Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

These days the boffins think that we’re just passengers in this life. They’ve looked at the way our brains organise responses to our environments, and they think that all our actions are predetermined. It is either the environment itself that chooses how and why we make decisions, or our choices are made by our subconscious before we even know that a decision has been made.

It’s a confusing line of argument, because feeling like we make our on choices is fundamental to who we are and how we find comfort in our existence. It says that, surely if life is already predetermined then the roll of the dice is enough to guide me? I’ve learned to be sceptical about all that. Even if fate is merely providing succour by appearing to grant me choice, then the appearance of choice is in itself an instrument helping unfold the future as it decends upon us.

This is because we are each of us the stone in a river of time. Our lives flow towards us, and over us, and we each experience the sensation of being alive, of recording the past as it becomes real.

So let’s say the boffins are correct. It is fated at the genetic level how each moment will fall upon me. If that is the case, then none of my decisions are my own. And knowing the past is therefore all the more important. We are then a backward-looking species, one confined to a knowledge of what has gone, and awaiting what will become.

But I’m not convinced. There is truth in the idea that we are backward-looking. The know-ability of the past does define our actions, but the assumption that we can each make choices to influence our futures, or to alter the course of the flow of time, is fundamental to our self-awareness, and our conceptualisation of the present. Knowing the past is a way to better understand how the future is approaching, because it provides the clear indications where the high-water marks are, and the rise and fall of the events that can end, or alter, our existence.

Our mere existence in time is enough to alter the course of the flow, as I shall deomonstrate. Though we might not have influence over every small choice we are offered, and we might not have all the free will some philosophers might have assumed we do, we are each actors in the great unfolding of the universe’s knowledge. Each of us a small, chaotic actor in a collossal drama.

F, FLP

 

Implosion

Raptor leaned way back in his sea and stared at the ceiling of his habitat. He started counting the tiles from left to right, from right to left, up, then down.

“Puter.” 

“Yes, Raptor, Avenger of the Nine Dry Worlds, Prince’s Champion?”

“Where’s that slippery little bastard Millard?”

“He’s currently speaking with the Vice-Admiral about the Gazers Mission, Raptor.”

Raptor sighed with boredom, “Guess we won’t be drinking any time soon then…” He glanced across at the doorway to his habitat, then back up to ceiling. He straightened his seat stared at the table.

“Puter.”

“Yes, Raptor, Keeper of Royal Virtue, Feared in Fifteen Systems?”

“Do you have any idea how bored I am?”

“No, Raptor.”

“Well let me tell you…”

“Please don’t.”

“Dammit.”

“Please don’t be upset, Raptor. Besides calculating several million equations a second, I’m also observing phenomena several billion clicks away, answering questions from a dozen of your comrades, and moving this vessel through an extremely complex four-dimensional space. It keeps me rather busy.”

“Isn’t that an excuse from an Iain M. Banks book?”

“I’m surprised you read, Raptor.”

“Iain doesn’t count.”

“Of course, Raptor.”

“Is Millard finished yet?”

“Yes, Raptor, he’s in the common room.”

Raptor lurched up and onto his talons, and clacked out of his habitat and into the walkway. Ship’s crew, mech and bio alike, scattered as his 3m tall frame lurched down the hallway, ungainly and awkward in the near 1G gravity the Navy liked to maintain in its capital ships. He ducked beneath low-hanging cables and swatted at drones making running repairs to the ship after its last confrontation with the Gazers. He grumbled at bio guards who insisted on checking his credentials at or near section-dividing bulkheads, and finally stumbled into the common room to find Millard having an in-depth conversation with what appeared to be a large block of ice.

“Oh, apologies Vice-Admiral” Raptor coughed, “Puter said you and Millard had finished speaking.”

The block vibrated back in reply, “No problem Raptor, we have finished just this second. Doubtless Puter anticipated your transit perfectly.”

“Damn smart-ass tech…” Raptor mumbled.

