FARING WELL: PART TWO: ROCKET LAUNCHER

 

This is the second in a series of posts called 'Faring Well', about some special ways of farewelling the dead, and about tender and liminal spaces. 

The Kauri Tree in the picture is unrelated, but represents respect for the stand out personage of Darren. 

Here is the story:

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My friend Lawrie had a misspent youth; in fact it was said to his face: ‘You’ve got a lot of teeth for a cheeky cunt’, and it was true. By the time I met him he had mellowed a lot, but he still had his rocket launcher.

One of nature’s engineers, Lawrie had gone to school to eat his lunch, but he had learned elsewhere by asking himself questions like: ‘What happens if I put that in there?’ He also liked things that exploded. He had a quality collection of weapons. So it was fairly understandable that he would build himself a rocket launcher out of bits and pieces of crap from hardware stores and people’s junk. He said he just wanted to see if he could do it, but I suspect his other motive was protecting his cannabis plantation. This was a serious piece of kit, I mean, a bring-down-a-helicopter piece of kit. Whenever Lawrie fired it, there was a Police investigation into the lights and bangs in the night sky. Lawrie leads a charmed life, that boy.  I am one of the few people to have seen the thing. It is made of plastic pipe and papier mache, would you believe, but its wiring is amazingly sophisticated.

Which brings me to Darren. Darren helped with the wiring. Darren was Lawrie’s mentor, and inspiration. Older, stocky, bearded, indestructible, a talented artist and a ferocious intellect. He was I guess a redneck environmentalist, a very local entity, who lived in a house he built himself in the deep countryside. I never met him. He died of cancer, and it was Lawrie’s great grief that he was not a part of that. Darren’s new partner had no time for Darren’s old crew. Lawrie was shut out.

Lawrie wanted to farewell Darren in his own way. He got the bros together and a party was held in the wilderness near Darren’s house. All day, while everyone else drank and smoked, Lawrie built the rockets, putting into each of the nine, the ashes of his friend and mentor. He had buried the hatchet with Darren’s partner. It took some negotiation and was good for both of them. I was invited to this party, and I knew no one except Lawrie himself. So I walked with the women down to the river. They talked about Darren. He was a man of influence. Everyone had a story, and it all went back to Darren’s wisdom, creativity and generosity. He was above all a teacher, of life and skills. The younger people all had learned from him a piece of practical wisdom, whether it be hunting or painting or the evils of Government intervention. He was truly missed. I say this without irony – we may never see his like again. Darren was a true rugged individualist and there is less and less space for such people.

That night, with friends and family gathered in the wilderness, Lawrie fired off all nine rockets, each containing Darren’s ashes. The sky lit up. There was even a sonic boom. Birds shrieked and flew. After the mighty sound receded, and the cheers died away, there was the sweetest silence. Lawrie then gave one of the briefest and most reverent eulogies I have heard. He said this:

‘Darren’s ashes will go into the river and the river will go into the sea’.

And so it was.

FARING WELL, PART ONE: TRAVELLING CASKET

This is the first in a series about death and dying, and the tender time between the death and the faring well. Thus the series itself is called 'Faring well'.

The sculpture in the photo has a small ngarara or lizard wrapped around the base of the koru, the fern frond. The ngarara are the creatures of Hine Nui Te Po, our death goddess here in Aotearoa/New Zealand. 

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Orlando was born sick. His life started with him struggling to eat, and then got harder. The doctors couldn’t work out what was wrong, but after some weeks it seemed plain he would die.

His parents were young students. They had no money and nowhere stable to live; if you were judgmental you could say they were unprepared for parenthood. They were kind, thoughtful, intelligent, and connected.

On Orlando’s last day alive, the medical staff unhooked all the machines and they and his parents took him outside. They showed him the sky and the rose bushes. They told him how beautiful the world was. They sang to him. The head neonatologist had composed a song just for him. He died outside, in the rose garden, loved, inspirational. He must have been inspirational, because I remember him down all these years.

