Depression is a medical fact. It is a pathology determined by doctors, and by a medical establishment, and it is away from any self-identification. To be depressed is to fit a very specific set of criteria—criteria that come from hiercahlised taxonomy of medicine and not from any other field of human endeavor that could give us clues to how we are feeling, or how we construct identities around those feelings. One is depressed, not because of spiritual ennui, or political dissatisfaction, or alienation from the world, or exhaustion and mourning at the state of the world. All of those reasons had a history in the west—and more specific reasons too. The medical language, being triumphant, shut its doors, and only allowed a set of language and identity that would reinforce its power, and the legitimacy of its construction
There is only one depression—depression that one might feel, the DSM suggests that “depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). But this sadness and emptiness—these feelings of being apart from the world, must be confirmed by an authority. There is little respect for self-definitions, for identities that are not confirmed by an identified outside.
If we think of people—and this might be a modernist fallacy, but it is a modernist fallacy that has been held as a chief value of our culture---as capable of making identity constructions for themselves, to determine how their moods work in concert to themselves and their larger identities—then low mood, or sadness, or emptiness, might be the pathologizing depression, or might be something else. Those low moods might be vital to an understanding of self, or to a larger understanding of how the world works. In the DSM mode, those low moods can be nothing but a disease. Once we entire the world of medicine, we enter this dialectic of that which must be cured and that which must be eliminated—regardless of how that curing or elimination might prove to be valuable, or if not valuable, at least autonomous.
This is obviously a Foccualdian tack, about how the authority of self-construction is lost in where observation occurs—the observation of the prison or the school or the clinic. The clinic - constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse - owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.1
For Foucault, the observing is not an act of simple reportage—it is an act of seeing—that makes discourse that might unsettle, or problematize or unsurface previously unknown depths. The fear of reorganization is the fear of finding a self, that might result in a scuppering completely a system of observed and observing. The more aware that the clinic is of this, the more the clinic works to preserve its own order—pyscho-analysis gives its power to the bio-medical, the bio-medical forgets it's beginnings as a psychoanalytic place. This repressing history through a politicized looking that denies the power of the individual to remake themselves in their own image, suggests the creation of an archive that evades identification.
To refuse this evasion, is to seek solutions in historical seeing, and observable history—it is to do the discourse without the permission of the clinic—but also to recognize which histories the clinics have repressed. In Foucault’s ideas of archives, it is not libraries, texts and books that are easily found, but a set of discourses that move around, that are never in the same place, that contain texts, but texts defined as bodies, as desires, as history, as memory, as the marginalia of lived experiences. It is an either/or not a but/and way of looking through the world. So, looking through the history of depression, and finding its history through these Focculadian visions and archives, the question becomes what other spaces and what other histories exist that allow us to examine what depression could be, without attempting to eliminate it or without having the medical establishment define what should be a personal seeking of narrative and understanding.
The question then becomes, what other ways of looking at depression have existed. Using the lens of a theologian, what words have used in a religious context to explain this set of moods and experiences. The one that seems to be the most common is melancholia. Melancholia is not strictly depression—it exists before both bio-medical and pyscho-analytic work on hierarchy and taxonomy. It is best defined against taxonomic forms. Two writers have attempted to work through though explaining what melancholy was—and historically recruiting them to help us define depression outside of the failures of 20th century models. One of these models is exterior—his attempts to find what melancholy is works like black ink through clear water. The other model is interior—her attempts to find what melancholy is, is a delicate set of internal negotiations, where the inner components of humanity carbonize into shards of crystalline sadness.
The first model is Robert Burton. Anglican Priest, Calvinist, and Academic—his eccentric document: Anatomy of Melancholy, written in 1621, is an anatomy in two senses. It is an academic anatomy—where a book is written as an attempted gloss on anything about a certain topic, functioning as a one topic encyclopedia. The second sense, is the one in which we are familiar with—anatomy as a discussion of the body. Burton’s work is a literal embodiment of flesh and understanding.
