Crocheted Wizard Hat

City-Watching Field Notes 16th - 18th July 2023

Mark O’Connell, Notes From an Apocalypse:¹ “It didn’t take much, in those days, to set me off on a path towards the end of the world. There were frequent opportunities to indulge my tendencies towards the eschatological…² So many things felt like a flashback sequence in the first act of a postapocalyptic movie, like we were living right before the events of the main timeline kicked in…

There is no mythological template to help us make sense of the current mutated form of the end times. We don’t know how to think about it, how to give it the form of myth and story, and so it metastasizes and spreads, a blood sickness in the culture… It’s all horsemen, all the time.”

Glass plaque, Ptolemaic Period - Roman Period: 100 BCE - 100 CE

Sunday night, lightly showery, wandering up from Matariki Ahi Kā. A young person with eye makeup and stripy multi-coloured arms and legs is methodically laying out a small nest of blankets and scarves at the side of Cuba Mall. I linger, not looking directly, pretending I’m not watching, waiting to see what they’ll do. They don’t seem to have an instrument. They complete the nest, sit down in the middle of it, wrap dark scarf-wings around their stripy legs and start to sing— sort of— a kind of improvised sound-music. They are using only the head-voice, high, quavery; no throat, no chest, no gut-voice. A wordless, wandering vocalisation.

They pause. “I love your outfit, by the way.”
Me: “Thanks.”
Them: “Do you have any requests? I can read music.”
Me: ”Just do what you feel.”

The sound of the bucket fountain in my left ear, its aural cycle of cascades. I step across and lay a gold coin on the part of the scarf-nest that looks likeliest. They immediately tuck the coin away. Me: “You have to show people where to put the money.”
Them: “I have this yellow paperclip, see?”

They occasionally pause to cough. The streetscape is cold and hard, and predictably unpredictable; I feel protective. They’re like a fawn or a leveret, alone in the grass. Their song is like an animal’s sound, or a baby’s. I can’t look at them while they make it, but I can listen. I start to think I can hear words forming. Whooo am III? Whooo am III? The singing, in its vulnerability, lightens my soul a little, makes me feel better. It’s somehow pure, like birdsong.

A ragged drunk guy comes along and looms over the young singer, and I’m poised to intervene if I need to, but he gives the following advice in an intense but well-meaning way: “Get a piece of cardboard and write on it, I’m not homeless, but I’m struggling.” He repeats the words again to make sure they understand him. “Write I’m not homeless, but I’m struggling.”

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Morning. Wearing the grey Wizard hat Marina crocheted for me,³ I go down the stairs in my stiff new boots. A van with a pale orange squid painted on the side of it is pulling out of the carpark; mantle pointing to the bonnet-end, suckered arms curving up the boot end and around the top of the doors.⁴

At the bus stop, a Mum with two red-headed kids. A little curly one in the pushchair; and a bowl-cut three-year-old astride a green balance-bike, who stares frankly at me. Tigers on their t-shirt, and good sturdy black gumboots, like a small farmer: a fashion choice I always find fetching.

When the bus pulls in there’s a big gap.⁵ The kid astride the bike can’t work out how to jump the chasm, how to get the front wheel across. The Mum says “Let me go first with the pushchair, then I’ll help you.” While she’s grappling the pushchair and Snapper card, the kid dismounts and wrestles the bike up the step. (Valiant child!) The front wheel is on, but they can’t get any further. Standing in the gutter— “HELP!”⁶

On the moving bus the kid stands lordly on the seat, leaning with one arm, eating a rusk, while the little curly one in its Mother’s lap bends backwards like a spaghetti and yells upside-down, half-angry, half-happy, showing its little pearly teeth.

We get off at the same stop and both go into the bakery. The kid has brought their bike in, and I see that there’s a little basket on the front. I’m sitting there eating my pie when the Mum’s card declines. The kid is confused. She’s explaining, “We’ve got no money.” Empty glass coffee cup, empty bike-basket; outside on the pavement the kid sets up a wail that hurts my heart.
I can’t bear it. I step to the door. “I’ll buy your kid a pie.”

