I’m here in Tai Tokerau, the Bay of Islands, which, make no mistake, is achingly beautiful, in a manner that leaves me feeling as if my head is going to be blown off my shoulders with the sight of so much green bush, such an expanse of the deepest blue water, hill after gently rolling hill–as Wallace Stevens wrote, “ah!” (It’s in “A Dish of Peaches in Russia”, taken slightly out of context here.)
It’s in such a setting that I realise I am rather sunk in depression at the moment. It’s not overwhelming, but the serotonin is definitely on the reuptake, if I may use the language of my drugs. I am having terrible nightmares, despite the many pleasures of these last few leisured days, and what I can only call “daymares” as well, short fierce moments of quite excruciating despair, which pass and leave me in need of a sit-down, at the very least.
I think my despair about Katrina–which continues, on and off, and which I won’t narrate further–is a symptom rather than a cause of this mental state, which makes me feel all the worse, since it’s not as if the suffering to hand’s not worth losing one’s mind over. But I fear the rather more prosaic cause of my slump is the pressure at work, combined with the toll of several months of hearty unionista-ing.
I feel guilty about feeling wretched, a sure sign that things are really not that well. However, you’d have to be an iller mademoiselle than I seem to be at present to be in this locale and remain unmoved.
Sunday was mostly noodling about in Auckland airport, not as tedious as it sounded thanks to the historical memoir The Fox Boy, which I bought a few years back and promptly lent to harvestmother, who has been telling me ever since I should read it. It begins just before the Land Wars of the last century and ends, as more narratives should, no?, at Parihaka. I practically inhaled the thing. It’s by Peter Walker; you should read it, occasional lapses in narrative tone and typos not withstanding. Since then I have also read my four buck copy of All the Conspirators, which I thought better than the author’s own evaluation of it, and am halfway through The Mill on the Floss. Beats working.
I am staying at the drolly named Pipi Patch, down on the waterfront in Paihia, now a resort town but also the site of the first Anglican settlement here. The main road is Marsden drive, but the heavy hands of Henry Williams, translator of the Treaty of Waitangi into Maori, can also be seen. (His accustomed habit of simply making up Maori words transliterated from the English, rather than using existing vocabulary, gave rise to the phrase “missionary Maori” and caused all sorts of problems for future generations when he decided the coinage “kawanatanga” would do, in the Treaty, for “sovereignty” since the chiefs would never relinquish their mana, a more appropriate translation.)
It’s warm–families were swimming in the sea when I arrived–and I am sunburned already. I think the narrative of my adventures, already well-photographed, is probably best postponed until I return home, or at least for a day or two longer; there is too much to tell, and to many photos to edit, for me to pay eight dollars an hour in the local internet cafe for the privilege of doing so. The thought did occur to me today that, these days, events almost don’t exist for me until I’ve taken the opportunity to write about them, so you may imagine me in a state of non-existence until my next entry.
A fragment with which to conclude: up behind Russell, across the bay, the face of Don Brash on a National Party election billboard has had a basic moko added, and the words “Mana Kororareka” emblazoned across his forehead. In case you were otherwise distracted, let me extrapolate this local objection (Kororareka was the old town where Russell now stands) to a wider context: this man must not win the election.
Mana Kororareka
I’m here in Tai Tokerau, the Bay of Islands, which, make no mistake, is achingly beautiful, in a manner that leaves me feeling as if my head is going to be blown off my shoulders with the sight of so much green bush, such an expanse of the deepest blue water, hill after gently rolling hill–as Wallace Stevens wrote, “ah!” (It’s in “A Dish of Peaches in Russia”, taken slightly out of context here.)
It’s in such a setting that I realise I am rather sunk in depression at the moment. It’s not overwhelming, but the serotonin is definitely on the reuptake, if I may use the language of my drugs. I am having terrible nightmares, despite the many pleasures of these last few leisured days, and what I can only call “daymares” as well, short fierce moments of quite excruciating despair, which pass and leave me in need of a sit-down, at the very least.
I think my despair about Katrina–which continues, on and off, and which I won’t narrate further–is a symptom rather than a cause of this mental state, which makes me feel all the worse, since it’s not as if the suffering to hand’s not worth losing one’s mind over. But I fear the rather more prosaic cause of my slump is the pressure at work, combined with the toll of several months of hearty unionista-ing.
I feel guilty about feeling wretched, a sure sign that things are really not that well. However, you’d have to be an iller mademoiselle than I seem to be at present to be in this locale and remain unmoved.
Sunday was mostly noodling about in Auckland airport, not as tedious as it sounded thanks to the historical memoir The Fox Boy, which I bought a few years back and promptly lent to harvestmother, who has been telling me ever since I should read it. It begins just before the Land Wars of the last century and ends, as more narratives should, no?, at Parihaka. I practically inhaled the thing. It’s by Peter Walker; you should read it, occasional lapses in narrative tone and typos not withstanding. Since then I have also read my four buck copy of All the Conspirators, which I thought better than the author’s own evaluation of it, and am halfway through The Mill on the Floss. Beats working.
I am staying at the drolly named Pipi Patch, down on the waterfront in Paihia, now a resort town but also the site of the first Anglican settlement here. The main road is Marsden drive, but the heavy hands of Henry Williams, translator of the Treaty of Waitangi into Maori, can also be seen. (His accustomed habit of simply making up Maori words transliterated from the English, rather than using existing vocabulary, gave rise to the phrase “missionary Maori” and caused all sorts of problems for future generations when he decided the coinage “kawanatanga” would do, in the Treaty, for “sovereignty” since the chiefs would never relinquish their mana, a more appropriate translation.)
It’s warm–families were swimming in the sea when I arrived–and I am sunburned already. I think the narrative of my adventures, already well-photographed, is probably best postponed until I return home, or at least for a day or two longer; there is too much to tell, and to many photos to edit, for me to pay eight dollars an hour in the local internet cafe for the privilege of doing so. The thought did occur to me today that, these days, events almost don’t exist for me until I’ve taken the opportunity to write about them, so you may imagine me in a state of non-existence until my next entry.
A fragment with which to conclude: up behind Russell, across the bay, the face of Don Brash on a National Party election billboard has had a basic moko added, and the words “Mana Kororareka” emblazoned across his forehead. In case you were otherwise distracted, let me extrapolate this local objection (Kororareka was the old town where Russell now stands) to a wider context: this man must not win the election.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2005 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Diaryland, commentatrix, in Aotearoa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.