Earth
There was a strange, sad music to his howling. His voice carried the length of the train when he shouted that his sciatica was shooting down his leg. Sciatica, though, was only his way of naming what Hippocrates diagnosed as black bile pooling in the spleen, what ancient Greeks imagined lay at the root of all melancholy. Yet even had he explained this, no one would have listened. The four humors are too long lost to science. He smelled too badly.
The train left Manhattan for Queens, and he stuck a finger in his ear. His face became briefly bathed in the erotic as he wriggled his finger more deeply in his ear’s waxen tunnel, as he began living some of his body’s private life in public. His finger left its cavern, and his hand reached for his shoulder blade, for a shape grown sharp through hunger.
Sunday afternoon and the train was crowded. Half the passengers were standing. The man’s legs started twitching as he begged for a seat. As everyone did their best to ignore him, he stared at my knees, likely noticing that both are scar-ridden. Our eyes met, and a part of me felt he needed a stranger not looking away, yet also not staring. I felt he needed to be seen with either love or clarity.
He called out my husband for his seat. My husband sighed, then stood and signaled me to stand beside him. I shook my head and stayed seated even as the man sat down, and the woman on my husband’s other side left, and her place stayed empty. The man was calm now, however. He kept silent. He rested his elbows against his thighs’ slim padding as his spleen began leaching bile blackened by memory. The tattoo of stars encircling his upper arm like a bracelet stopped convulsing in its skin, which was mottled and greasy.
I have seen only one photograph of my maternal grandfather, a photograph that for all I know has since been burnt, or has vanished. Something in this homeless man’s features reminded me of those of my grandfather. I know very little about him except that he was born into wealth and privilege, and that he last saw my mom on her fourth birthday, not long after my grandmother divorced him. When I was older, and saw his features appear, softened, in my mom’s face, I heard her mention that he’d become a pilot after going to West Point. Of their brief marriage, my grandmother said only that he’d spent the bulk of it flying. Until I saw the man on the train who sat beside me, I had never thought anything more about someone I never had a chance of meeting.
Yet while he was living, not long after his wife became pregnant, he found freedom, and other women, in the South China Sea. Poking the nose of his plane through vast cloud formations while still young and handsome, he later died of unknown reasons while my mom was still in college. Wanting to fly again in his next incarnation, riding the subway has now become his only option.
He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t howl again once his sciatica was soothed by sitting. I watched Manhattan’s skyline recede as the subway left the underground’s darkness for the sun still blanketing the city. To keep black bile from pooling, to prevent melancholy from overwhelming the system, Hippocrates advised staying in motion. Perhaps without any conscious awareness, this man was obeying ancient wisdom.
He didn’t recognize his granddaughter, I was certain. Trying to avoid inhaling the odors that clung to his clothing, I breathed as slowly as I could manage. I breathed from my abdomen, then felt myself lighten. I closed my eyes and filled my lungs until they emptied themselves again, until I became briefly conscious of my own skies within, until the crowded subway car felt more spacious. The man stayed still and silent. Sitting beside someone like me, who was slowly becoming more cloud than person, likely appeased the old pilot in him.
When blood is drawn from the body, a dark clot soon settles at the bottom of the vial it is stored in. Some soil looks lodged within the liquid. This is thought to be the basis for the black bile Hippocrates imagined building in the spleen. According to ancient Greek medicine, black bile is blood’s densest humor, one of four corresponding to the four elements that were once considered the basis of all existence. Every human body contains black and yellow bile, as well as blood and phlegm. While phlegm contains mostly water, and fire lends yellow bile its coloring, black bile is weighted with the earth’s darkness. Health depends on keeping these four humors in balance.
Some melancholy — some black bile to keep the yellow’s heat from turning the skin jaundiced — is needed. Without some earth in our systems, every one of us would become pilots. The planet would be left unattended. We would live out our lives among clouds grown large as elephants, floating among the largest of animal species, only to change into another species far too quickly. We would too soon inhabit a heaven, ascending to a cloud realm I am far from certain is really heaven.
After my husband and I stepped off the train, I picked a white tulip at the airport’s entrance. I pulled the flower out with its roots still connected to its stem. My husband shot me a look, asking why I did this. I said I had no reason, acknowledging I simply had an impulse, and I followed it. I had nowhere to put this flower, whose roots and the dirt attached to them seemed excessive. Before we walked inside, I dropped the tulip onto another flower bed. I dropped it, and the blossom flattened against soil in which several others were planted. Its roots wriggled toward the sky. They were straggling toward clouds, indifferent to everything taking place below them. Brown roots pulled from the ground, too, are homeless. Seeing the clouds in motion likely does nothing for them.
