My long day\'s journey into night

Tag : Deep Socket Sets

"The greater we are, the less we may feel that circumstances pressgreatly upon us.” These words, and I cannot be sure that theywere these words exactly, came at me powerfully from the tapeunabridged version of Middlemarch some nights ago - and I felt verysmall. I cannot be sure of the exact words without rewinding thetape for I am living in another country, like Venice in some ways,like an idea of Hell in others, where I can't, as I wouldinvariably have done before, take a note or (I know it's vandalous)make a mark in the book itself while I'm reading.
I am living in the country of the all-but blind. I'm a newishresident, not quite acclimatised, wobbly. It's been about twoyears. Forms of time have lost their old weight. I tend to measuretime now by whether it offers a moment or a promise of a moment ofsome kind of sight. I can see a bit after a long period of sleep,so that, for example, I am writing this in bed, pressing on a boardwith pen and paper, in the complete dark, at one in the morning, ajuncture when an hour or so of blurry seeing may arrive for me. Icannot see my words as they appear on the paper. Tomorrow I shallunknot them for you.
The other goodish wedge of time is between four and five in themorning, the suicide's hour or the farmer's hour, however you lookat it. I can scrawl a bit. I used to have fairly legiblehandwriting; never could touch type; never could really typedecently; now can't type at all.
Even in that hour, I can't read, or read as I understood it. I canlook at picture books very slowly with a pleasure almost toointense, as when for a few lire (euros now) a Titian shows itselfto you in a dark, out of the way church. How did I make the move tothis country? I made no plans for it, indeed couldn't have inventedso perfectly suited a punishment, so tailor-made a complaint formyself, for love, toffee or tablet. Seeing has always, to a perhapsextreme extent, been my sense of choice, in itself a hubristicthing to make. Reviewers have objected to the over-visualisednessof my work, its cramping perceived detail, its hyperaesthesia andso on. I have had all my life visual rage, as Dr Johnson said ofhimself that his rage was oral.
I couldn't ever see or read enough. It came from both parents andit is perhaps cubed in me by my physical ineptitude. But I foundmyself here, writing in the dark sentences I'm unsure will belegible in the morning (so it's a bit like writing in drink), eventhough these sentences are written for others (you), not thoseanxious notes one writes to oneself in the night about cities to bebuilt, lost tunes, things undone, letters to the dead.
I started my travels towards blindness, though I didn't know it atthe time, in 2006. I attended the Word Festival in Aberdeen, at thekind invitation of Alan Spence [the writer and poet] . The light inthe city and in the grand intimate precincts of King's Collegemoved me. The light seemed a very high white. I was as covetous asever of visual detail, the civic badges set in black stone, thicklyand richly painted, gold and red, leopards and roses, the gardenazaleas and rhododendrons. The ticks of granitic sparkle in the airbit my face and eyelids. My eyes were sore and I couldn't meetanyone's eye, which was horrible. I ascribed it to the pleasure ofbeing in Scotland, to overexcitement, to that faceted winter air ofa Scots spring, to tamped emotion, to hearing poems read by theirmakers, which always does me in.
I'd started to read for the Man Booker Prize, of which I was ajudge that year, with a group of people so discreet and congenialthat it was set down as a “dull” year, ie, notelefriendly fuss. The concurrence of my eyes' malaise and being ajudge of a literary prize is pure coincidence. I've done one prizeor another annually for about two decades. At no point did I feel Iwas being asked to read more in physical terms than I normally do(did; I must remember, did). I just might not have chosen every oneof the books I read. And yes, I did read them all, thatextraordinary most frequently asked question. I read about a novela day, except in the case of one whopper that took two days and anight, and that magnificent bouncing tome plus hundreds ofannotations I left to my regret, in a Bloomsbury club for Quakersand others of a quiet and serious disposition, where I was stayingtowards the end of the judging process, and where I hung off theend of the small prewar bed.
