Unseverable

Juliana Schiesari put me onto Kathleen Woodward and her insights as to how the mourning process may vary with age.

The notion of attachment to life is commonly cast metaphorically in terms of bonds, ties, and threads. When we speak of detachment in old age, of loosening of bonds to life, I think we may mistake the process at work. It may be not that we are detaching ourselves from others but that we have refused to untie the bonds which have attached us to those we have lost. We may begin to live with the dead.

"Between Mourning and Melancholia: Roland Barthes's Camera Lucinda" in Aging and Its Discontents. Note how this passage is cast in the idiom of a "we" that invites identification and acceptance that this the way things are for "us". We become tied to the point of view.

And so for day 328
07.11.2007

Elevations versus Liberations

After a chapter that anatomizes the gender politics of Ficino's meditations on melancholia and which provides an incisive alternative by way of Hildegard von Bingen, we come across this conclusion.

Hildegard also traces a crucial difference when she speaks of those who resist melancholia as potential "martyrs." Yet nothing seems to emblematize the ruses of male melancholia as a discursive practice better than the figure of the martyr, whose woeful suffering is merely the price to be paid for entrance into the immortal pantheon of heroes, philosophers or artists. But in Hildegard's revisionist sense, the martyr's suffering is not the call of something higher but the call to struggle for something better. Suffering is not something to withstand or passively "enjoy" but something to alleviate and overcome.

Our emphasis. Juliana Schiesari. The Gendering of Melancoholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature.

And so for day 327
06.11.2007

Juxtapositions

In our household books move and arrive arrested in some interesting configurations: Susan Stewart's On Longing underneath Wendell Berry's Home Economics and both bearing well under the weight of the two volume C.K. Scott Moncrieff translations of Proust's Recherche.

Sometimes the magic is comparative and relies less on the titles and associations. That sort of magic comes from finding the passages noted in one book providing an echo of passages in the other: the copy of Lewis White Beck's translation of Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals has a slip drawing attention to the idea of happiness being an absolute and thus escaping the will of an empirical finite being to form a definite concept of happiness. And how the passage in question reads so very much like the "catastrophize" neologism encountered by the recovering protagonist of Nervous System by Jan Lars Jensen.

A Beck-rendered sentence from Kant to explain the human predicament: "If he wills a long life, who guarantees that it will not be long misery?" alongside Jensen's description of months-long "doomsday postulating".

And just the day before yesterday one nice turn of phrase found in Bronwen Price's "Verse, Voice, and Body: the retirement mode and women's poetry 1680-1723" in Early Modern Literary Studies (January 2007) — "protean impulses of melancholy".

As children, the appellation "spoil sport" conferred a certain sense of power. Often it meant saving imagination from deceivers, recognizing what is for what could be. Deceivers eager for one particular could be shut down possibilities. Knowing the end of a story does not preclude not knowing how to tell the story. Children as great melancholics? The sad child is a theatrical marvel.

And so for day 84
08.03.2007