Status Updates From Living in the Maniototo

We came to New Zealand by ship. There were lessons in English and my brother Josef and I were soon speaking more English than Hungarian, and our father too, for it was his English that had helped him to be chosen. It would enable him to “fit in”, they said. The New Zealand aim was to have people who would “fit in” readily and painlessly (painless for those already there). Like invisible mending.

I explained that in the very early morning a troop of deer and fawns came down from Grizzly Peak and moved from garden to garden on Grizzly Peak Road, eating the vegetation. I knew that home in New Zealand the shotguns or the poison bait would be out at once, for the land is our saviour and we insist that we have no partners when we exercise our presumed right to destroy it.

He was young, charming, and he’d written two novels, Seed on the Shore, and Leaf in the Wind, both in a kind of blowaway tradition — women with streaming hair and eyes, horses with flowing manes, and trees and men with flowing seed, set in storm and hurricane country.

A writer, like a solitary carpenter bee, will hoard scraps from the manifold and then proceed to gnaw obsessively, constructing a long gallery, nesting her very existence within her food. The eater vanishes. The characters in the long gallery emerge.

Those creatures and worlds that we know only in sleep and dream and mythology—of yesterday and today—the magical technology—are emerging as usual reality in the new dimension of living and dying. And when the unreal has been accepted and made real, new realities will present themselves, forces which become gentlenesses, gentlenesses which become forces.