Light the fuse

Chapter 5

Losing the bloody The

Mega-Modello Editorial Board: Alongside homegrown heft the calibre of Distinguished Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, economics history Professor Adam Tooze is Cimino’s fanciful first choice for editorial board co-chair. Meantime, choice of author, and hands down, is Distinguished Professor Dame Mary Anne Salmond. image World Economic Forum

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240708

This is the day (This is the day)
Your life will surely change
The The

Opportunist, along with perfectionist, were just two of the many terms Cimino, as a child, had misapprehended as entirely laudatory attributes—Cimino and a sibling being, almost certainly, each somewhere along the autistic continuum. Although his father, Claud-without-a-bloody-e “Mac” McMurray Cole, often said to him,

You’re a bloody  perfectionist !

…because it was not delivered harshly, Cimino took it as an observation rather than a criticism. If there ever was an edge to it, it probably reflected Claud’s sense of culpability for his son having inherited the potentially crippling defect—bloody  was used for emphasis with love and abandon by Cimino’s father, uncles and grandfather. Regardless, Cimino had long since accepted that living as a functioning perfectionist was the only sustainable option realistically available to him.

Opportunism—in its counterfactual, directly-Latin-derived, entirely positive sense—Cimino fervently believes, is civilisation’s fatally lacking quality. This world, mired in the climate polycrisis, is patently not the world it needs to be. The key to precipitating the mega-mobilisation necessary is demonstration, but not of the proven-failure model of marching or rioting in the streets. What is desperately needed is practical demonstrations of the cities, farms, and forests that will employ, house, feed, and protect people, as the climate convulses—without further fuelling that convulsion. Only then, Cimino, believes, will building a zero-carbon world become to be seen as an opportunity and not a luxury—a Ferrari, or equally egregious, a Tesla.

The task of demonstrating to the masses why Mars and a billion Teslas are not civilisation’s saviours is much more work than a paperback can pull off. The mega-movie that the novel could conceivably spinoff, Cimino feels certain, would  make meaningful inroads in that mega-propaganda war. Driving him is the certainty that when civilisation finally cottons onto the fact that the world’s biggest story in 4.543 billion years is writing itself, the mega-mobilisation will  ensue. The only question is whether it is sooner, and heroic; or later, and lame and lamentable. As for the fate of 8.1 billion and counting human lives, and 8.7 million—and counting down— species, neither pathway comes with a cast-iron guarantee of a great outcome.

Cimino’s concept, meantime, with Light the Fuse: Not the Great New Zealand Novel , is not to write, or even inspire, the necessary best-selling paperback, but to provoke one. At 77, however, he fancies he knows himself reasonably well—he knows he lacks the single-minded­ness, much less the industry to be a true megalomaniac. Cimino needs the toil of crafting his proto mega-modello to serve multiple purposes, the most tangible being bespoke interactive psychological therapy for his early-onset climate-polycrisis cognitive-dissonance.

Meantime, life as a functioning perfectionist must go on. Practicalities include routinely relegating the definite-article the, Cimino choosing, on the pages of Light the Fuse: Not the Great New Zealand Novel , to never  begin paragraphs, and particularly those styled with a dropped capital, with the definite-article the—a habit he’d acquired when indexing the 416-page Jade River: A History of the Mahurangi. The same rule would apply to the titles of chapters—particularly of this one. Whatever style guide the actual mega-modello might adopt, he appreciates, will be beyond his control, supposing his amateur effort succeeds in its far-fetched mission of provoking a proper page-turner-paperback writer.

Paperback Writer, instantly causes Cimino to reflect. His family having forsaken the King Country before the Beatles broke, Cimino hadn’t embraced the group’s every release with the devotion of his Te Kūiti classmates. Blues, courtesy of the Rolling Stones, had more viscerally possessed his by then deeply wounded soul. The same year, and despite the same ignorance of origin, with the release of Paint it Black, Cimino’s soul was all-but irredeemably lost. Paperback Writer, though, was compelling—in a different league from those about which McCartney’s Aunt Lil’ complained:

Why do you always write songs about love all the time?
Can’t you ever write about … something interesting?

Cimino also knows that title of the hoped-for, professionally written mega-modello is not a foregone conclusion. Much less a mere concoctor of the concept, even an author can find their preference vetoed. This, yet-to-be-atoned-for travesty was occasioned on his friend Hutch. His  title Four Gone Conclusions  worked on multiple levels, not least of all its allusion to the inevitable failure of the wannabe pop group at the heart of his story. An impervious executive had imposed the egregiously unoriginal title Hello Goodbye , inflicting yet another of a thousand cuts to be endured. Now, with Light the Fuse , Cimino resolves to ameliorate at least a modicum of that literary defacement. He also desperately hopes, as much fun as it might be to single-handedly save civilisation, someone, somewhere, with vastly more intellect, industry, and talent is already streets ahead of him.

Adam Tooze, at the hypersonic pace at which he patently writes and researches, could probably bash it out over a long weekend. Just so long as he doesn’t insist on titling it The , something-or-bloody-other.

‹ Chapter 4   |  Chapter 6 ›

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