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.
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