From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
the makeshift
This article discusses the makeshift as a conceptual and ethical principle in Beach Surgery. For the novel's specific clinic, see The makeshift surgery out the back of New South Wales.
The makeshift is both a practical and theological principle across Beach Surgery adaptations: the refusal to perfect, the necessary incompleteness of urgent care, the ethics of what works now rather than what works finally. Katita's makeshift clinic is the novel's avatar—a room where Leif is tended by hand-sewn bandages, improvised instruments, and the surgeon who will not claim to have finished him.
In C. W. Smith's wider oeuvre, the makeshift appears as ontological principle: in *Antinomicity*, the cyanotype leaf and GPS projector cast palimpsests of family time; in *Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time*, the solar-punk community built on reclaimed radar and aircraft remains—each a figure of things remade from ruins. Adaptations treat makeshift as refusal of mastery—theological works ground it in apophatic theology, the via negativa of care.
The makeshift resists the doctrine of completion; it is always enough and never whole. Scholarship identifies it as the glitch made livable—the wound dressed by care, not cured but tended.