I had a crush on Mt. Alfred. Viewed from the lagoon at the north end of Glenorchy, NZ, Mt. Alfred is a self-satisfied thing, its confidence rooted in geometry. The mountain is an isosceles triangle, the left slope equal to the right, and its base exactly twice its height. But the mountain is not stolid; the stability of Mt. Alfred’s shape is offset with the gesture of its edge, which rises and falls like the line of a conductor’s baton, nuanced on the upbeat and decisive on the down. Sometimes the mountain is a sober thing of olive green and deep purple, but then…

the wind picks up and moves a cloud to reveal a fringe of chartreuse willow at its foot. Mt. Alfred sits at the junction of two glacial rivers, the Rees and the Dart, which rush to Lake Wakatipu. The lagoon sits to the east of these speeding waterways and is filled by less hurried sources.

The lagoon is on the Glenorchy Walk, a trail that circles the town, and a small part of the massive system of NZ public walkways.  The marshy spots are spanned by a boardwalk, which not only keeps feet dry but also provides percussion, each footfall amplified by the hollow beneath the wooden slats.

The lagoon is a good place to watch black swans with red beaks, and…

to feel the wind as it drags cow-hide patterns across the mountains. The wind in Glenorchy is a frequent companion. At night alone in bed, I hear loose things rub, drag and bang across the exterior of the house, sounding like animals, small and large, on nocturnal errands. The wind is such an assertive presence that I’ve been attempting to draw it.

January 14, 2012: Wind, Glenorchy NZ, 55°F

When the wind is up, I sit outside and trace it, looking for movement in the trees and dust and feeling its direction on my skin.  An improvisational process like this often makes for surprising results. In this case the drawing of the wind looks a little like a traditional Maori tattoo, which is a logical reference considering the location, but not one that was intended.

Maori male face tattoo

Amused and impressed by the ability of the human brain to sort, wash and fold messy, inchoate bits of information into tidy parcels, I looked up from my drawing and saw Mt. Alfred, once again, in the distance. Infatuated as ever by its shape, its bold placement in the Y junction of two quick rivers and its admiring lagoon, I decided to get to know Mt. Alfred better and climb to the top.

At the base the Mt. Alfred trail was smooth and designed with switchbacks to temper the grade. It was a pleasant start.

The flora was varied in texture more than color.  The palette of the Glenorchy region is restrained, blue being the dominant shade gently contrasted with olive and ochre hues.

As I continued, the trail became rougher and steeper and I considered the wisdom of climbing alone.

I had hoped for an opening in the canopy and a stunning vista to reward my effort. But the view was always blocked; the snow-capped peaks and the impressive, gravel plane of the riverbed across from Mt. Alfred were barely visible through the trees.

The light in the forest changed from dappled to brooding. The trees were shorter and broken. The precipices at the edge of the trail became deeper and, with pounding heart, I began to think of a wrenched ankle, a shattered leg and a broken skull.  I also inventoried my belongings. “OK, I have a half bottle of water and a granola bar and I’m overweight, so if I fall helpless into a ravine, I won’t starve for a week. I can use my car keys as a saw. My passport won’t provide much insulation between me and the ground, but at least my body will be identifiable.” Ridiculous wimp, onward to the top!

January 14, 2012: Wind, Glenorchy NZ, 55°F

The shapes in the forest got weirder and the abstract improvisations I made a few hours earlier seemed like realistic renderings of the place.

January 26, 2012: Wind, Glenorchy NZ, 69°F

When the trail became so vertical that I began to climb it like a ladder, I stopped. Defeated. I would not reach the top of Mt. Alfred today and expand my chest to take in the air or stand taller to see the vista or feel accomplished and invincible. Nope, the mountain was ready to swat me, but kind enough to let me know in advance.

So, with infatuation replaced by respect, I returned to Glenorchy and made a picture of Mt. Alfred with the lagoon at its feet and the wind at its crown.