That was the day after a security alert made it very hard to travelby air from the Edinburgh Book Festival, and impossible to do so inpossession of a fountain pen or a phial of scent, to each of whichitems I am suspiciously attached, so I trained it south on astanding-room-only SupaSquasha to King's Cross, and was surprisedwhen someone I did not know came and got me and made me sit downbecause I so clearly could not have stood - in any sense - thewhole distance. No penny had yet really dropped with me, but I wasalready looking distinctly odd. For example, I was continuallygrimacing and gurning as though I had Tourette's syndrome; I wasreaching for sight I know now like a cat trying to be sick, inspasm. I knew by spring I was growing mildly photophobic. I hadgone to the doctor. This was in Oxford, a city you might consideras readerly as it is writerly. The GP thought I might be reading abit much and gave me drops.
I continued to read for the Man Booker Prize, finding the work, ifanything, less wearying than I'd been used to, since it was of themunching, notetaking, ordered, sequential, forward-moving kind,rather than the omnivorous unscheduled open “quest”kind favoured by (some) novelists on the trail of their privatedragon; and of course there was a small let-up in trying tosubsidise my dragon-chasing with reviewing and so on.
I reread, with increasing physical difficulty and consciouslyfocused mental attacks, each book on the longlist and the shortlistfor the Man Booker Prize between four and eight times. The GPreferred me to an ophthalmologist who said that I read too much andgave me drops. I was surprised that this could happen in a citymany of whose inhabitants I knew read so much more. Who were theirdoctors?
Who, for example, was the doctor of the aquiline the Very RevProfessor Henry Chadwick, north of 90, resident round the cornerfrom me whose splendid head-scarved wife popped him in the cardaily at 8am for the library to contemplate and write about StAugustine and the City of God? I peered at them gratefully from mywindow; as long as they were there, reading was not a thing youcould do too much of, I felt.
The longlist meeting for the Man Booker Prize came. I felt sickwhen I was photographed, but that could have been vanity. I couldnot open my eyes, least of all against the photographer's flash.But at a press conference in the luxurious city atrium of the ManGroup, which sponsors the Booker Prize, a woman from The Timesnamed Dalya Alberge (I remember thinking, “So you are theowner of that great name; what a pity I can't see you”) askedme why such-and-such was in my opinion a good book. I spoke out ofa head emptied of thought by bright annihilating fear. I heard thecurling vaporous shifty nonsense coming from my own gob into thebank of bright lights and cameras.
Our cool and kind chairperson took over. She did not say,“What Candia means...” I had the sense one has indreams of mouthing unheard in thick dark in the face of aninterrogative deadly glare. It's the proleptic nightmare of takinga stroke. God knows how it is for “celebrities” withall that painful light; they must have leathern eyes. I wasstarting to fall over in the street. I am abstemious. That is, Iabstain.
Well, I thought, my eyes have brought me so much pleasure, maybeit's payback? A cheap thought and I fear some sort of Scots thoughttoo.
The PR people of the Man Booker were quite understandably anxiousthat I not let on that it appeared that I was losing my one use forthem, ie, my capacity to see (I'd less sense that they wanted whatone might understand as my capacity to read).
I saw more “eye people”. I was given artificial tearsin sterile plastic droplets, commercially known as Minims, toinsert into my red dry eyes from sterile plastic lachrymals; I wasmeasured for spectacles with inbuilt wire “matchsticks”to prop up my famously shut eyelids; these specs are known asptosis props and bring relief to many. I was scared ofweepy-sounding Lundy Logs (“Gracious, how Lord Loopscried!”); I was a guinea-pig for an as yet unpatented widgetto clip to my spectacles in order, intentionally, to irk my brain.I called it “the Distraction”; nicknamenotwithstanding, we did not bond.
My Chinese neurologist neighbour visited me in my small verticalOxford home; she carried a bag of quinces. “Can you seeme?” she asked. I could smell the quinces powerfully, theirdusty sweet musk and a kind of cool waxen smell, luminously yellowin itself, like the little yellow section of paint Proust'swriter-character Bergotte sees the moment before he dies in theView Of Delft by Vermeer that he so loves. I could smellquince-yellow. I could not see my neighbour. I put up my hand topull my eyes to make sight, like someone playing with binoculars.
“Ah”, she said, “the sensory geste.” Ididn't know what she meant. “You have blepharospasm. Youreyes are fine but you brain won't open them,” she said. Andso it is. Blepharos is the Ancient Greek for eyelid; and spasm,well, you know. People suffer these dystonias of different parts ofthe body, even of the major limbs. Websites are prudently cagey.“Blepharospasm is a difficult affliction to diagnose. It maylead to considerable isolation and psychological affliction.”It is in my case an absolute rotter to treat. I am glad that it isI, and not someone I love, who had this odd blanket over theircage.
