The Sea and the Man

You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face.

Laughter
was invented by those
who live briefly
as a burst of laughter.

The eternal sea
will never learn to laugh.

-Anna Swir

The Farmer and the Sea

The sea always arriving,

hissing in pebbles, is breaking

its edge where the landsman

squats on his rock. The dark

of the earth is familiar to him,

close mystery of his source

and end, always flowering

in the light and always

fading. But the dark of the sea

is perfect and strange,

the absence of any place,

immensity on the loose.

Still, he sees it is another

keeper of the land, caretaker,

shaking the earth, breaking it,

clicking the pieces, but somewhere

holding deep fields yet to rise,

shedding its richness on them

silently as snow, keeper and maker

of places wholly dark. And in him

something dark applauds.

-Wendell Berry, 1970

The clock is tolling eight as I start to type this; it's Sunday night and I'm in one of the 24-hour computer labs on campus. The doors lock but we can swipe our ID cards and use a PIN to be let in--I just let in someone who knocked, and he muttered "thank you, cheers." They say "cheers" a lot here. This is all part of living here: using the computer labs for internet or finagling the on-campus wireless (I have a favorite bench under a big pine for when it's nice out, and no one is using it for their cigarette break), the careful decision of when it's really important to leave the flat and connect to the world(wide web), people saying "cheers", the clocktower chiming the hours. And I really am starting to feel like I live here.

There is the fact that I've been in class for three weeks now, and that means there's a schedule around which to center my life. I'm beginning to recognize faces, and occasionally I'm able to pin names to those faces, and I know how long it takes me to get to class so I'm not late, but I'm not early, either. I also know what to buy at the grocery store, and which grocery stores to go to for which things: the farmer's market for produce, eggs, tea, honey and pasta; Taste Nature for bulk dried fruit, beans, barley, quinoa, and HoneyHaze, this delicious honey-hazelnut spread for toast; Countdown for baking supplies, hummus, crackers, biscuits (aka cookies), milk, cheese, mushrooms, avocados and occasionally raspberry lemonade (Charlie's) or fruit smoothies in cardboard boxes (McCoy's); and finally New World for anything I need last minute, because it's just on the other side of the botanic gardens and a nice walk.

I'm not sure how to compare living here to anywhere else I've lived, just because there's too much to describe. It's like America, but emphatically not America--and my life here is similar but emphatically not. Parts of it have to do with country, parts of it have to do with place, because I haven't lived in a town like Dunedin before, either. I walk everywhere. I'm learning to walk on the left side of the sidewalk, though if I don't pay attention I tend to favor the right--it's either instinctive or simply deeply ingrained. We have a main shopping street, a mall, lots of Asian and Turkish restaurants but only two Mexican ones, tourist shops that sell possum-merino sweaters, bars and pubs, three movie theaters (one conventional, two alternative). When the sun shines, it's warm, but as soon as you're in shadow it's frigid ("4 seasons in one day", they say), and almost all houses are badly insulated. The ice cream truck comes on Wednesday around 9 pm and on Saturdays in the afternoon. The public library charges for more things than a library could ever get away with charging for in America--new books and magazines, all DVDs and CDs, mystery and romance novels, putting things on hold. But I have a library card, and I use it regularly (after checking the spine of all my books for the $ sign). We get eight TV stations, one in Maori, one that only comes in black-and-white (for no apparent reason), and one that is just a repeat of another--so really seven. There are ads for a digital box which will let you get "over ten" stations. Channels 1 and 2 seem to be owned by the same company, as do channels 3 and 4--they'll advertise each others' shows. If I'm awake and have the time, I'll turn on the TV around 10:30 to watch "The Daily Show", only six hours after it airs in the States, but there's an Australian talk show that we get a full week after its original airdate.

These are little things, but they're as much pieces of my life in New Zealand as the field trip I took this weekend (where we sat around on the rocks while the tide practically licked our feet and the lecturer competed with the antics of a fur seal, where we got to see one of three exposed pillow lavas in the world), or the things I learn in class. Those are the stories I can tell--these are the things that make it real.

