being vigilent

As I stated earlier, when I got up on Sunday morning and realised I had slept through Sicily’s waters broking I had felt guilty, and the story of the disciples sleeping, after Christ had asked them to watch over Him while He prayed, flashed through my mind.

When we left to go to the Hospital I grabbed a couple of books figuring that if Sicily slept with the Epidural I would have something to read while I waited with her. I grabbed Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ which I had been reading and I also grabbed a little Pocket addition of the Gospel According to Mark (KJV) to check the story of the disciples sleeping. Now I have several versions of the bible from simple Good News editions to more scholarly Hebrew and Greek editions with a line by line translation to English under the original text. But for some reason I grabbed this little book not even sure if the story is in Mark or one of the other gospels. Sure enough I found the story in Chapter 14.

The reason I had brought this version of Mark originally was for it’s introduction essay by Nick Cave. In the essay Cave talks about the transition from the Old Testament to the New and how he had avoided the New Testament and how the Old spoke to that part of him that “railed and hissed and spat at the world. Evil seemed to live so close to the surface of existence within it, you could smell its mad breath, see the yellow smoke curl from its many pages, hear the blood-curdling moans of despair.”

Then he goes on to state, in a passage I really like,

“But you grow up. You do. You mellow out. Buds of compassion push through the cracks in the black and bitter soil. Your rage ceases to need a name. You no longer find comfort watching a whacked-out God tormenting a wretched humanity as you learn to forgive yourself and the world. That God of Old begins to transmute in your heart, base metals become silver and gold, and you warm to the world.”

All this I read as I sat watching over Sicily while she slept under the epidural (as an interesting aside to this aside, it was over this weekend that the existence of the Gospel of Judas was released to the mainstream media).

The next morning I arrived home first before Sicily and Zap came home from the hospital and there was parcel from S & C in Cambridge UK. Among other things was Nick Caves last album, a double album affair. When Sicily and Zap got home I was playing The Lyre of Orpheus. This became our soundtrack for the first three days after the birth.


The soundtrack was replaced after Linda, Sicily’s mother, dropt off an old german seven-stringed Lyre made out of pear wood. It is the most amazing instrument I have ever played and is both easy to play for the non-musician but is incredibly complex for a musician to play. Now I mesmerise Zap (and Sicily) with it, calmed by the sound of the seven spheres.