Patient 37

Patient presented with chronic abdominal pain and intermittent pleural effusion. Violent eruptions of black bile coming from both lungs.

I knew immediately I had to take the case. The other doctors wouldn’t understand. They are close-minded, unwilling to see the zebra standing in front of them until they’ve shot down a thousand horses beforehand.

I’ve seen weirder than zebras.

I slammed the file down on my desk and called for an O.R. – STAT.

There was doctoring to do!

“Hello Brian.” I smile broadly as he is wheeled into the theatre.

“Nice to meet you doc,” he croaks. Brian is a well-built man with a dark brow and searching eyes. I know instantly that he’s going to be one of those special patients, who will change as much in me with his words as I will in him with my surgical implements. I think he senses it too. “I’ve been hearing all about you,” he continues, “the maverick surgeon who can fix my mysterious illness.”

“That’s me.” It’s all about making him feel comfortable. Calm.

“Your card made me laugh.”

“My card?”

“Yeah, you know, like your business card card. What was it…” he spits up a wad of black bile, and then frames the words in the air shakily with his hands as he recites them. “’Dr. Lawrence Wimbledon – Unicorn Surgeon.’ Cracked me right up. I’m guessing you work with kids a lot?”

It took me a second to understand what he was implying. I feel a sudden flush of embarrassment.

“I see where you could have gotten mixed up there.” Don’t make a big thing of it. Don’t make him feel bad. Comfortable. Calm. “You see Brian, I put that on my card because I’m a unicorn.”

Silence.

“Doctor,” murmurs a nurse, “are we ready to begin?”

“Yes. Scalpel please.”

“Wait… Wait…” Brian’s no doubt trivial complaint is drowned out by another wave of vomiting.

“Making the first incision into the abdominal cavity…”

“Hey! HEY! Aren’t you going to anaesthetize me first?”

“Don’t worry Brian. I’ll just prod you with my magic horn and you won’t be able to feel a thing.”

“That’s… That’s clearly a syringe, WHAT ARE YOU PUTTING IN ME?!??”

The nurse looks concerned.

“Never mind him, Betty. The famed Arab psychologist Ishaq ibn Imran wrote that delusional fears and hallucinations were common symptoms of cerebral melancholia. Settle down Brian. This won’t hurt a bit.” The nurse whispers into my ear as I strap down the leather belts on Brian’s arms.

“But Doctor. Melancholia’s a made-up illness. Some old fairy tale from the Middle Ages. It’s not real.”

My equine nostrils flare as I contain my indignation. Keep it professional. Calm.

“You know, fairy tales can have feelings too…” I whisper.

“What?”

“I need you to believe in me, Betty. Can you do that? Do it for Brian here. Believe.”

All people ever need to do is believe. So few of them do.

“Making first incision -

“YOU ARE NOT A UNICORN!!!”

“You see this Brian? This is your kidney.” I waggle it up and down encouragingly. It flops back and forth, all shiny and slick. “Do you know how I know it’s your kidney? Because I’m a medically trained professional. Now can we please try to look past my race so we can find out what’s wrong with you?”

“I can see my intestines…” Brian proceeds to vomit on his intestines. I wipe the worst of it away with the kidney before plopping it back inside him. Brian has slippery organs. It’s times like this I wish I had hands!

“Aha! Got it!”

“You…” he vomits, but only mildly, “You found what’s wrong with me?”

“No. I removed your gall bladder.”

“Why?”

“You really don’t need it. It’s just clogging up valuable space you could be filling with happiness. Or rainbows. I think you’re going to find a lot more rainbows in your life after today Brian.”

“I thought… it was the appendix… you didn’t need.”

I lean in close now. This is important.

“So you accept that there are organs within the body that you don’t need?”

“I… I guess?”

“So if a doctor with 8 years medical training were to tell you that you didn’t actually need your gall bladder, you’d believe him, right?”

“Can I get a second opinion?”

“That’s not the point, Brian. You need to believe! That’s why this surgery isn’t working! You don’t want to be cured!”

“I do want to. You’re just crazy!”

“You’ve closed your mind, Brian. Look at yourself. Spending all this time ranting about how I’m not a unicorn –

“You are NOT a unicorn! I can see you! You have a nose and a beard and glasses for crying out loud!”

There’s a pause.

“Is it the magic thing? Is that it? You don’t think a mythical creature can thrive in a scientific field?”

“That… That wasn’t my point at all.”

“I know how penicillin works Brian. I know about chemical reactions and macro-biotics. And I know more about all of those things than anyone because I know they’re all powered by magic!”
Brian’s heart rate is skyrocketing. Thank god. It can only mean his iron-cast prejudices are being torn down, and this frightens him. But it’s okay.

Just make him comfortable. Calm.

“You’re nuts. This whole thing is nuts. I don’t even know what you’re doing anymore. You cut me open and… and…” His eyes rolling right to left and back, back into the skull. Teeth chattering. Body convulsing. He’s going into shock… or a seizure… or something. No time for all this medical mumbo jumbo. This is a time for action!

Time to believe.

