Asking Chas about the Aurignacian Dog

There was quite a long pause after I asked him and then he began in that portentous way he has. Since we are entering the last days, he said, I shall go back to the beginning. The beginning of what? The beginning. He went to the computer, he has thousands of images stored there. This was found in a cave in Africa. It is called the Makapansgat jasperite cobble and is estimated to be three million years old. Some australopithecine or early unknown hominid picked it up and carried it away. No, it is not altered by any hand, it is naturally that way. Nevertheless, it is the first mirror and the first self portrait:


A rock with a face in it. Manuports, they're called. Things of significance that people carried around with them. And this, he said. Look at this:


From Israel. Berekhat-Ram. Two, three hundred thousand years old. We didn't make this, Homo Erectus did. Adding unnecessarily: It's a woman. Do you know that the Acheulian hand axe industry lasted for more than a million years? All over the old world, the same technology, each item unique, every one the same? Look at this one, see, it has a fossil shell in it:


And the caves, he went on, the painted caves. They were used for twenty, twenty-five thousand years. No stylistic change. Just the painting and the re-painting, whatever it was for. If there are human images, and there are, they are either in the deepest darkness at the back or else near the entrance. That must mean something. But check this:

It almost makes me weep it is so pent up with reverential emotion. It's prayerful, it's the birth of the sacred. From a cave in Germany. Same age as the paintings. It might have been a staff that a clever man or woman held, they might have been wands. Here's another, it's from Germany too. Put together from a thousand bits:


Finally ... I don't even know how to talk about this one. I've looked at hundreds of photographs of it, looked at it a thousand ways: each time it wears a different expression and yet they're all the same girl. French. Found at Brassempouy in 1892. Old, like the lion-people. She can look a bit feline herself:





Who was she? She was someone, she wasn't just anyone. I've seen girls that look like that, in France and in other places. I think there's someone walking the earth now that looks just like this girl does. I want to find her.

He was definitely out of control now. Near to tears. It was pretty awkward. After a while I said: What about the dog? What dog? There isn't any dog. You were going to tell me about the Aurignacian dog. Remember?

I thought he might be going to hit me. Are you really that stupid, he said. Or do you have to work at it? There were no dogs in the Aurignacian, the dogs were all still wolves then. There's no such thing as an Aurignacian dog.

Rorschach tests for trees

Nothing could be like Ohakune.* Not the purple sky in the south against which the conifers resemble Rorschach tests for trees; not the fat cold spitting rain in my face; not the icy wind reaching inside my skin to clutch at the bones. The Body Corporate cannot fix the broken back window if they do not know about it; and who knows if they do? The air that seeps in through those starry cracks has been to the pole and back; it has been breathed by penguins and, soon as the thought comes, there's that fishy, feathery smell in the kitchen. As if the fridge door was open. Mould on the bread, the cheese melted then frozen into formlessness, I've been reading (seriously!) a review of an exhibition in which the paintings are made of butter. They look like ... butter. Now thinking about the Billy Apple show I saw many years ago in Wellington, he'd kept the thirty shitty bits of toilet paper he wiped his arse with that month. Seriously. It was unforgettable. Try as I might and do. Was standing outside the entrance to that gallery just a few days ago eating an apple. A sweet Pacific Rose. Already turned to shit. The cracks in the window look like an art work: a dog perhaps, an Aurignacian dog. Nothing like Ohakune. Could be. Remember one morning, May holidays probably, the grass upstanding frost-sheathed spears of white, the puddles all frozen over, going out into the porch to put my gumboots on and there was something in the toe of one of them. Took it off, put my hand inside, it was a mouse. Ran back into the warm kitchen where everyone was still sitting before plates of rapidly cooling porridge - Vi-Max, not that it matters - with the rodent held triumphant in my clenched fist: Look! Mouse upraised furry little head and sank little sharp teeth into the index finger of my left hand. Ow! Let it go, it ran away. Screams? Blood? Don't recall. Scar still there, was looking at it just the other day. Looking at it now. A raised semi-circle, proud flesh, with a curl at the nether end like a koru, beaut shape, could be an art work. What then? Like, nothing. These emblematic memories have no issue, narratives conclude without arriving anywhere. Except a scar. A little piece of me subtracted, a lack that has in it some incalculable advance towards adulthood. Meaning, I suppose, death. Could be. Nothing like. The farmer's ute without a back window, the headline in the newspaper on the seat beside him: Coldest winter in almost forty years. No, that's a Rod Stewart song: Maggie May. Cannot tell you the resonance those words have for me now. After the game was over she and her friend were in a bar on George Street. The bar was closed but a Kiwi girl came in anyway, wanting to use the loo. We're closed, said the bouncer. Find a tree, said my friend ... the Kiwi girl punched her out. Bruised nose cartilage, a split above her eye. As if you'd played the All Blacks, I said. It isn't funny but it is. Made me feel obscurely better about the deficit. And worse. Her too, Maggie I mean, Maggie maybe. Like Ohakune, nothing could. Be. Another memory, the dressing room at Ruapehu College, a Saturday before the game. Smell of liniment, Maori thighs, laughter, sprigs rattling on concrete, those blue and white jerseys, unstained shorts. Did they win or lose? Incalculable emotions, desire and fear, hope and its opposite, dread maybe. Penguins for dinner again, oh well. Ohakune. Nothing could be like.

* Mark Young

A Lifetime Ago

WYD

The Transposed You

Araucania and Auracania are different places distinguished only by that transposed U - the fourth letter becomes the second and we, that is you and I, are in another place. One is a simple act of colonial appropriation, the clayey waters or the rebel indigenes become a sign of the land in which we live, which is then used to name a province of a modern state, Chile, a tree that grows there and even a fictional kingdom that continues its notional existence alongside its also partly real, partly notional adjoining territory of Patagonia, a word of disputed etymology that may mean Big Foot or Big Feet; while the Chankas of Peru, enemies of the Inca at the same time as the Mapuche, are said to have been seven feet tall and to have had red hair. (A curious rumour: that all red-haired people, wheresoever they may be found, preserve in their lineage genes of the Neanderthals.) The derivation of Auracania is equally uncertain: aura from the Greek for breeze or breath? Latin, auris, ear? Or should we be recalling aurum, gold? What to do with the phantom K? I'm an amateur here, without credentials, but a subtle emanation or aroma, a distinctive atmosphere diffused by or attending a person or place is persuasive. Auracania as a country of the breath, a visible light surrounding a living thing, unbounded by space or time ... that is what I saw or seemed to see that desolate evening in Allman Park when the one I expected did not come. And now I think of Los Desaparecidos, whose stories remain for the most part untold:

Fell evening as the wind / scythes at your skin / on this far away shore / and bare corner of the world // where you wait on the steps / tap-tapping through the streets / of your lover who walks / the liquid arc of your eye // like a shadow on a stone / like the wind over bones / or the hulked emptiness / given out as a cry // when the corner is turned / and the one who was awaited / disappears in the absence / of the one who has waited ...

Well, perhaps. More likely this country of the breath can come back, does return and will continue to do so. The eternal recurrence of all things. Even the Neanderthals with their flowery memorials, their prehistoric rage, their grand passion that survives as a relict wherever we, that is you and I, find ourselves haunted by a place beyond the actual place where we are or seem to be. Whenever that old world, bone of our bone, blood of our blood, wakes within us. And we see forgotten things, of which we - you and I - are certainly two. Then we go home and this home calls and can be called ... Auracania.

