Smith's Bush | Part 2

Vivienne Kent, with intro by Scott Hamilton

RS: This is the second part of Vivienne Kent's 'Smith's Bush'. The essay has been extracted from her PhD thesis Inside Out: a History of Haunting, the Otherworld, Trauma, and Psychiatry. Kent researched and wrote the thesis in the University of Auckland's sociology department. By the time she'd finished the text in 2012, she wanted to move in other directions, and made no effort to interest publishers in it. 

That is a pity, because Inside Out is one of the original and adventurous pieces of research ever done in Aotearoa. Kent crossed disciplinary and artistic boundaries, combining autobiography with intellectual history, art and literary criticism, and psychogeography. At the heart of the thesis is the story of the trauma that she and her son suffered from abusive men and from a bureaucratic and poorly resourced mental health system.

Trying to understand her own experiences and those of her son, Kent turns to the history of psychiatry and to the way artists and writers have tried to process psychic trauma. How, she wants to know, did the psychiatric system that failed her and her son come to be so flawed, so counterproductive? And how have other survivors of that system understood their experiences and tried to heal themselves? 

Inside Out gives us a tour of the history of psychiatry, as Kent compresses centuries of suffering and theorising into a few score dense but somehow lucid pages. The thesis also introduces us to dozens of writers, artists, and thinkers, many of whom are today obscure figures. Kent is especially interested in the Expressionists, Dadaists, and Surrealists who tried to find adequate responses to the chaos and carnage of early twentieth century Europe. But she is also at home talking about the cosmologies of the Polynesians and the Celts, and the ways that both cultures understood trauma and healing.

The poet Kendrick Smithyman argued that there should be no contradiction, for Aotearoans, between the global and the local. Living on our islands in the South Pacific, he said, we are 'limited in space but not in time'. We have to learn how to live, think, and create in our corner of the world, but we can draw on the whole of human history to help us. The Tongan polymath Futa Helu expressed a similar idea when he said that the ocean of humanity was fed by the rivers of many cultures. Inside Out is syncretic in a way that Smithyman and Helu would appreciate, ranging through history, but all of Kent's reading and learning is focused on the problem of how we can heal and live well in Aotearoa in the twenty-first century. The thesis displays enormous learning and skill, but it is not a disinterested work of scholarship. Kent was writing a survival manual.

'Smith's Bush' describes a fairly short walk through a fairly small piece of remnant forest on Auckland's North Shore. But by paying acute attention to her environment and the way it makes her and her son feel, Kent is able to give us something baroque and mysterious and inspiring. Reading the text, I have to stop myself from leaping out of my chair and heading for one of the several small forests that lie close to my house. Kent's text reminds me of Robert Macfarlane's book The Wild Places, which also finds enchantment in modest, unpromising slices of nature.

As her body moves between the trees, Kent's mind turns to the 'Otherworld' of the Celtic mysticism, but also to Māori spirituality. There is there nothing awkward or contrived about this bringing together of different traditions formed on opposite sides of the world.

If 'Smith's Bush' has a precursor in Aotearoan literature, it might be Geoff Park's great 1995 book Nga Ururoa, which describes a series of walks through Te Ika a Maui's coastal forests, some of which survive only in fragile and fragmentary states.

Park criticised the idea that the world could be divided into two zones: areas altered and ruined by humans, on the one hand, and pristine wildernesses, on the other. He traced this idea to nineteenth century Britain, and bemoaned its influence on New Zealand environmentalists. The 'cult of wilderness', as Park called it, had led to the eviction of Māori communities from forests and from islands like Hauturu/Little Barrier. What was needed, Park argued, was a sense that humans could live positively inside nature. Ecosystems should be things we inhabit, not enclosures we stand outside and observe.

Park's influence on the Aotearoan conservation movement in the twenty-first century can be seen in the way volunteer groups and the Department of Conservation are trying to 'pepper pot' areas by restoring small reserves and parks to health. I live in eastern Rodney, an area where several large forests are interspersed with towns and orchards and scores of small fragments of bush. By clearing predators from small forest reserves, locals are making them places where birds can take pit stops on their journeys between places like the offshore sanctuary of Hauturu, the 'mainland island' of Tawharanui, and the forested maunga Tamahunga. Instead of keeping birds behind glass in secluded wildernesses, the aim is to integrate them into a world that includes humans.

Smith's Bush was saved from destruction after World War Two. The distinguished botanist Lucy Cranwell led the lobbying campaign that got it made a permanent reserve. Now it is part of ecologists' plan for the 'pepper potting' of the North Shore. Smith's Bush is to be a place where birds can find asylum, on their journeys between green oases in the metropolis. Vivienne Kent's text complements Geoff Park's book by showing how much humans, as well as birds, need  the respite offered by modest yet magnificent places like Smith's Bush. —SH

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Why this wintry sign should be written in our subtropical woodland is a mystery, but as creatures that take pleasure in reading meaning into random events we enjoy some imaginative speculation. Django squirrels away facts and is always surprising me with his esoteric knowledge. 

