detail of The Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymos Bosch. Full picture here.

things have changed

Storm still. I cannot find my crocodile letter opener or my black-handled scissors. Can do without one, not the other; can replace the other, not the one. My kids can't get through, there's trees across the line at Wondabyne. Feels strange, this space and time I keep open for them, empty ... except for me. Storm still. A ship aground at Nobby's Beach, a chasm at Somersby has swallowed five people, power out on the Central Coast, kids can't get through. Maybe they hid the scissors and the letter opener, it's the sort of thing they might do. Maybe I hid them. One once pretended to be about to cut my throat from behind with the tail of the crocodile, sharp enough to draw blood. Storm still. I'm looking at pictures of the Makatote Viaduct, among them is this


mysterious image in the State Library of Victoria, Ruapehu from Makatote Viaduct it's captioned, the library requests more information should anyone have any. It's one of a series of railway postcards from the early 1900s, there's lots of them on the web, what more can you say? Storm still. It must be because of this weather that I'm back in the King Country, it's like this a lot of the time there. What is that shape in the sky? In the lovely soft saddle between Paretetaitonga and Ruapehu proper? Like some mechanical ghost or outre ski lift. Pylon or poltergeist.


The last few days I've been obsessed with a song, running it over and over in my head, guess who wrote it, one of the verses starts out: I've been walking forty miles of bad road / If the bible is right the world will explode / I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can ... This place is too small to lose things in, only three rooms not counting the kitchen and bathroom, how could you lose anything here? I take the sofa and the two armchairs apart, am rewarded with three dollars and a lot of unidentifiable muck I don't want to identify. No crocodile, no scissors. Storm still.


My kids ring up, one says it's a doomsday day, sounding quite cheerful about it, the other says, it's a bad day, sounding doomed. Trees fell on their school. The waves on the beach, just down the end of their road, are six metres high. On the plus side, they've built a radio out of a game they got in NZ years ago now. They're listening to SeaFM by candlelight, by firelight. The power might come back on tomorrow, they're a little bit freaked out by it, no TV, no stove, no electric light. I don't ask them about the crocodile or the scissors, they wouldn't understand.


Storm still, I should stop writing that, it's getting boring. Finally I find the scissors at the back of the spoon drawer. The crocodile ... I don't know. Crocodiles are unusual, their embryos don't have sex chromosomes, gender is determined by temperature, males are produced at around 31.6 degrees celsius, females at slightly lower and higher temperatures. Does this mean boy crocs are steady but the girls either hot or cool? Or both at once? Lorca's The King of Harlem begins: With a spoon / he gouged out the crocodile's eyes / and thumped on the monkey-rumps / with a spoon ... but the crocodile is not in the spoon drawer and why would s/he be? And I don't have any letters that need opening either.

some dreams

... are very persistent. One from long ago: I must have been less than ten, we are driving along in the Hillman, in the King Country, somewhere west of Ohakune. My mother is at the wheel and my father, in the front passenger seat, is not happy about this. Us kids are in the back, me and an indeterminate number of my sisters, who total five in all but I don't think we're all there ... anyway. The road leads to one of those enormous, wonderful, terrifying viaducts that span rivers and bush-choked gorges in that dissected hill country west of the mountain. Viaducts made of girdered steel. Hand built, at the beginning of last century. That are not for vehicular traffic but for trains to cross. As we approach the approach, for no apparent reason, the car veers off the road to the right then soars into the vast, eerie space spanned by the viaduct. My father says, in exasperation rather than alarm: Oh, Lauris, I told you ... while I, seriously alarmed, cry out: Everybody, put your hands on the floor! In the belief that putting our hands on the floor will somehow parachute the free-falling car to safety. Much later, the Hillman does settle, unaccountably, on the grey river sand beside the silvery twisted skeins of the Manga nui a te ao, the great river of dawn, where thin green weed grows slinkily on the downside of boulders, streaming in the flow. There is the silence that follows catastrophe and catastrophe averted alike. We have survived. Above, the brown-black steel span of the viaduct still leaps across the chasm the family car could not manage. But we have survived.

