Cover for The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 5 by Eloise G. Morgan.

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A seething beast blows bubbles in a bumbling psyche. Boiling blood proves dire for the sailor ailing in a fit of calenture: the Spanish word for ‘fever.’ In its siege the sight of seas is swapped for risky visions: pleats of countryside or moors of yore.
 

‘So, by a calenture misled, / The mariner with rapture sees, / On the smooth ocean’s azure bed, / Enamell’d fields and verdant trees,’ described Jonathan Swift in ‘Upon the South Sea Project’ (1720). Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe found himself ‘continually sick, being thrown into a violent Calenture by the excessive Heat of the Climate.’ Two centuries later a doctor recorded a seafarer’s ‘disorderly motion of the blood in the artery on taking the pulse.’ He eerily added, ‘I could distinguish no distinction or vibration of pulse.’
 

A lull eluded Phyllis: Thracian princess and the bride of Demophon, son of the king of Athens. The warrior had left her shores assuring the besotted girl he would return to woo her on their honeymoon; she stood awaiting his returning ship. ‘I survey the straits: whenever sails / appear from far away I pray that they be / gods bringing an answer to my prayers.’ laments the lovelorn wife in the Heroides: Ovid’s epistolary glossary of heartache. Soon she grows weak and collapses in her servant’s arms. ‘The bay is shaped like a bow-pulled back, / its horns rising up out of the sea in cliffs,’ she clumsily relates, possessed by calenture-like episodes.
 

Land cradles her in safety far from ocean’s growls.
 

Yet it demurs before love’s peril.
 

Seven hundred years would pass before Racine told of a story not dissimilar – in which another maid assigns the blame to a terrain. ‘Hapless voyage! Wretched shores! Should we have neared your danger?’ asks Oenone of Troezen, a town in the northeastern Peloponnese.
 

‘But I was stricken earlier,’ explains her mistress Phèdre: stepmother of Hippolytus, and his deplored adorer. ‘I had just married the son of Aegeus; My peace, my joy seemed sure. But Athens laid bare my proud foe. I saw, I crimsoned, I paled at his sight; a trouble stirred in my lost soul. My eyes no longer saw, I could not speak; I felt my whole frame shake from frost yet burn; I recognized the fearful work of Venus, the inevitable torture of the blood she hunts.’

Electroshock embodied loss of love on Broadway in the early eighties – this time in another dirge. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing has Henry limn the singes of ‘Every object that meets the eye. A pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.’
 

21st-century Columbia University neuroscientists compared the effect of abandoned lovers looking at images of their deserters to feeling the scorch of a probe. The test’s resulting radiography was loath to tell the difference: the sensations activated the same regions of the brain.
 

Rock bottom is the last resort; on one occasion it was almost a real seabed. A sanguine sailor switched his character in late 1908. Turned solemn and withdrawn, he staved off offers of assistance till a shipmate mourned, ‘The calenture has come upon him.’ Scarcely had the latter topped his sentence with a full stop when the boy plunged headfirst into sea. A band of mariners collected him from straits where he secured a salve: the waters had restored his senses.

Infection sometimes festers till its inflammation has compelled the heart to pound less soundly. Heartbreak’s physiology performs a perfect symmetry – accelerating a surprised pulse while it laces blood with cortisol, our stress hormone. It is a flight-or-flight reaction – one akin to coming on a grizzly bear. It tells the prey to run.
 

‘Heads up! Risk, threat, danger!’ writes Dr. Lisa Shulman in her memoir of widowhood, Before and After Loss: A Neurologist’s Perspective on Loss, Grief, and Our Brain (2019). The blood pressure is suddenly incensed; adrenaline is unrelenting. In 1991 physicians diagnosed a group of widows with the newly labelled Takotsubo syndrome, also known as broken heart syndrome. Abnormal movement of the heart would be detected; the bereaved would feel a tightness of the chest and have to catch her breath.
 