“Brian,” I clasp his hand between my fore hoofs. “Brian I know what’s wrong with you, and I know how to fix it. But you have to trust me.” His flailing eyes flicker past mine for a moment. He’s listening. “Your lungs are slowly filling with black bile. This is obviously the work of an evil pixie – No, don’t splutter like that Brian. Okay? We don’t have time for your scepticism.” I hold his head in my hands. Heart rate climbing. He looks at me again, and holds my gaze. For a moment, everyone stops breathing. “I need you to believe. Just believe. In all of it. Pixies. Magic. Unicorns. Believe in me, Brian, and I promise you, you will survive this. Okay?”

He just nods.

“Nurse!” I roar. “Get me two milligrams of nebulized saline, stat!”

“Like I was saying, Brian,” I whisper to him as the nurse fetches the equipment. “A pixie is filling your lungs with goo. However, I happen to know he can only do this from within your lungs. Specifically, from a spot at the base of your trachea. So now we know where he is. And that means all I have to do is make a small incision to gain access to the area, shrink myself down to microscopic size, and then engage him in a magical duel…”

He just vomits.

“No, don’t worry Brian, it’s easy. Unicorns are excellent jumpers. You’ve seen horses going over fences? Well, I’ll be using more of a diving motion…”

Vomit and vomit and vomit. So much bile, just pouring out of him. For a moment, it stops coming. He looks up at me, gasping for breath.

“I believe you Doc. Do whatever you need to.”

“Fantastic. Great job, Brian. Okay. Ready nurse?”

She nods.

“Ready Brian?”

Vomit.

“Ready, Kidney-Puppet?”

“Yippeeeee!” he squeaks.

“Ha ha ha. I’m just fucking with you Brian.” Kidney-Puppet slops down onto a tray or something. “Seriously though, time for the hard work. Remember, just wish with your heart to be healthy, and you will be. I’ll see you when you wake up.”

He nods.

“Stand back, Betty. This is going to be messy.”

The nurse is staring at me. All I can feel is her eyes on the back of my head. All I can hear is the heart-rate monitor.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

He just… didn’t… believe… hard enough!

Why? Why can’t any of these stupid apes just believe? This destruction of the soul, this death of childish innocence. It’s the greatest sorrow that can befall a unicorn surgeon in these modern times.

I brush the worst of the gore off my scrubs, and look over at the nurse.

Her nametag says Emily.

“Nurse?”

“Yes Doctor?”

“Send in the next one.”

Week 14 – An Informed Rant

I’m not sure how closely I’m supposed to adhere to these dot point questions. I am liking my current method of ‘rant and pray.’ Hope you’re not expecting any variety in form – I’m pretty much just gonna go with what works.

Right. Lena. The identity thereof.
Lena sees the aboriginal half of her heritage as the one she was brought up in. She lives in Australia with her aboriginal mother. Her world is based on her mother’s side. And she hates her world. So she hates her mother. She rejects this side of herself because in her mind it is linked to her rural wasteland home and her rural pre-written life. So she hits the road looking for her father, who has become in his absence a symbol of escape, freedom. A better life. Sen comments on the disadvantage in quality of life experienced by many Aborigines in Australia today. Lena’s depressed view of her life as an Aborigine depicts this commentary. She sees this life as inherently worse than the one she could have as an Irish girl – a direct allegory of the issues Sen is trying to discuss. She even abandons her indigenous roots – (Having been brought up by her Aboriginal mother in Australia and with Aboriginal blood, Lena qualifies pretty damn well as Aboriginal, despite her light skin.) – and claims she’s Irish. Just to hammer home her rejection of said Aboriginal ancestry and embracing of her Irish one. Ireland is her other option. Australia hasn’t worked out so good. But she’s still got a bit of Irish in her! Maybe things will be better there. I guess from her perspective, it can’t be much worse.
Vaughn struck me at first as an angry jerk. He’s supposed to. He pulled that off pretty well. His yelling was convincingly aggressive, and his facial expression maintained a seemingly constant hatred of everything throughout the opening. Vaughn is clearly a troubled kid. Damian Pitt did some damn good work for a first-time actor pulled off the streets. From the sounds of it Sen made his selection based more on looks than acting prowess, but I guess he got lucky. Pitt portrays the character convincingly, and as the film progresses we begin to see the source of Vaughn’s anger – making his character more sympathetic.

Setting-wise… There were a lot of roads. The roads went through sunflower fields for comparatively light-hearted scenes. Storm-clouds appeared for the moodier stuff. The scenes in the church were used to allow the characters to discuss their beliefs. There was a small rural town used to introduce Lena and her life – a minimum security prison did likewise for Vaughn. Lena goes into a grungy diner and ends up vomiting the diseased food she bought there. There’s a pub at one point. And Vaughn’s home. But these are all plot devices. It’s the trip that is the focus of the piece. And the trip goes through cotton fields, sunflower fields, corn fields and grass fields. There’s a big field vibe going down over here. But yes. Sunny days and happy memories. Storm clouds and sheltering in burnt out churches wondering why our fathers abandoned us. The film seems to be intrinsically linked to the weather. Even the title. Still not sure what that’s supposed to mean. Cloudy scenes tend to be sad scenes in this film. When Lena’s brother gets taken away by the police, it’s raining. Thunder clouds are rumbling through the heavier dialogue that takes place throughout the trip. When the sun is shining, everything is fine. ‘Beneath Clouds’ could just refer to the protagonists’ depressing backgrounds, living beneath the clouds of depression? I wouldn’t put it past this guy. It could also just be a name that he thought sounded cool.
Incidentally, those cloud shots at the start. Specifically, the fish-eye red-tinged ones. Ewww. Just ewww. Those plus the ‘out there’ font made me feel like I was watching a bad 90′s childrens’ educational program. Distracting and ugly.

