Beach-Combing Journal: Blue Flower Mystery
Also! Political Predictions via Cryptic Dream-Symbolism
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History:1 “Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way.”
The dolphins are back, which means it’s almost Summer. I found these three small objects in a single walk, and wrote this Note:
Ceramic. (Fifth piece of this plate I’ve found.) Keyboard key. (A predominance of 8s in my key-finds to date: 8 = Strength in Tarot.) Seal tooth.
First hot day means swimmers. A pair of proud-stanced young women in vintage togs; a pair of 15-year-old boys who stepped into my path to take their shirts off, watching me under their fringes; and a bare-bum toddler, thigh-deep, delighted, accompanied by a frisking wet labradoodle.
Finding multiples— bits that match bits I’ve found before2— is always a buzz. Long odds. But when I got home and put the piece of ceramic next to the other ceramic fragments I thought it belonged to, it didn’t match them. The colours were lighter, the petals rounder. For a moment I thought maybe it was because this piece is far more worn than the four other pieces, which are all sharp-edged: the other pieces have been buried in the ground, while this one’s been rolling around in the sea.
But there are other differences, too. Look:
The most recent piece of the flower plate3 I’d found was on the 11th of October, just before the election. I posted my ceramic finds from that day with the caption “The flowering vines will smother the tower.”
While I was shard-matching, I noticed that a sixth piece I’d taken as belonging to the same plate, also didn’t:
Could it belong to THIS plate? (I’d only just noticed these three shards belonged together, were pieces of the same pattern.) Possibly… I don’t think so, though: the foliage pattern is different, the piece seems too wide to fit inside the plate’s rim, and the ceramic is very slightly thicker.
What these blue-flowered ceramic fragments represent, then, are (likely) four variations on a very similar pattern. They don’t seem to me to be matched pieces of the same set— say, cups, bowls, plates: there are too many subtle differences. The pattern looks Victorian to me, but I haven’t been able to track it down. If you know any antique-ceramics experts, please ask them for me! Naming a pattern often means triangulating a maker, date, and / or place of origin.
As for the number 8 key, it’s the fourth 8-key I’ve found on the beach. My button / key collection stands at eight total, if you include the Bananagrams tile with my initial ‘R’ on it: that makes four of the eight… 8s.4 Again, long odds.
In traditional Tarot, the eighth card in the Major Arcana is Strength.5
I’ve found Strength on the beach in ceramic form, too:
Etymonline says: “Middle English strong, from Old English strang, of living things, body parts, ‘physically powerful;’ of persons, ‘firm, bold, brave; constant, resolute; having authority, able to enforce one's will;’ of medicines, poisons, ‘powerful in effect;’ of winds, etc., ‘violent, forceful, severe,’ of wine, ‘having high alcohol content.’ The general sense is ‘possessing or imparting force or energy; intense or intensified in degree."
The year Jacinda Ardern was elected, 2017, I chose to vote on Women’s Suffrage Day, 124 years on. I went in full Wizard-regalia. (There was a whole thing about dressing Edwardian to vote that year, but high femme isn’t usually my bag.)6 Ardern is almost exactly a year younger than me (she was aged 37 at the time of the election), a fellow Leo-Sun7 and my near-exact contemporary. It was unheard of for such a thing to happen, for someone like that— like me— to be in the running. But I could feel in the air that there was a real chance she might win. When the initial results came in, it was too close to call. National immediately went into “We won, we won,” mode, as is their wont. People believed them, and despaired. But as I kept reminding everyone, it wasn’t actually over. As usual, it all came down to the decision of Kingmaker Winston Peters,8 who had fresh utu9 against National for leaking his pension details to the media. The old showboater stretched it out as long as he possibly could, orchestrating a weeks-long big reveal while the whole country waited. Oh the attention!
Part of the reason for my hopefulness was that the night before the election, I’d dreamed the following dream:
A man is standing in midair over a deep mine shaft ALA cartoon characters who run off a cliff and stand on thin air for a few oblivious moments. On his shoulder stands a rat playing a little violin. I can actually see its little paws making notes and the bow sawing on the strings. Then, just like in the cartoons, they both notice there is nothing underneath them, and plummet down, to be trapped forever in a manmade underworld, totally alone, to wander the concrete halls for ever, and never escape.
(But... Wait a minute... what about that glitchy lift? Could it be made to work?)
My interpretation of this dream was as follows:
The man is the Labour Party (appearing to lose— the election results were too close to call and National immediately claimed victory).
The musical rat is trickster Winston Peters.10
The concrete underworld is the prospect of a term in opposition. The lift is the possibility of an eleventh-hour reprieve.
AND LO, THUS DID IT COME TO PASS. The Kingmaker made a Queen, and 20,000 people didn’t die.11
(Psych! What was not specified in this dream was the toll the rat made the man pay in exchange for the secret instructions to make the lift work— namely Ardern's promise to Peters never to implement a Capital Gains Tax in her political lifetime.)
