Holy Monster

Auckland / Whanganui / Shannon / Wellington City-Watching Field Notes July - August 2023

Lauren Elkins, Art Monsters: “In Latin, [monster] comes from monstrare, to show (without forgetting that it also comes from monere, to warn). You monster: you marvel, you demonstration, you warning.”¹

Alberto Gennari, 2023. Artist’s impression of Perucetus colossus, a recently-discovered basilosaurid whale-ancestor from 39 million years ago. What was actually found— in the Peruvian desert— was 13 vertebrae, four ribs, and a hip bone (that’s how they know about the small hind limbs). The skull and everything else are guesswork: they don’t know, for instance, what it ate. Researchers estimate it could have weighed up to 340 tons: twice as much as a blue whale, making Perucetus potentially the biggest animal to have ever lived. (More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etc etc.)

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Sandringham Road. A woman who is somewhere between 70 and 80, with a silver bob and black patent leather stilettos, catwalks along the pavement to the bus stop. The heels are vertiginous, and Ellie and I, standing on the other side of the road waiting for the opposite-bus, are filled with awed appreciation for her foxitude.

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Three Spidermans:

A tyke in the Pak’n’Save queue in a cheap Spiderman costume. The vertical velcro seam at the back of the mask is intertwined with locks of dark hair. The eye-holes are too far apart, so that only the outer corners of the child’s eyes can be seen through the nylon un-circles.

Nick describes a childhood photo of himself in the Spiderman suit some relative gave him for Christmas, which he wore all Summer. “But where did he get the boots?” asked the relative.
“What boots?” said the parent.
They were filth-boots over bare feet, dark dirt-mud halfway to the knee.

Two old-school nerds at Kingsland train station. One wears a camo-patterned Marvel hoodie. I’m trying to eavesdrop words from their rolling, riffing, reference-chopping yarn, but they’re too far away, and all I hear is “Spiderman.”

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On a small hill South of the Bombays, a white horse in a blue coat stands grazing, surrounded by recumbent white goats. Snapshot: the horse’s white tail like a waterfall, a goat’s back-curved horns.

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Article, on a Saturday morning. Amy says jokingly to Joe that the rumour is that his six-owner household is a polycule. He assures us that it’s not; it’s two couples and two singles.
Amy: “Ah- a polycule of convenience, only.”
Joe: “Monogamy— in this housing crisis?”

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The (other) café in Shannon. I’m standing behind a man with Anglo-Saxon tattoos on the back of his calves. On the right calf, a boar in profile; on the left, a moustached man flanked by two rampant animals, unidentifiable to my eye. I enquire about them by saying “Anglo-Saxon… The unkillable boar.” (As seen on the Sutton Hoo helmet, the boar is symbolic of the tenacious refusal to die, among other things.)²
The man, who is middle-aged, shaven-headed, slight— not at all tall or scary— says “You’re the first person ever to recognise my tattoos as Anglo-Saxon.”
Me: “But who’s that— Odin?” (Pointing to his other leg.)
Him: “It’s not Odin, it’s the god Tiu— a war-god.”
Me: ”Like Tuesday.”
Him: “Yes, exactly.”

(The god has a drooping moustache: the kind the moustache-classification chart on Brian’s toilet wall identifies as The Wet Sock.)³

He tell me he’s from England, but he got the tattoos done here. He got the designs from a website called— I can’t remember exactly, something about English blood, English history. Ah. Awkward. The conversation tapers off.

Afterwards I say to the others, “I reckon that guy was a white supremacist.”

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The bottom of Brooklyn hill, on foot, with my Mum. A half-heard high bird-call. Maybe a kākā? But no— down the gap between the houses is the big magnolia in full bloom, and above it, against the clouds, a wind-tossed falcon, surfing the air in huge loops.

Daily Drawing: Monk and magnolia tree ~ 1-8-2014 - Dip-pen and watercolour

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Dingo:⁴ “You know Lambton Quay?”
Me: “I try to avoid it. But yes.”
Dingo: “Wellll, you know that big fat guy— white guy— bald, you know— well, he had this big bucket of cold fish and chips and he was just lying there, and people thought he was asleep, but he was DEAD! and nobody noticed for a couple of hours!”

