Skip to main content

Fossils

When the children were small, responding to an educational article in the kids' section of the Waikato Times, we drove to a cliff by the road near Raglan, and, armed with an unlikely assortment of tools, dug some Jurassic era bivalves out of the crumbling mudstone. Of course they weren't actually shellfish, they were just the bits that were left; they were not animals but was each an animal shaped rock, that had formed out of the sand filling  the cavities left by something long dead and decayed. One of them was nearly perfect. It looked a bit like a tuatua and I carried it in my pocket for years before giving it to Noah at his baptism.

Ask people who know and they'll look at the rocks and the little fossil shellfish and tell you what was going on at Raglan 150 million years ago,  give or take. It seems that back then a little creature lived briefly on the bed of some long gone sea. It lived as full and as rich a life as a shellfish is capable of living, which consisted I suppose, of filtering sludge and shuffling about the place with its tongue. It avoided those of its contemporaries which sought to eat it and it related, goodness knows how, to others of its kind, maybe even managing to score and leave a few descendants. After a time which seems brief to us but which probably had all the hallmarks of eternity to the shellfish, it karked it, floated to the bottom of the sea, got covered in sand and remained in darkness while continents shifted, and humans evolved sufficiently for one of them to read a newspaper, gather up the kids and go dig it out. For what seemed an eternity to me, I'd find it in my pocket when fumbling for my keys and be silently reminded of the vastness of the universe and of the strange and long forgotten world which once existed where Raglan now temporarily sits.
****
I've been reading the prophets. Taken together in one large chunk without the ameliorating influence of  lectionary prescribed sections of the epistles and gospels they can be a bit depressing. Of course there are the wonderful bits about rising on wings like eagles and having the heart of stone taken out and being given a heart of flesh, but mostly it seems as though YHWH is pretty ticked off at all the shenanigans with Asherah poles and is in smiting mode. I'm constantly aware that I'm not reading the full story here: what we have in the books of Joel and Jeremiah and all the others with their odd names is just the bits that were left. Once there was a vibrant, multidimensional culture filled with hope and intrigue and tenderness and violence. Once there were the great ones of the earth duking it out over the riches of  Palestine and the people of Palestine imagining that they were controlling all of that. Once there were some odd men given to piety, and not afraid to speak their minds, and seeing a deeper narrative behind the story of all that seemed so confronting and alarming. And now, like all things, the great ones of the earth are gone, as are the kingdoms they created and the people who inhabited them. All that are left are these words.

Ask people who know and they'll look at these old words and tell you  what was happening between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Coast in about 600 BC. It was a time of terror and the breaking of permanences. It was a time of anxiety and deep regret, all of which is perfectly preserved in the prophets.  But I'm not asking for that kind of expert opinion at the moment. I read the unadorned words, feeling them as I would the ridges on a fossil bivalve. They call back the long forgotten stories but they are also the entrance for me to a deeper story; into a greater narrative, one so big I can't begin to grasp it but merely to flow with it. It is telling me a story that goes back not just to Nebuchadrezzar and Ezekiel, but further - back even to the shallow sea where Raglan now stands. And back beyond then to where I can't even imagine its beginning.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
10 comments
Read more

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...
3 comments
Read more

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 ...
8 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more