Fragility

About three metres from my bedroom window a road crew is engaged in smashing up the footpath. The woman who came to the front door to ask me to move my car is wearing the most incredibly impressive false eyelashes with her hard hat and overalls. They are almost an inch long, curled, and thick with black mascara. The man by the gate is poking at something in a hole. He's wearing a blue hazmat suit and respirator. I've been sick in bed since Monday night. I don't know how these facts are connected but I'm pretty certain that they are.

When I hobbled out onto the street to move the car Respirator Man said Good Morning!, really loudly, and I assume sarcastically; hard to detect those cues through his costume, but it's almost eleven and I felt conspicuous, being not only the only person on the street not clad in hi-vis but also the only person on the street wearing sunglasses and her pyjamas inside out. I felt like he was accusing me of being hung over, which would be very ingracious given that I went and moved the car so they can do whatever it is they want to do there, or at least whatever they're being paid to do. I don't know whether they want to do it and it would be an impertinence to go out there and ask them. Can you imagine it? Not quite Norman Gunston style thrusting the microphone into bemused faces but more like the cheerfully bossy street interviewers featured in the ABC's Retrofocus clips (of which there are nowhere near enough). I lack the manly confidence for that sort of thing.



Please note that Australian Santas wore stick-on bushy eyebrows in 1965.

I drove the car round the block and left it in the carport at the back. Really I don't mind going out in my pyjamas - like the orthodox Jews of East St Kilda I have a home zone around my house and within this I can do on the street pretty much whatever I'd do indoors - it's the inside-out part that is troubling. In fact having identified that as the issue, I am now going to get out of bed, take them off and put them on again the right side out. Hang on a sec

Ok so I treated myself to complete fresh set of PJs. Why the hell not. I'm better today than I was yesterday but I still can't face food and I need to rest. Being home alone sickish in bed in the daytime always makes me think about this incident, although with Vinnie here and the men and woman from U.N.C.L.E. outside I don't feel as vulnerable today as I have at other times. The way he said Good Morning! to me, it was right in that zone where whatever it means, you can't do anything about it anyway.  I couldn't have stopped and explained to him that I'm not hung over, I'm sick. I'm reminded of this recent widely circulated Facebook comment where someone from the TAC tries to explain to some guy that 'bikes don't pay rego' is an irrelevant piece of wank - solid information but useless in the split-second street interaction - and even if there was time to say all this, the recipient of your discourse is only going to reply, Whatever. So because I couldn't tell him I am sick, and just how very dreadfully sick I am, I am going to tell you about it instead, sorry.

About 3am on Tuesday morning I woke up with stomach cramps. I lay there a long time thinking about what kind of cramps they might be. It wasn't monthly cycle-related. Yoga the evening before might possibly have precipitated them, though I sort of thought not. That left food poisoning or a virus. Around four I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. That's a journey of about five steps and in the time it took my entire body broke a heavy sweat. I was walking like I was on the bottom of the ocean. I emptied my bowels and threw up, with this heavily surreal sensation of my will and my independent body moving together to interrupt and reverse their normal processes and wheel everything around to expel all the loose material contained inside me. I was slumped on the cool tiles, my arm resting on the toilet seat, and I tasted the evening meal coming up, in two separate surging masses; it felt like a living thing with its own volition and purpose. It felt like a dreadful alien birth. I felt some sort of dim relief that I am so obsessive about keeping that toilet clean and I felt very afraid that Leonard would also be ill, since we'd eaten the same food.

When I could move again I ran the tap and splashed my face and rinsed my mouth then I went back to the bed. I was drenched with sweat and very disoriented. I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and my legs out straight in front. And then I passed out, and this is the reason I'm writing this down - not to be gross, not really because of being affronted by the man outside (although they are now doing something out there that's making the house shake) - that moment of losing consciousness is something I want to document.

As I sat there braced between the bed and the floor, unable to move, I felt my consciousness going out. Just like being inside a dark sphere with pinpoints of light across its inner surface, and these were imploding into me, into a vortex of darkness. As the patches went black in my field of vision, some were replaced with patches of dim neon blue light. I was losing my vision, my ability to move, and my capacity to think, and they were being sucked inward and down. I was going down. Just before I went out I thought, Am I dying, and then everything was gone.

I woke up a short time later, apparently having accumulated enough charge in those few minutes to be able to stand up and get into the bed. I wondered how Lenny was doing but I was not able to get up and go check on him until after sunrise. He was, and is, fine.

I am dumb and I showered and dressed and drove myself to Carlton for my Tuesday morning doctor appointment. In retrospect, driving home afterwards in the state I was in was an extremely stupid thing to do. The doctor wondered if I had been so sick, but Leonard not at all, because I am fragile. I was and remain somewhat amazed by this suggestion - not the suggestion of fragility but the view that such a vigorously physical experience could be shaped by a psychological state. The doctor really is a doctor and when she says things like this, it doesn't come out of a hippy-dippy disdain for science and medicine. This was a visceral and bodily thing, not delicate, not subtle, and oddly not connected to language (although I have just had a go at rehabilitating it into language). And yet the element of it which, despite it all being both disgusting and banal, I want to keep and remember and reflect on - is that sensation of being extinguished.

In the long darkness of winter we sometimes do a yoga practice which goes like this. We each sit on our mats, with candles set on the floor a little way in front, and we look at our flame, fixing the gaze on the darkest part, which is at the bottom, in the middle, where it burns onto the candlewick. After a minute we close our eyes, but we keep looking at the image of the flame, which is imprinted on the eye. We watch it until it is entirely faded, then we open our eyes and renew the image, then close them again. The centre of this practice, which is about silence, privacy, focus and inwardness, is in the long last stretch of looking at the flame's afterimage as it dwindles to nothing. In that time, what you are looking at is partly the retinal ghost and partly the mental image which you have formed, and are now preserving, by an act of will.



This one is really good too.