The buildings are razed, by machinery rather than by fire, and those that remain, damaged, are held up by nailed-on chipboard and large concrete blocks out of which steel poles extend.

**

In February, my friend Jane and I took in Julia Morison’s Meet me on the other side, my anxiety about venturing into the central city offset by the beauty of the NG building as a venue: not only the polished wood floor and plain walls, but the massive steel reinforcing beams that passed high above our heads. It was an exhibition of beautiful-ugly finished-abortive objects, so many of whose names evoked our common consciousness in this town, these days.

Missing thing

Curious thing

Fretful thing

Poor thing

Thing in the making

Old birdcages and medical equipment encased and captured resistant, rebarbative sculptures in liquefacted silt, the last of which was the least of the uncanny. “The mud has kept coming, as it once promised it would do”, wrote Creon Upton in the programme notes. It was easy in our place and time to identify both with those mud formations that appeared to capture a moment in time (“Small triumphal thing”) and the hooks and ropes and crueller tubing that formed their containment and put both Jane and me in mind of the hospital narratives of Janet Frame, the fear of the known blending with the mind’s superlative abilities to conjure up a worse unknown. We needed this, we said. We are so happy to be here.

**

I am shortly due to give birth. In the foregoing nine months I have learned that past pregnancy is not the preparation for present pregnancy that I thought it would be. In my more inward-looking interludes, which these days are more accurately described as streams of consciousness, I think about the loss of our built environment between then (2009-10) and now. The absence of so many of the places we spent those months, the impasses on the roads we used to travel, is as effective a memory-block as any amnesiac drug.

Now we have so few referents for our memories to give to our daughters, I say to my husband. They are going to grow up the way I did with my parents: listening to them talk about places that no longer exist in destinations we can’t go to. We are forever going to be pointing out what isn’t there. Even on outlying, suburban Racecourse Road, Sockburn’s northwestern egress, the old trainers’ homes, the character cottages and villas that had stables behind them, are being pulled down, not by CERA but by developers buying up land for townhouses. The home to which we’ll shortly move, not far from here, still turns up discarded horse-shoes from the soil.

This pregnancy looms, although to the rest of the world it is me who does the looming. Tenuous threads of discourse catch my attention from time to time, but mostly, I am a nesting brood bitch. My toddler daughter sits on the end of my knee with an attitude of patient exasperation. Casual conversations outside the house concern the extent to which I have prepared her for what is to come. I’m not sure that can be done. My lap will not be any more free, and besides, she is old enough now to make her own earthquake-resistant shell as and when is required. I can suggest to her how, but the final form is up to her. The proportion of women I know who as adults cherish their sisters is greater than those who rue them, but when you are not-quite-two, the only time is the present. Her father and I are happier for our siblings and I longed for another baby, in curious simultaneity from more-or-less when she was born. Lizard logic, maybe, but that don’t make it junk.

I have not coped well with the gradual erosion of my pregnant mobility. The start of the third trimester, when this large baby was sitting breach in an excessively large water world, was particularly challenging. We had parked at the north-central end of Barbadoes Street and were walking the several blocks to see Pete Majendie’s temporary installation 185 Chairs at the former site of the Baptist Church on Oxford Terrace. This was my husband’s old neighbourhood for much of his teens and twenties, and as we walked he began to lament all the missing buildings: the empty businesses, the ruined footpaths, the fact that those who were still living there (and there were plenty of occupied homes) would have lost all their neighbourhood amenities and thereby their sense of neighbourhood itself.

As we walked, my uterus constrained my diaphragm and I began to feel that shortness of breath that in another context might signal the start of a crying fit: that feeling that the world of air is shortly to be replaced by the world of water. What would I do if there were an aftershock? How could I run? My husband carried our daughter who grizzled at the uneven trek. When we got to the exhibition we were in no fit state to see it and circled the outer edge of the gathered crowd. The chairs were stark, yet domestic, ritual yet casual, the kind of seating one might put down for a wedding, but here for a memorial. You didn’t tell me, my husband said, leading our daughter to the edge of the grass, that the chairs would be customised. You didn’t tell me some of the chairs were specifically for the babies who died. We walked back rather more quickly and my breathing became even shorter while I did the morbid third trimester calculations about viability in early labour that is the black maths peculiar to the pregnant woman, not least one for whom those three white chairs – infant carriers, high chairs – are too easily summoned in memory.

We still exude earthquakes through our pores; I think we may be like this for the rest of our lives. Our impending move sees us watching Grand Designs with a condescending, jaundiced eye: to those brick-framed homes in the west and southwest of England we murmur that a mere 3.5 would bring it all down, secure enough in knowledge of the unlikelihood of that. As Ann Brouwer noted, wherever we are, we scan the space in three dimensions: what will come from this side, that side and above. Unlike those we lost, we have a fair idea of what can hit us, and when. There are as many places we no longer go because we won’t, as places we no longer go because we can’t. Less frequent aftershocks rattle through with the familiarity of a rip-at-sea, with the unwelcome intimate greeting of an old, shunned lover.

**

I am so agitated to meet my new daughter that I wonder sometimes whether, like the child in this anecdote, I might in fact eat her. This longing absorbs all my creativity as the uterine wall absorbs a blighted embryo. More likely of course is that I will be the one consumed, and that is fine too: by the multiple pole points of partner, daughter, dogs and fetus I am largely made piecemeal anyway. For a person who suffered for too many years from too much time to think, it is a not-unwelcome dismemberment, though it hurts poetry and shrinks prose in the totality of its reach.

Family and earthquakes: two great binders and constrainers that for all their likelihood I would never have predicted. Beyond their semi-permeable walls is the strange, grim spectacle of the city as property-development, a macabre and indeed perverse playing out of the national infatuation with property values and Tory government. The fact that we are getting ready to move house ourselves brings a certain dramatic irony to domestic life too, not least because our wheel-within-a-wheel turns largely unimpeded by post-earthquake bureaucracy (the unearned privilege of moving from TC1 to TC1, a few hundred metres down the road).

