odi et amo (i hate and i love)

and io saturnalia!

This essay is a somewhat disjointed two-parter, with two thematically corresponding Catullus poems. Translations are mine.

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carmen eighty-five

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. You might ask why I do this—
I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I am tormented.

Over the past couple of months I have been thinking a lot about my relationship with my hobbies and my interests, and particularly the fact that my border between “enjoyment” and “heartache” is thin. It’s very difficult for me to like anything casually: I’ll like it briefly, for the time it takes to read or watch or otherwise consume; or I’ll like it with such intensity that it takes over a large percentage of my daily life, interfering with my ability to concentrate on nearly anything else. For a while this is fun: I have fun. I commit time, energy, and sometimes money, because I like collecting and I like having physical representations of intangible things that bring me joy. And—this is important—during the honeymoon era, I do feel joy. I like thinking about whatever or whoever the thing or person is, I like the distraction and the sense of focus it brings me, and I like the feeling of falling in love, hard and fast, with something that can give my life structure and meaning. But then—always very abruptly, and often as a result of inadvertently tying my own sense of identity into the hyperfixation—it’s not really fun anymore, and the enjoyment is replaced by a strange sense of grief. Sometimes this grief stems from an actual event, but usually it stems from envy, which is something that I don’t really want to admit because it makes me sound shallow and petty and also a little bit stupid, and I don’t want to be any of those things. Sometimes the envy manifests in me as loneliness or as resentment—I resent others for getting to have an experience that I want, too, but haven’t gotten the chance, and it turns into why is everybody getting to experience this thing that I want except for me—except there are, of course, many others who also want the same thing, and also haven’t gotten to experience it—there must be—and sometimes the grief feels hollow, like a real weight I’m carrying around in my chest, and I think about one therapy session I had in 2019 when my therapist asked if I carried my sadness in my hips, and I said: No, it’s always in my chest, right where my heart is, like the word heartache, it feels exactly the same. Most of the time this blend of grief-envy just makes me mad—like, god, I had a really good thing going for me there, I found something that made me happy, and I fucked it all up by getting too in my head about it and overthinking like I always do, and also there are too many terrible things happening in the world and I’m sitting here being upset about something that doesn’t even matter, really, except it matters to me in that moment, very much so, to the extent that my chest feels heavy and a little pangy, and then we’re back to the heartache except it’s tangled up with guilt and shame this time.

I’ve always found that interesting: heartache as both metaphorical and physical. The former is the way that people usually use it, and it’s the way that Merriam-Webster defines it: anguish of mind; sorrow. But every episode of grief that I can remember in my life has manifested itself in that physical way, too—as if my heart is a stone or a pit lodged in my sternum, weighing me down. Part of this, I think, has to be attributed to the way that my anxiety manifests itself, which is often heart palpitations—but there’s something kind of poetic about the other interpretation, too, which is pleasing to me even though, practically speaking, there’s nothing pleasing about feeling anguish of mind; sorrow. 

In a way, I think the root of this problem is that I care too much; that I don’t know how to do anything in an offhand, nonchalant way—that I believe I have to immerse myself into something completely in order to love it. I think about this stanza from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” all the time:

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

I texted this poem to my own mother once, several years ago, while I was hurrying to class on my university campus. She texted back, put it on a bench and walk away—which was funny, in a dad joke kind of way, but not really helpful, because that’s the whole point—I don’t know how to put things down. I carry them, and I have a very difficult time letting go. This isn’t just about hobbies and interests; it’s about my eating disorder, my anxiety, patterns of living and behaving that are familiar and routine to me. I don’t like change. I’d rather sit with my discomfort than try to do something to alter it, even when I can tell I’ve outgrown the old behavior; that it fits like a poorly tailored piece of clothing; that it’s making me unhappy, actively and consistently, and I need to back away a little if not pull away entirely. Historically, my method for doing this has been to coexist, however uncomfortably, alongside the old behaviors and hyperfixations until new ones come along to replace them, sliding neatly into place over the ragged edges of where the old behaviors and hyperfixations used to be. It sort of works, but it also isn’t a solution: it’s a bandage. A bandage that doesn’t hold, anyway, because the problem underneath is still the same, which is that I’m always looking for something to make me feel whole. I feel unmoored without a hyperfixation; without something to distract me and take me out of my own head—which is, at best, a miserable place to be without the rosy, romantic filter of a full-bodied distraction. This is, I imagine, a problem that affects a lot of people, but my version has that annoying habit of tipping into grief and envy, and then I’m back at square one, drifting and unhappy.

