bellascribe

Since the beginning of this year, 2005, I’ve begun to talk more about my illness. I don’t like to. I didn’t expect nearly two years later (maybe longer) to even be in this position, to be having to make this decision. Didn’t think I’d be ill still, or at least not this level of illness. If I’d imagined anything at all about what life might be like 2-3 years later, I imagined residual bits of this or that. On occasion. Morning stiffness, or stiffness in the limbs, maybe the neck. Once in a very long while lasting longer into the day, after some bout of exerting myself a bit more than I ought to have they day before, say having ridden my bike too long or too far, too much at the beach dipping one or other of the babies into the waves, folded up too long in the front passenger seat, on a roadtrip, before getting out and stretching. Making notes not to repeat that behavior again, enduring the trouble with the aid of anti-inflammatories and pain relievers, warm compresses, rest, ruefully paying the price for forgetting to pay attention and remain aware. Talking about my illness feels like a double-edged sword. It makes it both easier to separate it from me — to put it in its place — to not allow it to define me. Yet, giving it time and space on the page, in the conversation (no matter how one-sided) seems to run that risk. Anything claiming that much consciousness would. Already I am tired of the topic — tired of writing altogether which I am going to attribute to the topic and therefore, change it, with the acknowledgment that it is an experiment — to write about my illness — in consciousness, an attempt to positively affect what I might possibly affect. The next addition to this page will (should) include background info to answer the following: What is wrong? What do you have? What are your diseases? Diagnoses? Etc and so on. Perhaps a timeline of some sort. I am writing these pages only when I can actually physically write them now, which means typing via the keyboard, as opposed to via talking into my little recorder and running that recording through software turning voice to text. For reasons I am trying to both articulate and formulate — understand — that experience is not writing. It is not a satisfactory replacement. It is something different, and maybe not altogether terrible. It is only terrible for me when it is supposed to be what it is not, in lieu of. This is related, no doubt, to how I don’t write a poem at the keyboard, how a poem starts for me on paper — in a notebook/journal usually — begins with a pen in my hand physically on a page, moving through the loops and the turns and curves, making the strokes and lines of the letters, the shapes of the words, how they look on the page, arranging themselves. In my MFA program once I heard a poet say during the course of his talk (lecture, class, like that) that even before the oral tradition of poetry, in the Far East [I think] it was about how the poetry looked on the page, the aesthetics, a poem’s beauty such as it was formed by its characters and their arrangement on the material (”page”).