Magic

What a peculiar position to be in... I am on the clock, but have completed all the training that can be done on this side of The Ice.  I am at work, with no work to do, and so my "work" is my own to devise. Do fire fighters find themselves antsy while they wait?  While wondering this one morning, I found grist for the mill.

I went out looking for The Wizard of New Zealand.  I did not find him, but I did find The Dancing Magician. 

This should not be understood to be peculiar here in New Zealand, for it is a magical place.  Apart from being as beautiful as faerie, I am writing to home from eighteen hours in the future.  Having left San Antonio on 18 August, and chasing the sun westward, we flew through what felt like turbulence but was I'm pretty sure, a tesseract for after 13 hours on the clock we landed in Auckland on 20 August.  Such magic does not merely slip time into some hidden place, but it moves the whole of the Land of the Kiwis there as well.  For the skeptic, I present for evidence, the fact that New Zealand does not appear on maps all the time.  Should you have a globe or map on the wall, you should check from time to time to see that it still holds a mark on that chart.

Case in point:

Just to the right of old Australia we should see humble little New Zealand.  Of course this is a map by the WHO, which is part of that incompetent circus, The U.N., so perhaps it should not be surprising that the magical folk of New Zealand evade U.N. notice... they seem to miss all kinds of important things.

But then, what are we to make of a map produced by "The World's Leading Location Intelligence" mapping company... that also misses this island nation?

It's wizards, I submit to you.  Peter Jackson did not make his cinematic epic here because it was cheaper, but because magic has not gone out of this place.  It has roughly similar land area to the U.K., but a population of four million as compared to the U.K.'s roughly 60 million.  It is largely rural, with excellent produce, dairy farms, birds without wings, spirit winds that devour the people, and wizards, .


One should not make the mistake in thinking that The Wizard is the Ian that played Gandalf in the LOTR films, though The Wizard was in fact once known as Ian himself.  He was appointed the Official Wizard of New Zealand back in 1990 by none other than the Prime Minister of the day after being something of a notorious nuisance for years, standing upon a ladder in Cathedral Square and challenging all comers with his wonderland take on reality.  Though he did bring with him an army, he ultimately conquered Christchurch, and then New Zealand with whimsy wrapped around shrewd rhetoric, and loopholery to confound census bureaucrats, and the more humorless parishioners of the Anglican Cathedral.  It seems that they did not want him in the public square outside the cathedral asking difficult questions of all comers, though especially of them.

He had his roots as an English March Hare back in the U.K. where he was born.  Though he did not make top marks in school, he seemed to always be an original thinker, and something of a trickster.  funpowder became his weapons of choice to combat them.  A conservative non-conformist of the first stripe, he eventually moved to Christchurch in the 80's, and resides south of here to this day.

He did not have the marks in Latin or Maths to pursue his first or second choice of study in university, but he did have high enough marks and more than enough brass to persuade the university to let him pursue his own hybrid social-psychology studies which did not exist there in the 50's.  With a colorful series of careers through Southern Europe, and Persia, and places between, he eventually emigrated to Australia, where he really began his crusade of madcap whimsy.  In the 60's the radical leftists who demanded peace and goodwill while funneling money to the Viet Cong became his worst foes, and humor and

I found out about him, because one of the Ice People happened to see one of his apprentices wandering to and fro about the downtown area, and got a selfie with the fellow before moving on. 
He did not know what a story he missed.  He met a Wizard of New Zealand, and didn't even get the lousy t-shirt.

Curious, I went downtown myself one afternoon, looking in hopes that I might find The Wizard or one of his apprentices.  It seemed to be an increasingly futile endeavor though, and so I decided that the best place to begin, was a good second-hand bookstore.  Having gone to one of the malls in town to find a book store in which to pick up a collection of Maori folk tales, I found the Kiwi analogue to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's of yore.  Ah, but who can even bear to go to such quaint chains after the advent of Barnes and Nobles?  But an old fashioned book trader... surely such a place would be the sort to help me find a Wizard.

I took the Hebdomadal Waka out looking for a bookstore I had been told about.  The maps from the hotel tourist kiosk were better than nothing... but they did not make it easy either, printed so small that I could barely read them even with glasses, and certainly not while driving.  Having declined to get an NZ sim card for my cell phone, I had no service to run a navigator either, so it was navigating by sun and providence. 

