lycanthropia

Sitting here putting away the pinot grigio morosely, I just realized: tonight is the six-year anniversary of me trying to kill myself on Atalaya Mountain with sleeping pills and cheap brandy and hypothermia but then blacking out and down-climbing and getting search-and-rescued and admitted to the psych unit at St. Vincent at like 5 a.m. and not dying after all, unlike Hunter S. Thompson who successfully dispatched himself that same night.

So there’s that.

Suddenly the blog is too small for all the things I want to say, all the words that are burning in me—suddenly the piece of paper is too small for the poem, I drive down to the college town for therapy and stop at a drugstore to refill my psych med prescriptions—$90, my co-pay having mysteriously gone from $25 to $45—and I also buy poster board, I am going to write my new poem on the wall with markers, try to visualize it, try to make a bigger space, to use different colors, to say different things. Suddenly there is all this sparking creativity and I have to grab a pen while driving to catch the words as they zoom past, suddenly things seem enormous and yet possible, suddenly, suddenly.

Wonderfully subtle berry flavor, creamy color, and SPF 20

Is this a bad thing? Is it an insignificant thing? Is it hypomania? Is it relief that I don’t teach again until next week? Is it a symptom, is it pathological, or just a natural part of being a person and therefore creative, this sudden uptick in mood, this sudden expansiveness? After buying meds I spend more money I don’t really have, I buy organic strawberries, a lovely new lip balm, mineral water, socks. (Though I need socks, mine are all growing holes and I don’t know how to darn socks as my mother did, putting a light bulb inside one of my dad’s dress socks and threading black thread carefully up and down through the warp or weft of the knitted heel.)

I go to a poetry reading, Jeannine Savard and Cynthia Hogue, both with new books from Red Hen Press, and afterward browse the bookstore and buy Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White because all my friends are reading it and it suddenly seems I must read it too. Suddenly I remember, music! music exists! and I drive around the college town listening to Tori Amos and Eva Cassidy and belting out songs along with them, driving past my ex’s house and refusing even to turn my head to look at it. On my cellphone I call friends, leave messages sprinkled across the continent. Suddenly my solitude seems thrilling and filled with information, rich with meaning. Suddenly.

The thing to watch for is the collapse, the charred despair that sometimes follows these periods of excitement, the deflation and the accounting for. Today is also my late friend’s birthday, or it would have been his birthday, and I still don’t know what to make of the fact that I can remember him so vividly, his soft percipient laugh, his thin voice, the angle of his body in a blue cotton shirt and jeans; and that he isn’t here anymore, and yet is still so very here in my mind, is confusing. It is confusing. And I don’t know why he did it. I mean, I don’t really know why; I mean I do know in some way, I have made attempts, essays on my own life, essayer as in to try, to try very hard; but in the end my fear and my dumb animal survival instinct won out both times, Plath’s old brag of the heart, I am, I am, I am.

I don’t know. I know I am obsessed with this image of the nest, the nest with eggs in it. I am going to paint it tomorrow, draw it and paint it, I am obsessed with blueberries and the color blue, rich soft crayon blue, I am obsessed with the fragrance of vanilla and with playing the piano, with trying to reproduce vanilla and blueberry on a keyboard. I can’t play the piano right now because the casita is too small so both electric pianos are in storage under my bed. Instead I am sitting here eating strawberries and playing this keyboard. Each letter has a color and each number, like each musical key. I never have thought anything about this, I always assumed that was the case for everyone. I don’t know, perhaps it is.

The best thing to do is to put myself to bed at a reasonable hour, the influenza of this particular star can cause a body to think she can stay up all night working, writing, playing and doesn’t need sleep, and not sleeping is the worst thing for it, hastens the crash. So to bed with me, soberly. And regular meals, not just grazing but “food off a plate” as my BFF and I call it. I am also obsessed today with celestial maps, constellations, representations of galaxies and stars. I want to write a book called Celestial, or, no, a book entitled Constellate. I want the cover to be a rich dark blue shot through and riddled with scattered stars. I haven’t ever before attempted a public prose representation of what it is like to have all the ideas and words and possibilities multiplying combinatorily in my head, factors intersecting and cancelling each other out but then replying with new iterations of themselves and ghosts of those selves refreshing and multiplying again.

If that makes sense which I rather doubt.

So instead of trying to figure out what I’m wittering on about, watch this about-to-go-viral video. For some reason with my current mind-ground I think this is the funniest thing I have ever seen, a giant baby trashing a bar drunkenly. Is it because toddlers do so often seem like tiny belligerent alcoholics? (Thus the wry designation in AA, “King Baby.”) Is it because my ex and I have seen similar persons inebriated in Mexico so many times? Is it the tiny wristwatch, fanny pack and touristy hat with which the baby has been outfitted? I don’t really know. I just know I generally start cry-laughing around the point when she stands up unsteadily and knocks over the palm tree behind her table. I guess this is what MFK Fisher thinks headwaiters are worried about when she writes with pride about being able to hold her liquor. Babies are all little tipplers, as this video plainly shows.

