The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel
This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.
Dear fellow sufferers,
Why, in this moment of compressed time and a feeling of vertigo, do I dwell in the dense pages of a seventeenth-century compendium of sadness? If it is, in part, to turn away from the day’s edicts, it is also to begin to come to terms with an agony I try to bury, and one that surfaces, more insistently, among people I love. Robert Burton’s taxonomy gives me a language for both psychic weather and civic climates that choreograph appearance, lingering, and withdrawal.
Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy was published in 1621 and was then revised across two decades and five separate editions under the pseudonym “Democritus Junior.” Somewhere between a medical textbook and a sufferer’s epistemological investigation, it is divided into three “Partitions”: causes and kinds, cures, and particular species (especially love- and religious-melancholy) each ramifying into sections, members, and subsections. It is a pastiche of authorities, relying heavily on Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and Democritus, spliced with recorded case histories and direct observation. In Burton’s day, melancholy was associated with fear, sudden frights, phobias, and terrors; a physiology that is uncannily current if we read his remedies as practices requiring slower, deliberate attention. The Anatomy can be read as a proto manual for keeping community intact in a time and place when community can become quite unstable, unravelling and reforming in a moment. I want to know what happens when Burton’s manual is read aslant, as if its partitions and regimens were instructions for arranging institutions alongside different forms of social life, a kind of early modern score for the choreography of a city that is trying to balance its humors.
In 2007 I was building a series of photographs under the title “Anatomy of Melancholy” based on specific sites of melancholy: the cold, desolate spaces of deep remorse such as the Titan missile silos and other Cold-War-era leftovers. This world-building imagines all the humors as a balancing act managed by the curatorial organizations that make up a city. As the government here embarks on a new phase of nuclear testing and as public space continues to be under attack, I was compelled to revisit this idea. Returning to Burton, I now read those earlier photographs as sketches for a wider humoral cartography, one in which missile silos, museums, gardens, and shelters all become organs in a melancholic body politic whose future is still, precariously, in motion.
Burton runs through causes, kinds, symptoms, and prognostics of melancholy, from supernatural forces to internal complexion and external air, diet, exercise, sleep, and passions. The non-natural causes he names remain with us: atmospheres suffocated by smoke and artificial light; labor is often isolating while intimacies are digital, producing a glut of information about the psyche and a famine of real world connection. The collapse of a public sphere that might hold us together feeds “a politics of inevitability”: nothing will ever change, so why bother.
While relying on Hippocratic notions of four humors and temperaments, and on Aristotle’s understanding of mesotēs—the balance of opposite energies—Burton recognizes a humoral theory that is already spatial: bodies and climates leak into one another; temperament is co-produced by architecture, weather, and labor. If melancholy is perennial, then our task (yours and mine) is to imagine a civic temperament that can meet it: a choreography of a humoral city that absorbs melancholic states instead of exiling them to the clinic or to the screen.
If there were a missing fourth partition, a set of cures for a community or city, I would ask with you: Where can devotion be embodied without coercion? Where can publics cultivate rituals of mutual recognition? When gathering in public narrows, how might architectures and programs lengthen our breath? For a contemporary reader, my invitation is to translate medieval cures into a curatorial langue for civic life, an index of what a body politic needs to stay balanced and flexible. The humoral city understands space as an active participant in psychic equilibrium, capable of aggravating or easing melancholic states.
In the second partition, Burton’s cures focus on everything from non-natural ones to surgeries; from walks in gardens to potions from plants. Burton promotes regimens of better air, a calibrated diet, sufficient sleep and waking, convivial sociability, moderated study and labor, evacuation and repletion, and the passions of the mind. Here, references to Michel de Montaigne claim the “power of imagination and passions of the mind as a way forward”—a force that in itself can sicken or heal us. Diversions, from time for play to watching theater, counsel and friendship, and a number of environmental therapeutics from water and orchards to cloisters and libraries precede physic (pharmacological and surgical interventions), spiritual and pastoral care. Taken together, these regimens read like a plan for a city of gradients, a civic design brief organized around dose, proportion, and seasonal adjustment instead of efficiency alone. He argues that the same tools that cure the scholar may frenzy the sanguine. In the regimen cures of the non-naturals, medicines were used as either alterative (strengthening) or purgative (voiding). A famous remedy for melancholy, the hellebore plant is a flowering evergreen with purging properties. It was used for a wide variety of ailments (including leprosy and palsy) but above all it was associated with treating melancholy, insanity, and delirium. (Note: I must re-introduce the hellebore to my garden.) Surgeries also played a role in curing melancholy. To remedy the excess of sanguine (blood), some physicians bled, cupped, or cautiously applied leeches. These therapeutics thus imply a built environment that scaffolds healthy regimens and solidarities. To design for love and faith can be to design for belonging, awe, and mourning as these are capacities of civicness in themselves.