Mostly I feel like a cobbled together conglomeration of interests, some still intact but many of them falling apart a little bit. Three mental illnesses in a trenchcoat—but things that have shaped me, encouraged me, bored me, given me happiness and comfort and some hurt, too, sometimes. I don’t think I’m unique in this way; we all are, to an extent, a patchwork that reflects the ways in which we choose to fill our time. But I still wish I could be more normal about it—if “normal” is even a word that can be applied to anything. I wish I could learn moderation. Learn that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Learn how to enjoy something without giving myself over to it completely. Maybe then I would be able to hold onto things a bit longer, stretch out the enjoyment in a way that matters.

I would like to know how to put it all down.

medius: io saturnalia

My original intention for this newsletter was to pay homage to Saturnalia, the Roman winter solstice festival in honor of the god Saturn, which took place from December 17 through December 23. At a stretch, it can be considered a precursor to Christmas. A public banquet was followed by gift-giving, a distinctly carnival-like atmosphere, and nonstop partying and gambling; social roles were reversed, most notably for slaves. They were permitted to “disrespect” their masters without fear of punishment (though to what degree this was true certainly must have depended on the master in question) and were given special dining privileges (either eating at the same table with their masters or even being served first).

Catullus called Saturnalia “the best of days” (in c. 14, translated below), but the celebrations must have been something of a sensory nightmare: the poet Horace wrote about fleeing Rome for the quiet of the countryside (Satires 2.3), and Pliny the Younger barricaded himself in a set of rooms at his villa to escape the noise and “festive cries” (Letters 2.17.24). General merrymaking aside, the traditional greeting for the festival was Io Saturnalia; Io! is a Latin exclamation of joy and it doesn’t have a great translation into English. Hurrah! or Ho! is probably the closest we can get.

carmen fourteen

Ni te plus oculis meis amarem,
iucundissime Calve, munere isto
odissem te odio Vatiniano:
nam quid feci ego quidve sum locutus,
cur me tot male perderes poetis?
Isti di mala multa dent clienti,
qui tantum tibi misit impiorum.
Quod si, ut suspicor, hoc novum ac repertum
munus dat tibi Sulla litterator,
non est mi male, sed bene ac beate,
quod non dispereunt tui labores.
Di magni, horribilem et sacrum libellum!
Quem tu scilicet ad tuum Catullum
misti, continuo ut die periret,
Saturnalibus, optimo dierum!
Non non hoc tibi, false, sic abibit.
Nam si luxerit ad librariorum
curram scrinia, Caesios, Aquinos,
Suffenum, omnia colligam venena.
Ac te his suppliciis remunerabor.
Vos hinc interea valete abite
illuc, unde malum pedem attulistis,
saecli incommoda, pessimi poetae.

If I didn’t love you more than my own eyes, most delightful Calvus, 
because of that gift I would hate you like Vatinius does.¹
What have I done, what have I said;
why did you wickedly ruin me with so many poets?²
May the gods grant many evils to that client of yours
who sent along so many scoundrels to you—³
but if, as I suspect, Sulla the grammar teacher
was the one who gave you this newly discovered gift,
then it’s not an entirely bad thing for me, but rather a good and fortunate thing,
because your own work has not been wasted.⁴
Still—great gods, what a horrible and detestable little book!
And you have evidently sent it to your Catullus on Saturnalia,
so that he would die without delay on the best of days!
No, you joker, you won’t get away with something like this.
When it becomes light, I will run to the shelves
of the booksellers. Caesius, Aquinius, Suffenus—
I will collect all of these poisons
and I will reward you with these punishments.⁵
Meanwhile, little book, farewell! Depart from here and go there,
from whence you wickedly came:⁶
the disaster of the age, the worst of poets.