Fetchers

Auracania III

Mapuche no longer wish to be called after the Spanish word Arauco, once derived from Mapudungun awqa—rebel or enemy—but nowadays thought more likely to have come from rag ko—clayey waters. Mapuche are obdurate and combative and fought the Inca empire incessantly until Tupac Yupanqui acknowledged the Maupe River as the northern border of their lands. For three hundred years they opposed the Spanish conquest while trading with the empire in the intervals between battles. When the Chilean people declared their independence Mapuche believed their existence as a separate nation was apparent to all and thus secure; but the new republican government did not agree. During the wars of the 1880s many thousands died of starvation and disease. Internment, destruction of economies, looting of property and the institution of a system of reserves called reducciones after the North American model followed; even personal ornaments and jewellery of superbly worked silver were stolen. Resistance by Mapuche never ended and activists continue to be prosecuted under legislation introduced by the Pinochet regime. These laws allow the withholding of evidence and concealment of witnesses. Resistance fighters attack Swiss and Japanese multinational forestry corporations that are planting Monterey pines and Australian eucalpyts instead of the conifers native to the region. Mapuche living in the mountain forests are known as Pehuenche after their own name for the trees; their staple is the seeds of the pehuén tree. Each group gathers piñone in the autumn from their local area: some by hitting the pine with a long cane, some by climbing the spiny trunk of the tree wrapped in leathers. Others believe it is necessary to wait for the seeds to ripen and fall spontaneously so that the spirits of the pehuén do not become angry. Piñone are eaten raw, roasted or boiled. They can be ground into flour for bread. A drink called chavin is fermented from the nuts. Stored dry on long necklaces in underground silos large enough to hold 500 kilos, the seeds may keep for four years. Or else they are dehydrated by being dropped onto hot stones in pits and then covered over with canes and dirt. Pehuenche also hunt guanacos and other animals and catch fish in mountain streams and lakes. Since the Spanish arrived they have become expert cattle herders because the paths across the cordillera run through their territory.

When Mapuche, including Pehuenche, were reduced after the Chilean conquest they reverted to living in pole and hide tents such as existed at Monte Verde, the oldest known site of human occupation in the Americas. Twenty to thirty people built a long house on the banks of a creek; it was framed with logs and planks staked in the ground to make walls that were covered with animal hides and tied to poles by ropes made of local reeds. There were separate living quarters within the main structure. Each of these rooms had its own brazier pit lined with clay. Outside the tent-like structure two large hearths were built and used perhaps for tool making and craftwork as well as preparing food. Around those hearths many stone tools and remnants of spilled seeds, nuts and berries were found. Remains of forty-five different edible plant species were identified within the site; some of them came from 150 miles away, suggesting that the people of Monte Verde either traded or travelled regularly that far afield. Other finds from the site include human coprolites and a footprint made by a child. Nine species of seaweed and marine algae recovered from the ancient settlement have been dated between 14,220 to 13,980 years ago; that is more than 1,000 years earlier than any other known human settlement in the Americas. Whether these people were ancestors of Mapuche is not known but the possibility exists.


However it is certainly true that there has been contact between Mapuche and Polynesian. In 1910 two Rapanui obsidian spear points, mata'a, were found in a shell midden south of Valparaíso. Many other mata'a have appeared since in Mapuche collections, sometimes in association with other Rapanui artifacts like polished stone axes; indeed the word for these axes, toki-, is cognate with Polynesian and South East Asian usage. War leaders among Mapuche were themselves called Toki, meaning axe bearers, and the symbol of their rank was an adze-like stone pendant called tokikura. There is said to be a Maori chant used when cutting trees with toki preserved in a Mapuche tale. Other linguistic parallels between Mapuche and Polynesia are Mapuche piti and Rapanui iti (little); and Mapuche kuri and Rapanui uri (black). Another is a term for traditional cooperative work under rules of reciprocity—minga in Mapuche, umanga in Rapanui and mink’a in Quechua. On Chiloé Island in the south of the Mapuche area there is a type of potato called kumaka though the word is perhaps a Quechua borrowing. There are also similarities in fishing techniques, in the earth oven called curanto (umu in Polynesia) and in the use of a moon calendar celebrating New Year when the Pleiades rise after the winter solstice. A Polynesian type rocker-jaw skull was unearthed from a prehistoric shell midden on Mocha Island but no genetic evidence of Polynesian admixture has yet been found among Mapuche. The most celebrated Polynesian-like Mapuche artifact is the Clava Mere Okewa, a polished stone hand club shaped like a Maori wahaika. Wahaika means mouth of fish and the clubs are often decorated after the shape of some fish, for instance the hammerhead shark. Other club shapes are present among the Mapuche tool kits; they lack the elaborate ornaments carved on the edges of Maori wahaika because they were made from local slate not wood.


Recently three small stone busts like Rapanui Moai were found on Chiloé Island, Mocha Island and at San José de la Mariquina respectively. Then early in this century chicken bones were dug up in association with human remains at a place called El Arenal on the south coast of Chile. Until this discovery it was believed that the flamboyant local Araucana fowl was brought to the Americas by Spanish settlers around 1500. However DNA analysis of the El Arenal bones showed the birds carried a rare mutation otherwise found only in chickens from Mele Havea in Tonga and Fatu-ma-Futi in American Samoa. There was also a near identical match with DNA of chickens from Rapanui. The Mapuche hens with their blue eggs are pre-hispanic with relatives in Polynesia. The bones date to a period at least a hundred years before Columbus reached the Caribbean and suggest a possible trade off—chickens, usually called moa, for sweet potatoes, called kumara both in South America and in Polynesia; as noted above it is a Quechua word. Ancient Polynesians were far travelling explorers but tended to settle only on uninhabited islands; if they found other people already in occupation they would usually turn around and go somewhere else. This is precisely what is recorded in a Gilbert Island, that is, Kiribati tradition collected in the 1920s. The people with the navigator Te Raaka found the high land forbidding and cold, with tall black mountains reaching up to the sky like a great snow-topped wall; they turned and sailed back to their islands.


Mapuche culture is shamanistic. These days the shaman, called machi, are mostly women although formerly they were often homosexual men. The machi perform ceremonies for curing diseases, warding off evil, influencing weather and harvests, and dreamwork. Machi have extensive knowledge of medicinal herbs, sacred stones and the sacred animals. As recently as 1960 there was a report of a human sacrifice among Mapuche—a five year old boy had his arms and legs severed and his body planted upright in the sands of the shore in order to propitiate the gods after the dreadful tsunami of that year. The waters of the Pacific Ocean then carried the body out to sea. Human sacrifice to weather gods is attested elsewhere on that coast: the Moche culture of Peru sacrificed young men whose throats were cut then their flesh carefully peeled from their bones during the heavy rains that characterize the El Niño phase of the oscillation of the Southern Pacific Index. A judge ruled that those involved in the Mapuche event acted without free will, driven by an irresistible natural force of ancestral tradition. Mapuche believe in twin spirits, Ten Ten-Vilu, goddess of earth and of fertility, creator and protector of flora and fauna; and Coi Coi-Vilu, goddess of water, origin of all that inhabits it and enemy of terrestrial life, animal and vegetable. Long ago the island of Chiloé was joined to the mainland. One day Coi Coi-Vilu manifested as a monstrous serpent and flooded the lowlands, the valleys and the mountains, submerging everything. Then Ten Ten-Vilu came out to do battle with her enemy, raising up the land to protect it from inundation. The battle went for a long time. Ten Ten-Vilu won but was unable to restore the land to its former state—it was left riven and dismembered as it is today. Coi Coi-Vilu fled but left behind as her regent of the seas and all they contain the king Millalonco, conceived during the battle when a beautiful Mapuche woman fell in love with a sea lion. It is that country dismembered by Coi Coi-Vilu—both the island of Chiloé, the mainland and the cordillera where the Pehuenche climb in their trees to gather piñone and listen to the murmurings of red-haired beasts—that is properly called Auracania and is remembered by that name even in places far away from there: everywhere Araucaria araucana, the monkey puzzle tree, grows with its spines evolved to prevent the too easy grazing upon it of dinosaurs of the Tithonian Jurassic. Anywhere where the dreams of the children of Millalonco, and the children of Tane too, with their intimations of ice and fire, earthquake and flood, endure.

