Lost in Virginia Woolf and Returned from Pnuemonialand

I've been quiet almost since I started this blog. Work of another nature intervenes so often, I teach composition to lots and lots of college freshman (read here, adjunct lecturer). Reading their papers interferes for a while each Fall as I go off balance and must regain my center.

Then, in early November, the flu followed by pnuemonia. Why be slightly under the weather when you can go vertical for a few weeks straight?

Anyway, once out of the high-fever stage of the flu, but not back to the working-stiff stage of daily life, I found myself suspended in a state of not-reading/not-writing. If you have ever read Virgina Woolf's long essay, "On Being Ill," you will know what I'm talking about. If you haven't read it, high thee to Paris Press for a copy, it's a wonderful read.

Woolf talks about that sense of suspension that serious, temporary illness causes. We are not jocular, reasonable, or even particularly diplomatic, yet we are mostly permitted our behaviors because we are also not part of ordinary daily life. We are 'Ill'.

I have to say I was actually too sick to be undiplomatic, mostly sleeping and drinking fluids. But I did enter a sort of extended dream state. The walls spoke to me through images late at night, the rain made music. One night the wind tore around the corner of the house evoking expectations that Cathy would appear in my room and Heathcliff would howl out in the meadow beyond the split-rail fence ala Wuthering Heights.

Best of all, or perhaps the silver lining to the cloud of being ill, was that I found myself disconnected from the previous 8 weeks during which I had relinquished my own pages for student papers, my own poems for student compositions, my own revisions for student revisions.

I came to rest in an almost wordless place, listening to sound, wandering through images that rose from dreams, memories, idle staring.

Now I'm wrapping up another semester. Student papers are piled on my table again. And as I review them I recognize progress has been made.

I still get tired and cough in spasms, pnuemonia does not go gently into that good night! But I also find myself stringing letters into words again and words into sound images. I'm reading other people's poems again too. A friend sends them in 2s and 3s by email; books I meant to read all Fall have risen to the top of the piles in my study and bedroom. My appetite for words has returned.

But when I look back on those hours in suspension I realize that I was, even then, in the company of words, or at least the result of having read and having written. I experienced it all, the illness, the wind, the rain, the silence, the dreams, through the vehicle of language. I told myself what each experience was as it occurred.

Alicia Ostriker wrote an essay, the title of which I cannot remember at this moment, in which she wonders at the fact that we live 'thinking we know what it is because we know its name' (my rough paraphrase). Her point is that there is so much we don't truly understand even though we do have a name for it: war, peace, love, etc.

But this experience was the reverse. I heard 'wind'. I knew wind. I heard 'rain'. I knew rain. I heard 'wind' I knew Cathy and Heathcliff in that particular wind's voice, because in my adolescence Bronte's novel had made that voice so clear to me.

I know I'm rambling, so perhaps I'm nearing the end of this posting. I know some readers will hear me.

Blessed be.

Mimzerella