This poem is addressed to Catullus’s close friend Gaius Licinius Calvus—also the addressee of several other Catullus poems⁷—and it’s focused around a rather spectacular gag gift: Calvus put together an anthology of the worst poems he could find and sent it to Catullus for Saturnalia. Catullus is horrified—are you trying to kill me? on a holiday?—and promises to return the favor by putting together and sending back a terrible poetry anthology of his own (I will collect all of these poisons; one can only imagine how shitty Suffenus et al. must have felt to see themselves referenced in this way). It’s worth remembering here that the Romans did not have printing presses or, indeed, any way of copying texts except by hand: it was a major investment of time and energy to create a compilation of bad literature just to fuck around with a friend.⁸ It’s the kind of joke that wouldn’t be out of place in the twenty-first century. The impulse to Stay Silly is ageless.

In honor of Catullus and his Saturnalia book of bad poetry, and in an effort to recollect pockets of true enjoyment I’ve had this year, I wanted to put together some literature lists of my own—not of bad books, but of the books I really enjoyed and five-stared in 2024.

FICTION

• THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS by Katherine Arden

• WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY by Sacha Lamb

• THE VENUS THROW by Steven Saylor

• THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley

• INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

POETRY

• THE ILIAD by Homer, tl. Emily Wilson

• BLUE HORSES by Mary Oliver

• NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, VOLUME ONE by Mary Oliver

• METAMORPHOSES by Ovid, tl. Stephanie McCarter

• LORD OF THE BUTTERFLIES by Andrea Gibson

NONFICTION MENTIONS⁹

• CICERO: POLITICS & PERSUASION IN ANCIENT ROME by Kathryn Tempest

• DIVINE MIGHT: GODDESSES IN GREEK MYTH by Natalie Haynes

• THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED by John Green

• FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by Caitlin Doughty

• MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH by Julian Sancton

• THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME by Olivia Laing

• CATULLUS & HIS WORLD by T.P. Wiseman

• MAY WE BE SPARED TO MEET ON EARTH: LETTERS OF THE LOST FRANKLIN ARCTIC EXPEDITION by Russell A. Potter

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Thank you for hanging out with me over the past few months, and for supporting this newsletter in its baby stages. I hope these last weeks of 2024 are kind to you. Happy holidays and, of course, Io Saturnalia!

1. This is a complimentary reference to Calvus’s celebrated civil prosecution of a guy named Vatinius. (Cicero—because he is everywhere—was Vatinius’s defense lawyer.)

2. Calvus has sent an anthology of especially shitty poetry to Catullus.

3. “So many scoundrels” = “so many shitty poets.” The phrasing here implies that Calvus attached a note to the anthology claiming to have originally received it as a thank-you gift from a client.

4. "I hate this for me, but I’m still glad that your efforts as a lawyer are earning you acclaim and thank-you gifts.”

5. More shitty poetry, Catullus → Calvus this time.

6. Pedem attulistis was a common idiom for “came,” but here it’s also a pun on the metrical foot in poetry: literally, this line reads “from whence you carried forth that wicked foot.”

7. Most notably, c. 50, a real “fellas, is it gay?” moment.

8. It must be said that many Romans would not have done this labor themselves but would have delegated the copying work to professional scribes or to a slave. It was common for upper class men, and especially politicians, to have one or more slaves acting as their secretaries. Our best known instance of this is Cicero’s secretary and slave (later freedman) Tiro, who invented a new form of shorthand (presumably to keep up with Cicero’s yapping) and wrote several (now lost) books of his own.

9. I don’t often five-star nonfiction, or give it a star rating at all—but I really enjoyed these books. MADHOUSE, CATULLUS, and MAY WE BE SPARED did get five stars from me.