In the Land of Ice and Snow

Although I could not quite bring myself to name the dream country I wrote about in the last post, I can say this: it is curiously reminiscent of the landscape of my father's childhood and I think perhaps that when I go there I am not so much wandering in my own hypnogeography as in his; if such a thing can be. There is another dream country I visit that is more my own - the mountain that stands over the town in which I grew up. I went there last night. In this incarnation the mountain was vast as ever, more conical than in fact it is, and I was toiling past oddly shaped granite outcrops, through snow and ice, heading upwards around the bulge of the peak towards an alpine lake that was always just around the bend. Along the way I found a lost archive assembled by previous explorers, amongst which there were many open receptacles full of moulded figures like dolls that were in themselves examples of various forms of cultural miscegenation. In their mixed expressions meanings were expressed, for instance the bitterness of racial hatred combined with the self-contempt such feelings can engender. And, at the other end of the scale, the exaltation of true understanding along with dread insight into the arcana of sorcery. I can still see some of these wizened faces, with their wild and tangled black hair, like something from the profligate pen of an artist (Tony Fomison comes to mind; and Ralph Hotere) uninhibited by previous or protected views of the way ahead. The same man who'd made the dolls, I learned as I went on (I could now see silver glints from the lake ahead) had published many pamphlets and these too lay before me in laminated stacks that I was avid to sort through. But there was no time so instead, not without trepidation, I took one to read later and went on towards that seductive silver lake. Some ghostly interlocutor intervened at this point and I turned back from the lake's shores to speak with him. I think I was trying to justify taking the pamphlet, and in so doing pointed out that my own father's book was included with those others in the archive of explorers' journals. I found his thesis and opened it up; learning to my surprise that it was a four volume work, not the actual single book in only three extant copies, one of which I own. I cannot now recall volumes 2 and 3 but #4, which was smaller, contained poems he had written that had certain affinities with the moulded doll-like figures mentioned above. In other words my father's poems, which were structured like a family tree, gave voice to those who had no other, to the silent and forgotten among us, those who lived and died and left no record of their activities and experiences. He had somehow extracted the memories of these forgotten ones from the recall of those who had left account of themselves behind; and although his poems were made of words, as poems are, I could also sense between or behind the lines the actual faces of these unknown ones. I say this is a place I have visited before and so it is; but this is the first time I have been allowed to look into the archives contained there, high up on the mountain, on the shores of the silver lake, among the ice and the snow and the whistling wind.

.