In this frame of mind even a few months ago, I saw Tony de Lautour’s Recent Paintings at the Ilam Campus Gallery on the anniversary of the February earthquake, and found in it abstractions of property maps, red zone boundaries, hidden streams and sites of liquefaction. The grim satire in which “the jargon of the Real Estate Agent surfaces”, as Melinda Johnston had it in the programme notes, superseded for me at this cultural moment the wider struggle between suprematist modernism and the present that formed the philsophical backdrop for the exhibition (although this, in turn, reminded me of Michele Leggott’s return to more traditional modernist forms in her poetic volume on encroaching blindness, As Far as I can See). It had been a physical effort for me to walk to the campus gallery from my post-earthquake office in the village on that day, and I returned to my desk just as the anniversary minutes came around.

I act out my anniversaries and moments of significance these days through the almost-liturgical taking in of image and music. The foggy vagueness of late pregnancy does not seem to impair my visual or aural imagination in the way it does my higher linguistic functioning. I play the middle albums of The Strokes in the car and talk to my musical daughter about the importance of a strong, accurate rhythm section in any setting. I sing children’s songs and do actions and talk about colours and shapes. Our whole household runs on a dialect unique to the three of us and I wonder what additions might be made in honour of our new daughter. I wish, with all the wilfulness of a person living among the bereaved, for a live birth and ironise the wish back to tolerability through filters of old pop music and high culture. If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody, baby. My G3, my darling P2-to-be, my little Thing in the Making.

What does this imaginary dust do? It gets, I suppose, in the eyes and mouth, finds its way to the lungs and the nerves. It doesn’t paralyse or even really endanger. It simply is, and by being, impedes.

12:51 was closer to the moments that preceded and succeeded it this year than commemorations might have suggested. It was easy to make and take the silence at my work desk. I felt a little more acutely that quiet constricting of the id that carries on from day to day (and later in the day had to call upon the help of colleagues after a photocopier jam flummoxed me entirely) but largely, that minute’s passing supported my ongoing wish to stay away from semi-secular civic ceremony. It is odd that something not only raw but very much ongoing should be so continually commemorated, last year and this. I was glad that Mr Muzik gave us the cipher of his Strokes cover (above-linked) through which to feed the lumpen emotions of the week. I note that the couplet “We could try to move forward/Pretending that life is not awkward” has no answering confirmation in that verse or the following chorus, except perhaps that “the world has fallen down around us”. “Kiss me now that it’s over” indeed. (What is life? ‘Tis not hereafter.)

Every day we feel it, this earthquake grief. It is a human condition, local and special at the point where we pick up the traces, in a manner part penance for those of us not daily encumbered by horrible bureaucracy, part pathway. It strikes me sometimes as a kind of slap-back to the modernist yearning for meaning in our dwelling-places that clotted the thinking of our literary predecessors so definitively. It is the dull, dribbling substitute of the undeniable to which those writing from out-of-town seek alternative narratives. You know the kind. Most of them involve resilience, that outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual free market come to save the people and their homes. Shut up and be grateful, or not.

There are various strategies in play for writers to account for all this: the first-person memoir, for example, as embedded (and sometimes as unaware) as any of Mansfield’s restricted third-person points-of-view. How did Bertha see the world after the horrible epiphany of “Bliss”? Another is the strike-back, the calling-out, the finger-pointing, the truth-telling. Peter Hyde’s first exemplar in this regard continues to stick in the heart like ice or debris. Within and around the cordons and in the suburbs, journalists from The Press continue to do tremendous work, as do their citizen counterparts in the blogs, the libraries, the humanities. There is and are more, of course.

Somewhere on the margins of this, I experience a kind of narrative paralysis, my imaginary keyboard perhaps clogged with that imaginary dust. I do not want to step into the stream of storytelling, even as not-writing is a modest torture. I think about Robin Hyde’s angry, heavily-worked poem “Spoil“, a simple verse-fantasy of Byzantium in which the narrator spells out in image after image that the listener does not get to know about her experience. I’m not sure why I feel this way, not least when I miss the comforts of these blog pages, of poems and craft.

In writing’s absence my home and work lives proceed according to a strict routine which would astonish the me of a few years ago (perhaps more than would those memorialised names and ruined buildings). It seems likely that this would have happened anyway – our daughter is twenty months old and I am more than six months pregnant. At the same time, however, it also seems a consequence of all else that has happened, the necessity of getting on with things only highlighted by the fact that the life we had, in which, as my mother puts it “we lived in the whole city”, is gone. My husband makes a pedestrian’s survey in his lunch hours of the hidden parks and green spaces of industrial Burnside (of which there are a surprising many) when previously he practised his flânerie at the end of the night shift (also gone) around the Square and the High Street precincts. My mother sets aside a full day to organise travel for afternoon tea with her two friends in Avondale and Redcliffs, their homes green among the red.

We hesitate to narrate these details outside the privacy of our family, aware of their insignificance next to the pain of others: the ruined reoccupied homes, the insurance pain, the arson. A secondary theme of so much of my out-of-town friends’ Twitter-chatter of old, which I thought of privately as their sense of the contemptibility of Christchurch, has long gone quiet. These days when we justify our decisions to stay here, it’s for reasons quite different.

These words are not the real words but they are offerings, throat clearings, in advance of three exhibitions about which I would this week like to write (and which I have promised others I will do). I don’t think I can exaggerate the extent to which art is sustaining me at the moment, and make this assertion with full awareness of its po-faced grandeur. Watch me then, type my way to a more acceptable detachment as I try and draw threads together to tell you about this, this and this and imagine me, shaky narrator, trying to find her way back to some part in this conversation.

