When The Lights of Health Go Down
"Why has the ‘drama of the body’ gone so largely unrecognised?"
"English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,
has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way."
"I discovered that sympathy and understanding alone did not help me cope;
what helped was a sense of regained autonomy through creativity and community.
One hundred years after its publication, the subtle complexities of Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill continue to resonate for a new generation of readers.
The New Menard Press is proud to republish Woolf's striking essay, one century on, alongside a collection of twelve brand new pieces which outline new perspectives on illness.
Essays on depression, migraine and long Covid accompany writing on trans healthcare, ADHD, nerve damage and more. All are highly personal, uniquely insightful and searingly honest.
Literature and art create such community and we hope to contribute to this dialogue. In this online exhibition are excerpts from the collection itself, as well as a range of further artworks that interrogate illness.
In doing so, we also aim to expand the range of human experience in art, to cover the enormous variety of ‘deserters’ from the ‘army of the upright’.
The book, and our online exhibition therefore, are more than an anthology.
They are a mission.
Virginia Woolf, Lina Scheynius, Jameisha Prescod, Eva Meijer, Ted Monroe, Alvina Chamberland, Kathryn Maris, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Mina Holland, Daisy Lafarge, Jude Cook, Nikki Dekker and
Jess Cawdron
On Being Ill
Virginia Woolf
"Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."
Three Surgeries Paving a Road to Passing, an excerpt from Blades of Grass, Shatters of Grass (Fragments of Life)
Alvina Chamberland
What We Inherit
Jameisha Prescod
The picture is now hung up in my hallway. I look at it multiple times a day. It’s this photograph that now allows me to face myself again.
I remember a time when I hated looking in the mirror. When I saw myself, it felt like there was a different person looking back at me each time. The inconsistency of sometimes liking my reflection and other times not was too unpredictable. I would face away from the tall mirrors at the gym and only take quick glances at my outfit to look out for stains and creases before turning away and heading out the door. This went on for a while until I came across a photograph of my great-grandmother, Maude.
A Failure to Convalesce
Ted Monroe
In his story, ‘Don’t Blame Anyone’, Julio Cortázar depicts one man’s interminable struggle to put on a jumper. The man is supposed to be meeting his wife at a store, and it is cold outside, so he reaches for a jumper before leaving his flat. The ensuing tangle suspends him in a permanent state of paralysis. Any gains he makes, as when his right hand comes out into the open, are soon undone – it turns out that freeing this hand comes at the cost of trapping his head, for his head is stuck up a sleeve and his right hand is in fact where his head should be. His right hand frequently
disobeys, even, at times, attacks him, so that cause and effect are drastically off kilter. The man spends the story contemplating whether he should take off the jumper and start again or go on forcing himself through. He opts for the latter. By the end he has
not freed himself.
When I’m asked what Long covid is like, it’s tempting to tell people to read Cortázar’s parable, because it is close to articulating the experience of living with this illness.
And so I organised both a move across countries and a vagina surgery within ten days of each other, and I wonder why my feelings are numbed, why I cannot cry when bidding farewell or fully embrace the new? Intensity of doing tends to block intensity of feeling … And I am forever more interested in the latter
Blood Ties
Mina Holland
As birthday presents for seven year-olds go, it was unconventional. But then, she hasn’t had a very conventional life. I gave my daughter a photo book featuring a hundred or so pictures – a very tight edit – illustrating her hospital years, from our (we thought) healthy newborn screaming primally on digital weighing scales to, just over six years later, the image of her ringing the bell on a paediatric haematology ward to signal the end of her treatment. On the book’s cover, she smiles cheekily aged four, holding a squeezy pot of paint; she wears a rainbow fairy tutu and a unicorn horn headband; meanwhile, her naked top half reveals something even more magical than her costume. The apparatus for life-changing medical treatment: a Hickman line, from which three lumens dangle, joined by a naso-gastric tube which descends from a plaster on her cheek.
Kairos
Kathryn Maris
AUBADE
A sudden downpour
augmented the gloam
of going – strange day
that cleared so brightly
I expected a rainbow
on my exit.
I found myself
inexplicably
at Goodge Street,
having lost the key
to my flat, and my friends’
flats – to every
‘safe’ space:
a dizzying position
for someone with a history
of agoraphobia.
But I confess to you
I’ve never felt
safe anywhere
not even home
I could die at home.
Migraine
Lina Scheyniu
I think I am attempting the impossible here: to write about these events now. I know I won’t come close to describing them as they truly were. The memories of the events are flat compared to the reality. The memories become a story, one small part of a full life. While I am in the middle of an episode, there is no room for such perspectives: in those moments the pain is everything. But of course, I could never attempt to write anything from that place.
The Limits of My Language (An Excerpt)
Eva Meijer
An ending. An encasing, a world within a world (a self inside a self), thoughts that thrust themselves into a nest of other thoughts and ruthlessly push out their healthy foster-brothers and sisters (like baby cuckoos), an ever-present shadow (even in the light), a confirmation, a truth, an illusion, heavy sand where the shore turns to sea, a fungus that manages to worm its spores into everything, static noise, fading away, a greyness that sucks up every colour, until all that’s left is the memory of colour.
On 'On Being Ill'
Elte Rauch
"It is not the norm to be blessed with immaculate health: to live a long, untroubled life and then die a natural death, peacefully, surrounded by loved ones. The norm, truth be told, is far less romantic. At some point in their lives almost everyone is confronted by illness, disability or the need for care, quite apart from whatever path leads to their end. Why, then, as Virginia Woolf observes in the opening of her essay, given ‘how common illness is’, has it not taken its place among the ‘prime themes of literature’? Why has the ‘drama of the body’ gone so largely unrecognised?"
On No Longer Being a Hysterical Woman
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
I cannot locate the day that I finally meant it, this heretofore speculative suicide think, but by some point, not long ago, it seemed I had only two choices: get a hysterectomy, or die. I would not die from endometriosis alone, though it is often called benign cancer, but neither could I bear to live with it.
Marx at the Spa (Or, The Sanatorium as Desire's Mausoleum) A Water Cure Trip to Karlovy Vary, Czechia
Daisy Lafarge
In November I was exhausted. The span of good days between flares kept shrinking until it looked like I would have to accept that this was the new new normal, a new baseline. I couldn’t accept it though; I was furious. I was doing everything right and sick of it. I was avoiding the bad foods, and taking enzymes to make sure I didn’t react to the good foods. I was doing physio every day, and rehab at the gym every other day. I walked myself like a dog first thing every morning. I took my supplements, tracked vitamins. I met my step count. I was pacing, and I wasn’t doing stupid things like sitting still for too long. I was using braces and compression and muscle relaxants when I needed to, though I’d weaned myself off the delicious opioids which helped with pain but made everything else worse. I took magnesium baths and checked my breathing. I puffed myself up with electrolytes during exercise, and rotated slowly in front of a red light panel before bed. Each time I switched it off the world went desaturated and greenish, like a film from the early 2000s.
Common Ground
Jude Cook
My father always used to say an apple a day kept the doctor away, though in a tone that implied illness was most often the fault of the sufferer. By the time I got really ill in my mid-thirties I didn’t want to hear that old saw ever again. And I really didn’t need to see the inside of another hospital. Four years battling gallstones and various related urinary tract infections had given me more intimacy with the X-ray gown and the hypodermic than I ever anticipated before old age. Then I was prescribed a new antibiotic, and I had an adverse reaction. Off-the-deep-end adverse.
My night in A&E was terrifying.
Attention Deficit
Nikki Dekker
I strongly advise you read this piece – though I’d permit you a note of caution: by now we’ve all heard far too many takes on social media and our attention span. Not to mention the seemingly unstoppable rise of ADHD. I would myself not be interested in yet another of these stories and would most likely stop reading as soon as I noticed the word ‘youth’ (when one says social media, one says youth). Someone recently mentioned to me that young people no longer read. I asked him what age group he was referring to. Teenagers, twenty-somethings? ‘Twenty-five to thirty-five’ was his answer, and although he is a respectable man who also happens to have some authority over my future income, I couldn’t help but chuckle and mockingly question, ‘So am I one of these youths?’ Indeed, although I am more often than not described as a young writer, I do have grey locks, take great delight in birdwatching, sometimes go to bed at 9 pm – I suffer from all kinds of aches and pains and often feel fatigued.
Notes on Psychosis