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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Instead of a dearth of relevance, suddenly there’s a ghastly surplus of it. Like a boor at a party, the quake insists on pushing in and monopolising every conversation. (Source)
Reticence came up with the dust or down with the snow, placing me at quiet odds to this rising heap of narrative to whose granular contents I cannot, in general, bear to incline my eye. It is important to gather stories as data, it is important for everyone, everywhere, to have their say, but, to be frank, I do not suffer well all the talking and I am waiting for the sifting to start and the making to follow. No doubt this will take as long as the rebuild itself.
I wonder if perhaps it’s because I’ve participated in times past in both a talking cure and group therapy for my own historical mental illnesses, that the wider feeling of a community and beyond its boundaries a nation more generally turning over the traces, circulating the images, talking, talking, talking about its feelings, is something that for cultural purposes I so resist. I’m not meaning here the coronial findings, the stories of crisis, of deficits of provision, of help wanting or help that never came, that to my mind deserve a loud reciting in public forums and plazas of all kinds, but the meta-narrative, the story about the story, the What Does All This Mean for Us that’s an inevitable consequence of the literate, numerate, articulate life lived in late modernity, in person and online.
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The southwestern rattler that came through a week ago has kept us all humble and blank of mind here on the edge of town. The broken windows reported in Hei Hei (which the NZ Herald reported as “Hai Hai”, overlooking one of the last vestiges of mid-century Pākehā pronunciation) served as a reminder – if we needed it – not only of what must continue to be endured but also of what our friends in the East have been through rather more thoroughly than us.
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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.
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There are nine boxes stacked in the garage, their contents the sum total of my ten-year work archive. They took perhaps ninety minutes to pack up, under the instruction that all our goods were to be packed for storage then shifting, then another ninety minutes across two different days to shift into my car, when the instruction changed to culling all but an under-desk set of drawers and two further drawers in the communal filing cabinets. In a large institution, inside which we are all in varying degrees of displacement, the instructions change frequently and sufficiently that the same task gets done over and over again, minor variations on the same theme. Even with the majority of buildings cleared for occupancy, there is not enough viable space, and a hierarchy of needs sees many of us moving or ready to move.
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Posterous
The needle and the damage done
27 December, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,we are family
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.
[click to continue…]
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