Hey My Droogs and Little Malchikiwicks

Well well for your Michael Trevor yes the time's been going fastly, O my far-away friends, and many sunny happenings have been going on over this-here little point of action, no mistaking that my friends.

I went to Ottawa. Yes! I went to Ottawa my mates and I was tolchocked on the groodies, yes I was, by the goodness growing there, the goodness and the multi-pleasurableness of this fun-sponging place. The trees were bleeding all over the city, o the ruby-water flowed and the leaves were dead on the ground and it was just like old times, o my foreign droogies in your happy summer full of oily skin and little lambs being carried off in trucks, o yes. And the things that they have built there, in Ottawa! So much building, you must see it some time before somone knocks you over, yes you mustly very soonish or there will be sorry things to say about it, notwithstanding. Buildings made of rock and buildings made of glass, all in glass, you could make a thousand knives if your inclinations lay that way my pleasing droogies, from these buildings.

And a parliament, a parliament just like the jolly big thing in London-city, all brown and spiky like a very serious fence, very serious indeed. And there were happy sunny houses in the happy suburbs, with the leaves lying sunny on the ground like money. And so much richness in these places there was, so much leafy money, that there were no footpaths at all, yes they had been killed off long ago my friends, quite some time ago when you were just a little droog with jelly fingers, o yes. And the cars went past like shiny bullets, very big and not see-through at all, not a little look-see even once.

And I went also to another place of much delight and belly-tumbling too. This was Quebec, not so far from Ottawa as you may know from school or some such thing. And there was as much leafiness and tree-falling sussuration and so forth as I had ever seen or ever wanted or needed to see in my short hooray. And the hills were all dressed up in it, o my comrades, in the heigth of Roman fashion so they say. And I scurried up a hill on my little scuttlers and I saw a little way ahead, where the hills were going bloody all the way along, poor things. And that was all. I just went down after that and was carried past the shiny lakes and people swimming and drowning happily all along the shore, like little babies fat with little arms ha ha. O yes, it was not too bad really, and me only two months from home.

And the journey then, o my droogs! A big bus with bolshy big windows black and wrapped around like darkened glasses, not unlike the road-machines back home I venture. It was not bad at all, not so bad at all I say. I say it was not so bad as you might think, and I say you catch my little meaning here and so I journey on.

And all this and many more besides, o my readers in your ugly chairs! Glad enough I was, I say, to catch a game of batter-ball. So much in the happening, and so little to see! A game of batter-ball, with all the pyjama-panted players and so much happy throwing and a little teeny bit of hitting it was not enough for me I think. Not a thing to recommend to a friend, though a foe is something different, except you may say if the friend has a beautiful companion, or some such thing, to make the time go past with greater snappishness, o my droogs.

All that to one side and the rest to another, I should say I found a friend or two while working round my itty way the city. And all are nicely set in place o my well-proportioned people, as is in the nature of things so to say. One for tennis and tennis on the table and under the table and other sizzling racquet-sports ha ha. Another then for other things, like study-work and such. And then some more for lighter times, for eating jugs of briny browny bubble-juice. But mostly study-work I think, o Michael Trevor knows the inside-outs of this and that when study-work is raised. And not all well-companioned, I should say. Not a social thing is study-work. But never mind. There's always juice or tennis on the table, so to speak.

And study-work is not so bad, though long. The History of the Physical Sciences and the History of Pschologicology and the Philosophical Parts of Science are the things I am reading and hearing about, and writing too. And there's a lot to do and no mistake. A book a week for each of these, they say that's not too much. And that is much. But very jolly study-mates I have, and not too bad are those who speak to us in class and know so much of this and that. So study-work is working just as well as one could hope, I think.

And so I go along with this and that to do and not a lot to say. I did go shopping for a thing or two. I took a lusty wallet with me, needed to, and found a place to find a windows tool or screen or pelvis-sitter, what they said it was I do not know and many grazny numbers on it too, all Niggerhertz and RAM and so on and heretofore and so they say. And other things as well. A grazny mouse or finger-lover. A set of speaking boxes which is very good for playing lovely Beet and Franz and other lovely gorgeousness, too bad about the room-mate sleeping ha ha ha. And a big sack to hold it all, of course.

I saw a film that had the right amount of dying. It started out with an unfortunate happening in a barbers shop, which left one man with a very sore neck, a very sore neck indeed, and not much means to speak about it ha ha. And so it went like that for some time, but got a little soft in the centre so to say. But mostly it was men with veins in their arms, and one or two sore ladies ha ha. Viggo Mortgensseon was there, I saw. And someone else who did famous things that noone told me about. Anyway, it was all a good time and someone gave me popping-corn, so not too bad, not too bad at all my droogs. I see you dripping at the mouth right now, o yes.

Wink wink my friends, I must away. The grazny time is timing all my typing. Not too long to go, I think. Not too long at all, now even less. O yes my droogs, I hope very much that nothing bad happens to you in the next day or so, and good things happen instead and every little thing is sizzling fast, if you like it that way, or something else if you don't. No doubt there's more to say. Your Michael Trevor o my droogs is not a one to slouch around in hats, so more to come I say. But not right now.

