MLWD Chapter 1 Retrieval

THE GOD MERCURY  

What do battles – some battles, anyway - ok then, ONE battle - have to do with dentists?  Apart from the fact that there would have been dentists there and the sons and brothers of dentists, but probably not the fathers, on either side.

The answer is Mercury – Mercury the God AND Mecury the poisonous substance named after him, much beloved by dentists of a certain school, namely New Zealand dentistry in the 20th century, as an essential element of their amalgam fillings, you know the ones that poison the bloodstream of the fortunate patient for the rest of her life. And Mercury, the winged God (although in many depictions he is airborne without wings), who gave his name to the German invasion of Crete, the airborne invasion of paratroopers, April 1941, which on the German side, which was the airborne side,

was called

                            UNTERNEHMEN  MERKUR

 And who is to say which is the more dangerous?

In terms of immediate death there is no doubt that it is War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ( here I could insert Durer’s illustration, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but the thrill of discovery would be diminished, so look it up yourselves). And clearly it would be criminal to say that dental Mercury is an equally dreadful killer because War kills mostly the young, those who stand at the beginning of life and who leave almost as winged beings themselves, having barely set foot on the ground before their earthly life is ended in the wars made by older men.

‘And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow;

and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.’

Those Whom the Gods Love Die Young, so the Ancient Greek saying goes. Look it up yourselves and see what it looks like in the ancient Greek script, and perhaps try to find out what it sounds like in that language of its origin. It will ring in your mind forever,

 and NEOS is the last word, meaning YOUNG.

            And now to the story from Crete, from the War that is still being described as the Last World War. And there are a few meanings to choose from when you consider that ‘Last.’

Last meaning the most recently completed, Last meaning that there will never be another one, or at least not on that scale, Last meaning both -  I”ll leave it to you to wander among and through them, as through a dark wood. And here, just for further contemplation, the most famous dark wood of all time, that begins Dante’s Divine Comedy in the selva oscura

‘in the middle of the journey of our life….(where) the straight way was lost.’

                        mi ritrovai (I found myself) per una selva oscura

                        che la via diritta era smarrita.

·       

PART ONE:    BATTLE

It might seem like a bad idea to start this whole thing off with such a terrible story as the one that I am about to tell, and from so long ago, now, though it used to be recent, of course, all stories start off being recent, and maybe this one did get told over and over at the time, maybe it’s even in the archives somewhere because we’re all proud aren’t we, proud of ourselves for what we did in the Battle of Crete, brave and fearless, New Zealanders to a Man, and the Maori Battalion too. But the Maori weren’t involved in this particular incident, they fought in Crete the way they always fought, fearless and wild, man to man, and Maori tradition has it that land won from a pitched battle was fairly taken by the victors, that was their Honour code. That’s what my friend Hemi said to me one night in London, we were all partying, all getting on, pakeha ( that’s us – white New Zealanders) Maori mates, a sprinkling of English. We, Hemi and I were talking about the Waihi Plains, which “we” have now (  Here’s where I used to thank God I came from the South Island, where I grew up believing that we South Island pakeha  were innocent of the thefts and confiscations that made white history in the North Island so heinous,( but that comforting illusion’s gone now – books have come out, the truth has been told,  and our stealing land from the Ngai Tahu is now widely admitted and, added to that, we now own up to our continuous belittling of the Maori presence and their history in the land they called AoTea Roa when they came upon it at the end of their vast voyages, possibly as much as 1200 years ago and certainly at a time when the Northern continents were sunk in darkness, but that didn’t stop us from setting up advisory councils and boards  for the ‘Aboriginees’ as if somehow they’d just been there all along…. Anyway as Hemi said to me about the Waihi Plains, which we just took over, ‘you didn’t even fight us for them…’ And that is true. The Maori fought close hand-to-hand battles, with honour, face to face, not hole in the wall scuffles like the one I am about to tell, but hand to hand, facing the enemy face to face, giving him the chance to die nobly in Battle, like the Battle known as Hingakaka, the Fall of the Parrots, fought long before we pakeha turned up to trick and cheat, called that because so many feathered crests fell, some say, from men adorned like Chieftains,

Fighting hand to hand. Nothing like this which I am about to tell from the Battle of Crete.