wyldewor(l)ds

I have been asked to say a little more about Auracania. First, some disambiguation is necessary. I do not refer to the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia founded in 1860 by Mapuche Indians in territory now occupied by the Republics of Chile and Argentina, curious though that place and its history is. Orelie-Antoine de Tounens, a French lawyer, was elected by the Mapuche as first King of Araucania and Patagonia but, in 1862, was kidnapped by Chilean soldiers and deported to France. He mounted three expeditions to try to reclaim his throne, without success. In 1878 King Orelie-Antoine died in Tourtoirac and the royal house has remained in exile in France ever since, although it has never relinquished its rights under international law. The current head is Prince Philippe of Araucania, who maintains close contacts with Mapuche groups both in South America and in Europe and has spoken before the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous People as a representative of Mapuche people living in Argentina. While the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia is only an historical memory, the Mapuche nation has preserved its cultural identity in spite of the concerted efforts of colonial and republican governments either to exterminate it, as the Argentinians attempted, or to incorporate it into a western, European culture, as the Chileans continue to do through laws designed to erase Mapuche traditions, land tenure and language. The Auracania I speak of is a different entity entirely, as the variation in the spelling suggests. It is a geographical rather than an historical memory and so cannot be accessed with resort to documents or indeed human recollection. It has however a kind of remanence that can at times contribute images of its shadowy provenance to the present and as such project its own fragile existence towards a possible future. It may sound arrogant, and perhaps it is, but I am one of the conduits of this projection, I can sometimes detect the shadow lines of remanence which carry with them an obligation - I nearly said sacred - to transmit the glimpses so gained, howsoever fragmentary, howsoever I can. Lately I have seen among the massed conifers ranked along the endless cloudy ridges of Auracania the shapes of large hairy beasts swinging slowly from branch to branch. They are a reddish colour, with strong pelts and a propensity to hang upside down from the branches for long periods. Cone eaters, leaf-eaters, omnivores, as we are. These beasts are said to possess a kind of prospective intelligence. The humans of Auracania, who are men and women of grand stature, if not quite the Patagonian giants of legend, cut steps into the trunks of living trees and use them to ascend into the tops, where they spend hours observing, indeed listening to, the conversation of these animals, which are known to them by the name Paramylodon after the sound of their ruminative cries. The wisdom of these beasts, it is believed, comes from the fact that they have absorbed into themselves all that the trees they feed upon know. Of what use this knowledge is to the giants I cannot tell. Perhaps just the kind of knowing that the wind has, or the sea; perhaps just a cloud of unknowing. Like anything once understood, it can never be lost. Sometimes in the quiet of night, even here, among millions of sleepers, I hear a whisper of leaves in a cold dark wind and know that, just for a moment, Auracania has returned with its ice, its calamity, and its unutterable adamant that will outlast glaciers; then too I see the shadows of rough beasts in the forks of the branches of the eucalypts that grow along my street, tranced, like Paramylodon were, by the alkaloids in the leaves they eat; murmuring wyldewords.

Da Shealladh

It means the two sights. Both this and the otherworld. The steeple and the darkness against which steeple stands in all its delusive certainty. Today and tomorrow, shimmering one upon the other, ghosting across the retina. When the otherworld comes it compels attention and so the quotidian recedes; yet without quotidian how would we know the otherness of other world? One takes on the lineaments of other, other predicts or informs upon one. The old seers would see their visions in a stone. A literal stone, held to the eye. That adamant. Stone is stone yet sometimes becomes lens. Stone seeing. Doom approaching from far away, doom of a future imagined in the now to which it will come. Otherwise how would we know it? Second sight is really first. Rarely first. First anyway, not second, second is what comes to pass. Can remember knowing things that did indeed happen. Came to pass. Others did not but might yet. New moon will bring an de shealladh - that is certain. What those two sights may be is still within the whirling of futurity. The imagination of time, at once infinite and confined to what is, was, will be. The (in)finite possibilities of the copula. It means two sights.

Magic Point

Yesterday I went out to Magic Point, just to the south of Maroubra Beach, to look for whales. It was a pretty casual thing - a friend who lives out there had the day off work and we were thinking of doing something together. Maybe visit the Biennale, maybe go for a walk along the clifftops. Maybe both. We ended up choosing nature over art and walked off into the afternoon about four pm. I didn't have very high expectations; I've never seen a live whale in the wild. On the other hand, this is the migratory season in our part of the world. Almost as soon as we walked out of the scrub of the headland and onto the low cliffs, I saw the spout of a whale not far away to the north. So casual and unexpected I wasn't even sure that's what it was. We kept on walking all the way out to the point and stood there for about half an hour, during which time maybe half a dozen, maybe more, whales went through. There was a large container boat moored a fair way out to sea and, just below us, a small tinny with a couple of blokes in it fishing. The whales passed along the sea road in the rather large space between these two vessels - some way out by the ship, other so so close in that the blokes in the tinny might have had something to worry about. They are beautiful to see. Calm and majestic as they dive and surface, dive and surface. Most of them seemed to take three or four breaths, if that's what they were, directly off the point and then dive and stay down until their next breath, too distant to see properly. The photos below, taken off Magic Point but not by us, give a fair rendition of what we saw:


Images from here and here

tiptoe through the scientists

Have just finished reading a book called The Elephant's Secret Sense by Caitlin O'Connell, an American scientist who came from a background of inquiry into seismic communication - in her case, the love songs of Hawaiian plant-hoppers. Many species of animal, it turns out, get in touch with each other by striking the ground or otherwise seismically. Fish amphibians lizards snakes crocodiles. Blind mole rats, the kangaroo rat, golden moles. Elephant seals too. Apache Indians would hold the hairs on the backs of their fingers up to the windows of their enemies' houses in order to feel the pressure waves from their heartbeats. All primates have specially adapted receptors in the hands, feet, lips and other places with the ability to detect vibrations. Elephants do it through their feet, particularly the forward tips. They have the ability to close their ears in order to mask sounds from the air so that the vibrations from the ground can travel up into their earbones. I had not realised before that our three bones of the middle ear, along with fur and mammary glands, are a defining characteristic of mammals. Elephants, like blue whales, have a huge cochlea. They have other attributes of marine animals, like so-called acoustic fat in their footpads, naval cavities and cheeks. Acoustic fat is good for transmitting vibrations. Close relatives of elephants include manatees, dugongs, the hyrax and the golden mole of the Namib Desert. Asian elephants, the genus Elphas, used to live in Africa alongside Loxodonta, the African variety. Until about 35,000 years ago. Namibia is where Caitlin did most of her research. She was seeking practical solutions to the problem of crop-stealing by elephants, which crash into subsistence farmers' gardens and eat the corn, as well as pursuing a more generalised and theoretical interest in communication per se. She loves her elephants and, despite a sometimes clumsy prose style, has written a good book. Some of its detail will remain with me: The animal poacher who had a big Panda sticker from the World Wildlife Fund on the gate of his compound. The poacher's brother, with his trunk full of dried human testicles to sell to witch doctors. He would sally forth every time he heard there had been a murder or a fight. Or he would send assistants out to get some. The ivory smuggling doctor. And her vivid descriptions of elephant behaviour in the wild - the Namibian herds she studied are the last truly migratory elephants left on earth. And yet scientists are weird. They fly around in small planes chasing the matriarchs of family groups so they can shoot them with tranquilliser darts and then attach radio transmitters to them while they are unconscious. Night after night they broadcast a recording of an alarm call made by a matriarch when lions threatened the babies of her group and observe how the elephants respond to this desperate warning. One young elephant called Miss Ellie became so upset she bit the ground, an action that is seen in the wild only under extreme agitation. Perhaps I'm missing something but the seemingly uncritical acceptance of the notion that the end justifies the means startles me. Also the apparent lack of awareness of the effect constant human intervention must have upon these wild animals. I guess you wouldn't do this kind of thing if you couldn't overcome certain scruples. But still. I enjoyed her book and admire her courage and her passion ... and how about this: if an elephant is calm it walks on its heels but if it is alarmed or nervous and feels the need for stealth, it tiptoes.