wild strawberries

Yesterday on my way to work I thought I'd check out the Bosch Berry Trees again. Walking up that end of the street, I saw a woman coming towards me. She had a handful of fruit that she was eating, berry by berry. I don't usually stop total strangers in the street but this time I did. Do you know what they are called? I asked. She was Asian. Her English wasn't very good. Oh, no, I used to know but I forget. Australian? I asked. Native? She looked confused. I get them just there, she said, pointing at the trees. I was nodding. Yes, I know. There was a brief pause. Her face cleared. Wild strawberry, she said. I think, wild strawberry.

forbidden fruit

At the other end of Smith Street, five identical houses, rising along the rise towards Prospect Road; outside four of them, a small tree, each of which, in this mid-winter season, is flowering and fruiting. As is the robust sugar cane planted in the front garden of the first of the houses, the first, that is, if you're walking west, as I was that day. Had I never looked before at these trees, had I never gone along this side of the street? Natives, surely, nothing so strange could have come from anywhere else. As strange in their way as the wooden pear tree is, with its silver and golden fruit. The flowers, a profusion of them, are small, a bell-shaped calyx about the size of a fingernail enclosing two or three tiny red stamens; creamy coloured on one of the trees, a waxy rose pink on another; the other two somewhere in between. On the footpath below the last, fallen fruit: round, spiky, from greeny-yellow to a bright seductive red. Like something out of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Or should that be Heavenly Delights? Boschian fruit, scattered before me. I could not help myself, I picked one up, the reddest, the ripest. It was soft, slightly squishy, not hard as I expected, not like the tiny unpeeled lychee or rambutan it otherwise resembled. Sniffed it: a faint, sweet odour, as of something lost. O god I wanted to eat it. To eat the fruit of the tree of whatever it is. I touched it to my tongue where a bruise was leaking juice. Yes, sweet. It had lain on the footpath how long, amid what toxic detritus? I glanced around, stupidly guiltily, then popped it whole into my mouth and walked on. Melted to a sweet, sticky paste, gritty, that was the stipples on the skin. A sweetness without sharpness, just a slightly flat, greenish undertaste, like you often get in wild things. Crunched on the grit for ages, wondering if, and if so when, poison would begin to cramp in my belly. Yes, there was a slight feeling of unease but that could as well have been psychosomatic as purely physical, who knew? Went on into the cerulean of the afternoon. There was a storm blowing from the sun. Way out west, beyond some hidden horizon, a pink twist of cloud like a tornado, drifting upwards into the empyrean. Days the rain came in, I thought, over and over, a line from a poem I'd been reading. Days the rain came in ... as if in a narcotic haze, though I wasn't, I was just walking with that sun-storm blowing in my hair, tight-roping out along a blue and lost horizon, drifting and turning in a rose madder twister, searching between my teeth for the last grains of paradise.

Luca nominated for Montana Book Awards ... in the History category.

double you into zed zed

If you were able to look in our direction from the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, our sun would appear as a fourth point of light in the constellation Cassiopeia, transforming the W into a Zig Zag. This supposition fills me with confusion, not least because you can't see Cassiopeia from the southern hemisphere, where I am. This is clearly stupid of me, since I'm not in the Centauri system either ... although sometimes I want to be.

Cassiopeia was the mother of Andromeda, and boasted that both she and her daughter were more beautiful than sea nymphs, the Neriads, which made their father, Posiedon, so angry he sent plagues down upon the Phoenecian kingdom of Ethiopia that she and her husband, Cepheus, ruled. The god sent a monster, Cetus, to destroy the kingdom and an oracle said the only way to appease it was to sacrifice their daughter Andromeda. So they chained her to a rock ... until Perseus came and saved her.

Andromeda is the nearest galaxy, as opposed to the nearest star, to us. A mere 2.5 million light years away.

So what am I on about?

It's partly a fascination with trying to get off planet and to see, looking back, what we look like. This statement may be modified and applied to the self. But it's also about the strange concatenation of these ancient stories, told in the stars, and our modern astronomical knowledge. How - why - do these two things relate so strangely and intimately to each other?