Inside again, with the note in hand, the kid is pressed to the warm glass, saying, “Where is it? Where is it?”
”He’s getting it, in a minute.”
I’m not looking directly. It’s not a big deal. The Mum hands me the gold coin in change. (Gentle negotiation, a pride-dance.) The kid puts the brown paper bag into the little bike-basket, and carefully reverses out the door and down the ramp.⁷

Daily Drawing: Leveret (detail) ~ 2-12-2018 ~ Dip-pen

When I step outside, a grey-haired woman says “Good hat!”
I turn back to her. “Thanks! It’s the first time I’ve worn it. So far, so good.”⁸

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Pigeons standing on a glass ceiling. Sun casts their dark-grey shadows onto the light-grey wall: strutting, toe-cleaning, flapping silhouettes.

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A young man dressed like a bureaucrat is playing classically-inflected guitar on Lambton Quay, falls of notes like showers of rain. Short back and sides and a beatific expression. Wedding ring at the frets, dancing fingers over the sound-hole.

When I hear someone playing guitar that way I think— You can’t sing. Not in a mean way; it’s just a phenomenon whereby the guitar becomes a voice.

(I’d already given my golden dollar to a beggar with a metal bowl, so that the coin rang, who grinned and said, “I like your hat, Miss! It looks cool.”)

When people make music they transmit energy into the world, and I sit and drink it in through my ears, and it flows down my right arm and back out of my pen in a thread of green ink. Transmogrification; like a plant making oxygen.

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In Te Awe library, I see an old man, dressed all in grey like me, who gives me a bright, curious glance. As well as the Wizard hat, I’m wearing a thick silver chain around my neck. It was a long-ago gift from Georgia, loop-in-loop chain drawn through a drawplate to make it round— an Indian snake chain. I used to wear it every day, but haven’t put it on for a decade or so. The old man has silver rings on every finger and multiple silver chain bracelets around both wrists.

Absorption. He slowly turns the clean white pages of a big book: photographic portraits of individual cows.

Lichen in the snow, Tuao Wharepapa, Kahurangi National Park

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Writing while female involves as much concealment as revelation. There’s a species of woman-written non-fiction I love to read, a kind that reliably causes sparks to fire in my brain: cool, cerebral, precise; passion under strict control— like fire in a vessel of ice. (Maggie Nelson, exemplar of this Didionesque mode: “If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story.”)

I’m most interested in true stories. I’m fascinated with narrative form, and with truth. (Memoir, personal essay, non-fiction.) I’m interested in the precise texture of unfolding reality. (Sequential, bite-sized.) It tracks; I’m a record-keeper by nature. Broadly, I aim to write the things I like to read. The stories that are mine to tell are of this particular life—MY life— the one that by chance I find myself in. There’s no way for that to be impersonal.⁹ Further than that, art has to be personal for me to find it interesting. Ethically speaking, meta-narrative is part of balancing exposure-of-others with self-exposure; my process is part of the story.

It goes like this: I’m constantly compelled by internal forces to write / speak. My daemon¹⁰ requires it of me. As stated, my bent is towards the personal / political. In order for that work not to be pure solipsism, it must be shared. (The feedback loop of other people’s engagement is an energetic requirement.) Then instinct awakens, tugs at my hem to inform me forcefully that visibility = danger. Drawing attention is inadvisable. Don’t put your head above the parapet. The nail that sticks up will be hammered down. etc. etc. The vertigo of permanence, which one mustn’t think about,¹¹ suddenly makes my head swim.

(The veracity or otherwise of these beliefs isn’t the point. Psychic guard dogs are not built of logic, but born of lifelong aversion training. Step off the narrow path and get shocked. Do it again and get shocked again. After some decades you get tired of shocks. It seems easier to shut your lips over the tongue-fire, to be quiet. But shutting up does subtler, slower damage, more grinding than shocking. Tug-of-war; Speak vs. Don’t-Speak.)

Note, though, that it doesn’t take flagrant wilful defiance to draw negative attention: it’s enough to stand somewhere in a female body¹² and say something, to delineate a point of view;¹³ in short, to follow the laws of literature rather than the impossible-to-fulfil, constantly-shifting dictates of majority culture. Literature says: Seek truth. Privilege your own judgement. Communicate honestly. Speak clearly. Say precisely what you mean.

Ursula K. Le Guin: “I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively - they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert… When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.”

Argument is a witch-trick. Eloquence uncanny. That’s what happens when you work a craft, though: evolution happens, whether you will or no. Art has its own life-force, a drive to change and grow. Since nobody can win at that girl-game anyway, who cares about its dumb rules?¹⁴ Keep rubbing those stones smooth and skimming them into Time’s abyss. What else are you going to do?¹⁵

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On the bus a girl, with her mass of hair half-covering her face, has been eating a chicken leg, and now holds the dark thigh-bone in her small greasy hand. She seems half-wild, with a changeling air, hiding behind her forest-curtain; the wild hair escaping from its band, its bond. Chicken grease on her lips and her thin fingers.