Sahultime

Auracania

I was in time for the rehearsal and easily found the venue, even though its designation—the Masonic Hall—appeared nowhere on the small, much altered brick building, which seemed rather an outpost of the nearby Anglican Church. There were Gaelic names everywhere but the town was called after an Aboriginal word meaning either thinly wooded hills or clear sky. It was under the one that I sat on a long wooden bench and looked over the disused playing field and across the railway line to the other. Long grass around the basketball court behind and also on the football field in the gully below. The late morning air soft and golden and still. Eastern rosellas grazing on seedheads. A magpie with rain in its throat carolling in the stunted pines. Someone at one or other of the blank windows must have been watching but what would they see? I ate my roll, I smoked a cigarette. There was something about it that reminded me of the Rec in Greytown where I played my first games of football with a future All Black running interference to my dreams. I always thought Wreck but actually it was short for Recreation Ground. Those only partially incorporated spaces in small country towns that you wander in perfect freedom when the world was bigger than now. So much at peace until I realised I had the details wrong and should have been somewhere else. Down the other end of town. No matter ... much later, the reading over, dinner over, the party in the marquee dissolving into song, I left the tent and went to sit in the grandstand at the west of the oval. I saw the singer in her high heels teeter towards the loo in the break between sets. Girls like fillies galloping out into the field. The phantom horses and their riders from the rodeo two weeks away brief against the rural dark and then I thought, as briefly, it might have been Raetihi. Later again, the volcanic plumbing exploded in the Royal Hotel and I heard some rural stock buyer or sojourning truck salesman clearing his passages in the 4 am half dark. Looking up at one of those high blank ceilings that make you wonder if this is the room to which death will come. And may have already for another. In the morning mist rolled between the trees turning everything to dripping grief or else a cover under which survivors of the night's misadventures might escape into the hills. I drove north through town and over the heritage bridge then turned the car around and, leaving behind the whispering enticements of that unknown country, headed down towards the flatlands.

Artemis Cooper

... the names it has blown ...

When I was fifteen or sixteen and living in Huntly, I went one night down to the local disco and heard a three piece Maori band from Auckland play ... Purple Haze. In an intoxicating wash of magenta light. The rumour that Jimi Hendrix was, like they say really, a Maori from New Zealand, is still current in some parts. A Ngai-te-Rangi from the Bay of Plenty perhaps. Not long afterwards I heard on the radio the first Bob Dylan song I remember - Hendrix doing All Along the Watchtower. I still love the radio, for the way you hear on it things you'd never otherwise encounter. Not so very long ago, on 2SER, I came across the thrilling voice of Cassandra Wilson. She was singing The Band song, The Weight. I pulled into Nazareth / I was feeling about half past dead ... Nazareth is a small town in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. Been listening to her a lot lately. On one of her records, she covers a Hendrix song. Not an easy thing to do. I remember this one from the radio in the sixties as well. Is there a better lyric evoking the night time desolation of streets in a big city ...

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footsteps dressed in red ...

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife ...

The traffic lights turn blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags down stream
Because the life that it lived is dead ...

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last ...

That's the words without the refrain, which is so well known it probably doesn't need repeating. Hendrix is said to have written the song in London when his girlfriend ran out into the streets one night after a fight. A band member said the riff came from Curtis Mayfield, and that Jimi had been obsessing over it for years ... Cassandra Wilson's version, like many of her covers, opens the song out so it sounds like a raga that she riffs along in front of with that fabulous voice. She has a new cd, called Loverly, but I haven't heard it yet. Recorded in a rented house in Jackson, Mississippi, her home town, it includes a version of Wouldn't It Be Loverly from My Fair Lady. The album of songs from that show, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews (and Stanley Holloway), was one of the very few long playing records we had in our house when I was growing up. I know the whole thing by heart. In those days, I thought Pygmalion was about a diminutive feral cat.

Bismarck's Dream

New Rimbaud!

... or is it?

OTS aka TWA aka TLA

Last night my friends the Maroubrans asked me to join a monthly comp they're instituting. To be called OTS perhaps, the prize goes, by mutual agreement, to the best street find during the month in question. Or it might be called Freegans. If that's the word. Anyway the streets are a perpetual harvest and a moveable feast if you want to look at them that way. And so on the way to the laundry this morning, on a small old-fashioned low red-painted concrete ledge that runs along the frontage of Smith Street Motor Repairs, there were two books. My heart leapt up. As you can imagine: the first one was W G Sebald's Austerlitz, which I have read and even bought a copy of once, but didn't until today own. What happened was, we took a friend's copy away on a holiday to Seal Rocks, it rained, the tent flooded, Austerlitz was inside, it blew up to twice its normal size and then turned to smeary brown pulp. So I had to buy Peter another copy, even though he demurred and said he probably wouldn't read it again. Bet he will though. The other book was The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. I haven't read this, nor any other work by her - but I'm intrigued. So far as I can tell, it's a novel, but there are bona fide photographs of real people between pages 177 and 178, as if the fictional characters in the family chronicle that the book is have, or had, real existences in the world. Also in this copy, at the back, on the very last page, is a list written with a black felt tip pen. I didn't discover this until after I brought the books home and had I seen it at the time, might have left them there. It reads:

- clean

- vacuum
- ring real estate
- return library DVD's
- collect shirts
- dinner
bibs

Well I think it's bibs, it might be bits; mysterious either way.


BTW TWA stands for three word acronym and to decode TLA you substitute letter for word. They are also possible alternate titles for the comp. OTS is on the street.

Springfield Lodge

I've lived in Australia almost half my life - tho' it seems shorter than that, because it's the second half, and the first was much longer. Anyway, I always mark the anniversary of my arrival here in some way or other. This year, on the actual day, I was in Newcastle wittering on about the muses (never thought that would happen) but today, a few weeks later, I found myself up at Kings Cross, sitting on a bench in the early afternoon sun, eating sushi and looking at a Thames & Hudson book of Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings ... right outside the hotel I first stayed at way back when. Various toothless or otherwise subtracted locals passed or paused, making their accommodations with fate and/or addiction. Amongst the smart people, who clip by fast and don't stop. And the workers lounging ironically around in their Blundstones and shorts and fluorescent yellow-green safety vests. A classy looking hooker was standing outside the ice cream parlour. We almost smiled at each other. The Manzil Room is long gone and I couldn't work out if the allegedly legendary nightclub Baron's (it did exist, I've been) has been demolished yet or not but the Piccolo Bar is still there. It felt ... familiar. Like it hasn't really changed that much, or not in essence. I was happy. As if I was home, even though I wasn't. No regrets. The sushi was good too.