January 24, 2012: Mt. Alfred, Glenorchy NZ, 72°F

]]> http://www.antipodes.us/a-change-in-the-relationship/feed/ 0 http://www.antipodes.us/glenorchy-nz/ http://www.antipodes.us/glenorchy-nz/#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:09:56 +0000 mGlier http://www.antipodes.us/?p=868

Glenorchy, New Zealand, where I’ll be for the next 8 weeks, sits on a lake that is 100 meters deeper than the surface of the sea and is fed by runoff from mountains named the Remarkables. The lake, Wakatipu, is shaped like a dog’s leg and Glenorchy is on the hip end at the north. If you zoom out to gain the perspective of a satellite,  you’ll see Chukotsky, the eastern most region of Russia to the north; the Ross ice shelf of Antarctica will be to your south; moving due east or west, you will cross Patagonia; and if you follow a true diagonal through the earth, you will bob up in the ocean a few miles off the coast of A Coruña, Spain.

Back at ground level, Glenorchy is a quiet town of 200 residents, whose main street supplies the basic needs of a modern life.

There’s good food at the Glenorchy Cafe…

clothing…

energy…

and emergency service.

Like the establishments that provide basic services, the cultural venues are similarly no frills, like the old town library.

There are a few sites of historical interest, like this monument to those who died in WW1. The poignancy of the memorial is not lost in the battle with necessary things like power lines and loo signs, but the clash of the extraordinary and the commonplace on Main Street makes for a small shock, like static electricity in a favorite blanket.

The source from which this settlement draws its life has always been the land. Since the nineteenth century, settlers came to raise sheep and pan for gold. The gold rush was short lived, but the sheep are still here. Now the town draws on the drama of the landscape for an income.  The story here is light, space and sky, all played out on the sides of mountains. It’s an old story, but still a good one. And as a friend said, “It is perhaps the best story, and we just keep struggling to tell it correctly.”

I lost the first round. We were looking at a canal scene of Venice that he had painted and I mentioned that once on art business I had stayed in that city for a month. Warren Cooper, a tall man of 79 years with clear, blue eyes and the kind of thick, white hair that elects men to Presidencies, sensed that behind the factual banality of my comment was a maneuver, common to first encounters, to establish our relative social positions. He neatly countered with, “ Oh, I’ve been to Italy many times as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of New Zealand.”

“When other kids liked comics, I liked color charts”, said Mr. Cooper about his first visual stirrings. From this innate attraction grew an early career as a sign painter in 1940’s Queenstown, a small but growing city on the south island of New Zealand. He did not have an apprenticeship in the trade, but taught himself from manuals. For it’s roundness, Mr. Cooper likes the typeface, “Cooper”, but the shared name is a coincidence, he says.

As a young entrepreneur, he encouraged clients to do big signs with artwork like the iconic Esso Tiger he once painted for an oil company on Main Street. More than the supplier of bold advertizing for local merchants, Mr. Cooper offered his community and his country years of service, first as Mayor of Queenstown, then as a Member of Parliament, and finally as a cabinet member in the Muldoon and Bolger administrations.

Now, Mr. Cooper has retired and has returned to painting with zeal. Working mostly from photographs that he finds in books, magazines and newspapers, he favors landscape subjects. Expecting to hear sentiment of deep attachment to natural scenery, I asked Mr. Cooper why he favors the genre.  He replied, “I have a huge difficulty doing bodies, I should practice.” Landscape, it seems, is a practical choice, since it is a more manageable subject than the human figure.

But he did hint, later in the conversation, of softer motivations. For one, he’s fond of the Tuscan landscape, a place he has visited many times and now paints often. Not one to gush, Mr. Cooper said of Italy, “If I just see it on TV, I immediately think I wish I was there.”

But the house is full of paintings, and I sensed a passion for the act that was more than a chance to relive pleasant memories. So what is driving Mr. Cooper’s desire to paint? “Winston Churchill”, said Mr. Cooper. “When he retired he spent time either brick laying or landscape painting. You can get lost in both. That’s the nice part about it, if the work is going well, you can do it for two hours and it would seem like 45 minutes. You can escape in it.”

So there it is; painting like brick laying is a place to enter time and be a part of it rather than sit outside of it and watch it slowly pass by.

Packing went on all week. Every choice was labored. It’s mid-summer in New Zealand, have I brought enough yellow and green? Will the mornings be cool enough for long johns?  Can I get by with medium grit sandpaper, or should I take fine and coarse as well? Once selected, each item was inventoried, and placed in suitcases, hard things nestled in soft things to minimize shock and damage.  Each bag was composed not to exceed the weight limit of 50lbs.

