A mere scholar, a mere ass.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (261)
Overmuch
The brain works and the throat closes. The sound of a voice traveling across the lake spun into a
cicada in full-legged bloom at the nape of the neck. Would you pluck your lute past the point of broken
strings? asks Ficino, more or less. In the game of blood-from-a-stone, the thinkers have their hands at
their own temples, pressing and pressing.
Whose fault, then, the pace of things? In the evening, in the time of disease, I become suddenly hot
and then very cold; my skin feels like someone else’s, like I am coated in a film of my own
disposition’s externality. In my shaking, I think to myself perhaps I have succumbed to history.
The great question of melancholy has at its center the question of service. Frenzy, as we know, is a
necessary affective state for the functioning of capitalism. It serves it, is in turn served. But sadness?
I roll over in bed. Of course I want to be famous. I am fevered; an unnatural temperature. Adust, I
decline to purchase any remedy.
◆
Overmuch
Praying for rain so that I might be alone, free of human sounds. The outdoors “pristine,”
problematically, the water making its ceaseless vocalizations like a screen. In that environment, I
would have ideas, I would be contrite as an orange. Contained, not stringy, not pulled away towards
the seethe of mere expression. My gut its usual icebox.
Burton hates the public. Its changeability, its fickle anti-intellectualism. “Hosanna! one day and Crucify
him! the other.” His patrons, rich assholes. Nothing has changed, everything has changed, we have
electrified the grid and are using all that wattage to make computers spit out wrong answers, or a
picture of the pope in a puffy coat.
It is said that the poets, created without the need for sustenance, were punished by Jupiter for their
freedom and turned summarily into grasshoppers. We have a new managerial structure now: the
muses, visiting some, remove the leaves from our mouths. The singing that results we call merit, not
starvation.
◆
Overmuch
Feeling like garbage: as in, a wrapper, that which holds something useful. The promise of
unalienated labor. From the bottom of this pail, I crinkle and try to enumerate the ways in which we
must be kept unsatisfied. The scholar’s penchant for taxonomy like a seawall behind which one
crouches, taking stock of oneself.
Of the negative dispositions that make up the seven deadly sins, only sloth hampers, rather than
heightens, economic activity. The paradox of scholarly frenzy is that it is seen as idleness. The
middle distance of thought. Its seclusion, its great swaths of stillness. Wakefulness in amber.
Perhaps the most common term of praise for literary writing is “urgent” because then we can make
it seem like we too are capable of running. Art has been poured into a shoe and it takes the shape of
the shoe. The shoe is running. The shoe runs over things. The shoe runneth over. Abolish races. In
the dissolution of beginning and end, a resurgence of the ground pine.
◆
Overmuch
The cultivation of ornamental flowers. Winter giving way to hellebores, lilac, iris, rose. We say: ooh.
Ahh. Crouching. No one says this is unnecessary. No one says we should eliminate flowers because they do not
provide their onlookers with necessary job skills training. Their bowing heads after a hard rain. That sadness:
not a luxury.
Originally, everything seems simple. Melancholy is caused by thinking. Sinking further into repose, I eye
the ceaseless sideways movement of the lake under weather, the cooler currents evaporative and
pliant. The tundra, I reason, will kill us all if it thaws. Those of sanguine disposition buy new
hairdryers, turn them on and march north, dragging great lengths of cord.
After the overthrow of market forces, the gasping will diminish. You will not be presented
continually with the panicked gills of your own lack. In this carefully cultivated field, however, the
scholar will still be miserable. Do not be contemptuous: longing beyond capital will remain abstract,
but perhaps neither punished nor cultivated in the same way.