Not that I had anywhere else to be or any schedule to keep.  So the day was to be a contrast to the remote places then, that had so enchanted me for days.  Not quite so lovely, nor quite so peaceful as the lakes, and mountains, and forests, but I had a mission, so there was nothing to be done but go.

It turns out that New Zealand can get you to Hell.  Who'd have suspected?

It seemed to me, wise at the time, to heed Winston Churchill's advice in this case:


"If you are going through Hell, keep going!" 

And so I kept going, through roundabouts and streets given over to new directions by construction and repair crews, traffic cones, and safety fences.  The earthquake that happened in 2011 was just off the coast and not very deep.  The scars of that disaster still mark the city today, and the repairs will undoubtedly continue for years longer.  That is far more a topic for ongoing discussion in local coffee shops and at water coolers than the movies that the rest of the world knows NZ for. 

Bear Grylls of Discovery channel fame, at one time came to Christchurch it seems.  I saw a sign outside a church with him inviting people to come in.  I wondered for a bit, whether that church offered locust rather than bread at communion, and if getting out was a matter of rappelling down the steeple... or if it was a place where one had to be able to survive the wildlife inside. 

I hope not.  Sometimes, the people we give trust most to are the ones that are the most dangerous, not of malice but of lack of understanding or of careless regard.  But Bear seemed to think it was safe, so God bless them.

When I at last found Smith's Book Shop, I almost missed it.  It turns out that it is in an old building that had once been a tannery until it was repurposed as a rather attractive gentrified retail location.  It has about four coffe shops, three bakeries, two boutiques, a salon, and Smith's Books.  It is a smaller place than the mall book store, but there is nary a book bag, coffee mug, game isle, or toy section as you will find in old BNN.  It has wall to wall, and floor to ceiling, books, and old periodicals, and antique postcards, advertising media, and documents watermarked and yellow with time.  While there are some new books, and some of them paperbacks, the majority are at least a decade old, some many decades, and a few over a century past their printing.  The book-seller, Barry, was in an animated conversation with another gentleman. 

Barry is sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, white of hair and white of beard.  His companion was a dapper fellow in a three piece suit, with a thick, snowy mop of hair and mirth-cut lines describing his face.  They were ruminating on the problem of kids today, who have no artistic skill that does not involve screens, and who can't be bothered to read an actual book anymore.  I listened as I browsed, and a retired university professor came in looking for a book but staying for the conversation as well.  They all agreed that the millennial generation is a study in contradictions and ought to be reading more.  When at last I joined in, we had a lively conversation for over half an hour that meandered from millennials to the veterans of WWII who were made of tougher stuff... of the quiet ruggedness of the Kiwi dreamers who settled the islands with the intention of making a new England, without the squalor, despair, and malice of the Dickensian land they left behind... of the shrewd bargaining of the Maoris who were enshrined into the founding documents of the new nation as equal citizens... and the problem of the leftist government of today that has fueled the fires of racism to bring discontent among the Maories against their white neighbors.  We talked about the politicization of "climate change" and I had to correct some of the hocus pocus that they had heard from alarmist media. 

After the professor left, I continued talking to the snappily dressed fellow, whose name, is Gavin.  He invited me to have coffee with him, and we ended up slipping through time as he revealed that he has been a dancer and a magician for most of his life.  He has a dim opinion of David Copperfield, and a resplendent one of Fred Astaire.  We discussed classical music, Baryshnikov, Daniel Day Lewis, and consummate artistry.  We talked about Bruce Lee, Star Wars, Superheroes as modern myth, and the expertise of Apollo Robins the pick pocket entertainer.  As the coffee magically seemed to continue to flow, the shadows grew long, and before long it was 5:00.  Closing time for nearly all businesses in the smaller land down under.  Finishing our coffee over a discussion about whether Trump is the brawling antidote to leftist fascism,  we shook hands and parted ways.  It was a most pleasant afternoon.

I did not find The Wizard.  But a Dancing Magician will do.

I did find the main city library after that...  It rather reminds me of a modern Hogwarts. 

As it should.