Envy, Part I

CLIMBER: My friend, today we saw a flame ascend.
No, not that. No-one would, I think, offend
A sense or taste, to say they saw not one
But more, a whole sun of flames, a flaming sun,
Go burning round a solar ring tonight.
What skill! Unearthly skill, unearthly bright!
Hot eloquence and wit, and humour too,
A brave unswerving urge to say what’s true,
Deeply true and truly deep. And so clear!
A standard orbit stays in higher air:
Strange to enter depths as well, sending lights.
But what is this? For all the lofty heights
I saw today, my spirits are not lifted.
The heights of others bring me low. Gifted,
That’s the thing to be, brilliant. Enough
Is said of jealousy and greed, enough
To make my sickness plain. But what’s the cure?
How can one who knows, and knows for sure,
That every job his mind can slowly do
Is done with greater pace, in fewer moves,
By someone else – how happy can he be?
(The plight of normal minds, redundancy,
Is double-edged. A deficit of skill:
A surplus to demand. If books could kill..)
A mind like syrup, slow-poured and dense.
A lack of speed, but quite enough to sense
Its own slowness. It’s worse to know than have
A love of wisdom, but an arid love
Unfed by streams of running wit,
But earnestness and pride, mud and grit.
Dark sights, and these are what the suns reveal:
High lights, highlighting fog. But this appeal
Is not an aimless thing. I train my ills
On you, my friend, to claim whatever pills
You give and know or own, to lift my pain.

RAMBLER: Well, well. A fine speech, well-declaimed,
As lurid in the lows as in the peaks.
(And a strange speech indeed, from one who speaks
So well.) Now listen well, and soon you’ll find
More syrup in your words than in your mind...

to be continued…

Lake Waikaremoana

There is not much to say about Lake Waikaremoana, in the North Island of New Zealand. This is not because there is not much to the Lake. Rather, the place is so beautiful that it is hard to say anything that will succeed in being about the Lake, rather than about some lesser place.

How can one say, for example, how the hills rise up straight out of the lake and run away into the distance for miles and miles, and how they are all covered in thick bush? The guide-book says that the hills “roll north in a seemingly endless procession, mantled in a lush carpet of emerald-green foliage.” This author tries hard to say what the hills are like, but there is something missing, and it is not just that the physical reality of the hills are missing from a piece of writing. The picture they put in the reader’s mind is also inferior to the real thing.

And how can one give a good picture, an accurate picture, of how the lake looks in the early morning, just after the mist has lifted over the hills and disappeared, and the water is perfectly still? In a little estuary on the lake, the water is like a mirror. It is like a mirror, but of course it is not a mirror. A mirror does not ripple like that, a mirror is set into processed wood, not living trees and tangled foliage, and a mirror reflects people and hallways, not toi-toi and rimu.

Perhaps narrowing the simile down will make it more accurate: let’s say that the reflective qualities of the lake surface, and nothing else about the lake or its environment, are very similar to those of a mirror. But actually we do want to say something about the lake and its environment, so accuracy comes at a high price.

And perhaps accuracy does not even come at all: perhaps we are so used to seeing near-perfect reflection instantiated in a household mirror, that the quality of near-perfect reflection cannot be detached in our minds from the qualities of household mirrors. Perhaps, for this reason, the mirror on the lake surface will always be smudged by the household banalities it carries over from the usual dwelling-place of mirrors.

Perhaps we can improve things by describing how the lake is not a mirror. A mirror does not fail at its edges, and show what is inside it instead of what is outside. You cannot look into the shallow parts of a mirror and see blue-green logs and grasses. And only a liquid could change itself so easily to match the contours of the shore-line, all the little bays and coves and stumpy peninsulas, the streams and the jutting bushes. And the silence! The immense and fragile silence, which is so dense and which you can break with a movement of your foot.

But look at the angle of the struts of the bridge. Perhaps you could specify this angle, put it at, say, 37 degrees from the vertical. But even to a person whose head was full of struts of every different angle this would not be enough, because there is something about the shape of the struts, and the texture of the wood, and the slope of the branch in the foreground, that gives the angle a special quality.

Perhaps one could get closer to the real thing by specifying the relevant qualities of the wood and the branch and the shape of the struts. But noone has a head full of wood and branches and textures of all different kinds. So even if we knew just where the special quality came from we would not be able to get that quality into another person’s head.

And the colours of the sunset? Well, one could say that they are “soft” and “pink”, but just how soft are they, and what sort of pink? They are soft in the sense of being diffuse rather than concentrated, and they are the kind of pink that you never find on the dresses of little girls. But is that really much use? It is something, but it does not really capture the actual delicacy or grandeur of the colours of the sunset, or the peculiar shapes of the clouds.

And I despair of getting across to the reader the precise way in which the water at the lake’s edge creased into a wrinkle, and bent into a little “v”, when it snagged on a stick that was poking up out of the sand. And there was also the soft beating of the sea on the sand, as if of an immense but far-off heart, a beating that seemed to me to be too specific and too rare to be chased down by similes and adjectives.

The toi-toi stood in groups, and their heads were bowed and nodded in the wind. They were a bit like old men in conference, bowing and nodding like that, but they were so much unlike old men in conference, and the source of the unlikeness is so hard for me to grasp, that I can’t say I have really given you the right idea about those toi-tois.

There were many different ripples on the lake, and sheets and bands of water that were distinct from the rest but had no ripples at all. There are many different ways in which the water rearranges the sun. Here the sun is a white glitter on the lake, here it is a wide and glaring plain, here an intense wobbly mass.

Is it breath-taking, the hills and the lake and the sun? When you go along the track and come to a sudden gap in the bush, so that you can see the whole scene spread out, does Lake Waikaremoana take away your breath? No, it does not. I have tried it, and if anything it gave me back my breath, smoothed things up in my throat as if a knot had been untied somewhere in there. But this may have been because I had a rest after a bit of hard walking.

Is it spectacular? One might use that word to describe the lake, but that would place the lake on the same level as rugby tries and economic booms. It is certainly a spectacle, but it is not truly spectacular. It is too quiet, too still, lacks aggression. Is it superb, beautiful, sublime, unique, unparalleled? I do not want to say it is, because the first four of those terms are muddied by incautious usage, and would make the lake sound more ordinary than otherwise. And the fifth is false. The best I can say is that Lake Waikaremoana is worth seeing, and you won't really see it except by going there yourself.

