Wild Sovereign Development Site

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  • if I ruled the world

    If I ruled the world for one day: to do list

    1. make leafblowers illegal.

    These waste fossil fuel and create pollution & noise pollution. They’re useless and they encourage blame-shifting. Communities who can afford the use of leafblowers invariably need more physical activity. Raking leaves is peaceful and calming.

    2. all toilet paper to be made from post-consumer recycled paper.

    There aren’t enough trees left for us to be cutting them down to wipe our bums. Anyway it’s softer: it’s been pulped twice.

    3. refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants shall be placed in whichever country best suits their character and can benefit from their presence, as judged by a panel of Indigenous elders and trauma psychologists. First priority: safety and escape from crisis. Second priority: they can go anywhere they want so long as they demonstrate to the panel’s satisfaction that they can make a contribution whether social, culinary, cultural, artistic, educational, spiritual or economic. The only proviso is that after five years’ citizenship every new arrival is required to make a report of their commitment to the new country with examples of how they sustain their native culture and how they adopt the new, and how they struggle to make these two compatible. These testimonials are videoed and available in libraries and schools.

    I need a sabbatical. That was tiring.

  • the littlest love

    I lost a baby last year, after a long time trying to conceive. It died inside me early without my knowing about it, so I carried the tiny corpse in my womb a few days, and was its grave. We had chosen our names, for a boy, for a girl. Every child is a girl at this stage. The doctor made his seven-week scan. I strained over his head, trying to see on the dark screen the tiny bean-shaped body for the first time. There was no heartbeat, only my own. The doctor pulled out his dildo-shaped scanner and wiped the condom off it with one movement. The condom he flung over his shoulder into the trash. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be taking home a baby this time,” he said.

    Later in his office, when I was dressed, he said airily, “Oh yes – one in two pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Didn’t you know?” I didn’t know. It occurs to me now this is just another way we brush aside the sorrows which affect women. We don’t talk about the griefs women carry. Miscarry. Give stillbirth to. Find dead in the cot. Incest, rape, infertility, assault.

    We were so excited going in for the scan. The first glimpse of the most important person in our adult lives; her first communication with us, through the tiny pounding of her heart. I had been watching the daily progress of this infinite darling in the form of diagrams showing the little heart finding its way, the spine beginning to form. These drawings seemed to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen on paper. On the screen I could not see anything, however tiny; I looked and looked. My partner held my hand. A sickened feeling of confusion very faintly took hold. The gynaecologist put out both his hands to pull me upright, as though I were an invalid. In such ways do insensitive people convey their empathy. This doctor liked to tell salacious jokes during intimate examination: we were already looking for another doctor, a better doctor, a woman. Earlier he had said, as he reefed the condom over his scanner, “I’m a mountain man. I like mountain women.” I had only just worked out, with a dull, sick feeling, that this was a pun, when he thrust the machine inside me and the scan started and the quiet unmoving bad news came in to rest. It has thus rested ever since. We are still not parents and our child is still unborn. I had not known before this how many of my friends had also suffered miscarriage and the loss of a child. How many still grieved. I had even felt intolerant, judgmental of the seeming sentimentality of these remembrances when they did appear, the candles, the flowers, the bears. Now I found myself applying this same non-compassion to my own grief. This piercing loneliness seared me from the first: after all I am hollow, I am alone in here. Oh how can you mourn something so early, barely a child. With its whole life ahead of it, just growing spine. Meanwhile the little cardboard box with its clot of bloodied fragments that I knelt over on the floor of the shower and howled, that I scooped up and wrapped in tissue paper then could not bring myself to bury, all alone in the cold dark ground, sits on my desk untouched, more than a year later. I have not been ready to let go.

     

     

  • knowing one another in the dark

    Knowing one another in the dark: this is life in the wintertime, in Germany. Three days ago the late summer turning purple in Central Park; tonight the moist grey soft air, the dark day, the lighted bicycles on the path. I have only just realised in Berlin we are on a latitude with Alaska; New York is on a latitude with Spain, a far sunnier prospect.

