ZIMINICHE

Some human societies seem to create bureaucracies in a similar way to that in which ants, termites wasps and bees make their swarm cities. Human bureaucracies can correspond with physical locations, but as Max Weber, who originally analysed them, pointed out, they are maps of social positions.

In their physical and pyscho-social forms they always entail niches, cul-de-sacs, temporarily blocked off short cuts, footbridges over railway Branch lines and back passage connections that are often too narrow for any passing police car to chase down.

Sometimes such locations are made to facilitate resistance to control. Accounts of Victorian London Slum rookeries tell of ceiling, loft and cellar walls knocked through between adjoining houses to create rat-runs for thieves.

But many of these odd bits of topology are not always so sinisterly and subversively made. Things can exist because of almost unintended consequences, because we always cut through the allotments here, or we put in another space, shed or street because there was some spare room here which could not be let left waste when money or some kind of accommodation could be made.

I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think that I know the name of the hospital or at least the name that most people round the area call it, if, say, they want to get a bus there.

However, you can never be too sure since at various stages of growth and/or contraction, bureaucracies may graft bits of themselves onto or into each other, like mistletoe onto oaks. So you could think that you’d been sitting in the General Ward of Central Teddington Hospital and you could be, but the chair and workstation that you use could be part of the Community Outreach Unit of South East Essex trust, or something.

You can never be quite sure where you are, what you are going to do, or what you are supposed to do, let alone why.

Further layers of medicinal and /or psychotropic confusion may be added then disorientation can easily result, I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think, and when I came out of sleep it took me quite along while to figure out that this was so. The walls are grey and featureless, the room is sectioned off into areas partitioned from each other by greyish pale plastic curtains which are probably washable and carry some sort of pink repeated design.

Each section contains an expensive mechanically adjustable bed with some chairs and tables placed closely by, so it is a holding institution of some kind, maybe? Most of the room’s occupants are male, but a woman enters wheeling a metal tripod trolley that carries electronic devices. She wheels it between curtains into one of the alcoves to stand over a supine male who is lying on one of the beds. One of her machines makes a loud metallic click.

“Three point seven.” She calls out.
“That’s low.” Someone else replies.

You can wake to dawns and wonder where you are.

“You” may be spark out, but your body monitor can be ticking over and maintaining your position, jerking your head back every time that it has slumped forwards. Practise this skill well enough and you could be able to sleep on your feet. Maybe if you swam like a whale you could sleep in the sea, (drifting off the Azores between squid hunts); but you ain't, so you can’t.

And then again holding the orientation of a semi-conscious body is about positioning a physically real object in physically real space and time; but we all also use mind-maps, dredging up the flimsiest associations between strange places where we are now and strange places where we might once have been.

You can wake believing that you are on a wide stone terrace, with beds laid out on interspersed stone buttresses, and creepers growing up and around the masonry. Everything is oriented to face the same way, which is contrary to some “badness” and for some “good” facing in the opposite direction.

You awake in the last echoes of a cry or chant that you feel that “nearly everyone else” (of who?) has been singing, as they were despatched somewhere, to ‘fight the good fight’. I in fact, you have no idea who “they” were or “where” they went or why. You only know that it was Very Good; they set off gleaming and courageous.

They may have been the “Few” and it could be that you have just missed “Our Finest Hour” and that this omission caps a career that has been devoted devotedly to inept and precisely timed inadequacy.

You can’t quite believe in yourself, you feel that you could have been preparing for this moment for all of your life. You ask someone who is standing there where you are.

“Where am I? I am totally disoriented.” You say.

“I am the sister in charge of the Intensive Care Ward of South Twyford Hospital. You are a patient on the ward, you were admitted yesterday.” She replies.

It all shrinks back, the creepers, the bastions, the battlements, the Mission have all gone. You are in an untidy ground floor grey formica building with plastic curtains with faint pink stripes on them.

Memories of last night return, you spent a sleepless night on a ward bed between two noisy old men who both repeatedly spoke words in languages unknown, (not phrases or sentences, just words and pairs of words). They bubbled their breath through the saliva that they are expectorating so that it accumulates in the curves of transparent plastic tubes, sometimes sounding as loud as boiling metal porridge pots.

