Seed-Crack to Raptor
Eels, Falcons, Douglas Wright, City-Watching
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: “I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.”
Walter Benjamin: “Every line we succeed in publishing today— no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it— is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.”
Kev is telling Andrew and Ila about how he used to gather seaweed from Rabbit Island for his market garden.
Andrew: “And you a fisherman! Tut tut.”
Kev says he used to think you needed to wash the salt out of the seaweed so as not to burn the garden. Now he knows you don’t need to. Some things even like a bit of salt, he says— like potatoes. (Yams too: we grew them in our seaside plot.)
Kev: “In my 1910 farming encyclopaedia it describes putting on salt for sugar-beets.”
Kev: “So whenever the wind was right—”
Andrew: “A Nor-Wester?”
Kev: “Nah, a North-Easter— I’d go down with my ute and trailer and drag back as much seaweed as I could carry to the farm. I’d put the high-pressure hose through it and all the little sand-hoppers and so on would wash into the creek and the eels would eat ‘em. I’d take as many loads as I could carry— six or eight in a day. By the end of the day the creek would be eel soup, boiling with eels. There were lots of kōura1 in there too, and the woodpeckers— hark at me! Woodpeckers!”
Me: “Kingfishers.”
Kev: “Yeah, we always had a lot of kingfishers, because they like to hunt the kōura, and those little bullies, you know— the ones that are triangular in cross-section. A lot of life for what was basically a ditch running through paddocks.”
Bibliomancy with my Mum’s big book, A Dictionary of the Maori Language.2 Inside the front cover, her Wellington address, from when she was at University: Tinakori Road. (Tina-kori, or more properly, kore = ‘No Dinner’; unsatisfying, dinnerless.)
I get Whakarau: cause to germinate (of gourd seeds).3
It’s a good book for bibliomancy. Me to Mum: “You do one!”
But she won’t. Maybe she is superstitious of messing with matakite / foretelling.
The next morning I have another go.
Pouākai: a fabulous gigantic bird. “He manu, he nui noa atu.” (‘A bird, a big one, long ago.’ Pouākai— Haast’s eagle, formerly Harpagornis, now Hieraaetus moorei— was the apex predator of this land of birds, the largest eagle ever known.)
Seed-crack to raptor. We are born astride a grave. I think of Douglas Wright’s Rapt, debonair Death stalking the stage in his brown suit and hawk’s-head mask. After the show, I saw Douglas in the street and ran after him. He turned— he was so slight— I held out my gift. My heart was kicking at my ribs. “It’s a hawk feather. For you.”
He took it without a word, turned again, and walked away.
It was my Mum who took me to Rapt, as she had earlier taken me to a Douglas Wright retrospective. Of that show I remember Douglas himself, dimly lit, hanging upside down like a foetus;4 and this piece, Gloria:5
The clip is so low-res that it’s like a film from the early days of film, like looking backwards in time, but you can still see the individual spark of each of these dancers, leaping like flames. Douglas was a great leaper. As he says in his memoir Ghost Dance: “[Nijinsky’s] ability to jump and hover in the air was a gift I shared.”
The Youtuber who has uploaded Gloria to Youtube is called NZrugbySupporter, which I think is kind of beautiful despite what Douglas says in the clip below about how he was a disappointment to his Father “because he wanted me to play footy… Which I loathe and despise.”
Another time, when I couldn’t afford to get into his show, I went and hung around outside the Opera House on Manners Street, and afterwards Douglas came out wearing a striped shirt, and smoked a cigarette.
Take, o take those lips away, that so sweetly were forsworn…
These precious fragments. When I think about Douglas, I see an art-force so desperate to be born that it rips its host apart. Parochial, cultural cringe-ridden, small-minded New Zealand was a straitjacket for him. He escaped to New York, but then he had to come home. That difficult, proud, mighty, unappreciated genius. When he couldn’t dance any more, he turned to writing. Later, he died.
Mum teaches me a phrase to tell someone to shut up: “Ka nui tenā.”
That’s a lot, that’s a lot already.
In the middle of the night I wake up thinking about the red pill and the blue pill, and I think What about the Luddite pill? My sleep-softened brain simmers the question gently. Then it comes to me: you’d just swallow a small stone. Earth to earth. The Luddite pill is nothing but a tiny pebble.
