Sensual Wheezing
A Dispatch from a Parallel World
To begin rather portentously: I write to you tonight from the country of the sick. I spend a large percentage of my life sick. I’m sick right now, stuck in bed, speaking to you via a rapidly heating laptop, which is cooking my crotch and, likely, sterilizing me. A small mercy there, at least.
Readers of previous entries here might recall that I fairly recently recovered from a bout of pneumonia. Well, guess what? I’m immersed in it again. I have been for… Shit, I don’t know how long. I know that I went to my day job a few times since this recurrence has been going on. I know that I’ve also taken days off. I remember a visit to an urgent care facility, where I was nebulized with Albuterol. Was there an ER visit in there somewhere too? I think so, but I can’t remember what, if anything, happened there. Along with the labored breathing and intermittent fever there has come a brain fog of amorphously varying strength and size. It seems to come and go. But if I had to commit to a timeframe for this current battle in the war of attrition that seems to be going on between myself and my body, I’d say it’s been two weeks. Two weeks and an eternity. (Forgive me, please. We consumptives tend toward the dramatic.)1
The upshot of all this is that I’ve been a captive audience for books again. In the distracted haze of illness, my reading habits become strange. Firstly, I’m shuffling between numerous things. I promise myself one chapter at a time of a varied group of books that I’ve downloaded via Libby, the public library app, onto my iPad. I ration the books out by chapters because my attention span is compromised and forcing myself to consume each book in digestible chunks is, I hope, allowing for more comprehension and retention than simply reading one book until I drop off to sleep again thanks to Gabapentin and ZzzQuil. Here is what’s been in the lineup:
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag
Yes, it’s on-the-nose. I sought this one out precisely because I hoped I’d find something to relate to in it, some feeling of comradeship. Maybe I wanted to find a text that understands what it’s like to be chronically ill. I’m halfway through now, and while I don’t feel, um, seen, I do find Sontag putting words to things that I’d previously only felt but not thought. Mainly it has to do with the languorous, romantic sensuality possible in certain illnesses. Sontag identifies this in tuberculosis amongst poets such as Keats, who died at 25 as a result of the disease. Coming across him in Sontag led me to pull my volume of his Complete Poems and Selected Letters down from the shelf. I hadn’t dug into him in a long time, and I realized that I’d missed him. I flipped through it, stopping here and there, admiring his incredibly inventive and fluid rhymes—the best rhyming poetry seems to me to be about discovering an inevitability that nobody but the author had previously thought of—and finally I landed here:
WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain,
When I behold upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
This poem feels catalyzing to me even in my diminished state. It almost got me out of bed; it at least got me writing this Substack entry again after a lengthy break to sleep.
Anyway, yes, the languor of sickness. To be sick enough is to be granted leave from the world for a while—leave to luxuriate in one’s illness and its attendant earned stoppage of responsibility and duty. Sontag writes: “The Romantics invented invalidism as a pretext for leisure, and for dismissing bourgeois obligations in order to live only for one’s art.” All one has to do when very sick is be very sick. That and, hopefully, allow yourself to be cared for, which can be an uncomfortably intimate position. You’re in bed, you’re submitting, you’re essentially at the whim of the ones who care for you. You’re also, most likely, in pain. There’s something sadomasochistic about the bond between the carer and the cared-for. Maybe that’s why I have trouble giving myself over to it and instead often choose to suffer without supplies and without company. My approach to illness is more onanistic.
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron
This nonfiction book by the novelist Styron is perhaps the most accurate depiction of clinical depression, which I am also blessed with, that I’ve read. This and the story “The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace. I first read Darkness Visible while in the grips of a very dark depressive episode in 2011, and I was drawn to it again now not because I’m depressed—I’m not, at least not dangerously so—but because of how well it captures the feeling of otherness engendered by being sick, whether it’s physically or mentally. Being sick imparts a feeling of unreality, a sense of living in another dimension that runs alongside the major artery inhabited by the healthy. When I’m unwell and I speak with people who are well, I feel an invisible barrier between us. Something gauzy and indistinct, but impenetrable. They are living in a different world than I am, with different concerns and priorities. In fact, when I’m sick, I have no priorities. The well can’t understand that—no matter how kindly they are.
Further sickbed reads:
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman
I just rewatched Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and was reminded how much I love Fassbinder. And I enjoyed Ian Penman’s book of essays It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track. But something about his book on Fassie (as I like to call him) isn’t clicking for me. I think my main issue is the structure. It’s divided up into little numbered chunks, some of which are discrete observations and some of which come in related bursts. I find this structure trying in most instances, and this is one of those. The book is lacking in ligaments.
Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan
A book-length interview with Mr. Cave. Banal and transcendent in equal measure. If you’re a fan, then you’ll wallow in it, as I am. If you must ask yourself whether you’re a fan, then I’d advise staying away. That isn’t meant as gatekeeping but as a caveat: If you’re not fawning, it might get boring.
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
I should have read this a long time ago. Pitch-black, cynical, hateful noir. Pure pleasure.
No, I am not tubercular. I have an esophageal disease (or simply a disorder, according to some doctors who haven’t experienced the fucking thing) called achalasia. It causes aspiration pneumonia which, with its breathlessness, fainting, and weakness, is perhaps an appetizer for what one might experience in the grips of TB. (But also, see above re: dramatic.)