He tells this story in his customary mode: radiant joy, as if everything’s a fine cosmic joke. “Have a bee-aut-i-ful day!”

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Upper Cuba Street. Wednesday evening, an icy Southerly off the South Island’s snow-mountains. Hurrying foot-commuters, wanting to get inside out of the cold. I see a ghost. A man, youngish, with a face marked dark-red, acne-wings across his cheeks as bad as any I’ve seen, and I understand the way he tilts his face down and away. I know this feeling from the inside. Shrinking from bright lights, from cameras, from other people’s eyes, as if their gaze burns. I think of what Mum said about someone she’d met: he has something of the wounded animal about him.

It’s just a quick flash, headphones, beard, and the red flare, wounding damage, layers upon layers; maybe he’s never not been that way since puberty’s gut-punch. When my face was like that (but never like that, maybe a quarter of that, though it felt bad enough from the inside) it was like slow-motion warfare from within, an auto-Blitzkrieg, each cyst a slow-motion bomb exploding over weeks, months, wounding the ground into craters, never healing before the next bombardment. The thing about acne is that even specialists don’t really understand why. It may as well be a curse from the Gods.

I always want to speak to these fellow-sufferers⁵ in the street, but I don’t. I bite my tongue and avert my eyes. It’s best not to stare. One gaze feels much like another when every gaze burns, and my ice-pick scars⁶ are likely invisible at a casual glance. I see the scars, though, on others— the aftermath— as well as acne’s full-bloom. They become a pattern one notices in the world. Subtle stigmata. After the smallpox, the decorative patches. Elizabeth⁷ wore white lead.

Petals on a wet, black bough. The face is such contested territory, the female face in particular.⁸ To wear a face like that every day— damaged, visibly imperfect— is to be marked, and thus, marked out. It’s an uncanny feeling, absolute visibility at all times, and yet, a kind of ubiquitous invisibility.⁹ People’s eyes slide over your face like ice. I stopped caring whether people were cool, and began caring whether people were kind.

Early on, Amos sat in my lap and turned his searchlight eyes onto my newly healing face. I bore his gaze, even though it hurt me: I knew it was important that I submit to his examination without showing fear. After a while he touched the scars at my temples with his fingers. “You’re holy. Get it? Your face has holes- you’re holy.”

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1. Full disclosure, I haven’t read this book, only the first few chapters— in Unity Books, where I shoplifted this quote from. There are two new feminist art-criticism books out with Monster titles: the other one is Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, which is about an almost-opposite subject— whether it’s OK to enjoy the art of bad men. I haven’t read that one yet, either: I have to wait until I get to the front of the library queue.

2. A very comprehensive overview of boar symbology in Viking and Anglo-Saxon culture:

The Boar- Thegns of Mercia

3. This one, by Gavin Mouldey:

4. The Cuba Mall harmonica player with the trinket-laden hat

5. I have a friend who told me how his back bled through his white school shirts for years. Shared experience = mutual tenderness.

6. That’s the technical term

7. Queen Elizabeth I, then aged 29, survived her near-fatal 1562 bout of smallpox with minimal scarring, but Lady Mary Sidney, who nursed Elizabeth through the illness, was disfigured by the disease. This is Mary's husband, Henry Sidney, in his Memoir of Services, 1583, on his wife’s scars:

"When I went to Newhaven [Le Havre] I lefte her a full faire Ladye in myne eye at least the fayerest, and when I retorned I found her as fowle a ladie as the smale pox could make her, which she did take by contynuall attendance of her majesties most precious person (sicke of the same disease) the skarres of which (to her resolute discomforte) ever syns hath don and doth remayne in her face, so as she lyveth solitairilie sicut Nicticorax in domicilio suo [like a night-raven in the house] more to my charge then if we had boorded together as we did before that evill accident happened."

That is to say, she hides at home, so as not to be seen. And he doesn’t live with her any more, just pays money to support her.

8. At least men can grow beards.

9. The elephant in the room