Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: i wish

  • dancing, just dancing

    Dancing in the dark. It’s so beautiful. I heard about it back in Melbourne, where it was born (and so was I), and just kept not going because I felt too shy to go on my own. In Berlin I signed up for the No Lights No Lycra facebook page and waited for them to organise an event but they never did. Finally last Tuesday the old Ukrainian Community Hall in South Brisbane with its solemn Cyrillic listings in gold of every president since 1949 and its overpowering fake floral stench from the immaculate brown-tiled bathrooms downstairs came through for me and truly delivered. A girl in a slouchy beanie stood bopping on the pavement, holding an envelope. “You here for No Lights?” She slipped my five dollars inside her envelope and pushed the door wide. “C’mon in, we’ve just started.”

    Inside the dim foyer were big double doors. I went through. The darkness bloomed all around me like mould, soft and plentiful. Oh, the delicious sound, oh, the song I had not heard in so many years and which swept me away like laughing salt water. The song took me by the throat because I used to love it, in the day, the day when days were nights and I was only waiting for the soft darkness to fall. I remember driving to a club I loved and smiling at the doorman whom I knew from a Government lecture at Uni and who never charged me, and just falling onto the dancefloor and dancing until I had to go to the bathroom, until I needed a drink, until they closed. The dancefloor was tiled in black and white and I was very often the only one on it. I didn’t care. Alcohol helped me to get there. A man said to me once in a park, I know you! You were dancing at the club and you smiled at me. But I hadn’t even seen him, I was smiling at god. I was god. The music was everything.

    In the darkness the first song made me dance and very quickly the dancing made me cry. I remembered all the times I had wanted to dance and couldn’t. I realized: nobody can see me! I’m invisible. I’m hardly here. I felt the hot freedom pouring like molten sand through me and through me, like glass, a kind of tide of revelation, only me in this full space, me and the lyrics, me and the bass. And as I realized the extent to which I always feel observed, counted, and noticed, and to which I hinge and hem myself, and won’t let myself go, it all got too much and I started to cry. The crying lasted only a moment, a long moment, then the next song took me in its arms and I got this big broad grin across my face, a grin that almost hurt, that lasted several songs before it disappeared without my noticing it.

    By the time that boring song came up I didn’t care, I was dancing. My feet came up towards my chin, I flung my shoulders like a bird. I shuffled forward between the blurs. Ever so slowly as my eyes arrived I could make out through the teeming darkness people in a trance of dance, their arms flung up, their heads hanging low. People hopping, jumping, one woman just strutting in a long walk back and forth from one pillar to the next, making a shadowy sashay. Just for herself. She didn’t need to be anything, do anything. Everybody looked absorbed in their own element. I was dancing. We could not make each other out except to keep from colliding. Somebody laughed. Somebody set up a clap and its contagion caught across the wide old hall.

    I noticed the second Tuesday something that felt really familiar in me but which I had never consciously seen before: that a lot of the time my dancing involves throwing myself slightly off-balance, so the dancing is more like a falling, a forever falling. Just in time I catch myself, I stave off the floor, I rescue me.

    Spun on the spot like a floss I faced the back. The thread of light under the double doors and upright in between them reflected dully on the dim floorboards, resembling an upside-down cross. At the end of every song we grew still and soon another song started. Some were from the 70s, 80s, some were woven by machine. I went out to get cool air under my shirt and let the sweat roll between my breasts and pool in the tiny belly button cave and run down my arms; the night breeze struck me like a soft tree, ineffably; across the road in the old church hall a dozen drummers had set up a racket, independently, a rhythm, they sounded like they were conducting ceremony rather than just rehearsing. I walked round the hall and peered in on them before plunging back into the throbbing, dancing dark. “Last song!” she cried and everybody whooped. At the end of the hour a small light went on up the front and people gathered along the side bench for their bags. As we left two by two or singly or in threes the girl with the beanie was there, gallantly holding back the door, greeting everybody the same: “Nice work, ladies.” Only then as the street trees dipped over the road tropically did I parse the vision I had seen but not really noticed, when the lights came on: these people are all women – it is us who dance, it’s we who want an hour off from being seen, we are here to hold our freedom in our mouths like berries too many to swallow, the jaw dislodges and the voice unhinges and juice rolls fatly and purply downhill, over the hills and valleys of me. Of you, who is me.

