River is freezing over and the swans and ducks have a narrow, darker path that they can swim through. Feathered ice-breakers. The ice is flimsy and resembles the scuzzy glass of an uncleaned shower cabinet but there are pure, sheer white patches where the overnight snow lies untouched and I can see two yellow leaves scudding across the white surface like spinnakers.
Went into my favourite bookshop today, which has owls carved of different woods stashed in all its corners. For the first time I noticed the sign on the back of the door: Antiquarian shops are places of inner peace. There followed a series of red circles crossed by red lines, like no-through-road signs for traffic: no headphones. No mobile calls. No shouting.
However I was so delighted I broke the rules immediately, by shouting. The proprietor, who is always barefoot or wearing a pair of rubber thongs & who drinks at one of the cafes I love, had got up from his desk at the back of the shop to say hello. “Inner peace!” I called over, beaming. “No mobile phones! I love this!”
He came down between the stacks of books which seem both wobbly and solid. “Most people like the hectic,” he suggested (it makes more sense in German). “Never stopping for a minute.”
“To never need to think!” I said. “To never… never die, right?” He nodded his head and we gazed at each other with a feeling, or so it seemed to me, on this one subject of utter likemindedness. Us & the owls. Hoo hoo.
What is that book you’re always carrying? my friend wanted to know. So I opened it and read to him:
“But the first of the thunder and lightning was always high, wild, savage and frightening. Every year people in our part of the land were killed by lightning. Yet long before I learned at school that lightning was electricity, and all else physics had to say about it, I caught the symbolic ‘other’ from Klara, for whom it was a pure phenomenon of the spirit. While the women of our community on their different farms would fold up the silver and metal in the house in sheets and blankets in the belief that otherwise they would attract the lightning, hanging towels over all the mirrors and drawing the curtains in their haste, Klara would sit with me on our great verandah and make me look at the lightning because she said that every human being had the same light as the lightning in his eye, and the fiercer the lightning outside, the brighter the light with which the eyes must look directly, steadily and without swerving, back at the lightning. She believed that if the light in one’s own eyes did not respond and flare all the brighter because of the example of the lightning, there was a form of lightning that would go black and invisible, and that that form of lightning was the lightning that killed.
“This was for me one of the earliest and most convincing illustrations of how symbolic the Bushman spirit was, how rich in the primordial wisdom stored up in that two-million-year old being of which Jung spoke to me later, describing at as ‘a living treasure of the all the experience and knowledge gained since the beginning of time’, and warning that if one lost touch with this innermost source and its symbols, life, rootless and adrift on the tides of fate, would fail and die. Fairly early in my life, thinking of the Bushman symbolism as I had done from the beginning, I thought of the lightning and the light in the Bushman eye staring back at the lightning as images of consciousness and awareness, and I ended up where I still stand today by thinking of lightning as the call to the battle for increase of awareness which is the imperative in creation.”
~Laurens van der Post, The Voice of the Thunder
Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into a bag and thrust it at me, saying, One Euro. A little further on, a stall of organic produce, flecked apples and satisfyingly plump brown mushrooms. “I’d like 400g of those please and a lemon and a….” Reaching into my stash of German words I realized I’d no idea what is the collective noun for leaves of spinach. A bunch? A bouquet? A posy? I can’t say any of these things in German. “… a piece of spinach, please.” She was already stacking it into the bag I had handed her. “A piece! I like that.” “How would you normally say it?” “Ah, well… I’d like some of that spinach, or a little of your spinach, or a bag of spinach… But I like ‘piece.’”
In German piece and peace are different sounds but I do love the way they have named their cemeteries: literally the resting place, “the peace court.” Court as in shared space: courtyard. So I guess höflich (polite) means really, courtly. God… that was exhausting. But at least I have a mountain of strawberries to fill my bath.
Went to the outdoor store to try on their $1000 goose-down & coyote fur jackets. “Made in Canada,” the sales guy explained as I was falling about laughing at the price: “Canadian wages.” “Ah,” I said. “Everyone wants Fair Trade but no one wants to pay any more for it.” He leveled his trigger finger at me: You Are Exactly Right.
Who has the money for this kind of malarky? They had a hat, with furry earpieces, a snip at 300 Euros. That’s, oh, around 375 Australian pesos. They had parkas in a seductive scarlet which have big hoods rimmed in fur. Magic. You put the hood up and you can’t see two feet in front of your face. The salesman folded the fur back for me: “Now can you see out?” “The street, yes. Stars, no.” He let his head fall to one side. “I’m not sure you’re taking this entirely seriously.”
Finally I bought a more ordinary hat, very warm, so warm it made me want to strip off a couple of layers. Leaving the shop I saw the original salesman, who had been called away to another section, leaning on a display cabinet of vicious-looking knives. He looked so bored. I tapped on the window from the snowy footpath to make him look up. In pantomime I showed him the successful and awesome furry-hat purchase, drew it out of my satchel and put it on to demonstrate how it makes me look like a Russian farmer maiden. His face split in an enormous grin. Thumbs up, he said. Thumbs up, I said. Thumbs up, said his colleague over his shoulder. Warm in the brain. It only now occurs to me the word ‘demon’ is embedded (devilishly) in the word ‘demonstrate.’ So all those door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen in the 50s were maybe like the anecdote, I mean the antidote, to God’s helpers who spread out on the ground and say, You take the poor suburbs, I’ll take the rich.
