The Supine Gaze

In her essay, On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf explores the phenomenon of illness from the patient’s perspective. Written after “a slight attack of influenza,”^[1] On Being Ill renders a comprehensive narrative of exquisite philosophic insight. In her essay, Woolf approaches the medical inactivity of the patient in a positive light, arguing that the forced posture of supine idleness allows her to notice the external world and to attend to details otherwise overlooked. Subsequently, I argue that by perceiving the lived world more closely, the ill person assumes a position to realize her malady, not as an inconvenience to be overcome, but a small privilege to be embraced; a metaphoric seeing of the marginal details of creation may birth introspection and sympathy as the direction of our gaze impacts our engagement with creation.

In the suffering and strictures of sickness, Woolf illuminates a new kind of seeing, one mystical and filled with surprise. In bed, one “look[s]…at the sky” and is incomprehensibly overcome by the grandeur of that vast nameless blue:

Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold, and, filling in branches, complete the pathos of disheveled autumnal plan trees in London squares. Now, become as the leaf or daisy, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!^[2]

What happens “ordinarily” is not the numinous seeing of the sky that illness illuminates, but a reductive and enframed^[3] seeing—if it is seen at all. To behold nature, Woolf notes, one must begin “lying recumbent” like the “leaf or daisy” (note the medical tone of “recumbent” juxtaposed with nature’s flora), and thus positioned she realizes the import of her illness. In illness the patient reposes, “staring straight up,” in a new kind of seeing: extraordinary and “a little shocking.” This new kind of seeing, though positively painted, is what I would call a negative liberty: the seer is suddenly free from her ordinary constraints, suddenly free from her necessarily vertical posture and forward gaze of daily life.

Forcibly freed, the sight of the sick engenders a novel knowledge: “it is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will conquer; the heat will leave the world…ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.”^[4] Although Woolf initially paints it as such, this is not a depressed eschatological knowing, but a hopeful one, for ultimately “the recumbent spring up at the mere imagination of frost about the toes and stretch out to avail themselves of the universal hope—Heaven, Immortality.”^[5] Reflective and introspective, the knowledge of the “recumbent” becomes a kind of paradoxical privilege: certainly the position of the seer is physically disabling, but in her bodily incapacitation, the mind—and the eyes—of the patient are liberated.

Seeing as privilege is more metaphoric than Woolf frames it. Yes, she explicitly references the way in which her eyes recognize the sky, but more than just receiving shaped light, the gaze of the ill is a rooted perception of creation from creation. Suffering gives us a vision of the world and Virginia Woolf is not the first persuasive writer to see this vision through her illness; Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously blesses his burned foot in This Lime-tree Bower my Prison because it allows him to, “on the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem / Less gross than bodily.”^[6] A physical indisposition, for both, allows them to behold, not just with their “bodily” eyes, but with their whole being as the objects of their usual sight—those of the natural world—take on new significance and new beauty.

An appreciation of the beauty of creation is clearly not limited to the ill, but in this inescapable beholding of the created world unique to the invalid, an internal seeing emerges. Introspection, as a sort of interior sight, is not incompatible with a seeing of the marginal details of the world. Rather, if suffering attunes us to the minute outside ourselves, then next we may turn inwards and engage within. Consequently, a daughter of attention and introspection is sympathy. Though Woolf does not address the sympathy of the sick seer, she notes the lack thereof in the daily, well life of a person. Ordinarily, “sympathy we cannot have… there is always some little distraction… to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering, and the vast effort of sympathy… is uneasily shuffled off for another time.”^[7] But, “looking down at something very small and close and familiar, we shall find sympathy. Let us examine the rose. We have seen it so often…that we have forgotten how it stands, still and steady, through an entire afternoon in the earth. It preserves a demeanor of perfect dignity and self-possession.”^[8] In illness, we are forced to redirect our gaze, and through this novel attention and introspection we shall find sympathy. In the little flowers of creation, in the otherwise unattended, a mirror materializes; we begin to see ourselves and others in the margins. Through her anthropomorphism of the rose, Woolf identifies a key quality of the sympathetic seer: in the “perfect dignity and self-possession” of this flower, she sees humans and their indefatigable virtues.

How then might a new sight become the moral end of medicine? How ought a patient, confined to rest and recumbence see—not just the world, but herself and others? Most of the time, the human is upright, forward-facing, with a forward-facing sight; but in illness, the patient lies supine, gazing upward. The patient’s gaze, as Woolf so aptly captures, is no longer horizontal. But beyond its deviation in direction, the supine gaze becomes heavenward in signification too, as we look to the sky with a new, necessary, and immediate sight. For a patient approaching death, or one with a mere bout of influenza, the occasion bestowed by bedrest invites contemplative and fruitful engagement with the world. Rather than a disconnected dissatisfaction or distraction, the sufferer may sublimate her discomfort into a perception of the external, a turn to the internal, and a sympathy with the natural world—and consequently, with the human. While On Being Ill offers a hopeful approach to the plight of the patient, I believe that the sight it supposes is something more; in engaging with creation through a redirection of our whole being upward—rather than forward, downward, or even inward—we may mindfully re-engage with the world around us. Therefore, it seems to me that if Woolf’s essay were a greeting card, it would read not “get well soon,” but rather “be sick well” because in this time of recumbence lies paradisal possibility: to behold our interconnectedness in a finite world and to gaze upon the infinite.