The second model, is Emily Dickinson, Poet, Calvinist, and falsely thought to be a recluse, her poetry written in American throughout the mid-19th century, is profoundly melancholic—it offers none of the definitions expected of Burton's work, but in the side long glances she was notorious for, discussed the interior life of the melancholic. These two writers, reclaimed for our own historical context, allow for wider and more self-directed definitions of what depression could be, or the use function of refusing the label depression and reclaiming that of the melancholic,
Melancholy had been previously defined as an excess of black bile—Burton positions this as the canonical ideal of how melancholy is achieved in the first book of his Anatomy: “HAVING thus briefly anatomized the body and soul of man; as a preparative to the rest, I may now freely proceed to treat of my intended object to most men's capacity, and after many ambages perspicuously define what this Melancholy is, shew his name and differences. The name is imposed from the matter, and disease denominated from the material cause, as Bruel observes, Melancholia, a sort of melaina {black) chole (choler), from black Choler. And whether it be a cause or an effect, a disease, or symptom let Donatus Altomarus and Salvianus decide, I will not contend about it. It hath several descriptions, notations, and definitions.”
Burton begins, and then with precedent, his sorting out what this melancholy is, must come from a history of naming, and a history of sorting. In this case, the language (melania) and the substance (the black Choler) historically combined to a number of factors—but each of these factors originated in an early, proto-materialism. The proof of melancholy was extended by the body, and the body’s failures were proof of the emotional mindset of melancholic identity. The anatomy then, that results from this introduction, was an investigative potential of the “several descriptions, notations, and definitions” The power of the black choler could be sorted through a taxonomic effort—a taxonomic effort that would later be recognized in Foucault’s history of both the clinic and the archive.
It must be recognized, though as a priest and a doctor, Burton uses the best science of his time, the science that is constructed here, is in the midst of a radical reinvention of the world. Burton’s Melancholy, in this passage, and elsewhere extends outwards—it is a construction that is marked by excess and exteriority. Too much writing, too much melancholy, too much thinking, and too much black choler all center not into one place, but in a miasma of emotion, text and history.
The changes of 17th century medicine, religion, and by extension religion, suggest that this excess perhaps could not be balanced either within a community, or within the larger understanding of the world at large. The tension in Burton—is between a melancholy, as defined as something that is interior, that settles into the marrow, and becomes part of the person, and a melancholy that can be defined as something that is a cloud of fine mist, sometimes settling more on one thing then the other, but through the air—a pollution, like smog or smoke.
Each of these, the marrow or the smoke, is a temporary notice of the imbalance of a personality—it does not suggest an identity, like modern ideas of depression, but it also does not suggest that the mood can be cured. The idea of being fixed—namely that the excessive miasma has grown to a solidity that can be settled into marrow, and the idea that this settling is inviolable, begins with Burton’s time, but the Anatomy is nervous about the idea of fixing. For a document that is supposed to be about creating a taxonomic, and air tight definition of what melancholy could be considered, the book is profoundly ambiguous about what fixing would look like.
The chief notable general fact about the Anatomy of Melancholy is not the exteriority of it, nor its excessive qualities, or its attempts to create one identity out of many, but how often it fails at being cohesive. Perhaps because Melancholy itself is not cohesive—which might mark the early modern from the late modern ,the idea of depression as cohesive, as a checklist, as an agreement on symptoms that can be battled through or suffered against. But in Burton’s early modern renderings, are about creating the encyclopedia of failures. Where one is unbalanced, and where that unbalance can perhaps extend, in a linguistic sense, into the world.
Burton’s attempt at marking the limits of melancholy, and his refusal to think of melancholy as just choleric, through the form of a taxonomic obsessiveness, eventually mark the failures of the encyclopedia itself. Nothing can be mapped in its entirety. There is a gap between the platonic ideal of information technologies form, and what becomes written itself—because perhaps of the nature of creation.
This lack of cohesiveness, and the mark of failure from a platonic whole, is an oddly comforting idea, and an idea that can be inherited from Burton’s Calvinism. The Calvinist idea that we are a totally depraved, and in that depravity we fall short from the glory of God in such a way that we are never able to fully understand him, any encyclopedic text is going to fail in the same complete ways. Burton’s textual failures at encompassing all of what melancholy could be, and his failures at making the work clean and quite comprehensive, is a textual mirroring of man’s attempt to gain understanding of the divine, and his or her failures to do so.
This mirroring can be made exterior in a really important way—we all fall short of the glory of god—and the recognizing of this failing short, is our first mark of humanity. We cannot know God, and that we fall short from His glory, is like the shame that Adam and Eve felt after they had feasted on the tree at the garden of Good and Evil. Burton’s ideas of melancholy come, not from an excess of Chloer, but from awareness, through a Calvinist lens, of his failures as a human. His humanism (as part of the encyclopedic project) and his devotion to a God, who might as well be absent, are foundational to an isolation, which suggests a kind of melancholy as de facto part of our humanness.
