Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: i wish

scandinavian tile

My host has Scandinavian taste and I love her house. The green river falls past the end of the garden. In my early twenties I visited and she and I ran down and flung ourselves in, again and again, fetching up winded downstream against the gravel island, hanging onto branches. You walked all the way back up the path and plunged back in. That was summer. The living room is populated with artefacts from an adventurous life. The upstairs office has rifles, a hammock, old round-shouldered business cards tacked to the corkboard with extra digits penciled in front of each telephone number. The whole house is filled with swimming trophies, and pennants for tennis. Her son was born in Africa and her daughter in Kalimantan. “I think we helped destroy the rainforest,” said my friend sadly, the first night I arrived when we were reminiscing about Indonesia, our lost homeland. She loves yellow and orange and the kitchen and bathroom are tiled in exuberant 70s clay, handmade tiles, each one of which is different to its neighbour. There is a photo of me and my two brothers and her daughter, average age six or seven, taking a bath together in a maze of these tiles, so small and the white bathtub so generous that it was intimate yet not crowded.

April 21, 2013
quiet heart

When I walk between the quiet cottages and see people with their heads bowed, eating dinner… I can feel the wildness in my heart and I feel like a teenager, it feels like rage.

April 20, 2013
wedgwood sky

Afternoon cycle ride down to the shops. I say down, but I really mean up: this is Switzerland. We set off up the side of a steep quarry and my host, who is in her seventies, left me so far behind that I had some trouble once I reached the crest working out which side road she had darted down. She had a basket strapped to the back of her bike and rode upright in deep elegance.

I would like to think this difference in speed was entirely down to our relative fitness but I suspect a small part of it was also blind tourism. It’s pretty here, pretty and industrial, and the blue and white sky this winter has been a long time coming. A Wedgwood sky, Monica Dickens called it. Or it may have been Agatha Christie.

Yesterday evening I was prowling with my camera and heard a cheery “Hi!” from behind me as I was crossing the bridge. It was my host, bicycling to her tennis club. She waved and I waved back. Then I stood under the willows and watched her becoming a smaller and smaller pink speck between the green, seamed fields. The evening had just begun to gather and tiny insectivore bats were bombing above the water.

April 18, 2013
the moss today

Today all I can think about is the moss that grows on furrowed wood; the sound of traffic, that reaches everywhere; my desire to sleep for a hundred years; the fact that not everybody wants to hurt people.

April 16, 2013
switzerland

My friend lives by a rapid, cold river in northern Switzerland; her little village is a lot more built-up than it was when I was last here. We walked by the river in silence and a kind of sadness for what has become of the landscape. You have to kind of relax your mind away from the glaring new terraces with ancient trees felled in front of them to afford the new tenants a view; and concentrate instead on the mountains behind, the green meadows, the velvet of moss in the crannies of birches. I was tired from the eleven-hour train journey from Berlin with too many suitcases full of books. We saw a tree felled by a beaver, its stump whittled to a pencil point, its inner flesh fresh and not yet yellowed. We saw a man turning handstands on a promontory, again and again, his feet falling in front of him and his white shirt dousing his head. We saw a lamb curled in the grass and chewing very slowly, its expression consumed with a kind of passionate ecstasy that made us laugh again over dinner, hours and hours later.

On our walk my friend waved to a nearby hillside and said, You see: that’s Germany.

April 13, 2013
these teachers

Went to a museum of ornate Islamic art and have finally learned the difference between Sunni and Shia. They began wrangling as soon as Muhammed was dead. Sunni say, the head of the church should be elected. Shi’ites say, it must be a direct descendent of Mohammed. Meantime the streets are quiet as people close their offices to commemorate the death of another teacher who was murdered 2000 years ago. These men and their legacies. In a lunchtime cafe, the only place open, a guy shrugging into his puffer jacket kicks the leg of my table and rights himself without even making eye contact. Whatever I have learned, I have learned from the sun on my closed lids as well as from daughters as well as from sons. I’ve tried to read the tea slops that spill into the rim of my saucer. I’ve tried to breathe before speaking. I feel alone & connected to everything. My heart is ornate and blue like a lake, like a cracked china bowl dug out of an old grave.

March 28, 2013
they were herded

Gleis Siebzehn (Platform 17). Here is where ten thousand Jewish Berliners were herded onto trains. Only very latterly (1991) was a memorial opened. It is very simple and harrowing. No names, just numbers all the way down the platform: 29.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. 30.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. The second place name refers to the ghetto or death camp from which human beings never returned. The numbers are staggeringly ambitious: 938 people in one day; a thousand. Towards the end of the war they grow pitifully small: 32. 27. 26. 24. One of the panels has a yellow rose cast on it and on the ground behind it, among the birch trees now growing up through the tracks, last week’s yellow rose lies discarded in the snow; beheaded by its fall, in fact.

March 16, 2013
gaga for vintage

Today I found a vintage store which glowed like a lit jewel box. Tried on this swishy 1960s poolside gown and just as I was leaving, with it wrapped under my arm, an intricately worked savagely pelted weskit of some ancient skin seemed to wiggle itself in the window at me. It was hairy. It was red that had faded to pink and indescribably beautiful. I took my coat off again and unwound my scarf. “You can tell people you bought it in the store in Copenhagen where Lady Gaga shops,” said the elegant girl. “Really?” I said, “Lady Gaga was in Copenhagen?” She said, “She made us close the store because there were too many fans. After that we kept seeing our outfits turn up on stages right across Europe.”

I told her the story of a cute guy who worked at the swanky local grocer’s in Melbourne, how I burst in there one day saying Guess what! Yoko Ono is following me on Twitter! And he said, unimpressed, “Lady Gaga’s following me.” I checked it out and it is true. He has ten followers and her blue-ticked official account is one. He is incredibly good-looking and perhaps he caught her eye. Because beauty is like royalty: one in the eye for the beholder, or beer-holder, depending on circumstance.

March 10, 2013
Neil Young’s baby

This cafe has changed its muserly, miserly, whispery music for Neil Young. He owns the business. His voice is quiet but sure and it penetrates. People gain confidence in such good musical hands, or seem to, and soon the hushed conversation level has risen like water roaring and the blond baby sitting on his mamma’s lap inside the window has piped up too, being part of things. “Ahb!” he says, dancing his feet: “Ah, ahb!”

March 10, 2013
København

København magical, sunken in the deep, dark water like a turtle from the undersea land, and all of these strangers (to me) riding the waves on its back. The water stretches away into the dark, black and pulsing with lights. Candles in the windows, restaurants which opened in 1694, boats creaking in the wind which have sailed past the horizon, although the horizon keeps moving and we know it. It is our own. At the rim of the sea equidistant, seemingly, all the younger lands I’ve known in this dark and troubled lifetime, where everything I touch turns to silver like leaves. At the rim of the world darkness falls away, falls away but here it is so dark the stars crust the harbour sky like satellites. Creaking of the trees, creaking of the hawsers, creaking of the wind. *@,)

March 4, 2013