Note: if a post contains lots of photos, it quickly gets too big for email. Click through to read the whole thing. Also, on the actual Substack, footnotes pop up when you hover on them. Sorry / not sorry about my footnote-peppering.
Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story: “Consider the possibility that you’re nothing without your relations. All your kin— human, non-human, plant, animal, place, blood, water— all these familial links contain your thinking and character, the things you have always imagined to be occurring inside your fabulous individual mind. Ponder the notion that there is almost nothing you can learn about ants by examining a single specimen in a petri dish.”
A few nights back I dreamed that my Hoya carnosa wanted something to climb. The dream was emphatically a request, so I pondered on how to do it, collected bits and pieces— driftwood roots, sticky hooks— then yesterday afternoon I made a trellis in the corner of the room where it lives. It was an improvised form, and it came out somewhat differently from my initial vision, which was to make something like a spiderweb.
(Now that I’m looking at this photo, I remember one of Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures in the documentary Rivers and Tides: a loose grid hanging from a tree branch. I remember it as being made from grass, but when I check, it’s reeds or sedges of some kind. It’s worth watching the whole film, but the relevant bit is at 54.48. His response at the end of this scene is very characteristic: understated resignation to Fate.
Someone told me the other day that they were an adult student in an art-school class where this film was shown; the young people were bored and frustrated by it to the point of baffled anger.)1
The construction and attachment of the trellis required sustained concentration, improvisation in three dimensions, attention to tensioning, and patient tinkering, which occupied me for some hours, so once it was finished I went to the beach to stretch my legs. I’d heard the ocean roaring in the night, and I’d seen earlier in the day that the waves were right up to (sometimes overspilling) the sea wall, wiping the whole beach clean like a giant Magnadoodle. It was a calmish, sunny day; meaning that the big waves originated far out at sea. Depending on currents, a gnarly swell can be good for flotsam— floating things— deposited among the seaweed.
The waves had sculpted the beach into stone-banks strewn with seaweed-drifts, and broad expanses of sand. There was nothing in the seaweed or the sand, though, so I started looking amongst the stones, in the backwash of the waves. When I’m picking in the edge of the waves I feel like I’m channelling the oystercatcher. I have to be quick to pick up anything I spot, and poised to flit, with half an eye out for the occasional mega-wave. A big swell like this is a reset, and when it’s happening the beach is truly random, un-sorted. Artefacts are few, and they can appear and disappear within seconds.
Underfoot, I found this: the chunky base of a bottle.
The date seemed familiar; as if I’d seen it somewhere recently. My memory— usually pretty infallible— is undergoing some sort of age-related reconfiguration at the moment, so it wasn’t until I looked up the year on Wikipedia that I remembered where.
When I was hanging out in the SaVĀge K’lub at Performance Arcade, I’d told the story of my Great-Grandpa seeing Halley’s Comet as a child, from the deck of a ship travelling from his home island Vanua Balavu (in the Lau Group of Fiji) to Tonga, where he played on the verandah of the King’s Palace. (He died before I was born, so I have this story through my Mum. I asked her whether her Grandpa had told her the story, and she said he must have, though she couldn’t remember where or when.)
The comet dates the story to 1910. “That comet was used in tapa cloth design,” said Rosanna.2
My Great-Grandpa was born in 1901,3 so in 1910 he was eight or nine (not four or five as I’d previously imagined: I think it was the ‘playing on the verandah’ bit that made me picture him as a younger child). I don’t have a photo of him as a kid, but here he is as a young man:
The thing is, there were two comets in 1910. Halley’s Comet, as predicted, appeared in April. But in January, a surprise comet suddenly showed up. It was (likely) the brightest comet of the Century, and was known as the Daylight Comet, AKA the Great January Comet. People who remembered a 1910 comet were sometimes remembering that January one, rather than Halley’s.
