I envy people who experience writing fevers. For 27 days or 29 days or 31 days or 17 days—it’s always an odd number—they do not eat or sleep or shit or piss or shift their body position as they pour out their 500-page masterpieces in one long, perfect stream of infinitely inspired prose. The angels pause their singing while this is happening, the mosquitoes stop biting people, and even the wind knows it should not move a precious scrap of anything that will break the writer’s focus. Oh, such divinely divine divinity.
And then, as the books put it, they “come to.” They unfurl their bodies from the positions of divine cramp and ache, realize they have not eaten for a month, have starved to death, and are looking at their masterpieces from the afterlife. Or, they telepathically beam their masterpieces into our collective unconscious and hold us enraptured—caught up in the rupture of you, with apologies to Anita Baker—until we are wholly transformed by their masterpieces, and must all smoke something to relax.
I long for the fever of inspiration!
Alas, I have the simple fever that leads to fuzzy thinking and worse writing. Yes, I have a slight flu. My sentences feel like sneezes and sniffs, like the stuffy nose I still blow loudly even though I read that you should puff gently into something so you don’t harm your blood vessels. I tried that. It wasn’t satisfying. From this fevered state—I exaggerate for effect—my itchy eyes ask why I’m looking at a screen. Whatever parts of me ache resent that I am paying attention to the shape of a sentence instead of correcting my atrocious posture. Each word is painfully extracted from the gap between this germ and that germ and the other germ. Picture words crowded by germs, trying to escape germs, sometimes getting caught. There is unclarity.
Say what you will about John of Patmos, who gifted us the Four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse, whatever stuff he was on that gave us the Book of Revelations, that was good stuff. Probably the best stuff in the holy book. The kind of stuff people like Dante and Blake knew how to access, but never Milton.
Alas: the fevers return me to the canon. How tiresome.
In the trash romances I adore, fevers are when the protagonists realize they are deeply, truly in love. “Please do not die from dysentery. I love you too much,” she whispers to her beloved partner. “Please do not die from measles, I will forever think you are the most ravishing creature, no matter what scars mar your perfect complexion,” he whispers to the 17-year-old virgin he wed on the day he turned 46. Fevers.
In any case.
I have no wisdom to offer
Drink fluids.
Recover from your fevers.
And then, perhaps, craft each word with the patience of a wasp building a nest from mud and body excretions. Light enough to be suspended from a ceiling. Robust enough to hold eggs. Hidden enough to avoid predators. And hope your words fly into the world like baby wasps.
May your fevers be productive.
I love these baby wasps that you have shared this morning.