... in the funpark of the mind, his favourite ride was the oneiric panopitcon.

over reading? or reacting ...

I know you're not meant to reply to reviews but, after all, why not? Or, why? I just want to make a few points re: the (otherwise accurate, in matters of fact I mean, not opinion, that's not my business) below: one, I haven't read Aldous Huxley's essays and he's not cited in the book, two, Waimarino County is not to my knowledge full of references to other literary druggies, three, I'd never heard of the de Quincy piece the reviewer says I've imitated, four, my interest in Rimbaud is an interest in his prose, not to his supposed or actual drug experiences, five .... I'm clean! Drug free! Have been for years! If you except an occasional glass or three of red wine, that is. And the odd puff on a joint, if I'm lucky enough to be offered one. Now, where is that church key ...?

Listener reviews WC

I want to write, but out comes foam ...

last summer in centennial park

Liamh wearing my hat & glasses, Jesse examining foot; photo by Julia Wright

& another thing

I learned from another friend that the Malay and Bahasa word luka means wound ... this suggests another possible meaning for Luca Antara (for it is pronounced with a hard k): the wound between. The wound between what? Between mind and page, perhaps; or the two natures (Bugis and Portuguese) of its main proponent, Manuel Godinho de Eredia; or between that part of the world and this (I mean S E Asia and Australia). Given that part of the book is a quest for understanding of its title, it is strangely satisfying to have come, serendipitously, at last, to this explanation.

the dust of light

A friend said to me the other day that if you have a sealed box, which is empty, even perhaps a vacuum, but into which light may enter, you will find that, after an indeterminate period, dust will gather within. This dust, he said, is a dust of light. It is energy become matter. Since he told me this, I have begun to see a luminous dust everywhere. It coats my fingertips while I'm sleeping, it dances, with Brownian motion, before my eyes when I squint at the sun, it is all over the golden windows of this apartment. My friend also believes gravity to be a kind of sentience. He says that, in time, we will understand that what keeps us anchored is in fact a fidelity we cannot help but feel towards that part of ourselves that is as yet inchoate, which our awareness has not yet illuminated. When he talks like this I feel myself begin to float, not away, but into an empyrean where the dust of light streams towards the future.

Magic Hour at KSO

The photographic shoot is on reclaimed land near warehouse sheds, at dusk or just before. The usual palaver, faces shiny in the arc-lights, magic hour obscured by the buzz of ambition and clouds of pheromones. Out there, partially submerged beneath the dark water, is Kenneth Slessor Oval. The girl is hanging on your lapel, soliciting - what? A smile? A sexy, sulky look? Or perhaps just the blank you feel, seeing the dome of your head reflected in a reflector. You brush her off and wade out into the night, surrounded by crowds of people, some boarding an ocean liner for the cruise of a lifetime, others simply trying, as you are, to return to the City. A performance enacted by robots under the auspices of the peak funding body draws bureaucratic applause, you flip open your mobile phone and place it before you on the table so that you can switch between the action on the stage and its tiny complement on the screen. Now you are walking through a long, bright tunnel, now you realise, with a sudden shock, that many of those around you are in fact aliens, their skin a rind of pinky-orange chain mail, very strange but non-threatening ... and how is it you can tell the human from the alien and others can't? They change back and forth without warning. Someone hands you a magnifying glass with which you can, they say, without fail, distinguish one from the other. Except it doesn't work, these creatures, whatever they are, have minds of their own and seem afflicted by an inability to control those inadvertent metamorphoses. So on you go, through the bright-dark corridor, surrounded by humans who might be aliens, or cyborgs, or robots, while below the faint outline of Kenneth Slessor Oval fades, washed by seaweed, scattered with the luminous bones of dead sailors, starred by pearls that were his eyes, consumed in a slow rumination of grazing sea horses.

