10th May Sunday 2-4pm

Steve Finbow
Notes From the Sick Room

As part of research into my new non-fiction book Notes From the Sick Room, an investigation into physical illness and creativity (to be published by Repeater Books in 2016), I have devised a symptomatological questionnaire for writers/artists/filmmakers/musicians, which – in multiple choice and open questions – hopes to chart the symptoms and signs of both illness and artistic inspiration and/or methodology. With the results of this material, I hope to connect illness and recuperation with waves of creativity and reflexion and, further, to explore these phenomena in the works and lives of people such as DH Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo, Gilles Deleuze, Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett and others.

The event would take the form of a doctor’s surgery – the new space at Five Years would fit this idea well – and have attendees fill in the questionnaire and have a ‘live’ consultation regarding the results, with members of the audience participating as fellow doctors/patients. This ‘practice’ will examine how illness writes itself into the body and how the body reads the signs as symptoms – how the hospital becomes a library of diseases and dysfunction. The body is both writer and reader of its own pathological novel; it is its own cartography and narrative – a shared experience of reader and writer, reading and writing.

As within a ward or waiting room, the readers/patients discuss their ailments and create a shared story that is one of exaggeration and concealment, horror and humour, resignation and hope. The writer/doctor – with his knowledge of pathological signs and taxonomy of symptoms – becomes reader of the disease for the patient in order for the reader/patient to become writer of his/her rehabilitation, cure or demise.

Illness as metaphor or metonym – our bodies are incubating machines for viruses and for language – “The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system” and “My basic theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host” – William S Burroughs.
As cancer cells metastasize and physically mutate the body they inhabit, so readers proliferate and adapt the text they are reading – see Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges. Is it possible to generate a writer/reader doctor/patient text from the combined analysis and treatment of the subject within a surgery/writing-reading group? What would be the response of the audience/performer to an invasive investigation of acts usually singular and secret – writing and illness?

Part 2. How to Read: Writing Groups. – Possible publication as doctor’s notes to be distributed as research into the reader’s medical history with case notes and illustrations of the narrative of disease.

Contact: Steve Finbow
stevefinbow@googlemail.com