In the Koru

Whew! It’s been a while since I last wrote my blog. And not without cause: the last few months have been busy, busy, busy. Ironically enough, my blog posts dried up the very moment I began working as a copywriter. Strange though this may sound, given the writing-intensive nature of my job, it does make sense: after spending hours in front of a screen agonising over words, the last thing I want to do when I get home is spend even more time in front of a screen agonising over words. In fact, you could go so far as to say that writing for a living actively discourages writing on the side. I’m sure the same applies to people who work in a fish and chips shop; after inhaling all that unholy oil, fish and chips would be the last dinner idea to cross their mind. As they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

And yet I’m back. And there’s a reason for that. For try as I might to put down my pen and live in mindless bliss, I can’t. To do so is to ask the impossible; my mind won’t permit it. Because however arduous the writing process is, it’s the one thing that keeps me sane. In no other activity do I feel such a sense of relief, as if the weight of my thoughts had been gloriously suspended, for a short while at least. For once recorded, my thoughts have no more need to pester me, for I then know that even if I were to forget them, they would live on right here, on this blog.

Which brings us to this blog post. As a native of New Zealand, a country in the South Pacific, I’ve a natural interest in our flag referendum, which proposes to replace our current flag with a completely new design. As someone with republican sympathies, but who nonetheless acknowledges the stability of our constitutional monarchy—which effectively ensures that no single individual could do a Cromwell and begin enacting draconian laws against the public’s will—I’m excited about the prospect of my country’s taking a leaf from Canada’s book and introducing a completely new emblem. Having taken a history paper on the British Empire while I was at the Sorbonne, I am only too aware of the role grandiose ideas can play in stirring nations, states and tribes into performing the most despicable acts. Hence while I personally love New Zealand’s current flag, it being the only design I’ve ever known, I feel it behooves the government to adopt a design that doesn’t draw so much attention to our colonial history.

Of course, given the way the flag referendum is going, there’s almost no chance of a change of guard. The five alternative designs are so uninspiring that I’d actually prefer to keep the status quo until something better can be mustered. Something with class that speaks to the hearts of all kiwis. Something, in other words, that I myself designed.

Just kidding of course, but for a while the government did encourage the public to submit flag designs. And because the criteria for entering a design was so low—you were in the clear as long as your design included no words or offensive emblems—I managed to sneak my own creations past the censors. So for my first design, Rule Fritannia, I decided to put colonialism into its historical context. And boy, I think I succeeded:

But it wasn’t all plain sailing from there. My next three designs were rejected, supposedly for breaching design criteria. Somehow, I cannot fathom why this may be so. I mean sure, flags aren’t allowed to include words. But if New Zealand’s flag is constantly mistaken for Australia’s, adding the words ‘Not Australia’ in comic sans may turn out an eminently sensible solution.

The exclusion of the next flag from the referendum was even more baffling. I mean sure, I did simply use a (copyright-free) image from Wikimedia or somewhere like it, but think of it this way: such a flag has incredible educational power. Because it depicts every single country in the world, school teachers the world over could hang it on the wall as a world map, thus ensuring that every child would grow up knowing where New Zealand is (or that it exists).

And ok sure, The Blue Ensign (Dj illuminati remix) may appear unserious on the surface. But hey, we live in a postmodern world, where remix culture is everything!

Alas, my reasons fell on deaf ears. Undeterred, however, I resolved to make my designs subtler—so subtle, in fact, that no hapless government employee would detect the hidden message in my designs. In other words, I had to adopt the mentality of a WWII prisoner scribbling coded messages to compatriots back home. Sure enough, my next flag Victoria survived the unscrupulous scrutiny in one piece. At first glance, it looks like the current flag design, the only difference being the addition of a running track, on which the four stars have been repositioned.

But that’s only because I left out the clef and the bar. Once included, they signal something else entirely—Allegro con brio. If you play the flag on piano, you may recognise the motif because it’s probably the most famous motif in the world. And they appear in Beethoven’s 5th symphony, which is also known as the Victory Symphony. Hence the flag’s name Victoria.What’s even better is that I submitted the design under the name of my rabbit; and because the name of everyone who successfully submits a design is to be engraved on a flag pole in Wellington, her name is sure to echo down the halls of history.

For my final act, however, I decided to go lo-fi. After seeing the remarkable similarity between the spiral-shaped Koru, which means ‘loop’ in Maori, and the Spiral Hill in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, I thought it fitting in my final design to reference the movie.

