Authors: Stephen Chan
The second time was less successful but, working from the old histories that bomb shelter tunnels ran under the university, Albert Park and the Supreme Court, Anton conceived a vision of the Supreme Court undermined by explosives and sinking into the warren of tunnels. One day, Stephen and Geoff walked calmly into the Auckland City Council map room and, unchallenged, found the archival map of the tunnels and, equally unchallenged, walked out with it. The nearest (disused) entrance was at the Beach Road foot of Constitution Hill and, for nights, Anton and his gang of colleagues hacked towards the buried door. It was discovered, of course, Beach Road being a major thoroughfare to the city, to the harbour, to the railway station (‘that’s why they put an entrance there,’ said Stephen. ‘It’s strategic, OK? You stupid fuckwit.’). The arguments that ensued led to the coalition of colleagues, forever only proto-comrades, disbanding. But one faction took the dynamite and, tunnels be damned, one night a safe time after, blew up the oaken doors of the Supreme Court. A gesture, if ever there was one, said Geoff. But gestures were the only stuff of the revolution in those crimson frock-coated days, and the pathways to justice never did lay down their paving slabs between the splintered porticos of the Court.
The third time was Anton’s greatest triumph, and this was the storming of the US Consulate. He even synchronised the lifts so that thirty protesters debouched simultaneously into the vestibule of the Consulate. Before startled staff could react, the students were in full control and were sitting-in, politely listening to the single professor who had accompanied them – who was reading from a war crimes tribunal and had a rope symbolically around his neck (for this was the first sit-in and he envisaged the first loss of tenure) – when the police arrived and, before the television cameras, rather gently carried them out. Other professors posted bail and a team from the School of Law provided Stephen with the convolutions of his self-defence in court
– anything to prolong the fascination of the public with the advent of the outside world and its concerns upon New Zealand shores. But no tenure was lost, and no more vanguard activities took place. Other, more ideologically-bound, comrades took over the revolution and from then on the emphasis was upon mass mobilisations, leading eventually to 10,000 very peaceful marchers on the streets of Auckland, and the romantics drifted towards the dissidence of unusual women and drugs, and Baudelaire, and any French poet who celebrated the melancholy illness of life, and sought to establish a new national poetics, since there would be no new national politics.
But, while in police custody, Stephen found himself opposite the cell of the single Rhodesian refugee who had joined the protesters, one of two Rhodesian refugees in the entire country, studying under scholarships raised among the students – not from either the government or the universities – and, speaking across the corridor from their small grates, Stephen heard for the first time of an African struggle greater than any New Zealand revolution.
For Anton was right; Stephen was struggling to become a New Zealander – not any New Zealander, but a countryman who viewed the outside world. Provided that outside world was not the China he had known from its refugee residue in Auckland. But he allowed himself as close as the borderlands – Vietnam, later Cambodia; later and circuitously he could approach the real China via Japan, specifically Okinawa – but, for now, the idea of a moral New Zealand engaged him. It was a project lost before he began it. The parochial islands of Heaven’s Cloud were God’s own refuge from the Out There, the not-conceived outback of oceans and foreign shores, the marginalised aborigines of a no-nonsense safeguarded heart.
But Anton’s greatest service to Stephen was purely domestic. In a strange conjunction, one night the Manfredian Byron and the Manchurian Byron dined with Stephen’s dragon grandmother, and the dragon had – thinking, probably rightly, that his influence over Stephen was baleful – conspired to slight Anton. Stephen promptly
declared this an unforgivable insult and, indeed, never forgave her – and never spoke to her again, formally burying the hatchet only long after she was dead and he had spilled out of a ten-year exile from New Zealand, unshaven, unwashed but heavily scented, and had directed his taxi-driver to her grave, muttering homilies by then about ancestors and their post-mortem work of preserving wayward descendants on the gun-strewn plains of Africa. But, in the New Zealand of the late 1960s, Stephen sought only escape from all she stood for, all her false histories of how one was predestined to act in foreign lands by carrying always the residue of one’s own. Like a vase of earth worn by the heart. But Stephen had never seen this earth, was repelled by the vases on display, and vowed no man would weigh his heart with the simple fictions that distance would insist was culture and authenticity. I cast down your history, Stephen said; and he excluded his grandmother from his earth; but opened up heart and vase to the pallid light of an autumn moon.
