Allegory

How I love organic thinking!

I am airy, lofty and quite serene right now. From where I sit on my bed I can see a still life of fruit and a Japanese woodcut calendar; reflections of real life in both mirror and window. I see my ancestor, the Poplar tree, loftily embracing the Northerly wind while the evergreen Magnolia shudders agedly.

My loftiness perhaps comes from a beautiful and much needed walk I had with a friend last night up to the Brooklyn wind turbine. From there we could see the golden night shroud upon the city, the busy clouds, and the sky bleeding upwards from the horizon. Clouds. Stars. A cradle half moon that since 5 hours earlier had turned 180 degrees to stable itself from falling forwards.

Golden germinating sparks of the night; a fence-line. A rusted lock that once it had torn its last ligament felt eerily through space, never fallen on the bedrock below.

The shadows covered; the past became darkness, the future black and white; while the present my eyes were shut tightly against.

Once, in my inner eye, the shadow had past I looked down to see an ocean so vast, so colourful; so beckoning. On the wings of the present tide I could see each drop of that ocean was a

Story

A life

A history

A fragment of somebody’s everything.

The sweat off my brow fell drip

By drip

Adding to the salt stories of insecurity

The unjust wars fought

The memorials raised

The omniscient wave that is the spirited land

Engulfing us all.

The Nelson. The King’s country.

Te Rerenga Wairua

The underworld

The leaping off place of spirits.

I smiled into the night

Watching the wind rustle the Pine trees;

Then the two toned face that broke forth into historia

From a bellowing force deep within

That was sincere,

Beautiful

Elevating.

The large portion of humble pie eaten

When starting each magnificent verse

With a self deprecating ‘so’.

I digress!

When I originally saw your above message, I pondered at the profundity of such a question. I am still not sure I understand what you ask?! I love the collaboration of a capitalised ‘M’ in ‘Man’ and ‘garb’; both give a Biblical resonance, and I automatically want to launch into the history of the cassock and vestment.

But somehow, I don’t believe my true answer lies in that history/etymology.

Instead I wonder  about the ‘girl’ cells that Eve Ensler (feminist) talks about being inherent in all genders. This so called ‘cell’ embodied in ‘compassion, empathy, passion, vulnerability, openness, intensity, association, relationship and intuition’.

This may be a far cry but I find it interesting that clothing for men in history has been very similar to what we would typically call ‘female’ clothing now, and that with the rise of patriarchy men’s clothing has become more restrictive; and literally so around the area where ‘manhood’ is inherent.

As Eve Ensler says in her talk (‘Embrace your inner girl’)

’And I want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell, the oppression of these cells, the reinterpretation of these cells, the undermining of these cells, getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing, eradicating, destroying, reducing these cells, basically began the process of killing off the girl cell, which was, by the way, patriarchy.’

To end this night I shared, hesitantly, Arundhati Roy’s thoughts on empire:

'Whose God decides which is a "just war" and which isn’t? George Bush senior once said: "I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are." When the president of the most powerful country in the world doesn’t need to care what the facts are, then we can at least be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.

So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything at all? Does it actually exist?

In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of countries in the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want?'

I leave you with these questions of beauty, of patriarchy, our innate cells and needs; my love.