By now the PR people from Man Booker were truly anxious that no oneknow they had on their hands effectively, that remote ancientideal, a blind judge. They were invariably considerate of thisunforeseen Banquo. I was sat for the great Guildhall beano, tidiedaway in a corner between friends and across from a literary editorwho described me later, quite correctly, to the gossip sheets asvery boring. The word used by doctors is “functionally”blind. By now I'd bought a foldaway white stick from the RNIBwebsite (I know) and had been the recipient of several injectionsof botulinum toxin into the muscles of each eye socket. I'm glad tosay that a high proportion of blepharospastics respond well toBotox. I don't. I got blinder. Nor, before you ask, did I get atall prettier. Much the reverse.
By November 2006 I could not read, could not bear light and wasbeing seen by, if not seeing, a number of doctors. My younger sonsaid: “I know it's a vulgar question, but are your othersenses compensating?” Actually, a wee bit, but only hearingand smell. Music is too much for me. I cry, and I'm a uselesscrier, though all the doctors recommend as much of it as possible.I've gone right off food, but the drugs keep me fat. So no sneakybenefit that way.
So far (I have to have faith even if it's a mug's faith, that Ishall again see) the last books I read with my eyes were themanuscript of Pilcrow by my friend Adam Mars-Jones, whichdemonstrates incidentally in its accounts of disability howextraordinarily lucky I am to be mobile, and The Devil's Footprintsby John Burnside, and his latest poems, and Edwin Morgan'sthrilling most recently published book of poems.
It's a good last repast when you consider how easily it might havebeen Grazia or Think Yourself Thin. But then, I didn't know thesewere adieux; I hope they may be aux revoirs. So now it's CDs andtapes. I prefer the latter; they're chewier, less fragile,sandwiches to wafers, even though far more temperamental andtechnologically doomed. They make a luscious lipsmacking snapbefore the story goes on, while CDs are a bit smooth for me. Withboth, so much depends on the voice of the intervening protagonist,even the protagonists, the actor(s), in the most private ofrelations, between words and reader, writer's and reader'ssynapses.
How is it like Venice here in the fluctuating dark? Well, I'malways lost, continually banging into things, but ever aware of thepresence of those and that which I love and seek.
A friend has lent me the flat of a deceased American artist ofadvanced years and learning, as it were a Common Reader of thegeneration before my parents', so that all around me breathingthough unreadable are fousty volumes of Auden, Edmund Wilson,Empson, Francis Haskell, Stendhal, Byron, the old brown clothboundPhaidon works on the old masters, Chateaubriand, Proust, EdithWharton, Montaigne, Henry James. There are heavy boxed sets oflong-playing recordings of opera and runs of symphonies, andcomplete sets of softening discontinued journals. I hope I can feeltheir contents seep into my days like water into mossy foundations.
If all this sounds fatally passive that's what happens when you'rewalloped by fate. It is a test of character, and this, apparently,is what I'm like, like paper to a stony roller. The trick of itwill be to reverse my bad habit and to make the paper float intothe words carved into that inky roller. My tall thin Oxford housewas nearly my hot tomb. The oven spontaneously combusted. Theemergency services were beyond praise, brave, intelligent and, evenI could see, shockingly good to look at, including the firewoman.
My children and husband's insistent affection and practicalityfacilitated this move to London, the city I have longsuperstitiously feared, like the type of provincial Scot I am. Foryears I had thought that when the last child was fledged, I wouldcome home to the north, but now, just for now, I am following myannulled eyes and the people who are looking into the brain thathas closed them down. These doctors are in London though from asfar away as Karachi, Dumbarton, Bombay, Rome, Dehli, and Lahore. NoAmerica yet thank God, which is where the brain cake ofblepharospastics has been approached and cut with some reportedsuccess.
I am blind but there is nothing wrong with my eyes; it is afunction of the deep brain, what tough boys call the reptile brain,the lizard brain. Either way you don't want to stick a spirtle inthere, and I have long had a fear of knives. I listen to talkingbooks day and night. They are as different from “the readingexperience” as can be. I can't scribble in their margins, Ihardly take notes (I fall over when looking for the pen, paper,etc). But they are some approximation to what fed me, words inshapes forming and reforming according to the movement of theauthor's imagination.
