THE MICA PAVILION
by David Howard
ARGUMENT
1874: Chang’e, Chinese goddess of the Moon, looks down on Tuapeka County, Otago. The miner Ah Sing works a gold claim, in the hinter of Lawrence, with his partner Sam Chew Lain. Sam provides the capital to work the claim from his income as a hotelier. Ah Sing courts Tiriata, the daughter of Te Kaha of Kāi Tahu. Te Kaha opposes the match; distrusting Chinese and Europeans, he demands Tiriata marry within the tribe. Tiriata falls into depression and dies of grief; she enters the Underworld. Ah Sing, supported by Sam Chew Lain, then goes to the entrance to the Underworld on the banks of the Tuapeka River. On advice from Chang’e and her companion Wu Gang, he attempts to win Tiriata back by singing to Hine-nui-te-pō, who warns him off. Hine subsequently agrees to restore Tiriata to the care of Te Kaha. Tiriata argues with her father that, since Ah Sing has saved her, they should be allowed to marry. It is full moon; Ah Sing and Tiriata are reunited under the watchful eye of Chang’e.
LOCATIONS
The Moon
Tuapeka County: goldfields, Lawrence, Tuapeka River (Aotearoa New Zealand)
The Underworld
CHARACTERS:
Ah Sing, lover of Tiriata, mining partner of Sam Chew Lain
Chang’e, Chinese goddess of the Moon, where she lives in the company of the woodcutter Wu Gang and a jade rabbit that manufactures elixirs.
Hine-nui-te-pō, Māori goddess of night and death, ruler of the Underworld; daughter and unwitting lover of Tāne who fled to the spirit world when she discovered the truth, giving the sunset its red colour, and bringing death into the world by killing Maui.
Sam Chew Lain, hotelier and mining partner of Ah Sing
Te Kaha (Kāi Tahu), Tiriata’s father
Tiriata (Kāi Tahu), Te Kaha’s daughter, lover of Ah Sing
Wu Gang, Chinese woodcutter, exiled to the Moon for seeking immortality; he is allowed to return to Earth if he cuts down a cassia tree there, however it grows back immediately so he can never leave.
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE ONE: Declaring
Setting: Watched by chang’e from the moon, Ah Sing and Sam Chew Lain at their gold-mining claim near Lawrence:
Sam Chew Lain (to Ah Sing):
What we want is often the death of us.
I might suffocate under gold
dust. My father drowned in the Pearl River
trying to recover a lure.
Where there are heroes there are wet gravestones –
they’re overgrown.
It’s difficult to know let alone do
the right thing in a world of things.
A lover’s conscience is a Chinese Box.
Confucius knew that if you hear
you forget; if you see you remember.
I stand upright.
That action expands the known universe.
Look harder, the mountain depends
upon the view adopted: a dark shock
from base to apex, then the sun.
I throw the shovel over my shoulder,
spilling raw light.
The hours carved out of schist, the minutes
splinter into milliseconds.
Everything gets small before the mountains.
Look at your hand, its lines are short
except for one–the heart, that's why you touch
Tiriata.
Ah Sing (to Sam Chew Lain):
Despite the smoke of this campfire I stare.
‘Do not lift the knife while you skin
potatoes–these kūmara are sweeter.’
So I keep the pressure constant
like my love for her, stripping off the skin
of tradition.
Sam Chew Lain (to Ah Sing):
Sort your priorities, even the sun
visits one side of this world first.
Because we lack understanding and means
we go deep into the mountains,
hoping to gain both. The clouds don’t confuse
a mountain pool.
You go on about the clouds, not the void
beyond clouds. It is prejudice
that binds our feet, as if we were women;
it stops us from travelling through
appearances to the real. You must see
Tiriata.
There is a ferry on Ch’in-huai River –
each trip is a preparation
for the next. Each breath is for the next breath,
then it is for the trip beyond
breathing. We miners dig through to China
for an echo.
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE TWO: Warning the Daughter
Setting: Te Kaha and Tiriata’s whare, Lawrence
Te Kaha (to Tiriata):
Women don’t have the freedom to be wrong.
Scattered firewood does not season;
it will not warm like wood from a bundle.
