PASSAGES

 There’s something missing  in Pegasus Town .  In this, the newest New Zealand small town, there is to be no cemetery.  After using the “online enquiry” form to check this out, feigning interest in my long term prospects of becoming a resident there, I was reassured that there will be a ‘memorial park’ with places for plaques.  But a cemetery?  No.  Building a town for 5000 residents without a cemetery is symptomatic of a contemporary malaise – the inexhaustible pursuit of happiness.  No-one should die, no-one should mourn. All of the promotional material for Pegasus Town is awash with happy faces, swimming in the fake lakes, simmering in the hot pools.  

The sun is always shining.  Yachts race across the water, threatening at any moment to poke their sails through the paper sky … it’s the Truman Show through and through.

To deny a small town its cemetery is to erase part of the fundament of memory.  An overt signal of losses, a locus of pathos.  Instead, Pegasus Town will have a lacuna at its heart, in its hedonistic quest for life lightly lived.  In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Clementine undergoes a procedure to erase part of her memory, that containing painful recollections of a broken relationship, a wish to deny that presence of absence, of longing.  To suppress the black bile.  Pegasus Town undergoes a similar procedure, bathed in eternal sunshine, with not a hint of the darkness which imbues New Zealand ’s psyche.  Not the landscape of Vigil or Rain. Dripping, damp, claustrophobic. No place for a Colin McCahon or a Bill Hammond to hang upon a wall,  visionaries of the glorious darkness.  Nor Anne Noble and  Laurence Aberhart with their  brooding monochromes.  No Renderers or  Bats on the stereo, no Janet Frame on the shelf.  No place for emptiness, ennui, introspection.  The antithesis of the ‘small-town melancholy’ that Martin Edmond divines in the work of Ronald Hugh Morrieson. 

 There are many precedents for this propaganda, and European settlement was encouraged by the work of booster artists like John Bunney and Charles Heaphy.  Producing many images of a sun-bathed New Zealand for the temptation of potential settlers, John Bunney never came to New Zealand .  Intriguingly, his painting of Auckland appears to be of some generic ‘other’ place, peopled by a kind of Esperanto autochthonousness, possibly more African than Polynesian. 

John Bunney, Auckland, 1858

Heaphy at least came to New Zealand , but produced a portfolio of images that were also in eternal sunshine, filled with fertile fields, and a hint of milk and honey. 

Charles Heaphy, Thorndon Flat and Wellington, 1841

They were a world away from painters like Petrus van der Velden, the Dutchman who produced the most sublime series of paintings of Otira Gorge, brooding and dark.  Van der Velden is rumoured to have lay on his back in the mountains when the sun shone, and refused to paint. 

 Petrus van der Velden, Mountain Stream, Otira Gorge, 1893

 And now, not that far from van der Velden’s roiling alpine sublimity, Pegasus Town is being laid out, de novo, like the spreading out of a board game on the table. 

The Game of Life perhaps, but without that ineffable, inevitable, consequence of life … death. 

Passages to …

Vigil (1984).  Director Vincent Ward. Writers Vincent Ward, Graham Tetley.

Rain (2001).  Director Christine Jeffs, based on the novel by Kirsty Gunn.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).  Director Michel Gonby, screen play Charlie Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth.

Truman Show (1998). Director Peter Weir.  Writer Andrew Niccol.

Martin Edmond (2004) The Abondoned House as a Refuge for the Imagination, reprinted from Landfall 208, in Misha Kavka, Jennifer Lawn, Mary Paul (eds) Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture. Dunedin: Otago University Press.

Welshpool, Vic, Australia, JBowring, October 2003

 All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor colour, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.

Victor Hugo, in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

A series of caves has just been located on the flanks of the volcano Arsia Mons on Mars.  The group of caves has been named the Seven Sisters, and present the curious spectacle of a coded surface. 

The Seven Sisters on Arsia Mons

Perhaps they are environmental art?  A  Martian riposte to Isamu Noguchi’s Sculpture to be Seen from Mars, 1947.

Isamu Noguchi, The Sculpture to be Seen from Mars.  1947.

Or perhaps a message … as in Italo Calvino’s story The Light Years, where cosmic paranoia ensues after a sign is spotted in a faroff galaxy which reads “I SAW YOU.”  The Martian missive is in braille … like the surface of the National Museum of Australia, in Canberra … which read “mate” and “she’ll be right”… will we recognise the Martian vernacular?

Big Braille at the NMA

Standing out in the light drizzle this morning and listening to the lonesome cries of seagulls circling above … recalling the passages from Jane Alison’s The Love Artist … and how this sound brims with pathos.   Like whistling.  Whistling is often considered somewhat jolly, yet it is the very embodiment of some anthro-avian hybrid which is at once the most poignant and otherworldly sound.  Anyone who needs convincing should listen to Goldfrapp’s Lovely Head … the most melancholic whistling wafts through the beginning of this track.  And the gulls carried my mind to the sea, not far away, and thoughts of horizons and all that falls off the edge of the world.  Watching a container ship as it hove itself into the onslaught of the southerly, balancing on the thin line of the horizon, wobbling back and forth.  The meeting of sea and sky, all that is sold melting into air …

Laurence Aberhart

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascape Series

J Bowring, Oamaru, December 2005

Does loss have a form?  Standing, staring at an absence, a void, where once was solid.  Someone told me, last week, that it’s just like a hand placed in a bucket of water, and then withdrawn.  When someone, something, is lost, then the world closes in around it like water.  Yet …  surely … there is that sense that something remains, resists closure.  Phantasmagorial … for time immemorial, and eternity.  A retinal stain, afterimage, after all.  Cerebral stigma. 

Anne Noble, Night Hawk. 8. 1982

 An empty bed.  Poignant, enigmatic, a question mark hanging above it.  A landscape of memories, each fold, each dimple, a mnemonic trace.  Anne Noble’s Night Hawk 8, spreads out a topography inflected with remembered presence, with the memory of movement, now preserved.  Domestic orogeny.  Sacred. Profane.  Place of comfort, then left bereft.  For Guillermo Kuitca, bed memories are a place of trauma - personal, introspective, at the same time as wildly geographic.  Plotting the terrain.  Plotting and scheming.    Recollections too, of Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’, from the 1999 Turner Prize shortlist, a terrain of certain pain.  The locus of depression, of dark thoughts, traced by detritus. 

Guillermo Kuitca, Untitled. 1989.

“… It is a metaphysical truth that all nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language …. This proposition has a double meaning.  It means, first: it would lament language itself.  Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of nature’s redemption in the  life and language of man – not only, as is supposed, of the poet – are in nature).  This proposition means, secondly, it would lament.  Lament, however, is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language; it contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even where there is only a rustling of plants, there is always a lament.  Because it is mute, nature mourns. Yet the inversion of this proposition leads even further into the essence of nature: the mournfulness of nature makes her mute.  In all mournfulness there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness which is infinitely more than the inability of disinclination to communicate.  That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable.” 

Walter Benjamin (1978) On Language as Such and on the Language of Man [1916], Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books.  

“All the being of the world, if it dreams, dreams that it is speaking.”

 Gaston Bachelard (1971 [1960]) The Poetics of Reverie, Beacon Press: Boston , 188.

[Image above, Trees at the Tate, London June 2007, J Bowring]

[And, speaking of silence, if that is not too oxymoronic, all will be quiet on Passages, away to the wilds of Wellington for a week].