Every drop-off then was the smell of hot bread from the ovens behind the factory walls, made grey in the mind by it always being wet and dark, head-lights on. When I drive past the road today the smell of fresh baked bread still breaks out of those same walls, now Newberry’s Funeral Home, where the ovens are hotter and sealed tight. For the symmetry, it’s at Newberry’s I can be dropped-off, on a weekday, when there’ll be a fight for parks, everyone oblivious to the smells and memories of years ago.
Author Archives: Vaughan Gunson
Beneath Hikurangi
Cicadas singing in the fire of the sun. We used to think they lived so briefly and it was too easy for the mynahs to catch them in their yellow beaks, hold them for a moment, still singing; no wild struggle or hardly a change in pitch. After we learnt they lived for years underground, it wasn’t so bad. Now, listening to the cicadas in the crystal space of early summer, the hill, always there, cut-silhouette on the horizon, we’re happy enough in our grand mediocrity.
Arriving
We can’t get it right
like Newton—we search
for patterns to lay it down
in best durable forms
[laughter]: watch the sea
deal with rocks,
feel the sand between
your toes. Does it matter
that Antares can consume
663 trillion Earths?
Monstrous weight, that can,
if you like, be lifted
by the work of bees:
a miracle none foretold.
Let’s say of art
that it thinks differently
about the shape of mushrooms
we picked together
on Saturday—we don’t know
anything about them,
except two hours of fun
in paddocks: the biosphere
and adventure ours. No one’s
going nowhere
but the infinity of our own
creative purpose, arriving
at a place unknown.
The gods in my shed
When Apollo says he knows whether all the grains of sand in the world add up to odd or even, and that he knows too the measure of the oceans, and the number of insects that crawl the earth, and the days of cities and empires, or how many waves are curling now about to break, or that he sees each butterfly flapping its wings and knows where every ripple goes, he is saying we do not know and that we should revere the knowing which is forever beyond us, meditate on it daily, pour water on the backs of goats if we must, to remind ourselves what we do not know, and never can. That is the function of the gods I still keep on a shelve in my shed.
Olive pressing
Seventeen years, mostly ignored. Finally, we learnt to press the olives from our tree into oil, a process which widens out into a world of infinite connections: the universe of stars and dust. Such that I hardly know how to say what we did. Perhaps, like Homer, we’ll discover in writing something smarter than ourselves. First, we blitzed the olives in a food processor, which bounced on the bench, rattling and shrill-screaming, as it spun the hard stones and oily flesh into a khaki mash that smelt divine, like the dark loamy earth between the thighs of Papatuanuku. Each batch we scooped into a large pot and heated, until this indelicate mixture began sparkling like morning dew on a pile of dung. You can thank the sun for sending water to the mountains, and for it to fall back into our laps, though it took men like my grandfather wielding the levers to build the dams with steel cracked from red earth, combined with gravel and cement squeezed from soft grey clay; the hill at Portland almost gone. And all this flows to the turning of the press made from ageless aluminium, everywhere and nowhere in the Earth’s crust, journeying now into space… and held tight in our hands, to wrench the oily liquid from its fibrous body, as alumina is wrenched from bauxite using the holding power of alpine lakes. Oil rises to the top, best left overnight in a jar that you can dip a ladle into and funnel through muslin cloth. What’s left behind is an acerbic liquid any gardener will deploy with pleasure to cut off those obstreperous weeds in mid-growth. In a ceramic jug the oil will stay peppery to taste; a wealth stored, to be drizzled on the familial bread, and spilling over onto the plate bounded by its raised rim. With the last pieces of bread, we soaked up the thin pools of golden oil and licked our glistening fingers— like shining Gods we are, for a moment.
A butterfly’s wing
These sighs, lengthening loud; split world, cold glare, chances gone in a touch of time. * Pains and pleasures still bind a common hope. * A seamless sky behind the weight of Cherry Blossom. A petal turns into a butterfly’s wing.
Rain on banana leaves
I built a shed on a hill about the size of Thoreau’s. Nearby, I planted a grove of banana trees, lady’s fingers. When they’re grown and the broken heart of Autumn brings the heavy rains, I’ll shelter inside my shed and listen for the patter on banana leaves. I make a promise, Chu Shu, to think of you then and share together our ten thousand pains.
