It’s a world of magic realism. Because of a Certificate of Public Use running out, a toilet is legal today, illegal tomorrow, the event taking place presumably at midnight. No physical change has occurred, simply a regulation kicking in. In the UK, six is suddenly the number for legal gatherings. A family of seven becomes illicit. Darcy, a fly in fly out miner turns up at the airport with paperwork that allows a workmate standing beside him in the queue to fly across the Tasman but the same paperwork proves inadequate in his case. Different immigration officer. A headache perhaps, a relationship breaking up?  This begins a bureaucratic process that is truly Kafkaesque. Similarly, the Assange trial is pure Kafka. The go-to epidemiologist, with shocking pink hair, seems a character out of Alice in Wonderland. National’s team of ‘competent business people’ get their figures wrong. Floods, hurricanes and bush fires rage. We have entered the time of crisis. The centre will try and hold, with the margins collapsing. I video a local candidates meeting and it’s all predictable, Labour keeping things moving, Greens kindly and idealistic, NZ First full of policy, National preaching competence for recovery, the rest a bit loopy and nationalist with the anti money party having the insight of extremity. A drunk is embarrassing and no one can ask a simple question. Given the opportunity, people start raving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZER-Ss7gFg

I read a book, The mushroom at the end of the world, which posits a strange hope on the margins of precarity, as war vets, refugees and ferals gather matsutake mushrooms in the degraded pine forest of Wyoming. A complex supply train gets the mushrooms to Japan where they are a delicacy offered as gifts. The point made is that in a post human, intersectional, contaminated world, a community of outsiders can still find a rough praxis, different species interact and nurture one another and capital accumulates on the margins. I wonder whether the wilding pines are hiding this mushroom delicacy and in our lust for purity we forgot to notice.

In another book, Cassie Thornton, a feminist economist artist (that’s a mouthful) makes an interesting proposal: ‘How can we let go of what we know are false and deadly dreams of individual success within this murderous system to construct a yet unimaginable social world?’ she writes. ‘Instead of constantly risking everything to survive as individuals we might use our energy to take risks to make collective experiences of steadfast and deep solidarity where success is measured differently.’ And she is not preaching new ageism which she describes as a ‘middle class, saccharine, self congratulatory, individualistic, crypto masochistic, quasi activist rhetoric of healing, self care, pleasure, generosity and kindness.’ Not bad.

Thornton mounted an interesting dance project with dancers entering a large bank trying to find some dirt; which, if it existed, would be the only real thing in the building. A Hamburg colleague, Sybelle Peters, works with children and their wishes; one project involved the kids finding miracles in their neighbourhood – which sounds a worthwhile exercise well outside the National Standards testing regime.

Reading about these women’s work there is a sense of entering a space which is real, a space where people have taken a scalpel to the dark clouds of mystification to let through a glimmer of light.