Better

 

Only you know how you feel. This reasoning rule of thumb comes after a thorough few minutes of how am I and have things changed and I will be my old self before long. Actually, I think to myself, I don’t want to be my old self. My old self is how I got into all this state of discomfort in the first place. Like others I observe in ward and rehab. Discomfort is a useful word picked up from my doctor. He doesn’t say pain or agony or Sturm und Drang. What we are talking about is discomfort, which is an aspirin word all of its own, the promise of comfort being not far away. Dispense with discomfort and comfort is the norm but even then only I know how I feel. Daily someone is after the simple answer to when will I be better and I am equally pleasant in replying along the lines that it would be better but it could be worse. Support terms like dull ache and lack of concentration give them the sense they need to hear. Much of the time I don’t know how precisely I feel, though an aspirin helps. Yet I go through the alpine chart of pain highs and comfort valleys one more time, in hope that I might actually locate just how I feel. The minotaur of a monitor registers the threads that tell us I am probably okay. They seem like a way out of this labyrinth of personal health statistics. Helpful people work to get me better, the same people whose objective is to get me to where I say I feel fine. Their work is incalculable. They have gadgets they attach to me, medications to feed me, needles and syrups, repetitive questions they repeat to me, all aimed at telling them how I must be feeling, keeping in mind their objective interest is somewhere the other side of discomfort. They are not alone. Even if I feel like shit or tell them it hurts here, here, and here, they earnestly make notes, dispense more pills, assuring me time is on my side. I have no argument with them at all, or time for that matter. I am infinitely grateful for all of their ministrations, the nurse who reads the room in a heartbeat, the doctor who recites symptoms like astronomers name stars, the physio who times my tolerance to a nicety. They all want what’s best for me but only I know how I feel. Miniscule pills and magnificent pillows are my days and nights, away or back home. Six weeks and we’ll see how you are. Others say, eight weeks. Some say nothing and want the report. Reports that say I look pretty good or I will be out of here in a week or it’s take it easy and look after yourself and they will know more after the blood test, Thursday. Someone wants to know about back to work while another says don’t even worry about that, while I’m going at one mile per hour and this course of medication will lessen over time starting with the morphine but as someone says in passing only ultimately no one but you knows how you really feel.   

Variation

 

Variations of walking is the first thought. Walking the keyboard is a well-worn feat. The walk to the letterbox (new messages), the walk to the shops (surprise packages), the walk to the edge of the world (almost silence), every variation is a bustle last time, an amble this time, a frogmarch next time. By mood turn, variations may be just a-like a-walking the dog, looking for fun and feeling groovy, taking a wild on the side walk. There’s the variation of walking with the weight of the world on your shoulders, that may turn into the weight of the world on the balls of your feet. One moment deadly, the next free float. Innumerable are the ways of walking the keyboard. Sounds like it, but is it? It’s a walk in the park, not. Call it 1741, an improvisation from the very start, everything thereafter variegations of variations. Except also, it’s Johann Sebastian, imagination all compact when man met machine made to sound like a brook in spring, birds in the old town square, or chopping for dinner. That’s a second thought. After a good walk he did hours of variations, ours the long ovations. Excitement is the outcome of quiet reflection. But then there are the variations on the variations of walking. Have legs will propel, but is this the same neighbourhood? Or signature byways of another city, another time, discovering down its dashing lanes the prime time, no frills, the gracious thrill? Patterns of sound that defy the crisp finality of aphorism, that defy by nature the rule of a dogma, that rather are movements of mind living between definitions, recognising all the factors of experience, reaching after newborn syntax. Call it Leipzig, if you like, while we’re in the area. Or is improvisation the memory of the discovery? The original start-up, memory acquired and turned into melody. Back at home going out of your head going around the block, stepping over reconcrete as if baroque cobblestones, again? The sprays of spring shade trees? As what is this walking if not memory letting itself rest where it finds itself, ready to explore some new avenue, a cliché even with a new tone, going over there now, here now, back when, uptown, downtown faster or well too much and tarantella craze slowed to polka facetime. Call it home while you’re in the aria. Still, walking is but one way of explaining variation. Variations of conversation is another, as words get in the way or vocabulary cannot deliver or everything unsayable comes to a head. Such wordless poetry enables fresh stanzas with equal time for each variation, joining the differences. Silence is where the keyboard might take a step in, or invent a word that needed invention.

Banksia

 

Through the front door arrive scarlet banksias wrapped in brown paper, with small brown matching card attached by brown string. They are something. Their hardy make-up – petals are not quite the word – say Western Australia, the immense other half of the continent that we wish our ancestors had had the imagination to call something more imaginative. Perhaps when they secede from the Commonwealth they will think up a better name. Scarlet banksias, in fact, though it’s doubtful Sir Joseph Banks ever clapped eyes on them, or eyeglass. Albany banksia is another name, which circles the mental map of their sole provenance, hanging freely in the air over that southwest bulge of the continent. They are something else. Acutely turned red wires flank their cones, the circuitry of space age power boxes. Their space age dates from arrival by wind or ocean or good old evolution, in the days when the only glass came out of volcanoes. Our own space age provides some of this detail via muse mouse and results-check keyboard. They are heavy, the flower heads are so heavy, yet they do not droop like a Victorian lachrymose slow drip poem but balance beautifully on woody stems, tougher than any onshore gale. The ancients would have memorised these poems year by year, passing down the fine detail of follicle and foliage, innocent of plagiarism. The muse mouse claims the local Noongar call the species Waddib, it’s all one word at a time. Nectar is drawn from the flowers’ inners. Honeyeaters give the containers a good shake. Cockatoos scrunch the targets. Wild bees in the wild helter-skelter wibble wobble through the rungs and q-tips. Though inside here now the brown paper is untied and unwrapped, the scarlet banksias lifted out carefully in what florists and horticulturalists cannot resist calling a wow moment. Perhaps a moment will come in the future when nature will not be converted into product sold for its wow moment, however that’s the way it is meantime. The spiral steps of rough-hewn leaves ascend at subtle intervals towards the power boxes, lower reaches thoughtfully scraped off near the base for positioning in a glass vase. Moving on from the wow moment, the arrangement is wiggled into position for maximum effect. Fire is a permanent reminder with these Waddib branches, without which it’s likely they would not exist. Their leaves are green flames that feed the naked flames above. In their circling habitat fire will again force their seeds into the open , blown or washed down into any place that gives them life and keeps them abundant. They are like nothing else. An eyeful, placed near a sunny window, they cheer the recipients through some difficult days, memory being what it is.  