But on a positive note, those dead animals were rad. Something about the sense of macabre imagery, the messages of mortality and escape. This is a dead place. Lena certainly has strong views that the place is a ‘shithole,’ and wants to escape it. Otherwise it’ll be a life of minimum wage and teen pregnancy and curling up inside a bottle to wonder where her life went. Either she gets out of this place, or she’s already dead. This is a dead place. These animals – moth, bird, fox. Two of them could fly, and the other was capable of traveling long distances. They all could have left. But they didn’t, and now they’re dead. The corpses are a warning to Lena, and a symbol of the home she runs from.
Of course, cordoning the symbolism off to just Lena is wrong. I haven’t even mentioned the horses. I felt this example was especially Vaughn’s moment, as he was the only one present and it acted as so clear a metaphor for his own life. These strong, wild creatures – living in a cage, waiting to die. It’s an ominous reminder of the future that awaits Vaughn if he is caught. But the horse cage is not a representation of his prison sentence. There’s a bigger cage, outside of the first one. The same one Lena’s running from… Hwoah.
Interconnection.
Interconnection through use of animal corpses.
 Yeah I just thought that was a highlight.

Week 13 – Beneath Clouds

1. My initial reaction to the film was a mildly negative one.  Mixed feelings, in a way. I had made a journey from hating everything about it from the start to feeling more neutral-ish by the end.

My dislike at the time stemmed from the fact that it seemed like I was watching two stony-faced teens talk about how crap their lives were for an hour and a half. Dialogue like ‘So what’s your story?’ made me cringe in its clumsy set-up for exposition – and generally seeing the machinations behind the story just gives off an air of the unprofessional. And try as I might to get immersed in the story, I didn’ t empathize with these characters at all. They were a bunch of racist country teens who hated their families and I just wanted to go away and watch something that didn’t have all these Australian accents. Also – intense naturalism. I’m not a fan. We’re in Australia. I get that. Doesn’t mean it’s interesting. I am tired of sunflowers and lonely desert roads.

I found some of the points brought up by the characters interesting. My sadness at the revelation about Vaughn’s mother was ruined by my own stupidity. I got caught up on the oxygen tank or whatever was lying on her bed. I thought maybe the ambulance had been here. Maybe she was okay… I almost knew she was dead. But I wasn’t sure. So I sorta ruined whatever effect that could have had on me right there.

I think what saved my first viewing was the ending. The ending felt good. It was well done. There was atmosphere. Dramatic tension. An ambiguous conclusion for Lena, a traumatic one for Vaughn. It ended on a good note. Yet, I still came out of there feeling mediocre at best. I think the second time around was better. I was more prepared for the style of the thing.

In retrospect. I don’t know. The dialogue wasn’t that bad. Just a few key points that made me unnecessarily hate-tastic. (The first police scene involves the driver looking back, seeing the cop car and saying ‘Fuck!’ We watch the cop car for minute. ‘Shit!’ Great furthering of the plot there.)

Every time I watch this film I feel less judgmental. I am learning to accept.

2.

a) The film was very realistic. I’m pretty sure it’s based on the directors’ real-life account of his childhood, and it was made with a very clear natural edge. Sparing music, mostly diagetic sound. The pace of the action was set with a lot of pauses and spaces – no Hollywood quick-cutting action guff. Everything was realistic, intended to be immersive. I think I got that effect eventually.

b) The start of the film just makes me feel depressed. The day-to-day lives of Lena and Vaughn are not particularly enviable ones. It’s an unpleasant experience to watch these events – to live this. We don’t want to be here. Narrative-structure-wise, Beneath Clouds places the ‘problem’ all throughout the film; but we are treated to a true sense of dystopia in the introduction scenes. The road-trip itself provides a generally tranquil atmosphere. We sit back and listen to these two talk about their philosophies. Leading us to -

c) The film talks a lot about heritage. Ideals passed on through bloodlines. This connects with Vaughn’s resentment of white people, Lena’s belief that she ‘belongs’ in Ireland, and the fact that ultimately, these characters are the way they are because of how they were brought up. Where they were born. How much their parents were around.

Sen lists his two core themes as ‘purpose and identity.’ I can see that. Everything seems to come back to ‘culture’ with this guy. It explores identity through your ‘cultural background’ and purpose through ‘that one scene in the church.’ That was probably another reason I didn’t like this movie on the first run through. Lena’s idea of magically ‘belonging’ in Ireland because her dad comes from there really rubs up my pretentious existentialist views in all the wrong ways. “NOOOO! YOU’RE WRONG! You’re wrong you’re wrong you’re wrong. Stop talking. You’re wrong.”

And yeah. I could be open-minded to her point of view. But this way’s way funner.

Week 12 – Stock Footage

Time to roll out the clichés. Let’s talk about 1984.

