Surly bonds

Waiting for the clouds to break in Wellington

We’re renovating! Nothing sexy (kitchen or bathroom) - just boring and essential repairs. It’s been nearly three months of maintenance now, with the most disruptive work still to come. Our lawn is bald from all the rain and heavy boots, our garden crushed by piles of buckled roofing iron.

If I were an emoji, it would be the one with Whirls for Eyes. I’m not Gritted Teeth, although having a tradie appear at any window, any time, can be startling (I’ve discovered the value of stick-on frosting). Part of me likes having busy people around in the daytime, and I’m used to the faint whine of power tools.

There’s comfort too in knowing this grand old lady - a hundred years of weatherboard, her old sash windows concealing weights on ropes, her uneven corners, shallow fireplaces, her bending in the wind, and her creaks - is being given the care she deserves. Want to know something charming? Scaffolding clinks and cheeps in the rain. It’s like listening to pan pipes, only much more expensive.

It’s a difficult time to stay upbeat, though (Brimming Eyes emoji). Winter has its fangs in us; more than the cold, it’s the low light that’s depressing. Sometimes I’m closing the blinds as early as half past four. In Wellington we’re used to walking chin down, shouldering the wind, but now there are other cold fronts to chill us. Everyone looks defeated. There’s a pall of concern hanging over us because this is a city worried about itself.

I was poking among small gifts in a local shop yesterday and remarked on the pretty enamelled pill boxes. The owner showed me some others, marked HAPPY PILLS. She said she used to have a range perfectly sized for hormone patches, but these had sold like hot cakes.

There you have it: Karori is teeming with midlife women powered by stick-on oestrogen and force of will and frankly, they are the lucky ones, with something to put in their pill boxes. There’s a national shortage of HRT medications, as it seems our government’s drug-buying agency has not had women’s health front of mind; the rest of us must shoulder forward somehow, through this bleak midwinter, this fag-end of a pandemic, this recession, creaking and bending, money tight and contracts few, but keeping the damned show on the road.

And then, Gard! The US Presidential debate! I watched half with my daughter, who eventually gave up, and half on my own. It was appalling as political theatre and crummy as entertainment. This is what America has to choose from: pugnacious lies versus meandering confusion, strength without morality versus morality without strength - a monster arguing about his golf handicap with Old Father Time.

I was exhausted afterwards. Alongside the existential dread everybody else was experiencing, I felt wistful. In my lifetime we’ve gone from the lofty heights of political oratory to this basic, single-syllable shitshow. My daughter, 12, has never witnessed a generation-defining speech by a contemporary political leader. Whatever hell this is, it’s not the age of imaginative language inspiring better behaviour. There’s no “We’ll fight them on the beaches” here.

Even the best of us, then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, traded fine oratory for simple, clear, soothing terms, coaxing us to stay inside during the frightening early weeks of Covid and explaining what to do, what not to do. This was perfect for that moment but four years later, I can’t remember anything in particular she said. She delivered a daily TV briefing of the highest order but to me at least, in terms of political language, there was nothing to cut out and keep.

Maybe I’m in that stage of middle age where you develop aggressive antipathies (oh, I definitely am. If anyone says “Happy Monday” or “Fri-Yay” to me, a vein starts to throb in my neck), alongside strange longings for the past. I feel like I’m looking for something we’ve mislaid as a society. I shouldn’t be looking for it on YouTube, probably; but I’ve been scratching the itch by watching and re-watching a speech that confirms for me the lost art of the national address.

It’s by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986, speaking to an audience of millions only hours after the space shuttle Challenger had blown apart on live TV, killing all seven crew.

I was 13 in 1986. I don’t remember watching the disaster unfold. I’m not sure the space shuttle launch was shown live in New Zealand - not only due to the time difference, but because we only had two channels back then and they didn’t carry breaking news. Nor do I remember Reagan’s speech. Perhaps this is why it threw me when I first saw a clip of it a couple of months ago, watching an excellent Netflix documentary about Challenger. The little snip of the speech was electrifying. It stays alive in the mind. I sought out the whole thing and have watched it now several times.

The Challenger explosion still makes your heart lurch if you watch the footage. It was all the more poignant because the crew included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who’d won a nationwide competition to be the first ordinary citizen in space. She left behind two young children; her parents and sister were filmed standing at a NASA viewing platform, gazing upward in disbelief, as the shuttle vaporised into competing plumes of smoke.

The disaster happened early that January morning. By evening, Reagan would have to speak live to the country - sweeping aside that night’s State of the Union address to instead settle everyone’s nerves, direct national mourning, pay tribute to the dead astronauts, restore faith in NASA and its embattled and extremely expensive space programme, and to score a few points in the ongoing cold war against Russia, who might exploit the disaster as evidence of American weakness and fallibility. (The facts would eventually show the disaster had been preventable, in no small part due to NASA coked up on its own hype and obsessed by its survival.) So, this was a speech with many boxes to tick.