And once you’ve read it you might well say to me that it was a mistake to start this whole document off with this particular and terrible story which I heard myself for the first and only time six years ago, but I think I’m stuck with it, not just because  it happened, but because I heard it, with my own ears, I didn’t read it, I heard it told, so not in my own voice, which is easier to get rid of because we get good, I think, at getting rid of things we’ve been telling ourselves in that voice that is the voice in our head, or voices, Freud says they are voices, in the plural, and they are the voices of our internalized parents, the ones he calls the super-egoes, and we think we can get rid of them but we never really can, not really or even do much more than begin to edit them out, though people some transform them, and hear them as voices coming from without, some call them the voices of the Devil, the destruction that wasteth at noonday, or of the Spirit , on the wind that may even be the voice of God, or the wind Vocalissimus,  not just the thing that happened in Crete and all the other terrible things too that we managed to get done, in Crete and all the arenas, terrible things that managed to get done, but even so recently as what happened in my country, too, less than five years ago and the people involved in both the first doing and the later telling were my people, white people, pakeha.

 ‘Are you of the blood’ Maori  have asked me, often, all through my life, because of how I look, I used to think, but now I think they have always meant something else, which I will try to explain below. But first to the story of what happened in Crete one night, nothing to do with Maori who were stationed there - no, these were pakeha, non-Maori New Zealanders like me, and because of this I need to know,  I need to know where the laughter could possibly come from, in the telling of a story like that, and maybe it’s widely laughed at and widely known, maybe it’s in the archives, the story of the six of them, how they fell into the hole together because we had roped them up, we couldn’t shoot them on the ground because that would have ‘exposed our position’ to the nearby Germans, that night lit by the flare of searchlights and fires and bombs, so we roped them all together and then when the first one fell, into that hole in the ground, young men, boys really, closed over in a hole, sealed off forever, because to shoot them would have been to draw the attention of the Germans to the fact that we were so near, how it had been an accident but then seen as a lucky one, that when the first one fell the others fell behind him, even his slight weight was enough to draw the rest down behind him and there they all were, maybe some of the same young men who on leaving Athens at the beginning of this great paratroop operation to Crete, named Operazion Unternehmen Merkur , craned their heads to see the Parthenon below - and they did see it, they did,  in the very last days of their mortal life. It went fleeting by below them, but they were the ones who were fleeting, with less than a few days to run, for down they came, floating on the wings of the air  over Crete, that folded around them until they crashed, and some had already died while still in the air, but most in and on the earth, shot down without mercy,  and the one who said to the others, as young and frightened as they were, as they stood roped together in the hole, looking up, and not even the mercy of a bullet, “We will die  together like good Germans,” he said, and the  men telling the story, which both of them seemed already to know, laughed, at that, found it ok to laugh, thought it was amusing, comic, really, Germans being so typical.

I left the room then, and then the farmhouse, as the sound of their laughing came out of the window next to me, and across the garden and out over the paddocks to where, through the mist the river roared its way through its rocky gorge, and their laughter made its way above the rushing water and through the river sallows.

How could they laugh? That’s the question. Not ‘How could they do it?’, meaning those New Zealand  troops, in all the brutality and fright and lust of action, and the terrible swagger of us on the battlefields of our own making, but later, so many years later, how could those old men tell that story and laugh? As I have recently said in reviews of the work of two men, one Australian, one Irish, who have recently translated Dante, and done it so badly,

 “What is it that these men don’t know about themselves?”

So that’s my question – how could they tell that story of the six young men left to a brutal, an unthinkable death – how could they tell it and laugh?

                                                   *

PART TWO:  CONNEXIONS.                                      

               “Are you of the blood?” they used to ask me, all the time when I was younger, ever since our family moved up North. Less now, maybe, less now. Now I get the other thing, more mysterious, different: ‘You’re from down the line,’ they say to me. ‘I can see it and I can feel it,’ she said, as I helped her pack up her things, her little stand of paintings that she was selling on the wharf. The two hefty young cops, pakeha of course, wrinkling their foreheads against the sunset brilliance, edgy,  standing around with their hands on their hips the way they do on the rugby field. ‘Why can’t she stay here?’ I’d said, before they broke it all down, ‘she’s not doing any harm.’

 A pakeha can ask a question like that, a Maori takes a risk. They were the kind of hefty young fellows who hang their hands from the wrists, holding their arms in a curve, as if they’ve got four of them, not two – two for moving things on, ‘getting the job done’, two in reserve, octopus boys, maybe quite sweet once at kindergarten stage, not so good out here now; they wrinkle their foreheads as they stare into the sun that is starting to inch down over the lower edge of the Harbour, and they move her on.

