Wild Sovereign Development Site

Author: moseara

  • the plastic to drown us in

    Last week on the market I spoke to the girl queueing before me at the fruit stall. She had said to the cashier, Could I have a bag for that too please? which focused my attention from its dreamy perusal of the mountains of plump and glossy fruits. She had put her single lemon, her three apples, her two mandarins and her kiwi fruit each in separate plastic bags lest they contaminate one another. When the guy turned away to change her fifty dollar note I spoke.

    Excuse me. I’m just so distressed by the… amount of plastic you’re consuming. Could you, I mean.

    Her expression helped me. Goofy, caught out, unblaming, sprung. I gathered pace. Couldn’t you please think about bringing your own bags? I know, she said, looking down. I know I should. I said, pleadingly, They drift into the oceans. They sort of fly about. If you are a turtle or a fish they look like food, jellyfish.

    I know, she said again, I should. Please, I said, please do. It’s really really time. And we smiled at each other and she walked away carrying her kilo of petroleum byproducts and once I’d paid for my bouquet of greenery and come out from under the awning into the wintry sunshine, so pleasurable, my partner was standing there opening wordlessly his canvas shoulder bag and as I fed the spinach and fennel in feet-first I was aware of the plastic bags girls passing us, seeing this transaction, maybe taking it home and owning it: we can normalise what seems a chore. However tonight standing at the checkout of a grocery store I felt unable to address the woman standing in front of me in line who had put every morsel of fruit and every mortal vegetable each into its own noxious, off-gassing solitary confinement. Bad, naughty vegetables, you suffer in there until you learn how to behave. I looked her over from her wood-heeled boots up to the leopard scarf that was slung so perfectly casually across her sleeves. I thought how I might say, Couldn’t you consider, and how she might say, It is none of your business, and how I might say, But it is my business! I have to live on the planet you are desecrating.

    In between I visited the nut store in West End where everything is in tubs or big sacks, and you point and say, I’d like a half a kilo of those please, a wedge of that. The good-looking and ordinarily bearded man who came out from behind the counter cheerful and broad said to me, Would you like a bag for those? I said, No thanks. See I think I’ve already used up my lifetime’s…. quota of plastic bags. A laugh of surprise spurted from him. I think I probably have too, was all he said. After the grocery store lady with her terrifying scarf I walked home in a kind of fugue. The moon hung like a slim segment of moon high in the blackened and starless sky, a plastic bag drifting in a bottomless trench. How can we have come this far without catching on to ourselves, I thought. Is the water just too dark and warm? Are we asleep?

  • Hazzard lights

    This morning I woke late and slowly and heavy and smiling, blindly at everything, the sun and the distant trains, heavy with the discovery unflowering in me: my heart is full of love. Heavy with love, impersonal love that is personal, dripping from me, in me, and through. Love is like honey through a window, as the great songwriter once said. Out of bed I took up my book, working slowly, carefully through the last pages of Shirley Hazzard’s impeccable novel The Transit of Venus. I’ve read it twice before and only now realise why, early in the second chapter, it forewarns us with such a light confidence:

    “In fact Edmund Tice would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city, and not for many years.”

    I always wondered, why would he kill himself? When he has devoted his life to this one woman and finally, by the end, she realises him. Thinking about the delicacy and quiet triumph in the description of their long, dry, separated love I glance across my desk with its starburst of opened notebooks. A prong of a specific tree given to me for meaning lies dying inaudibly in its glass vessel. It shades a shallow basket filled with candles and pens. I go back to the book, pick it up in my hands like an album carried from a wreckage in a world now lost and gone, by fire, by water, by the toil of time which places everything behind us like a mirror. Her work is so perfect. “‘I work. I think of you. These are not alternating propositions – I think of you always. Since writing you last, I’ve been to a show of drawings by Leonardo, a one-man industrial revolution.’”

