Matterhorn

Oh Matterhorn, I loved you           

Long before you were a bar:
your giant meringues,                 

         clammy sandwiches
                  the secret garden out the back;
rolled-up pancakes filled with cream, 
vanilla slice.

In the morning, your pavement-blackboard read,
Bottomless filter coffee
home-made scones
Mince on Toast.

Every evening as I passed,
heading home 
        through 1980s streets
someone had changed it 
              to "mice".

Monster

Godzilla, according to a recent article in Science Daily, is not scientifically accurate. No surprises there, you might think. But, mischievously, the research behind the article accepts that the monster is, in fact, a ceratosaurid dinosaur: a surviving relic from the Jurassic. The puzzle, the article explains, is not that Godzilla is living alongside us in the modern world. What’s much stranger is that having appeared in Gojira in 1954 at a mere 50 metres tall, Godzilla has challenged scientific theory by reappearing, just 65 years later, in

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 Godzilla: King of the Monsters 2 at a whopping height of nearly 120 metres. A team of concerned researchers from New England’s Dartmouth College has calculated that Godzilla has evolved at 30 times the rate of other organisms on earth – and this despite its body size remaining fairly stable for the prior 150 million years.

With 35 movies on its CV so far, Godzilla has been growing up in public, and film fans have certainly remarked on its fluctuating size before. But, it seems no one had previously thought to look at Godzilla’s growth through a scientific lens. Fans and film critics alike have explained away Godzilla’s rapid increase in stature as simply a reaction to buildings becoming taller: just a visual filmic device. Our Dartmouth researchers though, having established with the scientific principles of evolutionary theory that normal evolution is not at play, then switch to a cultural lens. Godzilla’s first appearance, they say, was a manifestation of human anxiety, post-World War II. Fear of nuclear annihilation, and of environmental destruction. The original monster, after all, emerged from the sea when its habitat was destroyed by a nuclear bomb. And according to film historians, the texture of the original Godzilla suit was designed to look, not like a dinosaur, but like the scars of Hiroshima survivors.

In fact, despite decades of subsequent kitschy remakes and pop-culture references, the original 1954 Gojira was a protest against American H-bomb testing in the Marshall Islands,

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tests which followed the horrific A-bomb drops on Japan during the war. Scenes of the destruction Godzilla has wrought on Tokyo, at the beginning of Gojira's trailer, are a stark analogy of the devastation of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Film producer David Kalat has described Gojira as a “contemporary folk myth for the nuclear age”.

No surprise then, that the Dartmouth researchers find a correlation between the annual military spending of the USA and the body size of Godzilla, between the first movie and the latest. Based on this, Godzilla is described as “the embodiment of our collective anxiety”, and by ‘our’ you’d have to assume they mean America’s. The article's lack of attention to Godzilla’s origins in Japan’s anti-American outrage is striking. 

Some might find the researchers’ thesis trivial, or silly, and certainly from a scientific perspective there is little knowledge to be gained by trying to impose an evolutionary theory onto an imaginary creature. But, from a cultural perspective, what the authors describe as the “sudden strong and selective pressure on body size” that has caused the massive growth of the Godzilla monster puts our precarious environmental situation – and our fear of it – in the spotlight. For 65 years, we’ve been telling the story of this gigantic and unpredictable monster, which threatens human life and crushes human civilisation. Where did it come from? We made it, the story goes, by damaging the environment, and we will need all our human cleverness to survive it – in some stories finally killing it with a weapon so dangerous that it too puts the whole world at risk. 

What do audiences absorb from movies like this, in terms of inspiration, reassurance, or catharsis? It’s impossible to say. But Godzilla, surprisingly persistent, keeps coming back from the dead in movie after movie: the monster created by our reckless disregard for the environment that we live in. You can kill the monster, as the fans say, but it just won’t go away.

Rats with wings

It was grey outside my window, typical concrete canyon. The ledge that ran around this side of the building was under shelter, and the air con units that perched there sat coated in a cement of guano from the pigeons who roosted in the beams. It was pretty disgusting.

Judith had been at this desk before me, and she hated those pigeons. Rats with wings, she said, it’s a health hazard. Over the years the property manager had regularly got the pest control guys in, to – well I didn’t like to ask.

I wasn’t very fond of city pigeons myself. Scavengey, red-eyed, with feathers the colour of a petrol puddle on the road. Compared to the beautiful and wacky birds that were here in Aotearoa before humans were? Drab.

