New Year's Eve Paragraphs
A couple of years ago a friend asked me, ‘Are you someone who is easily contented?’ I don’t know why I’ve always remembered that question. We were sitting in a bar next to a window and the sun was shining in my eyes. I can’t remember what I said. I think I was conflicted, because the question seemed to be about whether I wanted things to change or stay the same. Afterwards I cycled home, ate a big dinner and got into bed with a book and felt completely happy then fell asleep.
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I walked into the lounge and immediately forgot what I was there for, so I said what I always say when I forget, which is, accusingly, ‘What the fuck was it?’ A song by Guillaume Teyssier called ‘Shadow Dancer’ had just come on the stereo. In the video for the song, two French guys (one of whom is Teyssier) wearing shiny bomber jackets saunter into a classroom and give disco lessons to the students. I don’t understand why Guillaume Teyssier isn’t more famous. Every so often I google him and see if there have been any developments in his career, but there never have. In the lounge, I thought of the bomber jackets and suddenly I started dancing. It was the usual dance which I have been doing for twenty years. A series of rippling, bubbling movements, sometimes a geyser, sometimes a jug coming to the boil. The last time I’d done this dance was perhaps a year ago, and it took more effort than I remembered. Then, as I was dancing, I thought of a line in a James Brown poem about dancing, from his most recent book. The line is, ‘Her body made a kind of qwerty motion.’ Thinking of the poem took me out of the moment and I was suddenly incredibly embarrassed. I stopped moving around. I remembered what I was in the living room for. Nail clippers.
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I tried to write an essay about ‘New Zealand’s terrible year’. I was not happy about it – the year, obviously, or the essay. I kept telling myself, you will figure out how to describe it. Halfway through writing it I realised I wasn’t figuring it out and wasn’t going to, because it was impossible and because I should not have agreed to write the essay. A feeling of dread came over me, then panic, and I thought, I shouldn’t be a writer anymore. Then I said out loud, ‘Don’t be so dramatic. God.’ Then I thought, Still, though. You think about that.
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A big blackbird was sitting in a relaxed, almost spreadeagled way on the fence outside my bedroom. I wanted to take a photo of it. When I moved, I saw the bird’s eye swivel towards me and seem to widen as it saw me sitting on my bed in my dressing gown while the sun outside was shining, and the bird straightened up and flew away.
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When I think about happiness, which I am doing because it is New Year’s Eve and unavoidable, I think of it in kind of a mocking way, telling myself off for wanting it. You can’t just wish for happiness, because happiness isn't a place at which you arrive and then can stay. And the more you strive for it, the more elusive it gets. As far as happiness is concerned, the best you can hope for is to catch it for a moment, like a tail wind. It’s just logic. When I’m saying all this, my inner voice is both jolly and defensive, like a sunburned man on holiday about to lose his temper in the car. But I’m no longer satisfied with the knowledge that happiness isn’t something to be achieved and that I have to embrace my unhappiness first. I worry that it means that it will always be like dancing to ‘Shadow Dancer’ – for a few seconds my moves are impressive, until I remember that they’re not.
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For Christmas my mother gave me a book called Words on Words: Quotations About Language and Languages. When I was struggling with the essay I turned to the chapter ‘Writing: The nature and functions of writing; techniques of successful writing’. I read: ‘Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.’ (Walter Bagehot.) I put down the book and googled types of teeth. Walter Bagehot had left out the canines, premolars, wisdoms. Regardless, how was the statement meant to be helpful? I read, ‘No iron can stab the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place.’ (Isaac Babel.) I didn’t think it was right to equate punctuation with murder. I knew the statement was hyperbolic, and I was being disingenuous. But I couldn’t get past it and I still can’t. A full stop will never have the force of someone stabbing someone in the heart, not even close. Then I read a French proverb: ‘Where paper speaks, beards are silent.’ What the fuck.
I have never been less sure of anything.
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At high school I remember a friend said that a good title for a novel would be 'And She Went'. I agreed, it would be a good title, because it indicated that the character was decisive. The last line of the novel, we agreed, would be 'And she went'.
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One of my problems is I often have just a small scene that feels kind of meaningful, but it's not a story. It's barely an idea. I've thought I'd like to write about learning to ride a horse. More specifically, about being carried away by horses. Being carried away by a horse feels like something that should mean something and that I could write about. My mum and brothers and I all learned to ride horses together in Te Kūiti, and at different points each of our horses panicked and carried us away. I have a memory of being carried away by my horse, Alicia, which went galloping along a ridgeline far above the teacher's, Mrs Bakewell’s, house. Alicia cleared a couple of fences and then went sort of clambering, monkey-like, up a steep hill – her legs seemingly unstoppable, like one of those military robot dogs – while I clung on to her back, instinctively lying myself down on her neck, screaming. I saw the small riding paddock in the distance, with its brightly coloured jumps made of barrels and logs. My brothers, my mother and Mrs Bakewell were standing down there. I remember rolling down the cold wet grass, so I must have unhooked myself from the stirrups and thrown myself from Alicia.
And I remember watching my mother being carried away when we were on a trek near Piopio. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life to see her disappearing into the distance on the back of the horse. Then she, too, threw herself from the horse and rolled neatly, like Indiana Jones, along the ground.
I wrote to my brother JP to ask about his experiences falling off horses, and he wrote about an event at a gymkhana. His horse – rotund, black with a white star on his nose – was named Sparky. 'I remember falling off Sparky repeatedly as we attempted to canter over a series of small wooden logs set in the ground. The crowd were keen to see me succeed, and it seemed to become an important test of character (though I can't remember to who) that I perform this event satisfactorily.'
I remember thinking this was a great anecdote, but then I didn't know where else to go with it.
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I don’t mean this to sound like a joke, because it’s true – I’ve had a lot of sex dreams these past few nights. They are not normal sex dreams. In one, I was wrapped in wet muslin because in the dream people had a sexual fetish for cheese and were trying to form me into a kind of cheese. I was trying to stay calm, and keep an open mind out of respect for others’ predilections, even though I was struggling to breathe through the muslin. When I woke up, I was grumpy with myself for having these things in my head. How did they get there? I didn’t care if there was a simple explanation.
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On Christmas Day my oldest friend and her mum and I were swimming in the sea. There's always a moment in the sea when the sky looks very huge, almost glamorous, like a beautiful face on a cinema screen. Then my friend shrieked, 'What the fuck was that' and immediately I felt it too – a thick bed of slime under my feet. Awful. The slime felt old, somehow. It had been there a long time. How far did it go for? Impossible to tell! The water was brownish, cloudy. There were just too many things you couldn't see. We paddled back to the shore and walked up the beach in our togs. We all hobbled back to the car, dusted off our feet, and went.