    Irreplaceable Shirley Hazzard, alone in her room, writing from a kind of understanding few can be bothered to share. I hear the ardour of her disciplined quietude beating behind the pages: “She would be better off in a home. Christian said this to Caro, who replied, ‘She has a home. You mean an institution.’” Like Jane Austen’s I ration her few novels, unable but afraid to wear them thin. Getting up out of the sunshine I say almost inaudibly to my companion, spilling the steaming cup of tea, If I could write like this I would never do anything else. Thinking of writing about her work I am “A big woman in violet [who] leaned against the mantel, empurpling the view.” These thoughts pass through me like tiny fishes, transparent in sunlight, as deep in love the echoed longing might come. If I could be beautiful like you, it wouldn’t matter, I read – or imagine. Turning the last page to the end I suddenly realise with a hot shock: she is about to die, the main character actually dies on the final page.

    I paid insufficient attention to the last two or three lines. Beforehand as he is watching her go there are people grappling for their status and their airbearable possessions. And “The passengers passed through the disembodied doorway, one by one. There was a woman in pink linen: ‘Does this machine spoil pearls?’” They are “claiming, clutching, harbouring.” The man who tried to make her see, an ophthalmologist, climbs aboard without recognising her. His death has also been foretold. Everything deep, light, ironic and sweet. The love that is wisdom, the wisdom of love comes and takes a seat quietly, far back in the aircraft. Then:

    “The roar could be seen, reverberating on blue overalls, surging into the spruces. Within the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a long hiss of air – like the intake of humanity’s breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.”

  • vegemite kid

    One’s German companion begins to assimilate. He is working his way through a jar of Vegemite, observing that it contains the exact same colouring as Coca-Cola: 150c. “The trouble with Vegemite,” he says, scraping the traces of its oily residue into his gullet to clean the butter knife, “is it kind of contaminates the knife. You really wouldn’t want it to end up in the strawberry jam.”

    “Ugh,” I say, “no,” thinking of my brother with his webbed feet who used to eat one big bite of his toast with Vegemite and then four tiny bites of his other toast with honey. But Vegemite and honey, like honey with soy sauce, is in a special class of its own. We are on our verandah where the morning sun slants across the houses and I am gazing dreamily at the near corner of our block, a shady spot under the camphor laurel, where the rusted star picket has trapped a flapping shard of paper. “In Germany of course,” he says, “some people eat liverwurst with marmalade.” I put my cup of tea down and stare at it. The milk has turned it to the exact colour, pinkish and intimate, of liverwurst. Life is disgusting and here we are in its midst, chewing and swallowing, digesting and turning everything to shit. Sitting so pretty and containing all the world in minute, pulsing, cellular form, thinking our slow morning thoughts and and gazing at the sun.

  • bursting the bloodied vessel

    bursting the bloodied vessel

    Does god want us to live in a cage? Doesn’t god want us to be good because we’re free?

    A very respected and dear friend of mine just got asked to pull down a photograph she had posted, of the blood vessels and nervous system of the human body. The request came from someone who found the photograph “distasteful and annoying.” My friend’s response, very courteous, was: stop trying to censor science and trying to censor me, and if you find this offensive, just don’t read it.

    Who on earth gave people the idea that to follow god, they had to shame and shroud themselves, cover their faces, cover their minds. Who depicted this terrifying and, frankly, terrified god as a cowering punitive petty scoutmaster, jealous of everybody’s knowing. It is such a sad facsimile of the open exploration, the happy curiosity, the sense of blessed appreciation and wonder that should be our response to this natural world in and of and around ourselves, however we feel it came about.

  • this cat the sun

    I think this cat’s favourite person is the sun. She believes everything he tells her and is willing to let him whisper into her belly and long ears for hours. I don’t think she realises he is distant, to her he is close. And I don’t believe she cares that he sprawls his favours indiscriminately. He is her sun and that’s all that matters here.

  • like umbrellas

    Today was a torrent of windiness scouring Brisbane, everybody turning inside out like umbrella-bats. Wind Creates Friction, my hippie ex-boyfriend always used to advise: today is not the day to try transacting any very delicate business.

    However it is the last of June and I had to rush down to the Department of Transport to register my car. My German companion was amazed at the Aussie informality. So many fields to fill out in the forms, but the blonde girl wrapped up in her scarlet scarf helped me through: How much weight can your ute carry, do you think? I lifted my hands. Uhm, uh. Well, she said, you’ll have to take a guess or else I have to make you go get it certified. Shall we say… maybe a tonne?

    Oh, I said, maybe. I mean… it’s not all that big, maybe you wouldn’t get much more than a tonne’s worth of weight in there, unless it was lead.