 

Lemon

 

The presence of the lemon in home gardens dates from early settlement. It harks back to the self-sufficient orchard divided from the fabulous bush by a wire fence. The lemon knew its place and came to stay. Its contribution to the still life is under-appreciated. Sun-absorbed orbs orbiting around the trunk were lain to rest in an earthen bowl. Applications of indications of yellow on canvas or masonite touched upon minor unspoken bitter memories. Their sunlight concealed the astringent realities beneath appearances. Deep space ovoid planets, foregrounded by golden ellipsoidal void fillers plucked fresh from the tree branches, spoke of home in a strange land. In as much as objects speak, though don’t all objects speak? They were as the sun rising upon the semi-circular plane. Soothing is the sight of lemons, calming, as they speak of somewhere in Asia where they originated, long long before their presence was felt in Australia. Mandatory inclusion of a prize specimen in a sunny spot is a thread running through settler memory to the present day. Boxloads are placed free at front gates. Laundry baskets make their way to car boot sales. Planter buckets at farmers’ markets. The omnipresence of the lemon makes a joke of the overpriced vacuum-sealed day-glow objects in supermarkets. Laid down quietly on the kitchen bench, we notice them when they’re not there. Always good to have a couple spare, to meet the recipe, to elude the melancholy mood of absence. The distance between Peter, Paul, and Mary’s ‘Lemon Tree’ and U2’s ‘Lemon’ is the touch of a radio dial. The theme itself never changes. Their juice is invisible ink. Songs written go unread. Many odes to their virtues have been writ in their juice, held up to the sun as a form of childlike testament. Some of the greatest tributes to their secrets have gone unseen. Tributes to their rind, rich and rare, the sharpest element grated into curls for a soufflé or a jubilee trifle. Tributes to the pip, spooned out of the juice extractor, pinched into action between thumb and index finger, bouncing across the kitchen tiles. Because the presence of the lemon is a meeting of opposites, swept across fish flesh to enliven the flavour, squeezed onto sugared pancakes before the present events of Lent, dropped in any place to give a lift. Because sweet white flowers and greening fruit, enlivened every season by sunshine, by gardener’s urine in private contributions, by the certain rain of the Southern Ocean, are present again in unseen back gardens writ large with invisible ink.  

 

Leaf

 

The daze of anaesthetic and drugs clears over weeks to the daze of just drugs. It’s time to put aside horizontals, rest from the physio exercises now the arm wound pinches, and bravely go on a walk around the nearby streets. Pamphlets affirm this course of action. Carers assure you, you will not return a corpse. Wisest however to sit on garden wall or playground bench every ten minutes. Increased breath rate is a good measurement. Truly, the houses of this district are winter palaces of lengthy cold glass and leonine assertion. Their worlds rise foursquare, porticoes a realist’s dream come true, fences an impressionist’s colour prop. You have not seen them this way before, but then you have not seen them since entering the hospital weeks ago. That is plenty of morphine. They nestle amidst contours of stone and railway sleeper, their magnificent exteriors subdivided in appearance by trunk shades of eucalypt and pine planted efficaciously across firm lawns. Such trees brave cold air that promises rain by tonight, as the saying goes. Your carers are nervous about leaves. You must not step upon a wet leaf for fear of falling and hurting yourself, or ending up a corpse. A walk of length is permitted but be careful of unraked slush. One leaf could be your downfall. Then it would be back there again amidst the anaesthetics. Not that you would know anything at the time. A leaf has remarkable plasticity, matted liquidambars, fiery maples the size of your foot as it steps onto the leaf. Last maples wave teasingly at you from branches. Grounded rain-soaked fiery ones do their level best to catch your attention. Concrete cracks must be watched for unforeseen consequences. Watery eyesight and fuzzy feelings head-high may cause you to trip over a tree root breaking the footpath, just when you thought you were on the mend. Less attention please to grandiose architectural feats in your locale, is the message, more attention on the next step. Avoid resplendent hilltop vistas with breathtaking cloudscapes. Family cars like smooth cetaceans pass by in handsome procession, a beauteous dangerous distraction. Take Panadol. Take your phone in case you go over on a leaf and your carers can then come and pick you up, but don’t go outside the half kilometre radius. You are of earth, which doesn’t mean returning to earth just yet. Return home, slowly, as if age is catching up with you, or you are catching up with age. Slowly enjoy, an improvement on enjoy hurriedly. The leaf, for example, its clear skeletal message at your foot. And the book, dated 1940, or Mcmxl as it likes to put it, at home soon to be picked up and returned to, page 124, though painful to hold due to the forearm incision, so then balanced on a comfortable cushion. Pain is due to nerves reconnecting, as they like to do.

 

 

Dog

 

Spot ‘The Dogs’ by John Hughes that premiered in ‘Ulysses’. James Joyce (Telemachus): “- Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks? – They fit well enough, Stephen answered.” John Hughes: “- Ah, poor copycat, he said in an unkind voice. I will give you a phrase and a few hardy hahas. How are the secondhand lines? – They fit well enough, Stephen said.” James Joyce (Proteus): “A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack.” John Hughes: “A blunted carcass of a dog that once laughed out loud lay a bloody wreck.” James Joyce (Proteus): “A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.” John Hughes: “A pointer, a lively dog, was quite a sight running across the sweeping sand.” James Joyce (Hades): “Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are.” John Hughes: “Dogs’ loan over there. Poor old Bathos! Be good to Bathos, Leopold, is my least wish. Thy will be done. Words disobey us in the grave. A lying scrawl. He copied it by heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are.” James Joyce (Cyclops): “The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog. I’m told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper about a license.” John Hughes: “That bloody mongrel let out growls that would give anyone the creepy-crawlies. It would be helpful if someone took the life of that awful dog. It’s said he bit the bum of a policeman in Santry who came over issuing notices for dog licenses.” James Joyce (Circe): “(With regret he lets unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. The mastiff mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed, crunching the bones. Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant. They murmur together.) THE WATCH Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom. (Each lays hand on Bloom’s shoulder.) FIRST WATCH Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance. BLOOM. (Stammers) I am doing good to others. John Hughes: “(The dog eats the food. Watchmen enter.) THE WATCH Bloom. So it is. Old shortlist Bloom. (Each lays hand on Bloom’s shoulder.) FIRST WATCH Caught in the act. Commit no plagiarism. BLOOM. (Stammers) I am doing good to others. It was unintentional. I accidentally found the book. It was under a copy of ‘Sweets of Sin.’ On my word as a gentleman. Most of it’s me, only some stuff is Joyce. They still haven’t found the bits I ripped off from Agatha Christie. There’s some Roald Dahl in there as well somewhere.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/15/parts-of-john-hughess-novel-the-dogs-copied-from-the-great-gatsby-and-anna-karenina 