I’m not sure there’s anything new to be said on this book. We’ve all been down this road. I justify talking about it with the arguments that a) nothing all that new can be said about any book and b) some people still manage to hate this one.

This is sacrilege and I will not stand for it. Let’s rant.

Okay. 1984. A story set in a totalitarian dystopia that challenges everything you thought you knew about reality, morality, society, and pretty much any subject ending in -y. That’s a terrible summary. All summaries of this book are. There’s too much stuff in it. Orwell himself couldn’t fit everything he wanted to say into his narrative – so he threw in one of his patented essay-splosions and dubbed it ‘The Book.’ Everyone always hates this bit. It was one of the best parts.

Orwell is an essayist. He is good at what he does. 1984 is incredibly well written in its story – but when The Book comes in, Orwell allowed himself to stop hiding all his points in Winston’s musings, and just get down to business. The man made points. He had rules about what made good writing and he stuck to them. Don’t waffle on. Make your point concise and understandable. The Book is so amazingly coherent a piece of writing about so complicated a topic that it staggers the mind. Orwell sat down and wrote out a piece of text that made War into Peace.

That was always my favourite of the Party’s points. ‘War is Peace.’ It ended up working so perfectly. The eternal arms-race between the three nations operating to create in constant changing warfare – peace. This is art. ‘Freedom is Slavery’ was also brilliant. ‘Ignorance is Strength’ I think I just think less of because it sounded the most obvious in my head when I read it. There’s nothing wrong with that. When you think about it it’s just as brilliant a satirical statement about society as any of the others. Orwell’s a genius essay-writing savant and I hate him for being so damn intimidatingly talented. Grrr.

There’s always all the speculation about how 1984 is so close to reality. And I can appreciate that. I also figure that – if 1984 ever really did come true – we’d all already be too brainwashed to care. Oceania is a happy place. Winston is a madman. This is what I think when people tell me the book was depressing. I feel like they’re missing out on the best part of the story. The Party had their contradictions written on the walls of the Ministry of Truth. But they were always missing the biggest one. ‘Oceania is Utopia.’ Forgive me my failure at slogan-writing. The point is – yes, it could be depressing. If you have faith in humanity or God or your government or pretty much anything else, this book’s just going to undermine your beliefs and you’ll feel all unstable. But Winston’s view of Airstrip One is only told to us because he’s the one person in this society we can relate to. He would fit in in our current world. He would be sane.

But in the context of the world within the book, we are reading the accounts of a madman. A psychopath hellbent on destroying the perfect society. We look at The Party and we condemn them for watching everyone and editing history and all that. We hate them for essentially being Stalinist Russia. Which is fine. From our perspective. If you look at the society within 1984 as a whole, most people are happy. The proles don’t care, the Inner Party are living it up, the Outer Party get by. They’re all fueled by their love of Big Brother. And yes, it’s based around killing people for questioning the government. You might ask ‘Utopia, at what cost?’ But look at us. Australia went and helped America shoot people in Iraq because of imaginary nuclear bombs. We’ve tried to build our own communist utopias, and they haven’t worked. The society’s we live in today kill people all the time. At least the Party does it with the vast majority of the world living happily.

The reason we hate Stalin is because he couldn’t brainwash people. He didn’t have duckspeak. So we question him and so we hate what he did. And that’s cool. I’m not saying I want 1984 to happen. I think the fact that everyone is happy in Airstrip One would be appalling if it actually happened. Orwell was mocking us. Showing us we’re only a couple of steps away from total hive-mind oblivion. It’s a satire of contemporary society and Stalin’s government – not necessarily a warning. In order for the world he describes to become a reality, the majority of us must by definition be happy about it.

And that’s my rant. Did I say anything new? I listed the Party’s contradictions in order of preference, so I guess ‘Shallowest evaluation of the text’ could go to me. ‘Does this political satire make my butt look big?’ Anyway. Hope it was a fun ride.

Week 11 – Cinnamon and the Cat

Simenon. Seriously. It’s all I can think when I read that name. Does anyone else have this problem?

Seriously though. I haven’t read any of his detective books. I remember something about a horse… Maybe… Then I gave up. This guy wrote a ton of books. It’s horrifying. I’m reasonably sure the time spent typing these things up collectively surpasses the total lifespan of Simenon himself. My theory is he wrote them with the help of magic ghosts.

So we come to The Cat, a story about a husband and wife who hate each other to the point of never speaking to each other, communicating purely in notes centred on blaming one another and casual death threats. Their most common communiqués are simple. ‘The cat’ from the husband, and ‘the parrot’ from his wife. These are references to each others’ beloved pets – the cat murdered by the wife and in consequence the parrot murdered by the husband. They live quietly, having conservations in their heads in which they viciously insult one another, ruminating on everything from who is the weakest to who will die first.

Simenon lived by the principle of ‘If you can cut out a word, do so.’ There is absolutely no waffling in this book. It is succinct. And the language doesn’t become robotic because Simenon values the creation of atmosphere. And what an atmosphere. The entire book is filled with fog. It’s a cold French street, a cold French house, and it’s always winter. I remember about one sunny scene. It was a flashback. Apart from that, I’m not sure if it’s every actually stated to be cold or foggy. But it’s always winter in my mind. Maybe I’m giving Simenon too much credit for my perceptual weather-prejudice? Or should I be giving him more credit for so effectively manipulating me towards this said assumption?

