The Seba library treats Melting in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Carson, Anne, Onians, R B, James, William).
Is melting a good thing? That remains ambivalent. The image implies something sensually delicious, yet anxiety and confusion often attend it. Viscosity is an experience that repels in its own right
Carson establishes melting as the central ambivalent figure of erotic experience, simultaneously seductive and threatening to the ego’s boundary-integrity, drawing on Sartre’s phenomenology of stickiness.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986thesis
Sexual love is repeatedly described as a process of ‘liquefying, melting’ (TTIKECTOOU) and is characterised as vy pos,’ liquid, wet’.
Onians documents the archaic Greek identification of sexual desire with a literal melting of vital bodily substance, connecting erotic dissolution to the life-fluid itself.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
We may, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary ‘melting moods’ into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us.
James invokes ‘melting moods’ as the psychologically accessible analogue of religious conversion, in which the softening of inner hardness enables moral and spiritual renewal.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
you see at the heart of the poem a piece of ice, melting. The startling likeness of ice drops into your percept
Carson reads Sappho’s poem as placing the image of melting ice at its structural and psychological core, as the precise emblem of desire’s simultaneous transience and compulsive repetition.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986thesis
In melting and cooling there is no such transformation: the ‘water’ remains water throughout; only its structure is changed.
The Timaeus distinguishes melting as a change of structural grade rather than elemental identity, providing the cosmological framework within which dissolution preserves underlying substance.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
If time is similar to a river, it flows from the past towards the present and the future… looking at the things themselves, the melting of the snows and what results from this are not successive events
Merleau-Ponty uses glacier-melt as a test case to deconstruct the naive metaphysics of time-as-river, demonstrating that ‘events’ like melting are observer-relative cuts in a continuous spatio-temporal field.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
there are several varieties of fire: flame; that effluence from flame which does not burn but gives light to the eyes; and what is left of fire in glowing embers when flame is quenched.
Plato’s taxonomy of fire varieties provides the elemental backdrop against which the specific mechanics of melting—a grade-change rather than elemental conversion—is later elaborated.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside