On Being Ill

My body is sick. As sick as the earth that groans, crackling dust inside and puffing with water that boils, spills, bubbles. Virginia Woolf cries out against the blasphemy that there be no space for illness in literature as a prime theme among love, jealousy and battle. For our soul stares through the sheet that is our body, and endures its tempests of hunger and pain. For we become jealous of those in good health, we envy their cough-less laughs and free breathing.

We crave sympathy in our agony, demand it as a sudden obligation from all those who tiptoe around us. Our groans become dramatic, seeking to emulate that awful twitching agony within. Being ill is a nasty performance, except for when it is the Silent kind of ill. The brooding, grey type, sucking in a black hole of all matter. Nothing else matters then.

We resent the world which drags itself away from us. We are mute when describing our agony, so we “take our pain in one hand , and a lump of pure sound in the other, so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.”

Virginia Woolf’s stories makes me feel as though I were carried by fantastic, feverish visions. I imagine if I were to have tea with her she’d pour the tea in a circle, loudly note the beautiful choice of porcelain cups, before glamorously smashing them to pieces. I’d feel compelled to join. She is always right.

When I was assaulted by fever (yesterday), I read her long, winding essays, and the strange voyages of Saint-Exupéry. I understood suddenly, that indeed, prose is not for the ill. but Poetry. We turn to the Poets, and their “Heaven-making duties”. We are boiled down to mystery and instinct, the two main qualities of poetry.

“We rifle the Poets of their flowers.”

The empty space, the lingering ah— fall into place, oh so lovely, so tasty… our mind sips into that world, and becomes purified. We feed on the richness of those sparse lines, though our lips are cracked and stomachs nauseous, the divine stuff of poetry is the only thing that we may digest. Though its meaning evaporates like the sweat off our foreheads, it provided comfort in that moment, like the briefest kiss from an angel.

Then (today) I am pulled into the dull relief of sleep. My body is only forgiving when it sinks deep into that black abyss. It becomes jealous of my light and steals it, until I am paralyzed by lethargy. I may never be released, I feel. Every movement is a punishment, and only the drug of sleep is so… velvet, soft.