The Trick of Sinuousness
City-Watching Field Notes 12th - 19th February 2024
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files: “Does an ordinary adult go to work only if they feel in the mood?… A committed artist cannot afford the luxury of revelation. Inspiration is the indolent indulgence of the idler. Muses are for losers!”
Gilbert is eating lemon curd on toast as he tells me the story he’s working on to explain the scar on his calf (large, purple, shaped like an arrow-head, or a Star Trek badge). “I was swimming at Lyall Bay and a shark bit my leg. It wasn’t very big. I kind of kicked it in the head. I waved to a friend who was standing on the beach to come and save me. A chunk of meat floated away, and that’s why there a dent.”
(In fact, the wound was the result of a mysterious playground incident: he tripped and fell, but nobody can work out what sharp thing cut his leg so deeply.)
In the café. A Dad, holding his baby, talking to the baby’s Grandad: “Well, I never held one before! Avoided it like the plague!” Then to baby: “Didn’t I? Yes I did.”
The baby sticks its tongue out, smiles at its Mother. Its eyes are fixed on her face. It’s so little that it must have only just learnt to smile.
Now the Grandad has the baby, his big brown hands wrapping its little body up. He walks it to the edge of the deck to look at the sea. The hills on the other side of the harbour have disappeared behind a silver curtain of mist. He puts his lips to the side of the baby’s round head. (Is there anything sweeter than a rugged man being tender?)
Across the room, another Grandad with another small baby: he holds the dark-haired infant in its white onesie up in front of him at a 45° angle, like a book, with one hand behind its head and the other behind its body. This Grandad is wearing a black polo-neck t-shirt and glasses. As the baby has its back to me, all I can see is the man’s face as he makes funny faces for its amusement, bringing the baby’s nose to his own repeatedly. Its tuft of dark hair, its waving mitts. He turns the baby in midair, pointing it at the person sitting next to him. He looks like a man who has handled many a baby in his time.
In Cuba Mall a woman with a bare midriff walks past clutching her side. For a moment I think she is wounded or sick: appendicitis? But then I see it is only a fresh tattoo, under gladwrap.
I meet a woman at the bus stop. She comments on my hair, which is out to dry. She says she’s been at the gardens; in her cloth bag is a marrow, and herbs— she doesn’t much like marrow, but it will make soup. We sit together in the back seat of the bus; I’m facing backwards, and the landscape unspools itself from behind my head. She tells me she grew up in Ōtorohanga and Te Awamutu. When the Māori King hosted a gathering there was always sports, and as she played netball, she would go on a bus with her team, unsupervised. The King had his own brass band, and the netball girls would try for one of the boys in the band, who as well as being good-looking were nice boys: they wouldn’t hit on you.
“Probably too many of their Aunties watching.” I say.
She slept in the wharenui— she says in the meeting house. You got a mattress, sheets, pillow, everything, but you had to behave yourself. Some noisy friends of hers got kicked out, but she was allowed to stay.
She says, “The first time I went swimming in the river there— the Waikato— I could feel something around my feet. It scared me, but it was just a kind of seaweed, river-weed. Well, afterwards I saw the boys with some eels and I said ‘Where did you catch those?’ and they said ‘Anywhere there’s weeds!”
We talk about those countryfolk who never want to go to town, like her old neighbour. Why would I go to town? I have everything I need right here.
We talk about food. Blackberries, jam, smoking kahawai, eating rabbit.
She says, “When my second husband tried to feed me kahawai and mullet, I didn’t like it. I couldn’t stand the taste! I had only eaten flounder and snapper! But the first time I had kahawai smoked, it was a different story.”
They were fed smoked fish as kids, without being told it was eel.
I say that smoked eel’s good, but truthfully I can’t remember the last time I ate eel. (I’m very fond of eels alive, but I would definitely eat eel if it was a matter of politeness.)