    It felt strange to me, coming home to a home that is no home at all, where I’ve lived less than three years in total and always in spates, looking over my shoulder to the next project which had to be done in Copenhagen or in Madrid, or back in Brisbane. My father has cancer there and I’m here. My nephews are growing up there and I’m here. My cat lives over there and I’m here. For a cat who spends her afternoons tormenting tiny tropical lizards and basking in the endless pouring caramel sun, I remind myself: relocation to an indoor apartment life in northern Europe would be cruel. But she’s so soft and we used to sleep tucked into one another. When I was ill and alone once and could not very often struggle out of bed, this cat licked me, with great earnestness and a harsh tongue, all over, like a giant kitten until to her satisfaction I was clean. She is a wonderful companion but a horrible correspondent. I mourn about it over the phone to my mother in Brisbane, to make her laugh: all these months and not one phone call… Not a postcard… “She is scuffling at the receiver,” my mother says, and I hear soft scratching sounds. “She hears your voice.”

    At JFK airport everybody was white. Everyone except the wait staff, the security personnel, the cleaners and the guy emptying the trash. At the security gate he lifted a large plastic bag of plastic bottles of water from the bin and carried it away: I watched the glinting light that is really a terrifying form of the endless dark that will take us all underwater sift through all that plastic and bobbling trucked water and thought, America… it’s be part of the solution, not part of the dissolution. We ate a meal and the waitress brought us so many paper napkins my knife and fork fell off the top of the pile. Wait, she hadn’t brought a second set of – yes, she had. A second tower of waste paper stood across the tabletop and this tree graveyard was all for me. They hand you napkins when you order a coffee. They use polystyrene. Let’s not talk about that.

    At length in our airplane by which I am responsible for far more pollution than any squanderer of napkins can ever claim we left the land behind, at Nova Scotia, and began our crossing. The dark Atlantic. Thickened up with polystyrene chunks that never break down, only into smaller chunks of polystyrene foam. And roofed, increasingly, with a dully cluttered sea foam of plastic bottles, mostly the bottles in which Americans have bought water.

    Germans buy water too. Recycling the bottles is only a partial improvement. We landed at Tegel, the gloriously Soviet styled airport which was actually part of West Berlin. Germans streamed past with their big square heads looking serious yet warm. They recycle. They carry their empty bottles back to the place they were purchased and retrieve tiny amounts of loose change. There are no returned soldiers sleeping on subway platforms. Instead, in Berlin there is a Coldness Bus that travels round on frigid nights collecting homeless people who might otherwise perish in their sleep. There is something here to learn, for you, America, I think, and also for us, Australia, where we lock up desperate families behind razor wire and have turned landfill production into a sport. The clouds of pollution and damage are closing around us and we need to learn to know each other in the dark.

     

  • god bless the adult

    I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his hand. When at last a voice spoke, mysteriously, smoothly, over some unseen PA – good afternoon folks, sorry to disturb, I am going to be making a little music for you this evening – it startled us, mildly, and the shit-stained man looked over, eagerly, and we all saw a younger man, also black, beautifully groomed with a high-maintenance beard, bending to the floor to switch on his little blaster which filled the train with some R & B groove.

    He began to sing, effortlessly, like a bird on a branch who is free. He sang about Her, She’s gonna leave me, I know it, I know my heart is hers. Bending to the instrument again he chose a Michael Jackson groove, Rock with You, with that lovely tripping flute that everybody recognises instantly.

    Oh, Michael Jackson. We love you and we were happy to be transported by your music. Your music and the MTA. The shit-stained man left his pole and his pile of bags and ventured up into the cabin, dancing, smoothing his shoulders across the air. He tapped the singer on the shoulder and passed him some coin, “his last dollar” said my friend. Then he instantly, uncrazily, turned away and sashayed back to his post, his literal post, making no demands on the singer and not importuning. The man singing was emboldened to dance around a little. “He’s good,” said the fellow next to me, and I said, “He is! And he’s dancing like that while the train is crazy swaying.” I got up, grabbing a pole, and swung my hips a little, in joy with the music. When the singer came past collecting “anything you have helps, and if you don’t have, I love a smile,” we all dug eagerly into our pockets, you have gave us joy.

    The shit-stained man hollered, “Baby! You’re great! You need to get yourself in the studio!” The singer answered, ruefully, “Man. I am in the studio.” “You need an agent.” The man behind me was laughing anew. Tears fell in splinters from behind his outstretched fingers, he gripped his face and wept with the mercy of it. “Oh yes!” he was saying, helplessly, to himself: “He needs you to be his agent, baby!” New Yorkers are aware, I think, of one another’s ludicrises.

