“When […] I first dabbled in this Art, the old Distemper call‘d Melancholy, was exchang‘d for the Vapours, and afterwards for the Hypp, and at last took up to the now current Appellation of the Spleen, which it still retains, tho’ a learned Doctor of the West, in a little Tract he hath written, divides the Spleen and Vapours, not only into the Hypp, the Hyppos, and the Hyppocons; but subdivides these Divisions into the Markambles, the Moon-palls, the Strong-Fives, and the Hockogrokles.” – Physician Nicholas Robinson, 1732

Free me of the Hockogrokles…. isn’t that what we all wish when the sadness hits again, no matter how justified the emotion is in response to external events?

I came across these inventive nomenclatures for depression when reading up on an 18th century, English woman poet yesterday, Anne Finch, who took the topic of melancholy, solidly in male hands at the time, and ran with it. Wrong word, she didn’t run with it, she inspected it, talked to it, turned it inside out, related it to science, and, in the end, seemingly threw up her hands in resignation and surrender.

I had dug out her poem on melancholy in honor of my beloved father, whose Jahrzeit is this weekend – he died 18 years ago – and it still makes me deeply sad. Prone to depression, he nonetheless taught us how to put up a fight even under the severest of circumstances, resisting the temptation to roll over and accept our lot in life.

Finch had her own share of difficulties in her lifetime, including a predisposition for depression, perhaps even bipolar disease. She was exposed to political storms that threw her and her husband from comfortable positions in monarchic circles into an unsecured existence, when they distanced themselves from the ascendence of William and Mary, after the revolution of 1688 deposed King James.

She was also keenly aware that women writers in her times were at best tolerated, mostly ignored, and at worst ridiculed. To pick up a topic like melancholia, firmly seen as a gendered disease reserved for highly sensitive, artistic or creative men, required strength. As you know, I value strong women. As I value realism, which Finch’s poetry exhibits in spades: she tries all kinds of things, friendship in particular, poetry, what have you and just can’t get a grip on the darkness experienced with bouts of serious depression. She describes as it IS, not as it should be, well anticipating how women will be labeled as hypochondriacs or hysterics down the historical pipeline. I also value finding voices that tell of shared experiences, even or particularly if centuries apart. It never hurts to remind ourselves that we are not the first or only ones going through difficult times.

I am not an expert on poetry, as I have stated repeatedly, and I have no clue if her poems attack the patriarchy, or create religious parallels to the world as perceived or any of the many other things written about her. I just read the poem and multiple things rang true, hundreds of years later.

Ardelia, who Finch uses as a pseudonym, seems to be a victim of melancholy, unable to shake it across the years. But she also calls on it not just as an adversary, but a power source, addressing it as a challenger, gaining intermittent control over the sadness by being able to harness some creativity from it. I think this is the push me-pull me dichotomy that I have tried to write about this week in various ways for our very own times of sadness.

You cannot or should not pretend the sadness doesn’t exist. It does not help to favor rejection of it over acceptance; however, acceptance cannot mean to be engulfed, allowing ourselves to be paralyzed. There is such a thing as resistance, claimed for both the private and the public sphere. And creativity, art – in Ardelia’s case poetry – is a form of resistance. The fact that she in the end, declares resistance as futile, cannot mean that we should.

Why do I say that? Because some 300 years later, science has enabled us to treat the clinical forms of depression, the endogenous ones due to the physiological disfunction in the neurotransmitter systems, depression that paralyzes indeed. Medications and/or ECT treatments can work wonders, particularly for people living with bipolar disease.

The exogenous forms of depression, the sadness many of us experience in reaction to the events in our lives and the world, are the ones that serve a more healing function and also can be harnessed. The form of resistance will be, has to be a personal choice – your’ baking bread to my montages to her going to demonstrations to his meditation to their cognitive therapy. Anything that works to make our dusky, sullen foe into a companion, not an oppressor.

“Ardelia to Melancholy”

by Anne Finch

At last, my old inveterate foe, No opposition shalt thou know. Since I, by struggling can obtain Nothing, but encrease of pain,

I will att last, no more do soe,
Tho’ I confesse, I have apply’d
Sweet mirth, and musick, and have try’d A thousand other arts beside,
To drive thee from my darken’d breast,

Thou, who hast banish’d all my rest.
But, though sometimes, a short repreive they gave, Unable they, and far too weak, to save;
All arts to quell, did but augment thy force,
As rivers check’d, break with a wilder course.

Freindship, I to my heart have laid,
Freindship, th’ applauded sov’rain aid,
And thought that charm so strong wou’d prove, As to compell thee, to remove;
And to myself, I boasting said,

Now I a conqu’rer sure shall be, The end of all my conflicts, see, And noble tryumph, wait on me; My dusky, sullen foe, will sure N’er this united charge endure.

But leaning on this reed, ev’n whilst I spoke
It pierc’d my hand, and into peices broke.
Still, some new object, or new int’rest came
And loos’d the bonds, and quite disolv’d the claim.

These failing, I invok’d a Muse,

And Poetry wou’d often use,

To guard me from thy Tyrant pow’r; And to oppose thee ev’ry hour
New troops of fancy’s, did I chuse. Alas! in vain, for all agree

To yeild me Captive up to thee,
And heav’n, alone, can sett me free.
Thou, through my life, wilt with me goe, And make ye passage, sad, and slow.
All, that cou’d ere thy ill gott rule, invade,

Their useless arms, before thy feet have laid;
The Fort is thine, now ruin’d all within,
Whilst by decays without, thy Conquest too is seen.

(From: Anne Finch: The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea. Ed. Myra Reynolds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903.)

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Photographs today are a few samples of a new series of montages I have been working on in response to the loss of life incurred by the pandemic and the ways it has been catastrophically mismanaged. Setting Sail hopes that there is someone waiting on the distant shores to greet the departed and help them rest in power. I like to think my father, who’s dream it was to sail the seas to escape the narrow confines of true poverty in his childhood, is among the welcoming committee.

More of the series can be seen here.

And here is a musical antidote to the Markambles and Moon-Palls…