To my friend, a psychiatric nurse, my diagnosis makes perfect sense.
“You have a fragile brain,” she says, brusquely, over the phone. She’s meaning the stuff of which my particular brain is made. Sitting there, straining wretchedly into the receiver, a bavarois comes to mind. And close behind it, a blancmange. In any event, some shiveringly tender pudding that swims in some kind of milk.
As she talks, I find I’m keeping my head quite still. No sudden moves. And I can’t decide if what she’s saying makes me interesting or just jibberingly mental. I wonder if I happened to be born with this weakling brain or if its fragility developed, like fluffy arteries, over time.
“You can’t fight genetics,” she says.
“So is there a cure for a brain like mine?” I ask. I am bolt upright in my chair, keeping my soft pudding plumb with the floor.
“No. No cure. Just keep taking the meds. Don’t stop taking the meds!”
I know she thinks she’s being helpful, but it’s easy for her to say. For one thing, they cost an arm and a leg. For another, they come with grim warnings of side effects, most of which, I’m told, must simply be tolerated in the interests of functional humanhood. Among these are a sleepiness that turns my head into a 20-pound bowling ball, a potentially deadly rash and – fate far worse than death – weight gain. Those two words instill in me a stone-cold terror. You mean I’m nutty and I’m fat? The despair is absolute.
Blancmange wasn’t always a wobbly pink pudding, but the more savory brainchild of some raunchy cook in a medieval kitchen who conceived of a sloppy white amalgam of chicken, rice and almond milk. Later, around the 1600s, that gloop metamorphosed into the iconic (but not oft enjoyed) British dessert which relied for its structure on the gelatin of pigs’ trotters. Traditionally, blancmange was white (hence the name) but I know it as – and love it for being – pink. This love has everything to do with appearance and nothing whatsoever to do with inner essence - how it tastes, because actually I’ve never tasted it.
There was a book at my grandmother’s house called something like, “Ameliar-Anne Stiggins and The Green Umbrella.” Written in the ‘20s, it’s the story of a poor girl who nicks a bunch of cakes from a party to take home to her poor and ailing brothers and sisters. I wasn’t interested in the sickly siblings or Ameliar-Anne’s fundamental goodness despite her sticky fingers. But I loved the bit about how she hid the cakes in her umbrella. And I adored it when, on her way out, she tripped on the stairs, the umbrella pinged open, and all the puddings and cakes came raining down – perfectly intact. One of those puddings – and the least likely to have been in one piece due to its shuddering delicacy – was the blancmange.
Until that telephone call with my friend, I don’t suppose I’d ever thought much about the composition of my brain, or barely even pictured it. But that’s the thing with brains, and where it gets tricky: How does the thing which does the thinking think about its own rift? It would have been far less complicated (and perhaps less rude?) if she’d said, “But Alexa, you’ve got a wizened leg!”
As for Ameliar-Anne Stiggin’s blancmange, my mind’s eye still pictures it clear as day – that blobbily statuesque dessert wagon-wheeling its way across the page and presumably back to table, where … what? The rich party people got a second crack? Poor Ameliar-Anne was pitied and forgiven, handed a big spoon and nudged to the front of the line?
Oh, the morality tale here is all well and good. But the best messages are delivered subliminally, in whispers, to become the tools we pluck from our belts at a later time. The clever part is that we don’t even know it’s happening; we have usually forgotten all about the story or the picture because it’s now held deep and (mostly) irretrievable in the soft pink matter of our brains.
Fortunately for me, in that moment on the phone, the blancmange inside my blancmange was still within reach. It spoke to me then and still speaks to me now: There’s resilience – and possibly even beauty – in fragility.
AB - 19.11.22
I didn't want this one to end!
Another brilliant note♥️