"Who were the first people ?"

Origins - Who?

This is an image of a work by Len Lye, a great New Zealand artist, sculptor experimental filmaker, and philosopher. I took a day off work once in about 1986 and went to the Auckland Art gallery - and came across his strange work -one sculptural work is a "model" or a symbol of the universe in the form of a huge band of steel attached to an electromagnet which oscillates at mains frequency I assumed and through hysteresis etc causes the steel bands to pulsate; and as they do there is an awesome booming sound. Lye was fascinated by cosmology and the macro and the microcosmic. Science and metaphsyics come together in his workI think. At that time I hadn't written (or read significantly) much for many years and had never heard of Lye or Stan Brakhage - but later I was to learn that my lecturer in English - Roger Horrocks was doing a book on Len Lye, which as since been published. Lye's work ws shown at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. His work is on view in New Plymouth.

ABOVE: An image of the 'new- born' egg -shaped expanding Universe opening out from the initial beginning from the cover of a book called "The First Three Minutes" by Stephen Weinberg - a physicist and cosmologist. Whether this image of the Universe - the mind cannot conceive theUniverse per se - is "better" than that of any religions or that of the Maori or any other creation myths is debtable. The images or abstract concepts or conjectures of art or religion or mathematics help to perhaps give us some insight into the workings of our various universes -but in the attainment of knowledge- if such it can be called -after such attainment of such "advances" in our conceptions and questionable knowing; then further questions lurch The Question itself away from us - to paraphrase Bronowski in his book: "The Ascent of Man". Apart from anything we have the Heisenberg Unceratinty Principle and theories of knowledge and time involving entropy and information theory and thousands of years of philosophy and speculation and human history - and the mystery of existence and conscousnes and itself to contend with.



The First People - Origins.

A Maori Chief or Warrior by a 19th Century European artist. The tattooing is a kind of language - the link below decribes who the Moriori were and that they were basically another tribe of theMaori people - who were never actually "Maori" but a number of tribes. This -whether the Maori or who were the first into New Zealand or Aotearoa (The Land of the Long White Cloud) reflects other questions of ultimate origins and knowledge and my daughter's questioning as to "Who were the first people?".

Who Were The First People?

This is room 3 of maybe room 6 of this part of the house of EYELIGHT.

Anteroom: WHO?

I will precede what I originally included as such, with a short discussion on who were the first people in New Zealand; whereas the question asked by my daughter may have meant that issue, it probably was a question by a child about ultimate origins.


Many believe – wrongly – that the Moriori http://www.crystalinks.com/newzealandcreation.html - are or were separate “race” who arrived prior to the Maori It is in fact a favourite one for the Right Wing racists of New Zealand. The Maori were a group of many tribes from Polynesia and the Moriori were basically another tribe not separate race as such –see the link above. Racists claim that the Maori have no claims to NZ or any rights to ownership etc as they themselves colonized and killed off the Moriori –this is completely false – in certain attack on the Moriori at the Chatham islands only one tribe was involved –and as I said they were not the first people in NZ. Racists want this theory as it gives them some ammunition to go against such things as the Maori land claims and the recent Sea Bed and Foreshore Act (this malevolent and racist Act provoked huge nation wide protests by Maori and much discussion and dissention until the Maori people formed new Political Party) that the Labour Government pushed through. NZ has had some bad Governments and perhaps Labour –the present Labour Government - is one of the better ones – but that said it is more by omission than anything particularly enlightened they have done and they are not progressive –of course –waiting in the wings there are more right wing groups – racism is alive and well in NZ. So we have, marginally, the best of a bad lot.

So the Maori were the first people to inhabit Aotearoa – New Zealand. New Zealanders would do well to recall this and show an interest in the great culture and society that the Maori achieved see Sir Peter Buck and Sir Apirana Ngata and others on this aspect of our history. Maori includes a language that was spoken but also the carving and tattooing was a method of recording and symbolising Maori culture. We neglect and show disrespect to Maori and Maoritanga at our social and psychological peril – historically, politically, humanly; and in all other ways. The Maori were the first people to arrive in these Islands and are first in importance or at least in significance. Maori and English are New Zealnd's two official languages


Room 3

“Who were the first people?!”

When I lived in Wiri, or South Otara, in about 1982, Tamasin and Dionne, my daughters of 3 or 4 or 5 or so would ask endless questions - undoubtedly to delay the final bed time – which I – the patient dad – would answer as best I could. So much I had to say finally was made in factories – rubber comes from trees, but it starts as a liquid, a gum. What is gum? Books –paper and books are made from wood. How? It is crushed and the cellulose is pressed and heated etc and things (chemicals) are added to it and it is made into paper.

