He Had Survived The Night

*



Abruptly, Thomas collapsed in New York from exhaustion and excessive drinking while on his third tour in the U.S. in 1953. Shortly after his collapse he slid into a coma, and died on November 9 in St. Vincent's Hospital, New York, consumed by alcoholic poisoning and an injection of morphine. He was aged 39. The poet's body was brought home to Wales, and a simple white cross marks his grave in St. Martin's Cemetery in his beloved Laugharne. The Wales which had offered him such inspiration, but from which he had also, at times, felt the need to escape, finally claimed him. A white cross marks his grave: a surprisingly simple tribute to a poet who lived an undeniably colorful life.

http://www.undermilkwood.net/

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning, in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy.

It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Come closer now.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood




Oh if only, if only thing had gone differently. The yellow rain disintegrated, the sun came up on a new landscape after a freezing night, but even so he felt devastated, his thin frame shivering in the early morning cold. Oh rescue me, rescue me, he chanted inside, not knowing who he was praying to, to whom he begged. Catastrophic was the name of the game, and it kept coming to him in his waves as his teeth rattled inside his head. He had been young once. He had been a person once. with standing in the community, friends, a place to go, a warm hearth at night, a love in his house.

All that had gone and he could not even remember now what had triggered the series of calamitous events that had led him to walking down this long road. The sulphurous rains had stopped, indeed there was a preternatural sparkle to the air, so cold and clear he could almost bite it, its clear freshness biting into his lungs. The ruined church seemed no closer than when he had lost consciousness the previous evening, falling asleep in a shallow alcove beside a mound of garbage. The mound had provided little protection from the wind and the sleet, and he had truly thought this could be his last day on earth.

But here he was. Not just alive, but moving again. His body was still wracked, he was still worried he would not survive, but there was a fresh dawn, a fresh day. The wind had dropped sometime during the evening. He seemed to remember the loss of the sound, the wind whipping cold across this terrible landscape. And the rain stopping, although his wet clothes would never dry. Instead, the sun now glinted off broken bottles and household wreckage as far as the eye could see. He would have to be careful not to catch pneumonia; it had been such an ordeal.

His clothes still clung to him, dank and smelly. Most of all he needed new clothes. One foot went in front of the other, and slowly he tried to pick up his pace. The first sun hit his parchment flesh and although still cold, he felt a wonderful relief. All was not lost. While there's life there's hope. All those corny old sayings now resonated in his enfeebled brain. He looked behind him, and marvelled at the distance he had covered, the grim landscape possessing its own beauty as the wintry sun lit up puddles from the acrid rain, show cased a terrible, alien beauty.

There had to be a village somewhere. There had to be a kind person somewhere. One after the other his feet crunched forward. All was not lost now, and with each step forward his heart lifted. Thin, hungry dogs emerged from the mounds, watching him pass down the road. If he showed too much weakness, they would attack. One step, another step, his frame in agony. It had been a very fitful night in the cold and the wet; but even then he had gained an hour or two of piece, or at least oblivion.

The human spirit, it's very tough, a voice said, and he looked up almost startled, although accustomed to voices now. An hour of endurance, and he was halfway to the church. He could only hope there was someone there, a kindly priest, a nun who still believed in caring. It was unlikely, he already knew that, but he couldn't stop now. To stop was to die. The sun became warmer with each step, his skin dried, his hair no longer dribbled water down his back, and his clothes began to move away from his body, as they, too, began to dry. He had survived the night, and that in itself was an astonishing achievement.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/why-i-wont-be-leader-but-ill-go-in-my-own-time/2008/09/10/1220857637764.html

PETER COSTELLO has declared that he is not interested in leading the Liberal Party, freeing the party to sort out its leadership woes in the coming weeks.

In an interview with the Herald, the former federal treasurer said he was pursuing options outside politics and would leave Parliament when it suited him.

He said that his position had not changed since the day after the election when he renounced any claim to the party's leadership and signalled that he was planning to leave politics.

In the interview, which presages the publication of the first extracts from his memoir exclusively in the Herald from Saturday, Mr Costello expressed frustration at the speculation that has dogged his every step since.

"I think I've made it clear," he said. "I'm not seeking the Liberal Party leadership.

"They say, 'Oh, we've had a bad week, better bring Costello back.' I think that's basically what happened. And I said, 'No, I'm not seeking the leadership, I don't want the leadership'.

"Which proves that there must be some huge plot. I'm not going to go out and say it every day because the febrile state they're all in, the more I say it, the more they speculate."

He said he supported the leader, Brendan Nelson, and had told him so.

Mr Costello said that he was considering some options outside politics: "I've got a few things that I'm working on but my position as a backbencher is quite separate from any return to the leadership.

"I'll continue to serve my constituents and if I get to the point where I feel I'm no longer able to do that as well as I want, I'll make an announcement then. But at the moment I'm very happy serving my constituency. But I'm just a backbencher."

The Liberal Party has retained Dr Nelson in the leadership, despite dismal polling figures, because it has been hoping that Mr Costello might be persuaded to take the leadership.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24327202-662,00.html

PETER Costello has blasted ex-Coalition leader John Hewson for being incompetent and called for a Liberal Party makeover to allow it to more easily refresh leaders.

In his 400-page memoir, the former treasurer also takes a shot at John Howard for blocking his participation in the 2000 Walk for Reconciliation as he tried to display a more "humanist" side.

He will also claim credit "holus-bolus" for the big economic reforms undertaken by the Coalition government, according to sources familiar with his book.

The Herald Sun yesterday revealed the key details of the Costello memoir.

Senior shadow minister and close Howard ally Tony Abbott said changes such as the GST were a "joint effort" between the Coalition's two most senior figures.

Mr Costello will return to Australia today from the US.

He will be under intense pressure to answer questions over his future.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson yesterday conceded the continuing speculation was unhelpful.

Mr Costello is set to challenge suggestions the former PM drove the Coalition's economic agenda, instead claiming the credit for big changes, including the GST and balancing the Budget.

"It was no one else's credit but his. Howard was sort of second-guessing him, and taking credit," said one source familiar with the memoir.

The man dubbed by his father-in-law as the best prime minister we never had will call for reforms to the Liberal Party.

He argues that there is virtually no difference in policy between the Nationals and his party, but stops short of calling for a merger.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/10/2361197.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Three decades after it was conceived, the world's most powerful physics experiment has begun on the outskirts of Geneva.

Scientists have started up a huge particle-smashing machine and are aiming to re-enact the conditions of the Big Bang that created the universe.

But an Australian scientist says he would be quite happy not to find what has been called the holy grail of cosmic science, the Higgs boson, in the mega-experiment in Switzerland.

Dr Aldo Saavedra, a particle physicist at the University of Sydney, made the comments as colleagues at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), near Geneva, switched on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"I'm hoping for something completely different," Dr Saavedra said.

"It would be really nice if nature actually provided some very puzzling thing that theories haven't actually thought of."

For decades scientists have theorised the existence of a particle, called the Higgs boson, that explains how other particles acquire mass.

The Higgs boson is believed to produce a field that interacts with particles and gives them a property we interpret as mass, explains Dr Kevin Varvell, also of the University of Sydney.

"In the absence of something like the Higgs boson, particles would all travel at the speed of light and be unretarded as they went through space," he said.

But Dr Saavedra does not care much for Higgs bosons.

"It's not much fun if you actually go and look for something that theories have been predicting for the last 10 years," he said.

Renowned British astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking this week bet $US100 that the LHC experiment would not find the Higgs boson.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again," Professor Hawking said.



Mural on a wall, Glebe, Sydney, Australia.