“Sorry, Raptor?” The Vice-Admiral asked.

“Nothing Admiral, just congratulating the Puter on its usual spiffy work.”

“Of course.”

Millard slithered off the bench on which he had been reclining, and informed Raptor that the Vice-Admiral and he had been discussing the demise of the Gazers.

“Demise?” Raptor stated, a little shocked, “We’ve only just engaged them. How can they be demised?”

Millard smiled his distinctive reptilian smile. “Easssy, Raptor. We had the intel boffinss analyssse their sssociology. They’re an extremely tough raccce, and highly advanccced technologically, as the damage to thisss ssship indicatesss. But they’re also rather obssessssed with thought.”

“What are you saying? Are you saying that I don’t get to shoot anyone? Because that sounds a lot like what you’re saying. That I don’t get to shoot anyone, and might not be Champion again this year.”

“Apologiesss Raptor, but that is what I’m sssaying.”

“Wait… what exactly did the boffins come up with that stopped this entire star-faring race in its tracks?”

“Sssimple, Raptor. I suggested that our Ambasssador ask them a sssimple quessstion.”

“Which was?”

“How do I know I’m a Gazer, and not a Ssslave dreaming I am a Gazer?”

“Dunno, how do you know?”

“No, that wass the quessstion.”

“Oh… And that stopped the Gazers?”

“Yesss Raptor.”

“And what are they doing currently?”

“We think that their sssociety will unravel within two yearss. Individualsss are currently retreating into mental isssolation acrosss their planetss at approximately 140 beingss per sssecond.”

“So they’re just falling to pieces because they’re thinking about this problem? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yess Raptor. It iss called a SSSolopisstic Mind Bomb. Highly effective on advanced and overly-cccerebral sssocietiesss.”

“So I don’t get to shoot anyone?”

“Maybe the stupid ones.” The Admiral interjected.

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

As a child the only of these histories I was familiar with was the last, the bastard son who escaped the convict isle. It’s not exactly an ennobling story, especially to a boy well-able to read and discover the unspoken details of what such a life must have been like. There is no romance in that tale, no military history, no great battle against the odds. Just a boy run to escape and held to ransom.

I think, if anything, it demonstrates clearly to me now, as an adult, how even as children the narratives we build around ourselves can become all-encompassing. The stories your family tells of its own past, of from whence your waters run, and feeds into the daily speaking of where and who you are. They run under your consciousness, and manifest in your own talk of who you think you should be. Being given a past without dignity echoes within people, and profoundly influences who they are, and the world-view they enjoy.

So there I am you see, a criminal’s child. A bastard scion of an unknown house. A boy who sees himself with no future but that he can make for himself, and I’m acting it out unknown to my tiny seven-year-old mind. I have no dignity and only shame. I am a boy wishing he were a man, full and straining at the boundaries of lives unfulfilled.

But beneath what I knew there was this other layer, a set of lives I could not have known of, because they were unknown to the adults around me. And it’s that layer waiting to be revealed that has characterised my life. Just when I thought there was no more of interest to learn, another veil has been lifted, and my view has changed again, with divine provenance gifting me yet another knowing.

It is a strange thing this life. At times it is as thought I have lived many lives, with the twists and turns of fate’s flow lifting and carrying me gently between the spectres of the past, unfolding and lighting them with the magician’s sleight of hand, letting them fall onto my path for me to understand. This, a life never meant to be. A gift forged from a choice made by a teenage girl on the shores of a foreign, alien, harsh environment (for that is what I imagine her to have been, the woman who set this slow-rising locomotive in train).

At the centre of all this is that. The knowing this life was a gift. Whether a gift given in jest or love is a question yet to be settled, but the gift itself has been well-received (if at times a little petulantly). It’s that, I think, that has always aided the decision. The choices to stave off the knife. To keep the hand steady. To see out the flow, and know all the mysteries, and to know where the poison was introduced, and why it placed me in that field on that cold winter’s day.