Tamasin would get quite frantic about the question she struggled to express – that of the first people.

But where did the first people come from? Where? Where?! I tried to explain.

It terrified me the intensity and the import of this question – as it does now.

At that time I was quite young and very fit and very happy –of course there were problems –but I was and felt that in those days that I was fortunate to have good job as Lineman and a Cable Jointer for the NZPO – now Telecom – it was an active job and I also jogged every night before dinner -I was very fit – I had a good wife and three beautiful children, Many are less fortunate. I had a keen interest in Chess and in fact had some minor successes in that area – beating some quite strong players or at least drawing with –including some International Masters. I did have some thoughts that literature or something in that direction was what I wanted but I was doing and later completed a NZ Certificate in Engineering (in Electronics and Telecommunications) and I had/have the equivalent of an Electrical Registration. I had ambitions to become a professional Engineer. But in about 1990 I started a B.A. in English literature and completed that in 1994. My wife did a degree in History and finished it in the 80s.

But at that time – the time of the questions – I was very happy with my life.

I enjoyed chopping wood for our fire – and my morning coffee. Simple joys. I had everything I needed – I wasn’t rich but I was reasonably well off. From my sudden decline at age 19, I had come a long way. I now have three children and my youngest child, Tamasin, has produced beautiful grandson – his name is Sebastian Richard Taylor.

At that time – the time of the questions – I was very happy with my life. But death is inherent in such questions – and the ultimate mystery of the origins of all things. I knew the Darwinian theory, and tried to explain it –I had also read some anthropological and archeological books (and a favourite documentary had been Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man” and I had that book also –still have it – it is a beautiful but terrifying book) – but my explanations fell short – was this frantic questioning and her tears - a child’s preternatural awareness of the Nothingness? The mystery: of which I could say nothing? The Dog? The endless eternal beginning end?


‘BUT THE FIRST PEOPLE!. The FIRST PEOPLE!! BUT WHO WERE THEY??!!
WHO WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE???

WHO?!!

The Policeman Still Has Two

In the place of Justice, at the Court.
I sit among dark, strange, beings.
Policemen, unmenacing, brush past.
Lean lawyers, men in suits, chat
With savages. Street girls smoke
And laugh. A fat, sad man is fined.
A transvestite titters. Black jackets suits ties.
Broken and unbroken people.

The Judge hardly glances
At a boy, nervily shifting in the dock;
He has only one eye. What does it see?

A dark woman, as elegant
As a queen, sobs from an interview room:
I hear: “Both of you have, the...guilt/
The grief...” Or was it "burden"? A lady in
uniform walks past. I wait.

My son has one eye.

Lawyers from behind their ties, explain.

My son has one eye. .

The dark night has gone.

The men who
have been destroyed by those they destroy
Are kept for wicked Ogres
In their sneering woo wah wooh wah
Waspy cars. They club the broken hits
Of our land to bloody lumps,
In their daily night bashings. Like
weeders in a jungle, they are ten feet tall
And they are green
And they spit death blue
And their great, bulging, blindingly
Yellow eyes burn merciless and blind.

My boy has one eye. One!
The other one was burst…

He had run outside and cried
That a big in him had died.

The eye, infinitely aware, was all life long
In it's marvellous/ Billion step creation/ Billion step making.

One.

After vast tine unfolding
It shone in a baby’s face: it grew to manhood.
A policeman, a dutiful policemen, burst it with a baton.
The eye was as beautiful as every eye. My boy, my green
And gentle boy — has only one eye.

Two two two — one two one two one two — blue green blue green
Blue blue blue... Cops, courts, people, batons, judges.

Batons - love, hate - eyes eyes eyes. Victor cried for help -
They smashed away his eye. Why?

All I know is, a ten foot two-eyed Ogre burst his eye.

Here is the first poem and thus the first part of the first "room" of Eyelight:


Eyelight

How, at this light of time
Can I, a being bright yet dark, unblind
this aspect under the eye, and, breeding:
breed thus a truth? Not
a general, transcendent truth that sparkles
like a light on a gay green Christmas tree, but
some signal interchanged: some moment:
this, all this....

It began somehow, and I
and you also, got caught up in it all:
you know, the usual thing, the he/she/it and the
terrible lovely, and and

the Begin: the big big single bang bang boom!

the singular begin. it hangs here

Our task is: never to waver, to neither look right nor left:
and indeed as I know you are thinking, there are certain uncertainties
whose monstrous beauty is almost nearly tiresome:
Why couldnt the matter: the deep stuff in the dark spring of things:
why couldnt it get in control? Why wernt we informed immediately?
There has to be an inquiry of course. What was the matter with
the matter? Could I tell you? That it kept throwing molds, kept
re-shaping – kept touching the clay and rebreeding life and so on:
but nothing is ever perfect as you’ve probably noticed. Matter
and fire for example are surely forever at war.

