Annunciation in a Melian Boat

March 2018.  A show at the Mark Miller Gallery in New York with the catchy title Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women.  2015.  Has to do with Greek humor.  Or more accurately, the Greek theory of humors.  According to Hippocrates and Galen, our physical characteristics, temperaments, moods, behaviours are influenced by four bodily fluids known as humors.   Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile.  A proper mixing results in good health; an improper, in disease.  Some years later the elements fire, water, air, earth with their qualities of hot, moist, cold, dry are introduced and combined, so to speak, with the fluids.  What you want is hot/dry/yellow bile.  Certainly not its opposite.  Cold/wet/phlegm.

The theory takes hold, spreading throughout classical Rome and the Islamic World, dominating western thought during much of the Medieval and Renaissance periods.  Its appeal related in part to a general concern with human order.  Civilization.  This, at least, in the case of the Greeks, so very worried about matter being out of place, transgressing boundaries, causing pollution.

I’m reading Anne Carson.  Dirt and Desire:  Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity.  (Men in the Off Hours)  She writes that women are perceived as posing the greatest threat to social order among the Greeks. The reason?  Well, the assumption, with its ground in mythology, is that women are wet and therefore unbounded.  ‘They are formless creatures who cannot or do not or will not maintain their own boundaries and who are awfully adept at confounding the boundaries of others.’  ‘Pollutable, polluted, polluting.  Units of danger.  Unstable compounds of deceit and desire.  Prone to leakage.’   And here Carson calls up the image of a boat filled with holes, an image used by the Greeks themselves to signify an out-of-control woman.

Unfortunately for all those hot, dry men, women are necessary for some functions, procreation being one of them.  Even for the gods.  Women have a propensity to make trouble though, cheating on the gods or pushing them too far and often dying as a result of this mischief, the unborn child having to be snatched from their womb at the last minute.  At least, if it’s a son.

There’s the Hebrew god as well.   Wants a son.  Needs a woman.  Perhaps the women in his circle are warmer, dryer, less phlegmy.  I check.  Do a search starting with ‘Jewish humor’.  You can imagine.  No bodily fluids, no talk of elements.  Instead word play, irony, satire and comedy.  Changing directions I go for ‘pollution,’ finding plenty.  It’s complicated; women most often implicated.  And similarly attitudes toward women most disapproving.  When the man has his morning prayer, he thanks God he’s not a woman.  If the man and a woman are drowning, the man is saved.   If the man talks too much with a woman he unleashes evil upon himself and quite possibly hell.

Returning to New York I see the title of the Mark Miller show is named for a book written by art professor Zirka Filipczak.  Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women:  The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575-1700.  Like the book, ‘the show asserts that although the Humors are now seen as obsolete science, their long-standing hold on Western society and art history has left residual archetypes still held today.’  Reviewer Lori Zimmer.  I feel an impulse to see the show.  It’s long over.  A desire to buy the book.  Temporarily out of stock.

The archetypes continue to persist during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime.  (1882-1941)   She worries.  Perhaps as a woman.  Certainly as a writer.  ‘Whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it upon the art of poetry.’  She reads that the Italian men, the famous, the financial, industrial and corporate are hoping the Fascist era will soon ‘give birth to a poet worthy of it.’  Her response:  ‘We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator.  Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.  The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some country town.’ ( A Room of One’s Own)

Woolf understands there are times when it’s conducive to turn away ‘from the surface with its hard separate facts.’  To reject the ‘masculine point of view which governs our lives, sets the standard.’  Insist on a ‘world without professors or specialists with the profiles of policemen.’  This in a short story called The Mark on the Wall where her narrator resists investigating a mark on the wall.  Resists knowing.

Very near the end she:  ‘There is a vast upheaval of matter.’

Still closer to the end he:  ‘I don’t see why we should have a snail on the wall.’

The very end she:  ‘Ah, the mark on the wall!  It was a snail.’