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Now why are you laughing boy? It was a serious business, let me tell you. There I was, not much older than yourself, and I’d stowed away on a ship outbound from New South Wales.

What? Well, it seemed like a sensible idea at the time. The gold rush was starting to wane and being a lad it was looking like there wasn’t much of a fortune to be made. So, I packed up my swag, took what gold I had and snuck aboard.

We were barely a day into the trip when I was found by the crew. They’re small ships you see. So they dragged my up in front of the captain and he asked me all manner of questions, mostly trying to put the fear of God in me. You know, the usual stories, how they cut up stowaways and use them for bait, how they make you swab decks until your hands are worn down to the wrists, all that kind of stuff. But he shut up when I showed them my small bag of gold, and asked why I hadn’t just paid a passage in the first place!

Tell you what, there was some hilarity when they heard my name, how was I to know that “Tibby” means “ship’s cat”? The captain thought that was just the thing, and so it stuck, and the ship’s cat I was. Now there’s a job you’d avoid if you could. I was fetch and carry for every sailor aboard… But I kept my gold at the end, having worked out my passage.

What? The name? Well, I was found an orphan you see, wandering there in the gold fields. I never knew what happened to my parents, or where they might have come from. Who knows! I used to wonder if they hadn’t been murdered by other gold miners, or perhaps fled in the night from the attacks of the savages. But women weren’t common in that part of the world in those days, so now, in my older years, I think I was likely just the child of a midwife, and maybe I one mouth too many to feed.

But still. To cut loose a toddler like that. Thank the Lord for the kind-hearted people who took me in, and raised me.

Still! It’s not like they had to feed me for long! I was working for my supper in no time, and soon on that ship bound for Otago with my own money. And proud I was.

What? Oh, the name! I’m an old man you forget sometimes.

“Tibby” was the only word I could say when they found me you see. And so they named me that. The thing with the ship’s cat was just a coincidence like. But it was a name fair enough, and so now it’s yours as well. A humble beginning, but a beginning all the same.

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

I was nine years old when I set out from England. Nine. I was born on Sheppey, which is in the Thames Estuary by the way, and put to sea like all the men of that small island. The war with Napoleon was over, Wellington having seem the little bastard off, and the sea seemed the natural place for an additional son.

But it served me well. I saw much of the world from the deck of many a sort of ship before leaving the whaler Catherine and finding my feet here in New Zealand. Like all good wanderers sometimes you just need a clear place to stand before you can stop the roaming, and this was as good as any.

After I took up with Pairoke we settled on her family’s land just south of their pa, that’s a kind of picket fort by the way, there were still the occasional war between the tribes in these parts, which goes to show, you can travel 12,000 miles and still be surrounded by people wanting to kill one another… and I took up farming.

Farming, can you believe it. Farming! These local Maori didn’t need a fisherman you see. We’d long since taken all the whales from these waters, and the locals could fish well enough for themselves. So farming it was. Me, as sailor for twenty years. Farming. At least I still had a cutter to run when the salt had cleared too much from my veins.

We cleared the land and placed on it sheep, cattle, and horses. And it was this trade that the locals wanted. It was strange in those days of New Zealand. There was a tension between the British setting up in Petone and in the South Island and the local tribes, that Arthur Wakefield was an arrogant petty aristocrat, and it occasionally split over into bloodshed. But I? I was welcomed.

And so here I am now in a paddock. Every man who comes here knows you could make a fortune in these waters, and here I am, moving into husbandry! If me old dad could see me now. Tell you what, he’d be amazed, his boy, landed gentry.

We’re even thinking of putting a tavern up on the roadside, to try and capture a little of the traffic heading to Port Nicholson. Now that would likely spin a pretty penny… A pretty penny indeed.

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

I’m standing in the bow of a low, long boat, and I’m hefting a harpoon. Harpoon. It’s a great word no? Roll it around in your mouth and it sounds ancient, haaaaa-poooon. I’m sounding it myself while I’m looking over the side of the boat at the choppy green water, the northernly breeze bringing warm air from over the Alps and off the lands. Father sounds out quietly, “Spear the calf, the mother will come after.”

Spear the calf. Spear the calf. I repeat it to myself over and over, all the time watching the water for the sign of the beast rising from the water.

The beast rising from the water. Rising from the water. The Beast. Mother would be proud, I’m even remembering my Revelations. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and I saw a beast did rise up.

I glance backwards. My older brothers are in the longboat behind me resting on their oars. We’ve two days of water and biscuit, and we’re 12 hours into this day’s rowing. They’re still and there’s only the lapping of the oars in the water, and the chop of the waves against the side of the boat.

“Sign!! Starboard!” Someone whispers between gritted teeth, and the brothers lean in, the boat jerking as the oars bite, father pulling the rudder hard so we launch towards the rapidly smoothening patch of water. The whale’s head breaks the surface, its blowhole releasing a spray into the air, its slick sides rushing past the waves and slipping beneath the water.

“The calf!!” Father yells. I can see it rising with the cow, close to its mother’s side, it’s tiny eye appearing as the longboat bears down on them both. My brothers have their speed up, their backs straining to get us close enough to the pair, their silence broken as Father yells “Heave you useless buggers!! She’ll not escape us today!!”

A second is split while I draw back my arm and heave the harpoon. My brothers are grunting and roaring. The wind whistling and whipping the water past the bow. The long back of the cow sliding like a great tentacle through the water.

It grunts when the tip enters. A low shudder of shock. Its eye looks at me still. In wonder. In alarm. The sharpened metal of the harpoon sinking into its flanks. The rope unrolling out past my legs as the calf sinks beneath the waves, its life spilling into the water in a long red stream.

“Make for the shore lads!” Father yells, “the cow will be back for the calf and the Wright’s will have her, by God!”

For two days we’ll tether ourselves to her dying carcass, here on the ocean, to be dragged till she tires, a waiting game of courage and endurance.

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

It was yet another cold and grey day in Wellington the first time I’d ever heard of the Treaty. Actually, that’s an exaggeration. It was a cold and grey day the first time I ever realised the relevance of the Treaty. Until that day the Treaty was an abstract thing. A “something signed way back when”.

I was going through a stage in my life when I was soaking up information like a sponge. Which was strange in itself considering that my escalating to serious drug and alcohol habit was concurrently becoming all-consuming. Somehow I was managing though, and using the experiences to push my consciousness to new heights. I was taking all the lessons I’d learned at the feet of my older people, channelling them, and burning all the more brightly for it. But again, we’ll get to the hippies later in the piece.

My university experience mostly involved getting loaded, heading to campus, and moping about observing people’s behaviours, their interactions, their ways of being. I would attend lectures between bouts of snooping through the deepest recesses of the library looking for arcanery and mysteries. Old tomes written in the 1800s. Old discharged and ignored sciences. Alternative ways of looking at the world. Secrets hidden from the light; underground, musty and mostly meaningless.

Thing is, I knew that something had drawn me to where I was. At the time my entire knowledge of my family history, of me, extended only as far as my grandparents. But I was still drawn, inevitably, towards the South, the miserable weather and away from the Bay of Plenty.

The balancing act that was substance abuse was weighting heavily on me, but my natural inclination to curiosity kept up,  so hand in hand my knowledge and my dependency grew to new heights. They were dark days, the weight of the world sitting heavily upon skinny shoulders, and it often seemed that it was only good fortune, my constant companion, held back the fate being doled out to so many others.

It was the Quad outside the library on campus, and some amateur political rally was underway. Student politicians practising strutting and grooming one another for the day they ascend to office in a city council, or worse. The same damn exercise in mutual masturbation acted out on campuses across the nation, the world. It was the same characters I’d seen overseas (again, we’ll get to that), but a little “smaller”, and more like New Zealanders.

The candidates at the front were doing a lot of arm waving, a lot of pretending to state their own relevance to issues far larger than their ability to act or their capacity to reason, and a lot of shouting. I was rapidly becoming bored, and my mind was beginning to wander back along the path down to the flat, my fire, and my stash.

She spoke up from a crowd of people over the other side of the quad. It was though I’d walked all the way up the hill just to hear her voice. A young woman, not far from my age, dressed warmly but not wealthy, and surrounded by people she obviously knew well and trusted. She was clear, concise, and could obviously see through the posers below us blocking the doors to the library.

“But what about our Rights under the Treaty?”

No reasonable answer was forthcoming. A response I rapidly became used to.

 

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

It was a warm Summer month in early ‘39, the kind that turns a man’s thoughts to things other than work. The whales had been and gone, and Christmas for what it was worth produced little for us there on Kapiti. Of most interest was the word that more British will be there soon, from some company being set up to bring a lot of soft settlers out from England. We all thought that we’d see what Te Rauparaha would think of them, there was still fire in the man yet, as old as he was.

I remember the pathway well, and making the short walk from Te Kahu o Te Rangi and the stink along to the fresher water of Waiorua. The deep ocean currents wash over the northern peninsula of the island and brought the occasional deep sea fish into the Maori nets, and we traded some of their catch when we were too busy rendering the oil to fish for ourselves.

It’s a strange relationship. I’ve heard they used to refer to us as ‘their Pakeha’, as if they forgot that we’re free men of Great Britain and not at all here by their leave. Still, they liked to brag to other tribes that they had us, and perhaps it increased their self-importance in some way, so we all said good luck to them. As long as the fish came when we asked for it, and they kept trading the flax we needed for the boats, then so be it.

If you’re wondering, I made the walk along the island to perhaps catch a glimpse of a certain young lady I’d heard might be visiting Waiorua with her family. They’re Te Ati Awa, the sometimes friends, sometimes not, of Te Rauparaha’s Ngati Toa, and they’re well settled on the mainland. I had thought to myself, a man could do worse than being the pet Pakeha of a family like that…

Te Rauparaha seemed to have gained some kind of respect for me since I chased him off my cutter with a hatchet. He was demanding something I’d not had the mind to give him, and his confrontation got the better of my temper. I think the great Chief always did know the right time to surrender ground and over the side he went in a great retreat! Once we’d smoothed the old boy’s feathers he seems to have become a little fond of me, and it’s for that and his influence I was able to even think of courting the daughter of Rawiri Nukaiahu, a chief of the Puketapu. His wife Pakewa signed that Treaty you know, the one the missionary from up north brought to Port Nicholson, for what good it did them.

It’s grand when a little Dutch courage pays off like that, for on the walk along the island that day I snuck a look at her in the distance, and it was not long before I was able to marry her. Well, this is a fib. We married in 1849, but the marriage itself started in 1841, but such is the way in New Zealand. Her name was Pairoke, and she was my wife for 12 good years. A grand twelve years. And what a family we made.

 

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

All in all, history is really just a series of minute passing minutes that have incrementally defined the now. They slip past unnoticed and unremarked, but coalesce into the present and offer themselves into your hands. And because they do so, why go back? Why take a little trip back into the past? The present is past all bundled up and handed to you in newspaper, still steaming, hopefully fish and chips.

I went back to the very beginning because that past underlies the present and gives it meaning. When it comes time to heal the present you need to know where you’ve come from, because the from is a fundamental part of the now. Those things that make up our pasts become the language we each speak, they’re the syllables in the words we utter.

But, I’m starting to labour the point. The knife in the paddock and the knife on the shore are the same, and from delving into my own past looking for meaning I’ve discovered a number of such things, and how they’ve grown together to define me. They’re the suits and symbols that make up the cards dealt out to me, and they’re numbered by the individual actions of my predecessors.

You see there’s been numerous times when I couldn’t explain how and why I’ve reacted to or felt about things, only to have realisation fall upon me when a key piece of history is revealed, a pea exposed from under a shell to the light. Writing this story, this history, is a way of paying tribute to each of those pieces, and the way they’ve unlocked my life over so many years, slowly, with seemingly deliberate purpose. I’ve worked methodically to uncover each part, to bring them to the light of day, to examine them carefully, and to understand them. Because like old man Marley says, if you know your history, then you’ll know where you’re coming from. Pretty wise old guy that Marley (for a stoner mind you…)

All this is important because of where I grew up and what put me in that field. Events had conspired before I was born to completely isolate my atomic family. In fact, one could say that the advent of the Atomic age atomised us. But that would again be labouring the point (again). The truth of the matter is that a series of inevitable occurrences conspired to place me there, and is has only been with the fullness of time that I’ve been able to see each and every one of them for what they are. While a younger me would have blamed someone for the isolation, for instance for the flight of my uncles to foreign shores, and the sense of abandonment that ensued, the older me can see all the pieces that makes up the history, and can understand them.

The beauty of the history is that in revealing its fullness it has brought me closer to realising the interconnectedness of it all, and has left me to wonder how many other people are in similar circumstances. Who else has pondered their present or past and been unable to make sense of it because they lack those key pieces to peel away the mystery?

Perhaps, my story in the telling can inspire at least one other person to better comprehend their own full past, and the waters that have carried them into this present.

 

 

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Waitaminute… the reader says. Is this some kind if reincarnation thing? Are going to be subjected to an endless stream of hippy bullshit?

Well, no. I’ll get to the hippy’s all in good time sooner or later. For now we are talking about samsara, yes, but not in the way you think. Like all good and sticky ideas there is the popular version of what it means, and there’s the underlying truths. So I’m not exploring the idea that I’ve lived multiple lives. Going there becomes a little too fruity for my way of thinking. You know, we’ll start to wander into the realm of “belief”. I’m only interested in what I know. And I know I am the people who preceded me.

It’s not a belief structure because you don’t need to suspend credulity to understand how it works. You can see a child being born, and know that child wasn’t delivered by a stork or left under a cabbage leaf. We are each extensions of another life, and their lives wash through our bodies whether we know it or not.

So what of the field, the knife, the frightened boy? How is this evidence of samsara?

The field is where samsara is tested. The field is about choices, and how we make them within the patterns our bodies, our history, has laid out for us.

And the choices are everything. The define our legacy, and they set the course of our waters. Every person on that field made choices, as young as they were, to put them there. And, every person had choices made that effected why they were there. It’s the untangling them that is the mystery in life, and it is with the inevitable distance of time that we can see how these all interwove.

Take the friend for example, we couldn’t know where he would be 30 years from that day. But the seeds were sown. We were friends for years after the event, his defence of my actions an important part of the fallout. And his life has always been a yardstick for me in the transformation of a person in the passing of time, in the slow, lazy progress of the river.

When we were young he was known as the go-getter. He was all action; fit, healthy, knew where he wanted to be. He took life by the scruff of the neck and took what he needed from it. But somewhere this changed. Somewhere along the line he became less like the person his parents had made him, and less like the person the world around him understood him as.

You see, set upon the waters of his own life my friend was pushed to deny what he was. His attitude to life didn’t always sit right with the way people around us wanted him to be. He was called “too much” or “too big”. And so my friend chose to change over time, he suppressed his energy to better fit in, and to better be what was expected of him. He became more of what people wanted. I blame his decline on that.

A heart attack, 36, leaving a wife and three children.

I never thanked him for the way he defended me all those years ago, and I regret it deeply. He stuck by me the way a friend should, and I regret not helping him make choices to avoid the fate he sailed towards. My not defending his right to be who he was helped nudge him away from his true course. And it is with his death I must finally tell this, my own, story.

F,FLP