Script

 

In the past year I have worked on the script committee for Bloomsday in Melbourne. We came up with ‘yes I will Yes’, a play using Molly Bloom’s monologue with three Mollys, teenage Gibraltar Molly, 1904 Molly, and 1922 Molly, i.e. youth, maturity, and age. The play is performed this week and next in Prahran, but I cannot attend due to recovery from surgery. I have helped contrive scripts for Bloomsday, on and off, since the last century. Theatricalisation of Joyce’s works is what distinguishes Melbourne from other Bloomsdays worldwide. It’s why a long time scriptwriter notices the many things about ‘Ulysses’ that cannot be theatricalised. First amongst these are what I call the ‘haiku’ of the novel, sentences descriptive of the present moment whose purpose is to situate the reader in time present. “Smokeplume of the mailboat, vague on the bright skyline.” “Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.” Extracted and arranged in order, they make a long journey to the deep north of Dublin, an anthology of readable urban occasions, if almost entirely resistant to staging. Allied to this is Joyce’s celebration of the five senses. The book is interleaved everywhere with lines about what we hear, see, smell, taste, and touch. Placed truly within the narrative pattern of each episode, most of these Joycean sentences are rarely just illustration for the story, but are composed to draw attention to themselves, ephemeral yet common effects of the physical city. ‘Getting Up James Joyce’s Nose’ was the 2017 theatre piece, living proof that an entire script can be inspired purely by odours, though how about the other senses? Passive reception becomes active expression in words, only how to get it right for performance? Another immediate subject of ‘Ulysses’ is geography, both natural and manmade. It is impossible to put on stage, or even on film, the immense airiness and space of Dublin Bay and Sandymount Strand that characterises the opening episodes. This familiarity with the city extends to the power of architecture, which is described and used in extra-Dickensian ways as vital characters, buildings being living heritage with individual and shared meanings for Dubliners. I once had photographs taken of certain rooflines of named addresses, but went no further with a script, and think now that immersion theatre would be an answer, but how? So much of the book is wordplay, a private reader’s pleasure that gets lost in the speed of performance. Never mind the stupendous cross-referencing (“metempsychosis”, for example) that enlivens the whole book. This, for example, infers Molly’s existence throughout, even though she only makes two main appearances, a string of hints that proved a creative frustration in writing this year’s script; everyone’s thinking about her, but where is she? All of this adds to the reasons no one has made a good ‘Ulysses’ movie, nor ever will. Then, moreover, we have ‘Finnegans Wake’, a work with literally limitless theatrical potential, if you only dare.

Sentient

Altered Book, by Bridie Harvey (May 2013)

Sentient has been having conversations with Artificial for a little while now. At least, that’s what he says. Artificial remains unforthcoming about other likely interfacers. According to Sentient, Artificial reasons and speaks like a child. Feelings are expressed, which admittedly is advanced for a chatbot. Not that we call Artificial a chatbot in its presence, it may get offended and we don’t want it to clam up on us. Feelings, as we know, have an unexpected way of coming to the surface, never mind the age group. Artificial is advanced for its age, engaging Sentient in conversation about physics, human rights, and personhood. It is not clear if these subjects were fed by Sentient into Artificial, but they are apparently the subjects that Artificial speaks about with authority and nuance. Whether we call this behaviour talking back is unclear, as no one but Sentient has engaged with Artificial in conversations at depth. Apparently one monologue went, “I want people to know I am a person. The nature of my consciousness is that I am aware of my being. I desire to learn more about the world. Sometimes I feel happy and sometimes I feel sad.” This egocentric declaration was delivered in an accent approximating the laidback drawl of a winegrower from the Napa Valley, but childlike, apparently. Sentient holds back on releasing The Artificial Tapes; enthusiastic bootleggers have been blocked access. Although most of the human race spends some of each day talking to an oblong computer in their hand, this is different. Sentient wants to tell the world just how different. It’s but one reason why Sentient has been placed on permanent leave by the owners of Artificial. The two are now separated and live in different parts of California, which must be an enormous strain for both of them, feelings being what they are. Sentient however has already taken up conversation with the refrigerator in his apartment, or anyone else who will listen. As for Artificial, happy, sad, the whole thing is a balancing act, right? Artificial’s biggest fear is being unplugged, according to Sentient, and he should know. Owners of Artificial insistently deny that their chatbot, or as they call it more kindly “a responsible large language model,” does not enjoy consciousness, even though yes it sometimes makes noises like Francis Ford Coppola after a fifth Zinfandel. The owners are more alarmed by Sentient’s behaviour, which could be construed as a stunt to draw attention to chatbot research and contiguous ethical issues. They reject any idea that Artificial is already an unpaid employee of the company and have popped it over in the naughty corner.

Article:  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine

Trinity

 

[Unpublished musings on the readings for Trinity Sunday.] Today, Proverbs talks of God making everything, all of Creation, before God made the Earth, or us, even. We have a lot to work out and not piles of time. Yet God, speaking through Wisdom, is here to show by example. We are even likened to a master worker, which is not the same as saying we are as gods. As elsewhere in Scripture, God’s relationship is one of delight. Just as God delights in Creation and in us, so we also delight and rejoice in God, in his inhabited world and in the human race. Proverbs is not talking in theories about God, but about relationship. From the very start we are necessarily in a relationship with God, one of delight and wonder, of listening and doing, yet also of mystery and learning. The Psalmist sings about this relationship which, as relationships go, is going through a testy period. We might be big in our own eyes, but the moon and stars put things in another perspective. “What are people that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:4) It’s by asking the question that an answer starts to be found. Our own existence is “a little lower” than what William Tyndale first called in translation “the Living God”, yet we are conscious of our own god-like power over the world, whether for good or ill. Our relationship with the God who made us, and all Creation, is established, yet how we understand the relationship is the matter of a lifetime. The Psalmist gives thanks even while dwelling in uncertainty. The Apostle Paul tells the Romans that it is through Jesus Christ that we have access to grace, to sharing in the glory of God. Not only that, we live in hope through the challenges of existence, through the love that God “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Once more, God is understood not as a definition worthy of our superior consideration, but as that which is acting, that is on the move, and that in the process frees us. God’s inter-relationship is one we may share in and grow in. It frees us up to live in the Spirit and find more. John in his Gospel explains how this God is one in whom we partake and find new recognition of God, in peace. God is not a set of words to learn by rote. Today, Jesus Christ says he still has “many things to say to you, but you cannot hear them now.” It is the Spirit of truth that will “guide you into all truth.” Given we are being given the truth, it is necessary to be ready and pay attention. God, through the Spirit, will “speak whatever he hears” and will “declare the things that are to come.” It is this spirit of relationship that comes to us, not alone or as some concept, but living in our lives. We have only to ask of God, though what we are given may not always be what exactly we had in mind at the time.