After all, as everyone knows, a sheep performing yoga in the moonlight atop Spiral Hill in Halloween Town is as kiwi as it gets.

Reflections on a train journey (Part one)

I’ve always loved earphones. There’s something about having them in my ears that gives me confidence in social situations. More than anything else I know, earbuds let me watch other people without feeling overly uncomfortable. Somehow, the mere act of listening to music in the company of others puts me at ease. The thought that I am not partaking in the situation – with my head being elsewhere – makes existing around people I’ve only just met that much more bearable. Maybe it’s because people don’t try to talk to you when you’re wearing white earbuds that gives me a peace of mind; but in any case, having them in my ears was at that moment allowing me to eavesdrop on the conversations of the people around me.

I was sitting in the compartment of a train traveling from Genova to Ventimiglia. I was not the first person in the compartment; there were already four other people in it, chatting to each other in Italian. Although I was halfway through Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois – the album I often turned to during voyages – I could still understand them.

“Oh the people in Provence are lovely,” said the woman in the seat facing mine. She had blond hair and looked to be in her early sixties. “They’re really so kind and friendly.”

“Is that so?” replied the lady to her right, sitting by the window. She wore glasses and had a cheerful disposition. She was also on the plump side, which I believe had something to do with the snacks she kept pushing into her mouth. As the two were speaking, she continued to munch on chocolate fingers.

“To be honest, I’ve never been beyond Ventimiglia,” the bespectacled one said.

I found it strange that someone living so close to the French border had never visited France. Then again, when I think about it, it’s not such an unusual fact. I once knew a guy from Toulouse who had come to repair our fence. He had travelled all around the South Island and yet had never been to Paris before. It’s almost a given that people see more of foreign countries than they see of their own. When they’re travelling abroad, they’re under pressure to see as much as they can in a limited pocket of time. If you’re going to travel to the other side of the world – enduring long flights, in the process – it makes little sense to be blasé about the trip. When humans finally make it to Mars, they won’t spend their days there doing Sudoku. Aware of their being first humans to settle on another planet – and the responsibility that such a status entails – they’ll be out and about, exploring every notch and crater that the planet has to offer. To do anything less would be to fail to take advantage of the unique and limited opportunities available to them. On the other hand, why would an astronaut from Toulouse who has never visited Paris go out of their way to visit it? Since Paris is so close by, they won’t have to do much planning to get there. An as a result, since they never get to the planning stage, they never get there.

Getting to Paris, however, was exactly my intention – but at least not for this trip. I was going to go to Paris in late January, following my spell in Italy. However, though it was still December, I had decided to head into France early. Although I was studying Italian in Modena, my reasons for leaving Italy were pretty straightforward: it was only a couple of days ago that I had experienced the worst Christmas of my life. My host mother had refused to let me share in the festive spirit with her family. Moreover, what had made the day all the more uncomfortable was the fact that they had all gathered at her mother’s house, on the level below hers. Hence, as the family shared presents and had a merry old time, I was sitting in the living room upstairs, reading Marco Polo’s Il Milione. I figured out that if this was the way she treated me on Christmas Day, I shouldn’t have much to expect come New Years. For this reason, I wanted to spend the New Years with the French host family I had stayed with three years prior. They didn’t live too far from Italy, but it would still take about twelve hours to get there. I had already taken two previous trains, having left Modena for Milan, and then left Milan for Genova. Neither of those journeys had been much fun, given the fact that I had to lug a heavy suitcase around with me. But I knew what I was getting into.

In any case, I was glad I had found my seat so quickly. In the previous train from Milan to Genova, I had entered the wrong carriage, and then half an hour looking for my right seat. In hindsight, I should have learned what ‘carrozza‘ meant before I had gotten on board. Walking down the aisle, I felt completely exposed. The eyes of passengers staring at me from all sides. What were they thinking and why did they have to stare? I tried to keep walking, but such was the heft of my luggage, I could only take it one step at a time. It would be a cliché to say that I was taking it one step at a time. And yet, that’s precisely what I was doing.