    One tonne, she typed aloud, to show me. “Oh! Good, we got away with that. Now, two seater? Or five.”

    At the sliding doors – rattling in the high wind – I stopped to touch the screen and let them know their service was great, the girl in Booth One particularly helpful and kind. A gruff voice spoke at my elbow. It belonged to a little boy who had slid in beside me to watch. “I’m not goin’ out there,” he said. “Yeah!” I said, “it’s windy, isn’t it?” He said, pointing to his feet, “I had to put on me shoes and socks.” I said, “Well, you’d need extra-heavy shoes today, maybe with lead in the soles. Or you’d be in danger of just lifting off!”

    He looked me over carefully. Clearly this was silly. But why? “I might just blow away!” he offered, tentatively. “I know,” I said, “and you’d have to be careful not to raise your arms out, like this…. otherwise they might act like wings and you’d be up, up, and away.”

    A moment later he burst out of the juddering doors as we were crossing the pebblecrete quadrangle. “Like this!” he shouted, gleefully, raising up his arms like wings. “Yes!” I said. “And come up on the tips of your toes and feel the wind take you!” We wobbled gleefully at each other for a minute then I left him balancing there, amateur bird, laughing in the wind. We took refuge with our new Queensland number plates in an underground coffee shop with sweet, chirping songs playing softly and the hum of a rather old fridge. “How’s your day been?” asked the barista and I said, cheerfully, “Windy!” He said, “Oh, I know. It’s worst up at the cross-street there, a kind of a wind canyon, and I have to go against it to get here, turn up with tears in my eyes.” “That’s so harsh!” I said, exulting. You see I have a point to prove about winter in the tropics. It’s not cold, but it is rather cold. And cooler inside the house than out. It is hard for a person raised in the northern hemisphere to even imagine how this could be so. At home it is colder and you can die of it. But the sun won’t kill you. And the bureaucracy in the government departments relies on the administration of a thousand ill-paid hands. I remember the waitress aghast in a bar where I simply left my late, lukewarm, unappetising coffee and walked out. She followed me into the street and came up to me where I was unlocking my bike. She said, “We simply don’t do that!” Das machen wir einfach nicht!

  • book-learning

    book-learning

    I just feel so ruddy fortunate to have a decent academic education. It obliges me to be of service in the world, even as I benefit from the knowledge of people whose education differs from mine. I went off to Berlin for two years, leaving my old farm ute parked in the street. When I got back it was high summer in Queensland and we drove down to the local watering hole to cool our feet. On the way back down the main road my driver’s side mirror simply flew off, and smashed at the roadside, the solid steel stalk that upheld it having rusted through to nix. And then the gears started complaining. It took us several goes to get up a medium-gradient hill – we creaked up slowly until a handy side street appeared, backed into that to get another run-up and take another bite at it. Traffic accumulated at my tail like well-wishers to a visiting dignitary, only lack in all dignity and free from well-wishing. Finally I took the thing groaning and spluttering dust into a local mechanic, a Laotian named Vince who took one look at the aged machine and said, I can’t handle this one. We will need to call in Sid.

    Sid. What a guy. He is eighty, round and floury in his cement-dusted blue overalls, the fabric worn so thin it looks all snuggly and soft as down. He resembled in his courtesy that actor on Are You Being Served? who held his fingers to his lip when considering colour and girth – John Inman. He took my car to pieces very patiently and when, days later, they finally called me in he had assembled a teaching platform of worn-out sprockets and rusted-through parts in order to show me for sure and definite that (a) they weren’t cheating me and (b) I needed to change my ways. He left behind (without reluctance, I think) the fussy paint job his wife had set him out at Redland Bay and toiled all the way into the city by bus, an hour and a half’s early morning journey, so that he could take me on a long explanatory test drive and coach me – with a tact and delicacy I didn’t deserve – in the right way to care for my new shiny gearbox, the best way to use my foot on the clutch, basic things.

