Autumn

Autumn and Spring are the best times in Dunedin. The sun is always low so it perpetually feels like it's 9 o'clock in the morning. The light is clear and our place is sheltered from most winds. I make soup and bake bread and we sit on the deck to talk and look out over our lovely city. I have bought a diary, an actual one made of paper and cardboard with a little white pen to replace a plethora of cleverly interconnected apps. I have moved my cellphone charger away from the side of my bed and into my study; my phone is charged only once a day, overnight, and most days it's still more than half full when I go to bed. Life has slowed. Or rather, life has cleared, like the autumnal fog which is lifting from the harbour beneath me.

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We have been watching Ken Burn's documentary series on the American Civil War. There are 9 episodes, each about 70 minutes long, and consisting entirely of old photographs, interviews with historians and readings from documents - letters and journal entries mostly. It is a testament to the film maker's art that such dry ingedients have been shaped into such a compelling and engaging narrative. I knew next to nothing about this most seminal conflict until a week ago, but now find myself captivated by the complexity, the horror, the inexorability of this great drama and of its larger than life dramatis personae: The bumbling Northern Generals and the audaciously talented Southern ones; the unpopular president whose integrity and genius was only gradually and retrospectively revealed; the men who, in their tens of thousands were led to the slaughter and the women who mourned them or nursed them back to health. The American Civil War was one of the first modern conflicts. The denial of essential humanity and the mechanised slaughter in the name of abstracted principles was a pattern that was to be repeated incessantly over the next century. The Civil War explains so much of what America is and of who we in the West are. It is such a celebration of humanity and an indictment of what we have become.

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I'm reading Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary, of which I will post a proper review in due course. It's a big book, but I'm not hurrying through it; there is so much to learn and so much to savour. Our brains are neatly divided down the middle, with the two hemispheres being structurally and functionally different and McGilchrist explains what those differences are, and how the brain works as a whole to simultaneously perform tasks which are so mutually contradictory that they require, in effect, two separate apparatus. He has helped me deepen my understanding of much of my life and thinking and relating. His chapter on the development of language alone is well worth the price of the book. He illuminates the way the two hemispheres work together, and then posits that in the West, over the past few centuries, the Left hemisphere has become dominant to the benefit and to the deep peril of us all. The dominance of the left hemisphere made possible, for example, the beginnings of anaesthetics and hygenic surgery during the Civil War, and the rifled muskets and Ironsides and Gatling guns which made them necessary.

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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...

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 incomp...

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 Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

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...

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