Until July 10, 2007, I was too proud to listen to talking books. Ittook the intelligent persuasion of a friend, who is now patientlywaiting for me to grow up and grasp audible.com, a website you candownload talking books from. Meanwhile I guzzle 19th-centurynovels, lived for months on, by and with the Russians, though Icame to think that listening to them in English is in itself twokinds of abridging, took on Dickens, whom I so foolishly gagged onas a child, see more and more in the Palliser novels about silencein families, am less snooty about Barset, have come to appreciate,which I did not, Joyce and Mrs Gaskell (what dancing partners), tobe shattered by Beckett, Peter Carey, George Eliot, and to loveHardy's description and try not to fear the strain in his plotting.I am still in love with Prince Andrei and Charles Stringham.
Among the greatest treats have been archive recordings of the deadtalking: Auden; Larkin; Cecil Day-Lewis; Waugh on his friend AlfredDuggan; Max Beerbohm teasing W.B. Yeats, an impossibly grand yetstammering Elizabeth Bowen.
I cannot, could not, continue, to read like this without publiclibraries. Talking books cost the earth. As with “real”reading, rereading is yet another layer of pleasure. Some take itbetter than others and all are to a degree dependent upon thereader/actor. That's, maybe, another story. Much contemporaryfiction is just too thin to hold itself in the air. There's nopoint saying who's not up to it; they sell in bricks.
I am continually and self-indulgently rereading Proust round andround (literally) while all the other listening is going on, thoughlong before I was half-blind I stupidly gave away half of myunabridged Cover to Cover recording of John Rowe reading ScottMoncrieff's translation of In Search of Lost Time. I own and muchappreciate the Naxos/Neville Jason abridged version, but the otherday, craning, I rang Amazon about the big one that got away. Ispoke to cheery Odette, who said she'd e-mail me right back.Reasonably enough, that mighty searching engine couldn't find On aBridge by Marcelle Proust.
There is in this sightlessness another resemblance to Venice (thewhole thing is of course awash with metaphors). If I keep goingcarefully though the narrow dark unencouraging alleyways alone, Imay come upon an open square, a metal chair, a small table, a cupof bitter coffee, a glass of water and that thing I long to hold,to touch, to open, to enter fully again, a book, whose pages mayonce more collaborate with the reticulations of my brain andtogether, through my re-employed eyes, make something, book and -is it? - soul, something that will be and will have been new andold, light and dark, illuminating and shaded, shifting always likelight on water over stone, thinking engaged with thought, lightover dark over light over dark.
Until then, it is my fervent wish that someone record The SmokingDiaries of Simon Gray read by the author. But, oh the browsing youcan't do on audio, the dithering, the grazing, the magic arbitraryreach and connection. How to read the visually unique Lanark onaudio, and where are Blood, Paradise, A Disaffection? In my dreams.
This article first appeared in the Scottish Review of Books
Blepharospasm: the facts
Blepharospasm causes the muscles of the eyelid to twitch, orcompletely close, for hours at a time. This effectively leavessufferers blind, even though there is nothing otherwise wrong withtheir eyes. Symptoms are excessive blinking or eye irritation.Causes remain unclear, although it is thought to be due to abnormalfunctioning of the basal ganglia, in the base of the brain. It canbe induced as a side-effect of drugs, or after a brain injury.Bright light, stress and tiredness can also be triggers. Drugs andinjections of botulinum toxin can help the condition. Patients whodon't respond well to this can have protractor myectomy - theremoval of some or all of the affected muscles, which can improvethe condition.
ARTISTS AND THEIR AFFLICTIONS
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven suffered from a severe form of tinnitus. He wascompletely deaf by the time he was 44, but continued to write andperform masterpieces.
Jacqueline du Pré
The cellist Du Pré lost sensitivity in her fingers after theonset of multiple sclerosis. It triggered an irreversible declinein her fingers and she recorded her last studio album of sonatas atthe age of 31 in 1971
Claude Monet
Monet began to lose his sight in 1907, having already painted manyof his well-known works. In the last decade of his life Monet,nearly blind, painted Nymphéas for the Musée del'Orangerie in Paris