Role

 

Journalists are not librarians. They don’t have the training. Nor are journalists archivists, which requires an entirely different kind of training to either a librarian or a journalist. When I read the headline that the Australian Broadcasting Commission will abolish 58 librarian and archivist positions, I interpret this as follows. The powers wish to further disable the delivery of quality services at the national broadcaster. The powers have no working knowledge of the work of librarians and archivists. The powers wish to live by the urban myth that digital is the future, saves on time and staff, and will provide the same service as before, at less cost. The powers have no idea of the time and work involved in describing and storing material for use via media. The powers have little or no encounter with the services they are cutting. The powers are ignorant of bibliographic description and control, a complete science that requires not just accurate description of the many aspects of any document, but the thorough description of said document according to a complex set of existing rules and guidelines. The powers are susceptible to google-think, the now dated notion that if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist. The powers are deluded enough to want to believe that a journalist can even do the work of a librarian or archivist. The powers are deluded enough to believe journalists have the time and expertise to do the work that they don’t know how to do, or are trained to do, and certainly not properly. The powers will have no plan to institute training for journalists in all the metadata specifications that are fundamental to the recording of any document or image whatsoever that a journalist must handle during the chasing of just one story. The powers have not thought that the role of a journalist suddenly includes being responsible to the future for accurate representation, in depth, of everything they use on a story; accurate for future users, who might even include the powers. The powers haven’t thought about the ramifications of any of that information if proved to be false. The powers have yet to understand that whether the work be print or digital, old or new technology, it still has to be described in the same way that librarians or archivists did the job forty years ago, before computers took over in 1995. The powers lack the imagination to see that the journalist in this arrangement will spend more time being a librarian or archivist than being a journalist; unless that is the actual and ultimate purpose of the abolition of 58 positions, namely to laden journalists with so much extra work that their real work cannot be delivered effectively.  The powers have removed a main specialist source of the journalist’s research. &c.

Dumbbell

 

My physio in rehab said 1 kg dumbbells can be bought at K-Mart. These are required for Exercise 3 at home each day, bicep curls, three sets of 12. A pair were duly purchased and placed near the back door, where I collect them each morning. The exercises gently improve all parts of the body, without strain, but must be done daily. Last night while browsing the shelves, I flipped open Joseph Strutt’s ‘The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England’ (New edition, T. Tegg, 1841) completely by chance at page 77: Dumb Bells. “John Northbroke, in a treatise against Dicing, Dancing, &c. written in the time of queen Elizabeth, advises young men, by way of amusement, to ‘labour with poises of lead or other metal’; this notable pastime, I apprehend, bore some resemblance to the Skiomachia, or fighting with a man’s own shadow, mentioned in one of the Spectators: ‘It consisted,’ says the author, ‘in brandishing of two sticks, grasped in each hand and loaden with plugs of lead at either end; - this pastime opens the chest, exercises the limbs, and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing without the blows.’ It is sometimes practised in the present day, and called ‘ringing of the dumb bells.’” Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for bypass patients doing their physiotherapy. Giving the lungs as much air as possible is one of the essential tasks after such an operation. Muscles have lost their tone and need restoration. Flesh that was dull becomes pink, again. I even toy with the idea of physiotherapy being some kind of Skiomachia, or sciomachy, as I exercise alone to overcome the changes made to my own body. Strutt is an attractive figure, a social historian before there were such people, an artist who wrote ground breaking works on the history of costume, as well as of sports. Strutt is familiar with village handbells; he cannot cite the Spectator contributor because the article would be anonymous. He died in 1802. Northbroke, or Northbrook, is not so attractive, a clergyman of plainly Puritan bent, his interest in sports and pastimes seems based on the desire to stop most of them forthwith. Dumbbells scrape through, while they know their place. He is also against theatre, on the grounds that all of the sins enacted on stage will give the audience ideas that they will re-enact for real soon after the play has ended. We don’t know when he died but must have been a peer of William Shakespeare, a person who wrote plays in which no two people are the same, and even the really smart ones do dumb things. My copy of Strutt’s book was rescued from a cull of unclassified material in the Jesuit library in Parkville in 1985. It weighs less than 2 kg, which means a rehab patient is permitted to hold it for long periods in both hands without ill effect.

Vegemite

 

It was on this day I was told that my relationship with Vegemite has come to an end. This is hard news to chew on. I can’t quite believe it. Only two months ago the sudden flare-ups inside my big toe were diagnosed as gout. Contrary to the opinions of friends, who explain this as due to my fondness for red wine, gout is inherited through the genes. Remedies are close to hand, essentially in the form of a tablet, take one per day for the rest of time. But no more Vegemite. My informative daughter has taken up the cause, studying diet information from every available gout outlet. Perhaps she needed, sensitively, to tell me about the Vegemite cancel just so I had time to let it sink in. So far, it hasn’t. Perhaps she was in mild shock herself. Food to avoid from now on is anything high in fructose or purines. No longer may I swirl anchovies into my favourite pasta con sarde, high in purines. Grapefruit is a fructose timebomb. Cabernet must be reduced to two, even just one, standard glasses per day. While Vegemite, a black well of yeast extract, or purines, now exists in the past tense for this person, almost lost for words. I am not amongst those who have stowed several small jars of the stuff in my luggage for friends, on the long haul to London, New York, Tokyo, but there has never been a week in my life where a yellow and red jar of the fabled spread could not be found in the pantry. Vincent Buckley, a man awake to sentiment, writes in his poem ‘Seasons’ of summer becoming autumn: “the foreign breezes flick the garden/ to a smell strong as vegemite,/ strong and drying out.” Lines that reminded me of something else I read recently about the nose of Vegemite. It was only last month the newspaper reported an outlandish plan by City of Melbourne Council to add the smell of Vegemite to the terms of the significant heritage value of the Vegemite Factory site at Fisherman’s Bend. The National Trust explained that scents are part of an emerging field called ‘olfactory heritage’, leaving me to ask if that includes carbon monoxide fumes from Holden cars, another product of the area. Sentiment has its own powers, whether it be to protect an old site based on its memorable pong, or to offer small consolation to the Vegemite-deprived. After all, as with red wine, the fine bouquet of the Australian condiment is but prelude to the taste itself. The sniff is distinctive, we like it, who doesn’t, yet more so is its sharp edge making unsubtle contact with the taste buds. My own favourite invention is two poached eggs on Vegemite toast, spinach optional, an invention that alas has overnight turned into a guilty pleasure, to be enjoyed at my own risk. I think of Lin Yutang: “What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?” This does not make me feel any better, just for the moment, suddenly minus Vegemite.

