W. S. Di Piero, a favorite poet, published in Poetry (10/06) a wonderful selection of his notebooks, written during a moody stay in San Francisco. It’s not available on-line, unfortunately, but a key segment deserves recapitulation here nonetheless. What I wish to bring to your attention is his discussion of how our inner weather determines what we make of the landscape we see outside. It’s finely wrought.
To wit:
The mind freights weather with its own confabulations and anxieties. Serial rainstorms here in San Francisco, intermittent blue mist — the Asian mist of screen-paintings of hillsides — infiltrating trees in Golden Gate Park. The lull between storms softens things. Then the rain starts up again like cat-o’-nine-tails thrashing my windows. A certain kind of depression, my kind — a Motown-ish lyrics: "My kind, my kind, my kind" — brings episodes that beat against the coastline of the sane or balanced self, baffled just so by meds and the talking cure. It’s not curable because it’s the nature of that particular self. (Or, in my mental menagerie: the dragon of chaos must be fed, else he rip apart every order he sees; he never goes away, he sleeps in the gate.) Late one night, writing, I start to break up (who knows why? unknowability is pain’s core; sobbing is the stupefied noise pain makes) and so lie on the floor waiting for the waves, the dragon-ish sea, the un-nameable hurt, to pass over…
Clinical melancholia doesn’t color one’s feeling for reality, it determines it.
Or, as a friend of mine — one who doesn’t believe in global warming — put it more crudely: "Global warming is an issue for liberals, but that’s because liberals have issues."
Would that we all could wave it off so easily! But he’s not entirely wrong, either. How do we distinguish between the fate we fear and fear itself? Science, I say, but scientists too have moods sometimes…
Kit Stolz 