Bell's Falls, Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand

On the morning of the day I came to a narrow place of rocks and water.

Water came over the rocks because the air was filled with water. Water came over the rocks because the stream was round and running. The water on the trees made the trees thick and green and the water on the rocks made the rocks full of shining.

I came to the narrow place. I felt the thickness of the trees, and the green was full of moss and thick as fallen snow. As I came to the narrow place, full of falling water, shining of the rocks and the water on the run, and the rocks were full of water and I slipped along the rocks with the water and the rain.

And I came to the narrow place, on the morning of the day.

I came upon the narrow place and saw the water falling, from a rock on the walls that were full of water streaming and the water turned to snow as it ran across the rocks and it fell down the wall to a green sea below, and across the sea a spray, a spray of sweaty ghosts came across the filling sea.

In the green sea the water widened. In the sea the waves were green and the peaks were full of snow. And I saw the water falling and the filling of the sea, and the ghosts and the snow and the running of the green. In the narrow place, I saw the rocks and water.

I saw the trees and water, on the morning of the day.

Seven 50 Word Stories

50 word stories are as addictive in the writing as in the reading. They have the newness of poems without the tedium. They have the mysticism of a number, like haikus. The good ones are story and aphorism in one. The bad ones are over quickly. Read mine. Write yours.




“I am strong and full of longing,” I said. My cat did not answer. Nor did she answer when I picked up a sheet of very white paper and folded it in half four times very neatly and without any wrinkling or overlap, and so I watched the news instead.


“The examined life is not worth living.” That sounded right, so I read seven large books on the topic and dreamt about logical operators. This was worthwhile, in its own way, but when I tried to write things down there was nothing there. The unlived life is not worth examining.


The grey trees were even greyer in the pictures. They were thin and grey and leaned out like hungry ghosts. I tried to remember how they had been when I was small and hungry, but I always came back to the pictures. I hid them in a drawer and forgot.


It was five o’clock before they got any sleep. They had been up all night watching the grass change colour, and it was so exciting that they had sat there talking about it for three hours. It was one of their biggest nights, but they slept soundly in the end.


Once there was a large pond, full of bones and daisies. A man went to see it. He was warned very ardently but he went along anyway, saying: “I lost my bones long ago.” He never came back. There were many more bones in the pond, and three more daisies.


Near the end of my Honours year I spent two hours writing fifty words when I should have been writing two hundred words every ten minutes. “I am full of words,” I thought, “but most of them are badly shaped and hard to get out.” I must be more disciplined.

The Nut

Here is a poem about death. It owes too much to John Donne.



If inside that shell
A universe could fit,
And all of stuff, all stories, songs and stars,
All weight and store, all ways, signs, lightness, waste and wars,
Could therein dwell,
While we two sit
Outside, with only you and I
And breath, to wait and wonder why
We were not lost
Inside that nut-bound ever-widening sphere -
Even then, despite its host,
Eternity it could not boast.

But if instead I chose
To wait within those walls,
And near them could, tending ever more close,
Ever stay but near or, closing, all knowledge lose;
Then, though enclosed,
I’ld know no walls.
I’ld no outside perceive
And could with ease believe
That ball to hold
Inside all, and all inside.
Then, your palm feeling that form told,
You might my boundless all enfold.

Thus (knowing none to wait
Beyond) as our live set
Expands in time, our space of days to fill,
We sense each second’s sequence to a timeless null
Converge. Even late,
They’ve never met,
For to pass is to pass all sense
And to meet it is to pass, hence
Our mortal trap
Is all around enshelled in air:
We each within our lifetime’s gap
A tight eternity enwrap.

Applied Anthropology

If you are a prospective employer who has come across this blog while looking for proof of my credibility, please do not read the following. Otherwise, let me explain.

The following is a work of anthropology, not of smut. Recently, for ten days, I entered a new and interesting cultural environment, and set about trying to absorb and understand and like it. And you can get a good lot of understanding, you see, through participation. So when I was kindly given the short piece of creative prose shown below, I was obliged by the forces of scholarship to reply with something of my own; and if my reply is as unsavoury as the authentic example of the local culture reproduced below, then so much the better for scholarship.



Woodpecker Wood

I stuck my finger in
A woodpeckers hole
The woodpecker cried
God bless my soul.
Stick it in stick it in
Remove it.


Tuatara Lust

Once upon a time
On an island by the sea
I was puffing from a climb
I was holding to a tree

When I saw a lusty lizard
From the corner of my eye
And she hit me like a blizzard
Made me wobble made me sigh

“Come with me” said the lizard
With a tuatara blush
And I’ll flip you like a wizard
In my hole inside the bush

So I came upon her hole
Yes I came to her all right
I got muddy in her hole
And I beat her bush all night.

And she told me she was greedy
And I told her I was too
When we finished I was bleeding
I was tender I was bruised.

Oh I was puffing all the time
I was holding to my tree
Once upon a time
On an island by the sea.

Shade

Here is a poem from long ago.





Shadows are loyal as the sun
And as lone: low slabs, the chance
Uncoloured quiet of things, down-cast.

Lengthening as the day declines,
Short as it looms, shy
At noon and blind at night,

Fat behind hills, and fast
Fluttering over footpaths,
Fleeing endlessly under cars,

Calm, they come and leave
As objects do. They move
As movement does. To lose,

To lose them leaves the desert or the night.
To choose them dims the bright,
Leaving shade, the dark that proves the light.

