Skip to main content

Danielle

I came across this remarkable little film just yesterday. I am astonished by the technical brilliance of the film maker, Anthony Cerniello, but there is more than that. The piece is a reminder that we are not things: we are, each one of us, a process. We are a particular configuration of energy which is in perpetual change; and this energy pattern had a beginning and one day will have an end. 

This film is very beautiful.  The face is beautiful and the changes wrought over the years are, to me, awe inspiring. How astonishing that the food consumed by this little girl can be reconfigured into bone and flesh and brain tissue. How amazing that a design for a human being can so relentlessly and powerfully unfold. And as I watch her change in the space of five minutes, I ask, "when does she become more, or when less beautiful?" And the answer is, "she does not". At every stage of her continuous journey from childhood to old age she is constantly and equally lovely. I think of the efforts our culture puts into fixing the ideal of beauty somewhere in the early 20s, and think of the ludicrousness of that ideal and of the constant damage it does to the 90% of us who don't fit it.

Perhaps my viewing of the film was enhanced by my visit to the doctor on Monday. Nothing was wrong, particularly, but every three months I have a blood test and, in the week following, visit my GP to be told the results and to have an injection of the gunk which keeps me alive. I have recently changed doctors, so this was my first session with the new one. I sat in his room and we chatted about the history of my various treatments. He brought up my blood test results on his computer and the gunk is obviously doing its job: my psa level has descended into the undetectable region and, so he tells me, it's likely to stay there for a very long time. He opened the elaborate little package I had brought with me, took out the syringe and the little vials, mixed the paste and injected it into my shoulder. He gave me a prescription for the next dose, weighed me and took my blood pressure. I walked out into the lightly falling snow and made, as I sometimes do, a small personal pilgrimage.

I drove up the hill to Halfway Bush and to the house my family lived in when I was a small child. There, in that little place and the tiny park behind it which was my playground, the memories of my childhood seem close enough to touch. I sat in the car with a dull ache in my upper arm reminding me of the fragility of life and of my own ending and I thought of a Hornby clockwork train set laid out on the bare boards of the lounge floor one Christmas morning, only fifty feet away in space but fifty seven years away in time. 

It all seems so close, beginning and ending. 

The little film of Danielle is captivating because it is my own story. It is the story of us all.

Comments

craig mclanachan said…
Great post Kelvin. Yes the film is lovely but a little disconcerting, to me at least. As a fellow inmate of Halfway Bush I really liked your memories. I was just thinking about it today, the isolation, lack of any infrastructure and feeling of being dropped onto a foreign planet. The roads were gravel tended by a horse and dray ( + man). The first few years from'57 saw roads sealed, shops , churches and a school. Winters were more severe, fogs more common but the freedom to run wild! This new suburb was a social experiment with lots of State Housing. It was to be repeated in Brockville shortly afterwards. I have good memories from there - the neighbourly friendships, the wide skies, the native birds and my own friends. I missed it so much when we had to move, I still do - I go there too!
Kelvin Wright said…
I think of the course my family life took once we left Halfway Bush, and that time in that little house seems to me a kind of Eden; it was a time of joy and innocence. The snow was deep in the winter and there were hills to climb and bush to play in and a creek to catch yabbies and swings and lots of kids my own age to do it all with. But of course the seeds of what was to come were already there, even as I was innocent of them. The old story is right - the fall from innocence comes with knowledge. My nostalgia when parked in Ashmore St. isn't for the place but for that time of harmony. I am under no illusions that things may have been better had we stayed there.
Alistair said…
Great memories of the last innocence of Childhood. Still have the remains of the clockwork trainset in my garage. I open it occasionally & reminisce back to the park you stood in before they came with Bulldozers & planted grass. The forts we built & defended dressed in cowboy suits made of sugar bags. Sitting with Craig on the mounds watching our home made boats float on the ponds beneath. Racing trollies down the hills. Then devastatingly having to leave to a time of confusion & bewilderment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats