The Sick Bed & Dr. Donne

by Anne Boyer

Sometimes I think there is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how quickly it falls from the place you fuck to the place you waste away in.

or

Sometimes I think there is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how quickly it falls from the place you fuck to the place, if you are lucky, you die in.

or

Sometimes I think there is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how quickly it falls from the place you fuck to the place you think yourself mad in -- the site of sex and the site of dying is the bed is the body is then also the site of macro- and micro-projecting. Virginia Woolf's mother, Julia Stephens, wrote a treatise on sick rooms, in it instructing caregivers that while the patient may appear to have "absurd fancies," these are heightened perceptions of the real, a result of the "delicately organized" minds of the very ill, "whose senses have become so acute through suffering."

I have a magic theory for the kind of thinking that happens when you are sick in your bed. In vertical life, when you are well or mostly or walking around, pretending to be, the top of your head is the space that the sky (or skyish air) touches. The total area of the top of you is pretty small. You are only moderately airy, then, and your eyes, rather than gazing up, gaze outward at the active world, and it is to this you are mostly reacting. And it is mostly during the night, during dreams, that imagining becomes temporarily expansive and the ceiling air spreads over you.

When you are sick, though, and horizontal, the sky or skyish air of what is above you spreads all over your body, the increased area of airy intersection leads to a crisis of giant imagining, sensing, a massive projecting cognitive of forms. When you are so often lying down, you are also so often looking up.

Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.