the sirens have been remaindered

[cegeste sound library #1]

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quail island / the sirens have been remaindered


at the edges of whatever
can be attended to : ordinary
sky over

orderly macrocarpa : the lack
of perceptive
limit, over

this unwalled line of sea
stones, as
the ear : stacked

against the unending lack
of a word, or line
of words, is

the edge of whatever
can be languaged :
they are not (quite)

bricks, & the sky’s lending
library, full of wrecked
systems (persistent

repetition of cirrus
phrases : seeming to fan
out from something

prior, indecipherable),
admits its gaps
without arrogance,

shelves this eye’s
openness at mid-
air’s deaf

point : to browse,
half-Whitmanic,
half-shattered

along these introduced
avenues, in the green
exuberance

this gift is : its space
of not-knowing
is a mouth :

is, the misc.
silences (lengthened, as
breath) between

the noon shadows, the memes of
stated trees. but whose freedom
is it? it is a sky

i do not always know
what to do with (how to deal
with : as the ship’s

graveyard knows
implicitly : the quiet
rust into oblivion

within the day’s
greater attention,
as metal flakes

restate themselves
to the ocean’s
equal blood-taste)

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[track created 2nd August 2010. location recordings made June 2009, in the grounds of seacliff asylum, dunedin. violin scratch-drone recorded in dunedin in June 2009, edited in wellington August 2010. the poem 'quail island / the sirens have been remaindered', also written in the first week of August, 2010.]

[for janet frame. with thanks to edie stevens and markus gradwohl]

owls do cry : field recordings in the grounds of seacliff asylum, dunedin

a field trip to the grounds of the old seacliff hospital on the outskirts of dunedin produced some recordings of local birdlife, and associated reflections on Janet Frame's history on site during the most troubling period of the writer's life. Her first short story collection The Lagoon and Other Stories was published while she was a patient – advance copies arrived on 4 March 1952. Nine months later, in December of the same year she was scheduled for a leucotomy at Seacliff. As Michael King puts it in An Inward Sun – the World of Janet Frame :

“Nine Months later, when Janet was once again committed in Seacliff, the book may have saved her life – or, at the very least, her intellectual and artistic life. There medical staff informed her that she had been selected for a dreaded leucotomy operation (the same operation known in the United States as a lobotomy). This intervention severed the fibres connecting the front part of the brain to the rest of the cerebral cortex. Most patients who had the operation experienced a reduction in anxiety; some were rendered vegetative. In Janet’s case, momentum towards this outcome seemed unstoppable. John Money advised against it. But Lotte Frame was persuaded to give written consent. Within days of the scheduled surgery, on 26 December 1952, newspapers around the country carried a story headed ‘Writer Wins Prize for Prose’ – Janet had won the Hubert Church Award, New Zealand’s only literary prize for fiction or non-fiction prose, for The Lagoon. And the superintendant of Seacliff, Dr Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, took her off the operation list. ‘I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.’”

built in the 19th Century, the Seacliff hospital buildings were structurally unsound from the beginning, and after the relocation of the hospital staff and patients to Cherry Farm psychiatric facility in the 1950s, various uses for them were mooted but never realised, and they were left to slowly decay.

birds however have found their home here in abundance. in a improptu lo-fi tribute to Messiaen, and perhaps Sebastian, and certainly the people who once wandered the grounds here, some spontanious human-bellbird imitations were also recorded...