Cold Cuts
Cherry-Picked from the Archives for your Delectation
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction: “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again— if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all.”
Dear old friends and new friends, dear Magicians:
The last piece I wrote, Precariat Blues, was about housing and creativity.1 I’ve tried to write on the topic of housing inequality in the past. I can remember (this was a few years ago) spending weeks trying to wrestle my thoughts on the page into some sort of coherent shape. But form eluded me. I couldn’t make it work— I think because I was too angry— so I put the subject aside. But when I came back to it this time, I understood: that labour wasn’t wasted after all. The thinking I’d already done had been fermenting away somewhere in the sourdough of my subconscious— a kind of pre-digestion. I was writing from a different place now; it felt as simple as stacking blocks.
The housing piece struck a chord. It grew legs and leapt in many directions at once. That’s always a possibility when you’re writing on the Internet, but it’s the first time it’s ever happened to me. It felt surprisingly OK: maybe because Substack is a generally wholesome place, so greater visibility doesn’t bring inevitable badness.2 People responded from all over the world to say Thank you for naming the thing I also feel.
Being praised by strangers is heady. I’m far more used to toiling in semi-obscurity, launching my paper planes into a largely indifferent void. Blindboy Boatclub3 says that (due to a shit childhood) his need for validation is so bottomless that he can’t afford to pay it any attention at all— he has to entirely shut that addictive feedback-loop down. I agree with that: it’s best not to pay to much attention to what people think about what you do.
On the other hand,4 it’s amazing how technology affords the creation of silvery webs of connection with so many great thinkers, artists, makers, and fellow wizards all over the world. The camaraderie that comes from connecting with other weirdos who pick up what I’m putting down, and vice versa, is pure magic. So, for my new subscribers (Nau mai, haere mai!) I thought I would offer a smorgasbord of pieces from my archive. I’ve tried to select a variety of subject matter. None of it is paywalled, so please! Help yourself!
This short essay, The Pūpū Tarakihi / Paper Nautilus Method of Wizarding, was the first thing I wrote on Substack. It’s about that elusive cephalopod, the argonaut, and how her way of life is like that of a rogue thinker.
“Soft-bodied, like all mollusc-kind. A snail that learnt how to think, by way of studying for millennia. Argonauts can give a venomous bite with their beak, and like all cephalopods, can change colour and make ink. Camouflage and smokescreen. Eater and eaten.”
The Pūpū Tarakihi / Paper Nautilus Method of Wizarding
Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary... The storyteller is the truth-teller.’
Beneath the Pavement, the Beach is another early piece, distilled from months of news: largely from newspapers, but also via the Internet and word-of-mouth. It was an attempt to make a snapshot of the historical moment by way of semi-randomised information.
“June 2022. A huge glowing blue double-spiral of light, like a spontaneous galaxy, appears suddenly in the night sky over Aotearoa. I see it first on social media, photographed by a friend in Takaka. No warning before it happens. Just the sudden light-patterns in the sky-vault…
Before explanations begin to trickle in, it is possible to believe for a moment that aliens are here. OK then. Alien invasion, fifth horse-being of the Apocalypse, can I accept that? Behold, a white ship. Come to that, I could. If it were true. Interplanetary parents finally stepping in, Ekumenically, to intervene in this sandpit dispute, to make us learn to share, a species on the naughty step. (A visual arises, courtesy of Hollywood: octopus-creatures in the mist. Even imagining the alien, we imagine terrestrial forms.)”
Beneath the Pavement, the Beach
When ugliness, poor design, & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart’s longing for grace.
One of my long-time Wizarding practices is beach-combing, which overlaps with finding more generally. In this shortish piece, Under [My] Boot-Soles, I attempted to describe my beach-combing state of mind and distil some principles of finding.
“The unpredictability is what makes it addictive. The surprise. Like fishing: what will emerge from the deeps? What will show itself? Pattern-recognition is what makes us human. Hunting mushrooms: the way they suddenly pop out from the leaf-mulch. Getting your eye in, that’s called. In the process of getting your eye in, distraction— deviating from the scent— is like breaking a spiderweb mid-weave. The correct state of mind takes time to come to. The finding process is solitary, secretive, speechless.”
(Later in the year— October 2023— I had an exhibition about beach-combing, which you can read about here: https://www.rosiewhinray.com/flotsam-and-jetsam)
Under [My] Boot-Soles
![Under [My] Boot-Soles](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9zGU!,w_1300,h_650,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F747e0a13-d880-401f-ad30-4e3e3c48c81e_956x956.jpeg)
Federico García Lorca: “We have said that the duende loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression…
Another thing I often write about is city-watching. Benjamin Bowmaneer, Bespoke Tailor is a post about a particularly amazing city-watching encounter I had in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, when I stumbled upon a tiny tailor’s shop in the back of an old arcade. (Benjamin Bowmaneer is a folk song about a tailor who makes a spear out of his needle and kills a flea with it— that’s how the wars began.)
“The shop is an anachronism, like a rock in the stream of time, full of beautiful old surfaces: polished wood fittings, leather-bound book-spines, rainbows of fabric bolts. Hanks of black silk thread. Vintage ads and framed art lining the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Huge, strangely shaped pairs of scissors. Irons— small, heavy old ones— on cords coming down from the ceiling, like a dentist’s drill. A grey cutaway coat with silver buttons up on top of a set of shelves behind me, like a looming ghost. Other mannequins with jackets half-made, lines of white tacking stitch on them. Disorderly, maybe, to the casual observer; but only in the sense a personal working space ought to be, as if the workshop is a leather glove worn-in to the shape of the wearer’s hand. A masculine vibe in there, an occult vibe, in the true sense of occult, meaning hidden or secret. (Guild-like: arcane man’s-knowledge.) It feels exactly like being in one of my dreams.”
Benjamin Bowmaneer, Bespoke Tailor
Cordelia Fine: “A newborn human must be ready to join any cultural group on Earth, without knowing which,’ as evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel puts it. And our genes don’t know in advance what that cultural group’s consensus will be on the appropriate roles for men and women...
Yin to the yang of Precariat Blues, Of Hopeful Green Stuff Woven is the essay I wrote when I first moved into the wee house I’m about to move out of. I was thinking about the fact that my plants hadn’t been able to flourish in my old-old house, the one before— so how could humans be expected to?
“Poor artists, then, practicing in precarity, are balanced on the top of the pyramid, leaning out to catch flitting meta-needs in a net of twigs and string, while far away below the base layer crumbles away like soggy weetbix. Is ‘the need to self-actualise’ another name for the intrinsically-motivated drive that makes artists vulnerable to exploitation? (I will continue to make, come hell or high water, or my life is not worth living. I will do good work for my own honour, regardless of how little you pay me. I will choose to act in service of my craft, and take the personal hits that result.)”
Of Hopeful Green Stuff Woven
Heather Christle, The Crying Book: “Writing a poem is not so very different from digging a hole. It is work. You try to learn what you can from other holes and the people who dug before you. The difficulty comes from people who do not dig or spend time in holes thinking that the holes ought not to be so wet, or dark, or full of worms. ‘
I wrote Sharers, Not Owners the week before the general election. It was the most overtly political thing I’d written on Substack: I wrote it to try to sway my countryfolk away from voting for ‘dead-eyed bastards’. (Unfortunately, it didn’t work, and we now have the worst Government ever, who are systematically dismantling the infrastructure of society in order to more easily sell our country off to their corporate mates overseas. But I digress…) People liked and shared this one, and that emboldened me to talk more directly about the important stuff.
“Think of it this way: the spirit of the gift is a candle flame. Others can light their wicks from yours, then there is more light. (The law of the gift it that it must not be held or hoarded; it must keep moving, or it ceases to be a gift.) Those who live their life by electricity are so dazzled by fluorescent glare that they say— what candle light? Nevertheless the gift economy is absolutely real— the fire is warm, and old, and uncontrollable. The world runs on its energy, it underwrites Capitalism; and it is far more ancient and deeply human than any price-stickering of life. In virtually all hunter-gatherer societies (ie., the way human societies ran for most of human prehistory) the prohibition on selfishness is absolutely central, and transgressors are harshly punished. When sharing is survival, selfishness is death.”
