Waste Land to a Scream: A Gay Science

Novel 008

8. “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” Nietzsche

17 October 1914 South of Paris in a warehouse of Hospital

There was silence in cavernous rapture and the Dooms coming dinn. There were firecrackers excluded into quiet because there was no light in the corridors - because he was blind. He jerked upwards and tried to see all the commotion he looked left he looked right and still there was no sense of vision. He clawed at his airway hoping that this was only a dream and that he should still wake up and see. But there was no vision and his eyes were clawing against the bars so fine against the skin bruised and harried. And yet he could feel the rapture on his neck making disglorious light upon this gleaming sun. But it was still weak because the thin rays worked, going down in two solstice darkness. He did also feel the heat from below which did not have the strength of light but the sultriness which warmed the cockles on the coals.

Then a fluttering movement stemmed the tide and he could feel the soft touch which gently wafted until a voice from out of the everywhere gently whispered: “It is all right you are safe here.” At once the limbs calmed and he knew that there was no vision yet that entered in from the eyes. He was blind. Then he managed to move his face to nod that he had understood her and that he understood the French that she spoke. Then he rested.

Then he realized that he was expended in the battle games and left to be stamped out and lost - like a bullet expended and used. He then settled down into the wool blankets and rested. He was stretching his ligaments out. And his hearers still made entryway for the sounds - the gurgling of the dying trying yet to hold on to a scrap of the living and tell there was no hope. This came from all around him with each man going from life to death.

And yet from all of the dying in the many beds, he could also hear the living tending towards the respiration - it was the nurses who quietly discussed both the men who were grasping on towards life and the world beyond the hospital walls.

He heard the voices of two nurses, low and rumbling.

“It seems such a pity that almost all of the men will be dispatched.”

“Do not think about it or it will drive you mad. Think of it as the grass pushing its way up for a new beginning. Think of it as a sweet beginning rather than as a sorrowful interment.”

“You do seem to be able to find the Golden ratio in such debased times.”

“The hospital is meant for what it is meant for. And we are merely players in that grand sequence.”

“But why is it so?”

“You shall have two ask the men who command.”

“Must it always the so?”

“Perhaps this will sting the conscience of the King and we shall no longer vote to go to war on the blathering of Kings and monarchs.”

He could hear the silence even though he could tell that three men had died while the two nurses were talking. And he realized that the nurses did not really care: it was their duty to bury the dead but not to care about the men who had died. It occurred to him that like himself the two nurses were young and fresh. They were little used to the world as it existed

It fell on the right side of his gurgling intestines. He realized that his life essence was re-awakening and that there would be another day, even if it was blind to his eyes. At least it would be another day.

A solis ortu usque ad occasum.