As I navigate a relapse of the chronic neurological condition with which I live: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (M.E), my imagination places me in a seascape as a fierce wave of nausea tosses me up from my pillow and the mattress beneath me feels like foam and froth, upon which I am tossed like flotsam. Adrift on this raft of what feels like no return, I am drawn towards art for distraction, and focus on “After the Storm”, a piece of photomontage by Ashley Cook who specialises in printmaking responsive to her creative positionality ‘to express our need to find meaning and acknowledge[…] that we use stories to make sense of our existence’ (Cook, 2025). This work leans into the Greek myth of Sirens, culturally represented as malevolent bird-like creatures who tempt sailors to their doom. Yet Cook’s Siren defiantly faces the viewer, not the ship which remains intact upon the waves behind her. The vessel is a long, broad galleon which peacocks it’s sails the height of the clouded sky, and yet there is something fragile about these mainsails: thin, yellowing paper-like triangular sheets of canvas to which I imagine a torch set aflame. But perhaps this is not an imagining: the heat of a neuropathic jolt, a shocking fusion of numbness and molten pressure clamps around the base of my skull, before shooting up and across my face and I see the electrical activity of my body reflected in the sky above Siren, which is alive with plumes of hot cerise and purple swathes of swirling light, against which clouds of magenta explode like passionate bombs of warning. The look on Siren’s face and the sense of foreboding it imparts, makes me think that she is suspended in a moment in time before the storm or perhaps even during the storm. I wonder if this is another projection as I spin into a whirlpool of restless exhaustion, and my memory escapes to the Dumfries and Galloway coastline and my childhood holidays, to the bay in which we bobbed as a family, on a dingy made for two into which four had been crammed and from which I had dipped my fingers in and out of the cold, dark waves. Oh, for some cool darkness now, as my face fires from an unregulated heat within. I hear my mum calling, “watch out! watch out for the rocks!” and I am watching, waiting for an inevitable crash into a gale-force relapse as I have no life jacket; no potions or spells to seek for relief and I realise that the shore-bound ship of my bodily self has already been wrecked. There is wreckage to be found in Cook’s print, but you have to look closely and I have oh-so-much-time to do so. Siren’s rib cage is made up of pickings of drift wood, her waist merging into what looks at first like a nest of twigs and branches, but on closer inspection may be the skeleton of a bird, and this places her fully in the mists of myth: that she is half-women half-feathered creature. Her hips curve across and around brittle-brown and grey lines of bone, a determined female form of self-protection around which blue coalesces and tiny fish swim across. To her left lies her own reflection, ethereal in its underwater submerging. Like Ophelia, her hair waves away from her like strands of seaweed. But Siren has not been pushed down by the patriarchy. Even in her immersion, that is crystal-clear. There is a watery world of difference between the foregrounded Siren and her submerged reflection as the latter has no bird perched upon her head, only its remaining wings are stretched out in preparation to take flight. The fragile feathers arising from behind her neck make her angelic, her beneath the waves state one of a christening not exile. Under the weighted waves of my clinical fatigue, I perceive the bird on the upstanding Siren as an albatross. But isn’t that the sailor’s dead weight to carry, and aren’t I not only land locked but confined to the house, confined to a bed? This makes me both sailor and land dweller; a voyager between the realms of relapse and remission. This middle space may be mapped by writer and activist Susan Sontag, who talks of a “kingdom of the sick” wherein ‘Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place’ (Sontag ,1978: 3). I don’t want to reside in this other place, so imagine myself as a stowaway, seeking to remain undiscovered by the relapse pirates who would plunder my resilience. There are no pirates swashbuckling across the scene depicted in “After the Storm”. Possibly, there are not even sailors: I can only make out expressionist forms, mere dabs of colour at the ship’s helm and I wonder if their fuzzy outlines are to suggest a state of panic: their shanties long-silenced, their swaggering selves stilted by shock or stunned by the Siren’s song. But Siren’s mouth is closed and shaped by a contented smile. My own lips murmur sweet songs of blackbirds who sing in the dead of night (The Beatles, 1968). McCartney’s meditative melody helps to draw me away from the artificial night cast by my necessary eye mask and closer to memories of sunny days on the outside, under a cobalt blue sky when my eyes can tolerate a shaded spot of verdant green within which real blackbirds sing. McCartney’s lyric pulls along another refrain composed by Wolf Larsen. Larsen is the musical alter ego of Sarah Ramey, author of The Lady’s Handbook for her Mysterious Illness (2020), making Larsen, like the Siren and her floating reflection, a multi-faceted person. Her Lady’s Handbook lays out her overt physical pain and the medical gaslighting imposed on her in distressing detail, as she charts her decades of chronic illness experience. Conversely, her Wolf self sings haunting melodies in which the soul can bathe. The making of her music has often been stymied by her body, but she has succeeded in what all artists dream of: being heard. Her lyrics are a message in a bottle which has made headway from her home across the Atlantic to my solitary Scottish