Futility

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

I was reminded of this poem by a dead body being found on Liesbeek Parkway earlier in the week and a tweet about the resulting traffic chaos that ensued. Not a pleasant event and this isn’t a hugely positive piece of poetry, but it is very powerful.

Futility by Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, –
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Owen was a soldier during World War I and documented the horrors of what he saw in the trenches of Northern France. He died a week before the conflict ended in November 1918. “The telegram of his death reached his parents as the bells were ringing out to announce the Armistice.”
He was 25 years old.

Classical music yesterday, classical poetry today. I think I’d better get some rap music and naked women on here tomorrow before my readership completely defects to Bangers and Nash.

Le Onde

It might not seem like a big deal for many people, but I didn’t enjoy being stuck in hospital, even though it was just for a couple of days. I was bored, sore, drugged, a bit scared. It wasn’t nice.

What kept me going was Ludovico Einaudi – more specifically his music – and even more specifically, his “Greatest Hits” collection Islands. One favourite track therein is Le Onde which translates as “The Waves” and it’s no big surprise to me I like it. As I said before I went in, the thing I’m looking forward to more than any other (save maybe from avoiding future excruciating abdominal pain) is getting back down onto the beach for some blustery walks near the sea.

Sadly, while I wanted to share the goodness of Le Onde with you, I couldn’t find a decent version online. Sure, there’s plenty of Einaudi stuff on Youtube, but I don’t expect you or anyone else to enjoy staring at a picture of an album cover for 5½ minutes (pretty though it may be).
The music is evocative, delicate, powerful – it deserves more than that.

So I did my own version:

 

The music is Einaudi’s (obviously – that’s the point of this whole thing).
The images are mine – taken in and around beautiful Cape Agulhas, South Africa. (Flickr)

And sure, it’s not professional in any way, shape or form. I have neither the software nor the talent to produce a masterpiece.
But it sums up what the music means to me. And that’s what’s important, right?

In addition, it gives you something to look at while you enjoy a few moments of calm in your otherwise hectic day.
You will feel better after watching this.  

Please feel free to let me know what you think. Be gentle. I am a sick man.

0834319513

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think that hanging bog roll from trees in Cape Town is art.

I’m not really sure that the 0834319513 “interactive social project” is art either, but at least they provide a bit of a laugh to Cape Town drivers and they clean up after themselves.

This one seemed particularly apt after the events up in Joburg today:

More images and information here.

Post-op thoughts

And so here I sit/slump/lie, mildly drugged, with several holes in my abdomen.

I’ve been out of hospital for a couple of days now and I’m making my way along the road to recovery. The op went well and I’m under doctor’s orders to take it easy. As he said, I can eat what I want, drink what I want and do what I want, but if he sees me before the scheduled follow-up appointment, then he’ll know that I have no common sense.
“The operation may be routine,” he told me when I first saw him, “but it should not be underestimated.”
A bit like life really. But he was right. While I was in and out of theatre within the prescribed 90 minutes, things went badly wrong for the patient across the ward from me – a nice older gent who had been doing the Cape Times crossword with his wife before I went in – who was having the same op with the same surgeon immediately after me.  He ended up in the High Care unit after 3 (4?) hours of surgery and had to go back under the knife the following day to attempt to rectify matters. I’m sad to say that I have no idea how things went. I’ll make a point to ask when I see the doc again.

Immediately after coming out of theatre, I was plied with morphine. I have a vague recollection of the nurse asking me if I was in pain. I was. She slipped some morphine into me and asked again. I seem to remember telling her that yes, it still hurt and she gave me some more. Things were going quite nicely at this point, and it seemed that I had quickly worked out an excellent system for legally obtaining copious amounts of opiates by just giving an affirmative single word answer. However, it rapidly fell apart when I missed her next question as I was too busy watching the huge gerbils chasing each other excitedly around the walls of the ward.

Sadly(?) I’m not on anything quite so strong now and my bedroom is a gerbil-free zone. But everything is still a bit fuzzy and though I have proof-read this post about 74 times already, I keep finding errors and those are the errors that I have found. Apologies for any that I have missed.

And so this is me for the moment, still a bit slow and a bit sore, having now learnt that you use your abdominal muscles for absolutely everything you do. Breathing, laughing, coughing, walking, any sort of movement whatsoever, sit-ups (OK, I knew that one already), dancing, abseiling… absolutely everything. I have tried to cut down on my painkillers already, but it’s not an option yet, and now my wife has asked me to do the shopping (online – no driving for 10 days).
It could yield some interesting  – but I hope at least entertaining – results.

I’ll let you know.

I can dream

Stuck as I am in a hospital bed (or, if things have gone horribly awry, a mortuary fridge) in the land-locked southern suburbs, I am probably unable to enjoy a nice sea view out of the window (there are no windows in a fridge).
So, I’ll probably be mostly dreaming of getting out and about again soon for some crashing surf and blustery beach walks on the Cape coast. Meanwhile, here’s a quick quota photo to keep me going:

Of course, if I actually am in a mortuary fridge, this is going to appear horribly creepy, so I should probably tell you that this was written pre-op, as there’s no wifi in here and my fingers are too stiff to type.