10: Made Ill by Poetry

I was an English major at Michigan State University in 1993 and I had been reading and researching 17th century Welsh poet Katherine Philips at the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Wales and the University of Wales. Her genre was female romantic friendship poetry and I was head over heels for her.

I had finally found her home on a research visit to Pembroke, Wales during my junior summer abroad to study her. I walked the two kilometers from the tourism center to the priory where she had lived with her husband from the age of 15.

What I expected to feel when I reached the priory was: Welcome. I expected the spirit of Katherine Philips to hover joyfully about me, perhaps giggling with delight in a voice only I could hear. I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least to find a purple aura around the building, or perhaps a double rainbow. After all, I’d spent almost a year reading her poetry. I investigated her historical and literary references, struggling to understand her. At one point I photocopied two of her poems and distributed them in my women’s studies classes. I just couldn’t keep her to myself. Through my young passion I had created a connection with Philips. I thought perhaps she could feel it, too, even from her death 300 years previously. I’d traveled across the pond to London and to Aberystwyth and now to Pembroke and, well, my, I thought she’d be happy to see me.

As the building came into view, a different feeling swaddled me. The doors, swinging open wide to the public, seemed closed to me. Closed to me personally. The purple aura I was in hope of was instead an aura of ill will. The building was now the town hospital. Local residents walked in and out. Nobody else seemed to notice.

I felt a sense of danger. Of support beams swinging down upon corridors to crush me. Of walls crumpling, unleashing plaster dust that would fill my lungs until I choked to death on the dry flakes. In my mind’s eye the floors were damp with weak spots lurking to eat my unsuspecting ankle.

It overwhelmed me. I stopped in front of the building. I could see a path leading to the right and I went around to the back. There was a large lawn. I went to the very edge of it and sat on a stone fence, perhaps three feet high. Beyond the stone fence was a river, and to the north, a rocky outcropping – to rocks and rivers, not to thee, complain – I recalled from her poetry.

I ate my packed lunch on the low, stone fence. My mood was plummeting. I looked at the priory and noticed the glass windows, thick with age on the bottom and thin to breaking at the top. Original windows. Her windows. I looked at the cemetery of monks who had made this place their home in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The cemetery, rather than peaceful, was a wreck of crumbling headstones. My physical energy began to ebb. My limbs felt weak.

Finally, I took a stone from the fence as a keepsake and headed back to the bus stop. I felt worn. I felt dirty. I needed to sleep. I was returning to London the next day. I told myself it was almost over.

By the time I got back to Aber, I knew I was in trouble. By the time I walked to the YWCA from the bus stop, I hung onto the railing and dragged myself up the stairs to my room.

I lay in bed with the chills but did not sleep that night, watching the clock hands circle the dial while my stomach churned. All of it was accompanied by a horrible, grinding, mental intensity. I drank two or three glasses of wine, young thinking that alcohol would help me feel better. I drank a lot of water from the bathroom tap. I was very thirsty. Finally, I threw it all up. That week I’d been eating at the convenience store on the corner, buying sandwich fixings from a limited selection of ingredients and chips and nuts and chocolate bars and small jugs of milk. It had been five days since I’d had a balanced meal. It was a long, long night of pining for water that only made me sick.

I’d been running: high on poetry and libraries and Welsh museums and views that took my breath away and bus rides along tiny country roads and the ocean, always the ocean that you could hear from every place in town, and the lovely Welsh spoken around me and the friendly, open place that is Wales and the castle looking down on all of us and walking the prom and imagining the Romanovs who had left their own footprints in the sand, their long dresses wet about their ankles and… and…

And I had crashed. Crashed at the priory and made it back to Aber to spend the night watching the clock, my body trembling. I got it into my head that the rock was the cause. The rock that I had taken from the stone fence behind the priory where I was not welcome. Yes, perhaps taking the rock had brought on this illness, this rejection. It was almost 6 AM by the time I developed a fool-proof plan to set things right. But I had to do it before my early bus back to London. I got out of bed and walked the few blocks to the prom on unsteady legs.

I threw the rock into the bay at Aber and let the sea take it back to the river behind the monastery-hospital-Philips family home in Pembroke, or wherever it pleased, as long as it was far away from me.

I packed my research materials half in and half out of my backpack, precious papers stuffed awkwardly into a pack made for American-sized copy paper. It was time to go. To clean clothes. To nutritious food. To my classmates. To my dorm room at the University of London which was small yet full of the hope of this trip. I bundled up in two wool sweaters and stood shivering at the bus stop in the early light.

When the bus came, I got on. When it arrived in London, I got on the Underground and rode to Russell Square. I got off and walked to my dorm. When I got inside, I locked the door and slept for two days. I slept until I stopped shaking. Slept until that awful mental intensity let up. Slept until my emotional world didn’t circle the drain of priories, rocks, and rivers.