While sitting in the compartment, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on the people around me. It’s not that I was doing so on purpose, but when you’re sitting in the middle seat, eavesdropping comes naturally. The middle seat has never been my favourite because it comes with no clear benefits. Should you ever fall asleep, there’s always the fear that your head would fall on the person sitting next to you. Thankfully that was never going to be a problem here, since the seats had their own self-contained head spaces. But that still left the problem of having an obstructed view. People sitting on the window seat can, if they must, spend the journey looking out the window. Similarly, those lucky enough to sit by the aisle, can get up and leave the room quite discreetly. But if you’re sitting in the middle, you have neither of these benefits. You may try to look out the window, but it may look like to the person sitting in the window seat opposite you that you’re looking at them. Similarly, if you try to get up and leave the carriage, you cannot help but draw attention to yourself.

On my left, a man in his fifties was reading a book on what I think was Hegel. He didn’t seem at all interested in the conversation. Sitting in the aisle seat opposite me was a blond girl who looked a couple of years older than me.

At that moment, a black man entered the compartment and assumed the seat on my right. He didn’t look completely sure of himself, as if he were in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, no one in the carriage really took much notice of him. At first he didn’t talk to anyone, which made his initial attempt at conversation a few minutes later a surprise to everyone.

“Where are you from?” he asked the girl opposite him.

“Uh…Milano,” she said sounding as if she were surprised by the question.

“And where are you going?”

“Bordighera. It’s a couple of stops before Ventimiglia. I always go there during the Christmas holidays as my family has a home there.”

She later on opened a box of shortbread biscuits and offered them to everyone in the compartment. They were delicious.

“C’è un bel ragazzo!” I heard from the next carriage. There was a group of Sicilian girls in the next carriage. If there ever were a difference between Northern and Southern Italians, there couldn’t be a better illustration than here.

It was only around now that I began to feel more confident about speaking Italian. For the most part, I was afraid of speaking it. I didn’t know if they knew I was a foreigner, but I felt really self-conscious about how I sounded to their ears. I always got the impression that I sound bored whenever I speak Italian. Could it be that the language’s distinctiveness, namely its melodious tone, is something I am incapable of mimicking? Part of the reason that people learn Italian in the first place is because Italian sounds so pleasing to the ear. But it only sounds pleasing when people speak it well. I, on the other hand, felt that I always mangled the language. The thing is, I put so much of my energy into forming logically sound sentences that, in the end, I have no brain cells left to work on the more aesthetic aspects of the language. Learning second languages has always been a struggle. People who speak a language as a second language are always at a disadvantage to their native speaker peers. Second language speakers have no choice but to follow the rules of grammar. Since the language does not come to them naturally, they don’t know how to be lazy with it. Taking liberties with grammar does not display intuition, an inventive way with words. No, a grammatical error is a grammatical error, and further highlights their status as a non-native speaker of the language. Native speakers, on the other hand, have the privilege of owning the language, and as a result they can do anything they like with it. It doesn’t matter if their grammar is terrible and full of errors, for they can simply claim to be putting their own twist on it. And that’s not all. A native speaker can renounce their language and refuse to speak it. But at the end of the day, the language will always belong to them.

In any case, I soon found I had no choice but to communicate, for my bladder wouldn’t have it any other way. So I  tried speaking to the woman opposite me.

“Vado al bagno. Puoi…”

“Guardare il tuo sacco?” Damn. Just as she said that, I said “proteggere il mio sacco.” I wasn’t sure if my sentence didn’t sound too demanding. She didn’t seem to mind anyway, so I left things at that, and left the room, taking care not to trample the feet of the other passengers.

I turned left and walked down to the end of the carriage. To my left was what appeared to be a toilet. I tried opening the door, but it was locked. So I waited my turn. A couple of minutes went by, and yet the door still wouldn’t unlock. Whoever was in there was sure taking their time, I thought. My arms folded, I tried to keep my mind off my increasing discomfort by looking out the window. The sea seemed to stretch out endlessly. It reminded me of something the bespectacled woman had said earlier on: Che bella la Liguria! All of this sunlight, and not a cloud in sight. It’s almost as if winter never existed….”

Ten minutes later, there was still no response from the toilet. Frustrated, I went back to the carriage, my bladder as full as ever.

The train then came to a stop. As I looked out the window, I could see a ticket inspector on the platform. He was pulling  a Middle Eastern man in his early twenties away from the train. The man may have been a clandestine who had been caught without a train ticket.

The train then continued on its way. As I continued waiting for the toilet, the Middle Eastern man ran passed me into the next carriage. He had escaped the attention of the inspector and was now trying to make it to Ventimiglia, and possibly further afield.

The train slowly made its way to Ventimiglia. After about two hours of traveling, all the Italians in the compartment had departed. There was now only three of us left in it: the black man, the sexagenarian woman, and me.