And this was the history of Anton and Stephen, and Geoff and all the others who, for one season, packed cartridges and detonators in their cigarette cases, and walked in a colour like the rose of sunset. Theirs was a hidden history. Some months later, it was Anton who planned the first free-speech love-ins that attracted thousands every Sunday to Albert Park. But neither Anton nor Stephen ever went there. A man who never planned anything mesmerised the crowds in their absence, and made his great Alsation a symbol of the park. And this was New Zealand, dazzled by silver words. One day, the establishment would find a place for the man who spoke so well and, if still radical, would accommodate it as an eccentricity. But the other history of the revolution is a secret one. How Stephen turned from it, and what he inherited from the Alsatian of the park, seems sometimes like a moonlight shadow.
When it rained, a stream ran through it. And that was Parnell, and that was seduction in a barely excavated half-basement beneath the People’s Republic of Gibraltar Crescent, and those were the trees of childhood, and all he remembered was the green and the stream, and the breathless waif of a girl who lay there for him on a bed raised on stones above the clay floor; and, when they did not lie there, Brutus the dog lay there and Stephen’s body would seem sometimes like a rose tattoo of flea bites. He would emerge, half a litre lighter and escort the girl, half carry her – she was sometimes so weak – up the hill to look at the white museum and imagine, simultaneously, he could never leave; it would one day exclude him like a softened penis and, plop, he would be over the edge of a page he was still writing. For years he fingered an edge, but stayed to cry for the girl and carry her when it seemed she was dying for a very final time.
For if ever he imagined himself an Orpheus, singing to the trees of the Domain, she was his Eurydice, the temporarily recovered bride from a dream of women he had some lifetimes ago. Now, this child-woman, all of 84lbs of skin and bone – only the frontal ribs no longer moved. With each effortful breath, only the back moved. That part above her heart would never heave with desire for him. So, frozen ribs and dying lungs. She could take half an hour to climb a flight of stairs. But she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and when, one day in the back of a lecture hall, the unpublished don droning on about the grammar of Beowulf, she reached across and wrote on his lecture pad, ‘if you really want to make love to me it will be like lying on bones,’ he was delighted with the vision. To anchor the vision she drew a picture of them making love, and drew herself painfully thin, without breasts, and hip bones as prominent as her ribs. It has to be slow, she said, and if I pass out from lack of breath I want you to continue. I would like to know I have received you when I return from the other lands and that I am loved as a spirit is loved. He loved her. He asked the gods if he might die in place of her. And her angles and protrusions, her stillness when lying down, her complete
lack of voluptuousness moved him on his nightly walks when he sought to breathe deeply for them both. The world of politics is not the real world, she said, lying on the Parnell bed. You think of the people’s straight line through the false histories of the rulers. There is no straight line. The world is a microdot in the whirling circles of the cosmos, and our lives – even if turbulently – come back always to their defining points. Each great-circled time you come back more breathless than before, and hope to sail on winds more freely, more lightly, with fewer questions than before – until you float without resistance in God’s great universe. And you, if you love me, but cannot have me now, you will come back to me over and over again, and I will receive you without thought, but briefly, every single time.
But he resisted this. If any one of us is to leap into a void, he said, how should the other recognise her return? And after how long? And for how long does the brevity of reparadise remain? In his mind he preferred the image Dante saw in his underworld – the two lovers intertwined forever, floating without resistance certainly on the winds of hell. So fierce their embrace, even the angels or demons took pity on them and prised them not apart. And if the demons were really fallen angels, then they retained – as Milton and Blake knew they did – not a little beauty as well as their pity. For him, this preferable hell was a place of beauty and compassion. But her eternal brief return, punctuated by the pain and mashed incisions of a Catherine’s Wheel, meant a full turn of agony before the lost bride’s recovery. And, each time, how could one resist less? Knowing full well the repetition of impending loss. Call me husband, he said, long hair falling over her bones, but she gently led his head to her hips and said in turn, I want the work of your lips so you will be silent as I tell you a story. Kiss me there, brief husband.