And I’ll try to write more coherently or anyway less hysterically tomorrow.

When the matter is divers and confused, how should it otherwise be, but that the species should be divers and confused? Many new and old writers have spoken confusedly of it, confounding melancholy and madness, [and] will have madness no other than melancholy in extent, differing (as I have said) in degrees. Some make two distinct species: others acknowledge a multitude of kinds, and leave them indefinite. Savanarola will have the kinds to be infinite; Melancthon seconds him, as the humour is diversely adust and mixed, so are the species divers; but what these men speak of species I think ought to be understood of symptoms; and so doth Arculanus interpret himself: infinite species, id est, symptoms; and in that sense, as Jo. Gorrheus acknowledgeth in his medicinal definitions, the species are infinite, but they may be reduced to three kinds by reason of their seat; head, body, and hypochrondries. This threefold division is approved by Hippocrates in his Book of Melancholy, (if it be his, which some suspect) by Galen, and most of our new writers. Th. Erastus makes two kinds; one perpetual, which is head melancholy; the other interrupt, which comes and goes by fits, which he subdivides into the other two kinds, so that all comes to the same pass. Some again make four or five kinds, with Rodericus a Castro, and Lod. Mercatus, who in his second book will have that melancholy of nuns, widows, and more ancient maids, to be a peculiar species of melancholy differing from the rest: some will reduce enthusiasts, ecstatical and demoniacal persons to this rank, adding love melancholy to the first, and lycanthropia. The most received division is into three kinds. The first proceeds from the sole fault of the brain, and is called head melancholy; the second sympathetically proceeds from the whole body, when the whole temperature is melancholy: the third ariseth from the bowels, liver, spleen, or membrane, called mesenterium, named hypochondriacal or windy melancholy, which Laurentius subdivides into three parts, from those three members, hepatic, splenetic, mesaraic. Love melancholy, which Avicenna calls ilishi: and Lycanthropia, which he calls cucubuthe, are commonly included in head melancholy; but of this last, which Gerardus de Solo calls amoreus, and most knight melancholy, with that of religious melancholy, virginum et viduarum, maintained by Rod. a Castro and Mercatus, and the other kinds of love melancholy, I will speak of apart by themselves in my third partition. The three precedent species are the subject of my present discourse, which I will anatomise and treat of through all their causes, symptoms, cures, together and apart; that every man that is in any measure affected with this malady, may know how to examine it in himself, and apply remedies unto it.

It is a hard matter, I confess, to distinguish these three species one from the other, to express their several causes, symptoms, cures, being that they are so often confounded amongst themselves, having such affinity, that they can scarce be discerned by the most accurate physicians; and so often intermixed with other diseases, that the best experienced have been plunged. [...] So that I conclude of our melancholy species, as many politicians do of their pure forms of commonwealths, monarchies, aristocracies, democracies, are most famous in contemplation, but in practice they are temperate and usually mixed, (so Polybius informeth us) as the Lacedaemonian, the Roman of old, German now, and many others. What physicians say of distinct species in their books it much matters not, since that in their patients’ bodies they are commonly mixed. In such obscurity, therefore, variety and confused mixture of symptoms, causes, how difficult a thing is it to treat of several kinds apart; to make any certainty or distinction among so many casualties, distractions, when seldom two men shall be like effected per omnia? ‘Tis hard, I confess, yet nevertheless I will adventure through the midst of these perplexities, and, led by the clue or thread of the best writers, extricate myself out of a labyrinth of doubts and errors, and so proceed to the causes.

(Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, §3.1.3)

Lycanthropia, which Avicenna calls cucubuth, others lupinam insaniam, or wolf-madness, when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts. Aetius and Paulus call it a kind of melancholy; but I should rather refer it to madness, as most do. Some make a doubt of it whether there be any such disease. Donat ab Altomari saith, that he saw two of them in his time: Wierus tells a story of such a one at Padua 1541, that would not believe to the contrary, but that he was a wolf. He hath another instance of a Spaniard, who thought himself a bear; Forrestus confirms as much by many examples; one amongst the rest of which he was an eyewitness, at Alcmaer in Holland, a poor husbandman that still hunted about graves, and kept in churchyards, of a pale, black, ugly, and fearful look. Such belike, or little better, were king Praetus’ daughters, that thought themselves kine. And Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel, as some interpreters hold, was only troubled with this kind of madness. This disease perhaps gave occasion to that bold assertion of Pliny, some men were turned into wolves in his time, and from wolves to men again: and to that fable of Pausanias, of a man that was ten years a wolf, and afterwards turned to his former shape: to Ovid’s tale of Lycaon, &c. [...] This malady, saith Avicenna, troubleth men most in February, and is nowadays frequent in Bohemia and Hungary, according to Heurnius. Scheretzius will have it common in Livonia. They lie hid most part all day, and go abroad in the night, barking, howling, at graves and deserts; they have usually hollow eyes, scabbed legs and thighs, very dry and pale, saith Altomarus; he gives a reason there of all the symptoms, and sets down a brief cure of them.

(§1.1.1)