Dougal McNeill

Studying the Encyclical Letter (and thinking of Patti Smith’s reminder in “Horses” that, in that Tower of Babel, ‘they knew what they were after’). A friend highlighted this passage for me, a good guide for various things just now:

‘Fearing being scattered across the earth, they sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to “make a name” for themselves. It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.’

‘Hanging up on himself the way he always did’. This line, from Paula Morris’s ‘Isn’t It’ , was the first thing that came into my head on waking this morning. The critic Christopher Ricks, I learn from James Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life (2015), found at the Mary Potter Hospice Op Shop yesterday, ‘once proposed that a fairly good test of literary quality is if a sentence or image or phrase of a writer comes to your mind unbidden when you are, say, just walking down the street’. Morris’s did that for me, as pleasure and as warning.

And then O what a glorious sight: graduate students boo every time former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mumbles AI blethers at their commencement. A fine display of free-speech traditions in action, and a healthy registration of disgust. Michelle Goldberg, writing in the NYT yesterday, gave some statistics around how little younger people are buying the slop mongers' hype. Why should they?

The confidence men busy pushing their AI masquerades into universities always write _as if _student demand for it is universal, urgent, instantly to be addressed. I’m not so sure. And why do they want us to be in such a hurry?

Still hard to believe this is how it is in Welllington now. Walking down the stairs to put out the rubbish and there she is: with ah! bright wings.

Woke up this morning with my head still full of the set of _Toe Fai! _and Talaucaka, shows (fragments of a wider universe?) I was lucky to see at Circa last night. Grace O’Brien’s design was so startling! Simple, stark, challenging, somehow both elegant and chillingly intimidating (as it ought to have been for these climate dystopias). Everything about the night was rewarding: fine acting; the chance to hear Gagana Tokelau on the stage (my first, I’m sure); a script that is challenging and ambitious and unafraid of ideas and abstraction (rare enough here!); an unashamedly intellectual and Science Fiction approach that’s also physical, embodied, spare, felt. Emele Ugavule has made something rich and strange.

Tina Makereti’s work is an almost constant source of instruction and delight for me, and I’m feeling pleasure this morning in knowing This Compulsion in Us has been celebrated at the Ockhams. I’ve taught myself not to have opinions on prizes (I’ve not read all of the entries, so who am I to say who ought to have won, and what’s winning anyway in a reading world reliant on exchange, community, connection, talk?), but I do know that books take a lot of work and have a lot to give, and rarely get the discussions they need in our press. So it’s an exciting sense, this morning, feeling that this book will find more readers and that its essays will work their way into more lives. They’ve changed my way of thinking and keep changing it: they can do the same to you.

The Newsroom report writes of This Compulsion in Us’s “intense focus on race”. That seems to me wrong, and to miss the book’s point. It’s about whakapapa, and it’s organised by whakapapa, absolutely. But what isn’t? “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere”, the Master wrote, “and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” Perhaps a Māori artist is gifted with the ability not to worry so much about that appearance of an ending. Makereti writes carefully (and well) about being Māori and being Pākehā, and being both at once and finding ways to come out of spaces she was allowed to be neither. Those are topics as far from a “focus on race” as I can imagine. It’s a text in search of relations.

And, most important to that search, the family story ordering the essays is a way of thinking about (and honouring) whakapapa through writing an almost universal experience that can only be encountered in an irreducibly singular form. We’re all children; many of us become parents. We all will lose either our parents or our children, or both. How that happens is the story of each of our individual life: I’m not Makereti, I haven’t lived her life and don’t pretend to know the inside of her mind. None of us can know anyone that way. But she’s given me - us, all of us who read her works - access to her own processes of thought and composition and storytelling and searching and, out of that, I find something to guide my own. There’s a politics hovering behind and around all of this, certainly (we’ve got to find a way, if we’re going to live here meaningfully, to share our stories and to make sense of how we’re here, Pākehā as much as Māori). But there’s also a generosity, and the presence of a kind of grace. And that’s nothing to do with ‘race’.

Congratulations to this fine book and wishing it many more readers. I’ll take it down again from the shelf after work today.

I’ve been trying to teach Janet Frame’s work for the first time these past weeks, working with the elegant new edition of The Edge of the Alphabet from Fitzcarraldo. One pleasure when introducing a work just this good is that, no matter how bad or boring your own teaching might be, or how much you might get wrong, no one’s time will be wasted. The chance is there to read Frame in all her beauty and brilliance!

And that beauty and brilliance led me back, after twenty-five years away, to the Autobiography. This, from An Angel at My Table, captures the experience of reading its author:

“There is a freedom born from the acknowledgement of greatness in literature, as if one gave away what one desired to keep, and in giving, there is a new space cleared for growth, an onrush of a new season beneath a secret sun. Acknowledging any great work of art is like beingin love; one walks on air; any decline, destruction, death are within, not in the beloved; it is a falling in love with immortality, a freedom, a flight in paradise.”