Travel and Literature

Here you can find a long, loping discussion of the relationship between travel and philosophy, and in that discussion you can also find some thoughts about why I think travel is a worthwhile thing to do. In this post I want to go for a short sprint through some thoughts about travel and literature. My hope is that this post will be more readable than my previous one, and convey the spirit of my travel writings more clearly; though I can’t promise that this one will be as detailed or as earnest as the former.

For a person who wants to write descriptively about people and the world, in plays or in novels or in poems, travel looks like a very worthwhile thing indeed. What writers thrive upon, one might think, are new and interesting forms of life: people who are peculiar enough and vivid enough to be turned into characters; events that are dramatic and instructive enough to be turned into stories; objects and actions that have the bulk and breadth to make it as symbols; cultures and landscapes that are rich enough, full enough with the strange and the engaging, to function as settings. And one consequence of travel, one might think, is that a person is brought into contact with all these new and interesting forms of life. Hence travel looks to be just the sort of thing that a writer would want to do.

The subjunctive padding in the last paragraph is placed there to protect me from people who will immediately point out that a number of great writers have written great books about their own town or their own city, apparently without doing any travelling at all. Look at Dickens, with his London masterpieces; at Jane Austen, with her beautifully turned engravings of a highly localised culture; if you are a New Zealander, look at Frank Sargeson sitting in his shack on Takapuna beach, almost as well-hidden as Descartes in his oven. And looking at these books and these writers, what can one do with the theory outlined in the above paragraph, except paint it purple and call it a turnip?

Well, I think one can do a bit more than that. To be sure, the theory is defective. But it also has its merits, and even its defects can shed a little bit of light on the nature of travel and of writing. I will leave the merits to last. In the meantime, let me do what the previous paragraph invites me to do, and explain why the theory is defective, which means identifying its faulty assumptions. It assumes, firstly, that new and interesting forms of life can only be found through travelling. This is false, since they can be found in the mind as well, in the perpetual adventure of the imagination. Imagination does not render travel redundant, but it does make it less urgently necessary. The theory assumes, secondly, that the key to good novels, and the key to good novel-writing, is to uncover new and interesting forms of life. This is false with regards to good novels, since we often value novels for their ability to uncover something that is new and interesting about our ordinary, local forms of life. And it is false with regards to good novel-writing, since this uncovering of the new in the familiar requires a certain kind of sensitivity to the world; and this sensitivity is best cultivated, one might think, not by making it easy for oneself and letting oneself be assaulted by exotic species of nature and of humankind, but by making it hard for oneself, and looking with care and discipline for signs of the exotic in the quiet habits of ordinary life.

Now I see that this subjunctive buffer has again crept in between my prose and my beliefs. But I think that, in the final sentence of the previous paragraph, the buffer is justified. For I do not think that it is quite correct to say that, in order to cultivate the required sensitivity, it is best to make things hard for oneself. When we start to cultivate an ear for French, we make things easier for ourselves. We get people to speak slowly, so we can learn to catch the rhythms and the patterns in their speech that we must catch in their normal, skittering conversation, if we are to understand them properly. Likewise, we start writing by describing things that present their distinctive characteristics very clearly to the ear and eye and touch: we write about wonderfully high mountains and exotic plants and eccentric people. And, once we have caught the rhythm of the world in this way, when it is played very loudly to us, we can more easily catch that rhythm when it is played more softly; and when we have followed it into the soft sounds of ordinary life, so soft that they are inaudible to most people, then we can say that we have understood properly the language of the world.

Furthermore, this way of proceeding, from the easy to the hard, is likely to stimulate the will just as well as it stimulates the other faculties. We are less likely to become disheartened by a discipline if we do not find things horribly difficult at first; and we are more likely to be excited by a discipline if it brings us into contact with things that are, on the surface at least, much more new and interesting than our ordinary life.

And, to finish things off, I should observe that a knowledge of the local cannot be very easily attained without some knowledge of the foreign. For, a knowledge of the local does not really deserve that name unless it involves some knowledge of how the local is distinctive from everything else; and that knowledge is surely easier to come by when one has some knowledge of everything else. I cannot say that I know myself if I know only that I have ten fingers and toes, one heart, and any other attribute of body or mind that applies equally well to all other human beings as it does to myself; and a good way to extend my knowledge beyond this anonymous state, is to learn something more about other people. And as with knowledge of self, so with knowledge of country and of town and of family.

This point about self-knowledge is less apt to my travel writings than are the points about starting easy and about getting excited. Most of my travel writings are cluttered, excited, and somewhat lavish descriptions of the places and people that I come across as I go along my way. At least, this is how my travel writings have gone up to this point, and that seems like a good reason to assume that they will carry on in the same fashion. I could go on to discuss my reasons for choosing to report on my travels at all, and my reasons for choosing the written word as my medium of reportage (rather than photography, say) but this time I will spare the reader any more ponderousness, and invite them, if they are suitably inclined, to read the things I write about my travels.

Cats (and Mountains)

This poem is to celebrate the first comment on this blog. The connexion between the poem and the comment is loose, but perceptible.

A cat is always a cat.
Every moment a pose,
Every movement its own,
Lithe, clean, unclothed.

A cat is always alone.
It is unbothered by this.
It is its own centre,
Unclaimed and comfortably lost,

So there is a stillness
Peculiar to cats: a steady,
A steadying sway,
That starts in their eyes.

There is a kind of silence, too,
Unique in a cat. It does not
Make noise, but brings out
The noises in other things,

And he wanders through
Wanders round and through,
Through a room, unstilling things,
A patch of wandering gravity.

He does not speak. His mouth,
His inside-out triangle,
Is closed. His tail moves.
It moves slowly, making strange smiles.