This is just the kind of pointless-crap-trap that’s constantly waiting to devour anyone studying a subject like literature. Let’s get out of here before someone gets hurt.

But I maintain it’s a cold-feeling story. It’s told through the eyes of an elderly couple. You feel old. It’s not pleasant. There’s none of that clear, endorphin-flowing happiness that we’re used to. The husband realises he needs his wife – but the motivation is mostly that he needs that psychological warring they’ve had all these years. And then she dies. This is the ‘happy ending’. And it’s not depressing… as such. You end up sitting there thinking ‘Am I happy? Am I sad? I’m not sure…’ In the end I think it’s a complicated mixture of both, and I think it’s cool that the book managed to leave you with this sense of confused zen happy-sadness. Confusion’s fun.

The Cat is a psychological novel with original characters – to say the least. Simenon tells the story of two people going through their twilight years with hate-fuelled abandon. It challenges a few of our definitions about marriage and love, and it’s always good to challenge things. It’s depressing at times, but simultaneously addictive and morbidly fascinating. And French. Now you’ve gotta read it.

Week Etc. – MACBETH!!!

Missed a few weeks. Sorry ’bout that. I had an assessment. Thought I ought to pay attention. Anyway -

DUCK, HERE COMES SHAKESPEARE!

Alright. Gotta have some thoughts. Think I’m going to go for yet another amorphous blob, take all this Macbeth out in one go. A lot of these ‘questions’ from the course assume I haven’t already finished the play. I assumed we had to finish it before we started studying it and now I’ve read the whole thing. I’m a little brown-noser like that. So since I’m viewing the text less linearly than the course would have me, I’m just going to go with my usual formula of free-wheeling but fun rants. We’ll try to make some meaning out of it. It’ll be an adventure.

I think what I’ll have to accept when studying something like Macbeth is that I’m probably never going to understand it in full without becoming some crazed Victorian madman, loping down Swanson street, chainsaw in hand, screaming “I HAVE A DEGREE IN SHAAAAAAKESPEARE!!!” (Apologies to anyone who has a degree in Shakespeare. He seems to have been a crafty character. But do you ever feel sad that your job is talking about his job to other people who have that job?)

I think Macbeth stands out in its portrayal of power as not worth the hassle. It’s the dawn of last millenium – you most likely live on, in and are nourished purely by mud. You can want money, I can understand that. ‘Power’ I guess is an okay motive, but only because we’ve still got the Feudal system and if you’re not already a bishop or slaying some dragons you’re not really allowed to be happy. So yeah, be a social climber or start a revolution I guess. But this is all from a working class perspective. Macbeth has his own castle. He just got a big promotion. Why should he kill the king?

I wonder about to what degree Macbeth is a character driven by power anyway. Maybe not at all. At first, he’s just doing what some witches and his wife tell him to. His choice was to chicken out and not commit any homicides that night. After that, it seems like it was more about clinging to this royalty he’d won for himself, even though it doesn’t seem to give him any real happiness. Power for the sake of power. He worked hard getting this. Went through some bad times psychologically. He’ll be damned if he’s going to let that snotty punk Fleance get all the glory. Let’s kill everybody!

Macbeth seems like a character running on self destruct. He doesn’t want this. There’s just no going back. He knows he has it coming. At the end of the play he finds out that Macduff has the power to kill him. He accepts this, and decides to go out guns blazing. I’d almost sympathise with the guy if it weren’t for the ‘burning down Macbuff’s village’ deal. And the attempted child murder. That was kind of harsh.

Week 7 – The Skyscraper of War, Part 2

Welcome to the second half of our World War 1 Poetry Happy Hour – This second half has more variety.

I kinda like that.

————————————————————————————————————————

First up, ‘In Flanders Field’.

I think this poem creates a certain image. Something about that big green field with the waves of crosses. There’s always a light breeze making the poppies flap around just so. You can hear the breeze. The sea’s not all that far away. The sky is blue.

I’ve never even been to a memorial.

This poem is innovative in its delivery. It plays with time. From the beginning of the poem we are both after the war, with the soldiers buried here – “between the crosses…” and within a few lines also standing in the centre of the very battle the buried soldiers died in – “scarce heard amid the guns below.” It also breaks convention in its narration. The narrator is speaking as a collective, an unnamed soldier as part of his army, he is an ‘us’, a ‘we.’ Likewise, he speaks not to the reader, but to the reader’s generation. Those still living. Those who live their happy lives doing DECV Literature in the country we died here to save.

It’s very different from… pretty much every other war poem in this course in that it… does not… hate on war… so much. It commemorates. It’s really popular at Remembrance Day ceremonies because it doesn’t make us hate war. It makes us feel some sort of responsibility, some over-arcing legacy. “To you from failing hands we throw / The torch; be yours to hold it high.” It’s less visceral than the other works. It’s euphemistic. No one’s wading through the corpses of the fallen. It’s just “…and now we lie.” Comparatively it’s a lullaby. Lullabalistic? It may be 4am and I may be in the throes of coffee-madness-fever, but I like that word.

Just seems good, ya know?