The Elephant's Memory Revisited

Recently a friend forwarded to me a quote by Umberto Eco on his reading habits: If they are different than me, he said, I hate them, and if they are like me, I hate them. It reminded me of what Nora Barnacle said when, after his death, she was asked what her husband, James Joyce, read. He mostly read himself, she said. There's a glimpse of this in the Brenda Maddox biography Nora, in which Nora remembers lying in bed and hearing Jim in the next room, chuckling over the manuscript of Finnegans Wake. If you write, you do have to spend a lot of time reading yourself, if only to free yourself, by publication, of what you have written ... and even then you might find yourself going back to recall what it was you did put down. I had this experience yesterday, picking up Waimarino County, just to see how it read. I got as far as page 8 before the first shock of embarrassment and shame. It was this passage: Next morning we went up the mountain. To get there you have to pass the elephant's grave. The ghost of Rajah stands gate-keeper to that entrance to the Tongariro National Park. He came with Wirth's Bros. circus back in the 1950s and remains because he ate tutu berries in autumn when they are poisonous to animals ... almost every 'fact' in the last two of those four sentences is wrong. The elephant was called Mollie, not Rajah (circus historian John Sullivan told me Rajah was a name given only to lions); obviously, Mollie was a she not a he; the circus was Bullen's, not Wirth's; it was probably tutu foliage, not berries, that Mollie ate; and tutu is poisonous over the summer months rather than in autumn. The version in the book is the one I grew up with, imperfectly remembered in the family; it took quite a lot of research, most of it not done by me, to establish the real story, which could itself make the subject of a book that, who knows, one day may be written. Meanwhile ... what to do? If it was a blog post I would just go in and alter it but you can't do that with books. I could annotate my own copy, if I didn't have a superstitious horror of inscribing printed pages in my execrable hand. And that wouldn't change the fact that the erroneous version is the one that all other readers of the book are left with. It seems to be without remedy for the moment, unless this post is a remedy. That first paragraph on page 8 concludes: I remember as child going to look at the mound of dirt; perched on top was a tiny bunch of flowers, bittersweet, so funny, so sad. This memory, which is still vivid in mind, may also be false. Newspaper reports of the event mention that a white cross, not a bunch of flowers, was placed on the grave mound, apparently by a circus clown. How can you erase a false memory? If I ever return to the subject, all I can do is put the two versions, the memory and the newspaper report, side by side ... and yet I doubt that anything will shift my five year old self's quite possibly delusive image of a faded, wilting bunch of flowers on top of a huge mound of yellow-brown earth there on the other side of the railway tracks in Brailey's Bush at Ohakune Junction.

Genre Confusion

Learned yesterday that my 2007 book of essays, Waimarino County (& other excursions), has been shortlisted for the 2008 Montana NZ Book Awards - in the Biography category. While delighted at the recognition and proud of the book itself, I'm also confused - in what sense is it a biography? Who is it a biography of? There are a few pieces in there that could be described as (auto)biographical essays, but most of the book doesn't focus upon particular lives, not even my own. Where other lives do enter into it - Alan Brunton's, Ern Malley's, Ronald Hugh Morrieson's - the inquiry is focussed not so much on their biographies as their works. The other two shortlisted books are Ray Fargher's book on Donald McLean and Judy Siers' on architect James Walter Chapman-Taylor - both, by the look of them, bona fide biographies in the classic sense. I've very happy to be in this company however, especially since Ray Fargher was a mate of my father's and came to our house sometimes when I was still living at home in the 1960s. I hope he wins it ... if I don't, which I probably won't. Or I hope Judy Siers does. Trying to imagine Waimarino County as a biography is a bit like seeing Saturn from the other side, as in this image, which views the planet and its rings from a POV unavailable to us here on earth but clear enough to our probe, Cassini. It looks the same, only different, like a photographic negative perhaps:

home

Go here for key to map

B.O.A.T.S

Based on a True Story is the title of a 2005 album recorded by 7 piece dub/reggae band Fat Freddy’s Drop in their own studio in Wellington, New Zealand. The elegant irony of that title is repeated in the CD’s liner notes, where the band members are named alongside their aliases—or should that be the other way round? The 'drop' of the band name is similarly ambivalent. I’ve heard many suggestions, from some kind of psychedelic elixir to those country dunnies still known as long drops. Of course it's probably just homebrew. The art work of that 2005 album is elaborated around a picture of an octopus, most likely the grand mythological beast Te Wheke-a-Muturangi, who lived, and perhaps died at the hands of Kupe, in Cook Strait at the time of the early Polynesian navigators. Although there are some who maintain that the rush of tidal waters through the Strait means Te Wheke lurks there still. So what’s the true story? Who knows? When did movies start using that particular form of enticement on their posters? What’s it got to do with the current, and somehow wearying, debate over the border between fiction and non-fiction? Couple of weeks ago I went to a conference that focused upon the many varieties that now exist of what’s being called, increasingly, Creative Non-Fiction. Though Literary Non-Fiction is preferred in some circles. It was a good weekend, I enjoyed both curricular and extra-curricular activities there in Newcastle. One or two things bothered me—that there is already an academic industry dealing with this ‘new’ genre; that some, not all, academic prose is now repositioning itself as ‘creative’ while exhibiting the old defects of that form along with the more risible aspects of the 'creative'. I can remember, in the vernacular of my youth, that to get a bit creative with the truth used to mean lying; now it can be a serious endeavour with a doctorate at the end of it. Nothing wrong with that, or not in principle. But I wonder … of the five non-fiction books I’ve published, the first two are straight up documentary, at least in my own mind; the second two introduce fictional elements into the narrative, the first, minimally, guiltily, and clandestinely, the other flagrantly or at least it’s meant to be flagrant—one reviewer, an academic from Dubai who’s specialty is Albert Camus, angrily accused me of attempting to write a novel by stealth. The fifth’s a book of essays so I guess the question doesn’t arise there. As everyone who pays attention to these matters knows, the fiction / non-fiction border is patrolled by thought police these days, who periodically haul some malefactor into the light of day and snap them in the pillory so we can all throw our rotten guilts in their faces. That’s become a wearisome process too I think. As with so much else, the primal scene of literary forgery is very old and found among early Greek writings. Herodotus tells it thus: Onomacritus had been expelled from Athens by Pisastratus for inserting in the verses of Musaeus a prophecy that the islands off Lemnos would disappear under water—Lasus of Hermione caught him in the very act of this forgery. Onomacritus is described as a collector of oracles; Musaeus was one of the shadowy poets who can be glimpsed around the equally shadowy form of the Ur-poet, Orpheus. Some say he was Orpheus’ son and most accounts agree that he was a prophet. To re-write the prophecies of a prophet was thus Onomacritus’ crime—but he was himself a writer, as well as a collector, of oracles, and was said during his exile in Susa to have been partly responsible, by selective quotation of oracles, for persuading Xerxes to undertake the invasion of Greece. Onomacritus was also involved, some say, in the writing down of the first 'official' texts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; perhaps, one writer suggests, although he doubts it in the next breath, he ‘forged’ the Iliad and the Odyssey out of legendary or other material. Later, the tyrant Solon, himself a poet, is said to have inserted a line in the Iliad’s catalogue of ships in order to reinforce Athen’s claim to Salamis. I think it’s clear from these few brief examples, all over two and half thousand years old, that the legitimacy of written texts as a source of truth is always questionable. And that authenticity can always be traded for short-term efficacy. So how are we to know what’s what? How negotiate these murky, octopus-haunted waters? It probably sounds flippant, but I still think you can go by feel, the way musicians do. Here’s something Tom Waits said recently in an interview: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. And then, I guess, he wandered off humming that song he wrote with Keith Richard: Well there's one thing you can't lose / It's that feel / Your pants, your shirt, your shoes / But not that feel ...

In the mid 1970s, in Wellington, I used to do a bit of arts journalism. There was a magazine that went out to secondary schools, published by maverick Alister Taylor. Can't remember what it was called. I did a few things for it, one was a commission to interview two kids from New Plymouth who'd won art prizes. Their names were Andrew Davie and Richard Penny and they came down to the big smoke for the interview, which I duly wrote up and the mag published. They were, like, 18, and I was 22. A few weeks later I got a phone call from Andrew in New Plymouth. He'd won a radio competition; the prize was dinner with Bo Diddley; would I like to come along? It was in the dining room on the first floor of the Waterloo Hotel opposite the Wellington Railway Station. Bo had an entourage - some of his band, some of his minders. So far as I recall, everyone was black apart from me and Andrew. The food was awful - NZ pub cuisine of the era, tough meat, limp vegetables, some kind of gravy. Fruit and custard afterwards. Maybe they were drinking beer but we weren't. Bo was very grand. He barely spoke to us - what was there to say to two spotty awestruck white boys? - and I remember realising that he was probably disappointed that we weren't girls. I asked him what he thought of Hendrix and he waved the query away with a kind of magnificent indifference. Jimi was cool, he said. He could play guitar real well. Later on we went to the concert. The square white guitar, the sweat pouring down, that beat, that beat ... his signature tune: Got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind / I'm just twenty-two and don't mind dying / Now come on baby take a walk with me and tell me / Who do you love? He wrote that song in 1956. His given name was Ellas McDaniel. When he died, he'd just been back to his home town of McComb, Mississippi. He was a lordly man.