Rocks, Tongariro Crossing, Rocks

The other day I did the Tongariro Crossing, and because of the fine blue weather I could well see that it is a rock-filled place up there, a crumbling Stonehenge of a place. There are rocks like teeth, all kinds of teeth. There are bared teeth, dull white with gums of moss and black lines marking the gaps between the long white slabs. There are broken teeth, chipped and rotted with moss and gnashing upwards from the sides of hills. There are breathing mouths, mouths with no teeth but great steamy breaths instead, curling over the edges of cliffs and dissolving round the woollen socks of walkers; and there is a pair of open jaws as well, black inside and black teeth sticking down from a black cavern splattered with white as if with blood and yawning out of the crater-wall at the top of Ngaurohoe.Rocks like truffles on the flats, deep black and multifariously lumped. Rocks like coal, flat-faced, many-faced, sharp-edged, dully shining, and black too, the kind of black that looks as if it will make a charcoal mess on your hands if you so much as breath on it. Great heaps of truffles and coal gather on the hillsides like moss and gathering moss on their dark faces themselves. Rocks coloured like chalk, a rich colour as if the pigment goes all the way down, and arranged in mosaics on the sides of mountains, unmoving mandalas laid down so carelessly by the chemical rain of volcanos. A mosaic of red rocks, rusty on the mountain side like a great lichen dappling on the surface of the mountainside. Rocks with lichen dappling on their surface. Ordinary rocks. Ordinary, dusty-dirty rocks, cut-your-bare-feet toe-stubbers, slightly orange slightly yellow and good for crushing into shingle and holding down tents in the wind and not much else I should think. Rocks sliced in two, one slice missing and the other slice with a sharp-edged crater like half of a split marble. Rocks red as a red desert. Rocks white as bird-shit, black as flies, and the red-desert rock stains a rock-face with a bashed gramophone horn of smoke, with a layer of black-fly rock above it in the same shape, only more bashed, and bird-shit rock splattering the face under the red-desert gramophone as if the bottom line of the gramophone were leaking, with a line of white on the lower edge. From far away the whole thing, smoky bashed old desert, with a big tube in the hillside opened up like a windpipe with a gray crust on the outside and the red dust dripping round the inside and some stones falling out the lower edge, from far away the whole thing like an open wound, bright and free and weeping in the high air, and a crust of skin on either side untouching. On a plane as flat as a lake, rocks. Big rocks widely spaced, preoccupied as a herd of cows. Rocks like human faeces, elongated, rudely clumped, messy as a skinned sausage. Rocks like rabbit faeces, light brown in neat circles. Rocks like cattle faeces even, great cow-pats of lava folding down the slopes in great cow-pat layers, not so fresh as once before and cracking at the edges, cracking and splitting at the edges into little fiords. Layered rocks. Layers you can touch from the track, long and narrow and round at the edges like a pile of surfboards. Layers sweeping up in proud angles up on top of hills, prows and visors, and layers making terraces on the sides of other hills, greenish on the top faces and long low cliffs where one terrace drops down to the next. Layers in the rocks with orange lines in between, orange lines like cobwebs on the rock-face. Rivers of rocks. Thin creeks, widely spaced, fiddling down in clay lines from the tops of long ridges to the bottom where they disappear. Wide rivers of rock, orange rock and rock ground to black sand, sweeping down the hills in great highways of rock, widening quickly from a point like a highway seen from a low angle, and also stringy, tangled rivers of rock and mud, tangled hairs of light rock and gray rock running across the plane in dry rivers. Rocks like cemeteries. Black rocks the size of golfballs. White rocks the size of golfballs, seasoning the plain. Black rocks on the hills in shingle clusters. Rocks like wrecked cars up close, and shrinking to full-stops from a distance. Rocks really pebbles that line the green lakes, chemical-green lakes, with the rocks around the edges making a minute frill around the edges and the rocks in the border shallows showing up yellow-green and the shores of gray rocks on the beach like the dull crust around a precious stone you’ve found inside a dull rock and split the rock into ringed steaks. Large rocks on a hill like an old old building, a temple or fort that’s crumbled down now and left its founding stones broken on the top and the crumbs all scattered down the slopes, smaller the further down you go. Black rocks like an old old battleground, all charred limbs and heads and spotted with mossy blood and dripping too. Rocks light as wood, black volcano rocks that file down your boots and rasp away your shins. Rocks that stab your heel on their wheeling way down the mountain, a high mountain and conical and slightly concave and high, high so that from the top everything else looks flat, even the stretch we climbed up earlier and tore our lungs on the steep rocks there. Rocks that fill your pack so that you have a hard time sitting down and a harder time getting up, and rocks that push your pack into your head into the rock on the ground when you’re on a steep bit on all fours. Rocks that make their way into your knees and clash at awkward angles, grinding away down there and jolting out your legs at strange angles every now and then. Rocks from the sun that fall down in rays and deliver headaches from on high. Rocks in your legs and chest, so when you stop and undo your chest-strap there is a great release, an expansion and relaxation, as if you’ve undone your chest altogether and all your sweaty innards have slid out, relieved. Rocks in your pack so that when you take it off you are much too light, and your walk feels strangely out of time, too easy like peddling with the chain off. Rocks that fill your head with rocks. Rocks, rocks, rocks. I went and did the Crossing the other day, and it’s a rock-filled place up there, a crumbling Stonehenge of a place.

A Few Travels

I went to the village of Ankoh, on the NorthWestern tip of the Sahara, where it is so hot and dry that they no longer worship a God but a liquid instead. When they go to church on Sundays they drink water from the cup; and when they watch the sun rise over the lake at the end of the week they cover their eyes, so as to shield themselves from the image of their Lord. They have a shrine on the edge of the village, near the church, where they lay down offerings of water, in cups and bowls of all shapes and colours, some cracked and some clean and whole, and all laid out in a shining clutter. Once in their lives they make a pilgrimage to the sea.

