Dunedin

Delightful thing discovered in Dunedin 1: twelve brightly-coloured hammocks sewn together edge to edge with bushels of milk bottle tops strung off them, hanging in an art gallery, which visitors are invited to crawl along. My friend Alexander told me about this exhibit and I thought, "Oh, well, that sounds entertaining enough." I did not expect to be grinning wildly by hammock two, surrounded by blue and not quite sure how to move. From the outside a row of twelve hammocks looks quite short, but from inside it feels like an ocean, and the swing and balance of it is very strange. I don't know when I last had that much sheer fun on a structure; no playground I know can match it. Which would be very pleasing even if it was the only part of the exhibit, but after that there's a net covered in dangling plastic bottles which you can stand up underneath and shake as though it's your robe, or crawl about under making smaller-scale music, and after that, in the next room, there are hexagonal tables, with eighteen drawers each containing a different herb or spice or tea, with hot water and cups and teapots -- and intention of the whole thing, the reason it's in an art gallery, is to make political conversation with strangers comfortable. The only conversations we had with strangers there were about the tea, but I can vouch for the theory. I can hardly think of a better tool for lowering social barriers than those hammocks. (The tea stations also reduce the velocity of the many small children attending the exhibit in a way their parents probably appreciate).

However, do not make tea out of pure devil's claw. Alexander put a very little of it in his mix of herbs and hibiscus flower, which was very nice and like nothing I've drunk -- astringent and strongly fruity but without the stick-in-your throat quality that I dislike in overbrewed fruit teas. I wanted to see what the devil's claw brought to the mixture, and drank some straight. It was terribly unpleasant, but interesting enough that I kept drinking it for a while. Violently bitter with an earthy raw-potato quality that increased the longer it steeped and gave me indigestion. If the Dright were serving his guests tea, this would be it.

(The other thing I saw at the art gallery was a huge wall covered in abstract paintings which looked very serious and impenetrably conceptual, but which when you walked close to them turned out to be covered in whimsical bits of writing and quotes and jokes. It was visible from the hammock room's window, and seemed to fit in).


Delightful thing discovered in Dunedin 2: the computer game Goragora. I'm hunting my memory for anything which would prevent me from calling it the most beautiful game I've ever played, and not coming up with anything except possibly (in a very different direction) Go. Goragora is a puzzle based on relating images to each other. You have a grid of four pictures or scenes. Sometimes you can zoom in on an image of a room to find a hanging on the wall which itself contains four images each of which you can zoom in on. Sometimes you can move the images around such that two of them become halves of each other, and something happens as a result. Sometimes, if an image is in a frame, you can move the frame and put it around something else, and then zoom out to find that the context has changed. What you are looking for, glimpsing amid the images, is a dragon, or a constellation, or enlightenment, or beauty itself, though the search is hard and the times are dark.

After I played Goragora I was having a conversation about the significance of someone's bumblebee tattoo, why she'd chosen it and what she thought about bumblebees. That kind of symbolic thinking which links the dead bumblebee on the path to the live image on a person's wrist is the kind that Goragora uses, and I haven't seen anything like it before.

(There should be a word for the moment when you find yourself applying a sort of thinking where it can't apply. I've found myself after games of Go thinking about a social situation as though it were a Go problem; after playing Goragora I found myself expecting the floral pattern on the ceiling to be a puzzle component. And there's a split second when I don't notice myself doing it).

Delightful thing discovered in Dunedin 3: a setting for a roleplaying game that I'm about to run, which suddenly came together in my head with a whoosh at the point when I was saying to myself, "Well, it seems to be tending Westernish, but it would be fun to add Lovecraftian cults in, I know where I am with Lovecraftian cults, only seahearth wouldn't want to play if it was entirely madness and doom..." My previous attempt to run a roleplaying game was not a total failure but consisted largely of stress and things not quite going right; also, planning a game takes the same brain as writing. I hadn't quite realised how nervous I felt about it until the ideas I'd piled into a heap became a living creature, drew a deep breath, and told me that God was a Tree, that the world was being built outwards from Its paradise in a ring, and that Its wealthy human servants built temples to house Its seedlings in exchange for exclusive control over the fruits of the field and the sleep of the mind and the healing of the body on their new-made land. (It helps that in a roleplaying game I am allowed and indeed encouraged to steal things wholesale. Perhaps I should allow and encourage myself to do this all the time).


As well as these, there were the friends I was going to stay with, and the other friends I was going to visit, who have been kind enough to move entirely independently to the same part of the country. The fact that I knew about them already does not stop them being delightful too.

As for Dunedin itself -- which I realise to my slight surprise is the first unfamiliar-to-me bit of New Zealand I've seen since moving to Wellington five years ago -- what stuck out to me were chimney pots, stone churches, and holly hedges. The hills and landscape are fairly Wellingtonian, though I haven't seen anywhere in Wellington which has quite the kind of wide swooping street I was staying on, a gentler roll than Wellington's larger hills tend to have, meaning that I could sit in the bay window and see the street peak at each of its top corners, once far and once near. Alexander drove me out onto the peninsula, to Sandfly Bay, named not for insects but for how far up the valley from the coast the wind takes the sand, as though a bit of beach had been picked up and lain inland lengthwise. We attempted to catch an illicit view of New Zealand's only castle, but its managers have done their work well -- there's no view in through the screening trees from any part of the road outside the ticket gate. Other than that, I did less exploration than I thought I would, except little circuits of the nearer streets. It was a very holidayish holiday, full of background music, and talking, and of computer-game-playing and t.v.-watching (two things which aren't really integrated into my life except in small corners and as bits of failed self-care, so it was interesting to be visiting lives in which they were well-set-up and social and so suited me down to the ground).