April Notebook Entries from My Hospital Room
Healthiest guy in the hospital | Intransitive desire | A memory | Hydromorphone
I am the healthiest guy in the hospital. They take blood from each of my arms at the same time. I feel it rushing out of me like two dark rivulets. It is a sickly Grünewald Crucifixion painting with all of the death drawn out of it. The greens turn to red. The yellows lift into deep blues. Certitude. I lean my head slightly to one side as the vampiric, cool needles do their work. The blood makes them hum like the pipes of little organs. The chubby man on my left and the bubbly girl on my right are my angels. They rise and shake up my blood, laughing and dancing, holding the vials to their foreheads in a benevolent gesture of sanguine clairvoyance. When I take a walk on the floor, out by the other hospital rooms filled with their silent, still patients, the nurses marvel at my progress. A few of them sigh absentmindedly, oval faces held in slender hands made for manipulating delicate medical equipment into people’s screaming, catatonic, fighting, dying, delirious, bleeding and sweating bodies. Amazing things are happening in the GI ward. I politely wear the gown.
A wall of shining blue tears behind someone’s face: a man-made sea submerging and preserving every kind of life, like the sky come down over a town in a valley, no longer a visual impression but a substance.
Intransitive desires are no less intense for their objectlessness. But what are some of these things—closer to ambiences or images than any object—that I find myself overcome with wanting, aimlessly, every time I find myself confined to a hospital room?
Different scenes and images from The Magic Mountain. I want to read it again, but right now I am deeply interested in the conditions during which I already read it (warm outside, unemployed, healthy, etc.).
A dignified picture of illness. A dignified way to go about life in the midst of death. Time suspended.
Densely packed prose; an impression of time opening up, unraveling indefinitely. Always more—almost.
Sunlight, trees, water; but these are nothing here without the happy voices of others, or the possibility of these, just over my shoulder.
A cup of coffee that only gets hotter as it sits.
BIG MUSIC:
MAHLER’S NINTH SYMPHONY
EROICA
GӦTTERDÄMMERUNG
VERKLÄRTA NACHT
Handwriting—pencil on paper, confined to pages that close and go dark.
I want a curving path in front of me and nothing in my hands or on my back.
A nurse leans across me. She’s a little pudgy and her mouth purses together in steady concentration. The smell of a woman. I think of flowers, of happiness. She is close and serious. I try to picture my girlfriend in a scrubby little nurse outfit, leaning over me… This womanly, healthy scent, the silent, kind essence of another person annihilates that clean, anti-life, anti-death chemical smell of the hospital, so hostile to every good, lively feeling. I hate it.
I want to be left alone and to see many people, all at the same time; to feel myself hovering in the lazy power of a crowd.
I would like to open up the cage that keeps these things out of me, to let them in, and yet I would like to do so secretly, so as to better sneak up on them in my fresh health and hunger, which I can see outside if only like an imperfection in the tinting of the glass…
Thinking about reading Unamuno’s book on Don Quixote out in the leaf-dappled sunlight on my small wooden balcony last summer… Fairmount in Philadelphia… drinking soda and eating popsicles… Here is a good line from the book, chosen at random:
You will see how, as soon as the holy squadron [disciples of Don Quixote] sets out, a new star will appear in the sky, a star visible only to the crusaders, a clear, shining star, which will intone a new song in this long night enveloping us, and how the star will set out as soon as the squadron of crusaders set out, and how as soon as they have triumphed in their crusade, or as soon as they have all succumbed [...] the star will fall from the sky: and where it falls that will be where the Sepulcher is. The Sepulcher is where the squadron dies.1
(I read this book outside in the fresh air, rain or shine. Couldn’t bring myself to read it indoors.) Listening to an interview in my headphones as the sky turns into nighttime. William T. Vollmann. He seems like a very nice man. V. is inside, moving around under the kitchen lights with a glass of chilled white wine. The neighbors down below are having a fun night eating outside with their friends, I am on my back, there is alcohol in me like a bubble in a level, I feel a bus in my spine, rumbling up 20th, bugs appear here and there, clouds—nothing bothers me, because this is a memory. It was nice then, but it’s beautiful now.
Sun through my big hospital window, a little bit of liquid molecular architecture in my veins for the pain, given me by the smiling nurse. I’m closing in on death! but only chemically, as a flat image, like a kind painting of a field and a treeline and a road. Corot, or Daubigny, one of the warmer impressionists that in a museum you might pass by or ignore, over-excited to arrive at your old favorites. I pause long in front of this painless painting, and the muscles in my body, up to now ironlike with pain, forcibly relax. This momentary annihilation of pain through the direct intervention of drugs;2 it is nearly painful itself. If I didn’t know better—but even still—the positive brightness of that pain might frighten me in its very leaving. Now, joyful negation, like an eclipse during a picnic.
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Miguel de Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote, Princeton. 13.
The way IV pain medication sweeps away every bad, mean feeling in your body and lets the light in from the window with greater power makes me want to attempt impossible feats of readership. I could read all of the Summa Theologica in a day. I could get through The Anatomy of Melancholy or The Life of Samuel Johnson as if they were novellas. A single poem, on the other hand, would be enough to stop me in my tracks. A line break would make me forget how to keep reading altogether. Or Stifter… no commas no unnecessary periods just very good linear sentences going straight on into a field or a valley outside or a town square full of people straight out of fairy tales, ahistoric, buoyant…