The Colour Of Covid

A Fever Dream between the Worlds

And the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane
Numbs my brain, oh, Lord

From Van Morrison T.B. Sheets

In a kind of a continuation of last week’s newsletter I find myself in bed with COVID thinking about the inbetweeness of sickness. The milky tea. The sun under the curtains oozing on across the wall. Important business and times and logistics evaporating. The shirt I had pictured wearing to the wedding abstracted into sculpture. The dogs outside seem unfamiliar. I am turning over the plan to turn over and then sometime later the idea of an expedition to go down the hall for a glass of water. Almost if you had the energy to imagine it, it would be like you were in a hotel having been stung by jellyfish in the surf and still with a headache from the sun and dizzy by being thrashed by the waves and the dogs would be street dogs fighting under the palm trees whose leaves sound like brown sugar sifting against brown sugar. I thought I had come up out of it yesterday and started to write to you about a special foraging vest but then another mini-wave of flu and I woke up this morning woozy and still with a hint of fever dream and I got downstairs and brought a box up that my friend and collaborator Marta Abbott left for me with, a cone of dried wild Sardinian myrtle berries, a ziplock bag of tiny fallen oak galls we found together with private school kids in a ravine, Sardinian rust water, a strange two-toned postcard, and a jar of very particular pink salt smuggled north to Rome and then on a flight to Toronto. Everything in the box felt confusing and full of zinging energies. I took another COVID rapid test and watched the slow motion ink inscribe its line and then second line to make the positive that has been in me all week. I took my sketchbook back into bed with me.

Vanessa’s Bell’s original jack design.

Phillip Guston Painter in Bed 1973

CONSIDERING how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this an infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

—“On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf, 1926.

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu, 1919.

Six Studies of Pillows Albrecht Dürer 1493 (Inked on the reverse side of his self portrait)

Matisse designing the Chapel of the Rosary in Venice at Hôtel Régina in Cimiez,

Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998

Salvador Dali at the St. Regis Hotel

More pictures from the bed-based studio for Colour Lab members. JL