Sick as a Dog

I was feeling a little out of sorts yesterday at work. After work, at the gym, I just had no energy. I chalked it up to not enough in the way of protein lately. Then I started to get chills. By the time I made it home on the PATH train, I was feel really awful. Feverish, chills, and I couldn't get more than five feet from the toilet. I put myself to bed early, hoping that a good night's sleep would make me feel better. And indeed, the fever broke in the middle of the night. And this morning, I thought that I could pull it together enough to get into work. That plan lasted until I had to run to the bathroom the first time, leaping over the dog. Today, there would be no PATH train travels.

It's food poisoning. I would like to blame it on vegan eatin', but when I did the food poisoning test--thinking back over everything you've eaten recently and seeing which one makes your stomach lurch--the culprit was found to be the caviar that I had on my vareniki at the cafe where I ate with Brother and Brother's Wife in Brighton Beach. So, it looks like my caviar eating days are over.

Of course at this point, it feels to me like my eating days are over. The idea of food--putting it in your mouth, chewing it up, swallowing--just sickens me. I can't quite bring myself to swallow Tylenol and water for my headache. I want to subsist on oxygen alone, purging my body, making it pure, squeezing all of the bad stuff, the gunk, the contamination out through my bowels. Until water runs through me clear and pure, coming out the nether end as unclouded as it went in. Then I'll foul up the works again. Maybe.

Yeah, I guess I'll have to if I want my worship at the Temple of Physical Culture to have any payoff. Alas. Not counting the creatine potion I drank at the gym yesterday evening, I haven't had anything to eat since two slices of pizza at lunch time yesterday. It astonishes me how easy it is to forgo eating. I think I would be more successful in my efforts to quit eating than I have been in my efforts to quit smoking.

Huh.

Well, here's the poem. The selection is pretty obvious selection, isn't it?

Fever 103
By Sylvia Plath

Fever 103º
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern--
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise--
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)--
To Paradise.


Damn, I love Sylvia Plath! Back when I wrote poetry, I avoided Plath, because reading her poetry made me want to break the points off every pencil in the house and drain all the pens of ink: I would never ever ever be that good.

Not long after I moved to NYC, I read her book The Bell Jar. It is the story--largely autobiographical, but at the same time, not autobiographical at all--of a young woman from the country trying to make it in... New York City. I remember vividly when she is out on a date with a simultaneous interpreter who works at the United Nations, and she cuts her ankle. The blood runs down her shin and collects in her shoe. It's such a great image, her pump filling up with her own blood.

I never have a fever--this recent bout included--when I don't think of my head as being a glowing japanese lantern, and feel myself to be incandescent. That's what a good poem does: we are drawn to it because it describes perfectly some interior state, and forever after, we use those words to describe that interior state to ourselves.

I'm going back to bed now.

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