Sharers, Not Owners
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: “We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past…
Following on from that resolution to write more about what matters, I wrote On Being Galvanised, Not Paralysed, which is a long piece about how I think we need to get over being in denial about the end of the world, so we can start doing more of what matters. It’s also about Wellington Folk Festival, which is coming up again at the end of October. (I’m doing a workshop, ‘A Trad Singing Primer’.)5
“Let’s assume for a moment that the blackest assessment is correct, and the world really is a terminally ill loved one. How much time do we have to get real with the dying process? I’m frustrated and bored with the mass cognitive dissonance. Fantasism is not going to work, hedonism is not going to work: creativity and magic are the medicine, and those only work if you are willing to labour in service of truth and beauty. Time moves only forward, never backwards! This is the only life we have— these are our times! What if the imminent end of the world means that whatever’s yours to do or say, you should do or say it right now? Can we all please get through the denial-phase, and into reality, and start to live here and now?”
On Being Galvanised, Not Paralysed
Annie Dillard offers the following writing advice: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality?
This little chunk of thinking, Free Shit: A Rubbish Manifesto, was written for Garbagefest Wellington and published on Buy Nothing Day. It was printed in Garbagezine 2 by 5ever books (along with some haiku I wrote). It was an educational exercise to boil my ideas right down to their bones: to try to say exactly what I meant as simply as I could.
“Rubbish names a class of orphan-object, unowned. However, it is truly said that one person’s trash is another’s treasure. Value is in the eye of the beholder. A thing can have zero or little monetary value but retain a great deal of use-value: this principle applies to many things, including food, buildings, and land. Therefore the clever scavenger / bottom-feeder seeks out hidden beauty or usefulness. Learning discernment is a way to take advantage of incorrect assessments of true value (e.g. op-shop scores). The discerning eye is the fruit of experience; it can’t be bought. “
Free Shit: A Rubbish Manifesto
Rubbish is free: it costs nothing. Its assigned monetary value ranges from almost nothing (Dump Shop); to nothing (things scavenged from bins or gutters, reclaimed recycling such as glass or cardboard); to less than nothing / negative value (i.e. being paid to tear down a shed and take away its constituent parts, or clear garden waste).
This short, poetic compilation of impressions, Bumping Cosmologies, was written during Verb Wellington, the citywide reader’s and writer’s festival at which I volunteer.
“Listening to Sasha, Behrouz and Abdul. Dried fruit, snow, kerosene lantern, Father reading the Quran before dawn. Behrouz: “In Iran, as in Afghanistan, the Winter is very long.” Grandmother’s stories, to while away the dark..”
Abdul says that in oral culture, stories are passed chest to chest. He starts talking about Rumi and Hafiz, a waterfall of praise. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground
Bumping Cosmologies
Wendell Berry: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
Another city-watching post, about a young Wizard I saw on the train: The Many-Pocketed Animal. I spend a lot of time riding the bus and train, and I have a number of bus-friends— people I’ve met on the bus. The kid in this story has since become a friend. I saw him again a few months later, then I ran into him last week in the occult / philosophy / politics corner at Pegasus Books, where we had a long conversation about magic and housing and so on. His name is Omega.
“I’m watching him from under the brim of my hat as he puts on a little show for my benefit. He begins producing items from one of the inside pockets of his jacket. A box of what looks like mechanical pencil leads. A small portable chess set. A little round pot of what looks like black ink. A spotting scope. Two decks of cards still in their cellophane. A screwdriver. Some vape paraphernalia. A bag of Fruit Bursts. He stacks these objects on top of the rolled overcoat and makes a steadying motion with his hands like Whoah— this pile is so big I have to stop it from toppling over!”
The Many-Pocketed Animal
Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows: “He gave the name of the station that he knew to be nearest to the village of which Toad Hall was the principal feature, and mechanically put his fingers, in search of the necessary money, where his waistcoat pocket should have been. But here the cotton gown, which had nobly stood by him so far, and which he had bas…
On the subject of trains, Through the Manawatū Gorge by Steam is a story about riding the steam train, plus branching train-riffs. Fireman, fireman, keep ‘em rolling!