You must stay with us, marrying
among the tribe. Look within the compound
for your freedom.
Te Kaha sends Tiriata to her room.
Tiriata (alone, through a window to Chang' e, the moon):
Chang’e, study this window’s strong corner:
the vertical line is Ah Sing,
I am the horizontal. And we fit.
Because we do others can see
through to another world, where luminous
heads do not shake.
My sisters confirm the seed of all men
sets the same colour on their skin.
I’ll fall, a stone at the speed of twilight
through the underworld’s black window
until Hine-nui-te-pō catches
what’s left of me.
Despairing, Tiriata falls asleep. During the night she dies of grief.
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE THREE: Through the Black Window
Setting: The Moon shines over the Entrance to the Underworld, near Tuapeka River (Ah Sing with Sam Chew Lain outside, Tiriata and Hine-nui-te-pō inside):
Wu Gang, from the Moon (to Ah Sing):
I see more than you: soldiers with helmets
made of paper, heroes trembling
when envoys arrive, silent mendicants
staring at washerwomen’s breasts.
I see clearly, like the gods who condemn
and then pardon.
Chang' e (to Ah Sing):
Some leaves are picked in spring, some in autumn
but they all steep for the same time
once they are in the jingxi jar. You are
hungry for ponkan oranges–
they rot in the bowl. Do you have a choice?
Sticky fingers.
Sam Chew Lain (to Ah Sing):
We know love is invisible, like air.
We breathe without seeing what’s there.
We believe. At the river’s edge who thinks
Air is better than this water?
You must dive in, finding your way by grace
with your eyes shut?
Let her float without you, clear to the Moon
where Chang’e can teach her to drum
with rabbit’s feet. Wu Gang goes on hacking
at the cassia, it grows back
instantly. He will never leave the Moon
you stare at, mad
for immortality. Trust the tin mug
and those pinching boots I must pull
off when you drink too much. What is the cloud?
A dragon’s sloughed skin. And the dream?
A rabbit’s lucky foot. The earth we score?
A meniscus.
Ah Sing (to Sam Chew Lain):
When the crescent Moon stares through a window
at a mirror, it wants wholeness
rather than surface representation …
It wants to see what is not there.
With Chang’e and Wu Gang, I need to be
an immortal
and I need my songs to be visitors
echoing across the border
of time: each moment hosts eternity
so there is my entrance to death,
in a sustained note, an arpeggio,
a breathing space.
Tiriata’s ghost (to Ah Sing):
The executive residence reserved
for God’s not a place we will stay
being Chinese, being Māori. Look back,
my ancestors set traps for birds;
when white men asked what they wanted the most
it was to fly.
Tiriata’s ghost (to Hine-nui-te-pō):
If it is true that gods speak through humans
but not to them directly, why
let the dogs howl at midnight. But tell me
who plucked the qin, strummed the ruan
so the tunes flew into every seashell
to please children?
Ah Sing told me about these instruments
as if the nor’wester played them
the way it plays trees, plucking their shadows.
Why do men bend the straightest branch?
They break it, then pretend it was hollow
and held a song.
Ah Sing (to Hine-nui-te-pō):
Every thing has its home: song lives in air
and the singer who keeps his song –
he’s forgotten like the politician
who promises to deliver
a cartload of presents to the poorest
but steals the horse.
Together men can invent a language
to express their grief for the dead,
a language that lets the dead laugh so hard
they collapse their monuments, throw
stone after stone into the sky, sophists
who know the truth.
Hine-nui-te-pō (to Ah Sing):
Ah Sing, your songs will hover like wild geese
over a tidal bore: they’ll land
on the dark lake of memory, its mirror
showing up dead stars. A rainbow
changes with every step, you never see
the same rainbow
twice. So you’ll never get to where you were
with Tiriata. I learnt this
after I slept with my father, spreading
seed as I ran: you can’t return
to first love. If a thing grows, its shadow
grows larger still.
Infernal cartography has one home:
the heart. It changes for us all
and changes all of us; it cannot be
fixed, the antechambers fill up
with blood, the same blood that forces you now
to sing through stone.
With little care for the gods who look on
hungry children make their way home.
They believe they will eat the best of meals
instead of rotten scraps, and yet
that is what most people will sit down to
after midnight.