She gets off the bus at the top of the hill, still carrying the bone. I wait for her to throw it over the fence into the bushes— that’s what I’d do— but she doesn’t. She’s slight, thin legs in green tights. She walks out of my sightline, and when the bus overtakes her a few minutes later, she’s still clutching the bone in her hand.

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Cuba Mall at night. A small dog like an ambulant blonde wig is frisking about between people’s legs, seemingly unattached to anyone. I start to talk to it, but it stops and squats its body, and I see that it is shitting on the paving stones.

Getting off the bus. Eyes not yet dark-adjusted enough to see the stars, but glancing East I see a huge white meteorite flare quickly down the black, and drop behind the dark headland.

1. Amazing book that I’m halfway through and highly recommend. At some point I’ll elaborate further on my Hinge Theory: briefly, the idea that my micro-generation, sometimes designated ‘The Last of the Innocents’ (born roughly 1977 - 1982) find ourselves in a unique historical position: the last generation to have experience of young adulthood without the Internet. I first noticed this phenomenon when I realised that— very often— when I read something particularly galvanising, I’d discover that the author was born in that year-cluster. (O’Connell is less than two months older than me.)

2. Eschatology = relating to final endings and last things: death, judgement, the afterlife; the end of the present age, human history, or the world itself. From Greek eskhatos: ‘last, furthest, uttermost, extreme, most remote.’

(That’s some Twelfth House shit…)

3. For a long while I had a no-pointy-hats rule: too obvious. Then on Monday morning— on the way to what Kev calls your pavement office— none of my other hats felt right, and that one did. Anyway, it’s not super pointy; more slouchy. A hat that can be squished into a bag is not to be sneezed at.

4. Squidmobile!

5. Taxi to the kerb!

6. Not panicked, just a firm request.

7. I was hesitant to tell this tale. It seems egotistical to share it— it paints me in a glowing saviour-ish light, even though it was only a few bucks. It also feels like a violation of privacy. There’s a very slight possibility people might guess who I mean, though I’ve changed details (a thing I usually never do). The Mum didn’t ask for money, I offered it, because I’ve been there. Other people have done the same for me, many times.
But I really wanted to tell the happy ending, the part where the brown-paper-bagged pie was in the little basket and the kid was fully focussed on manoeuvring the bike out the door, paying me no mind whatsoever.

8. Last night I wore it again, to Unity Books, and I saw this same woman again. She said “It’s you! I recognise the hat. Good hat.”

(There was also a young man there with a ladybird tattooed behind his ear— a synchronicity with my previous City-Watching post- Winter Icecream.)

9. Twenty years of journalling led me here. Journalling is how I learned that detailed stories are far more fun to read back on than emotional purging. Emo-puking is repetitive and boring even as it’s coming out. (The benefit of hindsight is the weirdest thing: reading back from beyond the story’s end, those consuming feelings appear as the weather-storm they always were.) Details, though! Those fade from memory so quickly. To catch a few jewels in your net of words is worth the work of knotting.

10. Lewis Hyde: “The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person’s tutelar spirit his genius. In Greece it was called a daemon. Ancient authors tell us that Socrates, for example, had a daemon who would speak up when he was about to do something that did not accord with his true nature. It was believed that each man had his idios daemon, his personal spirit which could be cultivated and developed…

The genius or daemon comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again, the genius has need of us.”

11. I mean that the idea of posterity can act as a heavy counterweight to the spaciousness necessary for unbridled creativity.

12. I can’t speak of how it is to inhabit other bodies…

13. The Female Gaze. Maybe people go to writing school not so much to learn techniques as to excise (drown, rub out, squash) the part of themselves that wants to just safely shut up?

14. Allow me to refer you to this handwritten poemscript by Ursula K. Le Guin: Loud Cows. A veritable courage-potion. (Sample quote: “The word is aloud, the word is a loud thing, the loud word is allowed, aloud to be, the loud word allows to be…”)

15. I was going to quote Samuel Beckett here, then I read this by Rebecca Solnit, in Orwell’s Roses— just a casual aside: “I came back to England in late Summer… One Thursday while I was there, I wrote a climate change editorial for the Guardian over breakfast and then put a raincoat and a water bottle in my knapsack and…”

Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’