Very soon, all this will be amnesia, including my increasingly enfeebled attempts to hold it all in memory.
The buildings are razed, by machinery rather than by fire, and those that remain, damaged, are held up by nailed-on chipboard and large concrete blocks out of which steel poles extend.
**
In February, my friend Jane and I took in Julia Morison’s Meet me on the other side, my anxiety about venturing into the central city offset by the beauty of the NG building as a venue: not only the polished wood floor and plain walls, but the massive steel reinforcing beams that passed high above our heads. It was an exhibition of beautiful-ugly finished-abortive objects, so many of whose names evoked our common consciousness in this town, these days.
Missing thing
Curious thing
Fretful thing
Poor thing
Thing in the making
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I often have the feeling that the air is still full of mortar dust. There is nothing in particular, save the ubiquitous and ongoing demolitions, to substantiate this feeling, but it is hard to shake. My mother-in-law, who in times past might have been a Wise Woman, is convinced of it.
What does this imaginary dust do? It gets, I suppose, in the eyes and mouth, finds its way to the lungs and the nerves. It doesn’t paralyse or even really endanger. It simply is, and by being, impedes.
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I am an inveterate life-narrator, not only on these pages but also in my own head and with my friends and family, frequently (and no doubt tediously) turning my experiences into stories about my experiences: this is what we did. This is what we do. This is why that thing that happened that one time turned out to be significant or (more commonly), this is the pattern that emerged over time.
It started young and lost me friends in those early days, when we persisted in the belief that our lives were our own to direct and that spontaneity, epiphany and the practised resisting of interpretation would keep us in a state of grace and freedom. These days it gives both me and the señor something like an adult handle on what might at times otherwise threaten to overwhelm: being married (to each other), being parents. In our next-to-darkest hours, we can take comfort in the meta-narrative that auto-processes, incessantly, just beyond the tears.
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In the southern spring of 2003, not long before I started these pages, I went on holiday to Melbourne to visit my brother who had been living there for a couple of years at that time. (An annual or eighteen-monthly visit was a ritual of mine for those first few years of his domicility in that city.) As was my habit during trips away, I thought a lot about what I needed to do to reorganise my life and make it work better for me. I lived at that time under an assumption of the possibility of mastery, that if I changed x and rejigged y, something like tranquility and contentment would arise. I had spent six unhappy months applying for academic jobs abroad after spending much of the northern spring on holiday in the UK and was ready to quit that particular trajectory; I didn’t have the stamina for the three hundred or more applications it was widely alleged humanities PhDs should be prepared to make to get a university job anywhere. (I had a non-academic university job at home; I just didn’t like it very much at that time.)
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The wall to the left of the flat, narrow bed was largely clad in boxes labelled kits, that strangely jaunty name for what I assumed were needles, perhaps syringes and whatever sterile, sealed storage their preservation and transport demanded.
The needle whose future work had preoccupied our thinking for the previous four weeks was out of its own kit now, its action calmly described by the consultant who sat near the foot of the bed. Neither the señor nor I saw it, my eyes closing as I saw the señor drop his head toward the floor, knees and feet splayed and hands clasped in the sad stock pose of the waiting man.
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Thing in the Making
16 May, 2012
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,we are family
Very soon, all this will be amnesia, including my increasingly enfeebled attempts to hold it all in memory.
The buildings are razed, by machinery rather than by fire, and those that remain, damaged, are held up by nailed-on chipboard and large concrete blocks out of which steel poles extend.
**
In February, my friend Jane and I took in Julia Morison’s Meet me on the other side, my anxiety about venturing into the central city offset by the beauty of the NG building as a venue: not only the polished wood floor and plain walls, but the massive steel reinforcing beams that passed high above our heads. It was an exhibition of beautiful-ugly finished-abortive objects, so many of whose names evoked our common consciousness in this town, these days.
[click to continue…]
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