The intertidal zone

I wrote to a friend the other day that I didn’t think music crucial for my survival. I might have to revise the comment. A couple of times this week music has moved me to awe and tears. I think those are necessary elements in a life…

The first was after a workshop with Stephen Taberner when twenty of us practised ’sobbing manfully’ as a prelude to grasping the rudiments of Georgian singing in three deep and soulful parts. The following night we heard his trio ‘The Secret Lunch‘ in Chicks Hotel at Port Chalmers and were wooed into putty by their skin-stirring harmonies, eccentrically wondrous lyrics and musicianship.

Then I found Stephen combining music with a spot of social activism, stirring up shoppers in the most decent way possible: with one song, many singers. Coincidentally a friend alerted me to Il Travatore bursting forth in a Spanish marketplace which led me along the youtube path to the Antwerp railway station. This is where the tears spilled. Such delight and vigour penetrating the mundane, transforming the moment, the day, binding the crowd into one appreciative whole … Who knows where that will end and what further creative acts have already been engendered by such generous outpouring of talent and joy.

This small cry of pleasure, for one.

I’ve started setting up Skybooks, where dynamic, literary, heartening writing will be solicited, selected, edited and turned into stunning ebooks. My confidence waxes and wanes — not in the work itself or in its writers, and not in my ability to recognise that work and present it in its finest light — but in my capacity to approach and interact with the mysterious entity called ‘business’. When I sidle up to business-savvy souls, who have something I need, I’m often so daunted by the coded (and ugly) language of that other reality, that I simply sidle away again. Seth Godin’s daily blog-bridge helps coax me across when I’d rather rather stay on the dreamy, creative side of the river. Today he offers no false reassurances — every outcome is necessarily mixed; nothing is ever entirely okay — but he underscores my conviction, too, that Skybooks is more than a good idea; it’s important and worth seeing through. In fact, it amounts to a kind of glad duty: finding and launching ‘work that matters’.

When something touches us all (a wondrous feat or a dire tragedy) we remember that we’re all of one tribe: the tribe of those living on tiny, fragile Earth early in the 21st century.

These members of the 2007 Iowa International Writers family hail from Turkey/Bulgaria, Egypt, Malta, Hungary, and B from Haiti. Two years ago our Burmese sister’s province was ravaged; now it’s Haiti’s turn. Another day, another year, it might well be ours.

Claire’s provided a beautiful dedicated moment/space on her site, with possible ways to act.

(I’m pleased to learn that B is in the US with her children but she awaits news of her wider family and friends.)

The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be. Louis de Berniere, novelist.

Saying goodbye to the old year seems an apt time to ponder this quote (from Word a Day). I’ve foregone opportunities this week, this day, to be kinder than necessary (to others, to the earth, to myself); I’d like to take up more of them in the coming year and if you do, too, well, how civilised we might become.

My family said goodbye yesterday to perhaps its most civilised member, Uncle Frank Davie, with tears, and coral-coloured roses laid on coffin and violin. We remembered his gentleness, wit, compassion, mischief, vegetarianism, intelligence, laughter, and those piercing blue eyes which told you he knew something of the law of the stars. Here is a tribute from one who loved him well.

Frank was kinder than he needed to be. It’s a fine thing to have his footsteps up ahead.

… could prove beautiful. Okay, perhaps I haven’t picked the most elegant image but prepare to be awed by the others at this BBC site — with thanks to Grace at Rata Weekly for pointing me in that direction.

Via vast new telescopes and exploratory eyes-in-the sky, we’re seeing planets, stars and galaxies in scope and detail unimaginable mere decades ago. If the inner world is ‘intensified sky’ as Rilke has it, what does this expansive new vision say about our capacity as humans? It might say that willing or not, ready or not, we are opening, being opened, to new possibilities — which are ours to embrace or to refuse.

… is both a quotidien and a subtle experience. You don’t share with just anyone. You’re sipping from the same bombilla, after all. There’s a technique to it: filling the cup two-thirds full of the ‘tea’; jolting the woody bits to the top, trickling on the cold water, not too much and not too little; inserting the bombilla; having the hot water almost boiling but not quite and pouring it each time in the exact same spot; never moving the bombilla! — which is the metal straw with a wide, seive-like base. On a bad day the yerba tastes like straw chopped with a cigarette butt; other times it might be clover hay minced with a small joint, perhaps. More stimulant than sedative.

You drink it with family, with a partner, a friend, or an acquaintance who’s proving simpática.

It’s an eloquent moment when the little cup is slid to you across the table for the first time.

At Elena’s flat in Buenos Aires, we were taking an inordinately long time to clean our teeth, and we had three tubes of toothpaste — but all at the identical stage of oversqueeze. (Thanks for the charming photo, Elena.)

Is it worth cutting off the lids and scraping the aluminium lining? When is it time to buy a new tube? Should I stick with the tried and true or risk a new brand? Why not go without for a while (salt and water served the ancesters, and frayed sticks)? How about having them removed (the teeth)? Or making a whole new hybrid product: is the world ready yet for cybertoothpasta?

A few (more) of us lost jobs this week; yes, Longacre Press is moving north, to live on Random’s verandah. So, it’s Opportunity Time. I went off to ponder mine in Naseby, ‘2000 feet above worry level’. Polly was in dog heaven, sniffing and poking and rolling about wherever rabbits have been — which is everywhere. The air was clear and so was my head. I had an idea and it seemed like a good one.

Back home, it doesn’t look quite as simple but I’m toying with a sort of manuscript consultancy seguing into a kind of publishing mumble-mumble…

Watch this space — or send me your manuscript.

I’ve tried to translate what Elena wrote to me (with the photos — thanks, Elena) about this important day in Jujuy in the north of Argentina; this is the gist, anyway, of the bits I could manage:

… people don’t go to work because their dead are expecting them. As I live near a cemetery park, I find myself in the middle of the fiesta …The night before, in their houses, they set up a table with bread for an offering — bread that substitutes for whatever the dead loved in life; also they prepare their favourite food and drink. They leave the table set up when they go to sleep so that the souls can come at sit down at their leisure, eat and drink with gusto and without frightening anyone ….

Although I live in the country, in a very peaceful place, today the house is surrounded by cars, people have been coming to the cemetery since morning … to share lunch with their loved ones … They put coloured paper flowers on the graves and have a kind of picnic, they drink chicha and dance until they ‘drop dead’.

2 noviembre — pane y chicha por los muertos

The dead are allowed until midnight.

Pueblo de los muertos

In Argentina the dead are given the goods: their own miniature town with the best view in the neighbourhood, flowers galore, gossipy prayer sessions with the living, and food. On the annual ‘day of the dead’ families spread picnics on the graves including the dead one’s favourite dishes, tell stories, and celebrate their life and memory.

This year (in NZ) we lit candles one by one and wrote beside them the names of our remembered dead: grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends who died too young. I thought especially of Clare at sixteen — stroppy, funny and fiercely intelligent. She loved hockey, Latin and our pink VW, and appointed herself window cleaner when my flatmates and I moved house in her neighbourhood. The day before a bus knocked her from her bike, she bought flowers for her mother. After the funeral I was shown the tiny striped socks she’d just knitted for our new first baby. Clare was always as bracing as a tonic; just thinking of her straightens my spine…