Stuff From July & August 2018

        The Last Morning In June 

I was looking for a book

like the one I’d just finished,

but they (whoever they were)

had rearranged things,

and all I could find

was a large, flat, white book;

I had no idea what it was,

so I was late for the buffet

and all the plates were gone;

the people just ahead of me took the last ones,

and the woman in the white server’s outfit

handed me some

porous cardboard paper plates,

but they wouldn’t do,

so she took them away

and I went to the drain

to wash a just-returned dirty dish,

but I was having trouble

getting some baked-on

cheese and pasta sauce from it,

and I figured that

all the food would be gone from the buffet

by the time I got to it,

so I said, ‘Fuck this dream. I’m getting up.’

And I did.

I opened my eyes,

had a good, long stretch,

climbed to my feet,

turned on the light,

donned my dressing gown,

and headed for the loo and the shower.

Everything was where it should be.

                  Cheesy Politics  

Not being an ideologically motivated vegan,

I sometimes buy a brand of sliced cheese called Yolo.

Havarti, Gouda, Emmental, Mozzarella.

It usually costs a bit less than Dairy Works.

This does present me with a values dilemma, though,

since Yolo is imported from Germany.

All those food kilometres!

Burning all those hydrocarbons

just to bring it to my local Pak’n Save.

I googled German dairying, though,

and learnt that since 2015

Germany has had the most stringent

animal welfare regulations

in the world,

and from what I can tell,

the New Zealand dairy industry

(it has become an industry, Wal)

seems to base its livestock-welfare practices

on the principle of sadism.

I can’t win on this one.

  

         Let Me Put You Wise: 

Children have enormous wisdom,

but puberty strips it away from most of us,

then after we acclimatise ourselves

to our urge-to-reproduce hormones

wisdom can start to return,

bit by bit,

in fits and starts,

for those of us

who let it

and don’t close it off,

until (if we don’t die)

in old age we approach

having the wisdom

that should have been obvious all along

when it’s already too late

to make effective use of it,

but part of that wisdom

is to know that this doesn’t matter.

(El diablo sabe más porque es viejo que porque es el diablo.)

      White People and Toilet Paper

I remember when I was seven or eight

reading a story about how a girl in western Virginia,

or some such Appalachian place,

when it was what they called the frontier,

had been captured in a raid by irate locals,

or Indians as they were then called,

whose land her people had stolen

and who had, in return,

munted all the rest of the colonising invaders

in the settlement where she’d been living.

The story then jumped ahead a few years

to when some colonising frontiersmen

had found her, thoroughly acculturated

and integrated with her adoptive people,

married and a mother,

and it told how she refused to be liberated

and returned to white civilisation in Virginia.

In my child’s mind I wondered,

knowing that Indians were savages

who lived in camps in the forest –

what the book called the wilderness –

without streets or other civilised amenities,

I wondered how she had been able to live

without toilet paper,

the idea that white people

didn’t have toilet paper

back in the seventeenth century

didn’t occur to my little head.

       A Reflection On Extinction 

I really shouldn’t watch video clips

that show me what’s going on in the world,

with real people and everything.

It makes me feel shame for being a human,

for being another member of their species,

due to the evil and cruelty, yes,

but even more,

I think,

due to the stupid.

                 Blowing Bubbles  

Y’know, when I was much younger,

university undergraduate age, and thereabouts,

I thought it was a worthy goal

to be able to mix, and fit in comfortably,

with any kind of social company,

upper class, middle class, or desperately poor,

bosses or workers,

urban, suburban, or rural,

ancestry from any continent or country

or ethnicity or mixture thereof,

educated or just-went-to-school,

artistically aware or just plain square.

I thought that this would give me

a richer life experience

and awareness of a more diverse range of perspectives,

than just, as people say in 2018,

staying inside my bubble,

so I tried to give it a go.

A half-century or so later

I have a somewhat different viewpoint.

A lifetime of experience

and the tardy, gradual growing of my self-awareness

have convinced me that

I’m unable to feel at ease mixing socially

with any kind of company at all.

I don’t even have a bubble.

       Snake Oil, Anyone?  

She dismissed all of science

with a dismissive sneer

as ‘male and Western’ –

being, as she was,

in the business of selling

unscientific therapies and remedies.

I wonder about the respect

that her blanket dismissal showed

to the more than one and a half million

Chinese woman scientists.

