The Four Humors

Lyrics

You say you have a sense of humor.
You say you feel melancholic.
I remember when those words had weight.
When they had a color, and a season.
When they were the rivers inside you.

For eighteen hundred years, the map was true.
The body was a country, and we knew its fourfold soul.
Blood, the wet and hot of sanguine spring.
Phlegm, the cold and wet of winter's passive tide.
Yellow bile, the fire of a summer temper.
And black bile, the cold dry earth of autumn's heavy thought.
We saw the world in you, and you in the world.

I name the blood of air, the phlegm of water.
I name the choler, fire-bright, the melancholia of earth.
Four rivers in the veins, four seasons in the heart.
A perfect, balanced system.
An architecture of belief that held the sickness and the art.

In a London shop, the barber-surgeon read the signs.
The cupping glass, a cloudy oracle on the skin.
The leeches in the jar, a hungry, living cure.
We charted urine by the color wheel, a compass for the core.
It was a faith of balances, of excess and of lack.
A measured letting-out to bring the spirit back.
And people trusted in the blade, the purge, the careful diet.
They believed in the map. They found a harbor in its quiet.

Then came a quieter theory, born of glass and brass in 1858.
A man saw smaller things, a city in the cell, a different fate.
No fire, no suppression. No edict from a king.
Just a slow and steady tide, a new and better map to bring.
The old one wasn't burned.
It was simply folded, stored away, a lesson un-learned.

The lancet is a curio now, the leech jar sits on a shelf.
But the names remain, a palimpsest of your forgotten self.
Sanguine. Phlegmatic. Bilious. Melancholy.
You speak my language still.
You just forgot what the words mean.