Seek Not-Inferno
City-Watching Field Notes 22nd - 28th June 2023
Italo Calvino: “And Polo said: 'The inferno of the living… is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
A runty white kid and a tall brown kid in matching school uniforms are standing on the yellow carpet of gingko leaves. The skinny kid has a stick in his hand and jabs it upward into the side of a tree trunk repeatedly, fixedly staring at what he’s doing. The motion is like knifing someone under the ribs.
Then, at the other boy’s suggestion, he stick-whacks and high-kicks the yellow leaves still hanging on the tree. Animal spirits overflowing.
He pretend-kicks his friend very gently in the shin with the toe of his black school-shoe. His friend pretends to try to trip him up. They cross their shin-bones like swords.
Their bus comes. I lean around the tree and see that the place he was stick-fucking is a big wound, a place naked of bark: he was stabbing his stick up into the top of the scar, the juncture of smooth tree-muscle and keloid bark-roll.
Tapuae-o-Uenuku1 wears a dazzling snow-cloak. A boy-racer in a blue car whips past, shirtless— naked? playing with his face. (High?)
Snapshot: hand to nose. Brown chest and arms.
A single yellow gingko leaf on the pavement opposite the Vic Uni Marine Lab. There are no gingkos anywhere around here. How?
(Holmes-like deduction: it has blown off the back of a truck or trailer on its way to the dump.)
I bump into David the sculptor in Unity. (He is never less than impeccable. Twin earrings in his right ear, neat white moustache and goatee, cheeks smooth, as if fresh from a barber’s cut-throat razor.)
At the end of our ten-minute conversation, begun over the lectern of big art books2 and concluded on the street, covering, among other things, what he’s working on (“An asymmetrical piece of andesite, bigger than a football, but not much bigger.”— “Ah.” I say. “So it can be picked up and carried around,”); grandchildren (two of them, who visit most afternoons— and the difference between grown-up art and the kind of art you make with kids: less dry, more unpredictable); and the technique of speaking to someone specific when writing (he used to write as if to his Mother, but then she died, and he stopped writing. I say that people advise me to pretend to address someone, but that doesn’t work for me: I know it’s not real. Substack, however, with its initial known audience, gives me someone to address, and that does work)…
Anyway, at the end of this rolling art-yarn, which has carried us from inside to outside, he suddenly3 produces from his pocket a small white marble sculpture: a tri-lobed form, mathematically precise. Palm-sized, silk-smooth, blood-warm. I turn it in my fingers, looking at the grain of the stone. A wave of liquid delight spills through my body, making me grin.
David: ”Small things take just as long as big things, so it’s a waste of time.”
He’s already walking, tucking it back into his black trouser pocket. “It’s not a waste of time!” I call. “It’s… impeccable!”
Carrying things round in your pocket is a habit of stone-carvers. Ben does the same thing. He says that when people ask what you’re working on, and you pull a half-made piece out of your pocket, they’re seized with a burning desire to photograph it with their phones and immediately put it on the Internet. (Ill-mannered, we agree. Poor form.)4
Kelly says that a creative idea is like a newborn baby: you wouldn’t let just anyone hold it. I say that the metaphor I favour is a tiny seedling. When it’s still tender, it needs careful nurturing and protection. Don’t plant it out (into the public view) until it’s big and robust enough to survive the weather.
A young woman stalks through the crowded bus stop, wearing a tiny pink crocheted bikini top— straight bleached hair hanging down over it, a very short flared skirt, white knee-socks, and some kind of string-garter arrangement around her bare tattooed thighs. The eyes of the businessman and the construction worker follow her, magnets to iron. The skirt barely covers her arse.
All I can think is— cold.
Bus. Sitting on the top deck at the lights by Abel Smith Street, I suddenly remember the time I watched a young couple with their newborn, through their big apartment window, as if in an aquarium. They were conscious only of the baby— their new gravitational centre: moving slowly about inside their warm tender bubble, the room a womb.
I glance back to that window, which is just below the bus window,5 and there in it is a white silhouette of a dog, bright against the dark interior. A terrier, Jack Russell, with tan and black spots. Its pose is so perfect that for a moment I can’t tell if it’s real, or a cut-out, or a sculpture— like a frieze: essence of small dog, delicate limbs and tail poised just so— but then it jumps down from the window, and is gone.
The highest peak of the Inland Kaikouras, and the tallest mountain of the South Island’s skyline as seen from Wellington, it was a volcano near the edge of Gondwanaland, 90 - 100 million years ago.
The first written reference to Tapuae-o-Uenuku was on February 7, 1770, by Captain Cook as he sailed through Cook Strait: "Over this land appeared a Prodigious High Mountain, the summit of which was covered with snow."
Shaun Tan, and some French guy— Hervé someone— the kind who draws like a child but is a massively rich big-shot. David says he loves Tan: “A master of pareidolia.”
Like a magician!
Luddite solidarity in a phone-saturated world: rare.
There are layers of existence above street level; the double decker allows parallel viewing with first-floor life. Novel eyelines.
I love Tan too. BUTT not the faux tan of a blonde wearing next to naught in Welly Winter. I can imagine the male gaze- and laughed out loud at your thought- "cold". Thankyou for another excellent read Wizard Rosie!