Praise the Lord for all the Middle Pleasures

Praise the Lord for all the middle pleasures,
Work and play in one, pleasing sense and taste.
Rounding off the wealth of other treasures,
Often hidden, sometimes lost, never waste.
An easy joy it is to rut and feed,
But dumb, unaimed: better free than fatter.
Appeasing sense, the middle joys repair the need
To stuff the beasty holes with meaty matter.
And yet to feed the soul, the limbs, the mind,
With dryer food alone, is not much fun.
The middle meal, with bread and sweets combined,
Entreats the self to savour what it’s won.

Proud pleasures, raising both the high and low,
Where can these be found? Praise to those who know!

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.

Making No Difference At All

We need to stop treating science as if it were a single monolithic entity, a solid kingdom embattled against rival kingdoms. On the one hand, the various sciences differ hugely. Ecology and anthropology are not at all like physics, nor is biology, and this is not disastrous because they do not have to be.

This passage is from a book I am reading about symbols and science, and an elegant and well-written book it is too. But I am suspicious of the line of reasoning evident in the quoted passage, and I think there is a mistake in that line of reasoning that is made quite often. The mistake is to think that, if a group of objects are such that each object differs hugely from each other object, then there is no hope of finding any commonality in that group. Below are three reasons why commonality can exist despite large differences.

First, objects usually differ in respect of one or more qualities; and, since different respects are often independent of one another, a group of objects can differ greatly from eachother in most respects, yet be very alike in other respects. The set of complete sentences varies greatly in respect of length, tone, syntax, and content; but this does not stop them being alike in respect of their basic grammatical structure.

And in the scientific case, ecology and physics may differ greatly in respect of the precision their statements, and in their subject matter, and in their affinity with mathematics, but perhaps they share a common method. Perhaps they do not share a common method, in which case there is some reason to doubt the “monolithic” character of science. But simply saying that different sciences “differ hugely” is not enough to establish the lack of commonality in the sciences.

Another reason is more causal than conceptual. Small variations at a microscopic level can lead to highly divergent behaviors at a macroscopic level; hence a group of objects can appear to differ hugely in their everyday appearance, yet still have very clear structural similarities. The set of all tri-molecules (that is, the set of all molecular substances such that each molecule contains three separate atoms, a group I just made up then), is clearly a quite homogeneous set; yet it contains substances that are as different in appearance and behavior as CO2 and H2O.

The third reason draws on the fact that statements about similarity and difference only really make sense in relation to some standard of comparison. In respect of size, is a plate similar to a table? There is no way of getting a determinate answer to this question, I think, except by bringing in some standard of similarity to compare the plate/table case to. We may not be able to say whether a plate is similar to a table, in respect of size, but we can say whether a plate is more similar to a table than (say) a plate is to house.

This point is relevant because, as soon as one relativises similarity in this way, one universalizes it. If two objects can be similar simply by being more similar than some other two objects, then almost any two objects can be similar. If your scope is broad enough, any two objects in your vision will look close together. It doesn’t matter how much anthropology differs from physics; what matters is how the difference between those two pursuits compares to the differences between those pursuits separately, and non-scientific pursuits (say, English and History). One can bang on all one likes about how different anthropology is from physics. But as long as one has not shown that one of those pursuits is more similar to English (say) than it is to the other of those pursuits, then one has given no reason to question the “monolithic” character of the sciences.

But perhaps I have been a bit unfair here. The standard of comparison I have mentioned is, I think, usually established implicitly, by context. And by demanding that all statements of similarity and difference carry with them an explicit standard of comparison, I am showing a kind of insensitivity to ordinary usage that (some might say) only a philosopher could suffer from. When someone says that the temperature on Tuesday will be “similar” to that on Wednesday, we don’t all put on puzzled expressions and ask the speaker to relativise her statement to some standard. If it turns out that Tuesday’s temperature differs from Wednesday’s by 2.5 degrees, we are not surprised, even though this difference would (in some scientific contexts, for example) be vast. We are aware, in an intuitive sort of way, that the context of everyday weather fixes certain rules about which pairs of temperature are to be considered similar, and which are not.