cove of isolation. I mentally unfurl the parchment and her words from “If I Be Wrong” (Larsen, 2011), call to me - What if I'm wrong, what if l've lied What if l've dragged you here to my own dark night Larsen’s use of the dark night speaks to me as a metaphor for illness, and the fear that she has dragged her companion towards her as a signalling of self-blame. I recognise this remorse, felt when family and friends have to whisper to me in the dark, or anxiously wait on the edge of the rocks for sight of me signalling my return from over the horizon of respite. Larsen’s lyrics become more explicit in their connections to the lore of luring inherent in the Siren myth - What if they're right, what if we're wrong What if I've lured you here with a Siren song? Her music is captivating; enchants me in a way that I feel listened to, despite my silence. She sings on - But if I be wrong, if I be right Let me be here with you tonight, I am indeed lured towards Larsen’s initial undercurrent of self-doubt as it is washed over by a more buoyant belief that she may be right to have opened up her world to others. I picture myself spotting land in the distance and there on the beach is a bounty of treasure. Something to be found gleaming amongst the seabed or the imagination when fastened to the mast of a real bed: a new technique for coping, a fresh routine to enhance resting, a carefully-honed skill that brings distraction, a pink-lined conch in the form of a letter or voice note which echoes soothing words of kindness and support. Sometimes, these new songs, sand-grain-sized fragments of relief, play too loud and the world has to be muffled or even muted. As I place heavy but necessary defenders across my sensitive ears, I resist for a moment; I’m am no Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, who famously ensured that he and his men avoided the Sirens' lure by plugging their ears with wax. I want to listen to more of Larsen and I think how short-sighted Jason was as he protected his Argonauts by drowning out the Siren’s melody, because he too had misappropriated their songs to that embedded excuse for male weakness: female sexuality. There is little sexual or sensual about Cook’s Siren. Her beauty arises from her confidence, her attractiveness is in her assurance that things will change and that she will be the one to bring about that transformation. How sweet it would be to sense a seaside-salted breeze, although I don’t need the expanse of an ocean, just a few drops of rain and the smell of the cooling tarmac, which is growing hot in the outside summer. Yes, outside it is early summer. Here, on the inside, a winter has been cast across my world. But it is a winter which will be followed by spring and I am reminded that Sirens are connected to the Goddess of earth and spring: Persephone, who was abducted by Hades because he had wanted her for a wife. She had been forbidden any words of refusal, never mind her own song. Persephone’s companions were given wings by Persephone’s mother, Demeter, in order that they may take flight and search for Persephone, or as others would have it, were saddled with wings as a punishment for having let her be taken. But how could wings be a punishment? Who wouldn’t want to fly, to soar, to be relieved of the albatross? And who wouldn’t want to grow feathers and bone, sinew of pink and tissues of white to make it easier to search for a sister and to bring her home? By this retelling, Sirens are not malicious creatures diminished to acts of allure, but women on a mission to protect and hold onto their community. As the sky flourishes above Siren with the bloom of a new dawn, she signals to me that the storm is over. If I don’t feel it quite yet, I know that eventually, I will: I have become fluid in my approach to time, patient in my paddling of the shallows until I find firmer sand on which to support and steady my limbs. I am attuned to the direction of the winds of time and what change they may bring. My gratitude is practiced and holds fast: for shelter, fresh water and sweet fruit and most of all, the knowledge that through the eyes of these fellow female artists and my sister-friends, I never was or will be castaway on an island forever and alone, and as I catch this drop of hope, the storm truly ends Works referenced Beatles, The. (1968). ‘Blackbird’, The Beatles (also known as The White Album) [CD]. Apple Records. Cook, A. (2022). After the Storm, [digital print]. Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow. Available at: https://shop.glasgowprintstudio.co.uk/artists/43-ashley-cook/works/37171-ashley-cook-after-the-storm-2022/ (Accessed: 24th April, 2025). Cook, A. (2025). Introduction to ‘Wishful Thinking’. Available at: https://ashleycook.art/wishful-thinking/ (Accessed 2nd May, 2025). Larsen, W. (2011). ‘If I Be Wrong’, Quiet at the Kitchen Door [EP]. Ramey/Spotify Ramey, S. (2020). The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir. Anchor. Sontag, S. (2013). Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. About the author
Arlene Jackson is a postgraduate researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University. As a former nurse who now lives with chronic illness/disability, Arlene utilises her perspective from the other side of the medical fence to analyse and critique literary and scholarly representations of illness and disability. Her current project seeks to explore the meaning and value of fiction on audio format to individuals living with sensory impairments specific to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. She has been published both creatively and critically, including in The BMJ Humanities, The Polyphony, Synapsis, Sentinel Literary Journal and Thimble Literary Journal. She is available for contact both at BlueSky @arlenejackson.bsky.social and here
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