Muse Redux @philosphicalwhimsy - Tumblr Blog

Tove Ditlevsen, from a poem featured in There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die: Selected Poems

A Peruvian elongated skull with metal surgically implanted after suffering injury, The broken bone surrounding the repair is tightly fused together indicating it was a successful surgery. (Paracas - peru)

funeral

In melancholia, the body loses the lightness, fluidity, and mobility of a medium and turns into a heavy, solid body that puts up resistance to the subject's intentions and impulses. Its materiality, density, and weight, otherwise suspended and unnoticed in everyday performance, now come to the fore and are felt painfully. Thus, melancholia may be described as a reification or corporealization of the lived body. The melancholic patient experiences a local or general oppression, anxiety, and rigidity (e.g., a feeling of an armor vest or tire around the chest, lump in the throat, or pressure in the head). Sense perception and movement are weakened and finally walled in by this rigidity, which is visible in the patient's gaze, face, or gestures. To act, patients have to overcome their psychomotor inhibition and push themselves to even minor tasks, compensating by an effort of will what the body does not have by itself any more. With growing inhibition, their sensorimotor space is restricted to the nearest environment, culminating in depressive stupor.

Thomas Fuchs, "Corporealized and Disembodied Minds: A Phenomenological View of the Body in Melancholia and Schizophrenia"