cyphomandra

The status of the yontif this year is that my mother and I made honeycakes, but it is autumn and the head of the year and we are still here, the important thing. A sweet year, a safe. L'shanah tovah, all.

I did not post it last night because I was so tired, but spatch took a proof of life when I was finally home which does indeed look much more like a person than my fluorescently washed out self-portrait of a couple of nights ago and amazingly more so than the traditional tubes-and-wires effigy of earlier in the week. It's peculiar to look back on. Concentrating to talk to doctors during that period worked well enough that I was asked more than once if I had a medical background and had to answer only in the sense of having had a lot of medical to deal with, but otherwise much of what I remember of the first few days involved drifting in and out of weird half-overheard half-sleep acutely punctuated by conversations or procedures. It was amazing to go back to sleep this morning after my medications without having to discuss them extensively with anyone.



fleurdelis41 seasonally sent me some cases of piracy tried at the Old Bailey, of which my favorites are the prosecutor no-show, the punch line of the stolen hats, and the dudes whose defense was having been very drunk at the time.

Home from six days in hospital with a plan designed not to land me back there any time soon, I have been passed into the care of Dr. Hestia, who is already carrying out her duties with enthusiastic ministrations of purr. I have washed my hair for the first time in a week. I have eaten food prepared by my family. I napped like a stone in the late afternoon, which I will have needed since my regimen for the foreseeable involves a schedule of medications I cannot let slide even when some of them require me to be awake at hours I have preferred my entire life to spend unconscious. My calendar is inevitably full of further maintenance, but I am truly looking forward to an increase in conversations that have nothing to do with the monitoring of my vitals. Mostly I am marrow-tired and vague with new chemistry and glad to be home in my own clothes and drinking water I don't have to ring anyone to bring me in bed. I was not expecting and delight in the gift of a plush harpy eagle that arrived while I was away.

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I respectfully wish to submit that if I had just had scurvy, this whole week would have been much easier. Have a suspicious ghost crab, the Changelings' "Port Royale" (1998), and Tim Eriksen rocking out Bellamy's setting of Kipling's "Poor Honest Men" (2011). In keeping with the recent influx of Kevin McNally in the eighteenth century, when I get back to my stack of DVDs I could just rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). For all the varied and undeniable flaws of those second two films, their sea-iconography has clung to me like dream-wrack for nearly twenty years and I wouldn't have a cycle of stories without them.

This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.