               Snapshot Us  

Our long and stumbling

series of tiny incremental changes

from being animals of the forests and fields

to palaeolithic hunters and gatherers

to the multifaceted, glittery, destructive,

cruelty-based mess that we have today

has been painfully uneven;

we’re now gathering the harvest

of our evolutionary mismatch

between intelligence and egotism:

We have the brains to construct

fabulous civilisations

and the vestigial sort of

primordial atavistic survival instincts

to destroy each other en masse.

We’re able to look at the stars and wonder,

but our brains have also evolved to focus

on our personal lives and self-absorption,

and most find it awkwardly difficult

to acknowledge our insignificance

in a universe of a size we’re unable to imagine,

let alone picture,

so over the millennia we’ve tried

to explain it all on a human scale,

preferring to create explanations

that put us in the centre

to just enjoying the wonder,

even though with a bit of uncowardly thought

it’s obvious that we’re not.

        Power & Culture 

We are supreme on this planet!

We don’t eat what we kill!

We don’t kill what we eat!

We’re victorious and glorious;

warriors deserving of dominion

over all life forever!

Aren’t we?

        European Spiritual Art 

She told me that when she was in Italy

one thing that struck her was

that there seemed to be

an architecturally significant church

on almost every city block,

and that some local Italians

approached her,

in her traditional long, Navajo plush dress,

full turquoise adornment,

and striking Navajo features

and asked her for spiritual advice.

She told me that she wondered

what all those churches are for

if they’d approach her with this;

“And I’m a fucking lawyer,” she added.

When I see images

of mediaeval or renaissance paintings

of saints and such

that purport to be spiritual,

what I usually see is depictions of people

whose faces seem to indicate

that they’re having digestive difficulties.

Maybe it’s those expensively gilded

circular things around their heads.

          The Wisdom of the Ancients  

I scoffed at his complicated woo-woo folderol,

and he said, ‘Who are you to question

the Wisdom of the Ancients?’

and I couldn’t help but snicker:

The Wisdom of the Ancients?

What about the stupidity of the Ancients?

Or the mediocrity of the Ancients?

Or the piss-taking of the Ancients?

Or the guesswork-and-bluffing of the Ancients?

The Ancients were, you know, people just like us,

and capable of the same bullshit as we are,

only the ones with wisdom

had less knowledge to work with

than wise people have now,

since wise people are also curious people,

and have always passed on new stuff that they’ve learnt

to the next generation of wise people,

while the stupid people,

being too stupid to know that they’re stupid,

and unable to distinguish wisdom from dog vomit,

just keep repeating the same old ancient shit.

             Elitism   

It seems to me that,

in recent years at least,

the word ‘elitism’

has increasingly become

a pejorative that people

with more or less

average mental ability

use to pass disparaging judgement

on people who are

significantly smarter than they are,

but who lack the good taste

to pretend that they’re not.

Stuff from January 2018

  Reptile Fossils, Pop Art, & Roses

Small to giant reptiles

once dominated the ecosystem

of this medium-small planet,

spinning its way through space

around a medium-small star

part-way up one of the spiral arms

of a galaxy that’s one of trillions

in this part of the universe;

they did this

for hundreds of millions of years

without telling anyone

and, as far as we know,

without reflection or wonder or self-awareness,

then went extinct or evolved otherwise

hundreds of millions of more years

before our species

evolved to study their fossil record,

and to think about it,

and to talk about ourselves,

doing which has made us think

we’re somehow significant –

an odd word in the context –

while in the mid-1960s,

in our quirky way of reckoning time,

Andy Warhol listened to the song,

‘Sally Go ’Round the Roses’

over and over again for hours

as he produced garish pop art

with the same old universe around him

that had surrounded the dinosaurs.

  

   Pathos & Scorn

A small blue car

bearing just the driver,

male or female,

I couldn’t tell,

zoomed down

the otherwise

somnolent street,

its engine all revved up

into a howling growl,

or maybe a growling howl,

the end of the street

and its stop sign

less than fifty metres away,

and I thought of the driver:

What a pathetic person!

Then it occurred to me

that I’m pathetic, too,

only not as aggressively

noisy about it in public,

and that,

when viewed dispassionately,

our entire species

is pathetic to the core.

         Eggshell 

We have protection

surrounding us,

an eggshell

dangling from a spider web

in a good, stiff breeze.

We have sustenance,

with vapour billowing

from our cloud cleansers,

where we wash off

the thin film of soil

that also sustains us.

