Wild Sovereign Development Site

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  • nasally responsible

    On the subway I sat down next to a guy who was remarkably good looking. Tall and well set up, he sat at his ease, one leg crossed over the other and his knee splayed. I glanced sideways at him as I got my work out of my bag: Mmm, cute! Well dressed, too, in an unfussy way. Ah well.

    Next moment a movement had made me look up. There was his index finger, earnestly engaged in a twirling wiping motion, sunk in the nostril nearest to me down to its second joint. He wasn’t just foraging around in there, either: he was after something specific. He found that something and drew it out and rolled it. I felt myself stiffen and flinch. Was this man about to engage the public flick? I was right in his path. He had not glanced up, he was reading. Oh god. Then he did something far worse – and unconscious, and clearly habitual – he stuck his hand under the raised seat of his trousers and wiped his fingers onto the cloth under his thigh.

    Without planning to I had cried out, “No!” I gathered my stuff and struggled to stand. The train had taken off and was rattling through the old tunnels so fast it was hard to get past the vortex of our own movement. Gathering my long umbrella, gloves, hat, scarf, notebook, and pen I got clear of the long bench and began to walk in comical slow motion away from this beast, this monster, this person who behaves as though we none of us exist around him and he is disporting himself in the playground of his own world alone. I was crying with laughter and disgust. The train seemed to grow more crowded as I plunged slowly down, curled forward with effort, swaying at every corner, and I found a ‘sit place’ as Germans call it between a Turkish woman shrouded in her scarf and a young African man sprawled around his phone. Both of them contracted themselves very slightly, out of habit, to make way for the arrival of a fresh human. Thank you, Germany.

  • if this is democracy, I’m a jam donut

    The narrative of the powerful older woman in our society is a dangerous and poisoned one. She is the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Past her breeding prime and she knows too much. So if she survives dunking and burning, this must be proof of her ‘pure evil.’

    Meanwhile, the macho demagogues, some of whom have been women. For a long time I have been understanding their appeal as a longing for certainty in perilous times. In our heart and in our gut each of us knows we are in trouble. Climate chaos, mega fires, top soil stripping to the bones of our sea-eaten land. Sea levels rising to drown whole Pacific nations. Population explosion, terrorism, and refugee crisis. Our drinking water is at risk and the world seems everywhere at war.

    How to deal with this? The honest way doesn’t soundbite well. As the banner says, if your beliefs fit on a poster — think again. Any honest leader in these times is saying something like: This is unprecedented. I’m not sure how we best handle these pressing disastrous issues. All these massive interlocking crises are unbalancing each other, making our difficulties more complicated. Let’s all pull together and pool our wisdom; we need all hands on deck; all aboard, and it’s going to be a long night.

    How comforting, then, to take refuge and fall in behind the skirts of a raised-fisted demagogue who claims he knows the way out of this place. “Follow me! I have the solution!”

    Such simple mindedness has always had its appeal, hence the abiding popularity of sentimentality, cults, and religions: but the fact is no one on earth knows for sure how we are going to get ourselves out of trouble. From terrorism to water wars, we are facing new perils. The solutions are complex and require much sacrifice. What a relief to imagine we can evolve some magic pill that finds a scapegoat for our fears and renders us immune.

    In 2006 I attended a public meeting at the edge of the desert in South Australia, Australia’s driest state. Its purpose was to discuss the state government’s plan to build a water desalination plant. The idea was they would reef in sea water and desalt it, then pour the waste salt back into the bay in a deadly, suffocating spume.

    This stretch of South Australian coastline is barely tidal and is home to an enormous proportion of the world’s most exotic and rare sea animals. There lives in these waters a creature called the Leafy Sea Dragon, resembling a seahorse who’s gotten tangled in seaweed. These majestic and bizarre fellow beings would have smothered in large numbers, taking with them — as a side effect — chunks of lucrative tourism.

    Meanwhile the crudity of the proposed solution seemed to ignore even its own best financial interests. A man in the crowd was wearing a red t-shirt which said: Well, At Least Sell the Salt.

    A councillor spoke from a neighbouring region twenty kilometres north. Same low rainfall, same climate, same parching, blaring heat. He told us how their council had been harvesting rainwater and driving it down to store in the groundwater aquifer. They resell this water, which virtually everywhere else in Australia is wasted, to households, football clubs, schools. He told us how they had more business than they can keep up with.

    Call me stupid, he said, but maybe what is working for us might also work for you.

