beautiful monsters

dream monsters

I didn’t go to the dawn service. I’ve never been to a dawn service, despite having a great-grandfather who died at Gallipoli. I always feel a bit unfomfortable about some of the sentimentality and glorification of war that sometimes creeps out.

Anzac Day, which not so long ago some predicted would fade away as the old servicemen and women faded away, has – as commentators have suggested – become our de facto national day. A day free of the controversies that surround Waitangi Day, it is a day for remembering and honouring our war dead and those who served and came home and carved out a new life for themselves and their descendants, and it is a day for affirming ourselves as a nation and the core values of our nation.

Those core values include, I believe, honouring the right to dissent, and the right not to be penalised for dissenting. In the early twenty-first century, Anzac honours the spirit of those who went to the wars on their nation’s behalf, and especially those who never came back; can it also, I wonder, honour those who dissented, the conscientious objectors on religious or other moral or political grounds who refused to go. Some of these Pacifists, in the Second World War anyway, gave service in the YMCA or in Ambulance Units. One of them was an elder in my parish in Christchurch. His experiences serving in medical units in Asia, especially in China, were as every bit as dangerous and required every bit as much courage and sheer bloody-mindedness as was required of those in direct combat with the enemy.

At memorials up and down the country tomorrow, people like us will gather. Wreaths will be laid, prayers said, tears shed honouring our war dead and the combatants who came home and who worked to build New Zealand as the free land our national anthem speaks about. There are no memorials to the conscientious objectors. Perhaps their memorial is that described by Archibald Baxter in 1968 as the "confused majority who have begun to see that, whatever the national issue may be, all wars are deeply atrocious and no war can be called just."

(from a sermon at St Luke's Auckland)

Archibald Baxter, James K's father, was a conscientious objector in WWI. He wrote a book about it, We Shall Not Cease, Caxton Press, Christchurch. 1968.

*

My friend has gone blind from a tumor. You’d think going blind would be like a slow dimming of the lights, or a darkness creeping in from the edges. But it was sudden, he says, like blinking, and then it was gone. Scary.

*

My psychiatrist suggested that I write down my dreams. I don’t see the point, they are usually just my brain sifting through random bits of information and trying to make sense of it all. I don’t think they contain any deeper meanings. Still, I’ve been reading Dinah Hawken’s latest book, One Shapely Thing. It’s a mixture of poetry and journal entries, some of which describe her dreams. They’re interesting to read, so I thought I’d give it a go after all. Most mornings I forget, but I wrote down this one:

I’m kayaking around a series of bays with ? We are pulling out pine seedlings, some are so perfectlyformed, I wanted to pot them up for Christmas trees. N was there, on a bike, I drove straight past her, fast, cut another car off, then got out, onto a bike. The bike kept on swerving left, the handlebars had a life of their own. Couldn’t quite work out the mechanical reason for this. Got a text from JC, he sent me an animation of a waterfall, “the best place to swim after a ride”.

Then we were in a hut, H was there, I was teaching people about using the phone. Everyone was impressed by what I could do with it. I was apologetic about using Telecom who are evil.

Then I had to go through the bush to bring back a body. There was this beast, I had to take the body from him. He could suck out hearts and turn people to stone. He was sucking up the water of the ocean, and time, he was sucking up time, he was the cause of all death and the world slowly ending.

Back in the hut, there was a thumping from under the floorboards. I wanted to leave, H said sure, I could go and tell the beast I was going, but I was too scared to go out there. Then at some point the beast was on our side, turning another big threatening man to stone.

Then we were potting up aloe vera plants on the window ledge. I filled up a pot with soil, and then couldn’t make a hole big enough for the root ball.

See? Random.

Posted by Fionnaigh at April 25, 2006 11:22 PM | TrackBack