It rhymes, but it’s not a song. It’s got its own solemn, walking pace rhythm. It is a Remembrance Day poem. It’s for us all to sit back in our one minute of silence and give these people who died a pedestal of glory in our minds. We feel the sadness and solemnity. We feel responsibility for our ‘nation.’ How about that. Universal national pride – flash-frozen from Canada and shipped out to the world.

It’s psychological. It’s not for a realistic depiction of the war. It’s not about the grit or the horror. It’s the aftermath. It’s what we all have to live with. It’s what we have to remember. Or what we like to remember to remember.

It brings dignity to a hideous process, and for that it should be applauded.

————————————————————————————————————————

Now we cast our eyes to the whimsical works of Wilfred Owen. And I mean works, there’s two of them. To start, ‘Mental Cases’.

————————————————————————————————————————

Well, you know. The course sort of sums it up. The first stanza asks who these mental cases are, described here in a state of disarray and living nightmare. The second stanza answers – they are the soldiers. They live with their memories of the horrors of war and are damaged. The third stanza elaborates on this and in the last two lines condemns anyone who stood and cheered their departure to the war zone, anyone who didn’t seek to stop the madness.

It’s pretty much a page of very nicely done emotive language. The whole thing’s visceral – the poetic version of shoving a McDonalds lover head-first into a slaughterhouse and locking the door for the night. The line ‘Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,” really gets me. You don’t get enough flying muscle lines in poetry these days. You can almost hear it.

It also rhymes. Some kind of cruel wordplay going on here Wilfred?

But yeah. “Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter,” is less gory, but more poignant. The man knows how to write an unpleasant scenes – he knows how to sew disgust. Each word is chosen precisely, and the whole thing has such a variety in its wording that you’re attacked from every side by the twin forces of vocabulary and the disturbed. And you get to the last line and it’s just “Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.” Saves the simplest, obvious-est words for last. Hits home with a flourish.

Yeah. Simple message, but you just have to admire the artistry on this one. Pretty intense.

Second poem by Wilfred here, Strange Meeting. The course asks what I think it’s going to be about, and I haven’t actually read it yet so let’s take a moment to speculate in all the wrong directions -  You probably read it when you clicked the link, or you already know what happens in any case. So this next bit’s just going to be pointless guess-work. But whatever. Indulge my ignorance. Let’s go on a journey.

See that tangent there? You have no idea how old I feel. Moving along, I feel like the ‘meeting’ mentioned in the title is going to be with an enemy soldier. I’ve created a situation in my head based around this title, so yes it’s a situation of prejudice. The poem is narrated by a soldier who meets an enemy on the battlefield. For some reason he doesn’t kill him. Or maybe he does and it just takes a considerably long wall of poetry to describe. Maybe they just exchange some glance of understanding, that they’re not really enemies here, before eventually gunning each other down.

I’m feeling some kind of epic neo-absurdist work here. Some awkward epiphany punctuated with a gunshot to the head. So go ahead Wilfred old pal. Confound me.

I shouldn’t have said confound. Little bugger’s gone and taken me at my word. Hang on, I’m gonna go read it again.

Ah okay. So the narrator has wandered down this tunnel – probably some fox-hole or emergency tunnel – filled with prone bodies. He can’t tell if they’re sleeping or dead. Probably a mix of both. One of them, when he prods it, wakes up – and by the man’s smile he seems to believe that he has wandered into Hell. ‘Tunnels are hell’. The Rear-Guard is coming back to haunt me.

The rest of the poem is this man with his dead-smile telling the narrator what there is to lament about their circumstance. The waste of life, the death of their hopes and dreams. All they could have accomplished had there been no one to kill or to kill them. He talks about how it’s sad that the truth of war’s hideous nature will die with them, and people who did not fight will go on thinking it is glorious. This seems an odd point – I’ve spent the past few hours reading all about how horrible war is. Including this poem that talks about how no one will hear about it. Maybe some sort of irony intended here? I don’t even know. In the end I think he talks about how without the truth of war, there would be more wars – “Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.” The world will fight and society will regress as it devours itself – “though nations trek from progress… this retreating world…”

And, when the wars have gone on so long that blood clogs the wheels of their ‘chariots,’ the dead man will go and clean them with… quite possibly ‘truth.’ Or possibly his soul. Whatever it is, it wouldn’t come from his wounds. ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were,’ seems to me to suggest the truth option. The wisdom pours out of his head without having been cut.

It’s all very confusing until the end. ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.’ Why is it that the plot-twist is the most easily understood part of the whole poem? Some very nice imagery here. The dead  man recognized his killer because of the way he frowned ‘through‘ him as he ‘jabbed and killed.’ The dead man describes this as an act of savagery, and yet we do not get any sense of real anger or bitterness. Just, ‘let us sleep now.’

The last line suggests to me that our protagonist soldier is in fact dead, and has come to Hell. The tunnel he entered may be ‘the tunnel’ – with the light at the end and God beckoning and all that. In Hell he meets his enemy who laments all the losses of war, corporeal and theoretical. Lost opportunities, lost truth, lost lives. Together the enemies, having discussed the foolishness of the endeavor that killed them both, are laid to rest.

So in the end the ‘strange meeting’ was with an enemy soldier. Who he did kill. I am a psychic voodoo demi-god. Fear me.