And perhaps the reader is expected, from the passage above, to intuit some kind of context. And the natural context to use is that of prior expectation. That is, what the author means when she says “physics and anthropology differ hugely” is really “physics and anthropology differ much more than is commonly appreciated.” And the latter statement both makes pretty good sense, and is interesting.

Nevertheless, it is also pretty clear that the latter statement is milder than the claim that the author is trying to make. The claim is that it is somehow impossible to warrant the grouping of physics and anthropology, that they are hopelessly disparate. And, for the three reasons given above (though only the first and third only really apply here) this strong claim does not follow from the milder claim about the inaccuracy of popular beliefs.

A similar pattern of thought is sometimes present in discussions about ethnicity. When discussing the census, for example, commentators sometimes protest (for example) that Korean and Chinese should not be grouped together (eg. under the label of Asian), on the basis that Korean culture is “vastly different” from Chinese culture, or that the two have “very little in common.”

Again, it may be that people do often make genuine mistakes about the closeness of Korean and Chinese culture, and it is worthwhile to counter these mistakes by clarifying the distinctive qualities of each. But the fact that the two cultures are less similar, or similar in fewer respects, than is commonly imagined, does not mean that they should never be grouped together. They may differ greatly, and yet still differ less than what Chinese culture differs from any given European culture. Or in some respects (say, population size) Korea may be more naturally grouped with European countries than with China; and yet in all relevant respects they are enough alike to be put in the same box.

Taking Offense

Are we ever justified in taking offense? I think the answer is “no”, by which I mean that when people take offense at a remark, they do so partly because of a fault in themselves; and removing this fault would remove the disposition to take offense.

When I talk about “taking offense” in this post, I do not refer to the act of taking offense on someone else’s behalf. Often we use the word in this way, to mean just that we disapprove of the way in which another person is being treated. We are “offended” by the people who attack Jewish graves, though we may not be Jewish. And I do not refer to our response to an “offense”, in the general sense of the word, which we use broadly to mean something like a “transgression,” a failure to follow the rules. Nor am I talking about a slightly narrower sense of the word, which we use to refer to transgressions against ourselves, things that disgust us, as in an “offensive smell.”

What I mean (I think) is the rising anger that we feel when we feel we have been “defamed”: when we come across words or pictures or actions (usually words) that slight our character. In some circumstances, such as when the slight is false and also lowers us in other people’s opinion, it is clear that we are justified in feeling wronged by such an action. But often we (or at least I) take offense at slights that are not like this, of which noone is aware except ourselves and the perpetrator of the insult. We (or at least I) hear or overhear an unflattering remark and immediately become heated by it, as if an infuriating injury has been inflicted on us.

Sometimes there is a good reason to take some offense at a slight like this, even if it does not diminish us in the eyes of any third party. The slight may be evidence of the speaker’s ingratitude, for example. And the fact that there is one party other than ourselves that thinks ill of us, and who does so on weak rounds, might be reason to feel wronged by that person. But usually (again I speak for myself here) the offense taken is disproportionate to the wrong inflicted. If the slight is false, and clearly false, then it does not take much to set the person right. And if the slight is true, then it is hard to see how any sense of wrong-doing is justified.

In either case, at least half the fault lies with the offended person. In the first case, a person who reacts angrily, who “takes offense”, has only his lack of articulateness to blame for that anger: a perfectly articulate and persuasive person would just calmly show the speaker why he or she is wrong. And in the second case (when the slight is false) surely the person who “takes offense” should not blame the speaker for her anger, but her own insecurity or self-hate, which presumably is what causes her to react angrily to a true portrait of herself. The heated feeling that we associate with “taking offense’ is really a sense of frustration at our own inadequacy.

Not being a perfectly articulate or self-secure person, I find it easier to scoff at those who take offense than to avoid offense myself. To speak personally (with the thought in mind that describing my own condition will cast light on others’) in extreme cases I can successfully avoid taking offense, for the reasons just given. An obviously false slight is easy to disprove; an obviously true slight is not worth railing against. It is when the slight is partially true (either because its import is somewhat vague, because it is precise but we lack the conceptual scheme to distinguish the intended slight from other slights, or because our behavior varies with respect to the fault) that I start to feel prickly, and am most likely to raise my voice or sulk. I wonder if this applies to other people: what really nettles is the slight that is just true enough that it is not easy to persuade the speaker that he is wrong, but is false enough that we feel a righteous desire to do so, and hence to clear our name.

