A Blue Eye
A C Clarke
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you are not too sick
Children are playing in a garden
tossing their cries like balls into bright air
happy and safe: the garden gate is locked.
A girl sits facing a looking-glass. She fixes
a new-picked rose in her sweetheart-ready hair,
hears through open windows children playing.
A man is hesitating at a door.
In an upper window a lamp burns red. He swears
it’s the last time. Tosses scruples to the wind.
*
TO RESTORE THE USE OF REASON
While having his bedclothes arranged patient struck the attendant inflicting a blue eye
Where is she now my blue-eyed girl
with her silk stockings and her mermaid hair?
I’ll walk the world to find her, cram her pockets
with pebbles from the yard I’ve turned to gold.
We’ll live forever free as air.
says that last night he was in ‘heaven’ and in the ‘garden of Eden’ where he eat of the forbidden fruit
In the garden of apples I dream of Eden
taste the forbidden fruit and find it good.
But the serpent winds me in his knotted coils
I pluck him from my throat, shred his pale skin.
Let me breathe, let me breathe …
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you keep your fists to yourself
Children play in the superintendent’s garden
tearing the silence with their cries
he is at present very restless tearing the bedclothes
Bring me white fields of paper, seas of ink
sharpen my quills. I have lives to write:
no less than the biography of the world.
Come my attendants
tear off these bonds that chain my strength!
I am Samson of the Pillars, see how my hair springs back
after they scissored it. I’ve had Delilah
prone at my feet,
circled the Queen of Sheba’s
throat with rubies.
Kings have come out of the East
to view my cabinet of curiosities,
unicorns stamped their silver feet in my stables.
I ground their horns to powder for a potion
to win my girl.
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you have the gatekeeper’s permission
The girl sees a woman in the glass.
She lifts her hand to hair touched with silver
powders away the lines of suffering
*
TO ALLEVIATE SUFFERING
complains of pain in the left side
I have a pain on the left where my heart used to be
on examination the left rib is found fractured
God took my blue-eyed Eva
out of my side
she ran through avenues of flowers
blue as glass
waits in the walled garden
for me to unlock her
but my viziers have thrown away
the key
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you do nothing to disturb it
*
TO LESSEN PERIL
since last report has been very restless troublesome, dangerous and destructive
The man sweats in an unhappy bed
All night a red lamp burns in the ward
All day doors swing open and shut
Who is that glaring from the looking-glass?
I’ll smash his face to splinters
mend it after
so skilfully you won’t see the cracks.
That was my trade
mending worlds
in the depths of a window.
his delusions are of a most extravagant nature
loose these constraints I’ll give you
millions
when I come into my own
set me free set me free
within the last few weeks patient had 9 or 10 fits, apparently epileptic.
let me out let me out let me out
My girl is calling me from the garden can’t you hear?
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you are privileged with reason
*
WHERE REASON CANNOT BE RESTORED
yesterday he became very stupid, sleepy and regardless of everything…
today all his faculties gradually left him
Now he is shut forever inside
the four walls of an institutional page
his copperplate epitaph:
Died
his undemanding body laid out
for the undertakers, his coffin
draped with old sheets for a mortcloth:
Died
Sealed inside the walls of his skull
his fluttering fantasies,
the gate to childhood forever locked:
Died
Commentary
‘How do I know what I think until I see what I write?’ W H Auden’s question has always been my guiding principle. For this reason I will admit that I did not do any extensive research before embarking on the subject assigned to me for Writing the Asylum. Rather, as questions were thrown up in the writing, I checked and extended my frames of reference. That said, it was really helpful to be assigned a subject to explore since I would have had no idea where to start otherwise. I was glad too that the subject chosen for me was a set of patient case notes, something I found easy to respond to imaginatively, but not without its problems.
The first task was to decipher the notes, which were written by a medical superintendent. Once I was confident that I had deciphered the neat but not always easily legible handwriting correctly, I read through the notes two or three times. Two themes to emerge from that preliminary reading were first, the marked contrast between the laconic notes of the medical superintendent and the ‘extravagant’ fantasies which the patient entertained, according to those notes; the second, was that the patient was admitted suffering from the effects of general paralysis of the insane, the name then given to neurosyphilis, one possible development of late stage syphilis. It was clear that I had two contrasting voices to explore, the actual notes of the superintendent and the imagined voice of the patient; it was also clear that the life of the imagination would be a narrative theme: syphilis has often been associated with increased creativity (see especially Thomas Mann’s novel Dr Faustus).