You are a number in a med shed and you hope that you have a lot of waiting to do before you start singing the song of the sputum stew.

The Song Of The Sputum Stew.

Alone with two companions,
I must make
The passage that I can and must
Through small grey hours
Sat in a hospital ward
Next to an empty car park.

Under a red metallic sky
That echoes back miles of urban light,
Like an upturned frying pan
And there’s no sound to break the still of the night
Other than
The bubbling sound of human breath
Being percolated through the spittle
Collecting in the bottom of a curve
In the plastic tube
Doing and old man’s breathing
Through a breathing machine.

Detained by illness and poverty
I sit too
With Robert Burns and William Blake
Contained in slim volumes
Who now assist
me to make a fist
of coping with this long, long occasion.

“Mind forg’d manacles” William reminds
Are the strongest kind and the ones that keep me here.
But he doesn’t bring his Tyger
To melt the Hospital linoleum and
Warm my cold cracked feet.
Which do mean fear now
For into the carpark, I won’t go
To lie like a beast with nest overturned
By plough blade
I could be homeless
And lie shivering
Not sleeping like a policeman
Waiting to be taken in the warm at A&E.
Unless a zealous consultant came by
With his not quite chorus
Of not quite totally eager medical students
To whom he could expound
A homily on the virtues of thinness
over my lardy body
Proclaiming “yaY!”
“yaY, People “yaY!”
“Get Barry,
Get Barry
Get Barry
Atric today!
If you don’t do this
Then you will be as I portray
And get as obese as this
Fat bastard here
Who just sat on his couch
And digested himself
To cubby heaven or hell
Whilst we the thin live on
To fly like camels through needles’ eyes
Until we become
Tightly clenched hairs
Round a thin saviour’s bum.”
 
5 Flocks: Pigeons, Seagulls, Finches, Parakeets, Mallards

As Phillip Zimbardo, showed when he ran his famed simulated Prison experiment in California; it doesn’t take much in the way of social labelling and reinforcement to drive people stir crazy with instutionalisation.

I've seen five flocks over the wasteland and car park outside my ward window since, by seventh day in the general ward of this hospital and I’m starting to get the creeping Zimbardos.

One indication of this is the ornithological notes that I have written and append below.

Others are that I feel that I am detained here, under slightly false pretences and by slightly disingenuous means, (although I believe that I might be able to discharge myself against medical advice if push came to shove).One reason that I tell myself that I am staying is that some of my personal valuables are, apparently, irrevocably in the Hospital safe for the duration of this weekend, which makes it just too much hassle to do a runner and come back, especially if it could, as some events detailed below suggest, involve entanglement in the bureaucratic barbed wire trap of discharging and re-admitting myself.

I’m beginning to show analogies to zoo cage pacing bear behaviour and obsess about gowns and masculinity.

I go over to the lavatory to get some tissues in order to go back there and throw them away again; I repeatedly don and divest myself of my fleece jacket and waistcoat, moving different objects between different pockets so that I can lose them after I’ve found them.

And then there are the gowns. I am a fat man wearing two hospital gowns because one isn’t big enough for me. They hang loose from my gut down to half way up my ankles. At least the ones that I currently, wear, unlike a previous pair that I have some got onto my house, do not have the word ‘Hospital property’ emblazoned all over them, in a small blue font repetitively. They are merely spotted all over with a tiny repeated logo which makes the provenance of the garments very obvious.

According to currently dress conventions and parameters set by physical possibility, trousers can be super imposed over gowns or sub imposed under them. Or gowns can be worn without trousers or trousers without gowns.

Gowns may have been macho and a high social status in cold flag-floored Tudor palaces, to indicate to FatKing HenryWales which prelate or divine to decapitate next; but as Phil Zim grasped, they are now suitable twentieth or twenty-first century signifiers of masculinity for wear in suburban London Supermarkets.

When Zimbardo wished to dress the simulated prisoners in his experiment in a way which might speed the undermining of their pre imprisonment senses of themselves, he dressed men in gowns. When he wished to experiment with enhancing the macho authoritarian aspects of the guard role that he allocated to some in his experiment, he dressed his ‘guards’ in black and gave them shades to hide behind.