The special thing that burns in the eye: they are in conflict.
Eternal. The usual thing: Dog has set up a conflict, a complex:
a complex conflict like a five volume analysis of Finnegans Wake.
The Joycean, the Miltonic thing: which ever turns you on or out.

nothing is connected – somehow.

An enormous luminosity grew between her eyes and we were dumfounded: forgetting what was origin, orange, apple, or
where the serpent had parked the sedan beside the spreading sneer of the evening’s trees who were lush and unapproachable in the growing and licentious gloom whose possibilities mean so much, especially to the few in the know. So I stand outside in derided non-decision, forever
a pastel perhaps: struggling to at least reach the status of a syllable, or even a new word. Or had you noticed. Lets go inside...I have things to discuss...

Links and Beginning and Intro to Eyelight the Poem-Project

I have finally worked out how to post links. I am still also sending links to my own Blog and so on. A friend sent a comment re my poem-project Eyelight - briefly here are some of the concepts it is organised around - it derives so speak form my The Infinite Poem of which more (and more!) anon - but I wanted to do a project that took me away from the more "asbtract" poems I was doing - they are not actually abstract (that is term that is open to considerations) -but they wwere basically one page prose poems etc created indeed from knowledge (of literatrue and many other thngs) but not prefigured as such - and from years of reading live at poetry live - I will add a link here later but they meet to read poetry every Tuesday night at Poetry Live here in Auckland (N.Z.) - when they are going - about 7 p.m. - on Ponsonby Road in a place called The Grand Central open mike - I haven't been going as much as in the past but intend to start going a bit more - this somehow develop my craft -but I got to the stage that I could write very quickly - now "eyelight" was inspired by various long poems predicated on always some greater structure and based on some idea of poetics or philosophy or whatever - now I was working sans such preconceptions or structures - or I was concentrating such ideas into kind of semiotic mesh - not mess! Hence my "itch" to 'do' a project...
In reading about Louis Zukofsky I got the idea of predicating this perhaps on Bach (as starting motif perhaps) and also of bringing - however coded - myself and my poetry into Eyelight.

Here are some of the influences happenings in my life and ideas behind or in Eyelight

Light as light the physical phenomena (is the physical 'spirtual' or vica versa?) - but its many symbolic and or mystical and other references.

Various US poets of the NY and other schools and John Ashbery as well as
The "Language Poets". Also - nota bene - various NZ poets - some are listed below.

Becket and Robbe-Grillet and others such as Perec.

Art and the example of Beuys with his various art experiments and happenings (Conceptual Art is very important to me) and in particular -even if it may be apochryphal - his refusal to teach a course unless everyone who enroled in his art course was accepted.

Reading about contempray music of Charles Ives, John Cage, Stockhausen and others. Also New Zealand composers and the support of my friend the poet-composer Bryony Jagger who composed "If red be red" - a work for orchestra based on my poem The Red

The various 'long poems' eg Pounds 'Cantos', Olson's 'Maximus', Zukofsky's "A".

Hearing about the way Bach recyled themes of is music into his B Minor Mass.

Eyelight as the word is from poem in which the line"black veins on eyelight scrawled" is used.

My son Victor lost his eye to police actions in 1990 - it was tragic set of circumstances. I am not saying poor old us or that it was deliberate act as such - he events leading up to the already are complex (for example when he was struck it was getting dark - let us say however - that difficult and tragic questions hover about the incident.)

As well as being in some ways personal this "poem" (or text) is 'about' things such as the ultimate origins whether of the Univers itself or of New Zealand or whatever.

It is about the incredible wonderfulness of being alive.

It is 'about' the enormous strangeness of being. And Being.

It is about death and tragedy but also about life and hope - it asks "what is real" -nothing perhaps new there.

It is set agaisnt an incocievable Universe whose meaning we only we 'see' in flashes or perhaps we see it always - it asks why are we here and so on. Or 'why are we here'. Or why are we here.'

Eyelight is exploratory and processional - it is also for me to learn about things (seriously) -I also want to help others. While I have great interest in literature and some philosophy (I have very wide interests - but Iam not strong on philosophy - I find it very difficult) - I also want to involve these (in my The Infinite Poem) at all levels -but more on that - Eyelight is not as "difficult" or as grandiose as it might sound from this intro.

Science.

History.

Lester Kyle's (my friend's who is a poet and lives in Buller) many projects and poetic works.