Henson Street

There's a Henson Street in Summer Hill. Four streets over from where I live, in the direction of Ashfield. Just an ordinary suburban street - if ordinary is ever the word for such places. One of the houses has a topiary garden out front where the bushes are cut into animal shapes, a kind of diminutive fantasia of strangeness. Another house in Henson Street always puts on one of those outre, extravagant displays of Christmas lights, that people from miles around come in their cars to look at. Who lives there? I have no idea. Ditto for the topiary house. Never seen anyone outside clipping or, more likely, shaving with one of those annoying little hand-held machine tools. The guy who owns the next door building here spends hours shaving his cypresses with one, but not into any identifiable shape that I can see. Every time I cross or, more rarely, walk down Henson Street, I think of the Melbourne artist, Bill Henson. Not for any particular reason, it's just the coincidence of names that brings him to mind. I went to the 2005 retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW. I already knew his work, where from, I cannot say. I don't remember the show very well. Some of them were large nocturnal landscapes, with burnt areas that had, I think, the charred margins edged with gold paint. Some of them had a Dantesque feel, as if we were in one of the circles of hell. Cars. Dark trees. Country roads. That white flooding light that has a forensic feel, as if a crime scene were being exposed. I think there might have been some portraits of faces in the street as well, that were revelatory of the grotesque among the ordinary. The grim aspect of daily lives in antipodean cities. Then there were the portraits of boys and girls, about which there is now so much controversy. I admit to feeling troubled by them. No amount of sophisticated rationalisation can obscure the fact that you are looking at highly sexualised images of young adolescents. That's what they are, although it's not all that they are. Many of them share the sense that the nocturnes have, that you are happening upon a moment of crisis in an ongoing drama, from which the prior and subsequent scenes, with their potential to uncover some kind of narrative, have been erased. The way these images are lit is stunning. You think of Caravaggio, those deep blacks out of which an episode from a vivid, ultimately inscrutable, drama emerges. The gold rimmed skin of boy or girl, the glistening promise of their flesh, the equivocal zone between childhood and maturity that, as the artist has said, they inhabit at once so easily and uneasily. How do you look at them? That frisson of a glimpse of the forbidden - how is that to be seen? He has also said he cannot be held responsible for the uses to which people might put his images. Cannot police them perhaps. The ABC re-played a documentary, made a few years ago, the other night. I wasn't able to watch it but I did look at the promos. Two things struck me: one was the artist, in interview, saying why he was so drawn towards these young models. He made the remark paraphrased above, about that equivocal zone, and then said he found it ... interesting. This was the word he used, but the slight hesitation before he said it made me wonder if he might have more truthfully said fascinating, compelling, even addictive. The other thing was a glimpse of him at work in his Melbourne studio. Someone told me that it is a vast space on the verge of an industrial wasteland, with a vista perhaps over a part of the ruined shore of Port Phillip Bay. He was climbing a ladder to adjust an arc light, a great silver bowl with an incandescent lamp burning at its heart. We did not see what was being illuminated by what seemed a suddenly pitiless beam: forensic, yes, and excoriating, perhaps even with the power to light up the insides of bodies, to go right down to the bone. That's about as far as I can get down Henson Street at the moment. Beyond this: it's lamentable how public debate of these matters so quickly turns into mindless stoush, the kind of conflict that may have been best summed up in that Frankie Goes To Hollywood video for their hit song Two Tribes. A slugfest where nuance is the first casualty. There's something deeply disturbing about police going into art galleries and confiscating exhibits. There's something just as disturbing about the way many of those who are defending the artist against this outrageous censorship feel they must at the same time secure his work against all accusations of disturbing content. For there is, undoubtedly, something troubling, and perhaps also troubled, about Bill Henson's work. I think that might be the point.

uru-anna

Orion does a one-handed handstand over the spire of St Andrews. Balancing precariously on Bellatrix. Or is it Saiph? The maps are all the wrong way round. Every night, later and later, and how come I'm here to see it? Not every night. Feel better calling it Te Waka o Tainui. But I live here. Where too it is seen as a canoe. Julpan. Makes more sense. Two blokes in Arnhemland, brothers, went fishing and caught one they weren't allowed - up their boat went into the sky, a lesson to us all. Now I'm thinking of Noe's waka snagged on the steeple of Ararat. When Joseph Banks went climbing on Tahiti-nui, 1769, he wondered if the Great South Land had somehow submerged and that the peak he was on was a remnant. He may have been wiser than he knew. We used to call it the pot. And that's still what I think. First constellation I ever saw, or remember seeing. Out on the broken asphalt of the old tennis court at the Burns Street house. Held up my father's arms probably, after we got out of the car. Whispering star, at once a hushed intake and an outgiving of breath. Amazed to see it, and to see it yet - but how could it be otherwise? The self-centredness of the child, rocking along the continuum of spacetime. The self-centredness of the universe. Anyway, the pot. Boiling up dark matter in its silver pan. If you enter the magnification of telescopes, you discover unimaginable fires, dust clouds, births of suns, the whole violent panoply of creation. You imagine the unimaginable. And you can. Every night. Then say the names: Rigel. Betelgeuse. Bellatrix and Saiph. Alnitak, Mintaka and Alnilam: they're the belt. Don't know what the stars of the sword are called. The Shepherd of Anu, Sumerians said, they saw a crook in there somewhere. Uru-anna, the light of heaven: that's where the word came from. I see a pot. Then a boat. Then ... a dancing man, or acrobat, pirouetting around a steeple. Later and later.

kaka, kea, kakariki, kakapo

I get most of my books in second hand shops. Not sure why I prefer this kind of buying - perhaps it's the vertigo that a well-stocked shop full of brand new titles induces; maybe just because I'm cheap; or it could be that amongst the already-read you find things you've not only never heard of, but never imagined. Course, the ratio of misses to hits is fairly high but, on reflection, no higher than among the never-before-read. And you can always afford to take a punt. I went up to Newcastle last weekend with a book in my bag that is one of the best novels I've read. The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman, published in this edition by Faber and Faber in 1994. (If you go here you'll find a brief account of both the man and the circumstance out of which he wrote the book.) Two fifty it says on the flyleaf, but I can't recall if it came from St Vinnies or Anglicare. No matter. I was thinking about Bellingshausen's parrots on the way up, the story as told by Alan Moorehead in the Appendix to The Fatal Impact ($2.00, Vinnies, a hardback Reprint Society edition from 1966). The Russian explorer - well, actually, he was a Baltic German from one of the Estonian islands, but the expedition itself was Russian - paused to refit at Port Jackson in 1820 on his way back from the Pacific Islands. He and his crew became enamoured of Australian birdlife and when they left Sydney took with them on the Vostok and the Mirnyi 84 birds, including cockatoos, parrots, doves, a lory and a parakeet, along with a small kangaroo that was allowed to hop around the deck.