————————————————————————————————————————

Right. Wilfred Owen is behind us. It’s the last poem of the evening, and the title’s a real heart warmer.

————————————————————————————————————————

I’m gonna have to put this as a personal favourite purely for message. The other poems were controversial because they were written back in the day and condemned the war society told itself it must believe in. That was the norm, and they challenged it. Now our social consciences make us feel obligated to hate war but love those who died in it. And Charles Hamilton Sorley sits us down, slaps us in the face and yells ‘They’re dead! They don’t need your love!’

Well, it’s not really centred on mocking us for over-sentimentalizing war-heroes. It’s just realistic. It doesn’t create walls of labyrinthine prose lamenting the unknown soldier. It’s another poem about how to deal with the aftermath of war. ‘In Flanders Fields’ - with attitude. It touches briefly on the massive devastation caused by the war – “When you see millions of the mouthless dead.” This creates context, and also a sort of jux-ta-position. The poem uses emotive language to evoke the horror of war – so that you are seeing this legion of corpses. It’s not ‘If you see,’ it’s ‘When you see.’ The second the words have been read, we see them. The poem conjures us up an image we feel emotion over, then goes on to tell us how these emotions don’t help. The poem is an instruction manual for itself. The last lines continue the general theme of the poem. Even if you knew someone who died in the war, and see them as you dream this image, it’s not them. It’s just your memory of them. They are dead. It means nothing.

Would newspapers have published this during the war? you ask? Depends. Early on you’d probably get lynched publishing something like this. Maybe during the later war. It would make a lot more sense afterward. Despite all that, it’s a poem all about thinking rationally and making sense. What self-respecting newspaper would ever publish that?

I am making newspaper cracks now. This is what I have become.

So. Here we all are then. The course-book asks for one more thing. Which poem had the greatest impact on me. Now see there that’s a complicated question. I think ‘Mouthless Dead’ has the best message, but it didn’t really hit me as much as Owen’s double-whammy circus of carnage. I don’t think any of them really changed my mind on anything – I was never too big a fan of war in the first place. I’m sure working together, Owen could have made the gun-totin-est warmonger scuttle off to a peace protest, and when the protest didn’t work and the converts’ brother died in the war he once applauded, Sorley could (if the bereaved wasn’t offended, as to the directly effected the message would be quite confronting) help him move on. In the end the two poets probably only had any contact when Owen penned Sorley’s epitaph -

“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

And for all that, the Iraq War is still an ‘ongoing military campaign.’

Let’s get out of here while we can.

Week 7 – The Skyscraper of War, Part 1

I’m going to divide this up into sections. No one wants to sit through all of WWI in one go. This first half’s all one war poem. Have fun.

————————————————————————————————————————

I was given most of a poem with some options at points between two words. I had to pick whichever word I’d use. Here it is, with the subjective words in bold.

The Rear-Guard

Groping along the tunnel, step by step,

He flashed his prying torch with patching glare

From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,

A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;

And he, exploring fifty feet below

The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie

Slumped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,

And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.

“I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply.

“God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.)

“Get up and guide me through this stinking place.”

Savage, he kicked a soft, shapeless heap,

And flashed his beam across the livid face

Terribly staring up, whose eyes yet wore

Pain dying hard ten days before;

And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

Alone he staggered on until he found

Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair

To the dazed, muttering creatures underground

Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.

At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,

He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,

Unloading hell behind him step by step.

Now I have to read the ‘real’ one, and the questioning begins:

Why did you choose the words you did?

I chose based on whatever held the atmosphere best in my mind. ‘Winked’ to me just didn’t sound like a thing that happened in a warzone. I don’t think at any point during a battle has anybody used the word ‘wink’ for anything. Just sayin’…

Why do you think Sassoon chose the words he did?

Mostly to fit inside a strict 10-11 syllable line structure it seems. Maybe I should have read it in iambic pentameter? This is in contrast to the rhyming structure, which lacks any consistency at all – swapping from abab to abba seamlessly. Can’t tell if it’s modernist or just plain weird…

What is the impact of the words?

The words themselves are good. They give off an atmosphere that, whilst fluid and changing, carries an overall feel of distress and despair. It makes us feel as if we are part of a feat of endurance – walking down this tunnel to the other side, all these horrible things happening all around. We have to reach the end. In a way I guess this helps keep the reader hooked, though whether this was the actual objective is not something I’d put money on.

At first everything is quiet. It’s dark and threatening and confusing, but quiet. We never know where we’re going or why we’re here. ‘Uncle Sam says DO AS YOU’RE TOLD’ – (I almost wish that was a real slogan. The social commentary potential…) Moving right along. It starts quiet, but the arrival of the sleeper and the description of his appearance adds urgency. Suddenly the tunnel is filled with huddled wrecks, and we hear shells exploding up ahead. When we read something we are in a vacuum. As we read, the vacuum fills. The scene is described. We have a world in our heads.

We have a world, but no explanation for it. It’s in the war, but the narrator could be on either side. They’re going somewhere. We empathize with the narrator, so we too feel like we’re walking down this tunnel. We have no idea why. Horrible things are happening all around us. Why are we here? What’s happening?

The impact of the words is an image of some horrible experiences. And the kicker I guess is that it all happened.

Where is the rear-guard? What is going on above him?

