Negative Space
on Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Rosemary Tonks and bleeding, etc
The below essay, ‘Negative Space’, was originally published in issue 4 of Ache Magazine, “an intersectional feminist press publishing writing and art exploring illness, health, bodies, and pain,” which you can order here.
I wrote it in the winter of 2023, a murky time for me, when I was both physically unwell and psychically unhappy. I remember writing in my notebook while I was on tour, in Brighton, late November, freezing, tired, feeling both lonely and wide-open in the way that touring on my own always made me feel simultaneously a little lonely, and very kind of ecstatically wide open to all the world’s possibilities. I was thinking about the writer Ann Quin, who I was quite newly obsessed with, and who was from Brighton, and had died tragically young in the same sea I was looking out at. I was in an old cafe looking out onto the remains of the burnt out pier, and the gulls, circling. It was twilight, I would have to go to the venue (which felt like a bingo hall) and go on stage soon. It was, I think, the last tour I ever did. Backstage I drank Scottish whiskey, and that night, I slept in a small hotel on the square that felt out of another time. In the shared bathroom there was an enamel bath where I had a slightly unsatisfactory bath in the quiet morning. Anyway, the essay isn’t really about any of these things, but those are the conditions from which it emerged, which feel like a completely different world to the one I’m in now. It is definitely an essay by a younger person, lol, and one more unhappy, but maybe you will find something to enjoy.
Now I have to continue preparing for the first ever class I will teach, this week (on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick — fun!) Happy Saint Brigid’s Day!
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NEGATIVE SPACE
In the week before I bleed I start to think I’m a mystic. Clouds appear and part and then appear again. There is mirror and there is fog and there is blood that is not quite yet but that will be. In the flat colour of science, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder is the condition I have which makes me really lose my head. Health is one language, which is a limited language of reification, and condition is a concrete room to hold what might otherwise be vapour. The afflicted must enter the room of the condition if we are to receive care. Often a diagnosis is a poor translation of the otherwise inexpressible, but it is a translation which means medicine, which means allowances for the dis/order of our being. Entering the room which is of course a metaphor costs real money which is not a metaphor, and then there is waiting and denial and suspicion and waiting again. This is how the language of Health operates within the language of Capital, which is of course a wider language of eternally unfulfilled waiting, a language necessarily made of rooms without any doors. For Simone Weil, a very afflicted mystic, ‘waiting humbly’ is the spiritual condition, one by which man is made similar to God. Waiting is her ‘Mystical Way’ which marks ‘the movement of consciousness from lower to higher levels of reality.’ When I am afflicted I wait for health and I wait for God, I wait for language and I wait for blood.