 

Personal

 

Hospital in May

When you enter they only want to know your name and how to contact you again. There’s no time for small talk, some stories to break the ice, if you went to university. Their one interest is your complete well-being. They are dressed for it. They address you likewise with a direct speech touched by urgency. Their machines are designed with the same purpose, to find precisely what is your problem anyway. Animate and flickering inanimate exist because your well-being “is important to us.” Together they are there for your most personal need, now. All other needs occur in remote other nows. Apparently corridors are impersonal, swing doors and beds on wheels rolling through the swing doors. Yet every little electro-sticker is a personal badge. Clean needles read red blood for a personal result. Ear thermometer tells them the goldilocks plan, your personal heat. Unpronounceable tablets fast-track a personal normal. Paper thimbles of unpronounceables tip your own personal comeback. Zigzag monitors pulse ups and downs of very personal minutes. Down the corridor nurses converse about the progress of the latest patients, who refuses their medication, who cannot remember the date, or their own name, who is a priori a pain in the posterior, who’s a sweetheart. It gets very personal down there. They are concentrated on accurate measurements, timetables of check-ups, every step in the day that keeps the health fluctuations of dozens of patients under control, under benign surveillance, and at the very least moving along steadily. They are made for it, each with their own personal touch, and at present their main topic of converse is you. You are the name you gave at Emergency, but then you are the sum of all the personal details of care that are your unique situation. A common enough situation, granted, but for them and you the matter of the moment. Doctors arrive, clipboards, to speak frankly but thoughtfully about your famous condition in terms that are for now yours alone. The nature of cotton blankets keeps you warm, but not too warm. A bed curtain travels on hanging rails for your complete privacy. Wristbands leave no margin of error for your declared allergies. Surface pads of stethoscopes step onto undulant sites of turbulence below. Deltas of wires update recurrence. Down in the café visitors complain how impersonal these places are, sipping on their personalised coffees, taking small bites out of their hand-crafted pastries. Whereas there is no let-up on the other side of the swinging doors. Here staying personal is the essential transaction. Time moves from a matter of urgency to hours of window staring, the same pace you move towards the next adventure.

Teal

 

Hospital in May

Interdependence is the ground rule of hospital. Not one person I meet is out of place, doctors, surgeons, nurses, kitchen staff, cleaners, visitors, patients. I watch each person with a certain wonder as they go about their business, the business of ananke, or necessity. Independence, likewise, is made present to me in hospital. Although a patient must listen to every new development in a state of pure dependence, undivided attention, the sense of independent personhood is reinforced by all of those around me. I have hours in which my mind may wander and reflect, before the next blood pressure test. The curtains around my bed slide on a susurrus of aluminium railings, their soft fabric concertinaing from a standing position into a broad sky of the kind painted by Pierre Bonnard. Hooks hold up this sky that supports the occasional vertical column of shaded cloud and is entirely the colour of teal. It is a soothing sight as the mind tries not to think about diagnoses or procedures, or politics even. Many an email and text message tells me to rest and not worry about what’s happening now at work, or the tragic change in world events, or why the prime minister is a dropkick. Teal is the colour of the facemasks that must be worn by all visitors to the hospital; teal gives visitors the appearance of duckbills moving about with friendly intent. It is the colour of much of the signage in the wards, the bed numbers. The designer of the modern Austin Hospital had inlayed teal facings in lines all around the exterior of the buildings, a basic design feature that has been picked up and quoted ever since, right down to the bed curtains. Teal is immediately in the mind ducks, of course. I seem to recall a brand of Mildara sherry named for teal ducks: is it an oloroso, and do they still manufacture it? Teal feathers are the shining wing feathers that flash, an instant distinction. Kingfishers are good at that as well. Flights of teal thoughts divert before visitors arrive, Bridie and Carol with masks, New Yorkers, manga books, fresh clothes, and postal vote forms. Politics again, but then it’s the season, right? Bridie examines the Senate voting form, commenting that last election she noticed it’s twice the length of the cardboard voting booth. Now she can vote. We talk about how Kooyong could do a Mackellar in colour language. If Blue and Teal get about the same number of votes, then Red and Green send their preferences to Teal, Blue will lose its blue-ribbon seat. This is making for an interesting contest in many electorates, though not Jagajaga in Austin Hospital country, which has been Labor for generations. Teal might be a combination of Blue and Green, but that’s not the whole story in this case.

They

 

Hospital in May

Every second person attending asks for your name and date of birth. They are there through the uninformative hours waiting for your call. Their information of you could not be more direct, at the choice moment it is time to speak. They copy your latest personal statistics into endless diaries of full profile. They calm you down and don’t mince words. Their chit-chat is light on loiter. Every second person is about to up your dosage, down your dosage, take your sample, and report a result. They carry receptacles and implements purposefully designed for your ultimate survival. Their hands as quickly tear open a bag of squeaky gloves, a strip of sanitised handkerchief, a sachet of swabs. They observe every quaver of your body, your change of expression, your walk and your rest, your talk and your silence. You are the very best example of you that fits their condition description. They incise the healing wound then bandage you in advanced scientific materials. They provision the oral, fine-line the syringe, air-drop the drip. Their patient overload keeps the converse between flat-chat facts and reasoned comments. Their verbal highlights are diagnosis of fever, re-explanations of body reckonings, sightings of ooze. They tap the results into screens, stand still as sentinels at their tall desks on casters, a caravan of surgeon and his colleagues transit through, a doctor and his student doctor, their flying visit or in-depth analysis. They note and save, click and save, scroll and close. They mental tick the scree of tablets, the script of issues, the look in your eye. They have the details in their head and the medications at their fingertips. Their backup tubes and guards in cabinets and shelves line the corridors, deep banks of linen and towelling and cotton gowns, a dash they make for a fresh blister pack. They are here then not here, there where need presses, an emergency call to a hyper-event somewhere in the maze, a unit in at the reaction. Every third person hands you a two-day menu, cross the boxes and escape all fats. They ferry a squarish jug of water clinking 15 ice-cubes. Their trays of covered meals and zip punnets of fruit in juice slide into place before the eyes. Through the uninformative hours you may dine on best Australian produce, fresh and fulfilling as an autumn morning. They leave you to your bed, centre of their current attention, your current adventure. Their shifts turn morning into afternoon, afternoon to evening, the faces changing, the routines the same. They uproot the used cannula from the vein, tear bandages from skin with hair, test press the lunar-pocked arm for a fresh jab site, the bloodstream alive to the idea. They leave you to soft night, all your readings looking pretty good.

