The Mimosa Effect 2

R.I.P., Oscar Emmanuel Peterson
August 25 1925 – December 23 2007

Being sick is kind of like being on another planet, or at least on another plane of existence.  Nothing is quite the way it should be.  Everything is slightly off.  Things are the wrong size, the wrong weight.  Everything feels different, like someone’s messed with the gravity setting.  Even the basic laws of the universe seem to function differently here.   Perhaps it’s because being sick is rather more like being stuck between two different dimensions – the world of the real, which seems so remote and distant that it’s hard to remember what it felt like to be clear, and awake, and present in that world – and some mystical, magical fantasy land, where things don’t necessarily fall if you drop them, and if you think hard enough about it, you could just float right off the bed, and out the window over the snow covered lawn. 

Virginia Woolf once wrote an essay “On Being Ill”, and on why, given it is such a universal and profound human experience, it isn’t written about more often.  And while I can’t say that I went quite so far as going down into the pit of death, feeling the waters of annihilation closing above my head, I did tread on the edges of those shadowed undiscovered countries, and sometimes wondered if I were in the presence of, if not angels, at least some strange, otherworldly beings that only the sick and children can converse with.

I am now entering my tenth day of a long and protracted battle with an invisible enemy, and I have to say that being the general in charge of an army when you have no way of accounting for your troops, or any real idea of the terrain, or the strength and number of the enemy they will be confronting, is infinitely more frustrating than trying to hit a bulls-eye in the dark.  At least with the latter, you may be able to rely on some strange mystic blend of Zen awareness and sheer dumb luck.  But with all the countless, anonymous mutated modern bugs floating around, like tiny multiplying billiard balls bouncing between all the billions of human beings, I doubt even a trained physician could tell me exactly what form of microscopic entity is currently causing me all this grief.  And so I float in the ether of this nether-world, sometimes coming close to clarity when one of my ears pops as the air pressure changes, sinking and rising between the waves and troughs of thick sleep and muzzy awareness. 

Somewhere in the last ten days, I managed to drive myself and M. to Perth and back, also to Ottawa and back, through snowstorms and rain and slush and darkness; somewhere in there, we endured forced socialization with people we’d rather avoid and enjoyed the agonizingly short but sweet moments with long-lost friends that we’d rather have spent much longer with; we had quiet moments with family and long, strange nights coasting on cold medication.  On waking, it was sometimes hard to remember what day it was, what bed I was in, even what world I had awakened into.  But somewhere in there, we made it back home. 

After over a week spent away, home was such a powerful magnet that even the ominous first fat flakes of wet snow falling on the dark grey morning did not sway us from our path.  Many times along the endless, dreary tunnel of a drive that followed, squinting ahead along white highways surrounded by white flocked trees stretching into fogged, icy whiteness, betting our lives on the ability of our snow tires to stick to the snowy road, I wondered if perhaps this had been the best decision.  But here, on my own couch with a cup of hot herbal tea sliding in intervals down my throat, there is a certain sense that no matter what else happens, at least I know I don’t have to embark on another journey for a while yet.

After a month and a half of writing every single day, after the brief high of feeling like I had finally become a Writer with a capital “W”, the crash and subsequent drawn out recovery of the past two weeks has been especially maddening.  The worst part is the feeling like you’ve lost your best friends – all those mad voices in your head, constantly telling stories, interrupting each other with new revelations, seething with emotion and imagined peril, even during the dry spells when trying to get words to actually appear on paper is a feat akin to pulling toenails one by one and trying to arrange them into a beautiful work of art using only your teeth… for days, long, tortuous days, even those voices were silent, my thoughts blank and sluggish, concerned only with telling each foot to take one more step forward, concentrating on not falling down stairs, on putting food into my mouth when needed.  Even the simple act of reading was too much for my befuddled brain.  The one joy that one can usually drag out of a protracted illness – getting through all those books you’ve been meaning to read – even that was lost on the distant shores of reality, on the other side of the thick glass bubble.  I oscillated between watching movies – I watched an awful lot of movies -  and sleeping.  So now that I finally have the energy to put fingers to keys, it’s not so surprising that the one thing I can think to write about is this.  I am still not entirely in the world of the waking, but now that the words are flowing again, now that the pestering annoying voices are back, now that I can read again and savour all those rich moments like dark chocolate that inspire me to try my own, rough, raw concoctions, I’m hoping the stories will emerge from their enforced slumber, and bring me fully back to the world of the present and the alive.

Until then, I remain, couch-bound and awash in endless cups of tea, anticipating the light at the end of this long, white, fog-shrouded tunnel.

Advice from a successful author, as noted in the book “Reading Like a Writer” by Francine Prose: Begin with one true sentence. These are the true sentences I wrote while waiting for my connecting bus:

In the dark, there are two things you can see: the dark itself, and your own soul.

Sparrows are wonderful things.

Green is a colour much abused, and seldom done justice to.

And also one question…

How much and how often must one abuse, overuse and otherwise hack away at a good word until it becomes trite and meaningless?

…and one true observation:

There are no flowers in this world of glass and concrete; and yet oddly, from where I sit, I see a single tree, on the roof of a nearby apartment building.  It looks dead, but that might just be the season.

My black cat has seven white whiskers.  Or was that nine?  I haven’t counted lately.  It changes from day to day.  Not overnight, of course, but every once in a while we’ll look down at him, curled in one of our laps, and notice he has another one. Sometimes he loses them. Finding a cat whisker on the rug is a peculiar kind of discovery.  You’d think it would hurt, to lose something that is so sensitive, you can use it to help you find your way around in the dark, or let you know if a space is getting a little too cozy for comfort.  But it seems he just sheds them.  Sometimes they grow back white, sometimes black. 

He was a little grizzly when we first met him; a tiny kitten that would fit in one hand, all salt-and-pepper grizzled grey.  It might have been his immature colouration, or it could have had something to do with being malnourished.  As he grew bigger, and healthier, he lost most of his white stippling and became an all-black cat, save for the white spot on his tummy and a white Roman-collar patch under his chin.  But there are still a few stray white hairs.  Like the whiskers, they come and go. 

I like to think it’s just another sign that cats are quantum – along with being able to appear spontaneously in rooms with closed doors. The same way their brains apparently exist in more than one reality at a time (which can lead to randomly spazzing out for no obvious reason, or the phenomenon of being really smart one moment and really dense the next).

To anyone out there who may be bored, or lonely, or stuck in a rut (mental, emotional, metaphysical or otherwise), I highly recommend surrounding yourself with animals.  They are a source of endless fascination and delight. 

Currently, our turtle is molting – shedding bits of her shell, which flake off and sink to the bottom of the tank.  Weirdly, the onion-skin-thin flakes are iridescent green, even though her green-brown shell is normally quite subdued looking.  One of our goldfishes is now completely blind; when he first returned to the small-pond (living room tank) for the season, he kept bumping into the glass. Now that he’s acclimatized, he swims around as if he can see perfectly fine.  We have an attic squirrel who keeps us up at night, who isn’t really a pet at all, but somehow we still find him cute (he’s very fluffy, and eats what the chickadees knock out of the feeder), and we have yet to dislodge him.  We’re kind of suckers that way.

Just one corollary though; if you want an endless source of better-than-TV entertainment, you will have to feed it, and water it, and love it and take it on walks and pay attention to it even if you’re busy or tired or annoyed.  If you’re not willing to do all that, from the moment one of these fabulous creatures enters your life to the sad but inevitable moment when it leaves, then you should probably go back to your TV (or your X-Box). 

But if you’re willing to make that extra bit of effort, to connect with something not-of-your-species, it will pay you back in spades (or aces, or a full flush, or whatever other card analogy is meant to imply goodness).  It will let your soul breath a little deeper, make the darkness seem a little less dark.  It will connect you to all the other Life on this planet Earth in a way no SUV every will. Of course, interacting with critters in their natural environment is pretty cool too; and most of them should really stay there.  But if you know of a critter that needs a home, think of bringing it into yours.  There ain’t nothin’ else quite like it.

rhythmic finger picking on a steel strung guitar
chords like tall trees and horses
good crow flying music
don’t take the main road
just cut straight across
through the forests and the mist-shrouded clear-cuts
while the giant machines sleep
surrounded by twenty-foot matchstick kindling
finding beauty in a barren wasteland
like glass on the beach
a speck of green against the grey
the crow flies straight, over the drowned lands
the water shines in the sun
under shimmering depths of deep soul blue
the deadwood bones lie hidden

- T.H.

(what today’s sentence turned into; followed by an aimless ramble about water. not much of a prose writing day. think the noveling part of my brain has decided to take a few days off, go somewhere sunny where it can lounge on the beach and drink margueritas. darned fickle muse.)