The election we’ve just had, on the other hand, was one of the most depressing in living memory. I don’t mean for team-sport reasons— more the racist dog-whistling, stupid bad-maths economics, and general fatigue of it all. The night before THIS election, however, I dreamed the following dream:
I am on a back porch at dusk. On the porch with me are a woman, and a baby lying in a bassinet, crying and crying. The woman is not the parent of the baby. After a while I can't handle the crying; I pick the baby up and put it to my shoulder. Oops— I have upset the balance, and the woman says "Here he comes. That was quick." (Who— the moon? I gaze into the darkness trying to see what is coming.)12 Then a big man appears. Dark man. He takes the baby and puts it into his mouth and eats it— I don’t mean swallowed whole— he chews the baby up, crunch crunch.
The woman is patting the big man's cheek. This is a trick: she pats his cheek firmly one last time and when she takes her hand away he is marked with black on the face, like soot, and I think— he doesn’t realise, but he fucked up. He's now marked, he can be tracked.
Provisional interpretation: Christopher Luxon 'eats the baby,' i.e. becomes overlord. Ultimately though he fucks up somehow. He is marked— betrayed— by someone he doesn't take seriously as an adversary: someone seemingly unimportant, a bystander, possibly female. The outcome is a stain on his name (his face.) This interpretation may be entirely too literal; we’ll see how it plays out. In any case, I think Luxon winning this election is something of a Pyrrhic victory; Prime Ministership will turn out to be a poisoned chalice for him in the long run.
Friday. The anaesthetist: “This Fentanyl will feel like you’ve drunk two glasses of wine.”
Bam! Instantaneous wooze. I was like— Blergh— people do that for fun? It’s nasty! Stupefying, like a blow to the head.
Then they— anaesthetist and nurses— started making chitchat, even though the mask was over my face by this point: “So, what do you do?”
Me: “I’m a writer.”
Them, suddenly interested: “Oh, what do you write about?”
Me: “Creative non-fiction. Lately, politics.”
Suddenly I remembered, glanced at the clock. “WAIT— did the special votes come in? What happened?”
Anaesthetist: “National lost two seats, Te Pāti Māori gained two, Greens gained one.”
Second anaesthetist: “Nice deep breath for me, please.”
And I briefly became a piece of meat.13
Outcome of the specials: return of the fiddling rat. Coalition of Chaos. Underestimate Old Tuatara at your peril!
I haven’t even mentioned the tooth. It’s from a kekeno, a New Zealand fur seal, Arctocephalus forsteri. Here’s Martin Carthy singing Davy Lowston very ballad-like. It’s one of New Zealand’s oldest folk songs, describing an incident that took place in 1810.
Yesterday morning I heard a sound I couldn’t place. I thought it might be water dripping, somewhere outside. But when I went to the kitchen, I saw it was a hammering thrush, who has decided my concrete steps make a good anvil.
Just as I was finishing this piece, I heard a kerfuffle inside the house and discovered a bird in my bedroom, trying to get out of the slightly-open window. It was a juvenile blackbird, its breath clouding the glass, and I had to catch and hold the bird to open the window wider and put it out; light dry feathers, little claws, round black eye.
The last addendum to Benjamin’s last known work, written in 1940, months before his death (fleeing the Nazis— by suicide, or by Stalinist secret agents, depending on who you ask); brought to New York by his friend Hannah Arendt. Apparently he was working on something when he died, but the fellow refugee he entrusted the manuscript to lost it on a train.
Pairs:
In 1000 years, I’ll have a kintsugi dinner service.
The second key from the left is not really an 8— more of a digital universal number— but I’m including it in this line-up for the sake of form-harmony.
In the Thoth deck (the one I mostly use) she becomes Lust, and gets a different number.
On the Samhain / Beltane Zoom (most of my witch-gang are in the Northern Hemisphere) in response to the question “What does it mean to be haunted?” I threw this:
Approximation of voting attire:
Later that night I ended up meeting arch-Capitalist Bob Jones and, even later that same night, getting shitfaced on very expensive wine with a bunch of one-percenters… But that’s another story. Afterwards I wrote a haiku about it:
(As the CEO said to the artist:)
I couldn't write a
three-line poem: I only
understand numbers
I’d guessed already, by her hair.
If Winston were a card:
A grudge, revenge
Fun fact: in Ardern's very first press conference as Labour Leader, she was asked whether she had a message for Peters. She replied, cunningly, "Tell him I like single malts." It pays to suck up, when it comes to Winston.
Recent data: the number of lives saved by NZ’s Covid measures.
What rough beast etc.
Thank you, I’m fine, minor fix, small bikkies, don’t ask because I won’t tell you.
Thanks Rosie and I loved Martin Carthy
The 8tuv button is from an early push-button landline telephone.