Listening to the River

(for Dave)

Last night the moon rose early
orange and round. This morning
winter’s first frost on a bristly lawn,
the red iron walls of the barn
like pin-stripes in the slanting sun.
I would like to be able to say
No one I know has lost out
or failed to find what it is
they are looking for. Not so easy.
I think of so and so, a person
of many parts, who is drawn to water
and finds rivers speak to him
in languages he lives to translate
over and over. Their syllables
roll like stones, consonants catch
and tip like slivers of rock
flickering in the deeps. They hold
what life and light is theirs but cannot
stop the whittling and the wearing.
There is nothing unusual in this
and when they lie still we know
they are not asleep or dormant
but huddle awaiting what will be
rather than storing memories of things past.
A river is never silent. Even its
deepest pools thrive with dark
or dreamy utterance. They shelter
more than we can say we know.

-Brian Turner, 1983

I've figured out how to recognize American students. Clothes help a little, especially certain brands, but the surefire giveaway? Their water bottles.

Enjoy your second Friday the 13th of the year, by the way.

My first day in Dunedin, I called Otago "another vision of academia" in my journal. At the time, I didn't realize how right I was. The University of Otago is another vision of academia, which means of course it's different from the one I know. Should I have expected anything else? Probably not. But I think it's good to see that academia is a vision: someone or a group of someones is visualizing this, and it ends up a sort of hybrid of what the students and the administration see. With a bigger student body and without the unification of a shared religion, there are more visions to be realized. And that's not bad--but it's different.

So there are things I'm enjoying here: I love how many of my courses are team-taught, so we can glean information from lecturers in their areas of expertise. I like, too, how international everything is: the professors, the students, the perspectives we're taught. I've seen samples pulled from Chile, America, New Zealand and Indonesia all in one lecture. Then there are the things I enjoy less: I'm not sure how I can write a paper about why we should value our resources and conserve them without bringing religion into it. I know I did it in high school, but I seem to have forgotten how. And sometimes it seems like the entire student body is here to party, not to think--living from night to night rather from day to day. But the size of the student body, and the variety of their visions (which results in some incongruities--one of the proud old buildings houses a bar, now), makes me believe that I simply haven't encountered the deep thinkers yet. I'm looking.

Beginnings
Guthrie-Smith in New Zealand 1885

Who am I? What am I doing here
alone with 3000 sheep? I'm
turning their bones into grass. Later
I'll turn grass back into sheep.
I buy only the old and the lame.
They eat anything--bush, bracken, gorse.
Dead, they melt into one green fleece.

Who am I? I know the Lord's my shepherd
as I am theirs--but this
is the 19th century: Darwin
is God's First Mate. I must keep
my own log, full of facts if not love.
I own 10,000 acres and one dark lake.
On the seventh day those jaws don't stop.

Who am I? I am the one sheep
that must not get lost. So
I name names--rocks, flowers, fish:
knowing this place I learn to know myself.
I survive. The land becomes
my meat and tallow. I light my own lamps.
I hold back the dark with the blood of my lambs.

-Peter Bland, 1981

My new bike. I'm going to fix it so it works (the headlamp already does).
(also in these pictures, because right now the bike lives in my room: my scrapbook bulletin board, which I am a big fan of.)

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to the silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

-Naomi Shihab Nye, 1995

Newly instituted: Wednesday poem day.

Today I experienced the first pangs of culture shock, though it isn't the culture of New Zealand I found so shocking: it's the culture of a first-year lecture at a large university. All of us crammed into seats in a lecture hall, sharing the expansive desks that stretch across each row. A couple references to "mother earth"--a couple light jabs at North America (our lecturer is British). The lecturer introducing the class by asking if we know the difference between information and knowledge and knowledge and wisdom--trying to tell us that we aren't in high school any more, that we need to bring some insight to the table. And on the way out, two students talking about how they didn't get the lecture, which was a diatribe on human impact on the earth (case study: Chilean copper mine) and the earth's impact on humanity (case study: Indonesian tsunami, December 2004). I think they were trying to figure out what they'd be tested on, whether they needed to know how fault ruptures created the tsunami or the market value of copper ore for the exam. 
But that's life. The lecture itself wasn't bad, and I'm really here for the information (I can extrapolate on my own). I can only hope my upper-level courses will be a little more exciting.