Dear readers, such determined faithful as there are of you left, as I’m quite sure watching this blog fail to update is no way to pass a jolly evening, hello.
I have spent quite a few days in (somewhat apathetic) debate with the Editor about writing this post. I feel self-conscious and foolish about it. I ought to be writing all sorts of far more interesting things – I have quite a list of them. And I ought to be thanking Solnushka for nominating this as one of the blogs that make her think, which was so flattering that I actually had a little weep, and as both Aphra and Charlotte think I am worth a special mention for being funny and clever, then I ought to be funny and clever, damn it.
But what I shall actually do is whine. Because I am Sorely Afflicted, and it is creating a whole new Writer’s Block out of dust and ashes, or, this being 2007 and dust and ashes being in short supply in the well-regulated home of today, kleenex and hot-water-bottles.
The thing is, I’ve not been entirely well for quite a few months now. I thought I was managing to be merely slightly unwell, the sort of thing that can be sorted out by vitamins, fresh air, and a positive attitude, but recently I went to a specialist and had all sorts of diagnostic (and amazingly invasive) tests done, and lo and behold, I have a Big Complicated Thing wrong with me, and the doctors want to go in there after it and remove it forcibly with tongs and a laser.
The Big Complicated Thing has reacted extremely badly to being discovered, rather like a Bond Villain pressing the Red Button just as the army break into his secret head-quarters to drag him, still laughing demoniacally, to Justice. The boring symptoms have suddenly ramped up until they are horribly interesting symptoms that frighten the bejaysus out of my husband. James Bond however is doing his usual thing of waiting until the timer says 0:07 seconds, so we are on our own for the moment, and it is rotten.
The Editor did point out, in an unusual flight of almost flattering grandiosity, that there are many important writers and artists who did there best work while Sorely Afflicted, and I really need to get over myself. Keats wrote while coughing his lungs up, Marcel Proust spent years scribbling away in bed because he couldn’t go out without abruptly ceasing to breathe, Katherine Mansfield was disgustingly ill from her early twenties onwards, hell, Frida Kahlo went even further and turned her dreadful injuries into Art with a Very Capital A.
To which I responded, no one wants to know what’s wrong with my innards.
The Editor made me google for Frida Kahlo’s pictures after that, but no, really, you don’t want to know what’s wrong with my innards and anyway, I’d really rather not have the self-same Editor accusing me of being derivative [As if I... oh, yes. Good point - Ed].
So, I am letting the side down. The Novel is sitting about in an abandoned pile, the blog is getting dusty and tedious with neglect, even good old poetry, which I can normally scribble away at in a haze of adolescent anxst, is Not Helping. I mean, yes, it doesn’t help that I’m so tired and frazzled I can’t think straight for ten minutes together, but cogent reasoning was never the point of anything I did in the first place. I should be able to Sublimate, if not into Art, then at least into comment and vitriol. But I can’t. Everything I try to write ends up a great snivelling snot-trail of self-pity and far, far too much information. And I feel betrayed, because I had always held fast to the belief that yes, you could write yourself out of bad patches, that you could create at least a little scrap of something along as you had control of at least one eyelid, that writing was balm to the aching soul.
Instead, I find my ability to write depends very much on how well I feel, and that physical suffering is indeed the very arse of Beelzebub. I suck at this. Those brave Sorely Afflicted who Could are, frankly, better than I am.
So let’s pray for effective medication and a short waiting-list, shall we? Or it’s going to be an unbearably tedious year chez Out of Ideas.
