1
It’s a first day of school every year.
This year another group of Year Nine students gather outside the hall. Their white shirts are very white, their skirts hanging stiff still hold the factory pressing in their seams. The call and response karanga quiets them but the nervous first-day excitement runs through the 200 new girls like a skittish cat looking for an exit in a room full of closing doors. The karanga slowly pulls them into the hall, and they steadily drain from the outside in, taking seats on the benches looking towards the stage where the senior students and staff are waiting. For a while the size of the hall and the serious tone of the speakers will still them, the 200 new girls, but in time the foreignness of Māori, and the length of the speeches will make them restless. The nerves which never quite settled will stir, the heart quicken, the thoughts chasing their tails will start circling again: “Will I be OK, will I have a friend, will I get lost, will I be OK …”.
This year it is the first day here for my friends’ daughter. Last year my younger daughter began school; four years before that my older daughter.
2
Time never cares, if you’re there or not there—Celebrate, Anderson .Paak
In Waimarama you can see the stars.
Sometimes when you’re out in the country and you walk out into the night, and you glance up, for no real reason—you just flick your eyes there—the stars: their depths, that immensity, their distance, scope and quantity; it can wound you. Wound you because you forgot about the stars, forgot about their magnitude and your actual size, forgot that the very washed-out quality of the stars that struggle to shine against the lights of the city where you live have let you become self-absorbed. The light of the cellphone is brighter. The TV. The noise of life is always there, strangling off silence.
And much of time, and much of life, has been silent, and lit only by the stars at night, and we were not needed, and still aren’t.
3
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream—The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
My grandfather, my father’s dad, was born in 1888. When he was a young man he went with his father out into the backcountry of south Otago to build fences. They slept out there. Out there on the hills, in the long grass, with the coils of wire, and posts, listening to the emptiness, examining the stars. He wrote long letters to a girl he liked describing the beauty of the bush, and the birds, and the long sweep of the land that lay all about like an open hand on its back, fingers curled up and inward.
One day, many decades later, his daughter donated an old handbag to the Sallies and forgot that the letters he had written were inside, and the letters were lost, but he was once a young man who wrote love letters to the girl who would be his wife, and not just an old man, with a haggard face, and long earlobes. Not just a phoney widower.
4
I am the boy in the photo. A picture of a boy standing on the deck at the back of his home next to his mother. My mother has her arm through mine, but I am standing quite awkwardly, pinned to the moment unwillingly. It is a photo of my first day at secondary school and I am in my uniform: a maroon jersey but otherwise grey and grey and grey.
My mother and I had moved to a new town and I knew that I would know no one at my new school. I remember the feeling of that. The feeling all that summer of having been released from the routine and friendships of my last school into something unknown ahead.
I don’t now remember much of my first day. We probably had an assembly, but I don’t remember it. We probably had classes but I don’t remember them. I do remember realising that being in class where you sat and followed instructions was better than the times between classes when the isolating structure of the classroom unravelled into the free flow of friends talking, their voices high with the excitement of their first day, their voices bouncing all around the corridors and playing fields.
When you have no friends you are vulnerable and you feel your vulnerability. It is as if you were a deer that had wandered out of the forest in a dream and found itself standing in an exposed field, alien scent on the wind.
The boy who came and sat next to me at lunch saved us both. Our conversation saved us because it made us invisible. We were no longer lone figures of curiosity at the edge of the tar-sealed courts, but just two people hanging out talking at lunchtime. I received his gesture like a farmer receives the drought-breaking rain. After that I don’t remember loneliness at school. I remember friends. I remember cycling home. I remember songs, and the spirit of those songs.
5
I never wanna waste your time, my life
So precious, is yours, is mine
And look at the time, my God
So precious, is yours, is mine
—Am I Wrong, Anderson .Paak
The week before the first day of school this year, and the 200 Year Nine students, and the karanga, we went to Waimarama where you can see the stars. I have never understood stars, except as symbols. Last year when we went to Waimarama I located some stars and looked up their statistics, but knowing things about certain stars seemed to mean nothing, and I am unimpressed by playing join the dots to make shapes in the night.
The message of the stars is simple. It is the same message as the waves. It is a message about matter and cycles; about bodies and ellipses. About how we are formed and unformed. The light fades in the west, the light grows in the east, the waves ride up the shore, then recede, and we ride on the present, that moment that separates our increasing past from our decreasing future, our journey around the ellipse of our life. In photo albums you see hundreds of pieces of present pinned like butterflies or moths to a plain background: my birth, my first day at school, my marriage.
Should I write captions for the photos? Should I write a story? How do I make these specimens of the present come back to life?
6
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
—A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, John Donne
I read about Kepler for the purpose of understanding stars but became interested in the other things in his life.
Kepler wrote a little book about snowflakes, and wondered about the most efficient way to stack cannonballs, and defended his mother against charges of witchcraft while writing Harmonices Mundi.
While defending his mother he sought to prove that God—in whose name his mother was being prosecuted—had created a harmonious world along geometric and musical principles: to show that the human soul, and the souls of the planets are in divine interplay.
Ten years earlier he had written a story in which the mother of the protagonist learns the secrets of space travel from a demon.
7
I am the boy in the photo. A picture of a boy standing on the deck at the back of his home next to his mother. My mother has her arm through mine, but I am standing quite awkwardly, pinned to the moment unwillingly.
