To memory dear

Millie is on a seventy-two hour bender of demandingness that shows no signs of abating and continues by day and by night. Outside, it’s digging holes along the section border. Inside, it’s wanting to be watched continually in her elaborate routines of sitting up, sitting down and occasionally lying down. The soundtrack to all this is a series of barks that sounds like nothing so much as the dramatic wails and moans my international students like to make when their communicative abilities in English fail them. The joys of having an adolescent dog in the suburbs are a leetle thin at the moment.

In light of all this, last night turned out to be a grand time to have a bout of good old-fashioned insomnia. Hopefully it won’t be the start of the clusters in which it occasionally comes for me. What could I be worried about, I ask myself. I can’t do anything about the US elections, nor have I tried to, although my feelings on a surface level at least resemble the juxtaposition cited here (and I understand the article chooses Kerry, otherwise I doubt I’d be able to cite it in good conscience). It’s the layers of what I’d characterise as religiosity that all those media-bite vox pops reveal, the widespread voter conviction that a god who exists is one someone’s side, that are just as wearing. Are we card-carrying members of the eternal return club yet, or is membership automatic upon first noticing a certain pattern in voterly theism?

That’s the thing about coming from New Zealand: the cultural buffering zone between you and the rest of the world is kinda thin. Other people’s otherness seems perpetually on display, because there are so very very many of them/you and so few of us. (I’ll leave aside the argument that there is as much difference within cultures as between cultures for the moment, since it is a Saturday here after all.)

It’s over a week now since I was in Dunedin, where I stayed by the sea at St. Kilda. A softball team of nine or ten year old boys was practising on the sports field on a cold night; I was wearing the same clothes to walk on the beach as I wore on my wet Wellington vacation three months earlier (and carrying the same umbrella). My beach-walking intentions were almost scuppered when I fell over on the sort-of-boardwalk descending on to the shore by the surf club, and lightly sprained (though by my swearing you wouldn’t know it was light) my foot. On the premise that this was my holiday and I wasn’t going to let the fruit of stupidity stop me from getting out and about (although that resolution could also be characterised as further fruit of stupidity), I hobbled off down the beach until the cold took over and I could ignore what felt like tremendous swelling, though none was visible.

The beach suburbs in Dunedin are not dissimilar to some of the beach suburbs here a few years ago, before the developers moved in, which is to say that, apart from the surfer flats whose concrete frontages were filled with the kind of seventies station wagon my viola teacher used to drive as a statement about the poverty (and insouciance) of itinerant music teachers, it was easy to project lives of quiet desperation on to the elderly and pit bull-owning families I saw in their front yards and front rooms. In the fish and chip shop, a red-faced older man with his dentures out was talking in an outside volume voice to people who seemed to know him but not want to stand too close. One of the proprietors got so angry when I told her my order was wrong that she spun away from me, muttering expletives in Cantonese. It seemed easiest to leave and denude my burger of its meat back at the camping ground.

My next morning was rather more in line with my usual not-falling-over preferences for vacation leisure, although the previous occupants of my cabin had obviously decided to laugh derisively at the many “no smoking” signs within (if my sense of smell tells the truth, which I figure it does). I passed much of the morning at the art gallery, where it was a curious experience to hear the inner dialogue of my teacher’s voice (“who can tell me about the brushwork on this painting?”) with my holidaying/member of the public voice (something closer to, “cool”, “oh man”, “look, red”). The retreat of the first in favour of the second marked the switch from getting-out-of-town to actual relaxing, to the extent that I snickered for a while at the large, Rodin-influenced marble sculpture of two men wrestling naked, having read the night before Isherwood’s praise of “[w]restling and other forms of erotic violence” (Lost Years, 59). Dirty wrestlers!

The major exhibition in the gallery was a Jeffrey Harris retrospective, which I found emotionally gruelling as much for the narratives behind his paintings–poverty, isolation, family strife and bereavement–as the paintings themselves, although these were variously expressionistic, detailed, grotesque (which I use descriptively rather than pejoratively) and covering a considerable range of styles and techniques. Harris’s ex-wife, also an artist, was the sister of one of the markers of my thesis (yep, you’re in New Ziln); I say “was” because she died, drowned, tragically last year. In a sense, it was the thought of that tragedy that stayed with me as I went round the paintings, particularly when I looked at those concerned with the trials of their family life: the death of a baby, a love triangle, divorce.