Ah Sing (to Hine-nui-te-pō):
Perhaps my song can heat the earth, turning
three seasons to the fourth, summer?
When The Book of Songs, The Book of Music
and The Spring and Autumn Annals
all inform this thought, then you will listen
and let the dead go.
They will reappear like perennials
in ceremonial gardens,
like dock on the scarp above miners’ claims
after a night of nor’westers.
Tiriata will dance through the valley
with her shadow.
[Hearing Ah Sing, Hine-nui-te-pō relents and restores Tiriata to her father’s whare. Before Ah Sing's eyes Tiriata slowly vanishes as she reaches out for him.]
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE FOUR: The Birthday of Flowers
Setting: Te Kaha's whare, Lawrence
Tiriata (to Te Kaha):
This is the birthday of flowers. They bend
around the broken wheelbarrow,
hide a forgotten hoe, break through brambles
into the sun, like me. Ah Sing
laughs, ‘A divine dragon will show its head
but not its tail.’
If Hine-nui-te-pō heard Ah Sing
you can hear me: the lightest seed,
like aroha, is carried the farthest
on a strong wind. Let your hate go,
it is an obstinate pig dog digging
a short-cut home.
Father, to see dusk without shivering
you must wear more than one layer;
if you are my outer garment, Ah Sing
sits next to my skin. He warms me
more than a cloak of kiwi or kererū
feathers. Let go.
Tiriata and Ah Sing (who steps forward to join her):
It is the role of two tributaries
to converge. The murky water –
it soon clears, reflecting universes
whichever way it twists and turns.
We make things mean by seeing through the gloom
and that is love.
Chang' e (looks down at Ah Sing):
As if the Chi, Yellow, Liao, Yangzi
Hei and Huai Rivers converge
in the Sea of Tranquility, as if
the centre of Heaven and Earth
held itself without tension for all time
tenseless, perfect
as if. Where a shout is without echo
because distance is illusion,
when measurement proves impossible, then
love will be eternal. Ah Sing,
the frog carries its own drum: so do you,
it is the heart –
it beats constantly. It beats constantly.
1874: Chang’e, Chinese goddess of the Moon, looks down on Tuapeka County, Otago. The miner Ah Sing works a gold claim, in the hinter of Lawrence, with his partner Sam Chew Lain. Sam provides the capital to work the claim from his income as a hotelier. Ah Sing courts Tiriata, the daughter of Te Kaha of Kāi Tahu. Te Kaha opposes the match; distrusting Chinese and Europeans, he demands Tiriata marry within the tribe. Tiriata falls into depression and dies of grief; she enters the Underworld. Ah Sing, supported by Sam Chew Lain, then goes to the entrance to the Underworld on the banks of the Tuapeka River. On advice from Chang’e and her companion Wu Gang, he attempts to win Tiriata back by singing to Hine-nui-te-pō, who warns him off. Hine subsequently agrees to restore Tiriata to the care of Te Kaha. Tiriata argues with her father that, since Ah Sing has saved her, they should be allowed to marry. It is full moon; Ah Sing and Tiriata are reunited under the watchful eye of Chang’e.
LOCATIONS
The Moon
Tuapeka County: goldfields, Lawrence, Tuapeka River (Aotearoa New Zealand)
The Underworld
CHARACTERS:
Ah Sing, lover of Tiriata, mining partner of Sam Chew Lain
Chang’e, Chinese goddess of the Moon, where she lives in the company of the woodcutter Wu Gang and a jade rabbit that manufactures elixirs.
Hine-nui-te-pō, Māori goddess of night and death, ruler of the Underworld; daughter and unwitting lover of Tāne who fled to the spirit world when she discovered the truth, giving the sunset its red colour, and bringing death into the world by killing Maui.
Sam Chew Lain, hotelier and mining partner of Ah Sing
Te Kaha (Kāi Tahu), Tiriata’s father
Tiriata (Kāi Tahu), Te Kaha’s daughter, lover of Ah Sing
Wu Gang, Chinese woodcutter, exiled to the Moon for seeking immortality; he is allowed to return to Earth if he cuts down a cassia tree there, however it grows back immediately so he can never leave.