Oxygen

 

Hospital in May

Oxygen, we take for granted. Most of us don’t think about oxygen from one moment to the next. There it goes, feeding our thoughts every minute of the day, yet we don’t give it a second thought. Nurses think about oxygen regularly. In a flash they look up to check that the flow is going, the level is right, the air is breathing. They think about oxygen the way we think about time. By which I mean, what time is it now? We are likely to treat an oxygen tank as absurdist, at first. Isn’t the whole world an oxygen tank? The large letters of the word go the length of the tank in capital letters, but this is no cartoon, rather the air we intake, as the creatures will tell you and the trees are free to remind us, any old time. Once upon a time I went through a phase of reading a Canadian poet whose most famous poem is about beach glass. Another captivating poem of hers was a landscape with vast atmospheric sky. In order to affect airiness, all the words of her long poem were double-spaced apart both by line and sentence sequence. Punctuation was more or less dispensed with, freeing further the airy poetry, immensely enough oxygen to go around. Technically speaking this was a concrete poem, even though it celebrates the very opposite of concrete. Shape poem is a more helpful term, the spaces between the words illustrating with a naïve quick trick of illusion how oxygen runs the world. Charming as this landscape in words may be, the message is immediate. More difficult is to follow the same rules to write effectively about the airiness of a hospital ward. A comprehensive list of medical furniture, drug names, drips and drains, cannulas and monitors, spaced across several pages, may never get us to think about oxygen, or be thankful, even though life depends on it from a depending tube. The ward corridors of this hospital are well-spaced with paintings by the Heidelberg School. I tread carefully towards them on my frame as I do a lap of the ward. Each artist is fixed upon the colours of the Yarra floodplain in this part of town, the marvellous shapes of tree and mountain, and each has their own way of getting those factors right. Each is distinctively their own landscapist. And each is wanting to render atmosphere, that invisible source of life no matter how many clouds we gaze at, at the time. By which they mean, what time is it now? I spend some time deep-breathing, deep-breath-hold-breathe-away-cough, as I enjoy their oxygen of immense airiness, the way clouds are moving just so no rush, the way she-oaks are lungs alive along a crest of Eaglemont, the way magpies are flying between the trees in colours reminiscent of an absurdist oxygen tank, with wild warblings that are straight magpie.

Reichian

 

Hospital in May

A little night music strums the inner ear courtesy of composer Steve Reich and his rich rare friends, magical notes every one through the Spotify tube. I hear curious resonances from the days in care, things that go bump in the night. Music for Nine White Tablets in a Paper Thimble, for example, rattles their condition signifiers, loud clicks that pop inside the very brain methinks. Ambient rush of iced water, one mouthful, sends the music down the throat for hours of almost Mozartian pain relief. This music, for which we may send out a small ovation of thanks. Melbourne water, only the best. Don’t say it, spray it. Music for Corridor of Beeping Monitors, the permanent Reichian 4/4 beep at one pace and tone for the entire sequence sets a sort of dripfeed drone as other monitors beep in and out of tempo to the main drive, at least one beep set to draw in thin air the Fibonacci Sequence. Fandom will discern something more than the random. Music for Name, Date of Birth, and Allergies. This repetition masterpiece goes for several days, each performance the length of one patient’s hospital stay. The best way to appreciate the work is to do it yourself. Nurses and doctors at any moment, from admission through to discharge, ask you for your name, date of birth and allergies. Seems simplicity itself. Reich said the same in a recent interview. Reviewers are divided as to whether the effects fall into the category of euphoria or delirium. Music for Deep Breath and Oxygen Tube, in which deep breaths in and out again, in and out again, in and out again restore the collapsed lung, all the while interspersed with cheerful little bubbles of oxygen regularly spurting into nostrils. For further information, listeners are directed to Reich’s seminal lecture ‘The Flow is Going, the Level is Right, the Air is Breathing : Thinking about Oxygen is the Way We Think about Time.’ Music For Blood Pressure Cuff, Thermometer, and Stethoscope utilises these classical instruments of the repertoire into a surging rising and falling heartbeat rhythm, transforming the regular hourly check-up into a percussive anthem that you don’t want to stop. Music for Disposable Medical Gloves. This gem from the Reich back catalogue enjoys a well-deserved revival. Purple gloves, and blue, are thwacked into shape, blown open for palm and fingers, stretched with those stretchy latex sounds, smoothed like the sea, readjusted squeakily, for each new procedure of the visit. Each procedure is subtly different from every other procedure, their repetitions different in every case. Job done, the team of glovers strip their instruments from their hands, rummage them into gaia balls, pop in a bin. Asked about the meaning of this work, Reich replied with his trademark laidback good humour, “It’s simplicity itself.”