When it comes to the way in which humane, human rights respecting rules of a twenty-first century British general hospital are enabled and enacted by guards, who could have been coutured by Zimbardo himself, may attempt to prevent a patient trying to hide his gowns, (and the symbolic undermining of the feeble bastions of his masculinity), beneath his trousers; from shopping in a local Supermarket.

The whole exercise was justified by some spurious urban myth about drug dealers rushing to whack cannula wearing patients straight the veins via the cannulas taped and plugged into their hands and forearms instead of spending more than £40 worth of vouchers in the aisles.

So fulminating about the privatisation of public space and a tendency for, Supermarkets to impose crass and petty censorship of political expression in the verges and car parks that they now claimed to control it is possible to stare at birds through ward windows.

And see five flocks

1) The pigeons, (or to be pedantically accurate the feral rock doves), seemed to form a loose and shifting coalitions numbering maybe fifteen birds maximum. The mainly walk pigeononically, with sudden and frequent bouts of head-nodding and bobbing down to peck at something on the carpark tarmac. What can his be? Is someone leaving grain out for them in just the top north east quadrant of the car park? That’s where they mostly are and that’s where the mostly seem to head toward and walk towards. There’s no fence or organised pigeonherders around them, and they can move at will, (or to human eyes, seemingly at random), but this is their predominant pattern of movement. Sometimes there are only a few in the car park, maybe a half-dozen or so: others may fly over and then land to join them. perhaps due to a deep political flock fissure, a smaller sub flock can sometimes split off and fly away, but the flock as a whole seems to comprise a pecking coalition, always moving along the ground, always pecking pecking pecking, never reneging on the eventual triumph of international urban pigeondom.

2) Seagulls, probably urbanised herring gulls are the most beautiful flyers here. Some glide over from the south east maintaining a height of about fifteen feet, inclining aerodynamic bodies and knife-like wing tips and beaks so that individuals each pick up new and differing air currents that t sometimes turn back in the direction that the flock is coming from. This means that the flock interweaves round on itself quartering and re-scanning ground it has passed over, scouring for food. Nothing today, so no unseeingly screaming white fathered vortex forms pecking over the remains of a discarded take away. The flock silently flies on.

3) Finch flocking, (as I now nominate it), is strangest of all. I had no bins (binoculars), so could not see, what all the little birds might be, in their rapidly changing crowds moving like breeze-blown smoke. Probably a mixed bunch of seed eaters: long tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, green finches, gold finches; whizzing at speed across suburban gardens, road verges and along canal edges. This time of year (late autumn, early winter) fifty finches in a flock can descend on berry bushes, feed quickly and move on, leaving stones skins and shit stains and uneaten fruit and no stragglers for any hawk to hunt. It may be an anthropometric explanation, but these guys aren’t top of any food chain; round here it’s gulls and crows fighting to be top flying dogs of overlapping food niches. And I wouldn’t say that finches live in fear  but they don’t stop around long enough to fight or pray to be a hawk’s breakfast by day or an owl’s supper at night.

Their flocks whirl like smoke against pink London sunset and suddenly change direction like a sheet or a sail wrapped around a pole by a blast of high wind. Almost all of the finch flock seem to cotton on and follow instantly or maybe they all simultaneously all forge the same lead at once. In a new direction they can all swoop down to be birdstream inches above the rubbled surface of wasteland before rising high up again as though a living sail had been whistled to another boat and was hoisting itself up a new mast.

A man with a throwing net and some cages to sell songbirds in might cope, if he was fast and made some lucky throws. But any avian predator round here would be onto a bum steer. The chances of catching an individual finch from the rapidly twisting flock are zero minus. The whole flock would probably easily twist and turn away and the hawk, that wasn’t here any way, would survive unfed.

4: Parakeets: About twenty flew across the cat park from North West to southeast, straight line in a flock which could have been splitting with a wing of twelve leading I line and a bunch of twelve following, fast, straight and low, maybe to roosts in big tress in the parklands along the Thames valley.

5: Mallards: The fifth flock, about fifteen mallards making an s –shaped tracked flight about fifty feet above the car park from north west to the east, maybe broadly following the canal along towards Little Venice basin.