By the above I don’t mean to say, in the case of any offensive slight, that the antagonist is completely blameless. If the offender knows that a slight will cause distress that is greater than any likely consequent good, then surely they have done something wrong, even if a weakness in the protagonist is partly responsible for the distress. If we persuade a person to buy a dud car for an exorbitant price, we do not escape blame simply because the person is woefully misinformed about cars.

Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that part of the blame does lie with the person who suffers the wrong, in the case of the offended person as in the case of the woefully misinformed person.

*******

Supposing all the above is true, what can be taken from it? The lesson, I think, is that an immunity to taking offense is a quality worth aiming for, because in most ordinary people it is a good measure of intellect and self-knowledge. (I say “most ordinary people” because there may be people who are immune to offense, but who are so immune because they simply don’t understand what people say to them, or are too apathetic to care, too lacking in self-esteem to bother with self-defense, or are just extremely mild-mannered.)

To have this sort of immunity means having the confidence and articulateness to show another person why their slight is wrong, when it is wrong. It means recognizing faults when they already exist, and avoiding the temptation to cover up these faults with indignation. And, when a person’s judgment is delicately balanced between truth and falsity, it means being able to make the sort of conceptual distinctions that help one to clarify the meaning of insult, and accordingly to act as one would in the case of a true slight (if it turns out the insult is true) or false slight (if it is not true).

But I think that is a hard ideal to achieve. The lesson for the meantime is that the act of taking offence should not be read as a sign of some wrongdoing on the part of the speaker. Rather it should be read as an indication that, although a fault does lie somewhere in the slighted person, that fault should be looked for in their reaction to the slight rather than in the content of the slight itself.

Wairoa Tearooms

Here are the Wairoa tearooms on a Sunday afternoon at the end of summer.

Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.


Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.

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.

Island Life

From one point of view, my time on Taranga Island was a tale of misery and degradation. I was woken at 6am by the guy in the next tent calling me a tosser. I was assailed by immature nicknames, and by a Red Hot Chilli Peppers song repeated endlessly for the sole purpose of irritating me. I was forced by peer pressure to down shot after shot of Johnny Walker whisky, drunken out of a shot-glass made up of the sawn-off top of a soft-drink bottle; and having done that I was forced by general merriment to suck up split wine from the lid of a food container that had been a playground for rat-shitting rats the night before. I was mocked for going down the hill too fast (“Can ya smell the lolly bin Mike?”). I was mocked for going down the hill too slowly (“Hurry the fuck up Grandad”). I held onto a cliff face by a slippery root and two flax leaves while my supervisor stood on a ledge above me and laughed and made jokes about risking my life seven times for the sake of three weeds. I tripped over on a root the first day. Immediately this appalling misdemeanor gave rise to huge false guffaws from my travelling companions, as it did for the next ten days. For 10 days I had no dry socks. For ten days I put on a wet shirt in the morning and took a wetter shirt off in the evening, and I came back to camp to wash out of a small blue tub of cold water, an activity that was partly a bath and partly a shower and combined the worst aspects of both. In the evenings I sat and watched people hunched wordlessly over something called the “Brick Game”, an appallingly addictive electronic device that emitted many piercing electronic noises, including a tinny rendition of the famous part of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. I was surrounded by puerility. After a few days my protective reserve had worn away and I cheerfully joined in with the puerility. I composed a “bestiality ballad”, seven verses about an erotic adventure with a tuatara. I noted a brand of chocolate called “Dark Ghana,” and observed that this was a neat little euphemism for excrement, and having made this discovery I took every chance to extend it and explore its many variations. When the sole female on the trip went behind a tarpaulin to shower, and her jerking, rubbing silhouette came through the other side of the tarpaulin, and the others put all sorts of merry construals on the shadowy and naked movements, I joined in. When I went to the long-drop at night I had to whack the sides with a stick to get rid of the rats. And so on.

From one point of view, then, all of these happenings made up a truly unpleasant period of work. From my point of view, however, they were all part of the fun.