I have recently found myself with a lot of time on my hands, and this has been most unusual, given the frantic way I have lived for the past eleven years. For several months now I have been away from work, eyeball to eyeball with the ME which has plagued me, on and off, up and down, for almost eight years. When my son was three and my PhD just about finished (they coincided to unfortunate effect and I learnt that one could not be creative biologically and aesthetically at once) I suffered from a bout of viral pneumonia that took me unawares. I had never really been ill before. At that point, the information and the support networks available today did not exist, and it was only last autumn that I had to face up to, and accept, the truth of my condition. I have never liked admitting to being ill, and the majority of my strength had been spent pretending (at some cost) that I was not. But once I understood, there was nothing to be done but face it down properly, with all the resources and the focus at my disposal.
I have always felt that knowledge and understanding are all that stand between me and the forces of chaos. To become well, I needed to analyse what lay at the heart of my illness. I had to hunt down the truth like a stalker with his prey. And I came to the conclusion that ME is like being – quite literally – allergic to certain parts of your life, or at least to certain pressures and certain contexts. However, the complexity lies in the fact that the parts you are allergic to are the ones you are obsessed with. It’s rather like conceiving an allergy to animal fur whilst being unable to stay out of the pet shop. The more the body responds with a violent red alert to the dangerous situation, the more the mind insists you remain within it, until the body, functioning now on a hair trigger, responds excessively at the slightest indication of trouble. Even getting out of bed looks like it might mean trouble to the over-zealous guardian angel that is the hypothalamus. Whatever. The body speaks, and what it says in no uncertain terms, is that your existence no longer works. Your values, your ideology, your desires, have become inappropriate, mismatched, to your capacities. On n’est pas bien dans sa peau, as the French so insightfully put it. The outside and the inside layers, the complex machinery of body and mind, are at odds and there must be change.
I do not want to write any more about the illness than I have to. There are many blogs out there recording the daily struggles of other poor souls with this illness, and reading them made me uneasy. Bodies are tools; good slaves but terrible masters. Or as Kafka put it, I only have to think of my good digestion to lose it. Part of the vicious circle that drives ME is the constant, detailed monitoring of the body under a cautious and fearful microscope. Familiarity really ought to breed content. And in any case, the story of how I became ill, the disastrous way I attempted to cope with it and the mess I made of my life, is one I have told myself too many times. I used to cling to it like a life raft in a queasy, threatening sea. Now it bores me. The more interesting story is how to piece myself back together again, how to live life today and tomorrow, differently.
Whilst work has undeniably been a big factor in my old style of car-crash living, it is also as much a part of me as my heartbeat. The Greeks had a useful word – pharmakon, whose modern derivatives are easy to spot – that means both poison and cure. Kill or cure, we say cheerfully, having once really meant it. I cannot remember a time in my life when I did not adore stories. When the prospect of losing myself in a fictional world did not mean risk in security, comfort in adventure. Had my DNA come out slightly differently, I would have been a traveller. As it is, I detest travel with its discomfort and unreliability, but I will happily go anywhere in my mind. I had no idea where my interests would take me, and after all, a career as a lecturer in literature is hardly something a child could predict, but by putting one foot in front of the other, it was where I ended up. Many people have absolutely no idea how it is possible to, or even why one would wish to, spend one’s days talking about books. If the act of teaching literature seems mystifying, then imagine how much harder it is to envisage the point of research. To talk of university research is to conjure up images of white suits in laboratories and test tubes. But the age we live in has a pragmatic distrust of culture, which might be reasonable were it not for the ambivalence and confusion in its decrees. My son rarely comes home from school without some bullying reminder from his teacher to hear him read. But by 18 children have been conditioned to think the consideration of why and what we read to be hopelessly outdated and irrelevant to the modern world. Politicians campaign righteously for literacy, whilst slashing the funding for the arts. That disembodied voice known as public opinion suggests that reading is a waste of time, and yet people spend more of their lives in front of the television, the cinema and the computer screen than ever before, soaking up fantasy. Why should literature matter? Of course I have all kinds of reasons, more of which I will explain later on. But the one that touches me to the quick is the recognition that the ability to create, to imagine and to analyse is all that keeps up above the level of the animals. It is the vital essence of humanity at its best to tell stories in order to make sense of the world. Science gives us a form of absolute knowledge, I don’t dispute that, but only literature tries to come to terms with the complex and traumatic business of actually existing, of fitting into the world we have fashioned for ourselves and which we understand not at all. We need it because, without it, we lose sight of ourselves and welter in the murky detritus of mindless carnal needs.
And speaking for myself, I have done enough weltering of late.