We have transportation

inside of which we run errands,

mobile eggshell replicas

we can barely control,

and sometimes we die

when they crack or shatter.

We have jobs,

which bang us against

the inside of our eggshell

without our even noticing

or thinking twice about it,

because it’s there.

We look at each other

using mirrors and blindfolds,

sonorously exchanging

tall tales about worlds

without eggshell or dirt,

convincing each other

that make-believe is real.

    Small Compensation

Sometimes it seems to me,

probably stupidly,

that all our lives and deaths

are fractions of a world soul

that encompasses all of the

pleasure and pain,

joy and terror,

purity and pollution,

artistic experiences

and dull drudgery

of all living things,

and I rejoice myself

to observe my dog

adding to his enjoyment

of smells and fellowship

that I can barely imagine,

which adds to my experience

of the world soul

when it absorbs me

from my limitations,

although I can’t forget

that this is small compensation

for all the agonies and terror

resulting from human cruelty

inflicted on each other

and other animals

in our billions.

               Intimate Secrets

She hid her face in the pillow

in a paroxysm of embarrassment and fear,

and I said, ‘Hey! Don’t worry!

‘This is me that you’re talking to.

‘I’m never going to tell anyone,’

and so I’m not going to tell you now;

no, you’re not going to know her secret,

even though she later done did me wrong,

with heaps of hurt involved,

and told me all sorts of lies

along the way

that I’m not even

going to report now, either,

because it would embarrass me too much

to recount publicly, in specifics,

what a predictably pathetic mark I was,

anyway.

             The Smirk 

She smirked.

Then she said something

that she clearly thought was clever,

but was actually dimwitted and rude,

but it was the smirk:

the sides of the mouth

turned barely upward

and the middle of the upper lip

pushed down over the lower,

with the chin lowered slightly also,

to give just a hint of the impression

of looking down at the recipient,

the whole face arranged to convey

smugness,

self-satisfaction,

scorn,

condescension,

derision,

contempt,

and I’ve-got-your-number,

a nasty, affected travesty of a smile

that expressed no humour or warmth.

I have no ability to tolerate smirking;

it trips one of my triggers,

and only my commitment

to the principle of non-violence,

my aversion to being absorbed

into the criminal-justice system,

and the context,

a high-school hall

crowded with parents and teachers,

the smirker being one of my daughter’s teachers,

kept me from smashing that smirk

right off of her face.

       Colourful Surnames

 

I know, or have heard of,

plenty of people

in the English-speaking world

with the surnames

of White, Black,

Grey (or Gray), Brown,

Green (or Greene),

Gold, Silver,

and even a few

surnamed Rose and Blue,

and can google up people with the surnames

Pink, Violet,

and Redd (but not Red –

although Rossi is common in Italian),

but I can find no mention of anybody

with the surname Yellow

since 1653

(although Huang is common in Chinese).

I wonder why?

I wonder why about all sorts of odd stuff

when I’m walking my dog around the park.

                     From

I’ve been a bloke with an accent

for forty-five or so years,

and during those years

from twelve to fifteen thousand

essentially dull and superficial people

have asked, upon encountering me,

where I was from,

or some variation of this.

People with Asian facial features,

from what I’ve heard,

get hit with this at least as often,

no matter what their accent.

From.

Nadia from Pussy Riot rapped,

‘Don’t be stupid / Don’t be dumb /

Vagina’s where you’re really from.’

The superficials don’t like that answer,

any more than when I’ve responded,

‘From my father’s balls.’

From.

I feel like I’m from Hamilton,

since I’ve lived here longer

than I ever lived anywhere else,

but of course the superficials

won’t accept that.

I moved to Hamilton from Otorohanga.

I moved to Otorohanga from Guam.

I moved to Guam from Texas,

where the superficials also

interrogated me about my accent.

From.

Am I from my birth country?

We left when I was seven weeks old.

Am I from where my ancestors lived?

Recent or distant ones?

Am I from where I started school?

From.

Does having been a lecturer

make me from Academia?

Does my work as a labourer and

my grandfather’s trade-union loyalties

make me from the working class?

But my father’s working as

a small-town GP

makes me from the middle class.

From.

I’m from a dysfunctional nuclear family,

which is much more to the point

than where I went to school.

From.

My geographical location

a half-century or more ago

tells you little about who I am,

unless, of course, your objective

is instead to tell me what I am

and to jam me into a box

that’s the wrong shape

and far too small.

From.

Like John Frum and the isle of Tanna,

I’m not going back.