Mend

         Shenshan was mending clothes when Dongshan asked, “What are you doing?”

        “Mending,” said Shenshan.

        “How is it going?” asked Dongshan.

        “One stitch follows another,” said Shenshan.

        “We’ve been traveling together for twenty years and you’re still talking like that!” said Dongshan.
        “How can you be so clueless?”

        “How do you mend, then?”

        “With each stitch the whole earth is spewing flames,” said Dongshan.

                                                                                                          Record of Dongshan, Case 30

        On the left-hand page there were a few words written small.

        I took a hard step forward, and a second step, my hands clenched. I read the words aloud: Broken mend broken. …

        I sat and looked up at the great depths of the stars. I thought that the stars were like all the souls who lived in former
        times in this city, this house, all the thousands of spirits, the forerunners, lives like distant flames, lights farther and
        farther away in the great darkness of time. Lives past, lives to come. How could you tell one from the other?

        I had wanted to ask why the oracle couldn’t speak plainly, why it couldn’t just say Don’t resist, or Strike now, instead
        of cryptic images and obscure words. After looking at the stars, that seemed a foolish question. The oracle was not
        giving orders but just the opposite: inviting thought. Asking to bring thought to mystery. 

                                                                                                                              Ursula Le Guin, Voices

Cut or uncut, pastures shine golden as the days shorten and the season begins to turn. The forest is tinder dry. In the west of the island, in the country of rain and great rivers, huge fires begin after dry lightning throws down its spears. A plume of smoke reaches us, and it smells wrong as it always does when rainforest burns. Hot days, but still some mercy of coolness at night, some breath off the sea to the south.

Covid comes to the household. One morning T wakes and can’t stand. The weakness affects both sides of his body, but still I wonder if he’s had a stroke. He has a fever and his heart beats hard. We get an appointment at the local health centre and from there he’s carried off by the ambulance angels, who give him to the ER angels who scan his brain but find no bleeding and pass him to the angels of the isolation ward. As he recovers, I get sick, and so a month passes. The way through seems to be to let the sickness have us – it picks us up and carries us with it for a while.

The black cockatoo flock has convened high in the old pine windbreak to pluck green cones. The big birds shred half of each cone to get at the seeds and throw down the half they’ve been using as a grip. On the lower branches, scarlet robins in mating plumage sing their trickling, thready songs. Black currawongs come down from the mountains for ripe apples and pears in the valley orchards, and once again, white cockatoos eat every walnut from the little tree in the paddock. The pardalotes, who brought out young in November then disappeared into the forest, are back, trembling their wings outside the nest, calling through the garden.

Sitting up in darkness, I let the night soak in. Moths and flower wasps tap their chitinous heads like fingernails against the window-glass, from the outside, wanting the candlelight, and from the inside, wanting the moon. A little bat finds its way in and frip-frips around the room, scooping up insects until I open the door and let it out into the night. Flash-lit clouds loom beyond the horizon to the north, drifting closer till I can hear their thunder, but they bring only a scatter of rain. When the storm passes, the wind swings hard around from the west to pour, braiding and unbraiding, over the hillside and the house, an edge of the gales that ceaselessly circle the Antarctic continent. 

That same wind pours onwards to buffet the western coastline of Aotearoa New Zealand. I was born in a town on the east coast of the north island, Te Ika-a-Maui, but sometimes we went west for holidays to the Kapiti coast where my father grew up, beside the windswept beaches of the Tasman Sea, Te Tai-o-Rehua. In the 1970s, at a roadside stall there, along with fresh vegetables you could buy marvellous kites fashioned by a market gardener who had learned to make them as a child in China. Moy Chin Poy’s kites came in all shapes and sizes, some of them large enough to need real strength as well as skill to get them aloft; the biggest must have been ten metres long – a series of articulated paper disks with a dragon head at the front. 

Chinese men came in their thousands to the goldfields in the nineteenth century – welcomed at first as labourers but then treated with increasing hostility as the gold ran out. Forbidden to work claims, they found as much metal in tailings dumps as came out of the ground or alluvial wash. In the 1880s, a poll tax of £10 was imposed for each Chinese immigrant; ten years later it was raised to £100 – about $25,000 in today’s currency, so that most men couldn’t hope to bring their wives and children with them. Poll tax legislation was finally repealed after WWII, allowing newer immigrants like the Kapiti coast market gardeners to make a life with their families.

Moy Chin Poy with dragon kite.

Now, after centuries of subjection at home to the extractive colonial practices of several empires (Britain, Russia, Japan, among others), and to casual racism abroad (the Anti-Chinese Association, the Anti-Chinese League, the Anti-Asiatic League and the White New Zealand League in the 19th and 20th centuries, and their equivalents throughout the British Empire) and to catastrophic internal conflicts arising in part in response to these forces, the Chinese are pushing back. The People’s Liberation Navy conducts live-fire exercises off Australian shores and out to sea from the Kapiti coast, their ships toiling through storm winds and huge seas, shadowed by Australian airforce jets.

A cyclone reels south out of the Coral Sea and stalls off the coast near the New South Wales–Queensland border, far out of its tropical domain, bringing 30m swells and flooding rain – in some places more than a metre over the course of a few days – to areas where the ground is already saturated. Dunes all along the coast are gouged into sandcliffs, and the surf beaches of the tourist strip are in disarray. Insurers and the insured scramble to adjust to ever-narrowing gaps between calamitous weather events.

All over the world, tensions deepen, human to human and within the enmeshments of human and wider-than-human realms, in time with the devastations that grow from our belief that we are separate. Again and again our minds simultaneously offer and snap up the either/or bait; again and again the world invites us into a both/and necessity. Let the stars shine through, let the broken thought fall apart under its own weight, mending, let each stitch open onto the ground of things, not two, not even one.

References

Ursula Le Guin. Voices. Orion, 2006, pp. 188, 194.

Moy Chin Poy with dragon kite. Otaki Historical Society Journal, Vol 11, 1988.

Record of Dongshan. Trans Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant, pacificzen.org.