If Burton’s isolation is exterior—it marks human’s isolation from God, and towards an exterior attempt at recreating a kind of humanity—then his American Calvinist compatriot, does similar work, facing inwards.
Dickinson’s relationship to Calvin is obviously different than Burton’s—-there was a separation of geography, time, and of gender. Calvin had crossed the ocean, and settled by the time that Dickinson had inherited it resulting in the tension of absorption and rejection that exists within the text. Burton was the explorer working through the text, trying on new ideas, and never rejecting one. Dickinson’s rejection of ideas was a rejection of her Calvinist heritage, and her absorbing of ideas was a conscious choice of accepting what that Calvinism has taught her.
This sense, might explain the difference in the structures of Dickinson and Burton’s writing, and the problems of the structure might explain how melancholy becomes part of being. If Burton’s melancholy was about an exteriority, if it functioned like black ink in clear water—and if it was expressed by spreading, staining, and by being unable to be uncontained, than Dickinson’s melancholy functioned as an interiority—it was expressed by a clear and focused selfhood---it’s containment pressed down and shattered inward.
This shattering inward could be seen as similar to Burton’s realization of his totally depraved state—but Dickinson’s dissent was constructed at a time, when engagement with the proper praxis of theological life would alleviate this depravity. Moving away from the puritan understanding of the world, or at least allowing for a light to come in on the closed system of how the puritans understood the divine, would result in the intense separation of man from God that preachers had told puritans to avoid. It would be welcoming the isolation of total depravity.
Joanna Yin describes quite acutely of what occurs in this questioning and this pulling apart: “Instead of functioning as a mirror for external images of a culture that craves certainty, Dickinson concentrates on her inner self. The skeptical person shedding traditional means of religious consolation risks experiencing the horror of the unknown. Deprived of theological scaffolding, the questioning Puritan, like anyone attempting to examine a dominant ideology, can feel disoriented and ungrounded. When the speaker of P378 saw that "The Heavens were stitched," she "touched the Universe—// And back it slid—and I alone—/ A Speck upon a Ball—/ Went out upon Circumference —." These genealogical moments are terrifying to both the speaker and the reader. Yet because Dickinson creates as she deconstructs, she can often bridge or at least face the abyss that she uncovers.
The creation at the same time as the deconstructing does not only come from the creation of Dickinson’s poetry—though this was where here must formal approaches of working against religious consolation concurs, it must be carefully noted—that the interiority of Dickinson’s work was a formal concern –or at least the expression of Dickinson’s translation of melancholy forms, could be constructed as a formal exercise. The idea of Dickinson I n the popular imagination as a nun who refused human contact, a mad woman in white, or a new kind of American anchorite was never accurate, and became a misogynist way of dismissing her work. She lived in community. She wrote extensive correspondence to friends and family. This correspondence was as often about weighty matters as it was about quotidian details, about what she ate for lunch and about a note of theological forms. As well, even though her poetry often contained images of exclusion, and lack of desire—the constant editing, the sending works out through this correspondence, and the creating of small books, called fascicles, suggested that Dickinson intended to have this work as a public set of discourses.
In this sense, the privacy of the poetry, a poetry about using one’s melancholy as a tool to engage with a necessary separation from a fallen world worked at cross purposes with a set of written discourses that encouraged a full engagement with the world. The correspondence and the poetry constructed a series of ironic matrices, where melancholy decentralized community involvement, and community involvement decentralized melancholy. These matrices were not only found where correspondence and poetry met, but in the inter-textual heritage of Dickinson’s spiritual reading.
Burton was creating an encyclopedia, and so his inter-textual work was expected, and the excesses of his intertextual work resulted logically from the text itself. Dickinson’s inter-textuality, told through a set of dashes, of slant rhymes, of absences, and of inheriting forms, was not a direct writing on the body, but an oblique awareness of where she did not belong, even in the tradition of puritan wiring and plain speech.