Arete Again

Last week I was trying to explain to my kids about Odysseus getting his men to tie him to the mast so that he could listen to the Sirens sing, and afterwards took down from the shelf my copy of The Odyssey to check the story. This book belonged to my father, it's a Penguin classic, translated by E V Rieu ... in fact, it was the very first Penguin classic, published in 1946, although Dad's copy is a 1952 reprint. He also had its companion volume, The Illiad, bought and inscribed with his name and the date, August, 1950. Lovely old books, browning and fragrant and disintegrating.

I'd just been reading a collection John Fowles' occasional prose, which includes a long essay in which he elaborates on his view that The Odyssey was written by a woman - he held this in common with Robert Graves and Samuel Butler and, who knows, maybe he's right. Anyway, I read the bit about the Sirens and then, for some reason, curiosity I guess, turned to the front and started to read from the beginning. How long since I had? When did I last? Don't know, doesn't matter, I was gripped from the start and have been reading it ever since. With intense and unalloyed pleasure. Particularly in the intricate and wonderfully non-linear structure of the story-telling.

Then, a couple of days ago, I finally reach the point, about a third of the way in, when Odysseus arrives in Phaeacia, where he will tell the story of his wanderings to the King and Queen and their company. The King is called of Alcinous and his wife, the Queen, on whose mercy Odysseus has been instructed, by Athene, to throw himself, is called ... Arete. The name I heard called in a dream a week or so ago, and wondered who or what it meant. It is in this sequence that the assembled company is entertained by a blind bard singing of events at Troy, which does make you question what kind of a homage this is - Homer speaking of himself? Or another, speaking of Homer?

But The Odyssey has been in my mind for another reason, I've been writing a film treatment called The Return, set on a remote NZ farm in 1948 and also, in flashback, on Crete in 1941. The plot is pretty simple: a man who is thought to be dead returns to find his brother has married the woman he loves and is the de facto father to the daughter who is actually his. The brothers were involved in a fatal misadventure on Crete in the hiatus between the evacuation of Greece and the German paratrooper invasion and this has changed things forever between them. The drama plays out on the farm in a manner I like to think of as Rural Noir.

At one point, I had the returned man sitting outside the rabbiter's hut where he stays, reading a copy of The Illiad. Then I realised two things: the E V Rieu translation, which I want to use if and when the film is made, wasn't published until 1950; and The Odyssey is more appropriate to the story I'm trying to tell. So I changed it. Now, here is what the translator has to say of the circumstances in which it was made:

I began on the Odyssey three years before the Second World War started, and completed the first draft as France fell. Home Guard service intervened, and I could not finish the job till 1944. Even so, its revision was undertaken to the sound of v1 and v2 explosions and the crash of shattering glass - an accompaniment which would have chimed in better with the more warlike Iliad, and which, I hope, is not reflected in my style. Actually, I went back to Homer, the supreme realist, who puts his magic finger every time on the essential qualities of things, by way of escape from the unrealities that surrounded us then - and still surround us in a world of fantastically distorted values.

We'll Never Turn Back

The extra extraordinary

Otoliths

is one year old today

Or was that voice calling Arrêté!?

Last night I dreamed of a woman called Arete.

She is the one sung in the Song of Solomon. The one who sings in the Song of Solomon.

Her eyes like dove's eggs. Her mouth wide as a river of longing. Her hair the memory of time, glossy and black, to be climbed up or down or among. Her sweet white teeth.

Her children, a girl and boy, deserted by their father. The boy asks him to come but he is busy working. The boy does not ever speak to his mother about his father. He has his pride.

Pride will get you killed in a war, you would rather die than admit to fear.

She is from Persia. Her name is Greek because of Alexander's passing, two millennia ago. Or for some other reason, her courage perhaps, her spirit, the sheer elegance of her person.

I heard her name called three times, that was all the dream was; her attributes I divined later, while still under the spell of the vision.

Today I saw her in the street, looking into the bakery shop window while she waited for the bank to open. So slender. Immaculately dressed. Beautiful.

I could not tell if she had seen me or not, but as I passed by with my newspaper I turned, caught her eye, smiled and said Hello.

Hello, she said. How are you today?

I'm well, I replied. Then the door of the bank opened and she passed inside, out of my sight for now.

Arete! the voice called. Arete! Arete!