In order to be a good poet you have to have an ear for language so fine that to a novelist it’s really almost a disease
- Donna Tartt, via Gabrielle Bates
It was a clear morning earlier today when I stepped into the Health Trust for my X-ray appointment. I’d just had an espresso sitting outside Specialty Foods on the main strip, and I’d been able to confidently leave the house without my coat, just a jumper. The jumper has a funny history. Bought via an app from someone that started out anonymous but turned out to be an acquaintance (that’s New Zealand), the jumper was seemingly lost in the post only to turn up months later, when my uncle notified me that someone on the community page in possession of a mistaken delivery was looking for a Hannah Lees. The jumper had been sitting at their place alone for so many months because they didn’t actually live at the house, but rather lived in London, and this was their holiday house that they visited from time to time. It had been hard to get back to New Zealand on account of the border and the pandemic, so they’d spent more time holidaying in Europe than Waiheke these past few years, you see. They gave me all of this information freely and without any hint of embarrassment.
But the jumper was my own little luxury, knitted so soft and so fine. I chose it today to lend me the softness to face the appointment. I tried to remember my friend’s warm feelings toward medical settings: supreme care, supreme skill, all there in service of the ill. The waiting room was warm, with foam-cushioned seats and cheerful gloss pamphlets and bright art prints lining the walls. There was a box of wrapped N95 masks provided, and everyone wore one without fuss. But the X-ray room itself was cold. Windowless and painted grey, even the technician was wearing all monochrome. She looked down at my red shoes as though they were spilled blood and asked me to take them off, take everything off, and swap it all for a gown. Not a crisp ward cotton but more of a napped flannel, a small kindness to have that softness against the skin, with a bright green webbed tie at the back. You’ve got lovely long hair don’t you, can you tie that up? Sure, of course. Is there any chance that you could be pregnant? No. Can you hold still? Yes. Even more still? Mmm. Can you take only the shallowest of breaths? Actually can you hold it? Can you hold it in?
*
Earlier this month I got to see Michele Leggott, previous Poet Laureate of New Zealand, my masters thesis supervisor, for the first time since before the pandemic, since before I moved to the UK, since before her cancer diagnosis. She was speaking at the Auckland Writers Festival with her latest poetry collection, Face to the Sky. Whakaahurangi, the name of a place in Taranaki, means roughly exactly that title. Face to the sky: the outward and upward-looking position of a star-gazer, and also the prone position of someone that has died. We all will be and will have been in both positions. Michele shared with the audience that she wasn’t sure which reality she’d be occupying this May when the invitation to the festival came through last year. Everyone in the room felt the quiet triumph of her presence. She described the cover of her book with its Taranaki maunga and it all snapped together, how much our origin places become our emblems. To hear Michele speak of her place of birth after staving off death made me fiercely love her life force and fiercely miss my own origin place. Surely I don’t belong here. A glad but troubled guest, like everyone I am always saving a corner of myself for my mountain.
*
On another day in May I met a friend and her baby (who I hope will also be my friend but I don’t want to assume anything too soon; she can make up her own mind, in time). We went to the zoo all together, the big two of us walking and the little one in the buggy. I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I hadn’t been to the zoo in many years, and it was the most sensorily overwhelming experience. It was a quiet day in terms of human patrons, but there was something about the venn diagram of day-tripping as a trio that tripped me out. We zoomed around the enclosures (though I think they call them habitats now), on deadline for the little one’s approaching nap. It was a helter-skelter of half-started life conversation strands and environmentally-responsive narrations. Landing upon each enclosure I would ask myself, should I be looking at the animal and considering its enclosed life, or should I be narrating the animal for the baby (trying to avoid all the language that I have been learning is developmentally traumatising), or should I be ignoring the animal, ignoring the baby’s possible experience of the animal, even ignoring the baby herself, and focusing on my friend and her half-started story? Should I try half-starting a story, too, or is this well and truly the time to park it? Oh! A new enclosure, a new narration challenge, an old half-started story to nurture and— How are parents meant to properly honour their children and their partners and their friends and all the beings and animals? And their selves and their half-started stories, what of those?
