by way of a prelude

“...for stories, as histories, must be past, and the further past, one might say, the better for them as stories and for the storyteller, that conjurer who murmurs in past tenses. But the problem with our story, as also with many people nowadays and, indeed, not the least with those who tell stories, is this: it is much older than its years, its datedness is not to be measured in days, nor the burden of age weighing upon it to be counted by orbits around the sun; in a word, it does not actually owe its pastness to time -- an assertion that is itself intended as a passing reference, an allusion, to the problematic and uniquely double nature of that mysterious element.”
---- Thomas Mann
‘The Magic Mountain’




I imagine everyone has a lead in. A period leading up that is full of signs and wonders. It has been discussed widely that many chemicals are released during pregnancy, and especially with birth, and I’m happy to testify that they all work and make for an intense experience. Point of fact is I’ve never experienced consciousness in a state like I did in the week leading up to, during, and after the birth of Zap. It was straight dope.

Partly I blame Daniel Campion for this state of consciousness.

On Wednesday the 29th of march I travelled to Masterton with Dan as he was delivering one of his paintings to a buyer. I went with him, partly for a drive and partly to see off a painting I had much admired of two horses called Night Becomes. As a tangent on the painting I had visited Mr Campion in his studio as he was painting the outside parts of the panels and he roped me into painting the black panel. Which I did but painted in the right hand bottom underside “LHB waz hair”. Dan painted over it, grumbling.



Having dropt off the painting, to a thoroughly nice guy, we went to leave Masterton when Dan decided to get some KFC. I went along with him and got a burger. Now I havn’t eaten KFC since this time three years ago when I went into Gore after milking with James and neither of us could be bothered to cook tea so we got some of that stuff.

As I ate this burger it tasted like something bad. I had caught a glimpse of teenagers working in KFC as we went through the drivethrew. As I ate my burger and tasted how wrong it tasted I soundly realised getting underpaid teenagers to cook your chicken is probably a bad idea. At the same time this made me reflect on the work of the Unite! union under the leadership of Matt McCarten. They had recently made some news with the high school students going on strike and blocking off Queen St. Interestingly Unite! won their negations with Restaurant Brands, the company that runs most of the major fast food joints here and in Australia. At the same time I was aware of the protests in France of the new youth employment bill and that millions of students and Unions members had taken to the streets. It looked like the French were having a few good old ‘Night of the Barricades’ like they had in ‘68 and 1936 and 1871 and 1848 and 1830 &c...

That night, Wednesday night, I was struck by a terrible nausea and vomited at 40 minute episodes throughout the night. By morning I was devastated and felt like I had been hit by a truck. Friday I was still bed bound and couldn’t eat solids.

As all of this went on Sicily also was bed bound with a bad cold. At this point I told our unborn child that if she came when we were both sick I would call her Zap and she would have to wait until she’s 18 to change her name by deed poll.

Friday the 31st was the due date all the midwives had put forward (and I really do think pregnancy is a midwives gig). Both Sicily and I were still bed bound with DVDs and the paper. I noticed in it a picture of the French situation. A young student is on the ground being set upon by another bunch of youths who all seem to be of North African decent. The same set who were supposedly behind the riots where all the cars got set on fire.

One interesting thing is that all the youths are dressed in urban gear influence by American street wear. Further these “hooded youths” stole cell phones and cameras while beating up the protesters. Interesting state of affairs. The new face of the grand old French tradition of the night of the barricades, perhaps.

At some stage I went on line to look for a bit of information on the French situation and as the net operates I came across this article.


http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21820

It’s weird how having a baby can so easily be used as propaganda for something that at it’s core is grossly sublime. One of the last things Sicily and I did while she was still pregnant was attend the multi ethnic day in Lower Hutt. At some point a man gave me a rolled poster of the Treaty of Waitangi which I tapped Sicily on the belly with and Zap leapt to life. While sick in bed I had read the Hutt News and there was a reporter claiming that at the Ethnic day muslims were not visibly present. Which struck me as odd when it was a ethnicity day not a religious day. I guess that’s the difference; the hooded youths are described elsewhere as Muslim youths but the French student is never described as Catholic (which I would presume him to be, in that french anticlerical way). This reminded me of the time Sicily and I were invited into the Dunedin Mosque by members of the Otago University Islamic society. I talked with several of the young men and found them to be patient, thoughtful and gentle. It was working for them. At one stage I apologised to one of the young men for the crusades.
“What crusades?” He asked politely.
This was August 2001.
Shortly after that Sicily and I along with T. attended a public meeting in the Student Union in response to the Towers coming down. I don’t recall much of it except the president of the University Islamic society, one of the ernest young men I had chatted with, did a short speech which he ended by saying “God have mercy on us all.” and it was said with the most powerful pathos. It made me realise that the symbolic issue is, as it has always been, how to resolve the crescent with the cross.

When our child was born and we were all juiced up on oxytocin we had to fill in forms saying whether Zap is a European New Zealander or what? Such statistics can then get picked up to say New Zealanders of European descent need to have 6.8 children each to reproduce the workforce to be able to allow them to retire. Yet on average they have 2.5, and Immigrant families breed more, enabling fearmongerers to spark off that fear in unassuming citizens. I recall a passage by Jung:

“Since everybody is blindly convinced that he is nothing more than his extremely unassuming and insignificant conscious self, which performs its duties decently and earns a moderate living, nobody is aware that his whole rationalistically organised conglomeration we call a state or a nation is driven on by seemingly impersonal, invisible but terrifying power which nobody and nothing can check. This ghastly power is mostly explained as fear of the neighbouring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a malevolent fiend. Since nobody is capable of recognising just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbour, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas. The worst of it is that he is quite right. All one’s neighbours are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear, just like oneself. In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.”

The point of this story, and maybe not that absurd, is that if KFC paid better wages the world might not be so crook.