Fever

Most of us are far removed from the immediacy of illness. We control it, we medicate it, often with efficacy, forgetting the chronic until we are faced with the acute.

Perhaps I am alone in my mindlessness, perhaps I’m alone in forgetting how closely the people of the past felt their illnesses. I wonder about Fanny Burney and her breast cancer, wonder what became of the autistic children of the past, wonder about the depressed and the suicidal, wonderings prompted by fever, simple fever.

A fever I could not tame for two days, one that kept me soaking my clothes and soaking the sheets, shivering and chattering like victims of ague: it brought me up close to my body and to the inability to control it at will. I thought of stories from the 18^th and 19^th century, characters sweating through their bedclothes and covers and of the cold wet side of the bed that was mine.

It was so unpleasant, so tiring, so human, to be ill for such a short time that I wondered how on earth one tolerated illness that lasted months or years, especially in the absence of anesthetics, analgesics, antibiotics and the hundreds of other chemicals manufactured for our comfort and safety. I wondered about the pain of the past: could I have borne the pain endured by Fanny Burney, mastectomy without anesthetic? Probably not, since I could hardly stand the pain of being stitched after the caesarian section, a process that felt like having my uterus removed from the outside with fishhooks. The cutting was easy, swift, single-motion; the sewing was slow, the needle poked and tugged through resistant flesh layer by layer, muscle by muscle, until the final flesh was stapled

Now the child has it, the start of the fever and a nasty cough. He takes illness less well, just as he often seems to be ill when I need him to be well.

Blue

I walk out the back door and step into blue, the cold of late afternoon and the last ragged scrap of sunset; all I’m doing is dropping cardboard into the recycling, three or five steps I take every day, but I nearly fall, mistaking the light for step, it seems so solidly blue.

Blue: the color of an eye, a mood, a sea, a sky, the title of a song. I search my iTunes library and find “blue” in 76 song titles, from “All Blues”  (Miles Davis) through “Milkcow Blues Boogie” (Elvis Presley) to “Tombstone Blues” (Bob Dylan) and “’49 Mercury Blues” (Brian Setzer). I like this spread, this range of titles and genres, all these kinds of blue.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, a meditation on blue. Someone mentioned today the way January makes him think of, remember, mentally relive summer days at Watch Hill. I think of Watch Hill and how we loved it best in January, February, loved the beaches stacked with brittle sea stars, brittle dead and brittle species, not blue but red, that soaked the car with pungent oceanic death, the rock we called “spit rock” for the waves that beat against it and splashed the car as we drove past.

Winter to me, blue, is a kind of joy, the solitude of cold, the shock of wind: I relish the sensation that flirts with pain, the bright alert of that sounds in my skin when the wind flays my cheeks.

Telling

The pink sky flies over the tenement roofs, but before I can get to the street with my camera it’s gone, all that remains the cold blue sky and the black elbow of a dying tree, a sky so blue and frigid it is almost invisible.

I see Dr. Irony today.

He wants to know what I want to work on, and that will determine whether or not we continue with therapy. Now, I am very good at hiding things, or I try to be.  So when I see Dr. Irony early in the mornings, everything seems great not only because I’m barely awake but because I haven’t had to respond to any stimuli yet, and if things seem not great, they don’t seem screamingly bad. Not at 10:00 am, not usually.

Lassitude: that I can feel at 10. A dull hum behind my eyes, a desire to be anywhere but here, wherever “here” may be, again possible by 10. A sense of impending doom and an ardent desire for death generally take a little longer unless I am seriously depressed.

So muzzy-headed and fairly stable, what I will tell Dr. Irony? Will I tell him, “We’re through. I’m OK enough,” and toddle on until the next crisis? Or will I try to finally get down below the scab and find the original injury?

I don’t know.

How much would I lose? Would I lose my words, my eye, if I could see and solve whatever sends me spinning down?

Will it all end if I say, why I am terrified to call the auction house when the head of the department recognizes the importance of my institution and calls me back within half an hour on the day of their most important sale? Why am I convinced no one wants to know me or be friends with me and then find myself walking for an hour deep in conversation? Why am I always animating the flesh-puppet that is me, pulling myself through my days unwillingly? Why do I have so much fear?

Why do I have so little trust?

I do not trust my own husband. I’m afraid to go out alone with him, afraid that I will either find out I really do like him, or that I will have to face how much he bores me.

We argue in the basement and I realize he bores me. I can never tell him this. I can never tell him the depth of my frustration with his passivity.

What will I tell Dr. Irony in the windowless office, where the dark seeps under the door? What will I tell him?

Perception

Perception is reality, or so it is said.

Dr. Irony says, “You seem content.”

I suppose I am; there is no crisis right now, and I’ve only been back at work for a week after two weeks of vacation, knitting and reading and some writing. Monday morning at nine, of course I’m content: I’m not even awake yet.

So what’s the point of the therapy? We circle this issue, and I finally say that isn’t the question why I get depressed? Why I have a panic attack that lasts for hours and precipitates a depressive episode that lasts 9 months, or nearly so? Surely the medium field in M3 doesn’t frighten me, and can my concerns about my abilities at work be so great that they’d cause a cascading effect that large, that paralyzing?

