oak (n.): ‘tree or shrub of the genus Quercus,’ Middle English oke, from Old English ac ‘oak tree’ and in part from cognate Old Norse eik, both from Proto-Germanic *aiks… a word of uncertain origin with no certain cognates outside Germanic.
The usual Indo-European base for ‘oak’ (*deru-) has become Modern English tree (n.). In Greek and Celtic, meanwhile, words for ‘oak’ are from the Indo-European root for ‘tree.’ All this probably reflects the importance of the oak, the monarch of the forest, to ancient Indo-Europeans…
The form in Middle English was very uncertain (oc, oek, hokke, ake, eoke, aike, hock, etc.)
Etymonline - ‘oak'.
Also: Old English Ac gives us acorn, ‘oak-seed’.
In the ancient Ogham alphabet, the oak rune is Dair or Duir.
Indo-European *deru- or *dreu- gives us Druid— an ‘oak-knower’.
Glans— as in the glans clitoris or the glans penis— is Latin for acorn: look at the shape.
People came and peeped in the back of the van just as I was twisting the swab deep inside my right nostril. It felt super weird to be watched, but the process is time-sensitive.1 Grimly I switched the swab to my left nostril. A doubly private act, freighted with unearned shame. Anything to do with body-holes is like that, but the nostril is usually one of the least shameful, something equivalent to the ear-hole. It must be, then, that it’s the contagion that’s shameful. Contract a disease and a blame-flip occurs: one minute you’re the innocent victim, the next you’re the filthy perpetrator, spreading your filthy germs. Your personal defenses are penetrated, then suddenly you’re the Trojan horse— a barbarian at someone else’s city wall.
It was the Monday morning after Easter. I watched the little plastic window. It reminds me of a pregnancy test every time, no matter how often people post photos of their double pink lines on the Internet in the now-customary form of the social media Covid-announcement.2 Also like a pregnancy test, it’s pretty often negative— it’s usually like Great, now my paranoia is over, because science— but this time I was shocked to see the first pink line forming itself as soon as the diluted snot-wave soaked over it.
My predominant emotion was annoyance. This meant the end of my status as possibly the last Covid unicorn in the world. I had been starting to believe I possessed some kind of magical immunity, because I’d been exposed a number of times and never caught the Coves.3 More people came to say goodbye and congratulate us on our performances and I yelled at them stay back, I have the plague!
We had sung pretty well the night before, at the final concert. It turns out that being properly on stage with lights and microphones is actually less scary, because you can’t see the audience’s faces. The light shining in your eyes dazzles you so that you’re in a personal island of brightness, singing out into the dark, which sings back to you. I had my hair plaited up and my hat and jacket and boots on, and my voice held out fine, and everyone said nice things afterwards. (People generally want people to do well, performance-wise. It’s kind of like when you’re in love: if you / the other person are not complete bastards, your friends are rooting for you.)
Hamsterfest is held at Paeroa Racecourse, a site covered in enormous old trees, so that the outside space is a kind of leafy cathedral of beautiful dappled light, with a carpet of leaves and acorns underfoot. The racecourse itself had been planted in corn that had been cut down, rows of stubble overlaid on the huge oval form of the track, the cropped rows like a scissor-cut doll’s head. (A cut-down corn plant looks kind of like a little octopus with its head chopped off: a leggy aerial-root star.)
The corn was maize, of course, and probably by picking up the ears of corn that had been left lying on the racetrack Kev was breaking the law, offending against Monsanto’s patent or something. The kernels were dry inside their papery husk, separated one from another, and stained red at the root, like bloody teeth. “Gleaning,” I said: the ancient right of the poor, like in Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I.4 The French title is Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse: by which she means that her work— film-making— is a kind of gleaning, a scavenging or gathering up.
I remember the first time I saw that film, the revelation of Varda’s post-structuralist approach: proof that a work of art could be simple, homemade, and honest, but still deep, ambitious, and complex. What made the biggest impression on me, though, was the scene where she returns home to a large pile of beautiful mail from strangers. I remember thinking, that kind of fame would be tolerable. Letters from strangers, I’d be down with that.