    We don’t have a manual for dealing with mass species loss and the human loneliness it leaves in us. No one knows how we’ll cope with a three-degree global temperature rise because no one has ever been through it. “The government better do something!” becomes “We Are Currently Constructing a 16 Billion Dollar Desalination Plant!” and drowns out the more realistic response of perhaps, “See, it’s like a patchwork. We all need to conserve more water, stop washing our concrete driveways and sweep, take shorter showers; and you should install a rainwater tank if you can; and let’s look at industrial waste and stormwater catchment.”

    The man who says I Have a Magic Silver Bullet can sound so persuasive to a population desperate with suppressed fear. For one thing, these seemingly easy solutions do not demand that we think any further about such terrifyingly complex and new issues. To face the looming disasters of modernity takes so much courage, and it hurts. Energy crisis? “Nuclear power plant!” Or: “Well, see we’ll need to maximise our use of the sun’s energy, and use the wind; and coastal areas can harness the waves and let’s redesign our appliances so they don’t waste passive energy all night and all day, for starters.”

    The delusion in our disaffected and bored suburban lives that one Good Guy with a Gun can be a hero again, as his bear-shooting ancestors were; that a single man can bring us back from the brink of disaster by banishing one group of people or persecuting another; that job loss can be blamed on something visible — migration — rather than something seemingly irreversible — automation: all of these delusions in their shoebox have brought us this week to a potentially ruinous election result in the US. It’s happening elsewhere: Egypt, Turkey, Denmark. I fear the toxic masculinity and Hollywood hero narrative that have enabled this disaster. At this instant I am watching Trump and his Trumphalist family taking the stage in New York City — he is applauding himself, like the class act that he is — and all I can see in his expression is the fearful wryness that confesses: he cannot deliver the fantasy he has promised. No one can.

    Maybe it would be wonderful to be rescued, rather than having to knuckle down, ourselves. Maybe the fight against prejudice and privilege would be easier if it didn’t entail anyone making sacrifices of their own. But as Trump with his thin-skinned narcissism eloquently demonstrates, pseudo heroes and demagogues seem protective because they’re so defensive. Trump seems strong, because he is weak. It takes far more courage to face the unknown and the uncertain, to open our hearts and tune our ears to one another — even people we dislike, even people who challenge us — and to embrace the crucial issue of our time: how our fear is driving us deeper into the behaviours, such as expansionist, exploitative industrialisation, that have brought about these emergencies in the first place. You can’t fight fear with fear. The only way to fight fear is using our courage, and courage is love.

  • Trumped

    The Senate and the House. They are just going to do so much damage. I can hardly breathe, hardly swallow, it’s like iron in the chest. Now we see how dangerous our fears are, how fatal this cleaving to the lying pseudo-certainty that fist-raising white men seem to offer – in the face of unprecedented disaster, in the face of loss. Truthful people now are saying, we’re not sure how to deal with all these new and perilous situations, they have never occurred before and they imbalance each other, let’s all pull together and get all our wisdom, all hands on deck. The pseudo hero ‘lone man with a gun’ fantasy is now ruining the country. I feel afraid for habitats, for furry and slimy creatures, for any human who does not fit the pattern authorised by Trump’s arrogant male-centric white supremacist tune. God help us, even though there is clearly no god.

  • to her hinge

    Just found a line in a notebook which I wrote, on July 15 last year, and I’ve no idea what I might have meant by it. ‘In the mornings/we are proud of his everyday miracle together.’ Is it about sex? I guess it must be. My relationship was in the throes of some difficulties and a page later on July 20 I find, ‘his insignificant other.’ Then a cry from the heart, not mine, but which I wrote down after it came from the mouth that had applied itself to another woman’s hinge: “My beautiful Cathoel.”

    Even then, I was glad of the possessive.

    To be possessed, whilst remaining free and sovereign: isn’t this the essence of sexual love.

  • magic, or some kind of god

    My nephew and I had a conversation about death. He is seven.

    His teachers have said, apparently, he talks about Papa all the time. So I said, I was crying my eyes out today. Because I’m so sad about Papa.

    I know, he said. I can’t go to sleep because Papa comes to me in my dreams.

    We gazed soberly at each other.

    The night Papa died, I said, I lay awake all night. Just staring into the darkness with my eyes open.

    Me too, he said.

    In the week of our father’s death my brother was inconsolable. So this little son made him a present of a roll of paper taped along one side with a circle of pink paper taped across one end. It’s a telescope. You put your eye to it and it shows, on the circle of pink, a tiny drawing of Papa, standing with his stick. “So that you can look up,” he said to my brother, “and see Papa any time you want.”

