Lynley Edmeades
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme. — John Keats
It’s not every day you get an email saying that a friend of yours has died. I’ve only ever had one. I’d moved from Wellington to Belfast three or four months before, and I hadn’t spoken to Nick, the sender of the email, for a good few months. I was excited to see his name come up in my inbox and, if I remember rightly, I was a little tipsy at the time. I’d been drinking wine with Sean, the Californian, who I’d brought home from a bar a few nights before, and who hadn’t left.
When you think of hunger, chances are you do not summon up an image of a clothed, housed and employed individual. Yet in New Zealand there are accounts of children arriving for their morning classes without having eaten breakfast at home, and people working two jobs but still having to queue for food handouts. The food insecure within this country are not necessarily destitute individuals. They are also those on benefits, the under- or hidden employed, and the underpaid or working poor. In a country that is prosperous, free of conflict and agriculturally self-sustaining, a high level of food security is assumed, but that does not mean that the small pockets of those who remain food insecure should be any less disregarded, especially when the reason behind their insecurity is systemic.
I nearly give up. Twice. The first time I am sitting by the window at home, hand over my ear which still has a strange thudding lack of unlocated feeling that the doctor couldn’t find with her little hammer light thing and I can’t find the words for. Dull? Numb? Dumb. I feel so dumb. Stupid, stupid me.
Atlas is a literary medical journal, published in print and sold in bookstores around New Zealand, that offers an alternative to the usual scientific discourse that surrounds our bodies. It hopes to shift medical conversations away from the rigid and prescriptive to a literary form that accommodates our human complexities.
Dad was a papyrophile; he loved paper. Not necessarily what was written on it, but the feel of it, the size, length and shape of it. He viewed paper in its various forms in a way that most people don’t: as the end-point of a long, careful process of ruling, sizing, cutting, fitting into a desired product.