I couldn’t remember having travelled to a folk festival in Autumn before, but it was an evocative time for it. Bucolic, which as someone pointed out at the festival, means the nice things about living in the country. The North Island was covered in cornfields, some still standing, drying, golden, and some cut down. It made me think of this, an Autumn song— Now waving grain, wild o’er the plain, Delights the weary farmer:5
Driving across the country, though, seeing the hugeness of the monoculture, corn corn corn, dairy dairy dairy, sheep sheep sheep, I felt sad, as usual. I can never help imagining what the land was like 200 years ago, wishing they’d left something, some forest or swamp, some bits of wildness among the tameness. Tameness is not a strong enough word, though: it’s more colonisation, domestication, bringing to heel, stripping, owning.
The unfairness and wastefulness of all that land owned by so few, all those empty stretches of paddock. Where are our commons? We never had them here, and by we, I mean we, the children of the colonisers— those who were driven from their own lands, then went and drove others from their lands. History can be read as a chain reaction of dispossession.
The wind blows and through a high window I see the oak leaves fly from the tree just like birds. Against the light they could be birds, this stream of leaves letting go their hold. It’s the way they fly one by one, the same way one bird takes flight, then another, then another.
No Jack this time.
Me: “Why not?”
Chris: “Because he’s 86. That’s fourteen years away from 100.”
We spend some time discussing the coat Jack was wearing last Tradfest, a heavy black donkey jacket of boiled wool. Chris says it belonged to her Grandad— Jack’s Dad— an engine driver,6 so the coat is likely as old as Jack, if not older. She says he lent it to her when she went away to University, and that it’s so heavy it’s a workout to wear it.
Ann tells everyone that I’m the only baby she ever saw being born, and how beautiful I was. “You came out all blue and purple, but then you went pink.” (I text my Mum and she says it’s true, that I came out perfect; “Fully cooked, and with all that black hair.”)
Ann tells me a story about my Dad sitting at the table eating cornflakes and shooting mice with an air pistol. She also says he promised her that he would play the lute while she was dying, but then he forgot.
Oak of the Clay lived many a day, or ever Aeneas began. Quercus what? Kev says sessile and pedunculate oaks can be distinguished by the stems: one has a short stem on the leaf and a long stem on the acorn, and the other has the opposite configuration, but he can’t remember which is which. This one is pedunculate, maybe, he says, turning the stem of an acorn-cap between his fingers.
At night the white moon hangs in the branches like a hailstone, and my kneecaps freeze, and I wish heartily for my long coat, which is 550 kilometres away.
In Paeroa town there was an epic antique shop, so enormous I couldn’t even look at anything. It would take days to even scratch the surface, and as I’m a completist, there seemed little point. Also, we were in a hurry. Also, I could see that anything good was priced high— it was definitely an antique shop, not an op shop— no bargains to be had. It was run by a cranky old couple who sniped at each other. I flicked through the postcard stacks and chose these three:
On the way upstairs to the top level of the shop— about five or six interlinked rooms of antiques— I met the most beautiful dog. She was long and slender, her fur black and curly, maybe a poodle-greyhound, I thought. She had the bearing some dogs have, as if they’re humans in hound form, and not just any old human, but maybe a queen or a magician under a spell. She had a knowing, intimate confidence, as if we were already good friends. I scratched her long woolly back and her beautiful slender head. I could have patted her forever.
Later, back at camp, I mentioned the beautiful dog to Geoff. “Ah yes,” he said, “Sophie.”
(I had half-forgotten that he’s a dog-wizard. Of course he knew exactly the dog I meant, and her name.)
“Did she put her paws on your chest?” he said.
I was shocked. “No! She approached me very respectfully.”
”She jumped up on me,” said Geoff, “Then we played. I played I’m going to grab your paws with her.”
