Fungus of the Self

In Madeline Cash's Mold and Melancholia, the house is not a machine for living; it is a machine for rotting. And we are its softest components.

The narrator, displaced from the sterile functionality of New York to a damp London flat ("Murder Mile"), presents her descent into domesticity as a temporal glitch ("It’s like we’re living in a different era"). But the true regression is not temporal, but taxonomic. She ceases to be a modern cosmopolitan subject and becomes a damp substrate. The apartment's "original molding" and "original mold" are not homonyms by accident; they are the same structure. The mold is the true architect of the space; the humans are merely transient tenants who have not yet learned to decay properly.

It has much of the original molding. Unfortunately it also has much of its original mold—ominous black speckles that appear in the corners of the bathroom, in the dishwasher, on the bay windows.

The landlord calls it "pigmentation," the tenant calls it "mold." Both are wrong. It is writing. The house is inscribing its history onto the surface. The narrator’s horror is not hygienic, but ontological: it is the horror of the blank page being filled by a non-human author. She attempts to scrub it away with "aggressive British cleaning solvents," but one cannot bleach a haunting.

Cash's narrator diagnoses herself with "Melancholia," retrieving a Victorian category to explain a physiological stasis. This is a correct instinct. Depression is too clinical, too clean, too American. Melancholia implies a substance, a fluid, a "black bile." It acknowledges that sadness has a texture and a viscosity.

Doctors once thought that melancholic people had “black bile” built up inside them... I imagined my veins full of sludge, mold on the inner walls of my skin. Or wood pigmentation, as it’s called here.

Here the external (the flat) and internal (the body) environments merge. The body is just another room with bad ventilation. The "sludge" is the only thing that connects her to the reality of the city. She tries to cook "stews" to sublimate this wetness—turning the dampness into food—but she is the one being cooked. The "hogget" (teenage sheep) she prepares is a mirror stage: she is consuming the very immaturity she feels trapped in.

The narrative culminates in the discovery of a "Prolactinoma" (a tumor on the pituitary gland), which appears as the medical rationalization of the gothic atmosphere. It is "demonic possession" secularized for the MRI age. But the tragedy of the piece is not the illness; it is the cure. The ending is a retreat to the sterile safety of New York—dry clothes, recycling bins, no pots. A victory of hygiene over life.

I left the mold and melancholia, landed at JFK... put my clothes in the dryer... In New York, I didn’t even own a pot.

This is not a happy ending. It is a sterilization. She escapes the "wet" danger of creation (lactation, mold, stew) for the "dry" safety of consumption (ordering dinner, recycling). She has been cured of her depth. She returns to the "future," which is simply a place where nothing grows, not even rot.