    I opened all the windows and drove silent home. Thinking about a man who courted me by visiting with drugs. Who used to ply me with pot and I always accepted it and we would talk about music for hours, hours and hours and hours, maybe playing one song over a third, a fourth, a sixth and seventh time to see through the weave. He said to me, When you perform, remember: it’s all in the approach. It’s in the way you walk over to the guitar. I nodded, I had no idea what he might mean. And I got up and danced, irresistibly, through my own house like a thicket of books and ideas dense and shifting like sleeping cattle swaying upright, he loved to watch and I didn’t care, I let him, I’d forgotten him, and once I danced up in a sprung crouch onto the kitchen sink, under the taps, flicking the wall with my flat hands, I played the house like my instrument, I ran out on the verandah and threw my head back my mouth open where the rain poured down from the broken gutter and that night when I came in again and the song had ended my suitor was lying back in his chair, looking very grave, his long fingers a tent, and he said, “Yeah, I know you got the voice, like I said; I realize that you’re this big poet and all. But in my view: you are more yourself in the dance than in any other form.”

  • the other C word

    My dad has cancer. Our relationship has been so peculiar and, at times, so intolerably painful that my reaction to this news since we heard it a week ago has been mere confusion. He was told on Saturday that he had a “small, operable” prostate cancer. Today he had another barrage of tests and the surgeon called it “aggressive.” Another doctor has suggested it may have spread to the bone at the base of his spine. I feel strangely ashamed to be thinking of my own experience in this context. It feels like I can’t help it. My father’s own father died of suicide when Dad was only twelve. Dad never learned how to dad. A decade ago my brother, who mines coal, in a moment of unexpected empathy suddenly said, I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you; I think you’ve never experienced unconditional love. I was so relieved by this clear explanation of just about everything I burst into giggles. It was here at their house that this conversation took place. I remember running up the stairs to check out this new theory, calling, Dad, Dad! What? he said, from his chair on the verandah overlooking the river trees. Dad I said, would you say your love for me was unconditional? Oh, yes, pet, said my father. Largely.

  • two men took everything away

    Two men next door with an FM radio addiction came this morning and took half the lovely garden away. Distressed by the noise at first I went over to the fence in my rumpled tent of hair to ask them would they mind turning the music off. “Turn it down?” one guy called back, raising his head from the battered rusted skip they were filling with sawn trunks. They both wore identical dusty boots and ankle petticoats of puckered nylon. “Off would be wonderful,” I yelled back, waving my hand at the new house to show them, “I’m just… Right there.”

    I know asking such a question I have no right to it, it is merely a staining imposition, we have now a right to noise and sexual explicitude and self-expression and sweet silence is a concession, embarrassing to want, awkward to ask for. And I remember being of an age and golden brownness when such men would do such a thing, just to please me.

    They turned it off and I went back indoors to my page. This afternoon the machinery all stopped and I went outside in the pining light, carrying the cat. The next-door yard looks plucked and shorn. The big white house stands exposed with its weatherboards stained where the tiny claws of vines have clutched at it so long. All around the water tank bushes are slashed to sticks, where little purple flowers used to drop on the mesh over the dark reservoir and geckos rested, pulsing their throats.

    This garden was a repository in my mind of olden spaciousness, leafy tranquility, domain of clover and birds and bees, privacy. This was the garden I hid in when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, puberty had me in its prickly ferocious embrace and solitude was the only real empire of mine. This garden was ours then, we planted those trees, I have watered in those shrubs and bent over the ground covers and lost things belonging to me in its grasses: thoughts, ideas, whole afternoons, rustling and resting and waving things.

    I thought how the trees seemed to belong to themselves, not to anyone human, and wondered why ‘our’ garden, long ago sold to this nice bluff man who smokes on the verandah at night and who likes everything to be pared and pruned like a fruit basket for hospital, seemed not in fact to belong to him the minute he set out to cut it. I told myself, I grew up there, though this is in fact not true, much of that was done on an island well north of here, itself a fruit basket, itself a hospital. There is a camphor laurel, unwelcome intruder but so leafy, so green, so generously spreading and which has the long-ago beams of our teenaged treehouse buried in its trunk. I put the cat up on a high branch where she could see into both properties. I said: this was back before real estate investment spread its cold dry hands around even the smallest, most natural town and took our homes from us.