I said that she was clever enough to know exactly how to behave with each of us. I told Geoff what I had learned about her parentage, which was that she was part poodle and part golden retriever, and that she was the runt of her litter, far smaller than her brothers and sisters. I told him about the writing I did about all the untrained poodle-cross hybrids that plague Wellington. (Here: Terribility of Resplendent Propinquity)
Geoff said that breeding produces unpredictable results. For instance, his old dog Oku hadn’t been much into running, but Oku’s daughter Ava is a speed-freak; when let loose on the farm, “Her greatest pleasure is in chasing swallows.”
So this is Covid. It felt psychedelic, as if the world were overlaid with another skin. My experience of the world is usually fairly psychedelic, but this felt different. I realised that it was the particular, unnerving feeling of another entity working its will inside my body— like mushrooms.
It also reminded me of sex, in the sense of Oh. So this is what it’s like. I had remained a Covid virgin, waaay beyond when everyone else was experienced— as Jimi Hendrix put it— and now I wasn’t. Now I was deflowered; now I knew what it was like. Like psychedelics or sex, or indeed most bodily knowledge in life, theory counts for next to nothing: you don’t know until you try.
Also, I thought, my body was kind of analogous to my country. When the rest of the world had Covid and we in Aotearoa didn’t— Fortress New Zealand, so-called— there was a full year and a bit where the Rona was theoretical to most New Zealanders. Covid was a thing we knew through the news and through people’s stories, rather than through first-hand experience. I’d be on the Coffee and Cards Zoom every day with people in the U.S.A, the U.K., and Europe, and someone would say something or I’d say something and they’d all remember that there was no Covid in New Zealand. It was an extremely weird feeling, embarrassing, like survivor’s guilt, or unearned privilege. Our worlds were worlds apart. I remember Mark, a University professor in Paris, talking about only ever seeing the top half of his student’s faces: having a relationship with people by eyes alone, never having seen each other’s nose and mouth. So that was me— I was New Zealand and everyone else was the rest of the world.
Also— as in any altered state— I was like Let’s write. I’m always curious to see what comes out when slightly different brains are at the wheel. This Easter marks the end of Lent. I’ve been off the Internet (apart from set periods of time, not more than an hour a day) and sober, for forty days;7 more than forty days now, because I didn’t end up falling off the wagon over Easter. So, you know, Covid is the closest I’m getting to any altered state. Wheee! The stupefaction of Covid-brain means the vinegary critical voice is smothered under a blanket of snot, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I rang my parents to tell them I wasn’t coming to visit because I have Covid and my Dad helpfully informed me that having Covid means your IQ drops by three points.
But I want to talk more about the trees. The one we were camped under was a giant pin-oak, Quercus palustris.8 Its acorns were small, shaped like little belly-buttons— more acorn-cap than acorn— and Grandad-shoe brown, striped lighter and darker. At night, when it rained, the tree concentrated the rain into big drops on the van roof, like an extremely random clock. Also sometimes acorns fell, sounding much the same. Broken time. (On the first day of the festival I’d found a broken Casio with its face smashed in, which made me happy.)
Sunday. Χριστός ἀνέστη! The sunset light struck sideways through the trees and illuminated certain clumps of leaves, lit them up, and I couldn’t think what they were like. Like human ears, like rabbit ears, like petals, like stained glass, like anything that the sun lights up. We all sat around a picnic table singing to Erin’s guitar in harmony, marae strum, country pop, and I had my head back gazing up when a grey heron came, outspread silver wings against the dark twisting branches, and alighted on a branch high overhead, vanishing into the sunlit leaves. I pointed up, but too late, nobody else could see it. We were singing Bob Dylan, but I can’t remember the lyrics or the name now, because Covid. Then we sang The Weight, and when anyone forgot, someone else remembered, so between the six or so of us we sang, and, and, and, you put the load you put the load right on me. Other people came to sing. The people at the other picnic table turned. Black hawk and the white wing dove. Suddenly I was singing harmony, I was like, harmony! I understand! Other people say they just understand and now I understand.
