I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.
- Anne Sexton
September opened with a jolt of surreal focus. Freshly landed back in Auckland from the UK, my body was on a strict jetlag-recovery deadline. No time to feel too much horror for the damp shock of late winter and all the rightwing election hoardings across the countryside (“get our country back on track,” intone the two white people with their brash signage staked into Māori land). No time to adjust to the new reality of staying up north and home no longer being the little house on the island. No time, even, to unpack my suitcase and transfer its contents to the cupboards so kindly cleared for us in our temporary home. Instead everything was trained on needing to be sharp and upright for the wedding that I was booked to photograph on the first day of spring in Tāmaki Makaurau in the South Pacific.
And what a day it was. The photograph-maker in me wanted diffused cloudy light for the sake of smooth scenes and soft portraits. But the drama-lover in me wanted the bluest sky for the pair: bold light for bold vows; shards of sunlight to shoo away the winter and set aflame a joy in all attending. Drama won. The shards shot in and cast their theatrical shadows across each expression of love and awe. Lilies and orchids became geometric sculptures in the hard brilliance of the afternoon. One hundred people laughed and cried as the heat pricked gleaming beaded crowns across their foreheads. The pair wore finest wool and crispest poplin, their faces a blend of deep familiarity and unscriptable surprise: look at you, here, really here, in finery, in front of all who love us. When the ceremony concluded their parents beamed and their siblings shot out arms of welcome. The pair were the same people but they had been made new, now passed through the eye of the needle of ritual, former and future lives stitched together.
Something is always ending and something is always beginning. We all need some help to cope and cohere the before and after when we move through thresholds — experiences that make us feel both worthily singular and appropriately ordinary, another one of humanity’s roll call going through another one of our human things. I treasure the gift of double-witnessing the ritual of a wedding — first through my lens and senses, and second through the slow action-replay days of selecting frames and shepherding the story. This work connects me with that deep familiarity and unscriptable surprise: big things happen, life has significance, our individual lives and relationships deserve the affirmation of chime-tinkling laughter and throat-catching tears. It doesn’t have to be a wedding, but we are all aided by the gifts of hospitality. Speech acts, garments, melodies, meals; containers that we can count on for connection and catharsis, courage to carry on when we are seen and held.
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It’s only here on the last day of the month — a furious hailstorm day to shock the naïve new leaves — that I realise I ploughed on into ever more tasks rather than make up the time to feel the weight of being back in New Zealand. Or maybe it’s that I left my soul somewhere above Heathrow again, and I am not even all here for gravity to act upon. It’s been a hard year in New Zealand. A lonely one. A few experiences here have lent me a paranoia, or an earned alertness to dismissal. What you feel is too much, what you think is happening is not really happening. But bids for connection are always worth the risk. My heroes are those that are working out how to build interpersonal rituals and resources in the face of failing or absent ones. Or, as Judith Butler says in What World Is This? the important thing is to “demand to keep life alive — that is, to demand the conditions for living.”
We also need rituals to grieve the lives that capital encouraged — lives that seemed aspirational but that depended on consuming resources at rates faster than could possibly be replenished, and generating waste in excess of what could be assimilated. It’s not embarrassing to be sad that the adverts did not turn out to be true. But places and relationships where we can feel the sadness might also help us better accept and generate the changes that are needed, or at the very least surf the chaos and help keep each other afloat. I am glad for scientists and policymakers. I am glad for methods that can measure and describe the problems we face (how many degrees), or pull declarative levers (change vs. disaster vs. emergency). But, as Katherine McKittrick points out in Dear Science, description is not liberation. Descriptive acts may be a necessary step toward justice, but they are insufficient. We need cultural and relational containers, too.
Climate and mental health activist Charlie Herzog Young shares a painful testimony that, “living in a culture that doesn’t recognise the enormity of what’s happening and actually shuts down people who are trying to build better things is a really isolating and destructive experience.” Descriptions and declarations — without the cultural enfranchisement to act and demand new eco(nomic/logical) arrangements — can be destructive. How can we be generative rather than only diagnostic? How can we create rituals and resources in the face of failing or absent ones? We are all aided by the gifts of hospitality, courage to carry on when we are seen and held. I see your climate horror and weariness. And I am fiercely glad for the way that art can reach into failure and absence to bring something graspable back for us.
As for here and now there is big moonlight in the valley, and the ferocious wind has just died down. An age-shrunken black cat is by my side and he is asking for his nighttime snack, so I had better go.
Until next month may you give and receive the garments, melodies, meals you need,
H x
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