“Myself”, I said standing in the bathroom packing toiletries on the day before I left, “it’s a long flight to New Zealand and you’ll want to brush your teeth along the way. You could take this half-used tube of toothpaste, but it might be confiscated by the TSA for exceeding the gel limit. Or you could take your third trip in two days to the drugstore and buy a travel size.” Pondering the choice, I looked up, and saw in the mirror a face so worried that it could have been captioned, “MOMENTS BEFORE AN EXPLOSIVE ANEURYSM, MAN ATTEMPTS TO FORESEE EVERY EVENTUALITY AND PACK PERFECTLY SO THAT NOTHING EVER GOES WRONG”

Before dawn on the morning of my departure from Hawaii, I set out to visit the cliffs one last time. I drove away from the dark coast of Puna, up the side of Kilauea where I passed through a cloud that was filling with light. The sun broke over the horizon as I skirted the steaming crater of Kilauea Iki to glimpse the sheets of lava uplifted and buckled by recent volcanic activity. The floor of the volcano looked like an LA freeway after the BIG ONE and I was reminded how creation and a destruction often look similar.

Once over the crown of the volcano, the road to Halina Pali descended on the southern slope through the Kau desert, which lies between Mauna Loa and Kilauea. The wind was constant and strong here and the smell was fresh. Setting a standard for purity, the air flows from the arctic over thousand of miles of open ocean to arrive here.  Nearby, however, poisonous gas spewed from the main crater of Kilauea, forming a violet drift that floated down the rift toward the sea.  The stain in the air raised the issue of beauty, an experience which relies on contrast more than perfection. It’s surprising that pollution can be beautiful.  A drop of oil in clean water makes rainbows which curl like a nautilus and the effect is undeniably beautiful. Beauty is not a moral thing, a point made clear in the last century by the artists and architects who made stunning spectacles for the Third Reich.  No, beauty is just an experience, a compelling, motivating thing that has nothing to do with human notions of good and bad.

The road continued down the slope, alternately passing through dry grassland and…

young lava flows.

Once again the landscape proposed beauty as a topic of conversation. The lava confounded my senses, since it looked like a viscous liquid, but it was in fact crisp and brittle to the touch. The molten forms hijacked waking consciousness,  replacing it with a fugue of dreamy associations. “Over there, is that a cranium nestled in rope?”

“And look here, it’s the torso of a Hindu Goddess.” The shapes of frozen lava fired my imagination to see sublime, mundane and grotesque things, transforming a tourist like me into an accidental mystic.  And the richness of this experience registered as beauty.

The road ended at the cliffs of Halina Pali, which rose 1800 feet above and ran parallel to a 12 mile stretch of coast, which faced south-south east. To the left were young lava flows which poured down the slope and then stretched out to make a shelf into the Pacific. The shelf of lava is geologically unstable and may someday break off into the sea like an edge of cookie weakened by dunking and falling into the cup of coffee to make a plop so large that the wave will slosh over the rim to deposit sea shells on mountain tops.

Antarctica was straight ahead. Of course I did not see it, but only 6500 miles of empty space could account for a blue so deep and I was compulsive about that color. I found it thrilling. I could not get enough of it. I stared at it and I couldn’t describe the feeling, since it did not remind me of anything. The beauty of that blue was beyond words and I wondered if the sight was stimulating a gene deposited on the long beach of my genetic history by an ancestor with four legs, a set of flippers, and gills that converted to lungs on demand.

"Halina Pali", oil on aluminum panel, 24"x30". 2010

I took many photographs but they were all inadequate, since they failed to capture the vault of color that was Halina Pali. Painting may best embody the color of the place, since it can show how rich hues inspire thievery, compelling one to grab, hold and take away. Once again I noted that beauty is motivating, but not a moral force.

Like crochet on the edge of a pillow, a line of white surf stretched to the left, embellishing this, the southern-most coast of the United States.  And the prettiness of the scene was contrasted by weird cinder cones that poked up from the distant desert valley like canine teeth from a bottom jaw. Beauty requires a little brutishness.