*
On Monday I ferried into town to see Weyes Blood at The Powerstation. The last time I was at the venue I was harassed by a drunk man who kept coming up close and yelling WHERE’S YOUR SMILE. Afterwards I realised I should have told him to fuck off, but in the moment all I could find was a please mind your own business! I was nervous to come back but this time I was spared and could enjoy the act in peace. I did happen to be smiling a lot, but that was no one else’s business. An earnest performer and wry chronicler of our times unspooling in sound, 2020 came back to me and I felt edified. For an accurate appraisal of the intervening few years, there’s The Worst is Done:
They say the worst is done
But I think the worst has yet to come now
I hear it from everyone
We're all so cracked after that
I ended my social media hiatus earlier in the month with a big back-from-burnout(-but-not-exactly) announcement post. I so appreciated the notes I received, and I felt full of voice and communion again. No sooner had I come back from beyond than a new external shock was visited upon me, in relation to my housing situation. For most of the month I didn’t feel okay, but I will be okay in time. Some people don’t get time.
On May 16th the Loafers Lodge fire in Wellington killed many residents and laid bare the twin housing and poverty crises in New Zealand (Bernard Hickey, The Spinoff). New Zealand breaks my heart again and again. But on May 25th I attended Action Station’s Economics for the People session with Matthew Scobie (Kāi Tahu), Jane Kelsey, and Max Harris. Roughly live-tweeted here, the evening did something good for everyone.
By way of a break from reality Ryan convinced me to watch the entirety of the Fast and the Furious franchise before taking me to see Fast X on Friday. It’s been fun. (But, in all the fun of the aggressively learned and exaggeratedly performed masculinity, how is it that that is how the real Paul Walker died?? How?? The whole fantastically stupid sequence of films is haunted by this uncanny tragedy; it seeps into the hyperbolic beefy machismo of it and pours water on a lot of the camp. I don’t know why they carried on, really. I’m ten years late but rest in peace, Paul Walker.)
Reading Links:
“…corporate schemers plot a takeover strategy called a bear hug. It’s an offer that’s too much, too soon—a bid for a company’s stock that’s so high the board can’t legally turn it down. Smother your targets with largesse and you own them.
That’s the essence of family love in “Succession”
- Emily Nussbaum, Succession’s Satisfyingly Nasty Family Ties (The New Yorker)
“Could the state have any more contempt and hostility for the vulnerable if it tried? No one plans to enter suffering from which the only liberation will be their death.”
- Nadine Anne Hura, More truth than my chest could hold (The Spinoff, and also writing over at the incredible newsletter, Iti Te Kupu: Small words in a vast universe)“…when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling”
- Anon, The Limits of David Foster Wallace, Bartleby Life“Individuals who reported greater agency reported lower anxious and depressive symptoms along with higher vitality and life satisfaction (Chang et al., 2019)”
- Corrigan & Shute, The Relationships between the Hope Dimensions of Agency Thinking and Pathways Thinking With Depression and Anxiety: a Meta-Analysis (International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology)“Oh, the times are urgent, let us slow down. Slowing down is losing our way. Losing our way is not a human capacity or human capability. It is the invitations that are now in in the world at large, inviting us to listen deeply, to be keen and to be fresh and to be quick with our heels, to follow the sights and sounds and smells of the world … It's now alive, it's alien and wanting us to do more than just save ourselves.”
- Bayo Akomolafe, Slowing Down and Surrendering Human Centrality, Green Dreamer Interview
Green things of May, left to right: lucky rogue fern-upholstered bus seat (Symonds Street, Auckland), novelty bicycle horn (Fullers ferry, Matiatia headland), Hannah in a puffer jacket (Oneroa, Waiheke Island)
For June my goal is to stay alive, feel alive, and hopefully have an affogato on my birthday. I hope that your urgent needs can be met and that one or two nice-to-haves can come your way this month.
Until next time,
H x