Yet even these horrific episodes would finish. Victims didn’t suffer cardiac disease as a result.
 

In fact, another study cited in Before and After Loss insists that those who suffer quicker heartrates heal the fastest. Answering an urgent need to seek serenity, the brain goes into overdrive – enlisting other organs on its mission.

Its pilgrimage assuages cries for help. ‘I listen to the beating of my heart, its pulsations shake me like the pounding pistons of a steam engine,’ writes Berlioz to friend, librettist Humbert Ferrand in 1830. He is smitten by an unrequited love: entirely at the mercy of famed actress Harriet Smithson. ‘Futile!… Horrible!…’ he continues. ‘I was on the point of beginning my big symphony (Episode in the life of an artist), in which the course of my infernal passion is to be depicted; I have the whole thing in my head, but I can write nothing…’ Three weeks later he informs Ferrand, ‘I feel certain beyond a shadow of doubt that I shall become a colossus in music. For some time I have had a descriptive symphony on Faust at work in my brain. When I have released it, I mean it to stagger the musical world.’
 

Symphonie fantastique was completed that year. Sublimating lust and languor, Berlioz recruited his protagonist to play with fire: poisoning the hero with a dose of opium. It makes him writhe amidst a wakeful sleep of sinister hallucinations. Inspiration led Berlioz to impersonate his protagonist. Soon the master had appeared at Smithson’s feet armed with a vial of his own drug. She would marry him – or else.
 

It worked and they were wed in 1833.
 

Californian adolescent Jimmy Webb fell hard for Suzy Horton, a Colton High School cheerleader, in 1960. ‘I had been in love with her for months. I had already written songs for her. I began hanging around her like a wasp haunts a mint julep.’
 

But by the flower power summer of ’65 Suzy had turned cold. Their lunches at MacArthur Park – opposite where Horton worked at an insurance company – had started to grow stale. ‘In her vague, unfocused gaze I could see that the park wasn’t even real to her. It was streaked and faded like a watercolor wash and I was dissolving with it,’ Webb confided.
 

‘I sat down at the piano and idly tinkered with the right hand,’ he remembered in his memoir, The Cake and the Rain. ‘This could be my magnum opus for Susan Horton… My right hand found a D minor chord. I began thinking of images from the park, cozy symbols of innocence, like Susan feeding the birds and enticing them into her hands… the lunches on the grass, a birthday with a small store-bought cake that had green icing.’ It took three days to complete the song named for the park – which would sit firstly at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in Richard Harris’s 1967 recording before topping the charts with the vocals of Donna Summer in 1978.
 

Webb wouldn’t be deterred. He and Horton would make up after her marriage, which inspired his song ‘The Worst That Could Happen,’ then part before he fired up to write ‘All I Know’ for beauty queen Rosemarie Frankland. Art Garfunkel secured its place in the Top 10.
 

Sparks splay their bustling colours and then fizzle out. Incredulous before his longtime love for the married Irina, the protagonist of Turgenev’s Smoke Grisha wonders why her memory has ‘paled and vanished, and [he] had only a dim sensation of something dangerous beneath the fog which enveloped her image.’ At the impetus of dying love he renovates his factory, establishes a farm and hires labourers to pay his debts. ‘A shoot emerged from a shattered seed,’ explains the narrator – who also enlightens that Grisha went back to his old flame Tatyana.
 

Fazed by spates of grief, Charles Dickens' David Copperfield seeks comfort following the death of Dora, his first wife. For him the mind is nothing but ‘a hopeless consciousness of all that I had lost—love, friendship, interest; of all that had been shattered—my first trust, my first affection, the whole airy castle of my life; of all that remained—a ruined blank and waste.’ A few years pass and he is en route to rekindling the divine in Agnes’s seraphic eyes. There he can see ‘the spirit of my child-wife looked upon me, saying it was well; and winning me, through thee, to tenderest recollections of the Blossom that had withered in its bloom!’ Years earlier he had forsaken Agnes for Dora.
 

Now he forsakes her ghost for life.
 

Gone souls need not be dead to let eyes wander. Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 novel The Enchanted April introduces Rose: a bible-citing housewife who condemns her husband’s sinful novels. Away from him in San Salvatore – a fictional castle inspired by Castello Brown in Portofino, Italy – she relishes herself in Mr. Briggs’ discerning gaze, where she can see her erstwhile charms ‘as clearly as in a looking-glass. For a brief space, she thought, she had been like a torpid fly brought back to gay buzzing by the lighting of a fire in a wintry room. She still buzzed, she still tingled, just at the remembrance.’
 

Age doesn’t heed to finger-wagging conscience. A widower at eighty-eight, San Francisc0-based psychiatrist Irvin Yalom was invited to dinner by sixty-three-year-old Marsha two months after wife Marilyn’s death. Despite his overarching sorrow he was hard-pressed to resist the pleasure. ‘During our dinner,’ Yalom related in A Matter of Death and Life, ‘I found myself admiring [Marsha] more than ever and felt a bit—no, more than a bit—titillated by the many times she touched my hands.’ She drove him back. ‘I felt aroused and struggled with the impulse to invite her into my home… and… and… and who knows what might happen? But, thank God, after a lively inner debate, I nixed that idea.’ decided the octogenarian.
 

Four years later Berliner Sakino Sternberg – herself a psychiatrist – had hopes raised when a fellow member of the Irvin Yalom Facebook group reported he had scored a session with the master over Zoom. ‘Irvin Yalom has been my main (yes, indeed) inspiration for more than 40 years now, both, for my professional as well as for my private life. I read all his books, and every single one gave me hope, inspired me, uplifted me, sometimes brought me to tears, made me reflect, and always gave me a feeling that I am on the “right” track.’ she typed on her blog. In January 2024 Sternberg reported their wedding on Instagram. ‘I got married to a wonderful man,’ she announced. ‘Our love story developed over a period of three years. We are writing a book together.’
 

Even solitary brains seek symbiosis. Psychologists Lisa M. Diamond and Lisa G. Aspinwall studied decades of papers to focus on mirror neurons: mankind’s need to latch on to and mimic feelings of another. ‘A mutually regulating psychobiological unit’ was how they described such a process. Mirror neurons are no anomaly. They’re found throughout our matter in the premotor cortex (responsible for movement regulation), the amygdala (the fear and shock hub), the inferior parietal cortex (our linguistic engineer) and other parts. These cells ensure that few dwell hopelessly in sadness – even in resistant souls.
 

‘Lonely places, you lovers, are dangerous: shun lonely places, / Don’t opt out – you’ll be safer in a crowd!’ beseeches Ovid in his Remedia amoris: Cures for love. Propertius found his respite in the echoes of the woods of Cynthia: his treacherous love’s name. ‘I am used to bear timidly all your decrees,’ he informs her, ‘And in return am given sacred springs, cold cliffs, / Hard resting on rough paths; / And every tale of woe I have to utter / Must be told in solitude to shrill birds.’
 

‘Shinrin-yoku’ is a Japanese term for the ritual of drinking in nature; ‘forest bathing’ as they call it in the Empire of the Sun. Multiple experiments have shown these atmospheres alleviate a deadly stress – decreasing blood pressure and heart-rate in participants who wade past conifers and cypress trees for less than twenty minutes.
 

‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ vouches Solon in Herodotus’ Histories. But in the swinging sixties of a U.S. still embroiled in war, songwriters Bob Thiele and George D. Weiss sought to shift focus. ‘[We] had an idea to write a “different” song specifically for Louis Armstrong that would be called “What a Wonderful World.” We wanted this immortal musician and performer to say, as only he could, the world really is great: full of the love and sharing people make possible for themselves and each other every day.’ Thiele recalled in his autobiography.
 