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE ONE: Declaring
Setting: Watched by chang’e from the moon, Ah Sing and Sam Chew Lain at their gold-mining claim near Lawrence:
Sam Chew Lain (to Ah Sing):
What we want is often the death of us.
I might suffocate under gold
dust. My father drowned in the Pearl River
trying to recover a lure.
Where there are heroes there are wet gravestones –
they’re overgrown.
It’s difficult to know let alone do
the right thing in a world of things.
A lover’s conscience is a Chinese Box.
Confucius knew that if you hear
you forget; if you see you remember.
I stand upright.
That action expands the known universe.
Look harder, the mountain depends
upon the view adopted: a dark shock
from base to apex, then the sun.
I throw the shovel over my shoulder,
spilling raw light.
The hours carved out of schist, the minutes
splinter into milliseconds.
Everything gets small before the mountains.
Look at your hand, its lines are short
except for one–the heart, that's why you touch
Tiriata.
Ah Sing (to Sam Chew Lain):
Despite the smoke of this campfire I stare.
‘Do not lift the knife while you skin
potatoes–these kūmara are sweeter.’
So I keep the pressure constant
like my love for her, stripping off the skin
of tradition.
Sam Chew Lain (to Ah Sing):
Sort your priorities, even the sun
visits one side of this world first.
Because we lack understanding and means
we go deep into the mountains,
hoping to gain both. The clouds don’t confuse
a mountain pool.
You go on about the clouds, not the void
beyond clouds. It is prejudice
that binds our feet, as if we were women;
it stops us from travelling through
appearances to the real. You must see
Tiriata.
There is a ferry on Ch’in-huai River –
each trip is a preparation
for the next. Each breath is for the next breath,
then it is for the trip beyond
breathing. We miners dig through to China
for an echo.
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE TWO: Warning the Daughter
Setting: Te Kaha and Tiriata’s whare, Lawrence
Te Kaha (to Tiriata):
Women don’t have the freedom to be wrong.
Scattered firewood does not season;
it will not warm like wood from a bundle.
You must stay with us, marrying
among the tribe. Look within the compound
for your freedom.
Te Kaha sends Tiriata to her room.
Tiriata (alone, through a window to Chang' e, the moon):
Chang’e, study this window’s strong corner:
the vertical line is Ah Sing,
I am the horizontal. And we fit.
Because we do others can see
through to another world, where luminous
heads do not shake.
My sisters confirm the seed of all men
sets the same colour on their skin.
I’ll fall, a stone at the speed of twilight
through the underworld’s black window
until Hine-nui-te-pō catches
what’s left of me.
Despairing, Tiriata falls asleep. During the night she dies of grief.
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE THREE: Through the Black Window
Setting: The Moon shines over the Entrance to the Underworld, near Tuapeka River (Ah Sing with Sam Chew Lain outside, Tiriata and Hine-nui-te-pō inside):
Wu Gang, from the Moon (to Ah Sing):
I see more than you: soldiers with helmets
made of paper, heroes trembling
when envoys arrive, silent mendicants
staring at washerwomen’s breasts.
I see clearly, like the gods who condemn
and then pardon.
Chang' e (to Ah Sing):
Some leaves are picked in spring, some in autumn
but they all steep for the same time
once they are in the jingxi jar. You are
hungry for ponkan oranges–
they rot in the bowl. Do you have a choice?
Sticky fingers.
Sam Chew Lain (to Ah Sing):
We know love is invisible, like air.
We breathe without seeing what’s there.
We believe. At the river’s edge who thinks
Air is better than this water?
You must dive in, finding your way by grace
with your eyes shut?
Let her float without you, clear to the Moon
where Chang’e can teach her to drum
with rabbit’s feet. Wu Gang goes on hacking
at the cassia, it grows back
instantly. He will never leave the Moon
you stare at, mad
for immortality. Trust the tin mug
and those pinching boots I must pull
off when you drink too much. What is the cloud?
A dragon’s sloughed skin. And the dream?
A rabbit’s lucky foot. The earth we score?
A meniscus.
Ah Sing (to Sam Chew Lain):
When the crescent Moon stares through a window
at a mirror, it wants wholeness
rather than surface representation …
It wants to see what is not there.