It started young and lost me friends in those early days, when we persisted in the belief that our lives were our own to direct and that spontaneity, epiphany and the practised resisting of interpretation would keep us in a state of grace and freedom. These days it gives both me and the señor something like an adult handle on what might at times otherwise threaten to overwhelm: being married (to each other), being parents. In our next-to-darkest hours, we can take comfort in the meta-narrative that auto-processes, incessantly, just beyond the tears.

Fragments from the meta-narrative make us sheepish. In recent weeks it has been the devolving to parts of phrases originally spoken by Homer Simpson, when communication in more thoroughgoing manners was too painful. Not the better-known “d’oh!” but the whining “oh” that accompanies everyday disappointments, so many of them cohering around food and money, to carry us through. Likewise the pleading, anti-rational, “but I have a feeling!”, co-opted from the buying of fifty lottery tickets, to express the wish for hope in the face of fortune’s inability to show its hands save in fetal odds and aftershocks. These verbal squibs carried goodwill to each other when we were too tired and sad to articulate anything more detailed.

The detail of what’s meaningful has roots even older than what amused us during our twenties, however, and it’s been with some shame-facedness that we found ourselves, separately, pulling meaning out of the pop music of our teens as we waited out our uncertainty. No contemplation of the numinous, the deus ex machina, in Mozart’s Requiem or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis for us! The señor was brought to his knees by REM in the same manner, I noted, as 90210‘s Brenda contemplated the disintegration of her relationship with the blank canvas of Dylan (although in our case what was to be lost what not quite so visible). After our results, I found myself blind-sided by culture even more of its time and place. A chance viewing of a Sheryl Crow cover sent me back to the playlists of 1988. Gentle reader, there was meaning for me in the lyrics of Terence Trent D’Arby.

As I have written before, years spent in the archive with the draft poems of Robin Hyde has lent me a love of the partial failure in verse, and the single “Sign Your Name” must be placed in this category. At the same time, the straining for effect that occurs across some verses lends it the striving, aspirational tone that is a feature of both teenage verse and the work of speakers of other languages who are intermediate masters of English. (See “Keep Your Comments in Your Pockets” as an example of the latter.) Thus, the second-verse contention that “Time will surely bring disappointments in so many things”, a favoured sentiment of mine that was more recently expressed by Weezer as “So much pain may come our way”, is offset in its insight by the tentative syntactic inversions of what follows: “It seems to be the way when your gambling cards on love you play”. The musical metre demands a word in addition to cards, and so the overclarifying “gambling” is added.

What caught my attention anew in this song was not initially its lyrical awkwardness but the opening line, the sense of entering in the middle of a conversation: “Fortunately you have got someone who relies on you”. This was its value to me now, the inverting of my personal tropes of independence over dependence, the fear that if I didn’t somehow have a metaphorical bag packed at all times, I would be lost. (Nothing clears that one up like facing the possibility of a disabled child.) Here, the needs of others and implicitly the need of oneself to rely on others are presented as good fortune. This seemed to me an insight, especially when sung in that melancholy, quavering alto of the original (or, as I came by it this time, Sheryl Crow’s Memphis-rendered cover in which her vocal is a disappointingly blank recreation of the source, phrase for phrase the same over the completely different arrangement).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There in the original single’s video is the exotic (French) object of desire, pictured at almost all times with her young daughter, who views her mother’s bikie lover without fear, as of course does the viewer: we know he is only a pop star posing.

When this song was originally a hit I was in my first year of high school, where relationships for girls at least were usually characterised by teachers and students alike as a choice between abstinence or the terrifying threat of pregnancy. I was also religious, which added a considerable other dimension to my thinking about romance. It was in this context that I heard a line from the song as “I’d rather be in hell with the baby that we could have had”, which in my recent circumstances was a memory, reactivated, that cut straight to the heart when this song passed once more across my radar. The years 11-14 were a time of rich lyrical mishearing in my life but this one had escaped me until now: “I’d rather be in hell with you baby than in cool heaven”. The song took its emotional weight in memory for me from something that was never there. It was no stretch for my over-analogising mind to turn that into an extra chromosome of the song’s own. That mishearing fitted of course with my young teenage view of relationships: damned if you did and starved if you didn’t, forced by the nature of pressing adulthood to live humbly in an unideal world.

A browse of Wikipedia revealed that D’Arby, of whom I had thought little for almost twenty-five years, later changed his name to Sananda Maitreya, under the influence of a dream. Many of the YouTube commenters show a lack of familiarity with the 1980s version of masculinity presented in the video and read in soft phrasing and careful grooming evidence of effeminacy rather than the textbook pop star masculinity that it was. Despite D’Arby’s apparently regular declarations of his god-like musical abilities, the song appears second-tier in its presentation, in the sense that the vocal carries the influence of the phrasing of George Michael, Prince and Boy George. These things are by no means flaws, of course, and the sense in the video’s careful choreography of a relationship as wracked by deep emotion as by lust held some trace for me of how my thirteen year-old self might have stylised the days of the señor’s early days of house-calling.

A PhD has failed to do anything except embed my love of pop cultural fragments, and I know enough now not to be abashed that my palate and its context are as flat and broad as any other cultural studies academic. The heart, hurt, behaves like a child and the child seeks familiar comforts. The pleasure therein lies in rendering them again as an adult, of claiming back for the adult meta-narrative those additional insights that the years bring. The overreaching frame of reference that gives rise to the cringing bathos of a line like “we’ll shed our stains showering in the room that makes the rain” cannot complete offset the hope of redemption among vulnerable people, the dream that one day we might again imagine that “the earth rotates to our dictates”. The ability to take self-conscious comfort from failed art of adolescence is an arrow in the quiver of twenty-first century life.

