Nobody heard the shots. All the houses in the neighbourhood were too well insulated for sound ever to get in or out. A sound wanting in or out of Dwayne's dream house, for instance, had to go through an inch and a half of plasterboard, a polystyrene vapour barrier, a sheet of aluminium foil, a three-inch airspace, another sheet of aluminium foil, a three-inch blanket of glass wool, another sheet of aluminium foil, one inch of insulating board made of pressed sawdust, tarpaper, one inch of wood sheathing, more tarpaper, and then aluminium siding which was hollow. The space in the siding was filled with a miracle insulating material developed for use on rockets to the Moon.
[Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut, K.]
Monday, 3 November 2014
...of Armistice Day
So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance,
And all music is.
- PHILBOYD STUDGE
[Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut, K.]
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance,
And all music is.
- PHILBOYD STUDGE
[Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut, K.]
Friday, 31 October 2014
...of libraries
I felt the excitement tinged with gloom and foreboding that I first experienced when I was ten and joined the town library (called formidably Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute) and could not get in without passing the wicked-looking stuffed moa standing at the foot of the stairs, and a sharp-tongued librarian who sat behind a grille dispensing tickets and fines and books and keeping her eye on the adjoining Reading Room where the old men sat, petrified by the SILENCE notices.
It seemed to me that books must be wonderful treasures if they were to be reached only at the end of such a forbidding journey, and that books were only for brave people who were not afraid of giant stuffed birds with glass eyes.
And the fact that there were notices demanding Silence when one would never have dreamed of speaking made it seem, that the room contained secret presences which had to be controlled and which related in a strange way the death and painstaking reconstruction of the moa and the mice-like letters that were wired with meaning and resurrected to make words, and placed in imposing attitudes on the pages of the books. So it was for her own protection that the librarian hid behind a grille and pinned notices on the wall; she had to make every effort to subdue more than the timid subscribers tiptoeing between the shelves.
[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]
It seemed to me that books must be wonderful treasures if they were to be reached only at the end of such a forbidding journey, and that books were only for brave people who were not afraid of giant stuffed birds with glass eyes.
And the fact that there were notices demanding Silence when one would never have dreamed of speaking made it seem, that the room contained secret presences which had to be controlled and which related in a strange way the death and painstaking reconstruction of the moa and the mice-like letters that were wired with meaning and resurrected to make words, and placed in imposing attitudes on the pages of the books. So it was for her own protection that the librarian hid behind a grille and pinned notices on the wall; she had to make every effort to subdue more than the timid subscribers tiptoeing between the shelves.
[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]
...of pride
There were no people in strait jackets in Ward Two. Cynics used to say there was no need for them as the worst patients had perished in the fire; yet the more experience one had of Ward Two the more one realised that, in any case, strait jackets were treatments, or restraining processes of the past. Whereas in Treecroft the best-cooked meals (and the most plentiful), the gayest pictures, the brightest bedspreads were to be found in Ward Seven where the so called "sensible" patients lived, in Cliffhaven the brightest ward was Ward Two - that is, in terms of purely chromatic dispersion! And let no one imagine that the framed glassed landscapes on the walls suffered from the attacks of the disturbed patients. Although the surroundings were not openly studied or even admired by the patients, they were not abused. Windows might be broken in the course of a day yet the pictures remained untouched and the flowers stayed in their vases. It seemed that the more articulate members of the ward exuded a fertile pride that spread and flourished silently even in the midst of what one might have called the desert of the most withdrawn patients.
[Faces in the Water, Frame. J]
[Faces in the Water, Frame. J]
...of old men
Sunday was a pleasant day compared with the rest of the week. No shock treatment, church in the morning, in the afternoon a walk in the grounds perhaps up past the poplars away up the hill past the wooden building where some of the men lived, the old doddering ones who could only sit out in the sun and the younger mongols and imbeciles who gave a simple help around the farm and in the garden. A rope clothesline sagging with their striped ward clothes was stretched between two poles at the back door. Sometimes we saw a face peering at us from the curtain less windows; or a little group sitting in the sun staring, their lips moving in the way old people have, as if in their life they have never been able to say what they needed to say of have never had anyone to say it to, and now when they are old they babble on and on not minding the words, only to get it said in time. While you are alive and persist in the sovereign act of living you are surrounded by invisible courtiers of being which keep your self spruce and well fed, as the bees attend their queen; but when you are near death these courtiers neglect you or even join forces to kill you and acquire the inner, unkempt look of the dying. The unkemptness of these old men showed from within, beyond the shabby appearance of their braces hitching their pants anyhow, their unbuttoned flies, their flannel shirts bunched out, hanging loose.