From Ankoh I flew to Africa, and saw (among other things) the Stone-Chiefs of Mozambique. The Stone-Chiefs cover themselves in lichen and moss and grey pigments drawn from the stone-berry, and crouch down in the middle of a vast bowl in the earth. The bowl was dug many centuries ago, but it must be continuously repaired, and the loose dirt cast out, so as the retain the shape and dimensions that were decreed by the first Stone-Chief, Makaroth, whose great-great-great-great grandson I saw crouching in the sun, perfectly still and covered in lichen and moss and grey pigments drawn from the stone berry. There is a death-sentence for anyone who disturbs the Stone-Chiefs of Mozambique: no villager has yet suffered this fate (although there are frequent near misses, as in the recent case of the man who inadvertently stepped on a poisonous Minkoh, and let out a loud cry that caused one or two stone-chiefs to shuffle about in an irritated manner.)

I saw the red bulls of outer Ghana, and the ten-fingered plant of the Ivory coast. I went to Nepal and heard stories from the people there about the people who climb the mountains and the extraordinary heights to which they climb. “Baramu my brother was one of the greatest of our climbers,” one of the men told me, “and he used to climb so far that he would break through sky and see the stars on the other side, even during the day. There is no protection up there from the sun, and if you do not wear proper clothing then cancers break out on your arms like freckles.”

I went from hot to cold then back again, and found myself in the fruit fields of Italy, where the trees are so full of fruit that the branches snap off in mid-summer, and the pickers have to move very quickly so as to rescue the fruit from under the wood, where they can easily become squashed and rotten. Because of the damage to the trees, there is only one harvest every five years; but the tress in each harvest are so heavily laden that the people never run out. I was told by a villager that the traditional preserving techniques are unmatched by modern science. “We keep fruit like we keep wine, in barrels that are kept in the ground and covered in the sap of the sickle-berry tree; we leave them there to age and mature, our plums and apricots, and we do not take them out until they are properly done.” She took me into her house in the village (a small stone cottage, with windows in the roof) and gave me a nectarine that she had harvested in 1973. It was a deep orange colour, almost brown, and tasted faintly of mint.

You cannot leave the fruit fields of Italy without passing down the Valley of Hives, and this journey was one of the highlights of my trip. “There are over a hundred thousand hives in the valley,” my guide informed me, “and a hundred million bees. Every hive has been given a name, and we care for them like they are our children.” I heard the Valley of Hives and straight-away I thought of a great choir; I saw the Valley of Hives and straight-away I thought of a great carpet, because the bees were matched in numbers by the flowers, which grow there as if none of them ever die.

I took a boat out of Italy and sailed for weeks and weeks until I came to the end of ocean-rivers. The ocean-rivers are great currents that begin at the coast, where the rivers emerge from the continent, and end for no reason whatsoever. You anchor down at a certain point in the ocean: you look to the North, and the sea is highway of streams and white rapids; you look to the South, and it is just a quiet normal sea, with one or two salmon swimming round and looking lost.

It was all very exciting, and I hope to do it all again very soon, in other exotic and dangerous parts of the world; but first I have to have eat a proper meal and get a good night’s sleep.

Kaikoura and Beyond

Kaikoura is a small town on the East Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, famous among tourists for its whales - great grey beasts, submarines with tails – and among UC Philosophy students for its lodge, which affords an excellent view of an ocean that ends in Chile, and an excellent chance to undertake philosophical activities such as drinking beer, which usually ends in sillygism. When I went through this town on my way up to Wellington for the GREs the hills rose out of a skirt of clouds, like dwarf Everests, and there was a patch of dirty foam stuck in one place, just offshore. At 9 0’clock in the morning the town has a general appearance of greyness. It also has the vacant, modest look of a place designed to admit outsiders rather than cultivate insiders, a place whose main visible occupants are tourists and seagulls. The seagulls have the alert, inquisitive look of beings who have just dropped in for a few minutes and intend to leave very soon. The tourists look much the same. The tourists look at the seagulls with cameras; seagulls look back through their orange rims. The sea drops heavily against the sand, but it has no effect on the dirty foam, which stays stuck.

The bus is large and white with black windows and a sleek, rectangular look about it, like a fridge wearing dark glasses. The driver also wears dark glasses, and he is also large, but he is certainly not sleek. His face has the crumpled, bulldog look that Maori faces often have when they are depicted in cartoons. In the cartoons they are often equipped with large bellies, and the driver has one of them as well. The guy in the bus mimics the cartoons, then; but a few seats from the front there is the guy who inspired them: small eyes, heavy drooping nose, skin like bark, thick neck, multiple pregnancy. There are metal bars on the seats that I believe are called armrests: the living caricature uses both of them as bumrests. He does have a kind of stern grace about him, like a whale’s grace, and he would be a fearsome sight paddling a waka, and a friendly, fatherly sight collecting pipis. Sitting on his armrests, however, in his tourist jeans and striped shirt and red golf visor, he is the satirists’ dream.

When the driver says “Kaikoura”, he pronounces the last two syllables with the deft accent that newsreaders try to imitate but which they usually turn into an awkward stab or a bloated collection of vowels.

