The intertidal zone

    The day started with a lit candle that I sat and didn’t look at while I tried not to think either.

A nice young man cranked my arm and shoulder into positions it was reluctant to adopt. However, progress is being made.

I blogged over at Rosa Mira Books, wondering where in a sex shop an author might position herself to deliver a talk about erotica in the old days, the bits that didn’t fit into her novel.

I proof-read the final chapter of Michael Jackson‘s anthropological memoir Road Markings, which Rosa Mira will publish soon. The cover will be by a collaboration of  daughters. And it will look a lot flasher than the image above.

These seedlings found homes today: beans beside path, basil in pot, pumpkin ringed about by rainbow silverbeet.

                           I admired the freshly painted doorstep and freshly oiled door.

  Our son comes home tonight. The bed is welcoming but not wide. It’s all set up for early rising.

                    It was 27 degrees C here today. The vased peonies silently exploded.

Now it’s Key versus Goff.  Glib and smug versus honest and earnest. Take your pick.

Thanks to all my friends and family and the sun and the dog and birds and people who inspire me, not to mention life itself. . .

Oil is spilling. Marchers are occupying. An egg is cooling.

Yes, we too would be lost without our Apples.

By these means we have bitten into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are changed.

The question’s being asked, who can take the place of Steve Jobs? I guess the answer has to be no one and everyone.

David Pogue says in his eulogy: “Suppose, by some miracle, that some kid in a garage somewhere at this moment possesses the marketing, invention, business and design skills of a Steve Jobs. What are the odds that that same person will be comfortable enough — or maybe uncomfortable enough — to swim upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision?

Zero. The odds are zero.”

In fact such multi-talented individuals aren’t uncommon; I know more than a handful. Uncommon is the person who develops and fulfils those talents and capacities and brings something of beauty into being; who brushes aside the extraneous, and flies quick and true toward the goal s/he has set for her/himself. Whether it be caring for children, setting up a business, creating a garden or tidying a bedroom, most of us sigh and prevaricate, look around and dabble instead of doing this One Thing Well.

There’s a groundswell these days, of talk, dreaming, experimenting and reaching for the concept of the ‘possible human’,  which is to say the apparently impossible human who leads a life of high endeavour. The concept might have replaced contentment as the ideal state. (Although, I like to think that contentment and aspiration can walk hand in hand.)

Hundreds of books have been written about this; thousands of websites offer methods and courses for ‘neuro-linguistic programming’, ‘quantum jumping’, ‘integrated enlightenment’, and most of us know that we’re here not to live by rote but to apply ourselves to discerning and following the impulses that arise uniquely in each of us. We do this not for our own sake alone.

There was only one Steve Jobs.

But there are millions of us. We each have at least one particular strength. Many have potent visions. Surely it’s best now if we look not for one person to save us, but find ways to put ourselves together; seek complementary components amongst our friends, colleagues and cyber-groups. Become the greatest human invention of all: a living web of affinities and abilities. Such is the vision that Steve Jobs and his kin have ushered, wittingly or not, into the realm of human imagination, and therefore of possibility.

I felt myself to be in skilled and steady hands with Laurence’s (6th or 7th?) novel. Boden Black is a young butcher who spends a formative few summer days in 1955 helping build a hut high on the flanks of Aoraki-Mt Cook. His consciousness is pierced by  events — the relentless narration by a conscientious objector of his imprisonment during WW2 (its cause and consequences) and Boden’s own climb of the mountain with Edmund Hilary and guide Harry Ayres. Poetry is also at work in him.

Boden broods, listens, writes poems (none of which, alas, we get to read), cuts meat, ponders and occasionally converses, and we witness over decades the gradual accretion of character and motive as he, without haste, processes his life — from his lonely, troubled Fairlie childhood, to a maturity in which he is making peace with his people and his past, and with his calling as a poet.

There’s restraint and a deep calm at the heart of The Hut Builder, which makes for quietly impressive reading.

I thought the tomato probably wanted to speak for itself. I brought it inside and had a look at it:

When it’s grown up, closer to Christmas, we’ll hang a few of these on it: