One morning last week I woke with a dry cough. And I had a pain in my back. By lunchtime my foot was throbbing. But because I didn’t associate foot pain with flu, I convinced myself that I needed new shoes.
That afternoon I bought a pair in Carrick-on-Shannon, but when I got home I realised I didn’t need them. The pain had moved to my nose. My nostrils felt like they were in the microwave. And the following morning the flu had arrived in full force; my lungs had filled with so much mucus that I was panting like a dying walrus, my bones ached, and my pulse was over 130.
So I lay in bed all day, contemplating the shortness of life, the inevitability of death, and the fact that the flu gets more lethal as I become more feeble.
But in contrast to many of the great figures in history, my life is not what anyone would call significant, I suppose.
I get up in the morning, put on clothes, walk about for a while, eat, drink and go to the toilet occasionally, and then in the evening I lie down again.
That’s about it.
I write in my studio to earn some money. I go to Drumshanbo for lunch. Occasionally I go to Dublin, and two or three times a year I go to Warsaw and sit in the Opera Theatre with tears falling down my cheeks as I listen to Verdi.
It always seems appropriate to cry in Warsaw, because the city is shrouded in a melancholy special to places that have endured the cataclysms of history.
Leitrim hasn’t seen many cataclysms, apart from the ice age. I sometimes visualise a white canopy on top of Sliabh-an-Iarainn, extending a mile into the sky, and I wonder if that whiteness could ever return and blanket Leitrim again in a silence as natural as folding a baby back into its cradle.
Clearly it’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Facebook fun
My Facebook friends were having great fun all over the world last week. I envied them. All I could do was gaze out at the muddy fields and brown rushes, and try to find something about Leitrim I liked.
Being stuck in bed increases my sense of insignificance. My computer screen fills with important celebrities and politicians boarding planes or emerging from sleek black cars, while journalists with microphones report their every word on Twitter so instantly that I can’t even go to the toilet in my slippers and dressing gown without the world having changed by the time I come back.
When I was a child famous people on television were distant specks. The chicken coop in the backyard was the real world, while JFK was just a remote shadow
When I was a child famous people on television were distant specks. The chicken coop in the backyard was the real world, but John F Kennedy was just a remote shadow endlessly dying in a macabre loop of tragedy beyond my ken.
Now I know it’s the other way about. The heroes and history makers are the important ones. And there’s always one more celebrity ready to “bestride the world like a great colossus”.
The blackbird and me
I am the speck, as disposable as a bird clinging to an alder tree 20m from my window in a winter storm.
I planted that alder 20 years ago, but it died and I didn’t have the heart to cut it down. Because one day a blackbird landed on a branch and I knew instantly it was no longer my tree. And he has been coming regularly ever since, to the same branch.
His favourite hour is twilight. Though he takes up his position to sing after rain in springtime, and I have even heard him sing at night, as if rehearsing for a high Mass in the morning. But I have never heard him sing in winter. Perhaps, like me, some darkness inhabits him, when the days shorten.
Sometimes I imagine he is looking directly at me. And then he looks at the mountain beyond the lake, as if to say, “This is all fine; no sign of ice.”
He came almost every day last week, to the same branch, as I lay like a beached whale in the bed.
I was delighted. It was an intrusion into my little universe. A visitation. And perhaps the glow from my window was an intrusion into his.
It’s not that we communicate. But his presence is comforting. Even his wintry silence, his battered feathers, his ravenous eye, and his sudden flight on the wind, down towards the willow trees to his hidden refuge, makes me somehow grateful for this flu, this bed, this cosy nest.