There is not much to see or hear out of Kaikoura, unless you’re keen on wide, slapping oceans and shimmering wheatfields and paddocks full of grass and drooping cattle. I was probably keen on that sort of thing on the first five times I made this trip. This time I am entertained by the two young kids in the next seat and the fence posts blurring past the window on the right-hand side of the road. In front of the fenceposts there are metal road markers. At the base of one of them there is a piece of orange peel, looking very peeled and very orange. Halfway between two of those markers there is a fist-sized rock with a band of bright yellow paint on it. “The sea is a big puddle,” says one of the kids, a girl. She says it in the triumphant, uncompromising way that children sometimes have, as if they are telling someone off and enjoying it. “A big, big puddle.”

In one place the grass on the edge of the road has been peeled away like skin, and rolled up against the fenceposts. A yellow roller turns a pile of shingle into a cricket-pitch.

“I can’t see,” says the girl. “I can’t see anything.” She has the window-curtain wrapped around her face and is peering through it. The mother has to say something, and might as well make it educational. “Yes dear, it looks as if you can’t. Do you know why you can’t see anything?” The girl quibbles. “I can see some things. I just can’t see them very well.” There is a pattern that seems to be quite popular among manufacturers of bus seat covers. It is made up of think black lines and primary colors, with a grey background. It looks like a shattered stained-glass window, and it would be quite attractive it were not so intimately associated with boredom and mild nausea. If you look straight out of the window of a bus and keep your eyes fixed in place, you will see the fence posts as one long stutter of wood. However, if you flick your eyes from side to side in the right way you can see each post free of any blurring; except during the brief time it takes to flick your eyes away from the post that is disappearing out the back of your window, and towards the new posts that are emerging out of the front of the window. Just inside the shoulder of the road there is a smooth, shiny patch that looks like black ice but is not black ice. A red truck goes past.

“Are we nearly there yet?” This is the girl again. “Are we almost nearly there yet? Are we almost nearly almost there yet? Are we almost nearly, almost…” but she stops short, hooks a finger between her bottom gum and lip, and looks puzzled. The young woman sitting on the seat in front of mine has a barbed-wire tattoo on her upper arm. I can see this because there is a gap between the window and the seat. It just so happens that I can see the reflection of the driver’s head in the window ahead of me. I see him itch is ear once, then get tired of waiting for him to indiscreetly pick his nose. The kids start making noises. They are good at this. They make tiny booming noises, duck noises, nail-on-blackboard noises, high multi-tone rasps, electric-saw squeals. They play with their voices like drunken thespians. They are not imitating the noises of animals or machinery: they just make noises and come across the familiar ones by accident. Everyone in the bus listens to them. Three white cars go past. A tractor comes down the next hill with seven cars behind it, and it looks as if the tractor is towing all these cars along on its own steam. The kids make a noise that sounds like “buying” but which is not. They make it again, in a slightly different pitch and timbre. This game is fun, and they keep playing. I remember that I will need to courier something up to Wellington because I left it behind. A moment later I see a red courier van go past. Now the word is less like “buying” and more like “beating,” and with every repetition the “b” is sliding further into a “v.” The kids have an orange toy in the shape of a laptop, and when they press a certain key the laptop makes a noise that is cross between a siren and snorting elephant. I note that when this noise is repeated at the right frequency it sounds very much like the TARDIS when it takes off, at least when it takes off in the new TV series of Dr. Who.

We arrive in Picton and the little boy points his arm in that wobbly infant way, with the elbow and pointing finger imperfectly extended and the fist imperfectly closed, and makes a noise that could mean anything from “wader” to “beaver.” I get off and enjoy the view that visitors get when they arrive at the Picton waterfront on a fine day, a view that I am keen on despite frequent viewings. If you want to know what that view is like, you’ll have to go there yourself.

Apricots in Clyde

Like the sky, the surface of water changes constantly under the guidance of the sun, the rain and the wind. There are clouds in a lake, streaky thin clouds and pale dumps of fluff, and there are great areas of blankness and calm.

The water is in different states in different times and in different places. Here it is dark and lazy, like oil; there it is just liquid, clear and easy-moving. Now it is textured in the way paint is textured when it is layered up roughly; and now it is pure, unlined, a blue gas coming up out of nothing. There is electricity in the water, and when the sun is right and the waves are right you can see it flash across the surface in sheets of low lightening; and because there is lightening there must be stars as well, and you can see those stars if you look closely enough: the water glitters with them, at certain times and certain places, and looking down at the water is like looking down on a city during a night of fireworks.

Here on the rock the sun is hot and the water is deep, sore-feet hot and yellow-green deep. One or two tussocks spike out of the rocks. They are yellow and green and have one or two grey hairs. You can throw an apricot stone into the lake and watch it go down, twinkling like a flake of gold. After a while it breaks up into liquid blobs and then disappears altogether.

Everyone can see that the water is wavy on the surface, but you need to look carefully to see how many different waves there are, waves of different speeds and sizes and directions of travel. Often they are not really waves at all, but depressions in the water, smooth around the edges like dimples. A moderate wind turns them into wrinkles, where the rising peaks look to have too much water in them and not enough speed so they collapse as they go over like a piece of loose skin. A little more wind and they slap down with a little explosion of froth.

When the wind gets up a bit more the whole surface starts to heave, and a set of wide, low ripples moves the smaller ripples up and down, and it is like something has moved under the water and not just above it. There is a stick on the lake and this stick feels as you or I would feel if we discovered that the hill we were riding on was not a hill at all but a great beast who had just woken up. There are tiny waves as well, concentric threads of water that ripple outwards and ride the bigger waves. They are made by tiny stones and the wings of drowning flies.

All of this can be observed from the dam-end of Lake Clyde, in the South Island of New Zealand, where I went in January 2007. The township of Clyde is a pleasant enough place. It takes a while to get away from the generic suburban garageland, but it is worth it when you do, as the town centre (or what looked to be the centre; it is small enough to be a minor offshoot) is made up of old-seeming buildings, with early-settler facades. One of those facades has a plastic sign outside reading “Cybernet Central” in highlighter-green type. Two young children sold me 20 apricots for 3 dollars.