With Chang’e and Wu Gang, I need to be
an immortal
and I need my songs to be visitors
echoing across the border
of time: each moment hosts eternity
so there is my entrance to death,
in a sustained note, an arpeggio,
a breathing space.
Tiriata’s ghost (to Ah Sing):
The executive residence reserved
for God’s not a place we will stay
being Chinese, being Māori. Look back,
my ancestors set traps for birds;
when white men asked what they wanted the most
it was to fly.
Tiriata’s ghost (to Hine-nui-te-pō):
If it is true that gods speak through humans
but not to them directly, why
let the dogs howl at midnight. But tell me
who plucked the qin, strummed the ruan
so the tunes flew into every seashell
to please children?
Ah Sing told me about these instruments
as if the nor’wester played them
the way it plays trees, plucking their shadows.
Why do men bend the straightest branch?
They break it, then pretend it was hollow
and held a song.
Ah Sing (to Hine-nui-te-pō):
Every thing has its home: song lives in air
and the singer who keeps his song –
he’s forgotten like the politician
who promises to deliver
a cartload of presents to the poorest
but steals the horse.
Together men can invent a language
to express their grief for the dead,
a language that lets the dead laugh so hard
they collapse their monuments, throw
stone after stone into the sky, sophists
who know the truth.
Hine-nui-te-pō (to Ah Sing):
Ah Sing, your songs will hover like wild geese
over a tidal bore: they’ll land
on the dark lake of memory, its mirror
showing up dead stars. A rainbow
changes with every step, you never see
the same rainbow
twice. So you’ll never get to where you were
with Tiriata. I learnt this
after I slept with my father, spreading
seed as I ran: you can’t return
to first love. If a thing grows, its shadow
grows larger still.
Infernal cartography has one home:
the heart. It changes for us all
and changes all of us; it cannot be
fixed, the antechambers fill up
with blood, the same blood that forces you now
to sing through stone.
With little care for the gods who look on
hungry children make their way home.
They believe they will eat the best of meals
instead of rotten scraps, and yet
that is what most people will sit down to
after midnight.
Ah Sing (to Hine-nui-te-pō):
Perhaps my song can heat the earth, turning
three seasons to the fourth, summer?
When The Book of Songs, The Book of Music
and The Spring and Autumn Annals
all inform this thought, then you will listen
and let the dead go.
They will reappear like perennials
in ceremonial gardens,
like dock on the scarp above miners’ claims
after a night of nor’westers.
Tiriata will dance through the valley
with her shadow.
[Hearing Ah Sing, Hine-nui-te-pō relents and restores Tiriata to her father’s whare. Before Ah Sing's eyes Tiriata slowly vanishes as she reaches out for him.]
_____________________________________________________________________
SCENE FOUR: The Birthday of Flowers
Setting: Te Kaha's whare, Lawrence
Tiriata (to Te Kaha):
This is the birthday of flowers. They bend
around the broken wheelbarrow,
hide a forgotten hoe, break through brambles
into the sun, like me. Ah Sing
laughs, ‘A divine dragon will show its head
but not its tail.’
If Hine-nui-te-pō heard Ah Sing
you can hear me: the lightest seed,
like aroha, is carried the farthest
on a strong wind. Let your hate go,
it is an obstinate pig dog digging
a short-cut home.
Father, to see dusk without shivering
you must wear more than one layer;
if you are my outer garment, Ah Sing
sits next to my skin. He warms me
more than a cloak of kiwi or kererū
feathers. Let go.
Tiriata and Ah Sing (who steps forward to join her):
It is the role of two tributaries
to converge. The murky water –
it soon clears, reflecting universes
whichever way it twists and turns.
We make things mean by seeing through the gloom
and that is love.
Chang' e (looks down at Ah Sing):
As if the Chi, Yellow, Liao, Yangzi
Hei and Huai Rivers converge
in the Sea of Tranquility, as if
the centre of Heaven and Earth
held itself without tension for all time
tenseless, perfect
as if. Where a shout is without echo
because distance is illusion,
when measurement proves impossible, then
love will be eternal. Ah Sing,
the frog carries its own drum: so do you,
it is the heart –
it beats constantly. It beats constantly.