Vita Speculativa

by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

1.
Today I am dealing with complications regarding my usual attitude of Fuck The Enlightenment. For it is difficult to ascribe to the period the idea that thinking— today I am thinking about thinking, every day I am thinking about thinking—must always end in a salable product. Click here for good thoughts. Your thoughts are worth approximately one dollar in royalties for each book purchased. The rehabilitation of the notion of melancholy during the birth of western humanism did not, I’d like to believe, hinge upon its absorption into capitalism. So we can give it that much.

2.
What might it be like, in other words, to combine a love for studied aimlessness with a love for the collective? If anyone that wanted could be granted the time and space to mourn in a grove of blueberries, to then eat the fruit and rejoice? In a different world, there would be so much basil. In this one, wages stagnate and there are personal trainers. We are creatures; as such, we have changeable silhouettes. The concept of a medicine ball: that you can be healed by repeatedly moving around a small, weighted globe.

3.
Kronos, as the god of time, is also the god of silence, but as the god of duality, I imagine I am also under his influence when I can’t shut up. This happens when I am nervous, which is often; I have a tendency to look up and to the right as I speak, to look down at the balloon of my lap when I cannot, which is also increasingly often; I look and I look at the space between my crotch and my bellybutton and I want to excise it, just scoop out the whole knotted singing thing because I refuse to be a mother even to the possibility of reproduction. I am aware of the monstrosity of this.

4.
Whirling around alone, well beyond the Kuiper Belt: how strange it is that the word “romantic” can be used to describe both isolation and togetherness. As a ring of ice, I could nestle comfortably at the farthest end of a telescope or in a full punch bowl, cooling everyone down. If thought is a liquor, those who drink it to excess grow frenetic, then numb. Teaspoon by teaspoon, the back garden fills with honeysuckle vines, their thick and calamitous scent like a heart murmur. Knowing their invasiveness means knowing that sweetness as ruinous.

5.
Can the extremity of tiredness have a politics? We say exhaustion, but the word implies having had something to draw down, a well from which the bucket is lifted too many times. No care for the water, no care for the chain. Can there be a politics of the very shallow well? The tenderness of lying down, the solidarity of being in a heap. To make intellectual labor seem like motion rather than absolute stillness, these letters and the frequency of their delivery. Those of us afflicted by habitual slowness are not meant for this world, but we give good hugs, good firm handshakes.

6.
There’s no real reason to dispute the basic scientific premises for depression: the brain searches for a chemical, finds it lacking, reacts in the same way we all do when truly, we thought we would be able to have what we want. But as for the causes of the lack? I refuse to frame this in the normative terms of illness, that is, able / not-able / disabled. To be able to bear the actual fact of the world’s broken speedometer requires your own brakes to have dissolved into ash long ago. Color me a brake pad. Color me a hard gray speed-sponge, color me a clamp.

7.
The problems with thinking are many, but a prominent one in this instance is digression, as in, thinking about thinking inevitably leads to thinking about automobiles, plants, the reinstitution of asbestos as a suitable building material in certain cases. The first of Saturn’s moons to be discovered photographically was Phoebe, despite it being a tiny fraction of the size of Titan, the second-largest planetary satellite in the solar system. Sometimes there is valor in the hyper-specific. In the tiny jargon. Anyone that tells you otherwise is selling you something.

8.
The relationship between thinking and medicine is that the latter tries to make the former either less painful or less frequent. Sometimes these efforts are justified: I would enjoy, for instance, thinking less about the increasing roundedness of my shoulders, or about clothing as a disguise. I would probably enjoy untroubled decision-making. But who loves a perfectly polished statue? Most people, it turns out. Who doesn’t swoon at Strazza’s ability to make even stone transparent.

9.
Then there is the contemplation of the body, as in statuary. Staring into the full-length mirror by the bed, I realize that I cannot remember the last time I went forth into someone’s arms with nothing but the seasonal instinct of a crocus. At his mother’s direction, Kronos castrated his father and threw the genitals into the sea. Ambition disguised as virtue. Out of the sea, the goddess of love. Love from the genitals. Could it be otherwise? In the mirror, my body exists at an oblique angle to my desires for it. In the bed, this periscope, searching continuously for another shore.

10.
The doctrine of choice: here, then, already the fault-lines of humanism. “Saturn, too, was discovered in a new and personal sense by the intellectual élite, who were indeed beginning to consider their melancholy a jealously guarded privilege.”[1] Two roads diverged in a Saturnine wood: one for the many and a road of slowness, deceit, and petty cruelty; one for the few and a road of endless and finely-tuned creation. The poem, as circulating object, makes more sense if you consider it under these conditions.

11.
In other words, the life of the mind as a beautiful and expensive jacket. You look at the jacket, feel it and its silken liner upon the hanger. You know what it would do if you were allowed to wear it: your immense sadness would transform into peonies, it would make of you a plinth, on top of which people would keep piling more beautiful and costly garments. People would buy your sadness, little replica jackets, and that, perversely, would cause happiness. The price of the jacket, currently, is denying the jacket to others.

12.
The shining ladder of not climbing. The ceiling that remains above the head. The trumpeting of a slow exhale. In a world oriented towards provision rather than scarcity, might the sickness of worrying abate into an itch, scratchable without breaking the skin into its small and red component parts? The luxury of taking pleasure in the unknown: could it become a right? I say this for my own sake, selfish and shapeless as I am. But I say it, too, because its promise looks like hundreds of pairs of hands, each cupped around something ready to blush itself open.

[1] Klibansky, Raymond, et al. Saturn and Melancholy : Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. T. Nelson, 1964, p. 251.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry from the University of Akron Press, and BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. She teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Ottawa, and you can find her on Twitter at @kqandrews.