A Story About A Cow

Once on the edge of somewhere there was a large field. It was filled with grass and it was very large indeed. It was so large that the sky was not big enough to cover it, and at the far ends of the field, just above the horizon, you could see the stars and planets poking through, even during the day time. It was so big, in fact, that noone had ever found the middle – no one was sure whether or not there was a middle at all. Some people said that it was bigger than the whole world. Some said it was even bigger than two whole worlds. Some people even said it was bigger than everything put together, and that it was the Dwelling Place of Divine Oneness – but most people dismissed that as superstitious nonsense.

At any rate, it was a very big field. Not much lived on the large field. This was mainly because it was on the edge of somewhere, and not many things lived in somewhere, let alone on its edge. Something did live there, though. At a long way from the sides of the field – close enough to the middle to know where it was, but not close enough to see the stars and planets during the day time – there lived a cow named Arthur. Like most cows, Arthur was, for a cow, about medium height. He was black and white, and whoever had first painted him had almost run out of white after finishing one side, and so on the other side Arthur had patches of black which stood out like clumsy puddles. From one side, Arthur looked very much like an overgrown sheep. From the other side, he looked very much like a cow.

Arthur did very little. There were no flies, and there was nothing much to think about. Even if there had been something to think about, Arthur probably would not have thought it. Mostly, Arthur ate grass. But that was not all. Every three minutes, Arthur raised his right front leg off the ground and held it five hoofs off the ground, as if he was waiting for something enormous to happen. Then he put it down again. There was not much noise, apart from Arthur’s eating. Nevertheless, if a person were to find Arthur and open their ear right up and listen very carefully, she (or he) would hear a very soft, very dry and very insistent whining sound. This is the sound a maggot makes as it eats away a cow’s tongue. And the maggot said:

"It is that time of year again, and inevitably the atmosphere has changed. For there is in the wide noon of every year a certain vacancy in the air, a kind of drowsy emptiness that surrounds a maggot and his friends and insinuates itself into the joints and ripples of a the little creature, working its subtle poison on the tender parts. It is a vacant thing, but it has not the comforting formlessness of vacuum. Rather, it has the vacancy of dust, of not-quite-vaccuum, an almost-void of floating motes and dandruff, the kind of vacancy that tempts a creature with the fixity of substance only to torment him with substancelessness, with the falseness of its soft and yielding matter. It is a disease, but it is also a prison, a prison of an unusually paralysing kind. It is the prison of disorientation, of being lost among the empty inners of everything, and being hopelessly open. It is not a prison of somewhere, of iron bars and containment. It is the prison of everywhere, of large and changeless spaces, of slow, wandering uncertainty. It is the prison of monotony and nothing-to-do, of white time and settled space. It is not the prison of restraint, and it is not the prison of incarceration. It is the prison of ease. It is the prison of freedom."

Three minutes later the cow raised his right front leg off the ground. Then he put it down again.

Creative Writing: Wild Air, No Spine

Why do I write creative stuff? Self-expression, I guess, order and beauty and aesthetic bliss. Specifically, a delight in words, their sounds and their inexhaustible novelty. Boredom, solitude. The honour of being part of a tradition, and also the pleasure of being part of a present-day community. Habit, laziness, intimacy. An interest in preserving experience, but also in enriching experience, enriching the future and the present as well as the past. A tendency to occasionally become disenchanted with reason and real-life, and to look for enchantment elsewhere, specifically in the wild air of the imagination, the strange air. An interest in people and the way they talk. An interest in discovering just what experience amounts to.

Creative writing has its drawbacks. All that wild air, it’s so wild and so airy, and at times I would rather go and do something more solid, something like making dinner or going for a run, than flutter about in all that empty space. And there is something nauseating about poetry. Perhaps it is just that I have read some bad poems, or perhaps it is that I have read good poems in the wrong way, but there is an earnestness and self-absorption, and a kind of weak yearning, about some poetry I have experienced, that makes them very unattractive.

And any story seems to lack an essential solidity, probably because they do not have any real demonstrative force. This makes them all seem pretty boneless, even if they are good fun. Sure, so-and-so wrote a novel in which the weak and unfortunate could draw hope from the bottomless reservoir of their good-will and humanity; but another so-and-so could just as easily write a novel in which the opposite is true. A story is an invention, and is detached from the world in the same way that a painting is detached from the real world: there is as much reason to regard a story as true as it is to regard a painting as true, when the painting is just something that some guy with brushes has slapped down in an inspired moment. Sure, both the story and the painting may be demonstrably accurate in their representation of the world. But the demonstration does not come from the story or the painting, but from a reasoned account of the story, the painting, and the world. And how can a novel or painting have any spine if it has no demonstrative force? I think that artists can put up a sound defence of these charges, but in some moods I have no sympathy for them, and call Art a failure because it fails to be Philosophy.

Fortunately, those moods are infrequent enough for me to write something creative every now and then, and so I’ll slap those things down here if they’re not too personal or too crap. I think I have a pretty good idea of what is personal and what is not, but I’m not so sure about crap. So if I write anything that is offensively crap, then any visitors are welcome to say so, and I will be secretly dismayed and write a fiery response arguing that it is not crap at all, but something much more edible. And if it is still too crap (and even if it is not), readers are heartily invited to go along to Defect Perfection, a blog attached to the literary anthology of the same name (which is released by Canterbury University about once a year). You can view the writing on the blog, but you can also contribute a piece of your own, by emailing us. More details on the blog.