    Now we began, at his instigation, to speculate on what happens to us when we die. We were sitting in a couch piled high with cushions, after every single pillow from every single chair was mounted up here by him and his three year old sister. She sat at the end, staring thoughtfully, and our three little heads sprouted from the mountains of cushions like a shared bubble bath.

    “If we wanted to believe they still exist,” he said, “we would have to have god, or some kind of magic.”

    Yes, I said.

    “Some people have heaven,” he said. “So that they can meet the person again.”

    I said, “Yes. But I suspect that is more so that they can comfort themselves.”

    “Oh, yes,” he said. “But if there was another life, maybe Nana would become Papa and then Papa could be Nana. And then Nana would be famous! And Papa would be…”

    He hesitated, realising he was just about to insult my mother. “Papa would be… not quite exactly so famous,” he said.

    I said, “You know… I’m not really convinced that Papa was actually all that famous.”

    “Oh, yes,” he said, kindly. “We went to Churchie and he came tenth in the state. He’s on a plaque.”

    He is the middle child of a middle child. When our father died all the children were asked if they wanted to write a letter to Papa, to be burnt in the fire with him. His letter said, Dear Papa, I hope you are okay. Because I still want you.

  • Dad.

    My father has just died. His name was Peter Roy Jorss. His own father died of suicide when Dad was 12 years old. He took us all round the world. He built bridges. My mother rang to let me know and the call was eight minutes thirty one seconds long. He is still lying in his bed and my little cat is guarding him.

  • come to the cabarache, old chum

    Made a little performance the other night at a beautiful cabaret improv evening hosted by the lovely Marlène Colle in seedy cab-savvy Berlin – I read something almost unbearably sad among the expressive dances and unrenovated bar sounds in a place where the two barkeeps were thanked by their name. The green room was German with long benches for stowing our bags and a hospitable cut loaf of dark black bread, white butter and salt. I said, You know you’re in Germany when you’re offered black bread in the green room and a fellow performer, from Finland, said tolerantly, “That bread is not very dark at all.”

    Not compared to a place where it only gets light every 25 years for a half hour one sunstroked afternoon… no.

    In between I had been lying on my couch wondering could one literally die of heartache and it felt so good to take something I had made of beauty out of all this intolerable and endless sore grieving and throw it up in the air like a pigeon caught in the fireworks. I threw it very gently. I caught it when it came back down. Four women and one man came up to me afterwards hand on their heart to say, almost inaudibly, thank you, because we are a sexist intolerant culture and do not speak enough about the sorrows afflicting women.

  • presidential debate

    Big guy who shouldered in front of me to the vegetable stall on the markets kept picking up and fondling everything, laying things lingeringly down. In between handling the produce he was adjusting his own paper bag, at the crotch, for greater personal comfort. I avoided all the produce his omnivorous fingers had touched but his wife, heavily pregnant, presumably now has to just resign herself.

  • autumbled

    Autumn in Berlin and the grimy guy begging outside our supermarket is absorbed in a book. When I come home he’s set it down to thank a woman who dropped some coins into his smashed paper cup. It is Sylvia Plath.

    I prefer him to the punker dude who spreads himself with a large dog either side right in front of the sliding doors, then leans far across the pavement to make elaborate drawings in chalk which people then have to step around. His begging seems to me a form of veiled aggression. It is a set-up that forces compliance on every passerby, lest we tread on his art.

    The two months I was away I compared the daily forecasts and found Brisbane, in its winter, was invariably a degree or two warmer than here. Summer has been short and late. Just last week on the canalside two boys in the late sun were playing chess. These are the last days, and it will be so cold til June next year we will see nothing of each other but our faces.

  • Trump, the Musical

    Some lines from a musical we are idly writing, online, a bunch of strangers, in response to one of the many memes celebrating the second candidate’s atrocity, which says:

    super callous fragile racist extra braggadocious

    Which I realise also works as: super callous fragile ego sexist braggadocious

    So far we have:

    ….his ideas and attitudes are really quite atrocious, by Caroline McDonald

    …T’wards women and minorities he’s really quite ferocious, by Louise Gowing

    …even if he were a child you couldn’t say he was precocious… by me

    …if you say it loud enough he really is atrocious, by Steve Mcleod

    and

    superfragile egomonster expediting crisis! which ruins the rhyme, also by me

    All together now!

    Phew. Writing a musical is hard work. Who knew?