You Plastic Crab – 12 October ‘07

It began violently raining two hours ago, thick rain, heavy rain, monsoon rain. Two hours ago it started and it hasn’t yet let up. Apparently, if it rains for long enough, the subways flood and all service to the Island shuts down. It is gratifying to know that one of the world’s greatest cities can still be humbled by the weather - that all the architects and city planners and billions of dollars still haven’t found a way to subdue nature. This week has been a blur. The days have rolled into each other―mornings stretch into evenings stretch into mornings―and sleep is but an inadequate punctuation. There was a time when I was working that the ‘rolling’ continued for weeks and weeks until I realized that the details of entire months were obscured and had no form. Routine exacted a kind of muting force - sending a fine mist over hours and days until they were indistinguishable from one another.

Of note, perhaps: on Saturday, like many people back home and a few here, I joined some friends to watch the rugby. Also like many people back home it seems, before the game I just did not consider the possibility that our team might lose. So alien was the idea of a loss that when it happened the words to articulate it were not available. Thus, when the game ended, no one said a word. We just sat and stared and occasional cussed, to break the silence more than anything else. It is not so much that I mind us losing―though the French I had been riling all week with attacks on their inferiority exacted a swift and humiliating revenge―it is more that the result was outside the scope of my comprehension. I simply couldn’t understand it. And while the ramifications of the loss are unlikely to be anywhere near as bad as the reporters back home are making out, it is still disappointing. Rugby is the only thing I can think of that comes close to entering the global arena that New Zealand should win. Not just ‘might’, but should. For once we weren’t the underdogs, for once we weren’t the long-shots. It was ours to take, the conditions were right, but still we did not, or could not do it. And this distinction, between ‘did’ and ‘could’ is, I think, crucial.

Last week I went to a concert of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Last night, The National. Aside from the hordes of hipsters with square-glasses that were dubiously lacking in magnification, the music was divine. Another holy distraction from having to think and really consider (really consider) things. Another way of keeping myself―ourselves―occupied so we don’t have to try and explain the madness and absurdity of it all. Like the feeling that comes from staring at something for long enough so that it becomes bigger and bigger or darker and darker until its true shape is lost in the liquid at the back of the eyeball. Concentrating on something so much that the layers or rationality heaped on top of it are stripped away and what is left is pale and sickly, like a stomach after winter, and is in the same way easily burnt by the sun.

There are those who say that commodities shouldn’t make an individual happy. Or least that the craving and satisfaction that comes from acquiring a commodity is superficial and reflects a shallow individual. Last Saturday the camera I bought on Ebay arrived. It is beautiful – large, heavy, black, shiny – an intricate composition of plastic and wire and solder and motherboard and glass and crystal. And I am happy to admit that it makes me happy. Every time I look at it I grin. I like the camera. It is benign and dumb, like a big slobbering dog with a stupid grin. The camera makes no attacks on my time, does not interfere with my thoughts. There are other devices that are more subversive, malignant - they infiltrate lives on the pretext of improvement. I am not sure, for example, whether the cellphone I possess is mine or whether I belong to it. So good is its grip that I mother it and fondle it. So pervasive is its sound that I cannot think of anything else but the peal it sends forth. So seductive is its potential that I cannot be without it. So comprehensive is its colonisation of all other possibilities that I cannot be rid of it. It is a devious device which, like email, Facebook and occasionally Minesweeper, makes claims on my time that extend far beyond the real usefulness. It is part of the technological fallacy of improvement that I think Ted Hughes is getting at below.

Do not Pick up the Telephone

That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech

Before the soft words with their spores
The cosmetic breath of the gravestone

Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death
Do not worship the telephone
It drags its worshippers into actual graves
With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone

Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone
Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone
Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone
Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone
Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone
Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone

The secret police of the telephone

O phone get out of my house
You are a bad god
Go and whisper on some other pillow
Do not lift your snake head in my house
Do not bite any more beautiful people

You plastic crab
Why is your oracle always the same in the end?
What rake off for you from the cemeteries?

Your silences are as bad
When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane
The stars whisper together in your breathing
World's emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece

Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses
Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters
And you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

Blackening electrical connections
To where death bleaches its crystals
You swell and you writhe
You open your Buddha gape
You screech at the root of the house

Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone
A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone
A dead body will fall out of the telephone

Do not pick up the telephone