You wake from a dream but the dream just jumps into somebody else’s head and continues
- Mark Leidner
It’s hard to live it and write it at the same time, whatever the it may be. My it right now is being back in Aotearoa after living in Britain - the it that incubated last month in government-managed hotel isolation before being shot out into a back-to-front second spring of 2021. Nothing smooth about it, it’s more like the surfaces of life being flung into the air, confetti-like, shocking and beautiful. In one way this end-of-month newsletter (now officially two years old!) is an ode to the moment, to the small, to the curls of meaning to be found in shoots and motes and saline solutions. But it is strange to have a photorealistic record of something that has happened in each month of the past two years - strange for each entry to be true, yet also nothing like The Truth.
Here’s a true thing: I didn’t think I would, but I already miss the Thames. Before there was Heathrow there was the Thames: the site of every hello and goodbye, every advance and retreat, every welcome and unwelcome passage in and out of the warren; an engine of industry, a passage of power and wealth. The banks of the Thames once filled up with ship-building, ironworks, gasworks and vats of whale oil. The other type of banks filled up, too. The river isn’t one neat streak - not to itself, anyway. Swamps and marshes are the boggy beyond, queer and liminal, never fully drained and contained. Coots and cormorants rule the soggy kingdom, but back at city-level the banks might still have it.
I love and hate the un-neat streak. The Thames is my favourite antagonist of liquid time. I love the tidal language of the mud and flow. Gormless grey slaps of water run alongside the technologies that made for the tanking of our planet, unleashing destruction on living things and our living home, evangelising dominion, dominion, dominion; growth, growth, growth. It is as though a lost god came up to earth as a grey swipe of water and gave a desperate, mimed impression. It is as though just enough people squinted hungrily at just the wrong time as to take the god’s message to mean toxic capital chemical yes forever - yes to a forever which is no longer forever, forever now meaning merely as long as it lasts.
In London I walked everywhere. I had to walk everywhere because I had no car or bike and because, pre-vaccine, I was too ((dis)proportionately) afraid of the airborne stranger stuff to rely on public transport. But it was possible to walk everywhere. Each surface was flat, yet filled with space and light and movement. Each bridge was possible on foot, with some possible for pedestrians alone. In Tāmaki Makaurau it is impossible to cross the harbour bridge without an internal combustion engine, or the very odd hopeful battery. The dominion of toxic capital chemical yes forever has been too successful here by far. In brick-stacked London I experienced a claustrophobic sea-longing. Now all around me is sea and I feel an agoraphobic brick-longing. The reversal is an ancient myth hatching once more, all of our longings meeting the same meted out plots, again and again.
It’s not a tragedy, though. It is not all too-late reversals and recognitions. I am young, not young young, but not old. This must simply be the first time accepting the arc of these human plots - no exemptions or special passes. The ancestors must be in agony over all the dramatic irony I have put them through. It might be time to let them back into the play. Or it might not be up to me at all. This is All Hallows’ Eve, after all, so this might be them bursting through. My grandfather lived just south of the Thames, and he lived on this island, too. The gormless slap of the Thames and the preening teal of the Waitematā. War and ‘peace’. Foot and engine. Animal and mineral. Binaries aren’t quite the ticket, but living between contradictions feels better than living inside my own myopias or delusions of omniscience.
Being back in New Zealand means zoning out, at least some of the time. My mind is wandering. I could describe the scudding spring storms or the happily regenerated bird populations (post unhappy predator purges), but I am not taking in every detail of my surroundings, not like when I was in Britain. Maybe it’s that these surroundings are not mine to take. Or maybe it’s that zoning out is possible in the ‘peace’ of a lucky landing place. I am not paying, paying, paying attention - not earning my place on the pavement with some startled powers of observation. I’m realising in retrospect how exhausting it was to appreciate or invent circumstances of constant stimulation. Banality and tedium are okay sometimes, the beat goes soft and slow, thoughts take a break. Another thought-breaker would, of course, be more dopamine: loud lights, bright sounds. That dopamine is all I’ve been dreaming of, but instead we have the quiet of yet another lockdown.
I’m playing the same instrument I played as a teenager. I’m reading some of the same books I read as a teenager. I’m on the same island I grew up on as a teenager. Everything and nothing is the same. I have often found life hard in some way or another, but I have a feeling that life is only going to feel easier (with more ease, if not easiness) now that I know the ancient plots are playing with me; that I am just another of their gormless subjects. It will happen again and again, the slap of a reversal. I’ll want to be here when I’m there. I’ll want to be free when I’m held. I’ll want to be at home when home was never one place to begin with, not even for one second. And I’ll want for nothing at all because, by sheer dumb luck, I do have one second, and another, and maybe another.
Greed misread the lost grey swipe of a god. We don’t want toxic chemical capital yes forever, we want baton-passing constellations of works and lives and shoots and motes, backwards and forwards, through deep time, forever. But my personal forever? With my one second, and another, and maybe another, it will be merely as long as it lasts.
Stay spooky.
Until next month,
H x
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