When I talk about all the rabbits I’ve eaten, she says, “We used to eat rabbit once a week. And my Mum cooked pukeko.”
Me: “Is it true what they say, that it’s tough?”
Her: “No, my Mum would slow-cook it, on the woodstove. In those days that’s all Mummys did, stay at home and cook yummy things… The pastry! The scones!”
I went to see the dragon-dancing on the waterfront. As I got closer to the centre of things, the crowd became thicker and thicker. I dislike crowds, because they impede my free movement, but I persevered, slipping into the human stream, up the covered stairs to Frank Kitts park, behind the Paul Dibble sculpture. (I like that sculpture: a woman’s body from belly-button to thighs in double-relief, so that even though it must be solid bronze it suggests hollowness, two beaten pieces soldered together along the edge. The belly-button and the Y of the pubis and thighs are pierced right through, making lines of light. There are eelish long leaves framing her, which make me think of the World card, dancing naked inside her wreath.1 But I’d forgotten until I looked the sculpture up ((to find out its name: Fruits of the Garden))2 that there’s also an apple sitting on the shelf of her, the straight line made by her severance across the middle. I like Dibble3— he comes across as both witty and kind— and this cropping doesn’t seem brutal, but rather a framing like a photographer might use, or a painter: like a riff on Courbet’s L’Origine du monde.)
I found a spot to sit, on a warmed concrete wall. People dressed in black with red headbands were beating huge vertical drums with thick sticks, while a thin man with a grey ponytail played a flute. Taiko. Shakuhachi. (No: shinobue.) After ten minutes or so I realised one of the drummers was my friend Tamara, and I followed her through the dance. The square was ringed with people, three or four deep. Over the roofs of the city, flocks of small birds scattered themselves like confetti. Under my feet, a mischievous child in green, who waved up at me.
When the drumming finished, everybody rushed out of the square towards Te Papa. I went with them unthinkingly, but the people-river was claustrophobically thick, and at the bottom of the stairs I changed my mind and went back up, like an eel going up a waterfall.4 In the near-empty square I stood on a wall looking down on the packed road of the waterfront below. Eventually the sound of distant crashing and banging began— begone, demons!— and I saw the dragon coming. Small golden dragons made of light came first, twisting above the dark crowd, each operated by a single person. Then the great long dragon, sinuous, glinting, chasing a light-wreathed ball. Along it came, closer, then disappeared under the wall. I marked its way by the noise of cymbals, and through the gateway of the stairwell I could see its feet: human feet. I guessed that it would come back into the square, where I was, but I wasn’t quite sure.
A man next to me on the wall kept putting his thumb and forefinger together, gesticulating like Trump, and saying in a fake American accent “Worst Thanksgiving Parade ever. Where are the dragons?” After the third time, my mild desire to kick him grew stronger.
The drums and gongs went away towards the playground, becoming quieter, then louder again. People in high-vis appeared at the top of the stairs, and an electric feeling. The dragon! Into the arena, riding the air, long like a snake: jaws snapping, metal scales glinting on its diamond-patterned sides. At its pronged tail flowed the crowd, like rats after the Piper. It danced circles in the square, chasing its tail, spiralling inside itself: I thought of the Nokia snake game.5 I saw the trick of sinuousness— every running dragon-bearer tracing the same wiggle in turn, like a stream rushing around a rock. Bang! Crash! It seemed to pounce on the ball— the Pearl of Wisdom. Now the dragon coiled itself up in a great cone: the front people— the dragon’s head, neck, and forelimbs— were suddenly two high, sitting on each other’s shoulders, while the tail people crouched low as they ran.