Water
When two people stand or sit beside each other without speaking, sometimes too much happens for either one to want to know each other more closely. Inhabiting their separate skins, parts of them go swimming. The water inside them begins rippling, then leaps over stones it also smoothens. Strangers as much to each other as everyone else standing dry around them, they alone share the sense that they are reaching their arms forward into air, wafting in waves pulled toward no ocean.
However long it had been since the homeless man had performed any ablutions, he may still have been born in water. His mother may still have birthed him in a pool in which he paddled with fingers too small to yet grasp anything solid. Outside the pool, life ever afterward may have seemed less fluid. Deep within his spleen, he may have felt something had gone wrong with him.
At LaGuardia, we were returning to Chicago after a long weekend. My husband pointed to my skirt, which was whitened now in blotches. He shook his head at stains resembling toothpaste patches. He said the man’s pants were coated with bird shit, and I had sat too close to him. I didn’t have to be clean to fly so long as I had my ticket, I told him. I could sit throughout the flight as if I were as rooted in the earth as a plant, as a young tulip.
Of all the body’s organs, the spleen is the only one commonly compared to a paperback in its weight and size. I read this once in a book bound in hardcover and found this description consoling, the fact that I might hold it in my hand and read it while flying over the ocean. Only what the paperback might say as to suffering’s origin — why some earth in the blood weights us with unhappiness — these books keep silent.
A few months after my mom was buried not far from the small Indiana town she was born in, my husband and I flew to the French Riviera, where I sunbathed topless, and no one noticed because every other woman enjoyed the same freedom. Each day in the bathroom of the room we rented, I found ants plundering the bristles of my toothbrush. I rinsed it in hot water that left some black limbs in. I went swimming in the cool Mediterranean.
A man we met bicycling suggested that we visit a village known for being the origin of the Sorgue de Vaucluse, the most sparkling river in the region. Although the river seems to spring from beneath a cliff, its true origin remains mysterious. Hundreds of explorers spanning centuries have created conduits to find its genesis. Hundreds of divers have swum deep down below the earth’s surface, yet none have found it.
Still it is a river flowing like all others into an ocean. Its wellspring may be buried beyond finding, but it still produces water so clear it seemed to me to be a living presence. This is what comes of water emerging from such pure darkness. Water this shining, water resembling joy made fluid, is what comes of contact with melancholy so concentrated it has gone into hiding.
Late afternoon, and my husband and I ordered fish from a café overlooking the water flowing past. I bit into the fish, forgetting restaurants in Europe do not debone them, and swallowed a few bones in the process. I swallowed them and almost stopped breathing for a moment. I gasped for air and suddenly knew for certain that my mom had been born again as water this shimmering. She had decayed into the earth, then swum from out the soil with the same speed as a train leaving its underground labyrinth.
I spat out a few bones into my napkin. With my fork, I peeled back the flesh of the fish more carefully from its skeleton and realized she had become the one element she was often missing to rectify the imbalance. I thought of her taking baths on only a weekly basis, of her going to work unwashed nearly every morning. She also drank very little water, surviving largely on diet cola and coffee. After her divorce, my grandmother became an alcoholic. Much of my mom’s hygiene went unattended. She once confessed she often went to school wearing unlaundered clothing. Other children told her that she smelled badly. Had she been with me in New York City, she may have minded the odor of the man on the train less than the average person. She may have minded sitting beside him even less than I did.
Her body’s cleanliness was always less important to her than keeping clean within, than holding no resentment. Even as a child, she told me she was conscious of the need to forgive both her parents, to keep an inner space empty, keep her inner skies from clouding. I believe it is this that allowed her to love my sister and me freely, to give us nightly baths and regularly wash our clothing. When I attempt to describe her goodness, I am aware people rarely believe me. I have abandoned attempting to describe her for this reason.
Still, she laughed extremely easily. She was very pretty without trying to be. In this and other ways, I hardly resemble her. I struggle instead to sit quietly while my spleen leaches black fluid into my stomach and intestines. I often feel I am burning rather than flowing like pellucid water through a French village. In addition to having eyes not brown but green, her build was also slighter. Her face had a far more delicate bone structure. She herself was not a farmer’s but a colonel’s daughter.
Air
Cloud elephants bewitched those living in the Himalayas in long-gone centuries. These vaporous beings seemed to float, above ground made cooler by their passing. Yet only those who take the time to notice the sky can ever witness them. See something moving slowly, as breath exhaled from the abdomen, and melancholy lessens. The earth surrenders some of its reality to the heavens.