“Steam engines undoubtedly possess magical powers— but why? Is it just the size and power of them? Is it the fact that they’re a beast made of numbers, and one can seek to know the numbers? Is it the simplicity of the technology— the alchemy of fire and water, coal and steel, transmuting into speed? (A steam engine is called an engine or a locomotive, plain descriptive words that describe a class of mechanical object and its function.) Is it (Kev’s theory) because you can see the engine working, you can see all the parts moving and how they fit together— “like a science teacher’s diagram”?”
Through the Manawatū Gorge by Steam
“In your dungarees, cleaning Super Ds,
You're a sweeper-upper, brewer-upper, shovel slinger, spanner bringer,
Steam raiser, fire dropper, general cook and bottle washer,
Learning how to keep 'em rolling…”
Another tale of a journey, this one on foot, around the corner at Makara. Beach-Combing Journal: There & Back Again. I found a dead Royal Albatross, the only time I’ve ever seen one. “What did you do with the bones?” said my friend Finn, who wanted to make them into flutes.
“The coastal tracks wind their way between sea and steep hill, foot-roads as old as human habitation. They have that feeling of an absolutely logical way to walk, and it is easy to imagine people travelling that way for days, stopping to gather kaimoana and cook over driftwood fires. (You know that the blackened wood you see is half-charred from recent fires, but it also feels like centuries ago.) As we walked Kev was on fishing reconnaissance. He said it would be good to stay the night and fish in the morning, and I could easily imagine it, on a sweet day like this— how easy it would be to just not go home. There are piles and piles of driftwood, you’d not even have to walk to collect it. Just make a fire and recline by it as the sky fills with stars. The open night for a roof, until pink dawn.”
Beach-Combing Journal: There & Back Again
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: “The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature— a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.”
This memoir-essay Three Times I Went to Christchurch is only a few weeks old. I’d been writing a series on Notes,6 using one of my Daily Drawings7 as a prompt. This one grew and grew until I knew it was going to be a Post, not a Note. It was the first time I’d written true memoir; a new mode, a new voice. As I wrote more and more memories arose. A few days after I published the piece, I was out walking when I suddenly realised that it was only two times, not three: the time with John and the time with Tom were the same visit, the same snowy Winter. Vagaries of memory! I didn’t want to go back and change it, though, because I like the title too much.
“I loved Steve with a deep and pure love. There’s a flavour of trust that comes from sparring with someone who could easily kill you, but holds themself back; their restrained force calibrated to your learning, an indulgent tiger-parent. One time we were teaching a class together. We were in a grapple on the mat, demonstrating something, and he said OK, now kiss me. That seemed a little weird to me, but I figured he must have his reasons: maybe he wanted to defuse the tension. I kissed him on the cheek and he stared at me in shock, like what the hell?! TWIST me! I said twist me!”
Three Times I Went to Christchurch
“There—there! That was worth a little bruise,” said the brown bear tenderly. “Some day thou wilt remember me.”
Further self-selected ‘best-of’ posts are here. The posts other people liked the most are here.
Yesterday’s polar blast that rode in on the Equinoctial gales has finally blown itself out,8 and today is jewelled blue and green. The perigee Moon is very close to full now— it is being partially eclipsed by the Sun— so I’ll send this letter out on the crest of the weird eclipse-energy wave.
Here:
Precariat Blues
Deborah Levy, Real Estate: “In fact I would be content to live in a humble wooden cabin on the edge of an ocean or a lake…”
A few months ago I was having a freakout about visibility. I wrote this ranty piece to unblock my block:
Raw! Unfiltered! Journalling!
David Shields, Reality Hunger: “Literary intensity is inseparable from self-indulgence and self-exposure.”
Blindboy’s podcast has a million listeners a month, but he keeps it real. I fucking adore him.
My theory of why humans are so prone to thinking in binaries: it’s because we’re bilaterally symmetrical creatures. If we were radial instead, who knows how we’d conceptualise?
You can see my Notes here: https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/notes
I did an ink drawing every day for ten years, 2010 - 2020
The storm blew the flowers off the trees.
Thank you Rosie, for the bonus of lovely writing.
Even though I am an adequately housed boomer, I share your anger with the housing situation in our land. It has come about through deliberate policy, but things can be changed with political action, I believe. This current coalition is astounding in its stupidity and lack of empathy, but they may be doing us a favour by outraging a significant number of people, leading to real change.
Your writing shows us your humanity and is a taonga.