I’m driving a two-door 2001 gold grand am. The air conditioning no longer works after the transmission broke, wooden clothes pins and duct tape secure the windows. It must be August because I’m heading towards the city public library to flip through stacks of CD cases for a Canadian indie pop album. Is a locality with less than 10,000 residents a city? A town, maybe.
We had spent the summer in South-West Michigan working on the shores of a lake, teaching children about ecology. Cold mornings on the peninsula gave us the perfect excuse to have the kids make fire; transformation of endless consummation. A taurus, I don’t remember if I knew at the time. People thought we were dating, but that would be too simple of an explanation for how close we became. Over the years I would make trips to see you, and you’ll be the one to come find me when I move to New York.
As the disc sinks into the dashboard I imagine that the oncoming sounds will ease your absence.
Reading Disc
00:01
When there is nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire
The story is about two ex-lovers who smile as they are reintroduced by a distant friend. They share a taxi without saying a word – he can’t remember her name. The listener learns that it has been awhile since they’ve seen each other as the song progresses. There seems to have a been an inarticulable gap in their relationship when they were close. They fail to tell the same story of what they were; eithers experience of the relationship too excessive, or strikingly absent.
The melody belies the confidence that the two try to assert at the end of the song. Listeners know that something has been lost here, although neither persona can+ name it. The continual repetition of “I’m not sorry there’s nothing to say,” in face of the untranslatability of that which they lost, fills the space between them.
Freud says that melancholia differs from mourning in that it involves the loss of an ideal – a love object. The problem for the melancholic, Freud continues, is that they understand whom has been lost, but not what has gone missing; outside of their conscious awareness. Actually, what the object-loss has been eclipsed; the melancholic experiences the sense of ego-loss as libidinal energy withdraws into the ego once it’s severed from the love object; through insistent communication the melancholic becomes self-deprecating.
You asked me to move to New Jersey to take care of the house and I felt myself turn into a statue as the ground gave way beneath my feet.
Is this the nothing left, that prompts [us] to set [ourselves] on fire?
I am reminded of Donne:
But O, it must be burnt ; alas ! the fire
Of lust and envy burnt it heretofore
And made it fouler ; let their flames retire,
And burn me, O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of Thee and Thy house, which doth in eating heal
- Holy Sonnets V.
One of the competing beliefs on melancholia in the Early Modern was that it was both a physical and spiritual disease. Already Freud’s obsessive fear and sorrow can be read. Gallenic tradition tells us that the melancholic has an excess of black bile; this could either be addressed by balancing the humors or through correcting the thought of the melancholic. Donne tells us that it is the ‘black sin’ that has lead the speaker wish to ‘drown [their] world with [their] weeping earnestly.’ Tears are not enough to cleanse the wound for the speaker – a husk calling to be burnt.
Is that what happens to our desire?
Firewood destroyed the same instant our passions realize.
You gifted me stones forged de la tierra, and a lantern that has never held a light.
Baudrillard says that objects provide an access point for understanding the inner life of a person; objects as external structuring devices of the psyche. They mediate a historical narrative of the relations between the owner, their ideologies, and other bodies.
What do you see when you look around your room?
I’m left with languid memories of late mornings when I still listened to the old fool.
The planets that I take note of this week are Saturn and Venus – Kronos and Aphrodite. While Venus resumed its direct progression on April 15th, we will have almost one-hundred and thirty more days of Saturn retrograde. Mediated reflections on the love that we’ve known and now is gone – the sharp crash of reality that we try to prevent.
Tyler Smart, an MA student in English at Syracuse University, is primarily interested how space produces certain subjectivities, locally and transculturally, in literary and cultural imagination. Other research interests include cross-cultural influences, queer theory and the history of sexuality, subjectivity, phenomenology, eco-criticism, and post-humanism.