Post-Op and Cobalt Blue

POST-OP AND COBALT BLUE

The night ward was a tent, and he was in the jungle; noise and chatter clattered through his dreams. His mind was light and frayed and full of chimeras. Every time he closed his eyes some weird, disjointed imagery took him gradually away from logical thought. Little by little the anaesthetic loosed its grip. He begged to go. His doctor concurred though nurses demurred. They let him go, discharging him too soon, freeing him of their support.

Motivation is the key to life; there must be will. He wanted only to lie in bed or do the shortest tasks. Even those incomplete; he half-dressed, half tidied up, before once again lying banjaxed on the bed. A friend came round to cook, he struggled with the food. A friend with issues of his own so that tomato juice meant for breakfast disappeared into countless Bloody Marys, and later outside the friend was mugged, the product of inattention as well as felony.

At night he turned the lights off so thankfully. A bottle of cobalt blue from some tip or pharmacy twinkled on the window sill catching the light outside. Long days and weeks passed; he recovered slowly. He walked to his café but felt like Vasco da Gama. His heart beat unsteadily from the noisome effects of the chemotherapy. Let this only be learned, he thundered to himself. Let not poison be used to cure poison. The balance is too tricky, the fulcrum unsteady. Death by cancer can quickly become death by capecitabine, the fate of another friend. They meant well but medicine is too specialised and there is ignorance in the interstices between ologies.

Then a night in Bexhill by a windy shore. He heard the rigging of boats rattling round the masts, a empty echo of a sound as he was an empty shell. But he mended; his body somehow filled the gap of things removed. His mind began to engage; his soul’s hibernation was ending. There was a limit to the amount of afternoon television he could put up with- DIY and antiques, travel and cookery. Each has its place in the scheme of things, but he needed something more bespoke. For him alone he might have thought back then but is there anything that cannot be shared?

Nor did he forget what once had been. He thought of his poor friend. And he still saw the cobalt bottle. Its brilliant blue seemed to encapsulate everything that was once upon a time, the suffering, the ennui, the long pointless hours. All of it reflected and burnished in a piece of glass.

Hospitals are many things and attract diverse folk. At the centre are the doctors and nurses, and the patients. But healing comes in many forms, some unconsidered till adversity strikes. There is a Patients User Group liaising between the medics and the ministered to. A young woman is doing a study on her grounded version of object relations theory. Representation meets metaphor meets memory.

Recovery from illness is just the beginning if you want it to be. There are new contacts to be made, new groups to join, new things to discover and to research. Once he had been annoyed at how relatively young he was when the cancer struck him down. Now he could see possible benefits, plenty of resilience, plenty of opportunities left.

How do you describe a colour? It’s almost impossible. And the qualification there can only encompass dry-dust things like wavelength and a position on a spectrum. The nature of blueness, its essence, evades us. We have to focus on things that are blue or evoke comparisons. The blues for example, that great folk music of black people and their fellows in despair. Maybe blue is a cold sort of colour, lacking the warmth of red or yellow, or the naturalness of green. Yet he realised he dressed largely in blue, and that the two greatest expanses known to the human observer, the sea and the sky, are at their best observed, in reality or imagination, as blue. Blue must have something going for it.

All these things were part of the inner life of the recovering man. He knew he was the sort of man who needed a project, a project to study rather than to get his hands dirty on although one did not preclude the other. There was a gemstone he wanted to know more about, a gemstone that vaunted its blueness in its name- lapis lazuli. Its colour reminded him of his cherished bottle. Three men and a woman will now be partners in this story. There’s the man who is writing this and the man who is being written about. The third man will also be written about but by the second man. The woman writes about object relations and will give a presentation at a major London teaching hospital, and the men will all help her, but their help will be diluted the further they are down the metafictional chain that seems to have been created here.

This third man lived some five thousand years ago and was called Pancha. Because he came from the Land of the Five Rivers known in its native tongue (Sanskrit) as the Punjab. Because he was the fifth born son of his father and the others died in early infancy. And now the first man notices that there is also the matter of the five thousand years which he has not noticed earlier. So he enquires of the second man who is evasive.

Or perhaps the second man is too busy tracking down the origins and nature of lapis lazuli the sole source of which at that time seems to have been a mysterious civilisation from the Punjab who lived in brick houses all built to the same specification. Who left no records of leaders or military matters which seem to be engagingly absent from their lives. Conveniently for this story (and human civilisation of which it is but a tiny part) these people also seem to have built the first port from which they sailed west to the island of Dilhun, now known as Bahrain, and traded their lapis for arsenical bronze and horses with an extra rib.

The lapis moved ever further west and dallied in Egypt where it became the centrepiece of ornamental scarab beetles before being powdered and sprinkled on the eyelashes of a Hellenistic latter day Queen Pharaoh who dallied with two great Romans but came to grief when she tried it on with a third. Another millennium and nearly a half later it is being used by Italian Renaissance painters such as Sandor Botticelli for the blue robes of their Madonnas. It came of course from across the sea; by then it was known as ultramarine.

He contributed his bottle to her presentation as well as a poem concerning these matters now enlarged in prose. He still lurks among me. And the bottle, the objectification of illness, illness the process, a process which includes recovery. Hence this.