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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My father came to Christchurch in the middle 1960s from his home province of Southland, cheerful and friendly but with a lack of social power and mobility that was the general lot of young, single people in this country at that time. As was also the convention of the time, he was befriended by a handful of older colleagues and acquaintances who took an interest in him and made it their business to see that he was getting out and about and not spending too much time alone. One of these was a work colleague whose expression of interest in learning bellringing at the Cathedral, where she went to church, had been declined due to her being a woman. In a forthright manner befitting her heritage and education as an Old Cantabrian, she suggested my father take up the hobby in her stead.
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I‘ve been thinking a lot this week about my immediate forebears in my mother’s family, thought that’s only been intensified by the ongoing project of scanning my mother’s collection of family photos that includes those of both my grandmother and great-grandmother.
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Thank you for your variety of comments on my first scanned image of my grandfather and me. As promised, the harvestmother and I spent a productive Thursday evening eating curry and scanning more images from the family archives. All of these were from my grandmother’s collection, which my mother went through and rationalised when Grandma died in 2005. (The rationalisation was of necessity, given the volume of recent images taken by my uncle on his travels with my grandmother, in which the photographer’s goal seemed to be to record every moment of significance from a dozen different angles. One can’t fault his thoroughness.)
Many of the images I am reluctant to share in this forum, for two general reasons. One is that we have perhaps only two or three photos of many of my ancestors, and only one of some. My grandfather’s family in particular lived in what might be called genteel poverty, with great dignity in difficult circumstances. In keeping with their times, they were private people (see the latter half of this entry, following “Anyway”, for an idea of what I mean), and there seems to me a disjunction between the way the images of them are taonga in our family and the bright, harsh light of the internet.
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After many years of thinking about it, I finally bought a scanner. This is the first image that I scanned, this evening. It’s me with my grandfather. The family story goes that whenever he was asked to hold infant me (say, while my parents were setting the table), I would immediately fall asleep, which would necessitate everyone waiting until the powerful nap had ended before the task at hand (say, eating dinner) could be undertaken.
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Pūtaringamotu Tales
7 September, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,O internet,we are family,writing & research
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.
[click to continue…]
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