The hook that reallly held me was in another, smaller exhibition, Tiwai Project, glossed thusly at the website: “A collaboration between sculptor Stephen Mulqueen and photographer Erwin Brinkmann in response to the nature of place: Motupohue/Bluff Harbour, Tiwai Point and Awarua Bay, Southern New Zealand.” These places are in the same region as the annual family holidays I spent with my Southland relatives, alluded to in an earlier entry on this page. Many of the Brinkmann photos were of the chains of power pylons leading to the aluminium smelter at Tiwai, and inside the smelter itself. I don’t want to labour the gloomy narratives of my own childhood unduly, but there was for me a near-to-exact line-up between the juxtapositions of harsher industrial landscape and softer coastal forms and, to put it bluntly, the way it used to feel to be in the care of my paternal extended family (even though my parents were still around), in childhood. We gots loneliness, isolation, sadness and fear, and that’s why this write up is in this journal and not After Nadath.

It says something a little unsettling about my temperament that I loved having all this stuff stirred up for me in an art gallery, which is, I suppose, my kind of equivalent of a 1980s’ “safe [therapeutic] space”.

Anyway.

Before I drove out of town, on what was by then a brilliantly sunny day, I took on the relatively random layout and extensive hilliness of the Southern Cemetery, looking for Isabella, the first wife of my great-grandfather (the father of my Oamaru granddad. We are back on the maternal line now). Harvestmother and I only found of Isabella’s existence a few years ago, when we sighted the marriage certificate between Charles (my great-grandfather), and Maria, whom we thought was his first wife but who turned out to be his second. (Maria died in childbirth at thirty-five; Charles married Annie, my great-grandmother, some fiteen years later, when he was nearly sixty and she just over forty. My granddad was born the following year and his brother three years later.) Under Charles’s marital status on his second marriage certificate, it said “widower”. Harvestmother and I then returned to the Mormon family history centre (where we had already been told off more than once for talking and disturbing other researchers), and tracked down Isabella and Charles’s marriage in Dunedin.

She was eighteen when they married and nineteen when she died, of what her death certificate would say was a “seizure”. Her family were Irish Catholics, like Charles’s own mother; both Maria and Annie would also be from Irish, or part-Irish, families.

My granddad never knew of Isabella’s existence, just one of many family details elided in a time when people all over Australia and New Zealand were being vague about their origins and their history. These were pre-therapy times; the past was almost exclusively private.

The Catholic section of the cemetery is unsurprisingly small in a region settled by Scottish migrants (including my father’s ancestors), and the rows have lost any particular layout they may or may not have had (to my fussy eyes, at least). I wondered if I was going to sprain my other foot or cause an unmarked tomb to subside as several already had. But harvestmother’s directions turned out to be accurate and I got to see for myself the grave my parents had found on an earlier trip.

Below her father’s name, the inscription includes “Isabella … who departed this life 15 February 1876 / in the twentieth year of her age. / Though lost to sight, to memory dear.” When I phoned harvestmother to tell her I’d found it, she recited verbatim the inscription over the phone.

“To memory dear”: a private sphere out of which very little (almost nothing) was disclosed. A journal such as this would have been anathema to my ancestors, and indeed, I suppose it’s really only writers and artists more generally who mine their own memories for narrative and expressive purposes. But I’d rather have her name in the family circle than out of it.

Back in the non-holidaying present, all the programme’s students are returning on Monday, I marked yesterday an essay which concluded a series of illustrative good/evil pairings with “churches and drugs”, and my external dissertation marker writes to me that “I think you can safely say that you have a teaching qualification”, a message to which I say not only “woo!” but also “hoo!”

And a post-scriptum, to this post on Crooked Timber, I have to say, Des, is the gentleman cited in fact you writing under a Latverian pseudonym?