War. Haw. What is it good for?

I could not have chosen a worse time to try and make my dog famous on the internet. For a start, at 15, he is almost dead, and he has just recovered from a benign anal Cancer. The other obstacle was his sense of dignity. He hates it when I try and film him. He turns away, and tucks into a ball and won’t perform for my phone camera. Unfortunately, he is a Jack Russell and he has cursed me with a mind of his own. He has never heard of TikTok. He never questions where the Possyum dog roll comes from. He didn’t realise that my attempts to monetise his, um, cuteness, could save the family from financial ruin.

The other timing issue was the war. Everyone was announcing on glossy Instagram that now was not the time to plug your wares and create content. Now was not the time for influencers to pretend they loved the scented candle or chocolates they had been sent by some suburban artisan they had never met. No, now was the time to Free Palestine.

People started complaining about being shadow banned, which seemed likely, but I also suspected there are only so many images of an ashen dead child, or a man screaming for his lost leg a person can take. I shut down after viewing just one of these images, and I wondered if this bombardment of gory videos and calls to action was having the opposite effect on viewers. If they too imagined themselves as suffering from hypersensitivity. It was not that I didn’t care, I cared too much. I am aware this is a ridiculous statement.

The only thing I liked about Instagram before the genocide was how superficial it was. Now it was a political arena and demands were being made. Apparently, my silence was lethal. So, I committed my own atrocity, I made a video of the dog suggesting that he should go to Gaza, that we should all go to Gaza. I suggested the dog was too cute to die. But that’s the thing about Gaza, no one is allowed in, and no one is allowed out.

I wake at 6am every morning and go straight to the Al Jazeera news site. There is no good news. I watch the livestream for a while and then mute it and open another tab, because all the experts say a terrible situation is only going to get worse. I watch Jewish Norman Finkelstein speak very slowly about Gaza, like he is telling children the worst bedtime story ever. I get the sense he has to speak that slowly because otherwise he might start screaming.

I tried to study the history of Palestine on that bastion of scholarship known as YouTube. I discovered it stretches back thousands of years and becomes more confusing the further back the automated voice goes. I thought about what Māori mean by ahi kaa, or home fires, and how the flame, like the Olympic torch must be continuous to be called home. And how people on the other side, baying for more bloodshed, are weaponizing concepts of indigeneity when they usually show contempt for them. I added watermelon emojis to my name on Elon’s X site to show where my allegiance lies. But I resisted buying the watermelon earrings on Instagram. I signed a petition instead. I am lucky I don’t have a large following, and that nothing substantial is expected of me. I gave up trying to make the dog famous. It was a tasteless act, and we are both too old for TikTok.

One of the guests on Kim Hill’s last show was Richard Flanagan, who was being interviewed about his latest book Question 7 which is part memoir, part autofiction. He argues in it that if it wasn’t for Hiroshima he would never have been born, because his father was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp, starving and close to death before the bomb was dropped from Enola Gay. He measures his own existence against the thousands who lost their lives, and he delves into the history of the atomic bomb and discovers that it was first imagined as a fiction by HG Wells. His discoveries are proof you must be careful even when you dream, even when you use your imagination.

Flanagan also referred to time, and to history by proxy, as being non-linear. He mentioned Aboriginal Australians and how they have a fourth tense, where the past, present and future converge into a timeless space, a space where everything is happening at once. I have latched onto this idea because it is something I have been trying to express in my own manuscript and it makes sense to me as a Māori and the quantum physics of our cosmology. For every horror unfolding in the world, something good is happening, and will happen, and has happened. And will happen again. It is a huge consolation to me, this fourth place, as I contemplate my uselessness in the face of the atrocities. I try to ignore that this same sense of time or timelessness could also be applied to evil.

Recently I had a mirimiri and as she elbowed the trouble on the right side of my neck I jumped into a hole that felt bottomless, I was committed to being alone in this black hole, I didn't want to drag anyone that I loved down into the darkness with me, and that was when I felt the white ring of light around it. Another name for this is Te Ao Marama. And I was pushed back out of the hole.

Animals don’t experience time as linear either, they are always in the present tense, alive to every moment as it happens. And my inspiration for turning the dog into a TikTok star came from a Siberian woman Victoria who adopted a baby black panther she named Luna. She already had a rottweiler called Venza and luckily the two animals get along. Even as Luna grew to adult size, the rottweiler tolerates having her head licked by Luna’s raspy tongue for what seems like an eternity. Venza tolerates Luna stealing her blanket. Venza tolerates the way Luna can leap on her from a tree as they go for walks in the snow. Luna is quite tame, probably because she comes from a line of travelling zoo cats, and she is extremely well fed, but sometimes she gets a look in her eye which is all jungle. Lately she has been refusing to go outside because the snow is too cold for her paws. She has a lot more charisma than my dog, who just snorted in his sleep.

I watch all her antics so I can stay alive to the other place, to the place where unlikely animals can be friends, and to where the war is also happening in another tab. She might not know it, but in Luna’s eyes everything is happening at once.