Title: Apophenia

Author: Sarah McCallum

In: Sport 39: 2011

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2013, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Prose Literature

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Sport 39: 2011

Apophenia

page 280

Apophenia

There are too many bookshelves in this room. On the shelves there are: a cane basket of wool remnants; three macramé lampshades; eleven ex-Video Village VHS cassettes (including The Big Chill and The House of the Flying Daggers); an unidentified plastic action figurine (possibly a lesser known X-Man or maybe a GI Joe sidekick); two bobbins from a spinning wheel; a homemade drum built from an A10 fruit tin with the taut skin of a sheep tacked to its rim; a blown light bulb; two Agee jars of buttons; a red enamel toolbox; a clear Tupperware box of Lego bricks; and a bucket of plastic farm animals (blue sheep, orange horses, red cows and green dogs). There are no books.

Today I am 15,706 days old. In dog years I am 7.5 years old. The average dog lives for 10 to 13 human years. Bluey, an Australian Cattle Dog, owned by Les and Esma Hall of Rochester, Victoria, Australia, lived 29 years, 5 months, and 7 days. If he was a person he would have been 131 years old. Les and Esma said Bluey lived as long as he did because they fed him kangaroo and emu meat.

I don’t eat kangaroo and emu meat.

I dislike eating food that has (or had) a mother.

Yesterday in the Nelson Provincial Museum I saw the skull of a Mäori dog (kurï) sitting in a glass case. Kurï looked like foxes. They did not bark and they were dull, lazy and sullen in disposition. Sometimes their hearts were cooked on a stick and offered to Tu, the god of war. Kurï have been extinct for 17 decades.

Today is the Feast day of Saint Monegundis, a 6th-century French hermit. Her children died and an ocean of melancholy lay down on her. She asked her husband if she could live the secluded life of a nun. He said yes. Perhaps he was tired of her sadness too.

page 281

Last week I moved the bed from one side of the room to the other. Now the bed is beneath the window and the cats wake up in sunlight. Three cats sleep on the bed with me. They take turns to lie like cement blocks on my legs.

I am six years and nine months old in cat years. That is middle-aged for a house cat. Wild cats are lucky to live for three years. Three cat years are 28 human years. I would be dead a long time if I was a wild cat.

Things are different from this side of the room. There is a painting on the wall I have never looked at before. It is a copy of The Maitai Hop Gardens, Nelson ca. 1870 by JC Hoyte: 1835–1913. In the bottom left corner ‘Print No. 369’ is handwritten. It makes me wonder about the other 368 copies. The hills out the windows are the same as the hills in the painting. In ca. 1870, JC Hoyte could have sat with his easel and tin of watercolours on the same patch of soil that this overshelved room was built on.

There are no people in The Maitai Hop Gardens, Nelson ca. 1870. There are no farmers measuring the height of crops; no women beating their rugs in the slow breeze; and no children following the flick of eel tails in the river. Just the endless stretch of hop plants and unmoving landscape. Perhaps JC Hoyte, as he sat in the chill of the hillside putting sight to paper, only gave painted form to that which barely moved. Like a lengthy photographic exposure.

There is also an old Box Brownie on one of the bookless shelves. Like Eastman Kodak said, ‘You push the button, we do the rest.’

In 1839 Louis Daguerre set his camera up on the corner of a busy Parisian street. Boulevard du Temple was filled with people, horses, carts and the crick-crack of inner city movement. But only the lone black form of a man having his boots polished in the bottom left-hand corner of the daguerreotype was snared in the 10-minute exposure. Everything else was moving too quickly.

page 282

I also saw photos of the Royal Visits to Nelson in the museum yesterday. When the Prince of Wales visited in 1920 a banner was hung across the hardware store. It had GOD BLESS OUR KING AND CONFOUND HIS ENEMIES printed across it in thick black ink. And when the Queen came in 1963 she sat in the stands of the showground and watched displays of wood chopping and gymnastics. When she came back in 1974 she saw sheepdog trials and yet more wood chopping. This was a far-flung province in the wider reaches of her realm with a big appetite for entertaining with axes.