I saw another comet-omen at the Performance Arcade, too. A woman named Una had a comet tattoo on her forearm, that I recognised from the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch (circa 1552)— it was this one:
She said I was the first person ever to identify the origin of the tattoo.
Enrique once sent me a photo of himself bending over a vitrine, within which was this very book, open. (So is the comet book in New York?)
When I check this memory, though, it’s not an image, but a text.
Enrique: “I just noticed that your cover photo is a page from the book of wonders. I saw the original of that book this week in a gallery in Chelsea. The owner, a collector, is showing part of his collection perhaps with a view to selling it. I've been to see the book a couple of times. I was pleased to see that the people in the gallery change the page from time to time so that each time you go it is open to a different page.”
As I turned the piece of glass in my fingers to photograph it, I suddenly noticed there were well-worn letters along the rim.
An easy riddle— LONDON. That made me remember that there are two comets in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, too. Those comets appeared in 1664, and 1665:4
Defoe: “In the first Place, a blazing Star or Comet appear’d for several Months before the Plague, as there did the Year after another, a little before the Fire;5 the old Women… remark’d (especially afterward tho’ not, till both those Judgments were over,) that those two Comets pass’d directly over the City, and that so very near the Houses, that it was plain, they imported something peculiar to the City alone; that the Comet before the Pestilence, was of a faint, dull, languid Colour, and its Motion very heavy, solemn, and slow; But that the Comet before the Fire, was bright and sparkling, or, as others said, flaming, and its Motion swift and furious; and that accordingly, One foretold a heavy Judgment, slow but severe, terrible and frightful, as was the Plague; but the other foretold a Stroak, sudden, swift, and fiery as the Conflagration...”
Such a specific omen: a year, and a place. I was curious what else happened in 1910. According to Wikipedia,
There were revolts, rebellions, or revolutions in Côte d'Ivoire, Albania, Morocco, Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil.
In February, the New York Shirtwaist strike, AKA the Uprising of the 20,000— protesting sweatshop conditions— was settled.6 The strike inspired the first International Woman’s Day. Today is International Women’s Day. Bread and Roses!
In January and February, three coal mine explosions in the U.S.A. killed a total of 120 miners. Also in February, a coal mine explosion in Mexico killed 68 miners. In December, a coal mine explosion in Lancashire killed 344 miners; there were only two survivors.7
On the fourth of July in Reno, Nevada, Black boxer Jack Johnson beat the previously undefeated world heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries, who had stated, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.” After two knockdowns, Jeffries threw in the towel in the 15th round rather than have a knockout on his record. Johnson’s victory sparked race riots in more than 50 cities across America, killing over 20 people and injuring hundreds more.8
In November, in London, 300 suffragettes clashed violently with police: Black Friday.
I see that from the dataset events of 1910, I have drawn a particular story: a tale of social and political foment.
Here is a story my Great-Grandma told me about my Great-Grandpa. When she told her parents she had fallen in love with him, they told her, “You’re not marrying that black bastard.”
Her solution was to fall pregnant (with my Grandad). They had to let her marry him then.
Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of the short twentieth century dates the true beginning of the century to 1914, the start of WWI.9 Looking back from the other side of the war-torn twentieth century, the time before WWI can seem relatively innocent. But that’s a narrow view; it depends where and how you look.
As well as the Great War, the 1910s would see the Russian revolution; the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire; the Easter rising in Ireland (in which my other Great-Grandmother got a bullet-hole through her hat); the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people; and the sinking of the Titanic. Also Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; jazz; Cubism; Dada; and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.
Reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay Staying Awake, about readers vs. non-readers, I find the following sentence: “To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old was rather awesome.”
Searching for my Great-Grandpa online, I find an entry concerning a burglary of his house in the New Zealand Police Gazette of 1945. “Stolen: A black Burnham plunger filling fountain-pen, gold nib, pocket-clip, gold band with ‘G.P.’ thereon… Identifiable.”