My mother in that photo was 46. When my older daughter goes to secondary school I will be 46. We will take photos. She might be wearing the bright white shirt, and the stiff new dark blue skirt, she might be—in that photo—an hour or two away from crowding at the doors of the hall with her friends with a knot in her tummy as the karanga floats out above her head.
And I will have been the parent in the photo next to their child who is turning imperceptibly into an adult. Only now do I understand my mother’s arm through mine in that photo; until now I only understood my own discomfort as the shy teenage boy’s resistance to affection. Resistance to affection that I regret, and that I hope I will not experience myself in the future photo of my oldest girl and I in 2020.
Growing up requires grappling with moving perspectives. Growing up can suddenly help you to understand your parents. Your grandparents. It is disorientating. Unsettling. How could I have been so self-absorbed, I wonder, so self-absorbed so as not to notice the simple fact that the person I called Mum had once too been a child, and had grown, and gone to school, and loved and resisted her parents too. Like the moment I looked at pictures of my mother and father’s marriage and realised that she was beautiful.
Like that moment at uni when I discovered that the Pet Shop Boys were gay, and a level of meaning suddenly flooded into their songs as if I had been all the time looking down at the stars thinking they were a phenomenon of the surface of a lake, and then by chance had looked up.
8
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
—To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell
The mechanism of my heart and mind beats a steady rhythm, an andante kick and snare, a boom, tick, boom, tick that rarely changes outside of fighting temptations against which I sometimes do not wholeheartedly want to win, and then I feel the heart’s beat suddenly lunge forward. Then the whole of me seems to shudder with the strain of the increased speed, as all the seams of me begin to vibrate and separate at the higher frequency. It’s not what I remember. The heart used to say “go” and everything went. Now I think it is age which creates hesitation before action, and has a foot hover over the brake; age which means more past to reflect on, and better—or at least more pessimistic—foresight.
Young lovers sit out by the beach at night and talk between the fall of the waves and the dusk and dawn. Old lovers snooze on the couch.
9
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
—The Sun Rising, John Donne
Kepler wrote a story about going to the moon. It was called The Dream. The scientific purpose of the story was to imagine what it would be like to practise astronomy from the moon. That is, to have the reader taken out of their Earth-centred self and allow them to imagine what the first astronauts would see 350 years later: Earth from the outside.
It is tempting, but probably historically inaccurate, to think that it was writing this book that saw his mother charged with witchcraft ten years later, for the narrator’s mother, in that book, learns the secrets of space travel from a demon. For Kepler’s mother’s prosecutors, the line between fiction and reality was easily crossed. For others, poetry or the line in a song helps piece together the divine mystery.
10
I only own one thing from my father’s mother. It is a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. On the inside cover, in pencil, she has written her name, and then at the bottom of the page the date: 1911. She was 20 then and, I think, unknown to the man who would be her husband.
I have no way of knowing if she read The Pilgrim’s Progress or why my father had it, but there is one page that has a X in the margin marking a particular passage.
The Lord says, “Strive to enter in at the strait gate,” the gate to which I send thee; “for strait is the gate that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
I think it is easier to believe that there isn’t a god. For my grandmother, who was once not a grandmother, or even a mother, it might have been easier to understand the death of her own mother at 12, the death of two of her siblings through illness and mishap, the remarriage of her father and his whole new family, if she had believed not in god but in the utter indifference of the universe to our existence.
When she was put in Seacliff Lunatic Asylum in 1930 she had been married for ten years and had had four children.
I like to believe, although I have no proof, that she received the letters my grandfather sent eagerly, and ripped them open with trembling fingers. That she loved her children before she was overwhelmed. That she felt, as each parent feels, the bump in her heart as her first born went off to school.
11
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
—To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell
Like most overused abstract nouns love seems a simple word, and like most simple words it breaks apart into a million puzzle pieces upon examination, pieces that cannot be reassembled. It is connected to the divine, and to the dying Jesus in the arms of his mother, and to mothers and fathers, and to the feeling between people suddenly drawn to each other. It supports and overrides morality, it makes people kill, it salutes flags, it refuses the same, it is about making love, but also about fucking. It is, in short, as adequate and inadequate a word as God for describing the universe, and the purpose of existence.
12
On the first day of lessons, two days after the karanga in the hall, I found that my class of 32 was booked into a small meeting room with six chairs and two tables. The students sat on the floor and made do while I explained the course to them.
In Term One we look at the question: “How did we get here?” In Term Two we study: “Why are we here?”, and in Term Three we think about the answers to the question: “Where do we go when we die?”
The class unfolded with introductions and ended with a question for me. Sometimes the question takes a while to come, but this year it ended up being the first one.
Mr? What do you believe?
I explained myself. It was a story that started with my father dying, but it wasn’t the true story. The true story of myself. It wasn’t about the feeling I have about love. It didn’t mention the stars for example, their message to me about indifference, and godlessness. It didn’t include how love makes the blood purr, and the heart quicken, and the threads it throws out to tie us to one another. How a quickened heart frees you from time, for a moment, like being inside a song, or with a lover, or the blissful depths of sleep, in a dream. Nor did it include the fact that we sometimes wake from dreams and find ourselves in peril, or that love makes all people at some time attempt to kill and burn down the world, or that it can be fleeting, or as awkward as an arm slipped through another’s.
But love is one way to see the world. An alternative to power, a corrective, sometimes, to the forces of convention, the morality that chokes.
And it can defend us against the stars.