The Affliction: A Reading of "Renascence"
by Mary Oakes
I have struggled all my life with an unbearable intensity of emotion: waves of feeling that crash down upon my head as I gasp for breath, coughing out harsh water from my lungs. I have learned to live with the affliction, to take medicines that will never cure me, to make it quieter like a muffled sneeze you try to keep in as it burns your chest. The affliction is isolating. People call you overly sensitive, a crybaby, a hothead. They stay away, like they don't want to catch what you've got, like the sniffles of your cries and the fever of your hothead are contagious. It is sobering, and comforting, and terrifying, to be reminded that I am not alone in my affliction. So many others, now and throughout history, have struggled against the same waves of emotion, and some of them are pulled under. There are those who have been lost to the merciless sea, and there are those like me, who continue to struggle against the waves and manage the symptoms of every sickness the cold water brings.
Something about writing seems to draw in those with the affliction, as if the right combination of words is the cure. I've made myriad futile attempts to extract the sickness from my soul, and perform a transfusion to the ink of my pen. I've tried unsuccessfully to vomit all my feelings onto a sheet of paper, so maybe those feelings will no longer live inside my body. The biowaste left behind from these failed procedures are poems, diary pages, half-finished stories.
Edna St. Vincent Millay seems to have been particularly impacted by the affliction, and so she chose to carefully document her progression of symptoms in the poem, Renascence. Through melodic, rhyming stanzas, she tells a story of life and death and rebirth, a story which perfectly captures the repeating stages of the cyclical affliction. One may experience these stages at varying frequencies, to varying degrees, in many different arrangements and patterns, but the foundation is the same. Though our lives are separated by a century, Millay and I have the same sickness.
The first symptom is feeling trapped by a small life, longing for something more. The speaker begins with, "All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood," a phrasing which establishes that the view is not enough for her. The affliction, which causes one to feel great emotion, causes a restless boredom when there is no great emotion to feel. The boredom itself becomes the overwhelming feeling: relentless, infuriating, suffocating. She feels "bounded," like there is so much more to see and do, like she can almost reach out and touch the boundaries of her existence, "And all at once things seemed so small." This symptom causes pangs of hunger in the stomach; a hunger not for food, but a hunger for a fuller life.
The second symptom is a fleeting taste of triumph on the tongue, the split-second satisfaction of seeing all that is grand, and feeling grand. The affliction is not exclusive to negative emotion. Every good feeling one could think of, from freedom to devotion, is amplified tenfold. Every good feeling, too, is intense to the point of overwhelming. The speaker looks up at the immensity of the sky and feels her soul uplifted beyond the bounds that previously trapped her. However, the pangs of hunger persist. Even the grand intensity she now felt was not enough, "after all, / The sky was not so very tall." She wanted more; she felt her body demand more. She screamed to feel her hand "touch the sky." And so the sky was delivered to her, and thrust upon her, just as she had wished.
The next stage is where the affliction truly sets in, where the sense of self dissolves, where one feels winded and feverish from interacting with the profound. Examples of symptoms of this stage include but are not limited to dizziness from the spinning solar system, headache from the unimaginable scale of all existence, and speaking in strange unknowable tongues from the shock of seeing "immensity made manifold." The affliction reveals all the intricacies of consciousness and lays them bare, confronts you with them, shows you "how and why" the universe behaves in certain ways. This stage is an existential revelation popping the blood vessels in your brain to give you seizures and hallucinations and visions of truth you did not know were stored in your bones.
Along with the existential revelations come existential crises. The affliction is an extreme level of sensitivity, a type of sensitivity that makes one flinch at the mere thought of another in pain. Realizing the scale of the universe causes one to realize the scale of suffering, and what follows is intolerable torment concentrated into a stinging in the throat, chest, and eyes which well up with tears. "No hurt I did not feel, no death / That was not mine," every tale of torture and bloodshed ever told runs as a cold shiver through the body, as the anguish tears the mind apart. "So beneath the weight lay I / And suffered death, but could not die."
The next symptom is a desperate desire to stop feeling. The emotions are too severe to handle. Nothing is worth this suffering. Even the good emotions, the triumph and wisdom and joy, are too much. The endless deaths stab at your organs again and again, and the internal bleeding builds pressure until it bursts and you are bleeding everywhere. She wishes to feel nothing at all anymore, and her wish is granted. "Into the earth I sank till I / Full six feet underground did lie," a shutdown of all emotion ensues, a death of all feeling except relief. Finally, the suffocation ceases, "there is no weight / Can follow here, however great." The burden is lifted. Every drop of passion and intensity is gone. The affliction is cured now, because the patient has gone numb to it.
Then, slowly, the feeling comes back, like the pins and needles of blood flowing back to a limb that has fallen asleep. The first symptom to return is the pangs of hunger, much worse now than before. She longs for joy again, for the sweet comfort of the view she once took for granted. The forest and mountains, the views she used to be dissatisfied with, would now feel like a blessing to her eyes, "To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze / From drenched and dripping apple-trees." The spirit awakens again, this time with gratitude for every scrap of joy ever felt. "About the trees my arms I wound; / Like one gone mad I hugged the ground."
The final stage described is the satisfying conclusion of enlightenment. She has seen a new perspective on the world, gained a gratitude for her life, and made peace with God. She feels complete now, feels that she understands "The world stands out on either side / No wider than the heart is wide." Her desires and ambitions, her hunger for more, can be fulfilled within her spirit. Her life is only as small as she chooses for it to be. This seems to be a happy ending, a true cure to the affliction, but the poem ends with a grim reminder that "he whose soul is flat - the sky / Will cave in on him by and by."
All my life, I have struggled with an unbearable intensity of emotion. It comes in waves, in cycles and stages that repeat in unknowable patterns. The affliction has no cure, and I do not want a cure. The intensity is a part of me. Sometimes the symptoms are difficult to manage, but to cure the affliction is to erase my passion and kill my spirit, and numb myself beyond return. I would rather feel every symptom and face every wave than lie beneath the ground longing to feel anything.
Writing seems to draw in those with the affliction. Perhaps we write in an attempt to purge the sickness onto the page. Perhaps we write to record our symptoms, like a medical report on our own sickness. Or, perhaps we write to reach out past the walls of isolation, so another with the affliction a hundred years from now might feel less alone.
Mary Oakes, age 18, is a writer who grew up in Rockland, Maine. She is a freshman at Colby College and recipient of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Creative Writing Scholarship. She plans to continue developing her voice as a writer, but hasn’t decided on her college major. Mary has had a passion for literature from a young age, especially essays and poems.
