cold discipline for solo travellers
From the category archives:
Life is busy and heavy with both utility and novelty, but in a manner that borrows all the time and energy that was used, before February, for what seems now to have been easy leisure and creativity. The pleasures of the old life have been marginalised by the duller demands of getting through each day in a city that is itself all margins, no centre.
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Unlike most of the rest of the time, when it comes to earthquakes and being in them I have left little desire to make windows into [wo]men’s souls. We were neither killed nor injured, nor was our home destroyed or damaged, nor did our animals run away, nor did our amenities fail. The massive ground accelerations of which you have heard in the city and the eastern suburbs were no more than a tenth of that size at Ilam, where I was at work at the university. A colleague and I clung to two facing doorways, and I thought as our eyes locked of that zoom shot at the end of Bonnie and Clyde, when the gaze of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty similarly meets, in their case, for the last time.
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The first days of acquiring the practical knowledge of maternity were very much akin to drawing out Leviathan with an hook, a process that felt all the more surreal by the fact of having been delivered of a non-metaphorical Leviathan so very recently, whose nearby tininess belied the effort. Everywhere were signs: signs that displayed policy, signs that explained how policy is to be implemented, health-promotional signs that gave instructions that reflect the policy. All of this to keep the baby floating above that netherland known as Failure to Thrive, whose abyss we sensed beneath the bilibed and whose name was never spoken.
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You are All My Base and belong to me
Little gives as much pleasure as watching my daughter realise her intentions: look at the object, reach for the object, put the object in the mouth. Her language-world is mostly sensate: primarily taste and oral sensation, but also texture to the touch. What she sees seems to function mostly as spectacle, as witnessed when she shook with giggles at the sight of each of the dogs eating their dinner. To “hi!” and “hello!” she can respond in kind, sometimes with the H and sometimes without. Consonants are less important in her world than long flat vowels.
There are other vocabularies too, and they accord, in some ways coincidentally, with those of her parents. The unserious epithet, Boob Lady, by which I at home go, has been tethered recently by her own name for me: a fixed-gaze to make sure I am looking, then, almost imperceptibly, a quick movement of the tongue that, latched, would bring about the start of a feed. This is not the reductive expression I might once have thought it would be, since there is no-one else, after all, who provides for her that thing, and I know the whole of what I went through to be able to do it.
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Posterous
Delta Blues
19 June, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,we are family
Just as the eye of the New Zealander finds the printed “Z” all over the world, so my local eye travels always to the west-south-west in maps of my city, that corridor of suburbs west of Hagley Park that goes Riccarton, Upper Riccarton, Sockburn, and then the exit-town cluster of Hornby, Hei Hei and Yaldhurst. Within that cartography I can pinpoint my family as though markers on a board and, for the last nine months, much of the culture and commerce of our lives.
These neighbourhoods are also one of the long strips of unliquefacted land at present, meaning that our present experience is not like that of so many of our other friends and family around the city. Our daily habits are chiefly to shake, fortify and worry, without the heartbreaking insinuation of silt into land, home and hearth.
[click to continue…]
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