The astonishing thing about this event is that Bellingshausen was heading south, to resume the circumnavigation of Antarctica that he had broken off during the southern winter. The navigators seemed surprised when, at higher latitudes, the birds declined to sing. And that, even though they were kept in cages below decks, nevertheless began to die. One, a black cockatoo - whether red-tailed or yellow-tailed I do not know - collapsed after eating a stuffed kookaburra. On Macquarie Island, so early, fur seals had already been exterminated and the sealers were killing sea-elephants; whether, as in some other places, they were rendering them down using live penguins as fuel, is not recorded; but Bellingshausen was one of the last to see alive the parrot indigenous to the island, which the sealers were eating, along with albatross eggs.


In 1821, the circumnavigation complete and the southern continent observed, perhaps for the very first time, the two ships turned for home; as they sailed into warmer waters off the Atlantic coast of South America the surviving birds were brought up on deck after three and a half months below and at once burst into song. One parrot escaped and climbed into the rigging. A sailor was sent aloft to recapture it but it flew away and then tried to settle on, or fell into, the water ahead of the ship. A pole was thrust out towards it and the bird managed to grasp it, holding on so tightly it did not let go for hours. I do not know what happened to these birds after the voyage was over; but when, in the excellent Indigo bookshop in Newcastle I came across Parrot, by Paul Carter ($10.00, Reaktion Books, 2006), I hoped that it might tell me. Carter doesn't rehearse this story however, although he tells fragments of many others; and the illustrations (101, 77 in colour) in his small paperback are superb. One thing he says interests me particularly. Three New Zealand parrots, the kaka, the kea and the kakapo, are thought to be the most ancient species of the bird in the world: ur-parrots. I've never seen the latter two birds but, one lunch time, Jill Jones told me an enthralling account of her meeting with some kea on the slopes of the Southern Alps.


At the same shop I also picked up a copy of a recent life of William Dampier, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind by Diana and Michael Preston ($9.00, Doubleday, 2004). I had this book out of the Sydney Public Library last month and did not wish to take it back. The title comes from a remark S. T. Coleridge made about the Old Pyrating Dog. I'm not sure if it is in this biography or another that I came across the information that on one his voyages, his last, on the Duchess, Dampier carried a one legged cook by the name of John Silver. With or without a parrot on his shoulder.


The four NZ parrots illustrated are in the order given in the title; the third is of a kind of parakeet that still lives on some sub-antarctic islands, thought to be related to the extinct Macquarie Island variety.

flying over mars

There is another shoe, single this time, outside the medical centre. Alone, on the small ledge below the big window that looks up Lackey Street towards the railway station, round the corner from the entrance. A woman's shoe, high-heeled, a bit clunky, in brown suede with small diamante inlays picking out a pattern around the instep and along the toe. Italian, perhaps. When I first saw it, the other day, it was standing upright but now it's fallen over. The heel, which is thick as well as high, makes it unlikely that whoever left it there could have walked away on the other one. Or only with a most peculiar gait. Hopping. Or on crutches. It does not look much worn and yet its dancing days are surely over.

a rude awakening

Some nights it is as if I do not so much sleep as dream I am sleeping: like being adrift on a lake of dark water, which is a lake of dreams, into which sometimes I can sink and sometimes not. Often I know I am dreaming, which is not to say that I am lucid dreaming: the flow of images is involuntary as ever, but I seem to have some awareness of the nature of the flow, even if I cannot control it. Occasionally, too, I feel as if delayed at some interface between thinking and dreaming, only halfway through the elastic meniscus of that dark lake water. It's not necessarily unpleasant, it can even be quite illuminating. Writing problems might find sudden solutions, or new directions, in the watery transparent lens of that meniscus. Last night was like that, lord knows why; but in the middle of that broken image stream a rude awakening came. I heard a voice cry inarticulately out and, in the dream, wondered if I had really heard it or if it was just some ghostly intrusion on the reverie (which I do not otherwise remember). Anyway. The next thing I heard was the sound of someone pissing, quite loudly, nearby. And then I thought (in the dream): this is no dream! And woke up. And someone was indeed pissing, loudly, down beneath my bedroom window - I live on the top floor of a two storey building. Not just that, he was talking on his mobile phone. I heard him say: She wanted to fuck in the taxi! Can you believe that, mate? Then laughed. In a Bristol accent, so I knew it was my next door neighbour. He's a young bloke, harmless, quite pleasant really; lives there with his girlfriend who I think may be Thai. She's nice enough too, though both of them, as young people do, don't really notice an old bloke like me. Anyway. I heard him zip up, cut the connection (possibly the other way round) then leap the stairs to their apartment. Rat-tat-tat ... on the door; then silence. This young couple often go out on a Friday or a Saturday night and come home quite late. Dancing, clubbing, whatever. A bit drunk perhaps. I don't care; they're otherwise benign, as I say, and the woman who lived there before went out of her way to make everybody's life a misery, especially mine - she'd hammer on the door if I played my stereo, got her lawyer to send me threatening letters, even called the cops on me once. As long as these two don't mind my music, or my kids kicking up a racket, I'm happy to let them do whatever they like. But this incident intrigued me: why didn't he wait until he went inside to pee? Was it so he could call his mate and tell him that fascinating bit of information? Was the she in the taxi the woman upstairs or another? Who knows? By the time I'd rattled through these possibilities, the way back to the dreamy dark waters was lost for the moment; so I flicked on the light, checked the time (3.30 am), made a cup of chamomile tea and read for a bit while I drank it ... later slipping slowly back into quasi-insensibility. Wondering ... is it true that my grandfather painted railway stations (the real thing, not pictures of them)? Any of the ones that I've stood and waited at? Was it his mother or his grandmother who had second sight? And, in either case, was it thus he who carried the schizophrenic gene, if indeed there is such a thing? Did he really believe every word of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that my mother said he owned and read? Why didn't she go to his funeral? This gentle, unassuming man, with his passion for compost and for Douglas Social Credit? How is it that, every time I go back to her autobiography looking for answers, all I end up with is more questions? And then for some reason, just before I sank into true insensibility, I remembered the floor of the house at Pukapuka Road ... and drifted uneasily off into depthless black and suddenly perilous waters.