This pen is immediately real to me— I can see it in my mind— and I am seized with the strong conviction that I can find it.
Writing this, I see a movement out of the corner of my eye— a small mouse, wandering in a leisurely manner through the landscape of my book-stacks and floor-cushions; an omen of Autumn.
I love any artefact that bears information about its origins. Sometimes things like words or numbers give a clue that can be followed to precisely identify an object,10 but in the case of the 1910 glass piece, even though I have both a date and a place of origin, there’s no manufacturer’s name or product label, so the trail goes cold. By the size and colour, it looks like the base of a bottle that held a liquid— though it is fairly small, so maybe medicine rather than a beverage? (Medicine bottles tend to be rectangular rather than round, though.) Water was bottled in Wellington from the Waiwhetu aquifer, but those bottles tend to be made in New Zealand:
…It’s all just guesswork. Anyway, I’ve saved the coolest thing til last. Inside the glass is a bubble full of liquid, and inside the liquid, an air bubble— just like a spirit level. I’ve never come across this before.
How in holy fuck does that happen? If anyone has any ideas, please let us know in the comments.
Sea-glass speaks of the interrelatedness of solid and liquid, the way they act upon each other. Glass (made of sand), a solid liquid that once held liquid liquid, is smashed— it can no longer hold liquid. In the sea, solid stone moves within liquid water to wear the sharp glass smooth, rendering it round: the same process that formed the round stones. Given enough time— centuries— the glass will return to the form of sand. While it was worked on by the sea this spirit-bubble trapped in glass was air inside liquid inside glass (solid liquid)— inside solid (pebble matrix) inside liquid (sea).
I picked the omen up— air-in-liquid-in-glass— via the chance of putting my foot in that spot at that moment between one particular wave and the next. Enrique might call this sortilege. Are chance and magic the same thing? Or are they just interrelated?
I can’t remember who told me the story; they may have been the teacher. The point is, they were a Gen X in a room full of Millennials.
1901 was the the year Queen Victoria died, a hinge between eras.
Also born in 1901: Clark Gable; Gary Cooper; Louis Armstrong; Walt Disney; Marlene Dietrich. (Again, a theme chosen more or less at random— I could have gone with Linus Pauling, Enrico Fermi, and Werner Heisenberg.)
Samuel Pepys talks in his diaries about other people having seen the comets. He tries to see them, but as far as I can tell, doesn’t succeed. I’m guessing London was fairly smoggy at the time.
More on the comet-fever sparked by the twin comets of the 1660s here: The emergence of modern astronomy – a complex mosaic: Part XXXVII (For one thing, the 1664 comet got the young Isaac Newton into astronomy.)
The Great Fire of London, 1666
However, it was followed in 1911 by The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 people.
I knew there had to be a folk song about it, and indeed there is. Turns out the reason I don’t already know it is that it’s not very good. Have this coal-mining song instead, written by Ewan McColl and sung by Damien Dempsey:
The weird thing is, last Shanty Club David sang Big Strong Man, which mentions the Jeffries-Johnson fight.
Originally written in 1908, it’s a song that’s been much tinkered with. The Jeffries-Johnson reference, as well as the one to Jack Dempsey (world heavyweight champion from 1919 - 1926) are later additions, as is the mention of the Lusitania, sunk in 1915.
…And the end of the century to 1991, making this other piece of glass I found on the same walk a symbolic end-bracket: both fall outside the ‘true’ 20thC, according to Hobsbawm.
…Like this other piece of ceramic I found on the same walk. It is made by Joseph Bourne and Son in Denby, Derbyshire, and is likely a master ink bottle— that is, a large bottle of ink that one uses to fill one’s smaller inkwell: the lip of the bottle would have a pouring spout.
Ink was my medium for many years, so finding ink-related paraphernalia always feels like a personal omen. I have another beach-combed piece of bottle that my friend Maeve identified as referring to Dunedin ink-maker Meek’s, as well as a dip-pen nib.