One of the friends I visited in New York City had recently moved to a new apartment, one where her young son’s bedroom leads out onto a terrace. One of his walls is made of glass, which slides back to reveal a wooden floor covered by a Turkish carpet, and with only sky for ceiling. Late into the evening, my friend and I sat across from her flower boxes, drinking wine and reminiscing about when we were much younger women. She asked me whether I remembered when we used to ride in the bed of my dad’s pickup to the lake where my parents liked to waterski. I smiled and nodded.
The first time I invited her to this lake in the middle of Midwestern corn country, I told her we would ride on lawn chairs in the pickup’s bed during what was an hour’s drive. I had said it to her as if this made us women of leisure, as if we were leaving for a holiday on the Mediterranean. My enthusiasm for this ease of living, she said, had touched her.
When we were done waterskiing and swimming, we rode home in the truck’s bed again. On the way back, we folded the lawn chairs down. We lay on beach towels against the truck’s steel rivets, which were hard and uncomfortable, she remembered. This way, however, we could see the clouds changing. We could see their white tails lengthen, then blossom.
As my friend recounted this, she looked up toward a skyline littered with too many lights from too many apartments for there to be any stars left. Though there was no wind on her terrace, her face looked windswept. I kept silent but remembered I had enjoyed this part of the trip less than she did. I had liked sitting in lawn chairs rather than lying on towels and shivering, looking up at clouds continually shape-shifting so I could never know whether any animals actually inhabited them.
I finished my wine and told her I was growing chilly on the terrace. We went inside and watched aerial shots of American landscapes filmed from airplanes and set to classical music. We watched the channel to which the TV was already set without changing it. We watched Yellowstone’s geysers, then more of Montana’s big sky country, a place neither she nor I have ever been, and a place she acknowledged she had no desire to visit. This did not surprise me given that she herself is airy, and all things must be kept in balance. Only I said I might someday want to see a place so expansive. I said this without being sure if I meant it. Whenever I fly places, I rarely turn my head from my paperback before a plane has landed.
Doctors have considered the spleen a vestigial organ for centuries, simply because we can live without it. They have seen little use for melancholy, having long dismissed Hippocrates’ wisdom. The list of organs we are thought to have evolved beyond as a species, while retaining them, was once much longer than at present. Slowly, we have worked our way through the list, discovering that we need a good number of them. The myth persisted because we demanded far less of our bodies until we began living to older ages.
It was not until 2007 that scientists confirmed the spleen can help heal a heart that’s nearly broken. The spleen’s white blood cells alone, they discovered through several studies, can devour dying heart tissue, can keep this tissue from contaminating what remains healthy. The white lurking inside the bile’s blackness assists the heart in recovering from disease that otherwise could kill the organism. Only the healing that comes of melancholy allows this. The heart can love again only through some infiltration of sadness.
Live only to your forties, however, and heart disease is usually not a problem. No one living at the time of Hippocrates survived long enough to discover the healing properties of a melancholy organ. No one then read books made from paper, only vellum. No one in ancient times had the luxury of forgetting life’s impermanence. I have rarely seen animals in clouds for this reason — one species morphs into another too quickly. A cloud loses a tail one moment, and the next the curl of an eyelash becomes a larger appendage.
Yet elephants are clouds, and clouds are elephants in essence. Inside a Chelsea museum dedicated to the art of the Himalayas, a piece of metalwork from Nepal depicts an elephant whose tail widens into a flower of its same silver coloring. The plaque beside it claims this rain blossom was once part of a Sanskrit text in which a king and his subjects debated whether elephants were still elephants once their bodies filled with air and floated. Were elephants still animals once they became clouds? The kingdom considered this. On the plaque, however, no answer to the question was provided.
Once the monsoon comes to Nepal, elephants begin to dance. This is fact, not legend. Relief washes over them as the heat comes to an end. They lift their heavy legs and flap their ears while blowing water out their trunks. At each change of season, this happens regardless of what occupies their counterparts in the heavens. The rains are something earthly elephants have reason to celebrate, as they are unable to sweat through their leathery skin, as splashing themselves with mud remains their only way of self-cooling. Elephants know as well as anyone there can be too much heat, too much of any one element.
And as the rains come and elephants bathe again, they appear whiter than they had been. Shorn of mud baked into their pores over too many hot months, they briefly look as incandescent as any cloud with the sun flashing behind it. Walking through jungle and forest, they seem to shimmer for a moment. Flattening the grass beneath their feet, they seem to flow as gently as a river, filling their lungs with air too thin to remain long inside them.