But then one morning I noticed the nest. A couple of iceblock sticks, a twistie tie, a bread tag and some weedy little twigs.  Glued together with…was that pigeon poo? Judith confirmed,  r

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olling her eyes. A day later there was an egg in it, and a pair of pigeons keeping it warm. And suddenly I was hooked. My own personal pigeon soap opera was playing out, on the other side of the window behind my desk.

That egg was never alone, constantly attended by its devoted parents. I didn’t know enough about pigeons to tell them apart, but it didn’t seem to matter. One pigeon would sit patiently on egg-warming duties while the other stopped by to feed it, on and off throughout the day – and then at some point they would swap. I became obsessed. What if their egg didn’t hatch? There were older, abandoned nests around the ledge with orphaned eggs still in them. Had their parents been pest-controlled, never to return? Killed in traffic? There were other pigeons flapping about as well, squabbling over territory, perching briefly on the bird-spikes before reeling across the ledge. It wouldn’t have taken much to knock that nest right off. But morning after morning, as I sat down at my desk, there it was.

Then one day my pigeon friend seemed curiously restless. It stared back at me with a beady red side-eye, and as it lifted a wing I saw – gross.  What was that? A greasy looking, yellowish chick had hatched; its feathers like an old man’s comb-over, sparse and wiry over the waxy skin. I’d never seen a pigeon ‘squab’ before, and as I watched it feebly blinking and nodding, I realised I’d never even seen a pigeon in the street that looked at all like a youngster. I started to pay more attention to the city pigeons then, out and about, and wonder about them.

Because in some ways they are like rats (with wings). They live alongside us, recycling our

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rubbish. They live on abandoned kebabs, leftover chips, sandwich crusts. They’ve adapted to the environments we’ve built for ourselves, making use of buildings’ high ledges, and windowsills, and roofs. Power lines, and city trees, and statues. And, they make a terrible mess. 

But some say that pigeons should not just be seen as inconvenient pests. Rather, they’re an urban keystone species, a sort of canary-in-the-coalmine for city environments. More research on pigeons (beyond how best to keep their numbers down) could tell us a lot about the conditions we ourselves are living in.They’re in every city of the world, so they’re an ideal subject for studying regional differences and changes in environmental conditions: pollution levels, disease, and climate change. Pigeons could also help us understand, and maybe even predict, changes to biodiversity across different geographical areas. 

What’s more, as a wild urban species, pigeons can be a link between people and nature, encouraging a conservation mindset. It might seem like a small thing, but urban birds, along with trees and greenspace, can help take the edge off the built environment, and improve our mental health.

So why are we so quick to dismiss pigeons, and call them rats with wings? Maybe looking at them is too much like looking in a mirror. We made this dirty city, full of rubbish and disease, and we accept it as normal. We may keep our individual, domestic environments clean, but our quality of life is underpinned by the daily production of tonnes of excess food, leftover scraps, and stinking waste. We live, like the pigeons, in our own shit.

Time passed, and the property manager rang to ask what state the ledge was in. Was it time to get the pest control company in and organise a clean-up? The chick had started to look a lot more pigeon-ish now, tottering about and flapping its wings. It eyed me quizzically through the glass. Doesn’t look too bad here actually, I said. How about I call you back in a few weeks?

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Ko wai koe?

 

Under the water I see my feet so clearly. This is not like swimming in the sea, where rough waves topple you and you stumble, blind, afraid of standing on a crab. I’m four years old and we’re on holiday at Lake Tāupo. Later I will learn to float, and become familiar with the call, “Don’t go out of your depth!” from my mother, relaxing back on the shore. But for now I’m toddling around knee-deep, trying to hold handfuls of water, underwater, and wondering at the

way it escapes my clutches. Afterwards, back in the boat, we rock across the surface of the lake, fishing. Little waves pass, each one identical, confusing my notions of past and present. How deep is it here, I ask uncomfortably, imagining an endless cold, blank darkness under our little boat. Oh, about 50 fathoms, my father replies. 50 whats? “Full fathom five,” quotes my mother, “full fathom five, my father lies, his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes.” I burst into tears, imagining my granddad lying on the bottom of the lake, all alone. Mum explains that actually he’s safe and sound in Karori Cemetery. It’s just a story. There are bones in the lake, for sure. But they are not our bones.