ray

Descartes’ Traité des Passions (1649) defines lovesickness as a melting process, an embodiment in which love (l’amour de bienveillance) and lust (concupiscence) dissolve. […] ‘During this sorrowful state the pulse is weak and torpid, because a band of ice constricts the heart, slowing down the blood, as manifested by the pale countenance and the calling forth of tears and moaning. When awake the love struck dreams of the beloved, and, commensurate to the inability to satisfy the desire, a profound frustration is perceived as an illness.’ (Petterson 2000: 266-75)

The first girl in the village to fall in love walked straight into the lake and never came back out.

But yellow irises grew where she had stepped each year, marking a clear golden line to the centre in memoriam.

The second girl in the village to fall in love sought out the tallest tree and climbed it, wasting away into its wood and leaving only red leather shoes and a hair ribbon.

The third girl in the village to fall in love swore she wouldn’t but did and woke up in a desert she had never seen before, cursing.

At this point, love was decreed dangerous and a condition to be avoided, but nevertheless a fourth girl was discovered eating dirt in the woods and had to be sent home to photosynthesise.

A fifth girl cast her feet in mud, and as it dried under the sun each whorl of skin was revealed in burnt umber,

but the girl was gone.

The sixth went straight to the devil and smashed every window in the church, til shards of glass in blue, green and scarlet glinted on the floor and her fists bled into the undergrowth.

The seventh and luckiest saw an orchid sprout under her arm and hid it, pulling thick knit socks over the daisies which began to wind around her ankles. She kept her secret away from prying eyes for a while, but when she coughed out poppies during dinner she arose concern.

She began to sit only in the garden, embroidering with delicate roots on flat, dark leaves.

When grass wound its way up her calves, she stayed there nevertheless, and her heart began to pump water.

When she blinked, golden dust fell from her honeysuckle eyelashes,

And in the wind, her hair detangled into weeping willow.

Lovesickness, In search of a discarded disease by Janus Oomen, Woet L. Gianotten

Bright Star - John Keats (sonnet)

'And so live ever - or else, swoon to death'

In a society as relatively repressed as Victorian Britain, floriography must have presented tantalizing possibility. One could say anything without saying anything at all. Rather involved love affairs could take place almost entirely with flowers.

Uncanny Ecology, Timothy Morton

‘nature’s processes are uncanny’ – Morton talks about a time lapse of a flower growing, as though bursting into flame, and then dying – sped up, we become aware of the strangeness, the unnaturalness of nature – plants do move.

Nature's Calling: The Evolution of Sexuality and Poetic Imagination in John Keat's 1817-1820 Poetry

‘Keats […] resists the masculine conception of identity: he imagines a sense of self that is fluid and “[o]verflows itself, melts into the Other, that becomes the Other”.

Keats in a letter to Fanny Brawne: ‘the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy’ (Norton Critical, p.517)

[love mutates the biology of lovers – air becomes poisonous]

p.518 ‘I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated from you. For all this, I am averse to seeing you – I cannot bear flashes of light and return into my gloom again’

Fanny Brawne (in Bright Star, dir. Jane Campion, 2009) 'When I don’t hear from him, it’s as if I’ve died, as if the air is sucked out from my lungs and I’m left desolate. But when I receive a letter, I know my world is real’.

Morton talks about disintegration as well as evolution – naturalness is an illusion, what about the unaesthetic, horror, disgust – and in that regard, what about the love that destroys us in its presence and its absence?

to get closer to the earth,
you have to plunge your fingers downwards,
but carefully.

roots, tendril thin like golden hairs,
are breakable,
and gently –

gently, untangle, past their plaits
to deep, cool soil.

now eat it.

!!! MIRACLE CURE FOR LOVESICKNESS!!! CLICK HERE!!!

A gardener told me some plants move
But I could not believe it
Til me and Hannah Hunt saw
Crawling vines and weeping willows
As we made our way from Providence to Phoenix

Vampire Weekend - Hannah Hunt (mp3 - full song)

In her letters, Mansfield speaks of ‘‘Carnation’’ as ‘‘a sort of glimpse of adolescent emotion’’ and ‘‘delicate.’’ [...] the story tells of youthful sexual awakening patterned as a flowering, a blooming; of female voyeur- ism [...] It subtly conveys the state of teenage girlhood: a confusing mixture of sexual knowingness, typified by the carnation and by Eve, alongside the innocent and incipient erotic pleasure of Katie watching the man pumping.

There is also a hint of cruelty in ‘‘Carnation,’’[...] it resides within the extreme banality of the images: the bare-chested, water-splashed male torso, the teenage girl ‘‘snuffing’’ and ‘‘twirling’’ a carnation flower, laying it against her friend’s cheek and lips, tickling her with it, eventually, usually (although not this time), pulling it to pieces slowly and devouring it.*

Mansfield, I believe, is giving us something to laugh at, but the laughter is uncomfortable, like the girls’ for M. Hugo, because we are dimly aware that we are being made to laugh at ourselves, at our often limited repertoire for the rep- resentation of arousal and eroticism. ‘‘Carnation’’ comically affirms the observation of Francine Tolron that in Mansfield’s stories flora often ‘‘provides a short-lived ecstasy.’’ Say it with flowers.

(Jennifer Cooke (2008) Katherine Mansfield's Ventriloquism and the Faux-Ecstasy of All Manner of Flora, Literature Interpretation Theory, 19:1, 79-94)

Katherine Mansfield - 'Carnation'

On those hot days Eve—curious Eve— always carried a flower. She snuffed it and snuffed it, twirled it in her fingers, laid it against her cheek, held it to her lips, tickled Katie's neck with it, and ended, finally, by pulling it to pieces and eating it, petal by petal.

[…]

Hugo-Wugo's voice began to warm, to deepen, to gather together, to swing, to rise— somehow or other to keep time with the man outside (Oh, the scent of Eve's carnation!) until they became one great rushing, rising, triumphant thing, bursting into light, and then—
The whole room broke into pieces.
“Keep it, dearest,” said Eve. “Souvenir tendre,” and she popped the carnation down the front of Katie's blouse.

*Cooke seems to read the story as concerned with heterosexual desire which I think is....untrue

Of all consumptive artists, John Keats (1795-1821), an English medic turned poet, is most often associated with the disease. […] His final year frustrated by tragic love, declining health, departure for Italy, and eventual death represents the archetypical decline of a Romantic consumptive.
[...]
Although TB didn't end with the 19th century, its link to a romantic ideal did. There was nothing noble or lofty when confronted by the stark truth of noxious germs gnawing away inside their victims to cause the disease once known as scrofula.