I’m standing with my bags at the bus stop on Dixon Street. Any bus will do to get me to the train. A man appears in the corner of my eye, moving strangely. It’s the homeless guy who looks South African, and I can see that he’s in a bad way: he’s crabbing along the window in front of the library, talking to nobody, while a tic-storm shakes him. His hands are flying up around his face in repeated compulsive jerks. As he comes closer I see that his shirt is open, showing his dirty bare chest. Everyone looks away, but as he comes closer I glance at him and his eyes catch mine. The look on his face is pure desperation. I say quietly “Alright?” as simultaneously, he spits at me. The spit falls to the pavement between us. Nobody says anything. They pretend not to see. He has moved on and I feel nothing as I stare down at the drops of saliva, like a constellation of stars.
Cuba Street. 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. An Irish labourer with dark hair and ruddy cheeks, the face of an honest peasant, is eating yoghurt and cereal out of a plastic container with a metal spoon. The morning light illuminates the yoghurt-smeared plastic from behind. There is yoghurt on his lip, and his orange hi-vis casts a reflected glow on the shaded side of his face. His companion is wearing filthy fluorescent yellow. They each have their right leg crossed over their left, exuding mirrored contentment, letting the sun unwind them. I can hear their accent, their laughter, but I can’t pick out any words. The dark-haired one finishes his cereal and starts immediately on a sandwich. I remember the driving hunger of manual labour, the ruthless economy of input and output, the way the body demands fuel.
At the end of the first week, the worst week: “My wrist hurts.”
”Wanker’s cramp, we call that.”6
Against the light, birch seeds drift from the branches overhead: tiny papery winged hearts.
Suddenly I notice that four more men have materialised behind the first two, sitting on the stone wall: two more pairs of two. Steaming pies, bare legs, dusty boots. The pigeons and seagulls cluster for crumbs. Smoko. The labourer’s drinking from a white mug with steam drifting from its open mouth. Backlight— rim-light— shining through beards, hair, lettuce, plastic, steam.
Writing all this down allows me to centre myself in this moment, this bright morning of Autumn, never to be repeated.
At the bus stop after Shanty Club. Talking to Barnaby about how I used to be a visual artist but then I switched wholesale to writing.
Me: “I was sick of the world of matter. I just wanted to live in the intellectual realm, the realm of ideas.”
Barnaby: “That’s what people say right before they go crazy.”
I tell him my theory that he’s a frustrated Wizard. “Yeah, everyone says that.”
Me, musingly: “Part of the problem is that Wizarding’s not really a young person’s game.”
Barnaby: “Every day I hasten towards decrepitude.”
Me: “When my hair really went grey, people started taking me seriously as a Wizard.”
Barnaby: “I can’t wait.”
Walking back home around the rugby field, crunching through drifts of leaves, I come upon a burst of feathers on the grass. A falcon— probably the falcon that lives somewhere over the back of the empty section— has plucked a passerine bird here. I lift a wing feather and a tail feather from the cloud of down: a blackbird.
An old man leaning on a stick, seeing me gazing down into the grass, asks me if I’ve found mushrooms.
”No,” I say. “A falcon plucked a blackbird here.”
Old man: ”Oh, terrible, terrible, how awful.”
Me: ”Well… That’s just nature. We all have to get our living somehow.”
Afterwards, Kev says “His staff was a metal pipe, did you hear it? It must be bloody heavy.”
The rain is battering the windows. Elisha asks me, What was that song that Tony sang? Then she sings it through the computer, from memory, perfectly: We went walking by the river, she said she’d marry me for sure. We went walking by the river, but the river don’t run no more.
This is a typical Tony-song, in that it’s lyrical, nostalgic, with a complex guitar part, and about London. I’d forgotten until Elisha reminded me, but at Tradfest, in the Tony-concert, Barry sang it so beautifully that it wrecked me. I’ll leave you with this beautiful honest performance from Nick Hart,7 the song’s writer.
Small freshwater crayfish
A volume titled in the days before the dawning of the age of the tohutõ / macron
Naked?
Part Two here:
Part Three here— Douglas’ duet with Taiaroa Royal:
And Part Four here:
I have a clear memory of a drawing I made— a diagram of my hands and all their injuries, titled ‘Wanker’s Cramp’— but I can’t now find it.
Hart gives a good interview here wherein he describes his processes around singing traditional songs. His process is similar to mine in that he will take multiple versions of a given song and combine and distill them into ‘his’ version. I recommend this method to anyone, both as a way to learn the song inside and out, and as a way to create a distinctive version of your own. (His voice also reminds me of mine: rough, well-used.)
I also like how the interview blurb describes him as a ‘bright young star’: it’s all relative in folk-world. The Internet informs me that he was raised by Morris-dancers— that’s kind of like being raised by wolves, but jinglier.
I need a small stone for breakfast today. To wash down five decades of electricity and saw teeth spinning. Constellations of spit. Yeah. Like Substack. This is a star here you got. And that river song. Thanks. Spell.
Sorry, my mistake, took it literally.