Elephants tend to move slowly. Cloud elephants seem to do the same until you study them. Only then do you see they don’t live long enough for us to recognize them as a species. They reveal no internal organs once you slice them open. They never sicken with disease when one of the body’s four humors is lacking or excessive, throwing the entire system off balance. When their sciatica flairs with pain, they have no need for sitting. Instead, they thin, then vanish.
Fire
Because we lived as far from town as we did, more than ten miles from the nearest post office or grocery, my mom burnt our garbage, on most evenings, after we’d eaten. She walked softly past my bedroom, barefoot throughout summer, spring, and early autumn. She padded past where my bed lay level with the windowsill. I often read while looking out onto our orchard and garden. At the orchard’s end was a cylinder of fence, inside which we tossed anything we no longer needed. My mom lit a small fire there as the sun was setting.
My parents never lit any logs inside our fireplace, however. Doing so, they said, made the electric heat escape out the flue. They said the heat from a fire was inefficient when I voiced my desire to see flames rising toward the heavens. I therefore equated fire less with heat than as a means of ridding ourselves of what we were done with, of keeping our house and yard from smelling badly. And fire may still rid the earth of garbage, but neither this nor any other element can bring back something that has vanished. Not a single one of them can make a river turn back into a woman.
Our last afternoon in New York City, before I met my grandfather’s reincarnation on the subway, I saw a man melting. A man wearing only white underwear and pinching his belly stood on the High Line and reached his arms out in what appeared both pain and longing. Walking beside my husband, I laughed and pointed. He stood so still, and yet looked impassioned, desperate for either love or clarity. I laughed and pointed, because he was revealing so much of his body.
The man was made of wax, however, something I saw only once I came closer. Seeing I had mistaken him for a human, my husband laughed yet more loudly, because this is a pattern with me. Because I want everything to be living. Because instead of death’s resolution I believe in the four elements recombining themselves, into another river or person.
If the man standing there, nearly naked, had a wick on the crown of his head, I could have lit him. The sun, though, was doing some of the work for me, diminishing both his stature and his longing. Still, with a lighter and a wick, I could have shortened his lifespan, while bringing more light to the gloaming. I could have watched fire burn from his head, which looked too cleanly shaven for hair to have ever grown there.
Each time my mom burnt our garbage, I realize now she must have burnt some of herself along with it. She must have burnt the farthest stretch of her fingertips. She must have burnt some of the cilia lining her nostrils, and then her elbows until they became rounded. She burnt little by little of herself, small parts of her neck and her kidneys and her wrists. Her navel and her pubis and finally her spleen were incinerated. Her heart dried to ashes. Because my resemblance to her is so slight, because she was so slim and pretty, I will likely live longer than necessary while she did the opposite.
Hippocrates’ theory of the four humors has no basis in modern science. Yet, if melancholy does not reside within the body, does not inhabit a particular organ, it must still live somewhere. No one disputes its existence. Regardless of its origin, it still affects us, some more than others. If it does not arise from one of the four humors, it falls on some of us as heavily as the monsoon that sets the elephants dancing.
Inside LaGuardia, after my husband and I passed through security, a man brushed past me. Young and handsome, he was nearly running as he went in our opposite direction. He carried a bouquet of red roses. Though symbolic of love burning inside him, in truth they were dying since the moment someone plucked them. My husband saw me watching him and sniffed, asking me if roses were something I wanted. We were traveling, I responded. Even if he bought me any, I had no vase to put them in. I reminded him I had already killed a tulip.
Closer to our gate, another man stood behind a table asking everyone who passed him to buy vitamins. Each bottle had a picture of a celebrity, a woman who appeared ageless. Only I do not want to be this woman. I do not even want my blood and phlegm and yellow bile to put the black bile in balance. All I want is to continue burning until I am finished. Still looking towards the vitamins, I also realized I was carrying some of the stench of the man who had sat beside me on the subway. I became conscious of the need to burn the garbage, something likely not allowed in New York City.
Although I looked away from the man selling the vitamins, he still shouted to me to try them. He said they acted as a life extension while the man carrying the roses rushed past me, brushing my side again, this time approaching from behind, only more quickly. There was something he had either left or forgotten. Or perhaps he only wanted to fly to another city, and visit another woman. His roses were already wilting, something I could see from their edges, while the vitamin salesman kept trying to attract my attention. Try again, I turned and told him, knowing he had no way of knowing what I meant. Try and breathe and open the skies within. Watch the elephants’ tails blossom.