There are wooden benches placed at intervals around the boardwalk and we sit and look around the forest, soaking up the otherworldly greenness. Looking across the forest from this eastern side is like peering into a massive aquarium. Pūriri stand like giant corals with their heavy burdens of sword-leafed tank lily epiphytes, their huge trunks receding greenish-grey into the canopy and their roots covered with pukupuku fern, kōwaowao or hound’s tongue fern, mokimoki or fragrant fern, and kamu or hook grass. Light-gaps admit tongues of sunlight from above, and from this vantage point we sometimes see rainbow lorikeets like jewels in the glimmering sunbeams, their colours exotic in the muted palette of the forest. The Corpus Christi Carol returns to my mind:

 In that orchard there was an halle, 

 That was hanged with purpill and pall. 

 And in that hall there was a bede; 

 It was hanged with gold so rede.

The poem is a dream allegory, every part of which has a deeper symbolic meaning. A giant falcon carries a human in its claws as if it were a mouse, flying over a landscape into an orchard, the traditional symbol for heaven. Maybe because I feel so safe here, lulled by the greenwood, I often hear this poem reciting in my mind while I walk around Smith’s Bush. Maybe it is also to do with the way I feel so little next to the giant trees, like the person carried by the falcon, not a smallness of insignificance but a smallness of scale; how tiny humans actually are compared to the size of the earth. In the poem the colours change from the brown of death through sacred purple, to the gold of eternity and the red of blood. ‘Lully lulley, lully lulley.’

Django, though, has no such inner monologue to contend with; he is just here, being in the moment, looking and hearing and smelling around him with no distracting poetry running through his mind. He comes up to me, his green eyes glowing in his pale round face, not saying anything but looking fully alive. I am suddenly reminded of the pūriri dwellers, the pepetuna moth larvae; outside in the ‘real’ world, Django covers the entrance to his consciousness with a veil every bit as finely-woven as that of the pepetuna tunnels, but here, in the Otherworld, he can let everything in because all around him is gentle, dim and muffled. Django opens and shuts his mouth to me, like a little fish, a wordless communication that means he is satiated; the energy fields of the ancient trees have filled him up with their calming presence and it is time to go.

We complete the circle of the track, halting at the five-trunked pūriri that guards the fork. The giant trees stretch out behind in the dimness of the Otherworld, but we turn and make our way back over the bridge, crossing the running water. My mind hurriedly finishes the poem before we reach the gate: 

And in that bede there lithe a knight, 

His woundes bleding day and night. 

By that bede side kneleth a may, 

And she wepeth both night and day. 

And by that bede side there stondeth a stone, 

Corpus Christi wreten there on.

The poem is about the passing of time, the inevitability of death and the promise of the resurrection of the soul. It connects me to my ancestors and the image of a giant falcon carrying me across treetops to an orchard often appears in my dreams. I open the gate and we turn our backs on the Otherworld; the sun’s glare hits us like an oven door opening. Django snaps down his pepetuna moth silk veil; antennae in, head lowered, he slouches into the brightness and clatter of everyday existence.

* * *

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. 

It is not the houses. It is the space between the houses. 

It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. 

It is not your memories which haunt you. 

It is not what you have written down. 

It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.

What you must go on forgetting all your life. 

And with any luck oblivion should discover a ritual. 

You will find that you are not alone in the enterprise.

Haunting 

In Smith’s Bush—and it would be hard to devise a more generically English name—traces of pre-European history remain, the vestiges of the once-mighty forest a palimpsest written over by colonisation. I have given many of the flora and fauna their Māori as well as English classifications.

Every culture has an exclusion zone. Some topics eliminated from rationality and the historical record, and further marginalised through the violence of modernity, may be pushed into the shadows. But these terrors are never simply absent: the cruelty of child sexual abuse, childhood maltreatment, rape, and domestic abuse are, to use Avery Gordon’s words, ‘ghostly matters.’ Ghosts return to haunt, never entirely excluded, and to truly study the intricacies of social life these aspects of society need to be investigated. In describing her own work of searching for presence amongst absence, Gordon says:

Ghostly Matters is about haunting, a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production.

Haunting is at the centre of Gordon’s work: people who live in the most ruinous situations possess an ambiguous subjectivity, she says, and their humanity is never totally apprehended by regarding them as either victims or heroes. This turns people into ciphers at the very moment when they need a fuller understanding of the twists and turns of ill fortune that overwhelm them: ‘life is complicated,’ she argues, and as a consequence all people exist in a state of ‘complex personhood’ amidst the vast network of society. Lives are plagued by contradictions as well as beset by forgetting and remembering, and at times people both understand and misunderstand themselves and other individuals. People endure their sufferings with egotism or acceptance, often becoming trapped in the symptoms of their misfortunes, and yet can also transform themselves:

Complex personhood means that even those called ‘Other’ are never never that. Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward…. Complex personhood means that even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not.

