Back after this short break - I hope!

It's been quiet here for a good reason. Apart from three days in Donegal, during which the rain rained like a rainy thing (did-ya-know it's been the wettest July since, er, last year?), I've been trying to get over various chest-related things which have been leaving me drained and... er... well... still unwell.

Some of you might remember me moaning (Feb) about general unwellness long before the pneumonia (Apr) episode. If not, a quick recap: pain in abdomen, pain in chest, general fatigue etc. etc. hospital, home, bed, hospital, home, more bed, back to work ya-di-da-da.

I returned recently to the doctor after diagnosed pleurisy seemed to be refusing to go away. Conversation went like something this:

Me: The pain is still there.
Doc: Well, your chest is clear.
But, the pain is still there - it's tender to touch under my tight armpit; exactly where I had the pneumonia. In fact I've had this pain there since before I had the pneumonia. Me and this pain know each other so well, we could be bosom buddies.
Is that so?
Yes.
Maybe it's not pleurisy.
Then what is it?
It might be costochondroitis.
Huh?
Could be caused by pneumonia. Here's a prescription for some heavy-duty painkillers and some prednisone. Go home and go to bed.

Again? Sheesh...

Solving Sylvia?

I almost regret getting stuck into Ariel's Gift last week, as it ended up with me re-reading Birthday Letters, Ariel (the facsimile of her original ms), reading Her Husband, by Diane Middlebrook, and then turning to the internet to order Plath's Collected Poems (I did have this, but don't know where it's gone), as well as her Journals, Letters Home (you need these both, apparently, to balance each other out), and Johnny Panic & her collected Prose. I stopped myself just as the bill came to the 100 mark, at the children's stories - but only just.

I've also ordered some Anne Sexton, and Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, oh and AS's Collected too, I read her work at AMK and decided I really should have my own copy. But that's by the by.

Anyhoo, what do I think of the whole thing? I find S&T's whole story appallingly fascinating. Their sad story reminds me of my own parents: miserable together, miserable without each other. My mother felt trapped by the whole marriage versus a creative life. Like SP, my mother had an American upbringing and education (her parents fled France when WWII broke out). In Dublin at the end of the 60s, at the age of twenty-one, she met my dad, at uni, and got pregnant, married and ended up living in the back-of-beyond in a border-town-land just as the Troubles were starting away from the city lights, trying to raise children and have a creative life. The strain of trying, coupled with the loss of a baby, I think, caused her mental unravelling, and contributed to the subsequent demise of the marriage. He too had his own mental and personal issues - there are always two sides, and then ten more, to any story.

Weirdly (or perhaps not, if you're a psychologist), I've found myself in slightly similar circumstances to my mother: six children and all the concomitant responsibilities that go with those different personalities; as well as my own wants, wishes and desires for a working creative life. I guess you could say that I'm looking at my options; weighing my life and wondering, Have I got the balance right? Am I doing what I want to be doing? I'm beginning to think that the answer may not be what I want it to be; so I'm going to have to think strongly about what's important to me: the writing I should be doing, instead of the energy I give to others in the teaching process (Plath & Hughes taught in the US for a year; they didn't do much writing).

But back to the original spark of this journal-post: Ariel's Gift is designed as a sort of primer; like a literary York notes to Hughes' Birthday Letters. Erica Wagner takes each part of the couple's life together and matches the poems of that period. It begins with the infamous meeting of Plath & Hughes (she reciting his recently published poem back to him; he being snarling and manly - and all the rest) and goes on from there.

After a certain point, I couldn't escape feeling that Birthday Letters is more than an apologia gleaned from a lifetime of mourning and regret. Hughes would always write from the vantage point of selectively looking in his rear-view mirror; how he sees things and how he has to re-read her work in cataloguing it for posterity (and sale to Smith College) -memory being a trickster too. BL is in some aspects a synthesis of both of their work; the working relationship they had once shared was almost symbiotic: they re-used each other's mss to write on, they seized on each other's images and metaphors from poem to poem. In Hughes re-reading of her work, re-working of this material personal to them both, perhaps he came more to terms with the psychic rift that occured between them - but this is to trivialise the whole matter, and to re-hash what a whole pile of other people have written as well; I do realise.

Our fascination as a reader is with the what-ifs: what if she had lived and gone on to develop her writing talent; what could her riposte have been. That is why their story is enduringly fascinating to me - almost fifty years later; that and the personal similarities that I identify with.

Withdrawal

It's nice to be mollycoddled like I have been in the last four days. Breakfast in bed; lunch and dinner made for me. All I have to do is eat and not complain. He is becoming a very good cook - I trained him well ;)

I don't have to worry about shopping, laundry, what the kids are up to - nothing. It's a bit weird and takes a lot of getting used to, as I normally hold the reins of control quite tightly. Too tightly, he says. It's a bit like being a kid, not having these responsibilities. All I have to worry about is eating, sleeping and the mere body basics.

So, I'm reading: Elizabeth Baines new book, Too Many Magpies arrived yesterday. I read that to the strains of a programme on Madwomen in the Attic. How appropriate; the undercurrent of paranoia is so well maintained in EB's tightly woven book. I also have some Philip Roths coming in the post - and I'm getting a chance to look around the web and catch up on people's blogs.

Everything has slowed down to the pace of the Radio 4 programmes I listen to. There is nowhere I have to be or do. I just have to learn to be better and not push it at all - I paid for that yesterday and ended up sleeping in this morning. Softly, softly.

Readings and settings

Before I headed off to hospital Friday a week ago, I had the rare pleasure of hearing Martin Dyar, winner of the 2009 Patrick Kavanagh Award for an unpublished ms, reading to a select group of about 40 - 50 people.

The setting was magical: the drawing room of an old country house, Annaverna House, in the middle of a forest, on the slopes of Cuchulainn country - Ravensdale and the Cooley Peninsula. First, some readings by local writers; some who are getting started in the trade and some more established (yeah, I read too).

After drinkies and chat, Martin Dyar totally wooed the audience with his tales of characters from Mayo, his muscular language - I heard comparisons being made with Ted Hughes' work! Long poems, short poems, humorous and restrained, he brought something for everyone and had us all utterly spellbound. He even read the poem he read last year at the Irish Writers' Centre, Dublin for the Stinging Fly launch, which I think is called 'Death and the Post Office.'

That reading has sustained me over what became a very trying week. I ended up in hospital (again) from Sunday, with a partially collapsed lung, as a result of pneumonia - which I think I may have had for some time - fatigue and a persistant pain under my left ribs had been diagnosed as, well, something 'muscular' ... hmm.

It's going to be a long recovery, and you can help me: what I'm looking for are a list of books, easily obtainable, (think Easons for a start - possibly Amazon) that I might enjoy - come on guys, save my poetry & prose soul!

Sore but still here

I never knew how much pain two tiny wee holes could cause you! Well, it's all over bar the shouting, but it went well yesterday, despite me blubbering like a baby in the ante-room before I went in - last November I hadn't a good experience with the medication I was given before the colonoscopy; I was lucid for some of that experience and it gave me nightmares for weeks afterwards. Put it this way, yesterday I was scared witless.

Needless to say, the anaesthesia staff were really kind to me, and I was away with the fairies before you could say 'general anaesthetic.' I came round after a forty min op which sorted me all out for now. Into the wee holes they made, one under the belly-button, one above the bikini line, they inserted cameras and instruments, as well as Carbon Dioxide which helps to make space so that they can see around the organs a bit easier.

So, today, apart from these weird pains in my diaphragm and shoulders (which is caused by the dispersion of the CO2 and is normal after a laparoscopy) and my stomach feeling like someone peformed Riverdance on it with elephants that were high on red bull (maybe they did, who knows what they get up to in Theatre when you're out for the count!), I'm grand. Nothing that a bit of Difene and some extra strength Nurofen, as well as a good night's sleep won't cure. Aren't we women fierce resilient all the same?

Wish me luck...

... tomorrow I go under the knife - well, only a tiny hole actually; that's the beauty of a laparoscopy, a teeny, tiny hole, through which they insert a camera, CO2, the kitchen sink and whatever else they can get up the tube that goes into my tummy.

I'm just concerned about whatever it is that may come out... or, there being nothing in there and the pain is just 'in my mind' (thank you Eddie Izzard, for that one).

Either which way, I will be out of my mind for at least one day. No change there, then... :)

See you on the far side!

Spring Sap - Already?

So, only a few days since this area shook off its white winter coat and assumed its green one and what a relief to see green again. I think that you can feel a little ill if you don't get to see the colours you're used to seeing out in the garden. It's so warm today I've even turned off the heating, which is a bit mad. I even saw a few buds on my clematis outside, which is great because I was worried it had been killed by the cold.

I think they used to call these days Halcyon days; country people that is. I remember that great Weather Eye columnist Brendan McWilliams writing about them in the back pages of the Irish Times. He talked about those rare days you get in winter when the sun actually shines and people and the country take a wee breather.

It's nice, I can tell you, not to be feeling my feet going numb or my fingers going stiff over the keyboard. I know, you think I'm probably some old crock, the way I'm going on. Thing is, as I get older I'm getting a lot stiffer, a lot earlier than I'd like. So days like today are a blessing, halcyon or not. It makes me think forward to the summer.

And someone outside is running a machine that sounds like a lawn-mower. Incroyable! Brid's Day isn't even here yet...

Changing the Numbers

Isn't it great to be able to say twenty-ten, instead of the mouthful of two-thousand-and-nine, and all the previous year incarnations up 'til the end of the decade?

I remember when I was a little girl watching some programme on the TV, in the seventies, about what life might be like post-millenia, and seeing a picture of the then-BBC-newsreader Richard Baker put through special ageing makeup in order to see what he'd look like thirty or forty something years from then. Basically it was just a grey wig they used, plus some crow's feet around the eyes. I remember thinking that it was a long time away to me, a little girl - but look how the years have just plinkity-plinked past. Jeepers, I didn't even feel that last decade at all, at all.

All this is by way of remarking on how quickly forty-two years have snuck past when I wasn't looking; somehow I don't think I'll feel the next forty-odd either. This time thing: you can waste it and spend it, some say you can even save it (but I've never seen a time bank, have you?) - but you can't keep it from flowing through your fingers - each day, each hour, each second - all those labels to help us move along our seven days, our months, our years... and time only ever moves one way. Time's slow arrow moves into a future that we cannot see - a little like shooting over your shoulder without taking aim. Hmm.