a great deal about what is most difficult for us to recognize and come to terms with from the past, and how we might approach our hurt with kindness and wisdom.

We can learn to respect and honor melancholy. Yes, as we do so, from old habits curses along with efforts seeking to bolster these bluesy experiences may arise. We can come to recognize them as old habits while not absolutely accepting their validity. During all of this we can learn to become friends with the underlying experience, patiently, empathically, being with them, spending time with this natural, healthy way to process life’s challenges.

Well, them are my thoughts for this week. Love to all the Kinks fans out there.

My Best,
Jeff

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence.  To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

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