I’ve come down with “man-flu”. In a woman it would be a simple cold but in a man it’s tantamount to dying and requires tender concern from all the females around. Yesterday morning I drove early to Babylon Town; conscientiously completed the vital tasks at the MaxiRam Corporation on which the team depends. Then I found myself every fifteen minutes checking the slow passage of time. With the same frequency I was sneezing and snotting into a handkerchief. The women gave the requisite sympathy and the men (in my fevered imagination at least) acknowledged my heroism in coming in at all. Honour having thus been satisfied I came back home to sip a medicinal hot potion of rum, lemon juice and honey, before retiring to my cosy bed with a hot water bottle.
If I ever write an autobiography it will be rooted firmly in the present, with digressions to the past triggered only by feelings and smells, or what psychology has called “state-dependent memory”. Lying on my back with a fever and blocked head reminds me of a bout of ’flu aged 13, propped up on pillows with a heavy encyclopædia nearly falling from my grasp. On a column of a right-hand page was the photo of a campanile in Ravenna, with the comment that Ruskin mentioned it as the most beautiful in Renaissance Italy. Memory can be powerful: this one is burned-in like an error-message on an old VDU. All the same it can play tricks. I cannot identify that tower from Google or Flickr. This picture from Florence will have to do instead. In any case I have lived in that city.* In my fever nothing was evoked but the dry sound of Ruskin and Ravenna. It was probably my throat which was dry but memory has conflated all these things together.
I went to bed yesterday afternoon and thought I could tolerate BBC Radio 3. But they played Berlioz’ Romeo and Juliet. My diseased brain said “OK this describes mountains and valleys. This will lull me into a peaceful sleep.” I soon became irritated with Berlioz. I wanted to float around those mountains on a mental hang-glider and see what was on the other side, but he wouldn’t let me: it was a guided tour rigidly scored, leaving me strapped firmly to my seat with a headache and vertigo and no end to the ride in sight. I must have drifted off because suddenly it morphed into some annoying piano stuff: sugary feminine footsteps over the keys. I could not believe the announcer when he said it was Bach. This was followed by a cathedral-cave of a choral work, grey and cold, no fun there. After a while I got the hang of it. “Mahler!” I said, vaguely recalling something else in the same vein. I determined to see it through and get the satisfaction of at least confirming the composer, even if I could not enjoy him. It was actually Brahms’ German Requiem. So I drifted off and dreamed of wrestling with intractable 3-dimensional spreadsheets, of the kind that await me when I get back to work.
* In the summer of ’62. See “David’s Fig-leaf“
a wayfarer’s notes 
wonderful post, hope you're feeling better soon! I rather like fever dreams, they're so vivid….
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(but your 3-D spreadsheets would terrify me!)
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Well, all I can say is I'm glad I didn't fall in love, LOL!
“Yves” is not a common name here in the states. I guess it brought to mind Yvonne if that's how you spell it and Eve, which are both female names – not too common either.
I had one other experience like this but it was set to rights faster. I had a physcial therapy appointment with a therapist named “Jan” who turned out to be about six foot three, probably around 230 pounds. Pronounced “Yahn” in the Netherlands and the equivalent of John…
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Oh, dear, Paul. It had never occurred to me that Yves sounds feminine. It isn't my real name, anyhow. I got the name Yves Rochereau randomly off the sleeve notes of an album of African music, when I first started this blog, as I had certain reasons for not using my real name at that time – which would get into search engines.
I am both disappointed and relieved that you did not fall in love.
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Hayden, I know what you mean about fever dreams. For me it takes less than that to distort reality into interesting shapes and crossovers from one sense to another (synesthesia).
Indeed philosophically I think it's of great significance that we cannot trust our perceptions of reality. Our senses can be distorted (smell for example, if you have a head cold) and our interpretations too: in my example, a failure to appreciate music or art positively when delirium is induced by raised body temperature.
Our reason seeks a baseline reality so that we can compensate for deviations from it. But reason is certainly not sacrosanct either. First there is the selection of inputs, for reason cannot cope with the whole world of everything: it must reduce the inputs to those which are assumed to be significant. Second there is the method of calculation, which is equally arbitrary, depending on what we believe and how we have trained ourselves.
I know that the way I think and act is a construction which I have developed uniquely, like any artist or craftsman, over decades. These behaviours rather than reason in the abstract (which we might imagine is a common as it would be perhaps if we were computers) determine the reality which I perceive.
Whether I acknowledge a higher reality beyond the direct inputs of my senses and interpretations thereof, depends upon my thinking and acting too. Thus the person I have created by repetitious actions dictates the nature of the world in which he lives.
This is foreshadowing my next piece which will be, at least in part, based on the film “Groundhog Day”!
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did you delete my comments? or that it didn't post?
i am assuming the second one. i had said “lovely”.
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I certainly did not delete your comment, GF! But you seem to have deleted an entire post on your blog. I could understand possible reasons why, but it's rather a shame . . .
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yaa i know. but i had to. the comment section went out of control. that jonathan swift poem was excelent. i apologise to you Vincent…and only to you.
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But this is funny, and no kidding -I pictured you as a “strong” woman! I think something in your writing style says “masculine”. So in the back of my mind something wasn't quite adding up for me about my false gender assumption.Actually that's an interesting topic in itself to me – what makes us psychologically male/female. Lists of traits never really seem to do it. Seems like the qualities I've seen in both sexes that I admire the most/dislike the most, I've seen in both men and women.
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