I then had to face my first set of choices: would I name the patient and how would I invent his voice? The patient is named at the head of the case notes but not at any point in the record of his behaviour. He owned a glazier’s business in Glasgow and may well have living descendants. I chose not to name him. That also I felt gave me more scope in imagining a voice for him. Though I used specific details from the notes, I saw him as a generic figure not unlike the Tom of Bedlam figure in the ballad of that name, whose wonderfully poetic fantasies are magnificent in their extravagance. I could not hope to emulate the ballad, which can be read at Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song: Anonymous Ballad, circa 1620 (http://www.thehypertexts.com), but I thought it gave me a pointer as to how I might present the patient’s fantasies as an enlargement of his imaginative life, rather than a simple aberration.
To start any piece of writing I need some sort of ‘hook’ to open up possibilities. I was struck by an incident in which the patient was recorded as striking the attendant and ‘inflicting a blue eye’. The ‘blue’ rather than black eye caught my imagination and I suddenly had the first line spoken by my imagined patient: ‘Where is she now my blue-eyed girl?’
A lost or inaccessible lover, real or imagined, became one of the offstage characters as it were and a focus of longing for the central figure, the patient. In a time of restricted sexual freedom for ‘respectable’ women, syphilis was generally acquired through visiting prostitutes, another strand in the story I was building up.
The idea of a walled garden (the one at Gartnavel at this date, 1865, was for the use of the Physician Superintendent) in particular began to assume a central significance, as a symbol both of sanctuary and exclusion. Its biblical origins resonated with the patient’s own dream of having been in the garden of Eden and also with my invented theme of a lost or inaccessible love. I use it also (drawing on the Eden idea) as an emblem of lost innocence.
It was impossible to tell from the case notes how much the patient understood of his situation, but it seemed not implausible, on the evidence of what he did say (for instance about turning pebbles into gold) and his actions (tearing bedclothes, attacking the attendant) that he alternated between a certain grandeur of vision and a fear of being restricted, even imprisoned.
The central structure of my piece is the counterpoint of actual notes and imagined voice until the inevitable conclusion, given the nature of his illness, the patient’s death. I did feel though that I needed at least a third voice, probably more, which would fill in some of the background and hint at some of the questions which further reading and reflection were raising.
The stated principles of the Royal Asylum are admirable; but at no period has it been easy to treat severely ill patients in mental hospitals with complete objectivity and sustained compassion, particularly when, as in the case of the patient I was writing about, their behaviour is uncooperative. Thus the patient in question is described in the notes as ‘troublesome, dangerous and disruptive’; he takes exercise in the ‘airing court’ but such patients did not have access to the wider grounds; he sustains a fractured rib but there is no indication of how he acquired it. How far could the principles be put into practice for such a patient, especially since there was no hope of ‘restoring reason’?
In the finished piece the garden (standing in for the wider grounds of the asylum) is given a voice which invites and excludes. A third person narrative runs parallel with the main theme, setting it in context, and introducing imagery – of windows, mirrors etc – which recurs throughout the piece.
To maintain clarity voices are typographically distinguished: the garden by italics, the third person narrative by the Sans Serif font, the superintendent’s notes by a calligraphical script, the patient by the Serif font. Finally each section of the narrative is prefaced by one of the three aims of the Royal Asylum in capitals, like an inscription over a door.
[Patient record for John Whyte, HB13/5/57]
A C Clarke has published five full collections and six pamphlets, two of the latter, Owersettin and Drochaid, in collaboration with Maggie Rabatski and Sheila Templeton. Her fifth full collection, A Troubling Woman came out in 2017. She was one of four winners in the Cinnamon Press 2017 pamphlet competition with War Baby. She has been working on an extensive series of poems about Paul and Gala Éluard, later Gala Dalí, and the Surrealist circles in which they moved. The first set of these was published as a pamphlet by Tapsalteerie last year (2021). This year a full collection based on the same material, Alive Among Dead Stars, has been longlisted for the Black Spring Back of the Drawer competition.
