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“The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred;
No matter who it is, it is sacred;
Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere, just as much as the well-off—just as much as you;
Each has his or her place in the procession.”
Leaves of grass. I sing the body electric. Walt Whitman.
Painted plaster on tuff slabs
Late Classical-Early Hellenistic period, ca. 330-320 BCE
From Nola, loc. Cimitile, Tomba Weege 30 (formerly, erroneously, attributed to Paestum)
See Nola on Pleiades
Photographed on display at, and in the collection of, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN), Naples, Italy
Magna Grecia galleries
Former Carafa di Noja collection
Inv. 9363
My cast is horrible, uncomfortable, itchy, just horrible.
A friend of mine suggested sticking diamantes all over it. I held back and just decorated the edges!
Because of hand surgery, I'm having to spend six weeks in plaster. Sadly, this means no miniature making; however, since I'm left handed, it hasn't stopped me from working on the proper job (painting). Decided to prettify my horrible cast a bit... still itches, though.
Detail of former 2-layer plaster wall material with asbestos. Image also shows various animal hairs sticking-out of the grey/beige mortar-like material as well as residual fragments of wood fibers from former attachment to wooden wall lath.
This image is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you use the image, please credit www.medisave.co.uk. Thanks!
This image is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you use the image, please credit www.medisave.co.uk. Thanks!
This image is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you use the image, please credit www.medisave.co.uk. Thanks!
Detail view of a two-layer asbestos-containing plaster system material with white skim-coat and light grey-to-beige mortar-like base-coat. This image shows fine-grain aggregate mixed within the base-coat layer and various animal hairs protruding from the material as well as a distinct bundle of chrysotile asbestos fibers.
I turn my white plimsolls into door stops ! Dipped into wet wall plaster, filled inside and allowed to set
Yet another view of a vintage plaster sample containing two-layers, a white finish-coat and a beige base-coat. In this example, the base-coat shows asbestos fibers and animal hairs protruding from the material.
I was born in the ruins of Berlin. My father found me two days later. He’d left his unit to find his pregnant wife and escape to the west. He found her, too. Under the half ton of rubble where the upper floors had cascaded into my parents’ small apartment. She’d lived long enough for me to enter the darkness of her tomb and take my first choking breath of air filled with plaster dust. I’m told that I was still suckling her breast when the wreckage was cleared, the beams were parted above us, and my father’s face looked in upon the poignant scene. I don’t remember any of it.
Which is strange. Because my first memory is from inside the womb.
Just before exiting the birth canal, I felt a tug on my feet. I remember thinking – yes, thinking – that it might prevent my birth. So I kicked. The tugging grew more forceful, so I kicked harder. That did the trick, and I was born...
I don’t know what happened to my father. I was raised by a young girl who lived in the same apartment block, and whose family were lost in the air raid and building collapse. She told me that I was in her arms when she woke one morning. I was wrapped in a shabby Wehrmacht feldbluse and looking directly in her eyes when they opened. Her first reaction was to gasp, she said, not from the surprise of waking with a newborn in her arms, but from the awareness she saw in the depths of that newborn’s focused gaze. The impression was that of having her grandfather’s eyes reading her soul... So she says. I don’t remember that either.
In fact my second memory is of a dream months later. At least I took it for a dream.
A lone bomber, silver in a blue sky, white vapor trails in fading lines... A speck detaching from it, falling... then lost against the blue...
The speck became visible again half a minute or so later.
Plummeting down from the sky was a little boy - no, a bomb - or both, somehow. And somehow the bomber was also a mother... a mother who'd bred her kid to become a clinical agent of mass destruction.
I watched the little boy/bomb from my hospital room as it streaked toward me. In seconds it had sheared off the corner of a building in the hospital grounds, demolishing a quarter of the structure, then buried itself in the earth, sending a shudder through the window that I felt deep in my chest. There was no explosion. The fins of the huge bomb - it was definitely a bomb, now - appeared to be intact, sticking out of the hole where the monster hit the ground.
Or...
An instant after locating the speck again in the sky, I was looking directly into the sun. Except it wasn't the sun, but something else... something done...
I remember that my eyes were open as I woke, the glaring sunlight blinding and hot on my face. I took this to be what I experienced in the dream. At least, I did until many years later, when I learned more about my vision.
© Keith Ward 2007
This story began as a failed attempt to make the first line iambic pentameter... for a SF Sonnet. "I was born in the ruins of Berlin" refused to become iambic. So I had to write the tale as prose (and hopefully prose poetry, to some extent). It's an alternate history, as you might suspect from the parallel-but-divergent-threads dream - the (first) point of the split in the time streams. (The following occurred in the baseline - our own - time stream: Dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber named after a crewman's mother, Little Boy exploded over the Shima Surgical Hospital, about 185 yards from its intended target....).
[CAUTION: This next paragraph contains themes that may be disturbing to some.] [I'm one of them.]
The concept has spawned extensive research into the last months of WWII and post-WWII Germany (with a focus on Berlin) and Japan. I really don't want to write extensively, in detailed characterization, about the most horrific aspects of the fall of Germany and Berlin. The Red Army's weeks-long and repeated mass rape of 100,000+ (some estimate a twice that number) women in Berlin from ages 10 to 70 (or 8 to 80... you get the picture) did happen, but I sure have no interest in dramatizing it for this story. How I can deal with that and still write the tale I have to tell in a way that is true to actual events - that's the challenge I face, and what will determine whether there will be a chapter 2 posted here...
I already have strong swirls of a storyline for Chapter 2, as well as an outline of the divergent history (subject to change, but what I have is fairly detailed so far). We'll see if it all pans out before my attention gets captured by some other project... :)
BTW, the terms Stunde Null and Nachkriegszeit are concisely explained here. The Wikipedia article also has other terms you'll see in chapter 2 (if it comes to fruition).
Click here for more about this image and the series, SF Sonnets (although this particular work, Nachkriegszeit, as you can see, is prose or prose poerty, not a sonnet :D). The image is a gradient map alteration of a long-exposure photo I took, moving the camera, of a psychadelic oval-shaped lamp.
This is the 3rd time she fell in school. The first 2 times she had cuts on her lips. Now, the scratches are on her knee. Part of growing pain, I guess
This image is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you use the image, please credit www.medisave.co.uk. Thanks!
This image is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you use the image, please credit www.medisave.co.uk. Thanks!