VirusHead

I was looking at my dissertation today, wondering if I can yet make a readable book out of it. Now that I’ve got a little distance from what was an agonizing process (at least until the last bit, when I actually started enjoying it), it seems better than I thought at the time. Today I’m posting a very select few of the quotations I used as a kind of shorthand that helps me remember the train of thought that’s at the back of a novel I’m writing. Between mommy-brain and constant distractions, it might be helpful to keep this here – as a touchstone of sorts.

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognised as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
- William Burroughs

This Snow Crash thing–is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

How does Gemüt, the mind, speak, how does the heart speak, how does the voice of the blood speak in the time of AIDS? Does the virus expose this voice to a cacophony, a cacophony that does not even form a negative unity within which it still resonates? How is such exposure possible? Can the voice of the blood recognize itself in the cacophony caused by the virus?
– Alexander Garcia Duttman

About all, we need to resist, at all costs, the luxury of listening to the thousands of language tapes playing in our heads, laden with prior discourse, that tell us with compelling certainty and dizzying contradiction what AIDS really means.
– Paula Treichler

Discourse, alas, is the only defense with which we can counteract discourse, and there is no available discourse on AIDS that is not itself diseased.
– Lee Edelman

If Amanda had cancer or a brain tumor, they’d be bringing her casseroles and cakes.
– Alice Hoffman

Sh*t, do you realize that only about a tenth of infected Americans can get these new drugs? It kind of makes you wonder about the other thirty million people on this planet with HIV. I mean, how many people in Africa or Asia do you think are able to get any of these cocktails?
- R.D. Zimmerman, Hostage

The brain works like a collection of viruses, the Consensus said one hundred and fifty years later, when viruses were difficult to avoid.
- Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
- Marcel Proust

The life of the flesh is in the blood.
– Leviticus 17:11

But you must strictly refrain from eating the blood, because the blood is the life; you must not eat the life with the flesh.
– Deuteronomy 12:23

Drink from it, all of you. For this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, shed for many for the forgiveness of sins.
– Matthew 26:28-29

Think on the nature of this great invisible thing which animates each one of us, and every blood drinker who has ever walked. We are as receptors for the energy of this being; as radios are receptors for the invisible waves that bring sound. Our bodies are no more than shells for this energy.
- Anne Rice, Queen of the Damned

It is along the frontier of blood – on the red line between pure and impure – that the inexhaustible drama between the sacred and the profane is played out: between the history of the divine, and the history of the human element that would struggle free of the human.
- Piero Camporesi

Medicine is magical and magical is art
The Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
. . .
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry
- Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble, 1986

I spent much of the last thirty hours or so in a state of utter wretchedness. And retching. And intensified misery thinking of W. And retching. And wretched.

I don’t know whether it was food poisoning, or a virus, or what.

Even worst than the nausea and vomiting was the horrible alternation between the sweats and the shivers. I would just about start to get warm and then I would be soaking the sheets. Then I’d fling off the sheets and I would just about start to cool off and I would get clammy and start shivering. It felt like whatever it was would take any opportunity that it could for a quick exit out of my body – up, down, out – whatever. I took a hot shower at 3:30 am trying to feel better, and very nearly passed out.

The back of my throat was burning. Any attempt at even a sip of water was punished severely.

Finally, a few sips of ice-cold coke stayed down (it has very nice anti-nausea qualities if you stir out the carbonation). Oh, that felt like heaven. A few hours later, some diluted Gatorade. By last night, I was woozy and weak, but not sweating or shivering. It’s mostly done, at least now I can regulate my body temperature. Today, my neck hurts and I still have that light free-floating nausea but I think I’ll be ok.

I was really wondering if I should get medical help, but I hardly ever bother with that anymore. By the time all the driving and waiting is done, it’s not worth the basic advice and possible diagnosis/remedy; I would have been better off staying home. This time, it would really have been too much to even try to see my doctor.

Whatever it is seems to be on the tail end (double entendre alert) of resolving itself.

(W)retched.