Scott Hamilton's great intelligence, discernment and support and his introduction to me of many poets and ideas I hadn't encountered at the Auckland University - this is not an attack on academia however!

It is structured from many aspects or kinds of writings (including the use of collage etc)- eg there is book I have with quotes from or comments on Art -call that book A - I also have one called "random" (ideas and quotes or just things I have found so to speak " call that B, things about poetics or related call that C and so on - many ideas. I think I go to M as I included -(potentially) any milieu and I have many visual aspects I cant put on this Blog (at this stage)
What I did is I start with my poem "Eyelight" then I take something from A then from B and so on then I have a page that is a mix of all the pages (A B C D ...M). (Perhaps I will go to Z - thus echoing Ron Silliman's alphabet project? Then I start again with poem. So each cycle or section starts with a poem. It is not prefigured apart from certain methodologies, and there is no "plan" of how this is going to develop -no plan per se - just a structure and these themes - apart from these repeating "beats" (Pound also had something- rather distantly - related to this idea -epihany to the quiotidian and so on.) Pound is also someone whose work is filled with light - or energy . I don't share his politics however.

Each of these cycles constitutes a Room ( a 'canto' was originally a room I think)

Also it is important to add my growing interest in New Zealand poets and New Zealand history a and also Maoritanga. As New Zealander there is of course a large influence from this counrty - R A K Mason, Kendrick Smithyman, Sargeson, Mansfield, Cilla McQueen, Michelle Leggott, Richard von Sturmer, Wystan Curnow, Hone Tuwhare, Micheal Morrissey (in particular his The New Fiction) Robert Sullivan and many others are or have been influential.

To some degree - Eyelight is thus political - or all writing is political in some sense of that term.

I'm the old guy! Sebastian is my daughter's son. He is 3 and 3/4s.

Eyelight - poems poetics random thoughts chess daily life politics art etc etc

This is an introduction - I hadn't intended to start a Blog - I was trying to contact Nick Piombino - poet in NY - I mean make a comment on his Blog. My interests are centred in literature but I also make a small income from selling books - used quality and second hand - I have been a technician (in fact I have had about 50 or more jobs in my 57 years) - more of all that later - I
am a keen chess player - and I may mix my posts with some of my ideas on or about Chess - I dont know why I am writing all this - but I do things as they happen - don't plan much - I am in New Zealand - I am a fairly open person - Eyelight is from a line of a poem I wrote which goes "Black veins on eyelight scrawled" and is the title of a large work I am in the process of doing – well...I am hoping at I will actually get to do some thing on it if I have a Blog - I need an audience even if it is only a potential or a possible audience. Also have been commenting on Ron Silliman’s Blog - very informative –some great stuff on there. But here I need to talk about NZ poets.

I might put it straight onto here [I was talking about Eyelight – a project] - or at least in draft form so to speak...that just occurred to me. I'm interested in the idea of things continuing -no beginning or end and what I say now is the truth: for me there is no perfection - so all the forms a of thing to be completed are the thing "completed" but such a postulated completion can be anything in any order - there are no certainties – probably nothing completed or there are things - all things are processes - we merely snap moments and maybe moments in our mind - so a poem – in this concept of what a poem might be - is not the form traditionally 'there' after 20 drafts - it is also all the drafts - all the crossings outs - the decisions and indecisions and so on... The above probably sounds muddled - it probably is - in fact it could well be total nonsense - I don’t really know what I am talking about - I kind of know - but there you go... and does it matter? Does anything matter "What's the matter with the matter?" ( by me, sadly - sadly?) Just now I am working through Louis Zukofsky's "A" -more on that -but first I am using a dictionary and some knowledge of the book via Barry Ahearn and Mark Scroggins -both of whom wrote books about him - and also my reading of various other books including Michelle Leggott's book about his book "80 Flowers".

-But now I am reading Ronald Johnson’s “Ark” –anyone out there know much about his work? Also I am looking through Kenneth Goldsmith’s huge book 111 - that starts with the single word unit A and progresses…

-She (Michelle Leggott) also is a New Zealander and a poet and critic – runs or is prominent in organising the NZEPC – (Google new Zealand and poetry). I am a published poet but not extensively - I have published in Poetry NZ and a (fairly outre) mag called Brief - this is a intro only so it wont be very interesting - I will write a more extensive one another time...

-I have just discovered how to edit so this is still “tentative” – I’m not sure if I will get the Blog ‘bug’ – but thousands have so I might also. The above is mixed as it is combined with earlier comments – thus I am adding to my own stuff – I am having a dialogue with myself.

But I don't want to talk about myself only - I want to look at NZ poets and - of course - others.

So this is a beginning. Cheers.