     

  • she-moon

    Can there be anything more magnificent than clouds passing, at night between us and the stars, unhurriedly and without pause passing from east to west like the sun. In the distant western hills a community of storm birds screeches and wheedles and spools and yearns. The visitor I brought back with me from Europe had never seen the Southern Cross. It took him a long time to see what I was pointing at, some weeks back, because it is famous and small and dim: a cross properly. Dame Southern Land. The reef, the trees, the ineffable quiet hills. All of the creatures who burrow along the branches or through soil here underneath my head. The long beach, the wrecked mountains, the pulse. I’ll fight for you.

  • rustling and dark

    Last night I climbed into a tree that took me into its embrace. The saddle of the tree was high enough from the ground that I could draw my feet up and rest my forehead on its forehead, you know how trees do, and only the soft balance that is innate and the relatively large heft of spinning Earth in comparison with Earth’s fast spin kept me resting there. Me & tree, tree & me. Far away on the other side of the oval the lit windows of the little sports club shone all their inner information onto the dark pitch. Somebody was having a meeting and their backs turned to the long windows faced me. Underneath the boughs of the tree and around its skirts someone else, or maybe some of the same people, had planted monstera dark and rustly like elegant dinosaur hands. They had used a rotted horse manure or somewhere nearby hessian was rotting or somehow or other the tree smelt of horse. Stables and horse. Climbing a tree, crouching in its lowest branches, closing my eyes and smelling a scent of old stables was as high as I wanted to climb just then into such heaven as is available to us. That’s how it felt. The breeze moved around me like night, like a thousand little whispering hands.

  • Orion’s belt

    Lying on my back on the sharp grass I saw the stars, some of them, saw Orion’s Belt, or some of him, he is who the Greeks once saw they say only instead of Orion arching his back I saw a giant dragonfly plummet like a biplane doomed in the direction of the distant soil, dragonfly ploughing through Orion’s chest, a kind of shield ingrown, gone awful. I have left it there and come inside.

  • tilt a world

    Finally, bodysurfing. It must be a decade since I have surfed, maybe since before moving to South Australia where terror of sharks somewhat put me off. That feeling, you know that feeling? Carried by water, gasping for green. You invite the water to take you. The water picks you up and takes you. Rushing with the thousand million bubbles carrying me along. Making myself lean and long like an arrow, like a board. Glances from the other surfers, that joy at the wet dark head surfacing from the spent wave, way up close to the shore. I can see why dolphins do it, I can see why people learn to ride boards. It’s been so long since I surfed I forgot to take a breath before the first wave and had to pull out of it in order to gasp for air. There is that ineffable serenity when the whole world is tilting and green.

  • the great beauty

    If there is a chance you can get to see the Italian film before it closes The Great Beauty: do. It is just full and wonderful. Luscious but with not a drop running over, rich with sentiment free from sentimentalism. We sat so spellbound by the slow credits when the lights rose we were alone in the cinema. All the way home we were talking about it, but silently, pointing things out to each other to see. Under the moon we talked about it, mostly in gestures and unfinished language: the part with the flamingoes! the nun climbing the stone steps on her knees! the strippers in the window, the tourist who dies and the women singing on the antique balcony! It’s about a writer, who is old now and has only ever written one book. By the end of the film he knows what he will write next. He’s standing on a cliff top, indescribably except by film. If you love music, or dancing, or writing, or Rome, or the fact that human civilization has existed for a time on this planet: go see the film. I found it superbole.

     

  • it’s cruelty

    Racism is cruelty, what else can it be? Sometimes it is cruelty enabled by privilege & ignorance. But in such a dramatically unequal world, isn’t it our own responsibility to find out our areas of ignorance, our areas of privilege, and keep educating them?

  • turmerica

    This morning instead of coffee I tried an Ayurverdic broth of boiled milk, powdered turmeric and powdered ginger. Surprisingly creamy and good. Then this was set in front of me: a salad of fruits with a flicker of white wine, basil leaves, and sunflower seeds toasted in a drizzle of honey. A fresh breeze shatters the newspaper and life is spiced and sweet. The bamboo is rattling, birds purling their songs, frangipani is in bloom. And the guy next door is packing away his leafblower, ah, god bless him, even if there is no god.