When we passed their dining room and looked in at the bare wooden tables already laid for tea with the thick cup, plate and spoon at each place, I was depressed by the dreariness of a day where tea is prepared for immediately after dinner. After tea, no doubt, the old men were put to bed at once, in the daylight. I wanted to go in the dining room and put a white cloth and flowers on the long tables. The authorities in some of the hospital wards of the world had learned - it had been reported in the newspapers, with headlines - that flowers "helped." Could they have helped in this men's ward? Perhaps not. It seemed to be a place where there was no one home. I was reminded of the times my father used to come home from work and my mother was perhaps in the garden or the lavatory or talking to one of the neighbours over the fence, and a look of panic would cross my father's face as he walked into the empty kitchen.
"Where's Mum?" he would say.
And I was reminded of a poem we used to say at school, a mysterious poem beginning "'Is there anybody there?' said the traveler, knocking on the moonlit door." A traveler could knock for years at the door of that dismal ward; he could even shout, like the traveler in the poem, "Tell them I came!" and he could get no answer. The old men were dead though their mouths moved and they snaffled their tea and Borstal cake; though they sat in the gentle sun with their long sharp afternoon shadows, their only companions, lying motionless and dumb beside them.
[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]
When we passed their dining room and looked in at the bare wooden tables already laid for tea with the thick cup, plate and spoon at each place, I was depressed by the dreariness of a day where tea is prepared for immediately after dinner. After tea, no doubt, the old men were put to bed at once, in the daylight. I wanted to go in the dining room and put a white cloth and flowers on the long tables. The authorities in some of the hospital wards of the world had learned - it had been reported in the newspapers, with headlines - that flowers "helped." Could they have helped in this men's ward? Perhaps not. It seemed to be a place where there was no one home. I was reminded of the times my father used to come home from work and my mother was perhaps in the garden or the lavatory or talking to one of the neighbours over the fence, and a look of panic would cross my father's face as he walked into the empty kitchen.
"Where's Mum?" he would say.
And I was reminded of a poem we used to say at school, a mysterious poem beginning "'Is there anybody there?' said the traveler, knocking on the moonlit door." A traveler could knock for years at the door of that dismal ward; he could even shout, like the traveler in the poem, "Tell them I came!" and he could get no answer. The old men were dead though their mouths moved and they snaffled their tea and Borstal cake; though they sat in the gentle sun with their long sharp afternoon shadows, their only companions, lying motionless and dumb beside them.
[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]
...of the institutionalised
This process is supervised by Mrs. Everett and Mrs. Pilling who share control of kitchen affairs and are responsible for the fire. It is Mrs. Pilling (the most trusted patient in the ward) who also arranges the making of toast over the open fire in the morning, the collecting of bread and cream, the carrying out to the side door of the full pig-tin ready for the golden-haired pig-boy to pick up on his way to the farm driving the leisurely old cart horse. When the tin has been loaded on the back he rummages through the food, bypassing the cold skills bog of leftover porridge and reaching for the more appetising dainties of discarded toast and sodden pieces of currant bun, all of which he stuffs hungrily in his mouth and, chewing contentedly, climbs again to the front of the cart and with a tug of the reins and a "Gee-up" sets the morose but patient horse on his way. Mrs. Pilling in her undemonstrative silent manner has an understanding with the pig-boy and though she recoils from his habits she has a stolid tolerance and respect for other people's peculiarities and is inclined to act out of character herself in order to preserve someone else's individuality.