I had to go to therapy weekly to write the first NEH grant—paralyzed. I get paralyzed writing proposals, struggle to make my brain focus until I feel like the organ is a foamy-mouthed, wild-eyed dog, an Airedale straining at the leash to chase a cat when the task is sit, stay, lie down. Be good. Is that how everyone feels?

I send the proposal to the Big Fish and he thinks its fine: clear, well-written, organized, concise. I read it and think of auto-writing: I can hardly recall writing it, as if someone else (that spirit curator) takes over and writes from inside my brain. Who was that at the archives computer, tapping away about records and numbers and finding aids—surely it wasn’t me?

And I still cannot write the essay for Squishy, though I have promised and promised and hope to tomorrow. Again, the slavering dog overtakes me and my mind runs from the keyboard, or runs from her, perhaps. It’s not a fight I want to have, it’s not a place my ego’s invested. So she thinks she’s the best writer at work: OK, I’m not going to fight that. I’m not going to tell them or let them read my work, either, though they’ve access to the links should they care to. Some have, and no comments. Curious, though what would you say to your co-worker—well, boss, actually.

But perception, I started there: the perception of contentment. Dr. Irony asked what I was thinking, and I had to say, Nothing; there’s just a low hum. It’s as if contentment exists wherever crisis does not, which would make contentment default and not crisis, surely a good thing.

Contentment, happiness, the absence of crisis: these are the times to find out the whys of depression and anxiety, this is the moment when clear thinking should be possible at last, when some way can be found to solve, extract, dissolve, the ore of unhappy that has driven me for so long and if not dissolve it, at least define it. That is the theory, and that is why I must consider the things I want to work on in therapy. Do I rely on depression for creative impulse, the leveraging of unhappiness? Surely one thing to work on is the fear of losing creativity, and the fear that it is driven by depression (even as Peter Kramer refutes that theory). Perhaps the question is really one of control, and that only in depression do I allow less (or simply not possess) control over my thoughts and emotions.

Dr. Irony has said that my failure to read emotional cues, my ignorance of them, may be deliberate. I have felt sometimes like an alien, so little do I understand what people need, the hints they give me. If it is deliberate ignorance, what does that mean? That I’m as narcissistic as my father? Cold and cruel? Or simply unwilling to risk emotional contact, the possibility of calamity?

My mind rebels when I try to push it to thinking about these things, runs wild-eyed again, refusing to focus. There’s some truth there whether I want it or not.

Light

It comes up slowly over the pleasant houses down the hill, over the dark roof of the triple-decker, bleeds through the trees: what light. I miss the light of the Midwest, miss the wide fields and the roads that arced like whiskers smiling from the rivers, gentle traces in gravel on the land.

These longings for space come from strange and random places: watching the X-Files, an old red pickup truck driving down a rural road and I there I am, missing Augusta, Missouri and the earth frozen in ripples, brown and green and studded with straw. It’s not just light, but time: the time to look, only look, to have to do no more and no less than look, to not just pass through, grasping at the landscape for snatches, glimpses, of the wider world.

I sit in meetings and stare out the window while we talk talk talk, drag my eyes back to the Big Fish and Squishy, remind myself even as I speak, Look in their eyes; smile, nod, reassure, but I’m really outside, running for someplace else. It’s been a tough week already, and promises to be no easier today, no matter how soft the lavender sky that cushions the chimney next door: hard words coming.

I never thought I would need Architectural Graphics Standards again, really, not for anything more than clearances and access guidelines in setting up offices and exhibits, but now we’re talking about R-values, condensation, zones and wiring and controls and I have to play catch-up again, trying to translate, trying to remember and my mind’s only half there. I didn’t want to be there, it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. It’s fine, someone has to pay attention, and the hard part is not being borne back ceaselessly into the past in these meetings. The hard part is the responsibility, the twenty years of future environmental conditions, the half-million dollars, that these decisions affect. That’s the hard part—the crap shoot of risk-taking.

Silver

It’s John’s birthday today, or would have been, or was, once. His mother died on my birthday—not the day I was born, but ten or twelve years later. Some are born, some are dying. Everyday things, this life.

You’d think, working with what I do, that I’d be inured to this business and to a degree I am. It’s just stuff, more stuff, another story, another life: some days it all seems the same, monochrome. To each of us, our lives are thick with detail but after, well, what are we?

I don’t want to write about how we’re only objects to be cleared out of a house (though to a degree, we are) or just memories in others’ hearts (though we are); I don’t know what we are. Children, bodies of work, letters, images, what can ever really tell the story of the live a person lived?

We interpret, we reflect, the past a mirror, literally, in daguerreotypes and tarnished images on curling paper, silvered.

It’s a cold place, like the silver water that slapped the shore of the cemetery Saturday. Swan Point, endlessly the place I go, the necropolis, the neighborhood of the people I know here better than most: Sullivan Ballou, Elisha Hunt Rhodes, to name the most famous (I never liked Lovecraft). Do I go because it’s the closest thing to a park, to nature, that’s close at hand? Do I go because I cannot visit my own dead, grandparents, uncles and aunts, friends, lovers? I have adopted these dead and made them mine, pilgrimage in ersatz sorrow as I lead the life that reflects the life I wanted.