Melancholia and the Janus Hue – Part Two

vi

‘Since the Saturnine temperament is slow, prone to indecisiveness, sometimes one has to cut one’s way through with a knife. Sometimes one ends by turning the knife against oneself.’

(Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, 2009)

If one recalls a memory, one tends to edit and ‘clean up’ the recollection. The context of events before and after are deleted. One’s memory of the event becomes a Hollywood trailer, showing all the good bits in an exciting montage while eschewing plot and subtext.

As Sontag says ‘Memory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux.’ (Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, 2009) We all discard contextual moments to make the events of our lives seem more interesting and exciting. Bereft of context, bereft of the drivers of the scene, however, the memory becomes lesser, false. Perhaps it is the disparity between ‘the reality’ and ‘the tableaux’ that causes a hauntological moment.

Agoraphobia has exacerbated this feeling with this editing of memory occurring faster because of the lack of new experiences. With the montage effect being so strong and with vast tracts of my life disappearing and lost from my personal archive, I can see the moments and discontinuities far clearer than I can see the contextual memory bed.

Although I could make the claim that this work is autobiographical, I could only do so with several caveats. There is little in the way of continuity here, little that confirms a life that conforms to a steady and reasonable cause-and-effect timeline.

vi

At various times in history, melancholia has been seen as an indicator of someone who is special, perhaps even a genius. Courtiers in many countries would ‘develop’ a melancholic air, should the monarch of the time be so afflicted, causing melancholy to manifest as a status symbol. The ancient world even considered melancholy to be a unique and divine gift. At other times, and in other cultures, it has been condemned as a sin – a cousin to sloth – a sickness and an indicator of neurodiversity.

The phrase ‘born under Saturn’ ¹ is a euphemism for someone who displays a melancholic disposition and is often attributed to artists, philosophers, musicians, and poets that succumb to Plato’s idea of ‘divine madness’ or Theia Mania. Plato explains that the concept of divine madness could easily be misunderstood as a curse and clarifies the definition by saying that it is not the madness displayed by the insane, but rather a ‘heaven sent’ state. He deems this state to be superior to ‘normal’ sanity, and it is here that the link between madness and genius appears to have taken hold. (Phaedra) Plato prioritises the insight of the frenzied as superior to rational discourse.

Socrates had already noted that the idea of Theia mania (although unnamed as such) broke down into four separate ‘frenzies, ‘furies’ or ‘madnesses’ depending on the translation: the prophetic frenzy, as displayed by the Oracle of Delphi, and was a gift from Apollo; religious mysteries and rites of initiation, a gift from Dionysus; poetic inspiration, a gift of the nine muses, particularly Calliope; and finally Aphrodite and Eros who presided over the madness of lovers.

What is confusing, then, when transposed to the Roman pantheon, arts and creative endeavours were the province of Mercury (Hermes) and the word ‘mercurial,’ meaning subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind, does not adequately align with the state of melancholy. It may indicate a butterfly mind, but that does not necessarily indicate a negative or humoural aspect. A better fit would be ‘saturnine,’ of Saturn, meaning cold and steady in mood, slow to act or change, of a gloomy or surly disposition or having a sardonic aspect.

Marcilio Ficino – who translated the Greek texts of philosophers into Latin (Farndell, 2009) – saw Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue as written in a state of poetic mania. Noting his comments regarding the frenzies and melancholia, he made what appears to be an arbitrary change of patron gods. Although Mercury was thought to have invented the art and philosophy, their practitioners were observed to behave more as avatars of Saturn, and thus displaying the Theia Mania of genius, risking the wrath of Mercury/Hermes. Only including writers and philosophers to this new divine assignation, the great Renaissance painters took umbrage as they believed themselves to be more closely associated with the Gods than mere men of letters and took on the saturnine mantle, regardless.

So, ‘mercurial’ became ‘saturnine,’ and the allusion to genius travelled with it.

vi

‘The distinguishing mental features of melancholia,’ said Freud, ‘are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met within mourning.’ (Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 2005)

Freud’s definition is baffling and contrary to all historical counts of melancholic expression. What may appear to be a loss of interest in the outside world is, in terms of Time’s Arrow, most likely to be an absorbing and processing of an influx of overwhelming and unexpected information. It is not a lack of interest so much as the ephemeral having more urgency than the corporeal. This does not equate to mourning. There may be some crossover – as with all aspects of hauntology, boundaries are blurred – but to present a so solid and profoundly negative description completely bypasses the valuable job that melancholia performs.

Historically melancholia was one of the four ‘humours’ that were thought to inform the temperaments and one’s physical well-being. These humours, or temperaments, are sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholy.