Afterwards we waited for the sky to be dark enough for fireworks. I kept thinking it was dark enough. Now? Now?… Now, surely? I passed the time by talking to the two people who had joined me on the wall. They were from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and had met by chance at the airport three weeks earlier, both on their way to Wellington on scholarships. (I had already noticed the man for the slim, perfectly even dreadlocks that came down to his thighs. As an uncommonly long-haired person I notice other uncommonly long-haired people— long hair takes upkeep. I’d also noted his laugh— he had one of those laughs that makes other people laugh: a good gift.) They told me about their island, a mountain that rises out of the sea, and the Creole that well-brought-up people are taught not to speak; their indigenous language was lost. The woman told me that the thing that had shocked her about the Southern Hemisphere was the upside-downness of the constellations and the Moon. She pulled out her phone and pointed it at Orion, and the stars appeared on the dark-blue screen in a web of glowing lines. See? Upside-down. And it was so cold— her kneecaps were cold! They were hot-country people, from a place where it never goes below 25°! I said that she had better invest in a big coat before Winter comes.
When the fireworks started, the cracks echoed off the buildings behind us and ricocheted around. Gold, red, blue, green; flowers, fountains, paws, snail-shells of brief star-fire. Smoke spiralling upwards, lit by the city. Two women near me, wearing Indonesian-style grey hijab, turned their backs to the sky and held their phones up for selfies. Smile dazzlingly into the phone, fireworks exploding behind your head; drop the smile and check the photo, absolutely blank-faced. I can never get used to this odd two-step that people perform in public, seemingly without self-consciousness. It’s the extremity of the contrast between the performance of happiness and the absence of expression that happens when people are staring into their phones.6 The price of this particular self-image— me wearing a crown of fireworks— is paid in the currency of seconds spent looking away from the sky.
Drinking liquorice tea from a paper cup, under a marquee, beside the field where Tapu Te Ranga Marae stood before it burnt down. (I never visited it, to my eternal regret.) I eat a sausage wrapped in bread, with fried onions, tomato sauce, and mustard: I honestly can’t remember the last time. It’s so good, I eat another one. I listen to a curly-headed man with dark eyes and a ginger beard telling how he came here a lot as a kid, to visit his friend Hirini, the son of Bruce Stewart. “Yep, it was pretty much the Māori Hogwarts.”
I am on day six of a digital fast;7 I have decanted these tales from my journal and from memory. I am amazed by how rapidly the magic revives when I turn away from the screen. Here is a parallel report, from my Lenten-comrade Caroline Ross: The Oblique Hermitage. It begins: “I have been grinding bone ash, marble dust, chalk, oyster shell white and ochre into various binders: gum Arabic, aquafaba, linseed oil, gum tragacanth, cherry tree gum, oat gruel… My cunning plan, to one day wean people off plastic marker pens when they see how great metal marks made on prepared grounds can look: bold, permanent, soft, shiny, grey, black, brown, golden…”
After Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, some people posted selfies with ashen crosses smeared on their foreheads. Being a heathen, I was ignorant of such practices ahead of time.
(The Vincentians asked me dubiously, when I mentioned Lent, “Are you a Catholic?”
”GOD, no!” I said.
They fell about laughing. “Well— that was emphatic!”)
Jonathan Rowson was one of the ash-cross people, and, also, he read Eliot’s Ash Wednesday aloud, here: Teach us to Care and not to Care. I recommend listening to the whole thing— rather than some priest’s finger, that’s how I began my fast.
“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice”
Writing this ending, I happened to glance up from the screen to see the white windowsill lit up like a rose petal, orange, pink. Sunset, blazing: I went outside.
Alexander Andreev’s World, from his Silver and Gold Tarot:
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
He died last year, aged 80
How easy it is to go with the flow, how difficult to go against it!
And this text from Andrew, saved in my phone: “I took the red dragon off the flower wall to go mahjong today”
AKA resting bitch face
More info here: Fasting From the Virtual, Feasting on the Real
Beautiful density.
And really sent me off on one regarding Nick Cave.
Thanks Rosie
I love the cultural differences on the day before Ash Wednesday. The British have pancake Tuesday to keep them going for the 40 days of lent but the Brazilians have Mardi Gras- literally fat Tuesday.