The Great Hunger

Apollo Conducting the Music of the Spheres
[Gafori, Practica Musice (1496)]

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond
– G. M. Hopkins, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection” [1]

As you approach your turn-off, the urge to drive down it, towards your malodorous flat, dwindles to naught. Instead, you swing the big car north on Sunset [… the little Mazda west on Jervois Road …]. A green arrow deflects you, beckoning you down the dark canyon of Curran street, the Harbour Bridge approach.

You drive past the Westhaven breakwater (not without a sigh for those dark waters of the bay), and then you are racing up the bridge, rewarded by a brief dazzle of light as you crest its peak and see grandstanded before you Devonport, Bayswater, and the whole North Shore. Down on your left, the double pillbox promontory of Fisherman’s wharf looks curiously tenantless. Even the styley restaurants must be closed at this hour.

Once there were tollbooths at the ends of these lanes, but no more: instead, there is a speedway of competing trajectories as cars comet along, jockeying for position on the northern motorway. Not now, though. There are no more than one or two other vehicles in sight as you race past the Takapuna turnoff, Esmonde Road – home of old Frank’s fibrolite bach.

Past the golf driving range (a landfill seeping into the mangrove swamps of Shoal Bay, pukeko-haunted by day), and up the hill towards the Northcote turnoff … No, the road is calling still. You don’t turn off, but continue, past Tristram Ave (neon garishness of Wairau Rd), past Upper Harbour Highway, and down through the intricate bollards and barriers guarding the next, unfinished leg of the motorway.

And now into Albany village. Traffic lights interrupt you here, but you’ve found a late-night channel on the radio, and the music lulls you from thinking.

Thiss iz howee bardee
Kumon evreebahdee …
Kumon evreebahdee …

You pass the Albany pub (gentrified from its former station), then accelerate up the long wooded hill which leads toward the Riverhead Road. The land has turned to lifestyle blocks now, unlighted. You can put your lights on full beam. The turns are sharper, though, and it is a relief to reach the straights of Dairy Flat. No-one is waiting to turn out. You go on to Silverdale. There too, the lights are on, but no-one’s out walking the wide New World streets. Over the hill, past the fire station, and down to the long flat beachfront of Orewa.

So tie your long hair up again
This is the end of every dream …

You’d thought, originally, you might stop there. Gaze at the sea, stroll along the beach … no such luck. The car is telling you to keep driving, and you weather the three or four banks of traffic lights without impatience, before winding up yet another precipitous hill. Past Hatfield’s, and Waiwera, and Wenderholm, then over into the Puhoi valley. The road is good; you drive with easy intensity.

tango dancer
spun out of time

Somewhere along a long straight north of Warkworth, the impulse suddenly deserts you. Sleepiness erupts. You should be home, not here. It takes some time to find a place to do a U-turn, but you are assisted by the lack of other traffic – any other traffic.

Caught in a hailstorm
and there’s nowhere to shelter

On the way back, you imagine yourself stopping to pick up a hitchhiker. But who could be out at this time, in the small hours of the morning? Perhaps another Maori boy? You shudder at the memory. You’re past all that now, past all that intensity …


GAY

RAVE

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Notes:

[1] Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Robert Bridges. 1918. Second Edition With an Appendix of Additional Notes, and a Critical Introduction by Charles Williams. 1930. The Oxford Bookshelf. 1937 (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 67.

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ABDotWW 14 (1999)


[8/10/99]

[639 words]

[Published in ABDotWW 14 (1999) 34-37;
Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000): 87 & 90.]

Jack Ross: Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000)

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