Sanguine is associated with the blood, air, spring, Jupiter and the liver Choleric is associated with yellow bile, fire, summer, the new, and the gall bladder; Phlegmatic, unsurprisingly, is associated with phlegm, as well as water, winter, the phlegmatic, Venus, the brains and the lungs, while Melancholia rules over black bile, earth, autumn, the melancholic, Saturn and the spleen.

A change in temperaments is seen to be a result of the humours being out of balance. Although this concept has been discredited by modern science, there is still much that can be gleaned from their associations.

In his exhaustive work, ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Burton, 2008) Burton defined the humours as ‘a liquid part of the body without which no living creature can survive.’ He defined each humour and attributed various other aspects to them:

Blood	Sanguine	Air – hot and wet – Spring.
Phlegm	Phlegmatic	Water – cold and wet – Winter.
Yellow Bile	Choleric	Fire – hot and dry – Summer.
Black Bile	Melancholic	Earth – be cold and dry – Autumn.

Burton recognised that the ‘four humours’ model was simplistic and added the idea of the Serum. This mostly consisted of waste products, urine, sweat, and tears, but also included the spirit. This, apart from the obvious spiritual connotations, provided the means of cohesion between body and soul.

The state of melancholia, as we know it (loosely, a troubling of the soul), was induced as an imbalance of black bile that could only be fixed by ‘venting one’s spleen’ by processing and expressing excess anger, removing excess sourness and ridding oneself of the darkness within oneself that causes the morbid state.

vii

Interlude 2: You are staring at a spinning ball of rainbow colours. Its presence is irksome at best. Time stops. A sudden rapid influx of information has caused any forward momentum to stop dead. 

The ball spins faster, but somehow time slows down. Nothing comes to mind. Time stops. 

You are stuck in limbo until the ball is kicked away.

The ball is indicating that a mass of information is being processed. It lets you know that it is trying to restore temporal normality. It is working hard to restore the flow of Time’s Arrow. 

The beach ball flickers, and its spin slows. You are uncertain if this is because the ball has almost finished its job or if time itself is slowing down in this liminal, uncertain time.

With no fanfare nor any wish for acknowledgement of the millions of processes it has performed, the ball vanishes, and your temporal experience is restored. Nothing has changed.

Of course.

viii

In Sontag’s essay ‘Under the Sign of Saturn,’ she tells us that Walter Benjamin regarded everything that he chose to recall from his past as ‘prophetic of the future.’ (Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, 2009) That he chooses parts of his past to reference possible events borders on a kind of ‘retrospective mystical,’ giving credence only to those parts of the past that relate to specific points of the future.

Sontag also tells us that ‘there is no chronological ordering of [Benjamin’s] reminiscences because [to him] time is irrelevant.’ And this is the difference between hauntology and Benjamin’s outlook. Time and events do not operate in isolation. Multiple threads come together to form the present (Janus is clear on this), and the wilful – or forced, as in the diminishing recollections of the agoraphobic – removal of them will inevitably lead to a state of ‘psychic montage.’ He seems aware this by noting that ‘The work of the memory collapses time,’ giving credence to my ‘editing of memory,’ idea, but unaware of the potentially catastrophic effects of losing one’s memories to Tanner’s theoretical bubble dimension. Temporally, of course, this is entirely justifiable, considering Tanner’s Emboitment was not posited until decades after Benjamin’s death.

Inaccessible as they may be at this time, it is comforting to note that the memories lost to agoraphobia are stored in Tanner’s Dimension, perhaps for retrieval at a later date.

Where Benjamin views time as irrelevant, hauntology seeks to correct a broken timeline by actively pointing out the inconsistencies experienced by the haunted. Time is a structure that makes sense of life. The placing of items and events in a common chronological order is partly what gives one a sense of self, of being, of relating to others and providing a common bond between significant people and events; ultimately justifying oneself in the wider timeline. To have that timeline tampered with causes a profound sense of loss and forces the idea that one is somehow lesser.

1 As an aside, and for the purposes of this study, I had my Natal Chart drawn up. I do not believe in astrology, although I recognise the work it did to kickstart astronomy. The idea of having this artefact drawn up was to debunk the idea of being ‘Born under Saturn.’ Unfortunately, it didn’t, as Saturn looms large in my first house and is in conjunction with my sun, moon and rising signs. This, apparently, is the motherlode of being born under Saturn. It’s bloody annoying, but I have not changed my opinion on astrology.

*Partly, because in naming it ‘Hue’ seemed the most appropriate word, suggesting, as it does, an LL encompassing glow. ‘Stain’ and ‘Taint’ seemed unnecessarily negative. The other reason is the terrible pun made at the expensive of N**** F*****.