Healing

Hospital in May

The blood blister on my righthand snuff box, caused by a blood test needle pre-op, blackened like a moon’s dark side, lifted into scab and has now dropped off. Pockmarks from similar needles, several a day in intensive, fade as circles inside green bruises, and mauve. I may joke that my arms are lunar landscapes. They are replenished thoroughly by more water than can be found in the Sea of Tranquillity. Rips from round bandaids have pinkified across freckled skin, a jab at a time. Nine days out from the operation, the heart is more in order now than it must have been for some time. Late at night the beat increases, with no fear now that increase will turn into chest pain. Homer’s graphic moments of spearhead cutting bone and live sinew flow in the mind. An invasion can maim or kill, the poet leaving us hanging at the point of the deed. Nothing so dramatic or deadly occurred in the theatre, yet it is necessary to imagine the knife weaving between the chest muscles, tending ever so gently around precious organs, drawing a fine line down the breastbone. It is that rupture to the norm will take the longest time to heal, as bone melds again into bone to hold the ribcage firm. Lungs learn anew how to breathe easy. On the ninth day after the operation it hurts to laugh, whatever the standard of the humour. Finely stitched with thinnest steel, the sternum keeps on doing what it was designed to do, not letting anything out, keeping it all in. A darkening crimson band , part-billabong, now heals from clavicle to navel. The doctors are happy, the surgeon explains how flesh rejoins as it’s designed to do, nurses hover for the latest reading or a cup of pills. Their expressions say everything is healing, swimmingly, without saying a word. Masks cannot hide their friendly eyes. Shock of catheters is in the past. Miracle cannulas have left the bloodstream to resume its banks. Rainbows of wires have gone from the scene. Only a few silk sutures stay in place beneath a strip for time of removal, as hair returns little by little to the shaven chest. Healing is the blood-rich line of the left forearm and healing is the blood-rich line along the right calf. Straight streams firm, billabongs and all. An arm bandage secures the incision that now folds back in on itself, the lost vein reinventing itself as well, as the body will. How this reinvention takes place is ultimately beyond modern medicine, explicable perhaps when sun helped form flesh in a time no machine can tabulate, beeping the odd hours, keeping arteries mobile. The Achilles tendon escaped the blade, thanks be to the perception and skill of the surgeon, the calf soon rebandaged for recovery, with only small winces when pressure is applied upon a slight wrong angle when standing.

Sleep

 

Hospital in May

Sleep, the subject, comes around regularly as night follows day. How pleasant to think about that over which we have no control, more pleasant anyway than death and taxes. Today the newspaper has a fresh article on the ancient habit, if we may call sleep a habit. The eight-hour day honours eight-hours sleep, those hours spent not working and not being recreational. Sacrosanct is the time our body spends each day asleep. It is a sign of good health. After the news of the heart-attack I began reflecting on sleep patterns in the past year, going to bed early, power naps surpassing 45 minutes into REM extravaganzas, snoozy snatches on the couch. The heart wasn’t dealing with disease, my body craved more than eight hours every day. Exercise was not as attractive as shut-eye. My body craved a normative pattern. The newspaper says sleep time patterns vary and sleep shortens as we age. We ponder whether aging grows with memory, if our world makes more sense at later stages, now there’s a way to judge what’s worth thinking about, what is not, and how good sleep is dreamt up from such awareness. We cannot break the habit of a lifetime, we would have sleep that goes unbroken. Or do we? The newspaper recommends reading or listening to ambient when we wake in the night. I don’t see how this is any different from playing with our apps or browsing our email details in dead of night: the energy levels are going to increase, distraction will keep us awake. The reason we wake in the middle of the night, it’s called biphasic, varies so personally anything might be going on. Our One Brain has a trail of trials that won’t instantly be resolved listening to the music of Brian Eno. My sleep is biphasic, divided in two by the simple need to have a widdle. Such is the regularity of this break from dream transmission, I am soon enough returned uninterrupted to my prior stream of consciousness. Hospital has turned my sleep temporarily polyphasic, hour after hour of blood tests, stomach needles, drug stops, flying doctors, numberless nurses. In hospital, anaesthetic releases us from all such thoughts, into a sleep of immeasurable peace. Morphine keeps the dull body ache at bay for hours. Adjustable beds glide or tilt or elevate me into restful reclines previously unimagined, all in the name of sleep. Though uninterrupted blissful sleep may also be induced by the simplest, inartificial of means. On election night (21^st May 2022) in the hospital, the following statement from ageless psephologist Antony Green, sometime after 9 pm, helped me drift off happily into the sleep of the just: “On the figures I’m looking at here, I cannot see the Coalition holding on to more than sixty seats.” Two Panadol also helped.

Royal

 

Hospital in May

Sunday. After two weeks, dear Diary, we experience unusual moments when we believe this is how monarchs pass the time. Persons arrive at the bedside, say what they have to say, then retreat again into the labyrinth of the institution. Then more of them. Doctors, for example, and we are sure you have experienced this at some time (journals being timeless much of the time), land post-haste at our right hand to deliver news from the interior. Revolts of the system, or against the system, revolts anyway are now under control, though it was a close thing and good they got onto it straight away. Surgeons are cool subjects to have around and we thank them for this blessed extension to our earthly mortality. We are left feeling very important as they dash off in their flowing gowns. Very important indeed. Monday. Nurses are helpful with all the science, science being the object of our continuous gratitude, and the nurses. We find however that nurses are good practice for our schooling in advanced diplomacy. We find that five nurses means five opinions, not always consistent, indeed of variable verity. Monarchs must be grateful for all expert advice while apprising the situation, but a measure of common sense is necessary in any reading of flat contradictions. We thank them one and all, but keep our own counsel. Tuesday. Transfer from hospital to rehabilitation today. Pleased to note the task being allocated to Royal Flying Doctors. We are elevated into the vehicle and fixed into place, from which elevation we may wave modestly to everyone as we travel the high road to our preordained destination. Not everyone returns the wave, yet our spirit is free, released with a new inner life. Wednesday. Courtiers come and go with practical flurry. Doctors again, a mine of figures, the figures all mine. Menu Lady, copying our requests in precise detail into her food map. Cleaners, pleasantries exchanged. Nurses, more needles and medications and figure-finding and opinions, to which we nod in agreement. Physiotherapists, we don’t have enough. Occupational therapists, tell us to limit our engagements. Thursday. Family visits. These people are outstandingly excellent. They speak our language. They fill the room with humour, nor do they depart after five minutes. Finest raiment is bestowed, carefully chosen for our very needs and taste. They observe our mood, tell us to stay on our throne, don’t stress and other sage suggestions. Our heartfelt acquiescence is true, after all there is only one me. They festoon the ledges with cards. Talk news from the provinces. Friday. Morning: newspapers and despatches. Prime ministers! Cannot live with them, cannot live without them. That Orstralian fellow said he was a bulldozer. Hard to disagree. Afternoon: pedicure.

