On Blushing

23/12/2025

Back in England. I start this waiting in a West Country pharmacy to pick up a prescription of anti-depressants, which I take more out of habit than need these days. 1/7 people in England are on them. In Georgia you can get them over the counter. The pharmacy is very busy, everyone wanting a good stock of their statins etc before the opening hours get weird over the end of the year. What faces… We are not a beautiful country, to be sure. However we know how to queue, unlike the Georgians. This sighing queue, it is so neat, it needs almost no internal policing. An old mush white-knuckling a plastic shopping bag wobbles to the front and requests eye drops for Mrs. Johnson. It’s very romantic to pick up a prescription on behalf of. Co-codamol for a paint-stained man with a pretzled back, who cannot sit down to wait. A fat woman in a striped beanie sits down immediately with her oxygen tank and lets her husband queue. The old, the old, wobbling grim-faced in and out, casting plaintive myopic glances over the shelves of things too high or low to reach; the patient ministerings of a camp young pharmacist and his harassed manager; Alberto Balsalm Raspberry Shampoo and Conditioner, Ricola throat drops, plasters and Nicorette patches and Sudocrem and orthopaedic toe dividers…

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death -

But Oof! I still feel that between my shoulder blades!

Arriving bookless to my parents’ house, I picked from a shelf and began Christopher Rick’s Keats and Embarrassment. I was taught Keats at school by a Canadian hippie called Melissa, who was really the teacher of my life: she held reading groups on the floor of her flat and used to jump up and down on the spot when she got going on King Lear and would humiliate us into producing good and timely work with words like ‘derivative,’ ‘pedestrian,’ and ‘pathetic’.

Melissa, astutely, leant into the The Darkness & The Ecstasy & The Sex of Keats. She read the room, which was full of teenagers in the normal torment. Keats and Embarrassment is revealing a new Keats to me. Ricks uses his poetry and letters to present us with the Blushing Keats, the unhappily 5ft 1 Keats [‘I heard that Mr L said a thing I am not at all contented with - says he ‘O, he is quite the little poet’ now this is abominable], the Keats of proudly adolescent sensibility, who writhed in shame when borrowing money or describing his ‘Gordian complication of feelings’ towards women, but could then so beautifully cop to, make a subject of, and in so doing mitigate for himself and for others, his shame. For Ricks it’s part of Keats’s supreme empathetic powers.

Ricks describes Keats at the poet of embarrassment, and the 19th century was really the century of embarrassment in England; it was the obsession of poets, writers, painters, sociologists, ethnologists, physicians and moralists, it was a whole furore that produced books with wonderful titles like: ‘The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing; With a General View of the Sympathies, and the Organic Relations of those Structures with which they Seem to be Connected’. Propriety was paramount. Drawing rooms of blushing people. Even tuberculosis, the disease that killed Keats at 25, was embarrassing: ‘tied with weakness, repressed sexual passion or masturbation. Keats “refuses to give it a name” in his letters.’

I’m really blush-prone, though it’s eased off a bit with age. I blush when flustered, when lying, when caught unawares, when drinking wine, when self-aggrandising… I guess it keeps me in check. There’s a whole prickly catalogue in my head that I flip through from time to time when sleepless, blushing in the dark. It’s a balm to narrate your personal humiliations but I’ll restrain myself. They grow more charming to me with time anyway.

And it’s humbling and weirdly gratifying, to go transparent, be inconsistent, in front of people you don’t know very well. Ricks quotes Erving Goffman: ‘By showing embarrassment when he can be neither of two people, the individual leaves open the possibility that in the future he may effectively be either. His role in the current interaction may be sacrificed, and even the encounter itself, but he demonstrates that, while he cannot present a sustainable and coherent self on this occasion, he is at least disturbed by the fact and may prove worthy another time.’

There are ways in which you can like absorb the embarrassment, synthesise it, which is what Keats did so well. Anyway the more unembarrassable you try to be the more embarrassing it is when you are embarrassed.

And in front of people you do know, blushing can be lovely, exhilarating. My ex boyfriend could look at me in such a way as to make me blush, even once we were absolutely comfortable with one another he could still elicit a blush; we both liked that he could disturb something in me like that, physiologically. The Romantics were into blushing in part because it means the triumph of feeling over the will: ‘…the extent to which the deepest feelings are somehow involuntary and yet are our responsibility; some of the essential paradoxes about spontaneity, will, and freedom could come together in the blush.’

There’s so much to be said. I’m gonna read about blushing in Japanese culture. The English pharmacy is, surprisingly, a pretty shame-free place. We all have our revolting ailments and afflictions, I guess shame is left at the door. It’s cosy to be back in the Land of bad teeth and Embarrassment.