Joanne Diaz

At the Mind Museum, you can walk to the back, step on several large buttons on the ground, and watch parts of the brain light up: the frontal lobe for decision and memory, the temporal lobe for smell and sound, the occipital for sight. I try to make my toddler son laugh by hopping from one button to the next, watching each lobe light up along the way, but he will not leave the prison of his melancholy. My son: how he loves to revisit the most difficult point of conflict in a picture book, or the moment at which his favorite car heaves a difficult sigh at the pinnacle of a movie’s emotional arc, or the promise of injury if I take a fall. My son, so distant from other children in his sadness. Just the other day, at the pool, he gazed at the boys and girls splashing and shrieking and said,Look. The children are having fun, as if he were an anthropologist in a foreign land. If these are his musings at age two, one can only imagine the life that must follow. Through a dark channel he was born; to darkness he is most drawn. Easier to write than say the guilt I feel for giving him the sharp pain of melancholy. My son, always in the world without husk or shell, it is as if his heart throbs on the outside of his body, as if his brain has no skull to absorb the assaults that strike it. Today, I watch him writhe in the pain of a tantrum — a typical kid, this is what they do, everyone assures me — and usually I rush in, unwittingly increasing his sense of emergency. Instead, today, I stand back, relinquish the role of skull and skin, watch his mind unfurl like a medieval tapestry. In that moment of my feigned disinterest, his head is no longer head but battlefield where Wrath wages a fierce war against Patience. He is no longer a little boy screaming on the ground and throwing plastic trucks; instead he is a creature engaged in a struggle to free his enslaved heart from the monsters whose foaming mouths and hot fumes and clots of foul blood besiege him as he gathers his thoughts from the unraveling of his universe. Prudentius says that fiery Wrath in her frenzy slays herself and dies by her own weapons

Here, the brightest constellation is Hydra, the Water Snake, named for the half-woman, half-reptile whom Hercules slew with the help of  Iolaus, his charioteer. Imagine the sound of so many heads screaming — the long, shrill bays of an angry woman times twenty — and the smell of birth, of all origins, that followed Hydra as she rose from her fetid swamp. Iolaus was strategic, went straight for the bowels instead of the mouth, burned her center before the head. When her fundament was reduced to ash, only then could Hydra be silenced. Hera, enraged that Hercules was able to slay the creature she had raised in order to destroy him, flung the corpse of the decapitated, maimed Hydra into the sky, lest she be forgotten. Hydra’s blood, unstoppable, became hot gas; her screams rose and fell until they were radio waves; and her wild flailing was fixed into points of radiance. Hera was right to hurl those stars here, above this bay, so close to where the earth is bisected, a place where Hydra’s mirror image glosses the water, where dense blooms of  algae flourish on the nitrogen surface, thousands of wild heads and arms devouring ammonia, cyanide, and sewage as fast as we can produce them, this hydra, emblem of insatiable desire.