Long talks with my brother, some live gigs in which deep dub gave way to live drum + bass, and at least one night out that took me to the edge of the hell-mouth that is the heart’s-home of silly, introspective drunks, gave me the shake-up that I needed to get my thinking straight. I came home, got some professional help with the house and garden, planted annuals, welcomed my darling hellion and started an internet diary. In short, I took up a way of life that continued, with modifications, even after I began keeping company with the señor fewer than four years later. Its poles of house, garden and work have largely been the standard by which I measure myself even eight years after its establishment.

In one of those mini-epiphanies that inevitably takes place in suburban locations – in this case, the local supermarket carpark – I yesterday realised this early-century standard is in part the source of some of my worries now. The past year should have, more than any other, reminded me of the changes time hath wrought. Time and money have not only been colonised by different responsibilities, but also space. The scale of humanity and caninity that occupies this small house is so much greater than when I finally wrangled my life the way I wanted it, eight years ago, when it was one woman, one part-time job, one dog. This, more than the lack of domestic will I assumed was the source, is the reason the garden is now largely lawn and overgrowing shrubs, and the kitchen, poor, cramped kitchen, the site of daily struggle with a king tide of dirty dishes and food waste (our good fortune in having a dishwasher is offset by the fact it is housed behind the laundry door). When Millie came to us at nine weeks she destroyed in less than a month the level lawn, the plants in pots, the old foam couches on which I had till then lived comfortably. Add to that six live puppies since (the majority of whom still live here) and the folly of my aspirations of shining floors and level garden beds becomes clear.

I am living a life of which once I could only idly dream, but it demands I revise not only the standards to which formerly I held myself and my home but also cease to attempt to put multiple full-time responsibilities into what is only one fulltime life. Parent, employee, domestic slogger: it’s the last, in the case of both the señor and me, that suffers. This is no special insight outside of our own lives, but there is something to be gained, nonetheless, from realising the obvious from time to time. I realise too that I have not helped myself in the last few months by taking as my read-guidance domestic mapping by writers not also working fulltime. I forget, sometimes, when my job is like a second skin, that it is still a fulltime job (as is the señor’s) and thus eats easily the time that can otherwise be spent raising the home beyond the standard of tolerably habitable. We have the care of each other, the care of our daughter and our daughter-to-be, the daily needs of seven dogs; tolerably habitable must be good enough for what future we can foresee.

The needle whose future work had preoccupied our thinking for the previous four weeks was out of its own kit now, its action calmly described by the consultant who sat near the foot of the bed. Neither the señor nor I saw it, my eyes closing as I saw the señor drop his head toward the floor, knees and feet splayed and hands clasped in the sad stock pose of the waiting man.

The incursion of the needle was less painful than a blood test or an injection: with almost no sensation through the skin and then with resistance through the uterine wall, which contracted, as predicted, dully and at its distant perimeter.

Baby’s fine, said the consultant, and far away from the needle. Not paying any attention at all. All done for now.

All done: that moment’s marker that refers only to the passing of that incident, the completing of that process, in this case the step toward another degree of certainty at which, we were assured, we – I – would feel better, or at least less wretched. The process to this point had been a mélange of measurements and statistical probabilities, calculated from a wider range of sources than when I was pregnant with my first daughter two years earlier. Some were tangible and some painfully speculative. All pointed toward what felt, every day, like a door about to close behind me.

I had mantras, straws at which to clutch, that worked for some of the time. In moments of lucidity I could laugh at their disparate origins. A partly-remembered maxim from a former counsellor: that the ability to cope with uncertainty is a sign of mental health. Viv Richards, murmuring to the interviewer in Fire on Babylon that “I always backed myself”. Back yourself to raise this baby, I murmured in turn, not actually saying a word but imagining myself speaking through gritted teeth. The universal message of my colleagues, that they thought us best equipped among parents to take care of a child with the disability the numbers offered us. People wouldn’t consistently say that just to be nice, I reasoned, even in a workplace culture that prizes niceness above many other things.

I read multiple scholarly and newspaper articles to try better to understand just what our numbers were saying, grimly mindful too of the phrase “our numbers” and its usual location in fortune, lottery, fate. I did so much reading and research that I was instructed by more than one social service not to do any more.

Of the fetuses whose nuchal fold – an area at the back of the neck – was measured at the end of the first trimester, just five percent of those called normal would have a measurement greater than 2.5 millimetres. Of the fetuses who would be born with Down Syndrome or other conditions caused by chromosomal variations (I found the standard phrase “abnormality” almost intolerable to say), almost all would have a nuchal fold measurement greater than 2.5 millimetres. Our fetus had a measurement of 3.6 millimetres. Measuring alone could not indicate to which of the two groups a fetus with a larger measurement belonged. The odds could be further refined by including blood test results, maternal age and maternal weight in the calculation. This done, we had learned at the beginning of the thirteenth week of pregnancy that the particular set of odds given our fetus were one in five of having Trisomy 21, which causes Down Syndrome. The odds for the other trisomic conditions, rarer and more disabling, were also increased, but none to that extent.

It was strange to have a private drama take over our daytime thoughts in a year where all dramas and the source of collective hardship had been public, civic and seismological, and the reminder to self to think of the unhappiness of the eastern suburbs, to put my own uncertainty into some wider and more worthy context, was another of my daily maxims. These stuck as inconsistently as a fridge magnet thrown at a metal door from a distance. (It was further undermined when a colleague from the eastern suburbs told me she was using my worries to keep her own earthquake-related problems in perspective.)

I write of fears and worries, but these were specific. I was worried about our ability to take care of a child with disabilities, when the nature of those disabilities remained unknown, except under the wide umbrella of a syndrome: developmental delays and cognitive limitations reduced in significance by the fact of a first-year mortality rate of fifteen percent for affected children; the fear of prejudice, the fear of domestic chaos. I was also, far more pressingly, worried about my ability to know my own mind, my own wishes, in a system which included the facilitation of swift, early termination of such a fetus. My anguish was widely read as good grounds for abortion, should our particular trisomy be confirmed. I did not want this, but nor did I want the anguish.

The fact that we were a minority in this projected path – my reading suggested that anywhere between seventy and eighty percent of fetuses confirmed with Trisomy 21 are aborted – made trusting that I wanted to choose this path even more distressing. It put me in conflict with the señor, into whose moral philosophy relativism has made considerably fewer insinuations than mine. That first emotional plumb, the sounding at the first scan that we wanted our baby regardless, sustained him in a way it did not me. What if I were wrong about our abilities, our commitment? Neatly and swiftly, my fear that this would tear us apart did an accelerated job of doing just that, our lives over those four weeks converted by bitter irony and meta-narrative into a functioning version of what I feared would happen in future, and all, as the señor pointed out, for a paper tiger, a fetus whose nature remained unknown to us.

So I had amniocentesis, the narrative needle to extract the fluid in which chromosomes could be counted. After forty-eight hours and then again at two weeks those odds that more than one professional had described as “huge” were revealed to have gone our way, in that our fetus – female, who quickly became to us a girl, a daughter – had no trisomies, no syndrome, none of our fears. In the relief of this news persisted the fear of the increased risk of miscarriage that came with the procedure, the shadow of a shadow that we had also wondered how we might endure. Roulette, said the señor, Russian Roulette, but my mental health was not going to hold up with the alternative, without amniocentesis, of six months of waiting. Between us we found enough cultural capital – wedding vows, the memory of our respective maternal grandparents, so loyal to each other – to wear that fear.

What do we have now? We have our eighteen-week-old fetus, the daughter-to-be, longed-for no less for the month-long possibility of those trisomies, and her older sister, and each other. We have the possibility of fetal heart problems, another spectre of that larger nuchal measurement, at the coming anatomy scan. We have angry, radicalised, idealised sensibilities, the strong notion that society needs to change, that the solution to fetuses conceived with trisomies is not necessarily or logically that they not be born. The fact that this is the chosen path for so many parents of these fetuses speaks to me of a wider environment in which those commonplace concenrs of feminism and the history of labour are dominant.

The way in which the demands of work and family are positioned as fundamentally in competition, rather than in alignment with each other, the way in which the development of children is predicated, even before they are born, on their ability one day to join the industrialised workforce, the way in which the value of people is quantified to some degree by the amount of money their thriving will cost the state: all these things contribute to a normalising and privileging of certain kinds of human over others. Guidelines for those contemplating carrying or not carrying a fetus with a trisomy invite them to consider such questions as what the value of life is, as if these are matters best reflected on by strained, frightened parents in a window of just a few weeks. Why should moral philosophy be their work alone?

It pains me (and regular readers will imagine how much much) to impose upon the cool brisk tone I like to bring to my written work something approaching an impassioned plea, but these are moral questions for us all, and we have a social duty, I believe, to push beyond the post-industrial dictates of neo-liberalism, to find, as Robin Hyde argued in the 1930s, the way forward for a society in which mothers (and now fathers too) can work and have their children, including disabled children, including people for whom the social prescription seems at present restricted to demanding a lot of work but bringing a lot of love. I do not think the social value of my unborn daughter ought to be contingent on the fact she will not be born with the trisomy that causes Down Syndrome. I do not think our wish to bear and raise her even had this been true should be regarded as an aberrant choice. I do not think anyone is helped in this by narrow abortion laws that make a fetus with disabilities just one of a few reasons for which a pregnancy may not legally continue, although on this matter I doubt I have any stomach for engaging in internet debate.

It is easy when living and working the life of the mind, when running a household of little conflict and relative privilege not to think in any personal manner about the wider state systems that sustain and shape our moral choices, our assumptions about the value and viability of life; let this be someone else’s work, perhaps the working or non-working poor at whose feet neo-liberalism places responsibility for their own suffering. This experience has brought the señor and me into immediate, visceral contact with those questions, in a social context where it is assumed that success and privilege will largely consist in not having to think about them at all. It brings us to to that umbrella question that is the go-to for the left wing view: if like this for us, then how for others? On this and in this, as much as in the increasing fetal movement of my growing daughter-to-be, my thinking turns.

2011

You call me and you
call me and I answer. I
answer with the baby on the breast
or when I’m sitting in the dark
beside the cot while she sleeps,
the laptop on my knees. My knees.
The cold glow of the LCD screen
spins a shimmering scroll of emails.
You have too many emails.

You call me to read aloud your emails,
to read aloud my replies.
You can’t find your emails. You can’t find
the conversation history. You say
the email never arrived. You
tell me to tell you the gist of the reply
you say is on your screen. You
haven’t got time to read the message.
You haven’t got time to do your emails.

You call me and you call me and you call me.

2002

You sleep with one hand on the mattress
and one on your phone. You say

my phone is too old and too large.
You don’t want to touch my phone. You keep

your phone close to your heart while we are
sitting on the station platform. You check it

all the time to see if your friends are
sending you messages. I am your friend,

I say. You say, you know that, but you
are still going to check your phone. Once

I send you a text message while we are
sitting on the station platform. I am beside

you but not close to your heart. The message
says hi and calls you the nickname I have

given you and which you say you do not
mind. I watch the interest in your eyes

disappear when you see the message is from me.
You say, this is just the way I am.

2009

You keep your smartphone in your breast pocket
like a modern pocket book where you
account for us all. I see you slide it in
a single motion from where it rests to the

open palm of your hand. You hold your index finger
like a pen as you enter the information. The
information flies between our phones or
down the cable through this LAN that

regulates our relationship, our antagonism.
You are cheerful and polite and you have your
smartphone always. I see you in the corner of the room
at meetings, tapping with your pen-finger while

the announcements roll out, while hope rolls up
like a worn-out carpet. People say look, he is
playing with his phone again. Sometimes my phone,
silenced for the meeting, vibrates and I

see the message is from you, your phone, your
pocket book already slid back into the tailored
recess of your shirt.

2007

You text me from the bar when the first drink
arrives and every drink thereafter till the last.
We are always together, even when you are in
your cups. You text me from the taxi or from
the bus. You tell me what stop you are at and
how many minutes between the stops. You say,
fuck Riccarton, it is still too far away from me.
You text me when you cannot sleep or when
you get up early to go to work. You text me
in the downtime on the late shift. I am never alone
because we are always together, even when
you are at work. When you move in, we look
at our battered phones, side by side beside
our bed and we miss their separation, their
flurry of words and our love on the downlow,
our love in the dive bar, our love from first drink
to last orders, please.

Instead of a dearth of relevance, suddenly there’s a ghastly surplus of it. Like a boor at a party, the quake insists on pushing in and monopolising every conversation. (Source)

Reticence came up with the dust or down with the snow, placing me at quiet odds to this rising heap of narrative to whose granular contents I cannot, in general, bear to incline my eye. It is important to gather stories as data, it is important for everyone, everywhere, to have their say, but, to be frank, I do not suffer well all the talking and I am waiting for the sifting to start and the making to follow. No doubt this will take as long as the rebuild itself.

I wonder if perhaps it’s because I’ve participated in times past in both a talking cure and group therapy for my own historical mental illnesses, that the wider feeling of a community and beyond its boundaries a nation more generally turning over the traces, circulating the images, talking, talking, talking about its feelings, is something that for cultural purposes I so resist. I’m not meaning here the coronial findings, the stories of crisis, of deficits of provision, of help wanting or help that never came, that to my mind deserve a loud reciting in public forums and plazas of all kinds, but the meta-narrative, the story about the story, the What Does All This Mean for Us that’s an inevitable consequence of the literate, numerate, articulate life lived in late modernity, in person and online.

There is much, too, that can be said in public only aphoristically or as an allusion, but which is talked about in small groups, face-to-face, and whose contents sink the heart; a growing sense, for me, of a city populated in part at least by robber barons. Another friend put it more bluntly: “if [developer X] had actually strengthened his buildings instead of just painting and paperhanging then there would be people in [streets Y and Z] who would be alive today”. Between this, this, this and this, not rushing into text, not writing, not reacting feels like a distinct aesthetic, silence as practice, that bears if not its own virtue then its own preservative serenity for me.

That is not the story of the whole, of course. Governor’s Bay Jay has in her own anniversary account a paragraph of our joint art adventure in which

It was heartening to see people out and about in (almost) the central city, enjoying the photos and returning to the Museum. And I realized how unaccustomed we, in Christchurch, have become to doing just this and how the art fed my soul.

The wide paths of Rolleston Ave were full of people of all ages on foot, on bikes, talking and laughing and being together and giving the space the sense of a collective, of people in public, that has been a long time absent. Everyone is weary and wary of talking about hope in a public, civic sense, but here were proliferations of private hopes, of spring that might be a more merciful replay of the bright, fine day that followed the starting of all of this.

A different kind of collective has been gathering daily not far from here at the Riccarton Racecourse, where the coroner’s findings the papers have reported with near-liturgical reverence. This detail the señor and I have had to read rapidly, furtively and in daylight hours, not really able to speak to each other about the stories therein, the ordinary people doing everyday things in the same places as we might easily have done on just that day. The circles continue to widen as we recognise more faces among the families of the deceased: there is the mother of a school friend of mine, talking to reporters about the life and death of her brother and his wife. Some names assume a special taboo of their own so that they can’t be said, lest we break down while driving, while doing housework, while sorting the laundry. Taneysha. For her my right front wheel wobbles at the centre line near the end of Racecourse Road.

Echoes of a future austerity mean my institution is awash in cortisol at present, the acute weeks of teaching in tents, church halls and primary school classrooms long given way to the bleak voodoo of what happens next, to whom and for how many. I am giving up my voluntary role come next year. I’ve led one drawn-out industrial battle in my tenure and am ready to hand the reins on in a structured fashion to whomever for the coming fights, whatever form they take. It has been gratifying for the last two or more weeks to clarify for me so rapidly the matter of when it would be time to move on from the role. I am looking forward to the sideline life once more.

Personal zeal for the management of stress is the necessary pastime, locally, for all who are not too beaten down to do it; for those there is I suspect the floating-in-grey that is the emotional colour of getting by without amenities, clarity or purposeful domesticity. (All those Burwood and Horseshoe Lake gardens, so lovingly tended for so long, gone for good to stinking dust). An hour a day is a good length of time for me to walk to quiet my mind, but even this is a privilege, I think, of the dry outer west: I have level paths and streets with only limited cracking through which to walk; the air is as fragrant as the proximity to fertiliser factories and abattoirs will allow and the spring green has only the usual dry riverbed soils through which to break.

The neo-liberal narratives pivot and turn on the willpower and tenacity we allegedly draw from the same soil and ignore the privations of geography, poverty and random chance. The government bleats “fair” as if the manifest destiny of the State were indeed solely the preservation of debt/equity ratios, and as if these ratios themselves existed in locations abstract and universal. A discussion of the systemic problems in the mandate of the EQC prior to this disaster brings a perverse sense of relief to me: some childish part of my mind is relieved of the obscure notion that all that has panned out was in some way our – my – own fault.

All this, then, is a swirled-about miscellany of what people do, what poets do, when along with dust swirl up data and endless discussion. The roof sits very low above my head as I concentrate, fiercely, selfishly, on the interests of my daughter and my family, the needs of my students and concerns of my colleagues. When I look up it’s to the sky’s emptiness, that huge horizon that represents Canterbury for me more than anything else. I chafe more than ever at any vestigial remains of earth-as-mother stories and think instead of sista7 as a better representation of where I might like to go with my own work: the cool, abstracted beauty that distils suffering and menace and domesticity and privacy and the physical’s rapid smashing of the social, the civic. Or at least it does under the contextual labours of this imagination, whose practice, it would seem, is no more resistant to the reading, re-reading and near-over-reading of all that’s around us here than any other.

Furthermore, the commercial mysteries of special offers mean that it has turned out a saving to include a T-box in our domestic phone-internet-television conurbation. This means that we have, for the moment, two fresh Sesame Street hours each day, a useful substitution, for now, for the usual supplementary YouTube searching.

Most of what we daily see is continuous with my memories of the show from my 1970s and 80s childhood: letters and numbers (now up to 20!), music largely of a funk, soul and Broadway turn (now with hip hop!), the wry humour of disappointed expectations and relationship lessons humbly learned. New adults and young people have joined the neighbourhood, while others continue their domestic and stoop-dwelling life. Luis and Maria, whose relationship began around the time I stopped watching, are one of several sets of characters who have led the way into the middle age I am also, I suppose, here approaching. I remember, as a young viewer, struggling to tell Luis and Bob apart, each falling into the world of beardless men who all, to my eyes, looked alike. (This image of my parents in 1973 may provide some context for that remark.)

It is a curious experience to be viewing again what during my teens and twenties my friends and I did our best, variously, to subvert. As third- and fourth-formers we ran a swift, mean line in regulating each other’s behaviour by singing a quick round of “One of these things is not like the other” to bring any who departed from our narrow norms back into the group: a murmuring that “One of these things just doesn’t belong here” was usually all it took. Later, a flatmate kept as her desktop image one of what the internet would later reveal to be a diverse library of images that took the close companionship of Bert and Ernie to variously bound and and mutually consenting conclusions.

The subjectivity that looms large over the street now, however, is one that also comes after my dedicated childhood viewing of the show. This is, of course, Elmo, that curious, innocent, persistent and intractably childlike puppet whose habit of speaking of himself only in the third person in tones higher-pitched even than Grover‘s serves as an ongoing irritant to otherwise reasonable adults (NSFW).

I was, similarly, an Elmo sceptic; from the outside he seemed to me too light on complexity and too heavy on pitched charm, a 1980s’ smoothing of the grittier, funkier 1970s’ aesthetic. As might be expected, however, I have come to revise my position, for reasons that sit squarely but separately with my daughter and me.

The first is simple enough: my daughter loves Elmo. That high-pitched voice, that steadfast gaze: she gazes back and giggles delightedly. I am not wholly helpless in the face of the enthusiasms of a one-year-old child (she giggles at Barney too, but only for the amount of time it takes me to switch that subject-of-another-post irritant off), but neither am I wholly independent of mind. Imagined through the filter of her experience, Elmo’s world of colours, drawings, singing and inquiry is not much different from the way we try and live here, day-to-day. Small, wry and yet unbounded in the way the childish imagination is itself unbounded, it is now readable in a way it did not use to be.

And it grew both day and night/ Till it bore an apple bright

The other is my reason, and one I noticed at random, but which has stuck. Elmo has a best friend called Zoe, who carries with her at all times a pet rock called Rocco. Zoe expresses not only her own wishes, but also those of Rocco, in more or less every discussion about what is to be done. This continual articulation of subjectivity on behalf of an inanimate object is an ongoing irritant for Elmo, who, reasonably, cannot get past the fact that Rocco is a rock. This is compounded, repeatedly, by the acceptance in the rest of their circle that Rocco’s wishes are to be taken into account when Zoe expresses them. The problem between Zoe and Elmo is by and large intractable, and cannot be resolved; it must be tolerated, or tiptoed around, or ignored. While for others it is an idiosyncrasy of Zoe, between the two intimate friends this disagreement could quickly grow, if not checked, into something like the apple on Blake’s poison tree. It is always between them. It seasons their love.

This is a complex emotional state, and one I spent much of my PhD navigating in the poetry of Robin Hyde. It gets aphorised in various self-help manuals – wanting what one has, perhaps, rather than having what one wants – and contains within it the seeds of disappointment and tolerance that grow in any long-term friendship. If only Zoe would abandon that rock, and all the ways with which she manipulates the status quo, then Elmo could have a better measure of equality in that friendship. But she cannot, or will not; her wishes must have their avatar. Of course, friendships between the very young are also struggles for dominance and control, and Zoe’s various deferrals to, and articulations of, the wishes of Rocco are ways of keeping for herself some space in that struggle with Elmo. In that world we projected in our twenties, where puppets grow up and Bert and Ernie behave in ways inappropriate for children’s television, I expect Zoe is reading Hélène Cixous.

The tension in the Elmo, Zoe and Rocco triad gives me hope that the inclusive values that inform Sesame Street are not the social engineering of escapism that such worldviews are sometimes alleged to be. If disappointment, if teeth-grinding tolerance, can sit however briefly at the heart of one of the key character’s key relationships then there is already the chance to weave some of life’s longer lessons into a world of largely pleasant guises. This, in particular, is what I think philosophies informed by the relative and the contextual, the consideration of others can achieve: by acknowledging from the start that this work is difficult to do, we might forestall the more painful extremes of disappointed expectations that inform our earlier grand narratives. Elmo and Zoe are puppets, and young, and not at all exempt from this. Their interludes tell a tale of tolerance in miniature.

The southwestern rattler that came through a week ago has kept us all humble and blank of mind here on the edge of town. The broken windows reported in Hei Hei (which the NZ Herald reported as “Hai Hai”, overlooking one of the last vestiges of mid-century Pākehā pronunciation) served as a reminder – if we needed it – not only of what must continue to be endured but also of what our friends in the East have been through rather more thoroughly than us.

These earthquakes assail the comforts of identity, all over town. I am reminded continuously of the contention that runs like a thread through much of cultural studies, from various sources, that we are as much defined by what we exclude (or by what is excluded from our identity) as by what we include. Those very features for which so many of the eastern suburban middle classes chose their places to dwell are being taken away from them and they are given instead the implicit offering of transfer to future subdivisions on reclaimed land to the north. What “character” might mean is thrown into relief as communities that grew up under disparate historical changes and social forces are discontinued by decision of the State and offered no similar alternative, little except a developer-determined future. It is as if the worse and most homogenous aspects of our suburban life are to be retained at the expense of all else.

This says nothing of families in the neighbourhoods to be acquired by the State who will not have the opportunity to begin again in a similar fashion. The point has been made more than once and by more than one family that the comfortable modest dwellings that could be bought out East can by no means be acquired for that price in the west or northwest. The bitterness of the geographical divisions of ‘quake damage are thus compounded by the vagaries of the open property market. Land agents, insurance companies, property developers, demolition and salvage teams: it seems those who have lost everything are also to be thrown to the kind of capitalists who might people a novella of a different kind of West.

I was more agnostic until I heard the minister quoted as saying that the demolition companies have a right to salvage as much as they can, for which those moved out must not strip furnishings or character features, and profoundly less so still when the notion that the State was making an investment for which it was entitled to return was widely reported in the news: the land must be remediated, sold, and built upon again! I am not opposed to the intervention of the State in the matter of land at present ruined, but oh; I do not like the friends the minister brings. Can be the party of business interests without being the party of crassness? Can one allow the eventual trade in salvage without it being at the expense of the personal histories, the stories, fittings and features maintained, of the citizens, the electors?

We are lucky to be alive, of course, and we are lucky to have nationalised land insurance and we are lucky to have a State that is even ideologically or materially able to intervene. There are, however, things to which such a State should give a care that are outside the workings of the kind of laissez-faire land acquisition over which whatever atua Hone Heke has left us must be laughing like drains. We are cultural, storied beings and some among us have lost most other things. People need to be able to relocate with choice, care and dignity and the land they leave given space; it is not in this regard “an investment”; it should be let alone save for landscaping, a reminder that even the most torpid of low-lying wetlands can make heavy weather, even without “small, fond, human enclosures“. And if those who are to relocate are to be given the legitimate civic opportunity to make new homes equally small and fond, the transition needs to be managed far more responsively, far more tenderly, than to allow the possibility of future outlying subdivisions to be the panacea, the singular comfort it is not.

I have been immensely supported in my care of her by immediate family, extended family, friends on- and off-line, acquaintances, work colleagues and superiors and, from time to time, strangers in the street. It is thus not coincidental that she is so bright and sociable. Despite the generally negative fashion  in which very young children occupying professional and public spaces are written about in everyday media, she and I have been subject to an unceasing tide of good will that persuades me that many people enjoy babies and children very much. It helps incalculably that I have a flexible work environment. It is possible that I have been a more effective employee since I returned to work precisely because I must manage my time so carefully, and have become accordingly careful not to waste the time of others. In the early days of my career I had a deserved reputation for derailing meetings in various fashions amusing but ultimately frustrating. Those days are no more; I must often be steely of eye over institutional matters tense while dandling in my lap my young accomplice.

She is an intriguing mixture, my little one, of extroversion and stillness. She is happy to be offsider to the boss baby at creche, who moves around the furniture with forepersonal decisiveness while my girl plays percussion or rings the bells in the middle of it all. She remains delicate in size but unexpectedly strong. At certain of the dogs she laughs so much that she flails her arms. She is content to be held by most people, although increasingly reserved around strangers. She teases her adult friends and her grandparents with brief but elaborate displays of false coyness.

I work hard and anxiously for her every day, driving our routines and the demands of my work according to a kind of inner aesthetic, a sense of balance in starting and finishing whatever we can, my self-esteem, such as it is, residing in anticipating what she needs just before she voices it. We have all been tested by a post-February parade of continual respiratory ailments and I thank those of you who have given reassurance on this already. The last few have not been so disabling.

I think it is the tactility of baby-life that I love the most, the soft and stretching fabrics, the continual embraces, the wool, the giggling. Her fine motor skills seemed to arrive all at once, overnight, but the sight of her lifting some piece of foil or paper between two fine fingers as if inspecting a diamond for integrity still moves me (even as I slip the offending article from her hand before she puts it in her mouth, and substitute for it some other, chunkier, chewable). She crawls now with a kind of martial seriousness, the unexpected exemplar, as @nzdodo had it, of the old lines of Curnow (with whom it turns out my daughter shares a birth-date): “Simply by sailing in a new direction,/ you could enlarge the world”.

By cataclysm as well as culture, her world is very different from the early life of either me or her father, and we must dig new paths to the future as a result. I hope it emblematic that she slept on my shoulder through last week’s largest earthquake, oblivious until the dogs lined up to bark that I was braced and crouching in a doorway. Still, there is much love behind her, the dead and the living, and her father and I the ambassadors of its greater part. Now more than ever we know the inscrutability of the future, so it’s all I can wish that this love foster determination and resilience in her. However much in future she might regret, as we all at some time do, that she didn’t spring forth an orphan, fully-formed from the earth, I hope that the love and care we give her now form an invisible ballast for future days, whose provenance we know but whose destination we don’t.