The Flux of Feeling

Tragic emotion is liquid. Cholos, bile, rises; splanchna purple and darken and swell; madness beats against the shore of a mind like a wave. Padel’s central image: “The connection of purpling, darkening, swelling liquid with seas in the outer world, with splanchna within, underlies tragic images of madness.” Io’s madness is “a black wave”; Aeschylus’s undersea comes up; “Erinys is in the phrenes.”

The philological ground is Hippocratic physiology — humors, bile, phlegm, flux — read together with Homeric sea-imagery. “In Homer, a ‘black shiver’ runs over a sea whipped by wind. When a man ‘greatly moved’ dared to face Achilles, ‘his heart dark-purpled many things as he waited.’” The same verb — porphyrein, to darken-purple — governs sea and heart. This is not metaphor but the innards-as-kosmos principle in action: the sea darkens because the sea and the heart are made of one fabric.

Padel’s sharpest observation concerns what survives: the flux-imagery outlived its physiology. “We have kept on their image-system, calcified in our newer languages.” When Lear’s cataracts and hurricanoes externalize the tempest of a mind “minded like the weather, most unquietly”; when William James records a nineteenth-century convert saying “all my feelings seemed to rise and flow out”; when Freud pictures the id as “a cauldron full of seething excitations” — the Greek verbal system is still doing the work, though the physiology that generated it has long been abandoned.

For Seba, this is the philological demonstration that the tradition’s affective vocabulary has always been hydraulic, alchemical, liquid. The solve et coagula of alchemy, the seething of the prima materia, the flood-imagery of the unconscious — each of these is the flux of feeling in a later register.

Relationships

• splanchna
• porous-self
• innards-as-kosmos
• thumos

Primary sources

• padel-out-mind-greek (Padel 1992, chs. 3-4)
• Iliad (Homer)
• Hippocratic corpus