Tonight I saved somebody’s life. I cycled past a table on the mall where Scientologists were practising Scientology, just right out in the open as though it were nothing, were not based on shame & rooted in a foul, deliberate dismaying of the self. A beautiful, sumptuous, exquisite black woman sat paying attention and nodding as she was told wonders (presumably) that could be hers ~ the stance of her head & the slightly tall straight-sided hat she wore reminded me, at least, that she is an African queen. I cycled past. My heart roared in me. I swerved and slowed and circled round. When I went back to her she was still listening to this lanky dude in a red Scientology t-shirt. It seems to me funny that only McDonalds ~ almost endearingly ~ are not aware that the prefix ‘Mc’ does not denote corroboration (McFeast, McProfit, McCafe). He wore his Scientology t-shirt & she wore her splendid self & listened. I stopped beside them and waited for the courage. I’d a fear he might reach out some big butterfly net and trap me in glass forever. I leaned over to her over the neck of my bicycle. “This is a cult. And you are beautiful. And there is nothing the matter with you.” I know they start with personalty ‘testing’: presumably, everyone fails the test. The beautiful woman laughed; I spoke in English: she answered in German, “danke schoen”. Hearing me, I hoped; herself, I truly hope.
Today I saw the paintings of Felix Nussbaum who because he was born Jewish was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. My friend described how ‘we Germans’ had done ‘the worst thing’ by industrializing mass murder. I had never thought of it this way. Apparently Himmler watched a group of detained Jews digging their own mass grave and then vomited each time one was shot and tipped into it. His response was, we need to find a cleaner way of doing this; so the gas chamber was devised. (Why not, “we need to stop doing this”?) Standing in front of Nussbaum’s sensitive portraits and seeing from the dates he had less than five, four, three years to live it was impossible not to weep. We wept and choked and kept our tears silent. The museum gave onto neat German houses through a series of crooked windows, it is called the Museum with No Exit.
Afterwards it took a very long time to come to grips with my anger and fear and sense of terror and loss, with the grief, the resentment and yes, incipient hatred. I resented all of us for being here when so many sensitive and feeling people have died. I resented my own country, built on the backs of its own native populations and still dishonest about the murders in police custody and in jails. I could feel in my responses how easy it is to start blaming people and how delicate and difficult is the work of keeping one’s heart free of the pernicious weeds of resentment, envy, fear, and suspicion. How easy it feels to start to build on the seemingly empowering intoxication of self-righteousness. They, they, they. We, we, we. All the way home. Alright.
Went down to the print shop to ask him to make me a copy of one of the two novels I’m hoping to finalize this winter. Like a PhD student at the far end of his thesis I lean on the counter and say cosily, “I wrote all of that. Can you believe…?”
The man laughs, a friendly laugh. I am thinking of the cartoon where the doctor examining an X-Ray tells his disappointed patient, “I’m sorry, Mr Bundle. I’m afraid you really don’t have a novel in you.” I say to the print guy, “I can see now why not everyone writes books. They are hard work.”
He spends a long time stacking and restacking the pages with his expert hands, the paper silky and obedient. Turning the pile of pages to stand landscape, then portrait, then landscape again he deftly slaps all the spiky leaves into one great block. Then he stows the whole thing in an exactly A4-sized carton which springs open from flat stowage. Glancing at me he reaches behind him and takes another carton, which he fits over the top. “Like a cake!” I say and carry it home in two hands through the freezing wind.
On the Weihnachtsmarkt before it closed I had this most marvellous adventure. Rounding the corner my friend & I following the thread of sound came on these two solemn, courtly black American musicians, not young, setting forth the Gospel According to Lionel Richie. I have never been a convert but somehow the lissom groove of All Night Long got underneath my skin. I started to wiggle, stepping tentatively, dancing. My friend went rigid with embarrassment: Cathoel don’t! My arms were full of parcels and my boots were caked in snow but I danced. The dudes onstage picked up their feet, the groove came issuing from them, I love it when music is hired but you feel the mastery and its freedom. You can’t buy me!
Now, I was shy! this took some effort! but I had to, the sinew of the tune was irresistible: the thread. Within a few bars this strange miracle had started to happen. A lady near me raised her beaker of Glühwein and danced a little shimmy for her stolid male partner, jokingly. Our eyes met and she kept dancing. Within moments it seemed all the crowd was moving. We were dancing! We were dancing. At the end of the song another came and we all danced to that too. Then I shimmied away up the alleyway between the lighted stalls, night was coming on and it was so cold, women and men were laughing and showing one another their moves and applauding in little local circles and the sense of a shared joy gave everything this golden warmth; everything but the sky, the snow, the cobblestones. As the strains of sound fell back behind us we came round another corner and there people were skating, silent and as if motionless, around and around in a spellbound circle. Because I constantly battle my shyness I have started groups of people dancing before, but never with such universality. And this seemed a middle-aged, cold-stamping crowd. Maybe that’s why, in fact. Nothing to lose.
On the market I bought a tiny chopping block made from olive wood. It’s dense and silky and only a little larger than my spread hand. I was about to hand over the money when he said, Some of the trees are 500 years old! How is that a selling point? My eyes filled with tears. 500 years? Yet someone’s hacked it down to chop onions on?
The guy explained. When the tree stops fruiting. They plant a new tree. So the old one. Has to go. A few stalls later I bought a bottle of cloudy oil pressed from some other olive tree. In a furniture store in Adelaide my friend and I found foldable patio settings carved out of ‘plantation teak.’ Teak too takes hundreds of years to mature. I remember how bleakly we marvelled at it: What prescient person realized, half a millenium back, that one day we would need stands of teak? Why is there not a statue to this innovative forester on every town square and in every school?