1.
Today I am thinking about the difference between illness and predisposition, or personality. Or rather the dissolution of difference, the becoming-illness of the disposition. If, as Aristotle says, the melancholic is possessed of too much black bile and air, what should happen is bad sex, but what happens instead is that someone places a sodden sheet of burlap over a bed of tulips. Nothing in me, in other words, is inflated properly or improperly.
2.
Dreaming, however, affords the dreamer glimpses of the humors redistributed. Often, I dream about being touchable, which is to say that I dream about being in bed with women, or what it would be like if I could approach my husband without flinching into myself at the imagined sight of myself. I often think it would be easier to be simply egregious, like a ball of tar on the beach, or roadkill. To be pure, cold black bile, as Aristotle says, and thus to be stupid and incapable. Your warmth, my love, heats me into sadness.
3.
When the surface of the lake is calm, we say that it is glassy, which is also how we describe eyes that are drugged into unseeing. For the melancholic, the unmoving surface holds a similar appeal to one pushed into hills by the wind, one that strains the boat on its mooring and reflects a sky the color of parching pine. There is nothing in the Greek treatises about a predisposition towards water in those constitutionally incapable of exhaling completely.
4.
And yet I remain, fundamentally, terrified of water. Or, more accurately, deep water. Not to the point where I will not swim—I am a confident swimmer—but the thought of my feet making their small propulsions above an inscrutable depth makes my stomach feel as if it alone will sink me. I am, however, more buoyant than my husband, who cannot float. He is the kindest person I know. I tell him, “just hold more air in your chest.”
5.
Something has fallen from the trees to the ground and has been attracting small groups of birds unusual to habitations without feeders specific to their needs. The goldfinches in particular fill me with an unusual joy as they clean their beaks on nearby branches: a small, tidy motion performed by an animal the color of a banana. I want to be extravagant in this way, but instead I overwater my houseplants, having failed to account for the sharp increase in environmental humidity where I now live.
6.
A “well-attempered melancholy,” according to Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, was for the ancient Greeks an outstanding temperament for both statesmen and poets. I can see it: the diplomacy of sadness plays out each night at dinner when, mute about the events of my day, I ask you about something like rights absolutism. Metaphor is like this, too. You tell me you love me before launching into a sustained defense of confiscatory taxation. I feel, momentarily, like the goldfinch.
7.
Illness as deflection: a never-ending series of minor adjustments to the small porcelain dish on the bookcase. Once, I insisted upon wiping clean the inner and outer sills of each window in the house before going away on a trip. There were many other things to do, but I was gripped by the sense that if I could just free these transitional spaces from mold, I could re-enter my body like a lipstick turning back into its straight-sided tube. You would find me there, pigmented and bullet-like, and we would agree that I was a universally flattering shade, healthy really.
8.
I have been overeating, either because I am tired all the time and thus don’t know what else to do with myself or perhaps I am tired because I have been overeating. Regardless, the melancholic waif is not in my future. I lose my ability to speak and fill the silence with various noodle dishes that leave the sides of my tongue stinging with garlic. There is always something I want, and that something is always Starburst candy. I go to the grocery store alone and stand in front of the shelves of sweet things. I pretend that we regard one another.
9.
To lack frenzy is to lack the one redeeming thing about a condition which mostly fills the body with cotton soaked in a thick grease. I do not harness anything. Think of the bit in the mouth of a horse vs. the rider’s legs at its sides. To move the head in the direction of the pain is to alleviate it. To move the sides away from the pain is to alleviate it. If the pain comes from both sides, burst forward to alleviate it, and now aren’t you beautiful, stretched out like that?
10.
Humans are not the only species that poison themselves for fun.
11.
The Stoics had it right: the black-bilious temperament might produce a fine intellect, but to then see the substance as itself virtuous would be a mistake. “The tragic destiny of the man of genius becomes merely the ‘spleen’ of an overworked scholar.” One amounts, in other words, to a long alleyway in an old city, fine if swept. In the delicate evening, who cares. When looking out the window becomes an exercise in paralysis, the brain whirrs and whirrs, and its thoughts are where are you, genius, where is the blossom I was promised.
12.
My husband has a cold and slices coins of ginger into boiling water. He sneezes into a tissue and continues with his work. I am speaking to him and to you, who is him. I do not finish any of my sentences. As the Greek conception of melancholic genius gave way to medieval theories of the blood, depression became pure sickness of temperament, mold on a peach. He says “I’m fine, I’m fine.” It’s true. I sun myself on the porch and say “I’m fine, I’m fine.” I inhale the warmed air and my stomach growls in protest.
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Reference:
Klibansky, Raymond, et al. Saturn and Melancholy : Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. McGill University Press, 2019 (T. Nelson, 1964): p. 32, 50.