I’m not sure today’s political language is capable of ticking more than one box at once. It seems we no longer accept open sentiment from leaders and have no patience for poetry. We don’t want to idealize; we refuse to imagine things could be better for everyone, not just for ourselves. We no longer place faith in institutions, accepting they’re imperfect and can get better given time and work; and we prefer to have someone or something to blame.

This speech, then, has become a relic of history. It would not fly now. But I find it hopeful to watch it, not only because of what Reagan said and how he said it (finely-turned phrases, delivered masterfully) but the achievement in the writing itself. See this young woman in a red dress? She wrote it. An unimportant staffer in a side room, who spent her working-class childhood reading.

Peggy Noonan and her boss in 1984 (image courtesy of The White House)

Peggy Noonan is now in her 70s, a celebrated conservative columnist at the Wall Street Journal and a Pulitzer Prize-winner but then, she was a 35-year-old staffer who had written bits and pieces of speeches, often for the First Lady. She was, in her words, “a little schmagoogie in an office”. But that day she found herself a quiet corner in the vast complex of the White House and sat down to write.

It helped that her eventual words were delivered by ‘The Great Communicator’ - an actor who knew how to use a camera to his advantage, had the grizzled face and kindly delivery of an American grandfather, and could make a pause work like nobody else in politics. Ronald Reagan is at his most impressive in this speech, with his sharply parted Brylcreemed hair, navy suit, folded white lapel handkerchief, and full command of his talents. But he wasn’t convinced by the speech when he first read it over and thought when he came off air that it hadn’t met the moment, emotionally or politically. How wrong he was.

I can’t entirely explain why I find the speech so satisfying. I can see the cogs turning and the pistons moving, but the words feel deeply massaging, somehow. I think I miss what the 1980s must have been, and I was there, so you think I’d have a better idea. It’s a paternalistic speech and politically there’s a lot to disagree with. But the response to it was emotional, reaching across party lines. It was unifying; it privileged the feelings of people involved, and those watching. It mentioned children. It reminded America of the best of itself. It clawed back hope. Part of me thinks, well of course a woman wrote it.

Without breaking down every technique or lifting every hardworking sentence for examination, the emotional centre of the speech is the way it quotes a sonnet that even in the 1980s - not a poetic age - was familiar to many adult Americans. Pilot officer John Gillespie Magee Jr wrote High Flight in 1941 after reaching an altitude of 30,000 feet in a Spitfire; he sent it home to his parents but would never know how famous he or his poem would become. He died only months afterwards, crashing his plane after a mid-air training collision in England. He was only 19.

Again, today, the poem is not to our ironic tastes. There’s nothing mocking or self-mocking about it. It’s about the joy of adventure, risk and being young; it’s about the pleasure of technology, and a poet’s delight in the available language.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air ....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee Jr. "Letter to Parents," September 3, 1941. John Magee Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

Peggy Noonan plucked the poem from memory because she had been taught it as a child in class. And Reagan knew the poem too, as it was written on a plaque outside his daughter’s school. It was also well known to astronauts, and would later be carved into the memorial at Arlington National Cemetery honouring the Challenger crew.

There’s something audacious about the way Reagan lifts two phrases from this poem and joins them together, describing the highest point of the Challenger flight in spiritual, almost triumphant terms. Just before their deaths, he implies, the doomed crew experienced transcendence. He presents this as a human achievement and something in which to find deep comfort. This is bold, but also delivers a gut-punch at the end that still socks away your breath, nearly 40 years later.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them - this morning - as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’.

I think you can feel uneasy about the nationalism of the speech, the fundamental conservatism of it, while at the same time finding it moving and inspiring. You can park the politics and even what we’ve come to learn since about the disaster (the corroded O-rings in the solid rocket boosters, the attempt at a corporate cover-up). This speech can be appreciated for its fusion of poetry with politics, argument and appeasement. I think it’s an example of language in harness to a higher cause, whether you agree with the cause or not. I think Peggy Noonan was an unassuming genius, and nobody else could have made her words come alive as Reagan did.

It was a moment met and briefly, at least, a break in the clouds.

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It’s not the happiest book you could choose to read, because we all know how the story ends. But Adam Higginbotham’s recent book Challenger: a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space is deeply reported and compelling. I recommend it.

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Hello and thank you to some new subscribers led here thanks to

Zoe Barry

at Very Good Gardening,

Dan Keane

at NZ American and

Ana Samways

at Sideswiped! What good company to be in!

The school holidays are nearly here, and I genuinely don’t know if this means I’ll have more or less time to Substack. I hope you’ll bear with me if I don’t nail my weekly posts during July. Mwah!