What an existence, to be a satellite forever. A supporting character. Something to look at. Not for too long though, or you go crazy. Stare at a satellite for too long and you might try to occupy its perspective, then you go mad because the task is impossible. A satellite has no perspective. That would be a view from nowhere, from nothing. If you are a moon you’d better not stare at yourself for too long. Smash those 40x magnifying mirrors! Nobody needs to see the slippery slopes down the volcanic sides of their own pores, greased with igneous comedogenes, poised to make mountains out of melasma. How a landscape is formed. How texture develops on a face, like a photograph in a tray.
And then a moon shines when things are supposed to be dark. Keeps people awake who need to be asleep, need to not see what’s happening, need to forget. This is life or death, like I said. A whole moon, a moon fully itself, is dangerous—we made legends about this, full of fear, and we were right to do so.
So let’s say there is no down. We like to think time at least has a direction, but maybe future is nothing too when you zoom out far enough. I’m experimenting on myself here in the best traditions of medical science and I might die of it. A bit of carbon can be compressed so hard that it splits the light apart. Look what’s inside. And if we keep pressing? Bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end? And if we do, does that have to mean Hyde dies as well? Can Borges kill off his Borges but not his I? And if there’s another medium in which an I might survive, a substance this I can breathe after all the air runs out…well, well. If the experimentum crucis comes, don’t help me. I don’t need help.
I’m not saying there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m saying there’s no such thing.
—
The new psychiatrist Jeff had referred me to was a specialist in psychosis and schizoaffective disorders, as it turned out. I googled her.
I probably should have gone to see her, but I had another conference coming up. Actually I should probably have gone to see my GP first, because my body has been feeling like hell on toast for the last month. But I was scared to see either of them. And this particular conference is kind of a big deal. So I just came out here to Toronto. It’s been twenty years now since Deb disappeared. Just a couple of days, this trip. I’ll see the doctors when I get home. Did I break out of my path, coming here? Or was this just part of it, leading me back around, back into orbit? Is that even a fair question? Is there a difference?
Well, unlike a straight line, a circle can have apotropaic magic. Or at least it has an inside, which means there’s something to be safe in. Safe or trapped. The difference is one of interpretation. Safe and trapped. There, I fixed it. There’s a crazy lady called Molly in a film I liked as a kid. She says, Crazy is good. Crazy keeps ’em away. The film is called Life Stinks. It’s very funny.
We do love us some crazy lady characters. Crazy ladies on stage, in stories, on TV, on the big screen, in myths and legends. Crazy lady lit. It’s a whole genre. We can’t get enough of crazy ladies. As long as they’re not real. Take Cassandra, now there’s a crazy lady for you. You know why she went crazy? She could predict the future. Saw the fall of Troy coming, and she tried to do the right thing and warn everyone, and nobody believed her. Instead they called her names, shitty shitty names. And you know why nobody believed her? It was a curse: Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy but then he cursed her to never be believed. And you can guess why he cursed her, of course. Here’s the Latin for it: quam Apollo cum vellet comprimere, corporis copiam non fecit. That’s Hyginus’s version anyway, in his Fabulae. The Hygienic stories.
It means when he wanted to get with her, she would not “supply” her body, “provide” it, make it “plentiful.” Isn’t translation fun? Here’s the kicker: Cassandra had a twin brother called Helenus, and he could predict the future too. Only when he did it, people believed him. What we have right there is an origin story, a myth to explain why something exists. This particular myth explains what philosophers are now trying to label a “credibility deficit,” which is a fancy way of saying women just don’t seem like they would know what they are talking about. That, plus of course the ancient tradition of pulling out all your shittiest names for women who hit too close to home. Accuracy is a serious offence. Sometimes capital.
And what did we take from this story? The Cassandra complex. More language—another label for another kind of crazy. Crazy will be named for a woman or the moon, depending on whether the danger turns inwards or outwards.
Something else we’ve lost in translation: the possibility that mad words, dirty words, have more in them than hygienic words. That Cassandra, the Pythia, even the Maenads might be worth a listen. That the story sanitized—the story made sane—might be wrong. In some versions of the story Nyx was there at the beginning, and even the day was her daughter. Hyginus decided Chaos ought to come first—emptiness, void. Nyx is too pregnant for some people.
Isaac Newton went crazy, too.