At Pukapuka Road

Electrical Storm on Saturn

Otoliths #9

Ramshackle Day Parade

When I was a student in the early 1970s there was a fashion among us for wearing army surplus gear. Especially greatcoats. I had one, an enormous, prickly, khaki job that still had its brass military buttons with embossed crowns illegally attached. These clothes acted as a provocation to old soldiers, who became predictably enraged to see scruffy long-haired youths wearing their sacred uniforms. That was of course part of the point for us. Another fashion, or provocation, was to stay up all night drinking or drugging and then, dressed in these outre garments, attend the Dawn Parade on Anzac Day. A mixed up thing to do, because part of our fascination was with the ceremony itself, the peculiar emotion that hearing a bugler play the Last Post as the sun comes up seems to evoke in almost anyone, as well as the perhaps more familiar rush of feeling the Lawrence Binyon words also reliably call forth: They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old .... I can't remember now if I ever actually did stay up all night and go to the Dawn Parade or if I only imagined doing so after the accounts of others who did, or said they did, or said they were going to. Likewise, I can't quite pick the moment when I ceased to feel derisive of, or critical towards, ceremonies like Anzac Day and began to experience them with something like an unequivocal response ... never entirely without equivocation, but still. I remember reading Les Carlyon's book Gallipoli a few years ago and weeping involuntary tears at some of the descriptions he gives of that campaign. Maybe my father's death, nearly twenty years ago now, had something to do with my change of heart. Dad's war was reduced to a few ironic anecdotes, with himself as the butt of some kind of cosmic joke that wasn't even that funny. He liked to belittle both himself and his war but behind that was a well of deeper emotion - he'd had two of his close friends killed and continued to mourn them all his life. The last conversation I had with him, on the phone, a few weeks before he died, he mentioned one of these fellows, a Maori bloke called Bill Wilson lost when his plane disappeared somewhere off Rabaul. Dad also used to like saying the names of the places he'd served, a kind of mantra that managed to suggest an enormous amount without ever really saying anything much at all. Perhaps his passing has left whatever mourning still remains to be done with me, I don't know. Anyway, although I haven't been to an Anzac Day ceremony for a very long time, this year I decided I would. And take my kids along. After all, everybody loves a parade. We ended up on George Street near Town Hall station, just where Park crosses over and becomes Druitt. It was a grey morning but the rain was holding off. The parade had already begun. I don't know what it was, but as soon as I saw the first straggle of old blokes walking by, the tears started flowing. There they were, men looking exactly like Dad would have looked if he was still around, with their bad clothes sense and misshapen bodies, their peculiar hats. Some in wheelchairs, some sitting on seats in the trays of jeeps, some walking along unaided. Some even sprightly. It was without doubt a procession of grotesques, except that element of the outlandish that makes for true weirdness was missing - these were just ordinary men, ordinary women, who'd come out from their ordinary houses all over the city to march. You wouldn't otherwise, or anywhere else, see that generation altogether at once like this. The other thing was, they were so few; and yet there were so many categories - infantry men, artillery men, tank corps, transport, ambos, nurses, land girls, intelligence, the war correspondents, each marching behind their oddly home-made looking banners with wonky applique lettering marking out who they were and the places they had been and fought. Again, the names seemed replete with feeling that did not require any further explanation, even when they weren't names I know - Scarlet Beach? Scrubby Ridge? Tarakan? And who would have thought there are still so many brass and pipe bands around? With their bizarre choice of tunes. One was playing Coming through the Rye; another, Marie's Wedding; along with the more familiar Scotland the Brave and a plethora of versions of Waltzing Matilda, the tune of which is, or alleged to be, that of an 18th century Scottish song which may itself be based upon an earlier Irish ballad called Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself ... anyway it makes a good marching song. The kids of all shapes, sizes, ages, sexes, ethnicities in their ill-fitting uniforms scarcely less grotesque. When the pipe band of Clan McLeod went by I couldn't help but tell my own kids that it was their tartan they were wearing, even though it's an almost fanciful and quite distant connection. After a while I managed to stop the tears from squeezing out the corners of my eyes and rolling down my cheeks. A few soft and gentle rain showers passed over and umbrellas flowered all along both sides of the street. My kids had wormed their way up to the front and were sitting on the road in front of the barriers. I leaned over them with the umbrella as the rain got heavier. Next to us were three Chinese girls with little plastic Australian flags that had sprigs of rosemary strapped to them, which they waved dutifully as the parade passed by. I could not begin to imagine what the day meant to them but didn't quite know how to ask; one of them gave me a sultry, enigmatic glance but then wouldn't meet my eyes again. A line from a poem kept running through my head - the many men so beautiful - and it took me ages to track it down to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Course they weren't really beautiful any more, nor were they all men, but it was possible to see in most of them the boy or girl they had once been and that perhaps was the point. The bell on the Town Hall tower tolled the hour. It was eleven o'clock. The kids were ready to move on so I said once the next pipe band came by, we'd go. It was Knox College and they were easily the best of the lot, skirling and shouting down the wide rainy street. And all this time, the traffic lights on that busy corner, whose sequence I know intimately and by heart because of the number of times I've sat there in a taxi waiting, turned from green to amber to red and then back to green again, as if some vast array of ghostly phantom cohorts mingled with us were pausing then passing, pausing then passing on - unseen, unheard, but somehow not unapprehended.

... on a dissecting table ...

When I smoke I always think about giving up; when I drink, of stopping. If writing, I cannot help but imagine not writing. I go out to buy an umbrella and come back, wet through, with a copy of the Koran; keeping the book dry under my shirt. In a local shop window there is an advertisement from a local poet, looking for a small flatette for himself and his few pet birds. Outside the medical centre on the corner is a pair of shoes; they've been there for days - first saw them when I was going for the paper one grey dawn. Small, round-toed, black leather slip-ons; a woman's shoes. One has a sponge inlay, they other, some kind of red felt inside. They are placed neatly side by side near the door of the medical centre, facing away, just beyond the locked box where the pathologist's samples are left to be collected. Where did she go, so early in the morning, so late in the evening? Who could she have been? It is impossible not to think of transubstantiation but whether she rose in grace or fell in despair is not certain. Or did she just shuck them off, wearily, with relief, and go barefoot up the narrow canyon of Lackey Street to the station? Catch a cab to the City? What are the chances of spontaneous combustion? The other day, outside Ashfield police station, I saw a woman holding an empty baby capsule of the kind used to carry very small children in cars; she was sobbing uncontrollably. Did someone kidnap her kid? The burly cop was rubbing his hand up and down her upper arm as she bent forward in hopeless grief. While two other women, one another cop, the other perhaps a friend, stood mute at the remaining corners of their huddled square. It is clear enough that every action, every thought, carries the ghost of its contrary within it. Presence suggests absence; danger, safety; grief, joy; indulgence, abstinence; a chance meeting is revealed to have been pre-ordained. While silence is both the condition, and corollary, of writing, as well as its ultimate fate. And yet sometimes there is a suspension of contraries in a singularity; sometimes people do disappear without trace, leaving only their shoes behind. Poets do find tiny improbable rooms where they can sing along with their few small birds. Books may turn out to be, after all, umbrellas. Or sewing machines.

loot

Reliving the past is the most fantastic adventure of all. The event, relived, grows more and more enigmatic, and richer and richer in meaning. Turning to the past, I reach the future, I recall people I never knew. In the time/space continuum of consciousness, Was and Will Be occupy the same point.


from A Feast in the Garden by György Konrád

there is continually Something

You can become used to living in an unstable perceptual world, but there will still be times when what you think you see is not what you see; or perhaps, what you see is not what you think you see. Last night, after a long telephone conversation, I went out onto my little deck to smoke and look at the sky, as I am wont to do. There was an inky black cloud, shaped like a scorpion with tail upraised, floating near the steeple of St. Andrews. Intricate, very dark, unusually detailed. Floating in front of the paler, greyish clouds behind, that were drifting slowly northwards. Except - was it? A cloud? Or smoke? A chemical exhalation from some burning factory? I looked into the sky over the apartment block next door, to see if there were any other black clouds about. No, but there were black spaces opening between the cumulonimbus that have been intermittently dumping heavy showers on us over the last couple of days. Back to Scorpio, but Scorpio had gone lumpish and vague, far too quickly for it to have been made of water vapour. It was in fact a briefly scorpion-shaped gap in the clouds I had been looking at, a figure-ground ambiguity that sent me, as briefly, into a reverie of here be monsters. Fragments of a dream of an explorer came back, I was Tasman navigating pent up seas, threading the weedy stone walls of a canal that separated Utopia from the main: I had met a looming figure along this dark causeway and he had hammered down fists of adamant upon me in the seconds before I woke up sweating beneath the duvet. The candle-lit banquet hall beyond forever lost to me; but not the semi-circular quays of Utopia, or not at least their image. The mind as an autonomous zone, out beyond wolf-howl, making its accommodations with the ambiguous shapes of perception. Orion now lay where the scorpion had been, not a hunter, not at this latitude, but Te Waka o Tama-rereti perhaps; or something that is not yet thought; or something that can never be thought. And now the veritable words of Abel Tasman, no longer in a dream, return, written just a couple of days before he did at last see the merest tip, islanded, of the Great South Land: ... also our compasses did not stay stable as they ought or here are some mines of Loadstones, is indeed possible for our Compasses do not stay stable up to 8 points, there is continually Something which makes the compasses move or run. And heard the sound of horns blowing from the misty forests of Van Dieman's Land; and saw the giant steps cut in the trees, where men who are other than we are climbed to make their inscrutable imaginings real.

resplendance


(for Mark Young)

voices & echoes