These Others are figures that have been pushed outside ‘normal’ society, scarcely visible, banished to the periphery, to the Otherworld. Traces of these Others can be seen through the descriptions of those in power, but to decipher these spectral footprints is a fragile and risky project that tries to track the shape of these ghosts through history, ‘a particular kind of social alchemy that eludes us as often as it makes us look for it’. People labelled with mental disorder, especially children, are marginal figures: they are diagnosed, treated and examined by powerful medical authorities, but what of the Otherworld they, and on occasion I, inhabit, the structure of feeling they and I exist within, their and my way of seeing? Mad people haunt the social world of the ‘sane’, and their ghosts interweave the social fabric, with normality and abnormality written and overwritten on society’s walls.

Marginalisation is a sociopolitical process that is centred in power relations, and many diverse groups have historically found themselves peripheralised: the struggles and experiences of subaltern ethnic groups, women, the poor, the mentally ill, and sexual minorities have all informed the way exclusion is understood. Marginalisation is both a process and an experience: it is both inclusive of and a consequence of oppression. Marginalisation, as Joanne Hall notes, produces both vulnerability and resistance, and as such it is a space of radical possibility as well as a site of deprivation. Indeed bell hooks argues that living on the edge – in what I am calling the Otherworld – encourages people excluded from mainstream culture to develop a different way of understanding reality, a slantwise gaze that sees ‘both from the outside in and from the inside out.’ This Otherworld, both outside looking in and inside looking out, is the ghostly space where I am constructing my narrative.

The Otherworld 

The supernatural world of the Celts contained several Otherworlds, such as Tír fo Thuinn, the ‘Land Under the Waves,’ and Tír na nog, the ‘Land of Youth.’ Time ceased to have any earthly meaning in these happy places, which were ruled over by dispossessed gods and inhabited by magical beings, and some people could visit if divinely invited, or they could fall into the lands by force. As well as these lands of bliss, however, there was also an Otherworld filled with fear, horrors, and ghosts, sometimes called Ysbaddaden. In writing this thesis, I found the notion of the Otherworld ‘good to think’ with, as Claude Lévi-Strauss once said about animal totems, not only for my previous meditation on the natural world, but also for the sphere that my son and other survivors of trauma inhabit, a realm of altered consciousness termed delusional by modern psychiatry. The Otherworld is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s ‘Spaces of Otherness,’ lacunæ that are simultaneously physical and mental, neither here nor there, like when you see your reflection in a mirror. I have also lived in this zone, banished from ‘normal’ society, and the Otherworld can be at times both pleasurable and terrifying. As Charlotte Delbo so eloquently explains, there is no straightforward escape from danger after trauma: rather, a person lives alongside this darkness in a ‘doubling’ of existence, switching between these sites.

Psychiatric interest and awareness of the role of psychological trauma in the genesis of various psychiatric problems has oscillated throughout its history. Psychiatry, which organises emotional, behavioural and psychological problems using a diagnostic system solely based on surface signs and symptoms, has had a very problematic relationship with the notion that reality can have an overwhelmingly effect on a person’s body and psyche. Survivors, however, often find themselves trapped in their traumatic pasts, haunted by intrusive memories or suffering profound amnesia, compulsively repeating their experiences in further victimisation or on occasion re-enacting the violence by perpetrating it on others. Lifting the veil on the secrets of societal violence such as rape, spousal abuse, and childhood sexual abuse and maltreatment leads to widespread denials over the scale of the problem. Although many individuals remain silent about their pain, these memories of cruelty and brutality remain, overwritten by the bright stories of progress and social advancement that society likes to tell. The dominant discourse of the psychiatric field has found this difficult to acknowledge and the reckoning on trauma falls mostly to literature and the arts, which have traditionally held a dark glass up to humanity, reflecting our tragic inclination toward violence and destruction.

Palimpsest 

Palimpsests appear in psychology, history, culture, and architecture. Primal events only show through in glimmers; stories gain and lose characters, beauty and cruelty interchange, cultural motifs transform depending on what era we exist within. Our whole existence can be regarded as a palimpsest, where old ways are scraped away and overwritten, only to remain as ghosts. Historians use the term not only to describe revisionist histories and how they never work, but also to describe the way people experience time, as a layering of present events over faded pasts. We all wake up every morning with the memory of yesterday already smoothed for us to write the new day on, except that traces remain under the surface.

In architecture, a palimpsest is an image of what once was there. Whenever a structure is rebuilt or remodeled, shadows remain—traces on the sides of a building, long after a neighboring house has been demolished, and painted areas where staircases have been removed. Jean Baudrillard discusses the way modern American culture is simply a layered miasma of images of images of images—a totally mediated experience, so we no longer know where or what the originating scene was. Our whole experience of the world could be said to be like a palimpsest, the present-day haunted by traces of the past. According to Lévi-Strauss, animals are chosen as totems not because they are ‘good to eat,’ but because they are ‘good to think,’ that is, they symbolise attributes that the human mind needs to classify and theorise what is observed. Indeed, it is common for people to feel the sensation that a new environment seems overwhelmingly familiar, or that while performing some new activity that they have actually engaged in the same process in the past. This strange experience, termed déjà vu, is a cognitive dissonance that feels uncanny, and both parapsychologists and scientists have grappled with the strange feeling of precognition evoked. Palimpsest or déjà vu, this sense of overlapping worlds symbolises the interstices explored in my work.

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