Stones Gathered Together

By Pat Rosier

Stories, poems, fragments, thoughts, memories and ideas from over the years are gathered together in this book. Each comes from a particular time and place. Some are made up, some memoirish; it doesn't matter which are which. Together, they may suggest something of my world view.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pat Rosier
• Release date: Feb 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301009015

Pat Rosier

I live in Paekakariki, New Zealand, with my woman partner. I read and write and work some. A sixty-something, semi-retired, feminist. I read science books written for non-expert readers, contemporary and classic novels and a whole lot of other stuff.

Book preview

An Opening

He was twenty-six when he died, a soldier in another country’s army fighting a different country’s war in yet another country, felled by support fire from a friendly gun. A full military funeral was called for, and held in the country of his origin.

Family members flew around the world to bring his body home and his coffin sat in his parent’s living room for two days.

I thought they usually had the coffin open, said someone.

The funeral was managed with military precision. His sister bought some expensive high-heeled shoes in bright yellow, especially to wear with her short black skirt and tight black top.

The family is well connected. The army is well connected. The funeral was in the cathedral. Joint ops. No lies were told, but there was that combination of exaggeration and omission that make a person look different from how they were in life to anyone present.

A woman was there who had no business being there, other than that she cared about an extended family member and wanted to be able to talk with her about the funeral afterwards. As one who did not believe in any god, she had not been to the cathedral before and admired the colours in the stained glass windows. Between the karanga calling in the coffin and the trumpet-playing of the last post as it was carried out on the shoulders of slow-marching soldiers, there was no tangible emotion, except for a stranger sitting beside her who sobbed quietly throughout and appeared to know none of the family.

During a reading of verses from Ecclesiastes, well-known by way of a Seekers’ song, a gentle pop in the mind of the woman who had small business there turned into an idea for making a whole bunch of her short writings into something real and formed; stones gathered together.

Assembly

She likes assembly. Everyone has gathered together; the boarders walking from the hostel on the far side of the playing fields and the day pupils arriving from all around the town on foot, by bike or car or bus.

They gather, staff and pupils alike, to start the school day, singing the same song, saying—or not saying—the same prayer, hearing the same notices. She listens to the notices, wanting to know what is on the day’s plan, what is expected, valued. How to be good. How to live.

From assembly the organism disperses through the buildings of the school; bees with a common purpose—the honey of education, knowledge, success.

After assembly she knows, for a while, what to do, where to go.

Aaaaahhhhh

There is a moment, when you’re driving north down Pukerua Bay hill and the sea appears and Kapiti Island and the unconstrained sky, when you know that your daily toil is left behind and in ten minutes you will be home.

A Time To Every Purpose

Jeannie thinks she understands time. It passes, like water in a river, so you cannot enter the same portion of it twice because the water or time you were in before has moved on. Also, you yourself are different when you return from the you of a previous encounter. Kelvin quoted Augustine of Hippo at her: What then, is time? If no one asks me I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know. She replied that she wasn’t interested in trying to explain it to anyone else and anyway with a name like Augustine he was bound to be more interested in explaining god than time.

Water moves faster when it’s going downhill or (she thinks) forced into a narrower space, and she knows time goes slower when you’re thinking about it and faster when you’re not. Using science to slice time ever more thinly makes no difference to how she thinks of it, she tells Kelvin firmly when he asks her how she accounts for nanoseconds. Anyway, she adds, hours and minutes are just arbitrary ways of measuring, they’ve got nothing to do with how fast time passes. Try standing on one foot for thirty seconds.

At first she’s confused by relativity and time being faster or slower depending on the speed at which you, the observer, are moving. Then she finds out that this only applies if you are close to the speed of light, so it has nothing to do with how she in her daily life experiences time; if spacetime applies only in the larger cosmos it’s interesting, but not her concern.

Chaos theory appeals to Jeannie, partly because of its name. It introduces her to the beauty of fractals. That’s fractal, she’ll say to Kelvin of a fern uncurling in ever-smaller dimensions. And uncertainty as a principle strikes her as totally mirroring her life, which always seems chaotic and unpredictable and she makes what sense she can of it over time (there it is again!). One small, apparently insignificant thing, like bumping into Kelvin in the street years after they’d finished school, can have astonishing consequences; here she is, seven years later, having fantasies about leaving him, never mind a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado over Kansas. Chaos theory describes my life, she says to Kelvin and he mumbles something she doesn’t hear and refuses to repeat it.

When Jeannie discovers that the uncertainty principle really says that you can’t measure the location and movement of a particle at the same time, because the act of measuring one disturbs the other, she is ecstatic. Then she reads that a wave is a particle and a particle is a wave and you can’t actually observe either, only their effects. As soon as she fully understands that, she’s going to use it with Kelvin to demonstrate how irrelevant measuring is. Life is a ledger for you, she says to him, and when he asks, defensively, What do you mean? she tells him.

Look at the state you got into when you realised your younger brother reached a six-figure salary before you did. And how you work out how much your parents spend on birthday presents for each of you. You always tell me exactly how many minutes late I am and how often I have been late since whenever. And that’s just a start. And by the way, how come you don’t count the number of times I have to wait for you? Also,—She is relentless—You could tell me right now how many socks there are in your drawer, and which supermarket has the cheapest frozen peas, and that’s per unit. Not to mention knowing before we leave exactly where we will need to stop for petrol when we are driving out of town and what your mother will have cooked for dinner when we arrive.

That’s because she tells me, Kelvin says and goes back to his laptop.

Jeannie keeps thinking about time. Fast is a fast word, she says. Once you’ve said the first part, the fa…, there’s no way you can finish it slowly. The …st runs around in your mouth at great speed and ties up the word in a millisecond. Try it. Slow, on the other hand, is the kind of word you can draw out sssllllllllooooooooowwwwwwlyyyyy, for as long you like.

Poets make a big deal of onomatopoeia, says Kelvin, with what is surely a touch of sarcasm. You should read some poets, instead of …. He doesn’t finish the sentence. Jeannie of course goes on reading Simon Singh and James Gleick and Brian Greene et al, with not a poet among them. She buys a watch with a circular face, preferring its sweeping hands to the metronomic turnover of numbers on a backlit rectangle.

When Kelvin suggests they go to the movie Memento because it’s about a man out of sync with time she is touched. The reverse chronological order of some parts of the film certainly mess about with time but after the event she thinks it’s more about memories, as its title suggests, and getting them into long term storage. Fascinating in its own way, but not of great moment to Jeannie. She is more interested in the fact that Kelvin is fifteen minutes late to meet her, so they don’t have time for a drink before the film and he doesn’t apologise or even comment, and then, when she goes to the toilet afterwards and is stuck for ages in the queue he goes on about standing around waiting for her. She’s flapping wet hands because the remaining line of women was blocking the blow dryer, and sets off down the stairs without responding.

Kelvin wants things to go back to how they were before Jeannie got into time. She points out that that time has passed and can never be got back. We can do it again in a different time, do it the way we were then. he says.

But the way we are now is not the way we were then, she says, and goes on to tell him that according to the second law of thermodynamics they are more disordered than they were back then, (hoping she’s got this right) and maybe he should think about that.

This is when Kelvin starts taking over time. One google search after another, he produces articles and names and theories and becomes the household expert on time the subject. He suggests they could read Proust’s massive In Search of Lost Time out loud to each other, in episodes, after dinner. Jeannie is bored by him and his self-proclaimed expertise, as are their friends, but Kelvin doesn’t seem to notice. Kelvin has completely missed the point, Jeannie thinks, and seems to