In the latest post in our new series on creative practice research, Jane Hartshorn’s poetry allows her to experiment within the contradictory and temporary spaces of chronic illness and attempt to reflect this experience rather than control it.
Illness is a breakdown of meaning in the ill person’s life. Because of the disruption of habits, expectations, and abilities, meaning structures are destabilised and in extreme cases the overall coherence of one’s life is destroyed.
(Carel 2018, 14-15)
He wants someone with him at all times.
He doesn’t like going to the bathroom by himself.
He asks the nurse to stand over him whilst he has his dinner.
I try to understand his behaviour by comparing it to my own experiences of bodily doubt.
He has had a series of falls.
He doesn’t trust his body.
He has lost confidence in its capabilities.
Instead of trying, he wants others to take control of a body that has abandoned him.
He wants me to move his limbs for him.
I can’t see my feet, he says.
The refrain of my childhood was ‘I can’t’.
I’ve always wondered where this lack of confidence came from.
There was an incident when I was a child.
I attempt to jump over a tree stump in the garden of a hotel but hesitate just before the leap.
I keep running at the stump and keep stopping.
Eventually my mum brings me back inside.
The other guests are staring.
With diagnosis, I felt that my body had failed me in some way.
There was a lack of certainty in my body’s ability to function ‘normally’.
It sometimes seemed that the safest and easiest thing to do was to stay indoors.
I needed to protect the integrity of my body.
I didn’t want to see its lack rise to the surface.
I felt vulnerable in public, like my insides were on show.
In illness, there is no seamless transition from ‘I think’ to ‘I can’.
Intention does not necessarily result in action.
To try is to be physically vulnerable.
It is a stepping into the unknown, with all its possibilities.
Including the possibility of defeat.
I watch him struggle to use a knife and fork.
Can trying also be a process of unlearning?
He looks at the pair of trousers as though he doesn’t know what to do with them.
When I lived in Paris for a year, I found it difficult to learn French.
I struggled to say anything I knew wasn’t perfect.
I wandered the streets in silence.
I dreaded going to the supermarket.
Globs of pink saliva stippled the sink, unshaping vowels.
Every day feels like a reset.
I can’t remember what I did yesterday, last week.
The therapist said there are many blank spaces.
Scattered amnesias.
Every week, we start as though it is our first meeting.
A series of concrete blocks.
I sleep for three hours in the middle of the day and miss a meal.
She says there is nothing substantial to grasp.
I get drunk and black out, lose my jacket, take an hour to walk the 15-minute route home. Make an unexplained card payment.
She says she feels helpless.
I go back to Ayr to look after him and fall into another black hole.
Every time I return to London it’s harder and harder to readjust, to pick up from where I left off.
My room is in disarray.
The food in the fridge is going mouldy.
I am finding it difficult to hold myself upright today.
Trying to stay awake trying to stay awake trying to stay awake.
It is no surprise that I have lost faith in my ability to write.
Writing is a step into the unknown.
I write in the way I live – in shudders.
Your life is a series of stops and starts, she says.
Trying to put one foot in front of the other, each word a step forward.
I erase my steps.
You’re a jellyfish that has to write a thesis, she says.
Can you write about the experience of sitting down to write?
I am too hot, always too hot.
My bra is cutting into me, I undo it.
My back is sore, I ball up my jacket, place it at the base of my spine.
I peel a long piece of skin from my nose.
I bite my lip until it bleeds.
You have trouble imagining a future, she says.
I don’t know which leg goes into which hole.
My new year’s resolution in 2021 was to boil an egg for breakfast every morning.
Thoughts are intercepted by a body begging for attention.
Other people notice patterns, triggers, she says.
For example, the weather.
Or a food group.
They learn to pace themselves, avoid certain things.
Clutch their spoons to their chests.
Every day I burst into the world and I’m angry.
Each day is formless, something I have to make anew.
What am I going to eat, I think, when it’s already too late.
You don’t have trouble letting go, you say.
There is nothing holding me in place, I think.
Today the fog blots out the ends of branches and in September I wrote a list of everything I could remember about your body.
A constellation of attributes.
I thought I would never see you again.
A mole to a dimple to a point.
The care home form asks, ‘what are his distinguishing features.’
He is disappointed when all I write is ‘glasses’.
The red of your lips.
You live entirely in the present, she says.
I’m exhausted, I think.
And, yes, it’s true, because here I am.
Stuck like this on the arm of a constellation.
Oscillating between two points, forever.
We never talk about the future.
My mum drives me to the sites of her childhood in Glasgow’s East End.
The flat demolished. The school demolished. The church demolished.
Instability is bad for you, she says.
I let the past slide into the water.
I am not interested in looking for meaning.
Author’s contextual note
If we imagine the poem is a body, is it possible to map the experience of chronic illness onto the space of the page? This is one of the questions I am trying to answer as part of my practice as research PhD, where I argue that poetry can bring the reader closer to an embodied experience of chronic illness; its inconsistences, its fragmentary nature. The poet Rebecca Tamás writes that poetry is the ‘perfect vehicle for things which do not make total sense, which are not clear, which do not follow a plan’ (Tamás 2019, 24). Living with chronic illness is living with uncertainty; what might be manageable one day is not the next. Poetry can be a mode of inquiry, a feeling through of one’s emotions and impressions without necessarily fixing them in place. With poetry as my medium, I can experiment within the contradictory and temporary spaces of chronic illness and attempt to reflect this experience rather than control it.
About the author
Jane Hartshorn is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of Kent, writing about the lived experience of chronic illness. Her pamphlets include Blowfly (ossa prints, 2023), In the Sick Hour (Takeaway Press, 2020) and Tract (Litmus Publishing, 2017). She has had poems published by Boudicca Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Lucy Writers and SPAM. Her website is janehartshorn.weebly.com and she can be found on Instagram @jane_hartshorn_.
About In Practice
‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience.
References
Carel, Havi. 2018. Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford University Press.
Tamás, Rebecca. 2019. ‘The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult’. The White Review. 24. https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/songs-hecate-poetry-language-occult/