               ‘You’re from down the line,’ she said, ‘I can see it and I can feel it.’ Then she was gone.

               This annoys my brother. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ he says. ‘They just mean you’re from further down the railway line…just further south, that’s all.’

               But I’ve had this before. Our mohi, I think that’s the word. Our mohi,  meaning  our knowledge, our special knowledge.  Stories  Maori told of what they found here, when they first came, over the long Pacific, twelve hundred years ago, in their star-guided boats, what they found in the forests, the long bones, the red-haired people, the vanished ones, Celts maybe, who knows; and now again, since the 1820s the final Scots from the Clearances, over the long seas,  to set up the last of the Viking kingdoms, set it up out here.- 20% of all pakeha are of Highland Scots descent. But this is nothing compared to the mystery of the long dead the Maori found in the forests, the long-boned ones in the forests: the patupaiarahe, they call them, the fairies, the Turehu, they say. And on a clear night you can hear them, they say, laughing along the hills over in the wilder parts, along the deep inserts and bushed depths of the Coromandel, for instance, they say. And sometimes that’s what they mean when they tell me that I’m from down the line.

            And guess who also knew about this country of ours, and the first people too – Dante, would you believe it, Dante writing from the heart of Quattrocento Italy, Dante who was born in 1265 around the time, some say, the first Maori discovered the land they call Âotearoa,  sometime between 1200 and 1300 AD, coming down over the long Pacific, navigating by starcraft, in their strong but slight canoes, calling to one another over the long waters the great cry of summoning, and rescue, and greeting

HAERE MAI….

HAERE MAI

‘Well, Hang ON,’ you might say, ‘Steady on – what about PROOF??’

‘Or even better … what about saying exactly what you’re talking about,’ you might say.

‘The first People,’ That’s what it is! That’s what’s so astonishing!” I might reply: ‘How did Dante KNOW?!!! Dante, ensconced in early Renaissance Italy not too far from the time of the First Event of Maori in the Land of the Long White Cloud, how did he know of a place from where the first people (see below) could see the constellation of the Southern Cross?

  Here we are again, then, in another opening Canto, this time of the second great volume of the Divine Comedy, the one called Purgatorio.  Dante who is living and his guide Virgil who is not emerge from the dead air of Hell (the Inferno) into the living Air, and Dante sees Venus (‘the fair planet that hearkeneth to love’) next to the Eastern horizon. And turning to his right he sees

             four stars never yet seen save by the first people….

Here’s the whole verse

Io mi volsi a man destra, e posi mente

all’ altro  polo, e vidi quattro stelle

non visti mai fuor que alla prima gente

That’s the exact wording:

 – And I saw four stars, never yet seen save by the first people. 

So, first of all, the astonishing question: How Did He Know?? About the stars?  About the constellation? And look how up to date he was, or is – not 5 stars – a lot of people still think that the constellation we call the Southern Cross is made up of 5 stars, but in fact – in fact, that fifth star is in fact from another constellation, ‘in a Galaxy far, far away…’ as

we are used to hearing. And in fact (‘in fact’???) I believe that Australians are more inclined to say that there are 5 stars in the Southern Cross, as in the Australian flag, and NZers 4,

as in the New Zealand flag. But that’s just a glimpse into the world of the Antipodes these days, not something to make a fuss about.

             So, to get back to the point, we  know this, about the presence and the arrangement of the constellation now called the Southern Cross: But how did Dante know, writing the Purgatorio  at a point early in the 14th century, ( in the same piece of time as the Maori are discovering New Zealand, as has been said, but still worth empahsis ) It is an interesting question about knowledge of the southern hemisphere in an era long before such knowledge was generally possible.

  Even more interesting, but rather opaque, is who Dante means when he talks of la prima gente: the first people.  Well, of course one of the myths of the Fall has our expulsion from the Garden of Eden dramatized as an entry into the world of sin and sorrow, with

‘the first people’ easily translated as Adam and Eve. But in the context in which I am operating it’s tempting to translate that into terms used by Maori when they proffer the legends of the Patupaiarahe – that here we have an Indication of the long-boned, red-haired people, the Turehu, the almost pre-historic Celts who may have wandered this world of ours for centuries long before known history, the Celts an English traveller writes of, remnants of whose culture lie mouldering in places in north-west China, neglected by the Han Chinese who want to be seen as the first inhabitants of that far, long-disputed territory, long-boned, red-haired, wandering the world, before the lineaments of modern history appear.