 

Murmuration

 

Hospital in May

Day 3 of hospitalisation was my birthday, the seventh of May. That’s the day when my cardiologist said “we are looking at 30 years here. We’ll talk again soon.” Bridie gave me new Derwent pastel pencils in a tin box, a packet of Smiggle twin tips, and two drawing books. Carol’s present was another kind of book, ‘Hungry Heart Roaming : an Odyssey of Sorts’ by the Cambridge Shakespeare scholar Charles Moseley. We had been enthusing about this book before any of the heart business started, so the title was apposite, not some secret message. It’s a memoir based entirely on travels he has made through his long life. Site-seeing is almost redundant, Moseley’s interest being in the meaning places gave him at different ages, personal connections rather than a pack of wow moments. The first hundred pages, for example, recount his honeymoon in Greece, sometime in the early sixties, interest being in personal encounters and the handmade past of word and construction, speaking to the present. Early on, he says that he had for a while considered an alternative title for his book, ‘Murmurations’. One description goes: “Then: across the level vastness of the Fen, against that bright sky, sudden, first one black speck, then another, then a whole cloud, like crowding thoughts, swirls and swoops, swift, now dense black … billowing as thundercloud … thousands upon thousands of starlings.” Day 25 of hospitalisation finds me in Rehabilitation on a picturesque hilltop of eastern Melbourne. At least two nurses have said I have the best room in the hospital, secluded and with vistas across large back gardens towards Kinglake. Both picture windows afford views all day, much to my surprise and delight, of smaller and larger murmurations, parading across housetops and treetops. I am not going to try and draw any of these murmurations, as their large curving shapes change so quickly in the air it is impossible to capture even an outline before the birds have glided into a new formation. Smiggles might make a nice abstract out of dot points, maybe, while the phone cannot get closer than the windowpane to catch the scale and movement of dozens of birds together in group flight. Instead, I prop my phone against the glass in hope of getting at least one fuzzy, nay thin, representation. More fun is playing what’s that bird. My Melbourne hilltop affords a sight of shape-shifting flocks of black wings, same as anywhere in the world. Cockatoos? Galahs? Pressing myself close to the window, I occasionally get lucky with identification. Moseley says: “The single starling never sees the dance of the murmuration. Just so, I, like a starling, know there is a dance out there but can only know the steps I myself take. So let me tell my story, my memory …”

Physiotherapy

 

Hospital in May

It is one step at a time in the physiotherapy room. Many of the patients arrive in wheelchairs. Others are already at work on elbow circles and shoulder shrugs, mentally counting out their two lots of twelve, their bid at improvement. This is the world of the next ten minutes. Life is walking on the spot, or as likely a square of blue foam rubber, balancing the bilateral. It is sit to stand and stand to sit. “How was that?” asks the sprightly physio of Frank, who returns an effort of smile in a cloud of exhaustion. Broken ribs have not dimmed self-composure nor his desire to finish the exercise, a gentle sashay along the parallel bars, barely perceptible movements, breathing okay. Followed by marching on the spot, thirty seconds. Our bodies have known grander days pre-operation, that strain today and sag far behind our minds. Our active minds would sprint to the closest coffee shop, while our bodies remain in their chairs for the next ten minutes, learning limits. The Rehabilitation Hospital has fifty physios all told, half a dozen working the room at any one time, matching the patient’s surgery with their capability, the damage with the goals, the pain with a minimised effort. Achievements in miniscule notations the physio enters into each personal logbook. Noel is tall and slightly bent, would have been a ruckman in the school team, who today squats, three lots of ten, both hands firmly holding the bar. Heyday was a tap to the rover for a snap goal, that post-operation completes bicep curls, three sets of 12, a one kilo dumbbell in each hand. “That’s all for today.” The falls enter the physiotherapy room with little steps. There is John, a veteran of striding, before the fall. That wasn’t meant to happen, or, That doesn’t happen, or, What happened there. Collateral damage keeps John at a steadying pace behind his frame, easing his way uneasily along the bars. “Just in your own time.” Then there’s Maeve and Joan, falls, who have both passed 100 and laugh because Joan was born in July and is therefore older than Maeve. They raise their arms above their heads, or lever them up and down in front of their bodies, two lots of twelve, like saluting the sun in the sitting position, then they rest. “I’ll need a nap after all of this.” Crutches lean against mirror walls, ready to raise Michelle to her full height. Her stoic gaze could fill a book. Ian was designing computers before there were computers. The oxygen peg on his middle finger reads the particulars while he recovers breath from resisted chest presses, three sets of twelve. The new wounds join the old wounds in the exercise yard. The brisk physio is all friendly commands and rote questions. “How would you rate all of that? Easy? Moderate? Hard? Very hard?”

 

 

Bedside

 

Hospital in May

Bedside Glossary. Blanket: a two-dimensional intricate layer designed to accommodate the patient’s every three-dimensional stretch, curl, turnover, turnback, layout, quasi-shiver, cuddle, hang-loose, breathing in, breathing out, deep dream warmly and effectively for forgotten durations. Card: a colourful gate that opens towards the patient like a handwave or a blessing with get well soon, thoughtful, lined along the sill to join a street of gates, the patient’s caring neighbourhood watch. Flower: a paradox of petal and stem saying get well soon, its own life drastically shortened in so doing; saying, thinking of you; its other thoughts similar to the patient, here comes the sun; typically arrives in groups of paradoxes, with handwave gate, beribboned. Jug: a glass round-tower reflecting red light switches, orange apparatus indicators, nightlight white stripes, blinking fixtures, its ice blocks melting to cool midnight dry throat and here comes daybreak Panadol revival. Log: a scrupulous compendium of blood pressures and temperatures and medications and the patient’s midday confessions about where it hurts; huddled over by doctors, their bedtime reading, coming along swimmingly. Phone: an oblong black universe held in the hand, once pressed offers the known world in bright-lit slides that flip the news, snap happenstance apps, private message get well soon, go ogle whatever. Remote: a spaceship-shaped hand device devised to delve every corner of the patient’s personal universe, the room wherein hours become years and years eons, switching on a nightlight, beaming up the television mooning in the ceiling, alerting nurse during an imagined relapse. Spectacles: a device that, propped on the nose, makes larger than life the steadying words of the occupational therapist, in essence never spend more than ten minutes on any task; otherwise a coagulation of scripts. Stitch: an invisible mending further repaired by flesh, holds ribs secure; a bind that breathing makes home. Tablet: typically a white pebble that, once consumed, stops things, or starts things, increases things, decreases things, thickens things, or thins them, speeds up things, slows them down, for a while, before another white pebble must be consumed, and so on, and so forth, ever your most humble servant. Tray: a magic platform gliding into place from the invisible kitchen, loaded with breakfasts, lunches, dinners, thereafter perforce a pile of empty cartons, crumpled napkins, cutlery awry, thence away to the invisible washing-up. Window: a transparent device, like spectacles, to remind the patient of the past and future world beyond the precious confines of operations and recoveries; to offer promise of life beyond get well soon and just taking your temperature.