Vegetation was blonde and spare, since little rain falls on Halina Pali. Uncluttered by surface detail, the beauty of the place was fundamental, derived from the four ancient elements of air, water, earth, and fire. Sound increased my perception of size. Beside the distant rhythm of the surf, I heard the wind filling both the hollow of my ear and the curve of the cliff. A large bee passed my head at full speed to demonstrate the space-stretching character of the Doppler effect. I felt very small here, an experience that was relaxing, since the perfect majesty of the place relieved me of all ambition.

And like the beautiful landscape before me, I emptied out and the cavity of self that was left was scoured and smoothed into a simple bowl, poised and amoral.

If beauty is motivation to live, and I think it is, then the plants of Hawaii do humanity an enormous favor, reaffirming life with their sensual display. Having ten or more distinct climate zones, the island of Hawaii has an astonishing diversity of plant life to contemplate. And it’s not just the visual sensation of shape, color and texture that is so pleasing…

it’s the compound experience of sounds emanating from shapes moving in the breeze and…

the smells that slip from the colors. Plants are special to people, particularly the bloom, representing love, its blossom and loss, across cultures. Who knows how the flower became such a universal symbol of affection, but it probably has as much to do with frailty as it does sensuality.  But there is evil afoot. The potency, in fact the very meaning of flowers, is under attack.  Within Hawaii, perhaps more terrifying for daring to invade this paradise, are plastic flowers which live here, undead, in profusion.

I’ve been living in a house full of them, and they tried to destroy me!  Like zombies with a familiar shape but no soul, they invaded my space.

Blooms should crush under foot and not spring back to form. But these are sturdy constructions without need of food, light or water. They seem so normal, such good, modern things, advocating for efficiency and durability as they do.

But here is starts, the invasion that ends a life worth living; the insidious assertion made by all plastic flowers that the illusion of feeling is satisfaction enough. Without moisture or movement of their own, they feed on every nosegay of wild violets ever picked with innocence and presented with love. They suck from every prom corsage, wedding bouquet and grave wreath.

They collect dust.

It’s not just the smell of Play-Doh and benzene that reveals them as the undead, it’s also their sound which is insincere. It is the unmistakable sound of plastic, the most malleable of materials; whether in the form of a freezer container or a stamen, it makes the same lifeless thud when struck. *

Like the mutant gene on a healthy chromosome, they look normal but their expression is deforming. Protect your soul! Send these uncorrupted corpses to the landfill where they will live, undead, for a thousand years.

*Observation made by Roland Bathes in his essay, “Plastic”.

“Even before we knew the gory details about Mo’okini Heiau’s history, the place gave us the heebie-jeebies. We aren’t the only ones who have noticed that the area around the temple is filled with an eerie, ghostly lifelessness, and it’s the only place on the island that we like to avoid…Used for human sacrifices, the area feels devoid of a soul. The quiet isn’t comforting, but rather an empty void.”

Why would a guidebook author, who is usually practical, suddenly go Gothic? Was this calculated entertainment? Or an ingenuous expression of personal experience? And if it is the later, what created his reaction?  Can a landscape be haunted?

The vibe at Mo’okini Heiau is unusual and the feeling begins a few miles from the temple with a dramatic descent on a single lane, which drops 500 feet to the sea. As my Kia Sorrento and I were losing altitude, other famous descents came to mind, most gloomy, like the journey of Orpheus into the underworld to find his lost love or the descent of Jesus into hell.  Primed now for mythic interpretation of whatever came into view, I saw at the bottom of the incline a platoon of giants with faces to the breeze.

The wind turbines, whose great size was occasionally obscured by the rise and fall of hills, sent scimitars of shadow across the backs of grazing horses. The turbines were white but for one blade, which was painted the shade of marigold. The unexpected flash of color required my eye to follow and my brain to tally repetitions, which may account for the dreamy, hallucinatory feel of the wind farm.  But maybe the strangeness was created by the quiet, compound sound of the turbines, at once mechanical like a buried pump and human like the swish of ballet skirts. The association of giants and ballerinas was odd, but I left the wind farm happy, encouraged to see sustainable energy technology applied.

But the oddness continued; at the bottom of the road, edging the sea, was a well-maintained and perfectly empty airport.  No planes, no people, no cars. If it were derelict, the airport would register simply as something old and not useful. But since it’s groomed and ready for action, the total absence of humans is weird. Where did everybody go? The scene is Hitchcock weird, subtle, ambiguous and full of portent.