The reason writers are so superstitious about their process, habits, etc. is that the work of writing can truly feel like a mystery even from the inside. What if the ideas just dry up? What if tomorrow I suddenly can’t do what I did today? How do I make it complex and funny, not inspiring and boring? What about a title? Chronology? Tenses? What if it’s a bad idea to put my journal on the Internet? What if losing three IQ points means I stop being able to tell when something’s finished, or if it makes any sense? And so on. And so forth. Sense-making is labour like net-knotting. Consistent small efforts in the service of a greater useful shape. (Call it Carrier Bag Theory, if you prefer.) Writing is automatic, but being able to see if I’m making any sense is difficult, high-level stuff.
Maybe for once— because I’m sick, because I’m finishing this ramble in the photophobic aftermath of shimmering migraine-hallucinations that rippled down the left hand half of my vision like Swallow Falls in the postcard of Wales come to life— maybe for once I can have a holiday from thinking, and structure, and hard things like that— maybe everything doesn’t have to be so polished for once. I’ll pretend I’m a poet, and sit under this big tree gathering acorns.
On the way home, tripping on Covid, I saw a hunting hawk stoop into a field of standing and vanish beneath the golden surface, neat as a gannet diving for fish.
I was conscious of my brain inside my skull, not as a matrix of electrical ideas, but as a lump of meat in pain.
Later I saw a large black bird sitting at the edge of a mown cornfield. Bird identification is a split-second cross-referencing of information: location, size, colour, shape, movement, behaviour. If that doesn’t work you have to think about it more and it’s like, not this, not that, not the other. The strange bird was at the fenceline, and suddenly I saw that it wasn’t a bird at all: it was a black cat, sitting neatly with its back to the yellow stubble.
It reminded me of drawing— the feeling of not being able to stop in the middle of an activity. Once you’ve started walking the tightrope, you have to keep moving or you’ll fall off.
Someone could gather all these photos up and make a really boring montage that runs until the heat death of the Universe.
My fellow unicorn
succumbed a few months ago via a series of international flights. She was very annoyed.First four and a half minutes of the film here:
Rabbie Burns for life! At the festival, Paul— a Scotsman— told me my Scots pronunciation was very good, which I was happy about. Singing Burns as a non-Scot means walking the tricky line of correct pronunciation without going anywhere near my particular most-hated folk affectation— a cod accent. (I beg you, never, ever do this, whether Irish, American, or any other. Nowt wrong with a good honest Kiwi accent.) Dick Gaughan says it’s fine to sing Scots in any accent, so I took that as permission. Despite trawling the Wayback Machine I couldn’t find where he’d said it, but I did find this excellent and comprehensive tipsheet on Floorsinging for Beginners: https://web.archive.org/web/20010204142900/http://www.dickalba.demon.co.uk/umf/floortip.htm
A song about working your way up to being an engine driver:
More about my tech-fast here: https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/open-forum-fasting-from-the-virtual/comment/52988579
(Writing on Substack doesn’t count.)
I knew what the tree’s species was because it was the same as the tree outside the front gate to Parliament that got scorched in the riots. I researched that tree because I had a plan to affix a post-box to it so people could post love-notes to the hurt tree, and to trees in general that they loved.
I'm so sorry that Covid finally found you--I hope it has been a mild case and that you're feeling much better now.
This was a wonderful post. Every part of it was interesting to me. Thanks for writing it!
Ah no!!! We did so good, us 4-year (me, almost - you, over!) Rona unicorns 🦄 Sorry she got you in the end. You’ll make up for the 3 IQ points in life experience (plague!) and altered brain state writing.
We missed you at Krakenburn (no COVID but the gastro & strep virus said an unwelcome hello!), I know you would have loved Ms Naughtyless and how gloriously she burned (check out pics on FB - we epically surpassed anything we ever burned at Moa Point). Always missing you, friend. X