They took him home, as is the Maori way, and kept him with them in their bedroom. They needed to take him to their turangawaewae, their home or ‘place to stand’, and bury him there in the urupa, the cemetery belonging to their hapu (sub tribe).  This was harder than it seemed.

They had no money and no car. It was just on Christmas, and public transport was all booked up. An uncle offered them the use of his car. I rang the ferry company, to try and get them across Cook Strait between the South and North Islands. At first the ferry company were very understanding and found a ticket on the fully booked ferry. Then came another sticking point. They would agree to have Orlando on the ferry providing he was in an approved casket and was kept in the car. This is a big roll on roll off ferry. You drive on, park your car among all the cars in the hold, and walk onto the passenger areas, and then when you arrive you are all ordered back into your cars and you drive off.

This upset the young parents. They had thought they could just walk on to the ferry holding Orlando in a basket. They did not want to be parted from him, not for the three hour journey, not  for any time at all. For a while there was a tearful impasse.

By this time I had worked my way up to the senior management of the ferry company. I outlined what I thought were the principles the company might use to govern their decision making. They sympathised with the young couple who had just lost a baby. They also did not want to have a dead baby among the passengers, who might be shocked if they happened to see him. Fair enough. How can we work with this? Let’s not say no to this. We share an understanding here. Let’s try and work out how we can do it. After some negotiation, the manager decided that he would book out the sick bay, and make it the private quarters of the little family for the duration of the journey. Provided Orlando stayed out of sight in the sick bay, the parents could have him with them and have some privacy.

The parents agreed, and it went well. Orlando had the full tangi (funeral) he needed, at his home, and his parents were nurtured by their closest whanau.

When they returned, Orlando’s mother came to see me. She talked about how well it had all gone, and what it was to have her son die so unexpectedly. I have dismantled my personality, she told me. Taking Orlando home had been an experience of Shamanic intensity. It wasn’t a bad thing, in her eyes. Since Orlando’s death she had become more calm, more able to see the big picture, more mature. Grief dismantled her and made her new.

I was privileged to work with Orlando and his family. Privilege is an overworked word but it is true here. You only feel loss if you are able to feel love. The grief over loss like this is love’s release; it is the hardest thing to do after our own dying itself, the sharp end of love. It happens to us all, perhaps less suddenly than with the death of a baby. This young woman stood up afterwards with dignity and authenticity, and thinking about her moves me to this day.

 

HAVE SOME URBEX WITH YOUR SHAMANISM: A TRANSGRESSIVE APPROACH TO JOURNEYING IN THE MIDDLE WORLD

 

I I hail the superhuman;

I I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

-          WB Yeats, ‘Byzantium”

 

Our 2011 earthquake brought with it 181 human deaths, the destruction of much of the central business district, and well over 10,000 more earthquakes. It also brought the reordering of the land. At that time, the river Otakaro Spoke. She defied a hundred years of Victorian positivism and drainage and told us all very clearly she wanted to be wetland again. I was brought up with English children’s books and I liked Otakaro as it was, called the Avon, with proper banks and grassy swards. My daughter knew better as a child and told me an origin story of her own invention: how the great Tuna (eel) escaped from bondage in the mountains and plowed this giant wide furrow towards the sea, kicking up the land as she did so, and after her came the water, and thus the river was formed.

 

I frankly enjoyed the aftermath of the earthquake because all the things that were supposed to be inside were now outside. I could look at the broken buildings and see boxes of shoes and mannequins leaning out of the windows and uneaten meals. I took to wandering at night, well, more so than usual, and doing a bit of urbex. This may seem ghoulish but I was not interested in the destruction as such but in the transgressive nature of events. Transgression means to carry across, to cross a boundary. I liked how the boundaries had shifted, how transgression had become more possible, how there were basically no road rules for several weeks and how hidden things had become exposed.

