Bed, fevered, around 39 degrees

do you believe in blue?

Wake, some time in the night. No light at the window, night still; no sound of rain or wind in the way there has these last few nights, instead a cavernous silence, duvet tangled, pulled up now around my neck to keep the cold out and yet why, my skin thick and wet with sweat, my head sore, my throat raw; felt it coming this time, denied its arrival on Saturday when I blamed exhaustion on the night before, on being out with friends and too much food, too many festivities, up too early for a ceramics class, rushing for the train to London to chair an event, working on the train there, back; dinner party, bed. Just need to sleep. And yet. Body too tired for sleep. Too tired to accommodate what it needs and it’s always been like this, if I stopped to think about it which stop to think I try not to, going and going and going and then the crash and the fever and bed and Covid certainly made it worse, long months absent of memory other than fever, pain, turning blue, and after this Vishnu-like incarnation I would visit IKB ‘79 in the Tate. I would stand and want to disappear into the surface of it as if convinced I was still the hue I assumed the day the sirens stopped for me, perhaps I thought I could find a kinship there. Perhaps I wanted to be as dimensionless as Klein claimed blue to be, perhaps there was a feeling of lightness in the colour I did not feel now my body had shown how captive I was in it, to it. Certainly that Maggie Nelson was wrong when she said there’s such a thing as too much blue. Red, there can be too much red. After or perhaps during my illness in the wake of Covid - it was hard to demarcate the distinction between well and unwell during those months, for a long time there were only gradations, ones I regularly slipped between, but something was wrong that summer - during, after, during, after, never before though, never again before - covid, with vibrations. I had felt, in the long nights when the fever gripped and intensified, a certain baffling yet real heat emanating and then radiating from my stomach. It felt to me that perhaps I had been beset internally by an acid so strong my stomach was burning and I was in danger of being eaten from the inside out. I felt too something new moving under my skin, as if ants had become trapped there. I would feel this most intensely when I started to recover and began to move, never managing to take it easy, always doing too much. These physical sensations soon translated themselves into a more worrying psychological or possibly more accurately, psychosomatic symptoms, the most bizarre of which was an inability to tolerate certain colours, red being the worst of them. Whereas red had used to be a favourite colour, now when I looked at it it seemed to shake, to leer, occasionally to glower, often to recriminate. I became convinced red was the root cause of the tinnitus I was plagued but more accurately, haunted by. Red was gaudy, it seemed, too loud and too brash, something I had perhaps identified with until death was in the room making me quieter, more distant and yet hungrier at the same time. Having outlived death, there was an urge, that summer, to remember what it felt like to be alive. I painted over the red table the television had sat on for years. I took it into the garden, making myself sicker in the process, painted it white. It took four coats to cover the red. I was still sure it shone through. Sometimes, in the right or the wrong light, I am convinced of it still. The children were not happy we loved it red they said. But it wasn’t white I wanted, it was blue, only blue had the correct vibrations, and a precise blue at that, only Klein blue. By the time I was in Turbine Hall I would be breathless, it would pull me from the next room; I cannot tell you now what else it was surrounded by, I only had and only have, eyes for it. I would sit on the bench in the middle of the room after standing too close to it, and I would watch it and I discerned then that there are two types of people in the world; those who see the magic of the pigment he created, those who also lean too close to the glass, and often these people tend to be under the age of ten and quickly pulled away by their parents, the people who stay, stay for a long time, I could see they too were pulled to it, by it, and there are those who walk past the innocuous and possibly overblown blue square; in short, there are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe in magic and those who don’t, and that whole curious summer when I could not sit still, where I walked the banks of the river listening to the bells of St Paul’s, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster Abbey, merge in the air before Vauxhall Bridge convinced I’d found the ghost I’d come for, but ghosts do what ghosts will, they run, and taunt and lead you down dark alleys; that summer, the beginning of the dark alleys, a fevered time then, as fevered as time has become now in this night that is not night still not morning either, a bluing around the edge of the curtains, the sound of soft rain perhaps, not sirens, not this winter, not yet. Turn my face to the wall, think of praying.

(This is part of my daily series of entries, explained here. These entries, have, for the last week, not been daily. A combination of preparing for my next book’s release, illness as detailed here, and deadlines. I have discovered I feel and work much better when I stick to daily entries, and so I will.)