Hospital Visions: Constellations - Reflections From Life By Sinéad Gleeson

At some point about halfway through Sinéad Gleeson’s magnificent book, I began to wonder whether her knowledge of medicine and the human body might, by intimate association, be at least as great as the medical professionals she tirelessly describes. Familiarity, here, breeds an uncommon, in places exquisite, understanding of the body’s blindsiding vagaries, for hers has been a life of consistent exposure to serious malfunction and illness. That the process is ongoing gives this semi-autobiography a terrible currency: the psychological ruptures the process has occasioned – her conflicted reactions to each new blow are thoroughly exorcised – are at least as significant to the unfolding narrative as the illnesses themselves.

By definition, her condition is her muse. The excellence of her story is inherently informed by the terms of her subjection: it colours judgement, shapes description in pyrotechnic metaphors and gives the astonished reader new ways in which to perceive these common denominators of existence. It is as central a definition of an artistic temperament as the mustard gas-induced lung disease of Paul Nash, or the tubercular John Keats. And Gleeson’s journey - her narrative is roughly chronological, following the trajectory of her life – is as unsentimental as an authentic picture demands. The writer fully understands the bathetic pitfalls of grief and is scrupulously averse to the signalling of self-pity: her approach, though richly eloquent, embodies a recognition of narrative distance. Her armoury of linguistic devices enables inferences to be made without recourse to solipsistic blackmail.

And it works. We cannot fail to admire the resolute stoicism with which she faces crushing news at every turn. Her detachment somehow enables an overview of pain, even whilst forensically engaging with its excesses: she can describe precisely how she felt at a particular moment without overwhelming her own tonal approach. The received effect is impressionistic, laden here and there with epigrammatic asides, Aurelian musings, which act to infuse the fallibility of memory with philosophical structure. Most chapters include the observations of other writers whose work may bear, tangentially, on her own experiences. If such observations sometimes look static on the written page, it is not because they are irrelevant; in fact they coalesce to reinforce her position. Hannah Arendt’s famous assertion that acts undertaken publically are necessarily political is met with Gleeson’s unblinkered and blindingly honest assessment of transfiguring pain in the female body:

Women learn early that absorbing pain is a means of martyrdom inching us closer to the bodies of saints, as if discomfort equates to religious ecstasy. That there is meaning in suffering, except that there is not.

Gleeson is refreshingly open on the subject of religion. Professing a ‘much-lapsed’ faith, she yet acknowledges the mysticism and sense of the supernatural which continues to inhere to Irish Catholic culture. The ‘seers’ and diviners in her own family – the witnesses to ghosts, the everyday prophets – are counter-intuitively conspicuous, as, in fact, is the shadow of the church, which hangs over the crucible of Gleeson’s phenomenal capacity for invention as surely as it loomed over Joyce. She has drunk deep at the well of ritual: when overheard, ‘every word of this incantation (the Blood of Christ) still rises up from memory’. You sense the influence in the wonderful abstraction of her style, the modern-mystical use of language which frees the potential of metaphor, as it did for those shaman of the deep south west of Ireland, the interpreters of religion and local mythology. Gleeson’s writing is intelligent, immediate and unusually persuasive. Here, though you could pick any brilliant apothegm out of dozens, is an image of a hospital whose philosophical purpose is commodified to incorporate a sense of teeming history within its body politic:

Hospitals are a dominion of streets and mapped lines. Their psychogeography filled up with each body that has passed through them. How many have slept in this bed? A commonwealth of words, a confederacy of the sick.

Within its compass of impressionistic essays, the titular ‘Constellations’ represents a defining metaphor. Against the turning of the cosmos - variously muse and titanic embodiment of the star dust that unites us – Gleeson sets the possibility of the constellations within us. Our biological underpinnings, the blood coursing through our veins, give the writer a template on which to build a wider schema of recognition. Noting, in an early chapter, that blood is highly symbolic to the Catholic imagination, Gleeson uses the viscera of her own lifelong exposure to its semantic offices through medical procedures, illness, transfusion, and the defining moments of childbirth, to create a kind of road map of painful experience with which we may identify. And entirely without sentiment: the vascular routeways of arteries and capillaries – 60,000 miles of them – bearing the irony of leukaemia in the life’s blood, are not worn as stigmata. Gleeson’s cool determination of the indivisibility of blood and human existence, and of its corollary serviceability as metaphor, is bolstered throughout by well-researched histories of blood as totem and as symbol. ‘Blood has seeped’, she says...

Fluid and uncompromising – into our language and etymology: in cold-blooded killers or hot-blooded lovers; blood magic and blood diamonds; blood moon, blood rain and blood lust.

It is no surprise to find this writer’s lyrical turn of mind occasionally dissolving into poetry. Acting as a glossary of levels of pain – the kind of pain which doctors try to measure on a scale of one to ten – Gleeson’s litany of abstractions late on in the book, of ways of describing the ‘suffocating’, ‘searing’, ‘scalding’ and ‘lacerating’ pain of prolonged suffering, performs a synoptic service to all that precedes it in her narrative. Is there a more fitting conduit to reflective silence than the distillation of ongoing pain into a precisely apposite simile?

They recur these infections,
returning like sailors with the dawn,
from things they wish they’d never seen.

Gleeson’s identification with Frida Kahlo, or more especially, Frida Kahlo subsequent to the life-changing injuries she sustained after a bus crash at the age of eighteen, lies on the battlefield of suffering. Kahlo’s shattered spinal column, smashed ribs and mangled foot, resulting in immobility, encasement in plaster and ultimate leg amputation, mirror, if not in precise anatomical disposition, Gleeson’s many surgical interventions and the relentless occurrence and re-occurrence of physical debilitation. The pinioning of Kahlo’s transformative experience to the mast of pictorial art is rendered, here, in that other medium of transfiguration, words. It is somehow fitting, in this fine book, that Gleeson finds a compelling aesthetic inhering to the otherwise terrible scene of Kahlo’s personal tragedy:

The explosion blew her clothes off, and another passenger, possibly a decorator, had a bag of gold powder among his painting tools. It burst on impact, showering an already naked and bleeding Kahlo. Her boyfriend recalls that when people saw her, they cried, ‘La bailarina, la bailarina!’. Gold mixed with red on her bloodied body, and they thought she was a dancer, limbs decoratively twisted among the wreckage.

Constellations – Reflections from Life is published by Pan Macmillan
For more information: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/sin-ad-gleeson/constellations/9781509892730