A Blue Eye
A C Clarke
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you are not too sick
Children are playing in a garden
tossing their cries like balls into bright air
happy and safe: the garden gate is locked.
A girl sits facing a looking-glass. She fixes
a new-picked rose in her sweetheart-ready hair,
hears through open windows children playing.
A man is hesitating at a door.
In an upper window a lamp burns red. He swears
it’s the last time. Tosses scruples to the wind.
*
TO RESTORE THE USE OF REASON
While having his bedclothes arranged patient struck the attendant inflicting a blue eye
Where is she now my blue-eyed girl
with her silk stockings and her mermaid hair?
I’ll walk the world to find her, cram her pockets
with pebbles from the yard I’ve turned to gold.
We’ll live forever free as air.
says that last night he was in ‘heaven’ and in the ‘garden of Eden’ where he eat of the forbidden fruit
In the garden of apples I dream of Eden
taste the forbidden fruit and find it good.
But the serpent winds me in his knotted coils
I pluck him from my throat, shred his pale skin.
Let me breathe, let me breathe …
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you keep your fists to yourself
Children play in the superintendent’s garden
tearing the silence with their cries
he is at present very restless tearing the bedclothes
Bring me white fields of paper, seas of ink
sharpen my quills. I have lives to write:
no less than the biography of the world.
Come my attendants
tear off these bonds that chain my strength!
I am Samson of the Pillars, see how my hair springs back
after they scissored it. I’ve had Delilah
prone at my feet,
circled the Queen of Sheba’s
throat with rubies.
Kings have come out of the East
to view my cabinet of curiosities,
unicorns stamped their silver feet in my stables.
I ground their horns to powder for a potion
to win my girl.
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you have the gatekeeper’s permission
The girl sees a woman in the glass.
She lifts her hand to hair touched with silver
powders away the lines of suffering
*
TO ALLEVIATE SUFFERING
complains of pain in the left side
I have a pain on the left where my heart used to be
on examination the left rib is found fractured
God took my blue-eyed Eva
out of my side
she ran through avenues of flowers
blue as glass
waits in the walled garden
for me to unlock her
but my viziers have thrown away
the key
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you do nothing to disturb it
*
TO LESSEN PERIL
since last report has been very restless troublesome, dangerous and destructive
The man sweats in an unhappy bed
All night a red lamp burns in the ward
All day doors swing open and shut
Who is that glaring from the looking-glass?
I’ll smash his face to splinters
mend it after
so skilfully you won’t see the cracks.
That was my trade
mending worlds
in the depths of a window.
his delusions are of a most extravagant nature
loose these constraints I’ll give you
millions
when I come into my own
set me free set me free
within the last few weeks patient had 9 or 10 fits, apparently epileptic.
let me out let me out let me out
My girl is calling me from the garden can’t you hear?
Come into my garden all you who are sick at heart –
if you are privileged with reason
*
WHERE REASON CANNOT BE RESTORED
yesterday he became very stupid, sleepy and regardless of everything…
today all his faculties gradually left him
Now he is shut forever inside
the four walls of an institutional page
his copperplate epitaph:
Died
his undemanding body laid out
for the undertakers, his coffin
draped with old sheets for a mortcloth:
Died
Sealed inside the walls of his skull
his fluttering fantasies,
the gate to childhood forever locked:
Died
Commentary
‘How do I know what I think until I see what I write?’ W H Auden’s question has always been my guiding principle. For this reason I will admit that I did not do any extensive research before embarking on the subject assigned to me for Writing the Asylum. Rather, as questions were thrown up in the writing, I checked and extended my frames of reference. That said, it was really helpful to be assigned a subject to explore since I would have had no idea where to start otherwise. I was glad too that the subject chosen for me was a set of patient case notes, something I found easy to respond to imaginatively, but not without its problems.
The first task was to decipher the notes, which were written by a medical superintendent. Once I was confident that I had deciphered the neat but not always easily legible handwriting correctly, I read through the notes two or three times. Two themes to emerge from that preliminary reading were first, the marked contrast between the laconic notes of the medical superintendent and the ‘extravagant’ fantasies which the patient entertained, according to those notes; the second, was that the patient was admitted suffering from the effects of general paralysis of the insane, the name then given to neurosyphilis, one possible development of late stage syphilis. It was clear that I had two contrasting voices to explore, the actual notes of the superintendent and the imagined voice of the patient; it was also clear that the life of the imagination would be a narrative theme: syphilis has often been associated with increased creativity (see especially Thomas Mann’s novel Dr Faustus).