    Today I realised that arghkh, the rego runs out at the end of June. And that the end of June is on Monday. And it’s still registered in Victoria, meaning it will have to go over the pits and be checked out. I rang Vince. “Sure,” he said, sounding so beautifully unalarmed, the television sqwarking in the background. Last time I was in there he showed me the framed photograph of his father, who always told him he could have his own business. An hour later Sid rang me back. “We can do it, luv,” he told me, “but you might have to get in here pretty early. Vince is gunna ring his mate for you, that does the roadworthies.” He asked had we been enjoying the vehicle, had we been out of town, off the road. I asked had he finished his work in the kitchen. He told me what was on his mind: seven months ago he got $40,000 worth of hail damage to his motor home. “And the insurance people are kicking up a fuss.” I said, “They’re not bad, are they. Do anything not to pay out!” He said, “I had to get the ombudsman onto them. Now I’ve just gotta write them a letter, only I’m not much of a one for letter-writing, I’m just no good at English, I’m struggling with it a bit.”

    I said, Sid, would you like me to look it over for you? Because I am good at English, and letter-writing. Send it on to me if you like, I’d be happy to. His gratitude was so overpowering I felt shamed. I cannot understand engines, motors, mechanics. I look at those devices and my brain glazes over like a river in winter. I can feel the synapses cracking, it hurts, it makes me feel stupid inside. Sid parsed my rotten old engine like a chef diagnosing the herbs in a beautiful soup. But he’s no good at letters. And I rely on engines all day, in my computer, my car, on the bus, in the train. And he rides English as his only tongue, feeling no mastery of it and no ownership. How can we respect each others’ gifts better and expertise?

  • brisbanally retentive at last

    Brisbane. Took me ten years to settle here, having uprooted from sultry Jakarta and a school which had barely two students of each nation in one class. This was the first time we’d lived in the suburbs, since I was a tiny baby by the sea, a child learning to walk in the desert. I used to lie on my bed listening to lawn mowers almost frantic with the choking feeling that lives go nowhere and end in dust. Lawn clippings and agapanthus and dust. But then there was sultry West End, the village which now has devolved to a suburb at last. And then I moved away and now I am back. It has taken me months to move out of the suburbs and into a place of my own. And six months and tonight I feel the trickle of sweet familiarity at last, a trust in the landscape, a kind of security that releases a kind of intrigue it is hard to feel when you are always new, like how it’s hard to be deeply creative and free and wild with no safe home place and without a routine. I felt I belonged at last. God damn it, Brisbane.

  • all the accidental musics wrung

    Sometimes a song I’ve been listening to intently for ages suddenly rolls past in a different setting, the studio rather than the live performance, or another performance of it at some other gig somewhere in some other dive across town… and I all of a sudden realise, unwelcomely, that favourite line I so exquisitely cherished is in fact a simpler, balder statement or plea than what I had heard… and what I’ve been singing all of this time. Whenever this happens I wish I could take it back, unhear it I mean but also take it deep into myself, have that line – which in a kind of unintentional way, perhaps I wrote, or cowrote – for my own and smuggle it into some other song, illuminating some other life. I guess you could do this (I could, I mean) if you acknowledged the spurring accident… as in a piece of poetry or a painting made in response to something made by someone else, a work that brings to conscious light an insight some artist you are not has already articulated. Maybe then.

  • superpow

    I think maybe my superpower is interfering in other people’s lives. I pick up their rubbish. I make faces to cheer up their miserable kids. Not only do I do it but I feel like it’s my perfect right, kazam, kerpow. We went out for dumplings. The table next door were depressing. He sat sprawled in his own homeroom slump, scrolling endlessly through the blackened thicket of his fascinating phone, actually holding the device up to his face while she ate stoically from a bowl of poached pork gyoza so that the back of the phone covered half his face, a carneval mask. The girl pulled out her wallet at the end of the evening. I said, Excuse me. Politely she leaned over. The boy was in earshot. I said, You’re really beautiful. And you seem interesting. Her eyes came to life. Thank you! she said, warmly. I said, I think you deserve a better relationship than one where the guy drizzles through his phone all night while you are out with him. And I wanted to tell you that. Ok, she said, um, fair enough. Thank you. We walked home slowly in the light dark rain and passed two signs that reminded us of underpants. One was an A-frame set out sturdily in front of a kebab house, and the other hung from the awning of an old shop now a restaurant. I said, pointing, does that photograph remind you of underpants? The photograph was of a segment of Grecian columns. Yes! he said. With the… and the way it sort of… Exactly, I said, lengthening my stride. Underpants.