 

 I might add here that this town is small enough so that everyone here knew someone who died. My enthusiasm for transgression and exposure does not remove that human context and I have only respect for those who died and their loved ones. The human stories have been well told elsewhere. This story is mine and it as usual idiosyncratic.

 

Over ten years later and there are still patches of inner city that have not been pulled down and replaced with the currently fashionable laneways. Here is an office block. Walking past it, I was amazed as I often am. It looked like a sort of dystopian advent calendar or a giant Zoom meeting in zombieland. Every window is different, and the graffiti is a marvel. How about those ghostly curtains wavering in the breeze? All those tiny tiles set into the concrete. How some windows are even intact, and yet as opened up as graves. You can look and look. I was dead keen to get in of course and wandered around casual-like considering an entrance, for old time’s sake. But then the wonder of it all overwhelmed me. Of course thousands of lives pass through us all the time, we move in a stream of ancestry and acquaintanceship and transaction and love and loss and enmity and it’s all human business. At times in the ordinary course of a day I can feel them, if a boundary becomes a bit porous and I pick up a thought or snatch of speech. Looking up at this building, the life of it and the lives in it seemed to wake up for me. Not just the earthquake, but all the history of the building. Every drop of sweat, every word, every sandwich, all exposed. In Non Ordinary Reality, time is, well, I don’t know what it is really, and so the press of bodies over the decades in one space was such  a press on my senses I wanted to cry. Trying to write about it, wanting to find words that are not metaphors but are also not literal in any sense, I can tell you only how the it was, a flickering of life-in-death and death-in-life moving as fast as film, a wheel moving so fast it seemed that lives and deaths were happening all at once. My desire to break in vanished, because in a very real way I was already there.

 

This is transgression. It is a carrying of consciousness across boundaries. It is also my way of introducing the idea of journeying in the Middle World.

 

The Middle World is everything in Ordinary Reality, from the greatest galaxy to the smallest sub-atomic particle. In other words, it is a place of wonder and terror and beauty and we are super fucking lucky to live in it. There is also a heap of tragic rubbish, which we all know about, but right here and now that is not to be taken too seriously. So, you can journey in it, in Non Ordinary Reality like you can in the Lower and Upper Worlds. You can journey to the night wind, or Mars, or Uluru, or your childhood home. I could journey to that building, if I wanted to, and remembering that was another reason I decided not to try to break in. I once took a journey to my heart. I stood in a red corridor, a corridor of flesh, awash with blood, and my hands had been cut off, and blood travelled up one arm and through me and down the other arm. Only afterwards did I realize where I had been. ‘Mere complexities of blood and mire’, as Yeats says in the poem quoted above.

 

The MW is as en-spirited as anywhere else. I have talked about two spirits already. These are the spirit of the river Otakaro as she Spoke during the earthquakes, and the spirit of the building who hosted all those human lives. We are in a world of non-human, other-than-human and more-than-human beings. MW spirits are as mixed a bunch as humans are and they have their own loyalties and concerns. If you work with a Power Animal, take them along for protection and extra wisdom.

 

I also want to say something about culture. Journeying to a sacred place such as Uluru, Aoraki or Mount Kailash does not make you an indigenous wisdom keeper. You already know that, but once you are in the journey and are part of the wisdom and power of these great beings, you can easily come back thinking you know shit about shit. What you know starts with you. So maybe you can make such claims, but I am always having to learn respect.

 

What happens in the MW has its echo in the other worlds. Or maybe it is the other way around! You can make wonderful journeys to natural places and they can tell you what they need and how to help them. You can also journey to plants and experience how deep and wide they are connected. Journeying in the MW is one way of working out what is going on, if you are up for it.

 

We are never alone, or at least we are not separate. We are nodes of consciousness in an entanglement. Sometimes you have to do arduous and perilous things for that. Sometimes you have to walk two kilometres into town and look at a building.