I then had to face my first set of choices: would I name the patient and how would I invent his voice? The patient is named at the head of the case notes but not at any point in the record of his behaviour. He owned a glazier’s business in Glasgow and may well have living descendants. I chose not to name him. That also I felt gave me more scope in imagining a voice for him. Though I used specific details from the notes, I saw him as a generic figure not unlike the Tom of Bedlam figure in the ballad of that name, whose wonderfully poetic fantasies are magnificent in their extravagance. I could not hope to emulate the ballad, which can be read at Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song: Anonymous Ballad, circa 1620 (http://www.thehypertexts.com), but I thought it gave me a pointer as to how I might present the patient’s fantasies as an enlargement of his imaginative life, rather than a simple aberration.
To start any piece of writing I need some sort of ‘hook’ to open up possibilities. I was struck by an incident in which the patient was recorded as striking the attendant and ‘inflicting a blue eye’. The ‘blue’ rather than black eye caught my imagination and I suddenly had the first line spoken by my imagined patient: ‘Where is she now my blue-eyed girl?’
A lost or inaccessible lover, real or imagined, became one of the offstage characters as it were and a focus of longing for the central figure, the patient. In a time of restricted sexual freedom for ‘respectable’ women, syphilis was generally acquired through visiting prostitutes, another strand in the story I was building up.
The idea of a walled garden (the one at Gartnavel at this date, 1865, was for the use of the Physician Superintendent) in particular began to assume a central significance, as a symbol both of sanctuary and exclusion. Its biblical origins resonated with the patient’s own dream of having been in the garden of Eden and also with my invented theme of a lost or inaccessible love. I use it also (drawing on the Eden idea) as an emblem of lost innocence.
It was impossible to tell from the case notes how much the patient understood of his situation, but it seemed not implausible, on the evidence of what he did say (for instance about turning pebbles into gold) and his actions (tearing bedclothes, attacking the attendant) that he alternated between a certain grandeur of vision and a fear of being restricted, even imprisoned.
The central structure of my piece is the counterpoint of actual notes and imagined voice until the inevitable conclusion, given the nature of his illness, the patient’s death. I did feel though that I needed at least a third voice, probably more, which would fill in some of the background and hint at some of the questions which further reading and reflection were raising.
The stated principles of the Royal Asylum are admirable; but at no period has it been easy to treat severely ill patients in mental hospitals with complete objectivity and sustained compassion, particularly when, as in the case of the patient I was writing about, their behaviour is uncooperative. Thus the patient in question is described in the notes as ‘troublesome, dangerous and disruptive’; he takes exercise in the ‘airing court’ but such patients did not have access to the wider grounds; he sustains a fractured rib but there is no indication of how he acquired it. How far could the principles be put into practice for such a patient, especially since there was no hope of ‘restoring reason’?
In the finished piece the garden (standing in for the wider grounds of the asylum) is given a voice which invites and excludes. A third person narrative runs parallel with the main theme, setting it in context, and introducing imagery – of windows, mirrors etc – which recurs throughout the piece.
To maintain clarity voices are typographically distinguished: the garden by italics, the third person narrative by the Sans Serif font, the superintendent’s notes by a calligraphical script, the patient by the Serif font. Finally each section of the narrative is prefaced by one of the three aims of the Royal Asylum in capitals, like an inscription over a door.
[Patient record for John Whyte, HB13/5/57]
A C Clarke has published five full collections and six pamphlets, two of the latter, Owersettin and Drochaid, in collaboration with Maggie Rabatski and Sheila Templeton. Her fifth full collection, A Troubling Woman came out in 2017. She was one of four winners in the Cinnamon Press 2017 pamphlet competition with War Baby. She has been working on an extensive series of poems about Paul and Gala Éluard, later Gala Dalí, and the Surrealist circles in which they moved. The first set of these was published as a pamphlet by Tapsalteerie last year (2021). This year a full collection based on the same material, Alive Among Dead Stars, has been longlisted for the Black Spring Back of the Drawer competition.