Now accompanied by Hitchcock, giants, Orpheus, Jesus, and the corps de ballet, I continued through the constant wind, along an unpaved track, parallel to the sea toward Mo’okini Heiau. The land here is very dry and open, receiving only a few inches of moisture a year.  As a result, it’s tan and dotted with gnarly trees whose branches turn like expressionist strokes of black on a field of raw canvas.

One approaches Mo’okini from below on a path of red cinders.

“Heiau” is the word for “temple” in the Hawaiian language. Mo’okini Heiau was for centuries the most important temple in the Big Island District of Kohala and much of it’s history has come to the present through oral tradition. The original temple was built near the end of the first millennium by Mo’okini a local priest.  It was subsequently rebuilt and enlarged, circa 1370, by Pa’ao, a priest who arrived from the south Pacific, bringing with him new gods, and the tradition of human sacrifice, a practice that endured for centuries after his death.  Reports of the number of sacrifices range from hundreds to tens of the thousands.

By legend the Heiau was built in a single day by a line of 15,000 men who brought rocks from 10 miles away by passing them along the human chain. The exterior walls of the Mo’okini are roughly rectangular, about 250 feet by 130 feet and the height varies up to 14 feet, but they may once have been as high as 20 feet.  The base of the ground hugging walls is 10 feet thick and they taper on the exterior and the interior.  The scale and the mass of the exterior is sobering; “weighty” describes both the thing and the feeling it evokes. By comparison a modern temple like the average Wal-Mart building is much larger, but it has no scale or weight, festooned as it is with light, color and signage.  For the modern viewer, the weight of the stone and the size of the walls dominate perfectly, not unlike a sculpture by Richard Serra, who is a master at creating sober reverence through manipulations of space, scale and mass.

The entrance to the temple is large enough for only one person to pass.  Stripped by the architecture of the comfort and strength of companions, you enter alone.

The thousand year old walls, assembled without mortar, block the sound and feel of the wind.  The quiet and stillness are surprising and register as a small loss, as if loved ones, who have been visiting for the weekend, have just left.

Inside across the northerly end is a raised stone platform three feet high which once held fires, statues, the alter and wood towers.

On the alter someone dropped a lei around a stone as if it were a head.

Detached stone platforms only a stone or two high, are scattered around the interior and once served as foundations for wooden temples dedicated to various gods.

At the north end of the compound situated between the main temple and distant Maui lies a flat stone named, Papa-nui-o-leka. Here human flesh was separated from bones after the body had been sacrificed. As was the tradition in many Pacific cultures, the flesh was eaten and the bones used to make tools like fish hooks, and needles.

A natural table, the Papa-nui-o-leka stone is about 6’ x 5’ x 2.5’, concave, and smooth on top. It’s easy to imagine it in use. The sacrificial stone is the tangible evidence that supports the myth that Mo’okini Heiau is full of spirits. Mo’okini is a sober place in which one feels isolated, but there is no need to resort to mysticism to account for the feeling that comes from a visit here. As with any site in which humanity slaughters humanity, like the beaches at Normandy or the World Trade Center, the visitor is moved by the loss and unsettled by the thought that killing is so often ideological. But few would claim as did the author of my guidebook that these sites are “filled with an eerie, ghostly lifelessness, … devoid of a soul”.  Perhaps it’s the cannibalism and the reuse of bone that upsets modern sensibilities to the point of hallucination. Putting modern standards aside, however, it was practical of these people to utilize the protein and raw materials of sacrificed bodies. But it’s not just history that accounts for the feelings evoked by the place, they are also created by the site, an isolated windy, dry slope as well as the architecture, which nimbly exploits the psychological effects of scale, weight and space. If Mo’okini is haunted, it is haunted by the prejudice of modern people who too quickly indulge in a fantasy that people of the past were bloody to a degree that surpasses our own.

But there is relief from the gloominess, unintentional as it is. Someone has placed several sprinklers around the grounds, which go pfft, pfft, pfft and shoot little rainbows making a counter-memorial to the monument of Mo’okini Heiau.

Most of the historical information in this post is from the following:

Russell Apple, Pacific Historian, US Department of Interior, National Registry of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form.