Devotions
In the summer centre, the island on a limb, the sun swelts the volcanic earth mixed with sand pushed up out of the sea. Manuka thrives, pink and white flowers speckle the near horizon. Beneath blackened boughs are deep pools of shade we dive into, a relief to skin and hot-flushed mind—such abundance, such hunger for contrasts given in plenty. * Flashes of silver, consumed by hunting eyes, somersault above the net, caught on our stage. The show, put on by the escapees, drags us from all over, as the watery world shrinks; the curtain drawn by long-shorted, dripping, wielders of the rope. At the wings, they hurl their catch of spike-nosed piper onto the beach in a rolling crescendo of pebbles and fish. * The southern wind edges the waves moving across the bay; white lines of static flicker and vanish: a jumpy picture of turquoise-blue blotted with shadows from dampened clouds above. Amidst the froth and crests of roughening seas birds in the distance race to a haven at the north end of Tokerau Beach, where the sands curve behind the rocks marked by Maui’s net. * The setting sun, like a cut blood-orange, bleeds out over the distant hills. The beauty, this time, is in the far view and the silhouette. In front of the lamp the Manuka are scissored. The shape of things distracts from mosquitoes at my ankles. We forget that we are prey often enough to believe in a moments bliss, ale in hand, crunching chips and dip.
The stonewalling shag
The shag declined to be interviewed, wouldn’t allow a photograph, said she knew nothing about the fish carcasses. “Ask the throttle-and-munch-em sea riders who were here last night.” She didn't have a song, just a certain way of puffing her chest, of being exactly where she was: the rock pools, the purple crabs, the decomposing seaweed, the curve of the bay. A rock higher than the high tide, an easy take off, these were her piper and pilchard. “Off the record, my silence was inevitable considering my original disposition to dive down under the horizon into the quiet.” After a long pause, while still looking out to sea, she said: “It's like this, those carcasses were of fish I knew in the way that you used to know the sky at night.” “Take what you want from that, I don't really care.”
New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission still puts growth before planet
New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission a few weeks ago released its draft advice to the government for consultation. The vision statement describes the future Aotearoa as a veritable utopia. This future land of ours will be “thriving,” “equitable,” “inclusive,” and “climate-resilient.” Carbon emissions will be low, we’ll have a “flourishing bio-economy,” and we’ll be “respected stewards of the land.” Transport will be “accessible to everyone equally.” Everyone will live in “warm, healthy, low emitting homes.” There will be “very little waste”, and energy will be “affordable.” Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? All we have to do is follow the advice of the report’s seven co-authors.
Some of that advice is good, like getting heavy freight off our roads by using rail and coastal shipping. And if the government were to take up the commission’s recommendations, new road construction would stop, and spending would be immediately diverted to the electrification of rail and public transport. The more I read through the report, however, the more I started to question its underlying assumptions. A major problem is how carbon emissions are calculated, which forms the whole basis for the proposed emissions reduction targets. Our emissions are those which are physically produced in this country when we travel domestically, fire up factory furnaces, and light our gas cookers. And when the country’s 10 million cows burp. Anything we import into the country isn’t included in our emissions.
According to the Climate Change Commission, a significant chunk of our transport emissions can be reduced by importing electric cars. They advocate phasing out the import of petrol-fuelled cars by 2032. The point is, the carbon emissions generated by the manufacture of all these electric cars won’t be included in our ledger. Though we’ll be the ones using them. Electric vehicles and their batteries are made with metals, plastics and raw materials sourced from around the world. The mining and manufacture of those materials are heavily reliant on fossil fuels, not easily replaced by renewable energy. Suppose the electric vehicles are then made in Germany, China and the United States. In that case, a substantial amount of the electricity used in the assembly will come from coal and gas-fired power stations. There are limits to how much low-cost renewable energy those countries can produce to cover the energy needs of their heavy industries.
It’s not just electric cars. New Zealand will have to import solar panels and wind turbines to generate the increased electricity we’ll need. As a country, we’ll be shopping our way to net-zero carbon emissions, consuming products with a high component of fossil fuel use in their construction and transportation. Effectively, we’ll be outsourcing our carbon emissions to other countries, where it will be their problem.
Another issue with the commission’s report is that our agriculture sector’s carbon equivalent emissions are dealt with lightly. There’s no call to regulate herd numbers or impose costs on our leading export earner, dairy. Farmers will largely find their own way by fine-tuning current farming practices and using new technologies. If every country goes easy on their biggest export earners, global emissions reductions will never progress at the necessary pace.
The Climate Change Commission is proposing we do something to reduce New Zealand’s emissions, but not too much that economic growth is adversely impacted. This is spelt out in passages in the report. It’s admitted that only a certain level of emission reduction is “possible at home” and that “offshore mitigation” will be needed. That means industries offsetting emissions by purchasing carbon credits overseas or investing in “carbon sinks,” like forest plantations in Siberia. The need for offshore mitigation assumes that other countries can do better than us. If all countries take this attitude to protect their economies and lifestyles, overall emissions reduction is clearly impossible.
The Climate Change Commission’s report is an overly optimistic vision of “green growth” that relies on importing high technology products and offsetting the emissions we’re unwilling to cut. That way, our economy, the commission predicts, will still grow 60 per cent by 2050. If the world economy grows at that rate, carbon emissions will continue to rise globally as a result of the massively increased energy demand. And the worst-case scenarios of catastrophic climate change will be inevitable.
Vaughan Gunson : Writing 