Think of Anton’s own secret history: how he was expelled from the millennial religion of his late father. These people want to be pure within their own small community, certainly did not want Anton with them, for they promised themselves that God would let them live one thousand years in a seamless paradise, a grace sensorium. After one thousand years, there will be another sifting out of hidden Antons,
who will burn forever, even as their very recent brothers and sisters will live forever without grief or rancour. They hope to live forever in a linear history on this microdot in the universe and imagine themselves blessed. But it is Anton, in his grief, in his dispossession by friends, brothers and sisters, of those very friends, brothers and sisters, who will live more truly and taste the human bittersweetness which has its own greater essence in the universe. Even twenty years from now, when he recalls the pomposity by which he was expelled, and regrets that brothers shun him, when he is rent in turns by hilarity and bitterness, it is Anton who will be feeding back into the emotions of the universe, and it is the others who will be as mummified relics, bypassed by the cosmic wheel, the dervish of God.
And you, brief husband, it is a wonder your refugee immigrant family did not fall prey to such evangelism, did not seize upon the instant cake-mix of everlasting life as a bargain by which both foothold was gained in host community, in the Book of the host, and in the perpetuity of life which had hitherto been so uncertain.
She was weeping now, something she had learned in place of gasping on her slow and blue-burning climax. But whether she was also weeping for something else – out of pity for Anton or out of relief for having explained something to Stephen – he could not tell. He wondered why she had so little hair there, whether it was a by-product of hyper-asthma turning into slow-burning tuberculosis. He looked up at her ribs, wondered that she could live at all with so little air there. He was hard like titanium, but did not want to release it, nor for her to touch it while she wept. But he could release the mental side of the ache – only it led to a sort of delirium, thinking of
La Bohème
and Mimi’s lungs (how could she, therefore, sing like that?), of everlasting breath and everlasting life, so he came up to her face and asked her, What about my people? The Chinese have a Taoism in two streams. One seeks indeed to live forever on this earth. Five immortals found the Way through the alchemy of magic teas which they drank from a golden woman. The other talks of time, space, circles, the release of self and the jettisoning of resistance – just as you do.
Oh, she said, you can have this duality. I want you to have both, but
not the single line of history to the alchemised disappearance of the state that you now espouse. And, anyway, what I am saying is older than Taoism. It comes from Sumer. Gilgamesh sought everlasting life and the legends blame Ishtar for denying him. But if men no longer lived in cycles, her moon could no longer shine in cycles, and the tides would drown mankind as they almost did only a few years before Gilgamesh, and Uta Napushtim had to build a boat of reeds gathered only by moonlight.
He thought, the delirium’s contagious. But she reached down with her fingers and stroked like a very earth-linked woman and, because her lack of breath meant she could never do this for him on a prolonged basis, she pursed her lips for him just before he came, and this was his soft moment beside the trees of Heaven’s Cloud.
His grandfather, a gold miner, had been called Moon Wan – nothing to do with the moon, or moon girls; it meant Securely Fastened Door. But there was nothing secure in the early manhood of his grandson. So, one insecure day, walking down Parnell road, clutching a late breakfast of a pie and pint of milk, he met James Baxter, whom he stubbornly refused to call Jim or Hemi, for Stephen was present as James began the last legend of his legendary life, and he accepted the unkempt and unwashed hermit-in-rehearsal, as he was certainly rehearsing that late morning on Parnell Road, and he bummed a piece of Stephen’s pie and some slurps of his milk and, afterwards, wrote a poem in which, very unflatteringly, he recorded the meeting, and Stephen had become a garbage eater, pugnacious, sly, something about a tomcat’s eye. The poem was addressed to another New Zealand poet with an image-in-rehearsal, Sam Hunt, and became infamous for the easy rhyme, ‘Sam Hunt, Sam Hunt, Sam Hunt, Sam Hunt / the housewife with her oyster cunt…’, but ended with the lines about Stephen and the acknowledgement that he might fuck the girls
James and Sam might miss. Wryly, Stephen forswore pies for the rest of his time in New Zealand, and certainly tried to court, if not fuck, the cloud-bound island of women. And he forgave James, for he knew that here was a broken soul who could heal itself only if it could manifestly – and he italicised the word ‘manifestly’ in his diagnosis and log of James – be seen to be healing others, and seen to be loving those who could not be healed. Here is the man who would wash the feet of Jesus with his hair, thought Stephen, even when those feet were clean. That man will rub raw the holy feet and, to make up for it, will then cut off his own. He had never met someone whose very great true love was drawn from a wellspring of even greater true guilt. And every time James did something good, he felt worse if – first – he had felt pleasure in it. The more he healed, the more difficult his own healing became; but without the attempt, the heart of James would have packed it in some years before it finally did.