Not three decades after its creation, then thirty-two-year-old Eva Cassidy debuted her own rendition at Blues Alley Club in Washington D.C. She dedicated it to ‘everyone here,’ calling it ‘one of my favorite songs.’ Eight months later still-little-known Cassidy appeared at The Bayou in Georgetown with aggressive melanoma. It was being treated with a course of chemotherapy and Cassidy was given morphine prior to appearing. Despite impaired mobility she found her core self yet again – that restlessly resistant self – to praise the ‘trees that are green… red roses too,’ as well as the ‘skies of blue and clouds of white, the light of day and the darkness of night.’ The last two stanzas she had never sung before. Cassidy remained composed as audience members shed a tear. She died six weeks later.
 

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are not foes but archaeologists. In recent years a field known as epigenetics has explored how ill-acquainted human beings are with their own characters. Experience does not just lead the flock to age and wither; it exposes strengths as well as weaknesses. In 2005 Drs. Michael J. Shanahan and Scott M. Hofer proposed life’s impact on a molecular level of self. Events can ‘trigger’ a genetic predisposition; ‘compensate for a genetic predisposition,’ ‘control the expression of a genetic predisposition,’ or ‘enhance a genetic predisposition.’
 

MIT professor John Nash felt the onset of intrusive paranoia that would later be confirmed as schizophrenia in 1959.
For decades he roamed hallways muttering under his breath and speaking of himself in the third person. Despite shunning anti-psychotics, Nash located light amidst his smog-like logic. ‘Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation,’ he recorded in 1995, a year after receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. ‘This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists.’
 

‘Another happiness’ is how The Crooked Little Pieces’ Isabel foresees her pupils’ futures at the end of Volume 5 whilst entertaining no hopes for her own. Anneliese fears her identity has been irreparably compromised until two figures – one old and one new – extend hope’s panacea. Suddenly she feels her hands have ‘slid over the silver of an amulet slipped from her bedside table into black’s abyss. Dissolved amidst the occupants of dust and shadow, it had shunned her sight for lifetimes. Now she could retrieve it.’
 

An abyss absconds with errant souls.
 

It is a cruel illusion hiding kind unknowns.

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Sources

D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: Washington Square Classics, 1920 edition, p. 32.
 

Ovid trans. H. Isbell, Heroides: Viking, 1990, p. 15, II: Phyllis to Demophoon, lines 123–4 and 129–30.
 

J. Racine, Phèdre: Act I, Scene 3, 149–159. Translated by the author.
 

E. Knight, ‘Nova et Vetura,’ The British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 2513, 27 February 1909.

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L. Shulman, Before and After Loss: A Neurologist’s Perspective on Loss, Grief, and Our Brain: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, pp. 92–3; 142.

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D. Cairns, Berlioz: University of California Press, 1989, p. 355.

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J. Webb, The cake and the rain: St Martin’s Press: 2017, pp. 120–21; 147; 204–5.

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I. Turgenev trans. Michael Pursglove, Smoke: Alma Classics, 2017, pp. 175–76.

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C. Dickens, David Copperfield: Penguin Classics, 2004, pp. 819; 867.

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E. von Arnim, The Enchanted April: Grosset & Dunlap, 1923, pp. 248; 281.

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I. Yalom and M. Yalom, A Matter of Death and Life: Piaktus, pp. 191–2.

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Ovid trans. Tom Payne, The Art of Love: Vintage Classics, p. 256, lines 579–80.

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Propertius trans. Guy Lee, The Poems: Oxford World Classics, p. 23, Book 1, Poem 18, lines 25; 27–32.

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B. Thiele, What a Wonderful World: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 1.       

 

S. Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash, Simon & Schuster (Reprint Edition), 2011, p. 32.

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J. Nash ed. T. Frängsmyr, The Nobel Prizes 1994: Presentations, Biographies & Lectures.

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