The reader can see this most clearly in how she literally and symbolically rewrote hymn forms—sometimes explicit hymns them. In her tight, difficult study comparing the original Calvinist hymn writer Isaac Watts to Dickinson, Shira Wolosky talks about the purpose of Dickinson’s inter-textual emphasis on Watt’s texts: “A surprising number of Dickinson poems seem written in direct response to particular Watts’s hymns. Furthermore, Dickinson's relation to Watts is not simply parodic. The hymnal frame of so much Dickinson verse asserts a genuine and profound effort to accept doctrines that she cannot, however, help but question, leading her in turn to question her own doubts.” She then goes on to work through a few poems—talking about where Dickinson fits formally in the tradition birthed by Watts.
Wolosky points out that where Watts leaves hope, or at least the potential for liberation by faith in the Divine, Dickinson leaves little room for doubt. Dickinson’s ironic reversals of Watt’s conventional Calvinist piety are the work of a melancholic mind, who constructs narratives not of redemption, but of denial, exhaustion, work, and eventually the tomb. While Watt’s tells his followers to “gird themselves with the gospels armor”, Dickinson rewrites this to mark the absence of the divine: “Go slow, my soul, to feed thyself//upon his rare approach —“. For Watt’s this girding results in the triumphalism of God and his servants. For Dickinson, God’s rareness leads to “Go boldly — for thou paid'st his price/Redemption — for a Kiss —“
Dickinson’s melancholic world view—positioned against Watt’s optimism, suggests that believers in Christ are closer to Judas than they are to soldiers triumphant on a religious battlefield. Dickinson’s theological impetuous ends in bodily death, namely in the suicidal body of Judas and not the resurrected body of Christ. The melancholic force of her writing shares an attachment to the corporeality of Burton’s anatomies—but an anatomy that comes from close personal inspection, and through the first person voice—and a first person voice that was often domestic.
A reader can see the connection between bodily death, the domestic, and corruption/rot in poems as diverse as So I Could Not Stop for Death, where Dickinson and Death, riding in a carriage, note: “We paused before a house that seemed/A swelling of the ground;/The roof was scarcely visible,/The cornice but a mound.” – this interlacing of the domestic, of the visible, and the invisible, of death, and of life—of the swelling of a house best by a rot that would eventually engulf flesh—marks the obsession with gaps, and absences—that deny a presence in traditional catholic sacramentialism. There are others: “To fill a Gap/ Insert the Thing that caused it—//Block it up/With Other—and 'twill yawn the more—//You cannot solder an Abyss/With Air—; Where the personal fear of death—and of hell (the abyss) cannot be blocked, that the melancholy cannot cure melancholy, and that the desire for blockage and by extension wholeness cannot be found in traditional spaces.
Dickinson’s attempts at blockage, ad her acknowledgement of the abyss is profoundly different then Burton’s refusal to block anything. Dickinson’s death is about silence, waiting for death to come, and talking in small bits and quiet moments as a w ay of evading death—but death can never be fully evaded: “And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –//We talked between the Rooms –//Until the Moss had reached our lips –//And covered up — our names –“ . Truth and Beauty are not sufficient enough to survive past the falling apart of the flesh—of nature to absorb the arrogance of human communication. The melancholic failure of communication as a way of evading death becomes a textual and personal way of working past the Calvinist ideas of total depravity—but just as Burton recognized that total depravity was a way of recognizing our own humanity—tiny and cowering against the expanse of an immobile God, then Dickinson recognizes the same kinds of awareness.
This is the use function of melancholy. It is not depression—as depression suggests something that can be readily cured, or that something should be cured. For Burton and for Dickinson melancholy is not depression. Melancholy is recognition of one’s inability to fully speak. Burton’s exterior attempts and failures to mark a full narrative of low mood succeeded in placing low mood in its proper spiritual place—low mood is not a medical condition, it is not a mark of the clinic, or the chapel, but of the human beings recognition of their minute place in a universe that is carelessly large. Dickinson’s recreating of her tradition, hymns, correspondence anti-sacramental nature of congregational practice brought her closer to her own interior nature, and her own closeness to death. The denial of the sublime, the swelling of the house that would contain her until her death, was all a blossoming of her place in the larger corpus of family, of town, of country—and of eventually world.
The interior, almost mystic, energy of Dickinson’s melancholy, and the exterior, anti-mystic energy of Burton’s melancholy both led to a place that talked quite sweetly about the absence of divine spirit, and of the necessity of living in the world, on its terms. To evade the clinic is to acknowledge the place for lowness and humility.