She sometimes leaves a slice of staff cake on the pig-tin. It seems that she has no husband no children no relatives. She never has visitors. She never speaks of her personal concern; one is seldom aware that she has any. She has lived for many years in the hospital and has a small room at the end of the T.B. corridor; one is surprised on passing it to notice that it has a cosy appearance as far as that is possible in a room in a mental hospital. She is allowed to keep her overcoat. It hangs behind the door. There is a feminine smell of powder and clothes. At one time someone must have given her a potted plant; it now stands on a chair in one corner, and an old calendar of five years ago, presumably kept for its old-fashioned English country scene, hangs over the hole in the centre of the door so that the nurses may not peep in at her in the night She is allowed that privacy.
Her sobriety, her apparent acceptance of a way of life that will continue until she dies - these frighten me. She seems like someone who could set up camp in a graveyard and continue to boil the billy, eat and sleep soundly and perhaps spend the day polishing the tombstones or weeding the graves. One watches her for a ripple of herself as one watches an eternally calm lake for evidence of the rumoured creature inhabiting perhaps "deeper than ever plummet sounded". One needs a machine like a bathysphere to find Mrs. Pilling. A bathysphere of fear? Of love?
[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]
She sometimes leaves a slice of staff cake on the pig-tin. It seems that she has no husband no children no relatives. She never has visitors. She never speaks of her personal concern; one is seldom aware that she has any. She has lived for many years in the hospital and has a small room at the end of the T.B. corridor; one is surprised on passing it to notice that it has a cosy appearance as far as that is possible in a room in a mental hospital. She is allowed to keep her overcoat. It hangs behind the door. There is a feminine smell of powder and clothes. At one time someone must have given her a potted plant; it now stands on a chair in one corner, and an old calendar of five years ago, presumably kept for its old-fashioned English country scene, hangs over the hole in the centre of the door so that the nurses may not peep in at her in the night She is allowed that privacy.
Her sobriety, her apparent acceptance of a way of life that will continue until she dies - these frighten me. She seems like someone who could set up camp in a graveyard and continue to boil the billy, eat and sleep soundly and perhaps spend the day polishing the tombstones or weeding the graves. One watches her for a ripple of herself as one watches an eternally calm lake for evidence of the rumoured creature inhabiting perhaps "deeper than ever plummet sounded". One needs a machine like a bathysphere to find Mrs. Pilling. A bathysphere of fear? Of love?
[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
...of inaccuracy
In any event, none of the few other books I have noticed over there interests me remarkably either.
Although I am perhaps forgetting the one-volume selection from among the Greek plays, which is an edition I had never seen before.
Conversely, I have no more intention of ever opening something called The Origin of Table Manners than I do of reading the book about grass.
One other is actually called The Eiffel Tower, of all nonsense subjects.
There is naturally nothing in any of the plays about anyone menstruating, incidentally.
Although when one comes right down to it, one can often make an educated guess about that sort of thing despite the silence.
One has a fairly acute inkling as to when Cassandra may be having her period, for instance.
Cassandra is feeling out of sorts again, one can even imagine Troilus or certain of the other Trojans now and again saying.
Then again, Helen could be having hers even when she still possesses that radiant dignity, being Helen.
My own generally makes my face turn puffy.
One is next to positive that Sappho would have never beaten around the bush about any of this, on the other hand.
Which could well explain why certain of her poems were used as the stuffing for mummies, even before the friars got their hands on those that were left.
[Wittgenstein's Mistress, Markson, D.]
Although I am perhaps forgetting the one-volume selection from among the Greek plays, which is an edition I had never seen before.
Conversely, I have no more intention of ever opening something called The Origin of Table Manners than I do of reading the book about grass.
One other is actually called The Eiffel Tower, of all nonsense subjects.
There is naturally nothing in any of the plays about anyone menstruating, incidentally.
Although when one comes right down to it, one can often make an educated guess about that sort of thing despite the silence.
One has a fairly acute inkling as to when Cassandra may be having her period, for instance.
Cassandra is feeling out of sorts again, one can even imagine Troilus or certain of the other Trojans now and again saying.
Then again, Helen could be having hers even when she still possesses that radiant dignity, being Helen.
My own generally makes my face turn puffy.
One is next to positive that Sappho would have never beaten around the bush about any of this, on the other hand.
Which could well explain why certain of her poems were used as the stuffing for mummies, even before the friars got their hands on those that were left.
[Wittgenstein's Mistress, Markson, D.]
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