...run(ning) up a blind alley full of hatred and dark breath.

Listening to Afternoons on National Radio one afternoon last week I was lucky enough to hear Gary McCormack, a resident of Christchurch, reading this poem:

What the Drummer said to the Drum

Sitting in my comfortable chair in Dunedin in  the days following the earthquake I had felt an urge to write a poem in response. But in the end I felt that from said chair there was nothing I should say. 

At the time of the destruction of the world trade centre in 2001 I was enrolled in a poetry writing course at university.  That day in my comfortable chair halfway around the world I penned a poem.  It involved a sleeping Dorothy in a field of poppies, winged monkeys gnawing at her breasts.  The Lion roared. The Tin Man discarded his heart.  I can't remember what the scarecrow did. The imagery seemed so apt. I am still embarrassed by it.

When it comes, as Gary mentions at the end of his poem, to making sense of it...

There's a blog I read by a theologian-philosopher Glenn Peoples.  At times I feel compelled to argue with him in the comments over trifling points relating to larger issues he supports, but on the whole I respect his posts explaining various religious and philosophical subjects, and the depth of reading he draws on for these.  I don't go to church, but when I did, after the music, I did enjoy sermons interpreting the scripture. Where I live, the Bible is still the source of many of our ideas on morality, the nature of our existence, and how we cope with adversity, so even if you would take nothing else from it it's still worth appreciating. So I read him.

Anyway, in his latest post, Glenn quotes a verse about a man born blind. The disciples question Jesus about him and the response is given - “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

Harsh if you're the blind man, but that to me is the function that disasters, whether in New York, China, Pakistan or right here on our doorstep and involving people we know serve for humanity.

Stories that are worth the telling are told again and again.  Shakespeare is re-presented and remade (RichardIII - High Noon, The Taming of the Shrew - Ten Things I Hate about You, I'm going from memory here, correct me if the titles are wrong) And every child that goes to Sunday School gets their chance to fill a role in the annual nativity play.

This time we see our own countrymen taking up roles in the disaster story.

A woman is trapped in a collapsed building.  Her fiance waits outside while rescuers search the building. They were to get married that friday.  Miraculously she is rescued, largely unscathed.  The wedding goes ahead in a church unaffected by the quake and all the invited guests are able to attend.

A man's family see him on live television being carried, covered in soot, from a destroyed shopping mall.  Days later they have called every hospital they can think of and still have no idea of his whereabouts.

An "awesome maori guy" is caught on camera seconds after a building falls lifting huge blocks of masonry to rescue people from the debris. His name, by the way, from the Herald article, suggests he's actually a pacific islander in case he wanted that acnowledged.

Some dairy owners are reported as charging nearly double the usual price for bread and milk. (I seem to remember when something similar happened after the Edgecumbe earthquake, the shop owner in question was all but run out of town.)

A man whose family survived and was sitting at home wondering how to help is told just to sit tight. That wasn't enough for him so he canvases local businesses for donations of coffee and tea supplies and sets about providing refreshments to rescue workers. (Little things like this bring tears to my eyes.)

Families recieve texts and phonecalls from people trapped alive under ruins.  It seems that some of these texters will not be rescued.

And there are reports of looters and drunkenness.

From the best of luck to the cruellest of fate, from self sacrifice to selfishness.  Our people have found themselves arbitrarily cast in roles in a story that is retold on different stages around the world again and again and again.  As a child I was proud to be given the role of Joseph in the Nativity Play, and then disgruntled when I realised it wasn't a speaking part. We play the parts we are given, though how we play them is sometimes up to us.

In the end I can probably make no more sense of this than Gary, who was there.

Christchurch

Just yesterday morning I was listening to a news report about how people put out of their homes by last years earthquake in Canterbury were coming to the end of the accomodation cover provided by their insurance.  It set me to musing about something I had read about an earthquake that had affected Canterbury  in the 19th century.  I can't find reference to it in any of the places I thought I had read it now.

What I thought I read was that in the 1800s Christchurch was hit by a mildly damaging earthquake, followed within a year by a much worse one which knocked the tip from the Cathedral Spire.  Either I dreamed it, and am more of a prophet than I thought... or it's in "The Brick Book" which I borrowed from the library to research things for my studies in construction, and which contains a section on masonry performance in earthquake conditions.

Anyway, enough about me.  Whether I dreamed it and am a prophet, or I read it and noted something about Canterbury geology which nobody else has bothered to bring up, It happened again today.  I felt it, waited ten minutes for the geonet site to update, texted a friend to say I hoped they were ok and then turned on the radio.

This is the earthquake we were all so thankful we didn't get last September - everyone was tucked safely in their beds at 4:30 that morning. This time the town was busy, and the workplaces relatively full.  This time people died.

I'm not the sort that feels my sympathetic comments mean much in the face of something like this, but here, if you like, are a few things that come to mind that we can still be thankful for over this event.

12:50pm is right smack back in the middle of the primary school lunch hour, so the little kiddies were all (comparatively) safe outside in the playground.  I heard a report from one of the school principals who'd been in communication with the other schools saying "they're all safe".

Our building code has, for a signifcant time now, enforced the inclusion of bracing elements against exactly this type of event in new buildings.  We don't always get it right, but it was heartening to see behind the footage of collapsed historic buildings (and one relatively new one I do admit) a number of newer buildings still largely intact, and therefore capable of allowing the occupants out safely.   We take the earthquake risk seriously when we build and it does pay off.

We saw on the TV something of the stoic kiwi I identify with - people calmly helping each other out and showing comfort and affection to the distaught with little of the staged hysterics the movies have taught us to expect.  We still just muck in and help each other.

Alright... that's all I can think of.  I watched the news this afternoon and seeing one of our most beautiful cities strewn with rubble for the second time in less than a year; seeing the cathedral fallen; seeing people milling, wearing a mixture of shock and their own blood; and hearing of a rising number of fatalities has the whisper of tears pressing around my eyes this evening.

My best wishes to all affected  and to their families,

The Gedle