Under the Cover with Jason Purcell, author of Crohnic

What Blue Does

The chairs in the clinic are blue. Those of us who are compelled to come to this place every few weeks settle as much as our bodies allow into the medical-grade vinyl cushions and wait the hour or more it takes for our medication to drip through the IV and into our veins.

I have over the course of my life heard people say that we are wired to find the colour blue soothing because it reminds us on some subconscious level of the sea or the sky, bodies bigger than our own that churn onward despite all the things we do to them. Whether that’s pop psychology or the real thing I can’t say, but when I’m in that room with windows that look out onto the walls of other buildings and concrete alleyways below and only these large blue chairs to rest the eye and body on, I believe it.

Perhaps that’s why, as I was writing Crohnic, my latest poetry collection about Crohn’s disease and what it means to live a medicalized life in Alberta, I had in my mind from the beginning a particular image: Edmonton’s river valley rendered in blue. Perhaps the closer word to what I imagined is awash, like sky or sea coming to cover the surface of this scene I look out over every day. This was, I suppose, also the fantasy of medication: that that which dripped into my veins would wash over the landscape of my gut, with its open wounds and scarred valleys, and soothe it.

This is what this collection is about: medication—taking something that hurts you to help you—and the landscape of the North Saskatchewan River valley, where flora and fauna, growth and decay, life and death are imbricated. I was thinking about this project and writing these poems one winter from my apartment that overlooks the North Saskatchewan River and its treed shores, convalescing after a hospital stay and the introduction of a new treatment plan. What I saw made sense: the river and its neighbours, frozen in shades of metallic grey and blue, the thrumming life of other seasons slowed down, everything at rest.

My friend Mathew Thomson, a printmaker and photographer based in Edmonton, has been working with cyanotype for the past handful of years. Cyanotype is a form of printmaking that yields, when a solution of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate or oxalate reacts with UVA radiation, a print that reproduces the photo negative or specimen in rich blues. This process, capable of capturing the fine detail of the print’s subject and so used often to capture botanical specimens, requires only water to develop the image. Awash again.

I realize in writing this that there is a shared language between sickness and the process of cyanotype. Both can be slow. Cyanotype is a process that takes time to react; the ferric iron reduces to ferrous iron once it is exposed to the proper light, a chemical reaction that happens by degrees. Likewise, the experience of illness changes the experience of time. Some things happen too fast, then everything else feels too slow. Convalescence drags. And when that UVA radiation comes in contact with the chemical solution and causes it to break down, I think of the two medications I take that have made me increasingly photosensitive, with a risk of developing skin cancers high on the list of warnings I was given when I first started this treatment. Diagnosis, treatment, capture and representation, an illness, an image; we are changed.

When the idea for this book was given to me by a customer at the bookstore I used to own—a nurse who herself worked with patients undergoing long-term medical treatment—it seemed a fertile artistic space to nurture the question, How does one cope with a medicalized life? As I worked through this idea during early mornings, now unable to sleep past 3 a.m., I searched the winter river valley for answers. From my living room’s wall of windows I looked down: the tissue of the river, the ice scar, the hard feeling in my own gut, the rip of pain, the blue rush of relief when the medication worked, the white dust on everything else when all I could do was lie there. It isn’t right to say that the river valley reflected these things that I was feeling, or that it was feeling any of it itself; it’s wrong to anthropomorphize that way. The more-than-human world that I looked at every day was simply enacting its own rhythm, and I was able to listen in.

This is why I asked Mathew to use his art on the cover. He captured a ray of light falling across the floor of the valley, and he made it blue with chemicals, light, and time. It isn’t easy living a life that requires you to swallow down pills and receive IV infusions regularly to keep it going. It can feel, in its own ways, dark, oppressive, frozen in place. But you still do it, over and over, and hope that, if you keep doing it, a beam of hope will fall on you.