The cats have been refusing to eat their Eukanuba Salmon and Rice flavoured cat food with ‘real salmon to satisfy a cat’s natural craving for seafood’. Instead they wander around the house hissing and spitting at each other. And during the last three weeks the chickens in the hen house have laid only four eggs. But this morning there are six eggs in a nest. It was worth threatening the chickens with the carving knife and the soup pot, and telling them they’d be poultry-flavoured food for cats.

Cool Hand Luke was one of the best movies of 1967. Paul Newman was Luke. One of the best scenes in the movie is when he eats 50 hardboiled eggs in an hour. One of the best lines in the movie is when he says, ‘What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.’ Cool Hand Luke is also six years and nine months old in cat years.

The sky is full of contrails today. Last week I read in the newspaper that there are people who believe that the vapour trails left by highflying aircraft are not droplets of condensed water. They believe agencies of a mysterious one-world government are spraying trails of chemicals to curb population growth. Smaller groups of people are easier to dominate, they say.

The man from next door walks down the hill with his dog, like he does every day. Since his wife died last year he has got skinny. His dog has got fat.

There is a card from my mother in the mailbox. ‘For Someone Special’ it says. ‘Please know you’re wished a wonderful birthday and a yearpage 283 filled with happiness and love.’ There’s also a card from a friend. On the front there is a photo of a cross stitch sampler like the ones old ladies have hanging on the wall above their beds, and in neat little stitches HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY.

The pieman at Ka Pie is wearing his kilt today. He’s Clan McLeod, like my mother. I tell him we’re related and he gives me a free cup of coffee while he’s waiting for his pies to bake. The furniture in his café reminds me of student flats I’ve lived in—1950s vinyl, formica and chrome. There is a flock of glazed china ducks flying across the wall.

Formica is made by soaking layers of paper in phenol-formaldehyde resin then laminating with melamine. It is easy to clean, fireresistant, durable and available in dozens of colours. It was used in the refurbishment of the now retired ocean liner for the Cunard Line, RMS Queen Mary (permanently berthed at Long Beach, California), as well as reading tables in the Library of Congress, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, and the café tables at Ka Pie, Nile Street, Nelson.

Dean invites me to a party. It’s his birthday on July 4 so he says come as something American. I think I’ll go as Lorena Bobbitt.

Dean is writing a novel. He calls it a sociological examination of the relationships within a community on the periphery of society. I call it drug porn. He says he wrote 4,000 words in six hours yesterday. I don’t tell him it has taken me six days to write 3,784 words of an essay—and I spent one of those days rearranging punctuation.

The em dash often demarcates a parenthetical thought or some similar interpolation. Sometimes it is used to indicate that the sentence is halted prematurely because the speaker is too emotional or too lost in thought to continue. Like in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, when Darth Vader says. ‘I sense something. A presence I have not felt since—.’

page 284

I have afternoon tea with the Eighty-Six-Year-Old and she tells me about the time she danced with Noel Coward in a ballroom in Glasgow in 1943.

In 1943 Noel Coward was one of 2,820 people listed on the Sonderfahndungsliste-GB. This was a special search list known as the Black Book compiled by the Nazis. It was a list of people who were to be arrested and killed after the German invasion of Great Britain. Politicians, writers, homosexuals and the founder of psychoanalysis were also on the list.

Jung wasn’t the founder of psychoanalysis but he is the man who coined the word ‘synchronicity’ to describe meaningful coincidences. Synchronicity is a principle that links events having a similar meaning by their concurrence. Sometimes Jung thought he was a prophet with ‘special insight’ who had voluntary confrontations with the unconscious. Some people thought Jung was mad.

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.

Today is Friday. I was born on a Sunday.

A child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe and good in every way.