He’s in a tunnel, with a war going on over his head. He can hear shells exploding outside. When I think ‘rear guard’ I assume it’s someone who guards the rear. Maybe the soldier in charge of watching the way they came from. Last in line, everyone else far ahead, trying to get to headquarters and safety.

What is it like in the tunnel? Pick out some of the words or phrases which help describe the tunnel.

Most of the scene setting is done in the first stanza. The use of ‘his prying torch’ tells us that the tunnel is dark. We smell the ‘unwholesome air.’ Our surroundings are a clutter of objects, ‘shapes too vague to know.’ It’s dark, a confusion of shrapnel left behind in some abandoned outpost at the back of the tunnel. We are in a war. Apart from this knowledge we are displaced. No country, no surroundings, no purpose. These things do not matter to the rear guard. He is a soldier. He goes where he’s told. We walk through hell and we do not know why.

The rear-guard meets a sleeper in the tunnel. What does he look like? What has happened to him?

“It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.”

I don’t know who said that; I just stole it off the movie Dead Man. I figure that’s where they got the name. Either way it’s a cool quote.  Basically just there to assist a tangent on the sentence ‘the sleeper is dead.’

The sleeping man is in a lot of ways the embodiment of the horrors of war. The tunnel is unpleasant. The sleeping man is horrifying. The soldier trips over his prone body, kicks him, yells at him – only to point his torch downward and see ‘the sleeper’ clutching at his own rotting wounds. He died here. The soldier is not safe. He thought he’d found someone to guide him home. Instead he has found this. He is alone.

“It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.”

At the end of the poem the rear guard leaves the tunnel. What is the tunnel compared with in the last line? What point is the poet making here?

‘Unloading hell behind him step by step.” I feel like I should be looking for something less obvious than a ‘war is hell’ message – but really back in the day that was probably avant-garde enough. We’re examining poetry’s part in the big tidal shift of public opinion over the war.  That’s this week’s thing. This poem, if released to a mass media brought up on war stories and patriotism – a nation built on the valuing of one’s life below that of the rock you spent it on – the effect would be devastating.

Siegfried Sassoon was born into this. He went to war driven by patriotism. This story actually happened – if not to him then to somebody else. A lot of somebodies.

Everyone sailed off thinking what a great big adventure it would be. How glorious and wonderful it was. Then they came back and warned the rest of us.

‘War is hell.’

Week 6 – Fly Away Peter

I’m basing this all on the big friendly message written on page 8 of week 6 of my coursework – “Don’t forget to write in your reading journal.” And since that’s right in the middle of a week about this novel I’ve had to read I figure this post should be some kind of summary piece about said novel.

So. Fly Away Peter – the summated observations. Let’s rock.

Fly Away Peter is one of those books we can look at and pull so many meanings out of it that in the end we unravel all the interwoven strands of subtext and find hidden within a rather small and confused canary. And he hasn’t eaten in about three weeks so he’s probably dead. And suddenly someone’s knocking at the door and you’ve no idea what to do with the body and that gateway to Narnia hidden at the back of the pianoforte in your loft is looking more and more inviting…

What I mean with all this is obviously that Fly Away Peter is just a person trying to tell us some truth in print. Avoiding that whole metaphysical jargon so easily fallen into in which you end up discovering that the whole of creation is pointless and thus so is your thinking about it – the book sticks to the truth as far as we can see purely from the evidence we have.

People are insignificant. Objectively life is pointless, but from our own subjective point of view it’s pretty much all we’ve got. You can call it an anti-war novel, you can point out the symbols of ‘duality’ and ‘the dark side of humanity’, the biblical references, the whole shabam – and they’re all present in the text… but it’s all just setting. Tools to make the artwork.

Everything we have is based around this. The fact that a book based around the only significance in life being its individuality, should cause us to spend hours weaving meanings around canaries when we could be out living our individual lives is… mildly ironic. Even reading that much into it is over-indulgence. It’s the story of the end of someone’s life. This is all we have. This is all we should need.

That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.

Week 5 – Disappointingly Few Ghosts

Alright. ‘Ghostwritten.’ Not really going to talk much about the content of the book – lotta characters, lotta interweaving, lotta deep sounding stuff – but more about the style.

The whole concept behind the book is that it’s told from the perspective of nine different characters. This seems to be David Mitchell’s thing. But the idea is interesting. We have novels and we have short stories. Ghostwritten is a book of short stories that follow a central plot. They all interweave in little subtle details – some of them seemingly purely for nostalgia or to make the author feel smarter than everybody. But despite occasional superiority-complexes, it’s written well and the narrative style feels… new.

I’m sure it’s been done before. Everything has. But it’s not what you’d call mainstream (In the sense that I hadn’t heard of this method until I read this book. This is the definition of alternative.)

But… I don’t even know. The whole short-story-novel idea to me seems like an opportunity to keep up the variety of a short story collection, yet continue to carry the one centralised message. The fact that the story is told from all these different perspectives – and not in the hackneyed, seven different views of the same crime scene sorta junk, the story has its own flow – allows the book to span genre and evade bias. Maybe not even in this book. I’m just running on a concept now. It just seems like the middle point. An interesting mediator.

The is the age of post-modernism people! The boundaries of genre are coming crashing down. Vive le revolution!