    The singer returned to his portable blaster, the subway doors still open, and he picked it up and called out thank you and left I thought how he could lose all his profit if someone grabbed the music box and ran away with it. The doors slid shut and we began to move. Left alone to his audience the man in stained pants began to declaim in song. He sang, movingly, God Bless the Child, in a cadence and tune of his own. I joined in, a lovely melody we wove and we were glancing at each other, shyly. I said, “You have a lovely voice.” He said, “I’m 71 years old. I begin to sometimes wonder, what is God’s plan for me.” “Ah,” I said: “that I don’t know.” He said, “My mother always told me when I was little. Boy, God has a special plan in mind for you. But I begin to wonder sometimes, what it is.”

    He collected all the crumpled bags at his feet, laboriously, very often missing when he went to grab them by their outstretched necks. At the next station he was gone and another busker came on, young, Mexican, radiant, and silent, a stocky boy wearing a sandwich board with his two stumps of arms held out in front of him, like Jesus on a candle. His sign read, Hi, my name is Felix. I lost both arms in a work accident. God bless you and thank you for any help you can give. The cabin fell silent. All the joy fell away. We are lost in an industrial accident, this fractured world. Soberly people fished in their pockets, to help. Felix’s face was suffused with the grace of joyous living. He came past and I fished shame-faced in my emptied-out purse. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.” “Thank you.” His voice was soft and filled with humour. “I just gave all my money to the busker,” I said, uselessly. He smiled at me, and I smiled at him a smile that turned down at the corners and pressed my hand to my heart where it ached, and at the next station he got off and walked away, inside his sandwich board, a human pyramid only one head high. As I watched him disappearing into the mystery of his own devilishly difficult life and its challenges, his form flickered with metal stripes as the train took off, I realised my hand was still pressed to where my heart lives and that, unlike the man in stains, this younger man trapped in his sandwich board “for life, as it were,” as Washington Square has it, has made, is making decisions; he has formulated a plan; he is not waiting for some unseen God to evidence in his life. God, if you’re there, bless the child that gets his own. Make us less helpless (we say, helplessly). Give us this day each the daily breadth to see where we are in this life, where we can get to in this world, and how we can all help each other. Amen.

  • New York is hard to write about

    New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, a creature of its own. I have every day many tiny full ripe conversations with strangers on subways, in pharmacies (they sell vitamins shaped like Darth Vader’s head!), in bookstores. Sometimes we talk for a little while, like the Hispanic man with his huge happy smile on the way to Yankee Stadium with his kid, his young pretty wife who spoke up now and then “when there was least danger of it being heard,” his two mates who were African American. I love the Bronx-bound trains where racial normality prevails, exposing the patronising lie of that persistent white-privilege word ‘minority.’ He held up the flattened round ball of black when I asked about it, turning it to show that its two steel antennae were its little legs. “I thought it was an alien,” I told him, pointing, “I thought maybe it was your little pet.” “It’s a speaker,” he told me, turning it upright on the grimy floor to show. “When we get there, we going to listen to some music. My little girl loves it.”

    Oftentimes when you have some exchange with a New Yorker you will both turn away afterward, so as to show – or so I think – that there is no harm, no foul, that we are both not crazy people, the city has not unhinged us and there is no intent to latch on and keep talking once the moment’s gone. You might both say, See you later, when one of you climbs out, and I always find that beautiful and moving. And how at the checkout at the grocery store it is normal, it’s friendly, to stand and chat whilst buying but if I were to stand another five minutes, chatting on as the next customer piled their bags, I would become instantly a freaky aberration. All that openness and friendliness now has an agenda: we recoil. And in fact that friendliness and openness often does have an agenda: I want all beings to be happy. That is my secret and now it’s out.

    We walked clear up the centre of Grand Central Park, as my German-speaking companion calls it, til we reached the tiny walled gardens of the Conservatory Garden by East 104th Street. There is a lily pond there where water lilies bloom in threes: pink, and hydrangea blue, and a strange candling white. Fish churn under the water now and then and two gentlemen who bought them, from a shop in Chinatown, and who have wondered, they tell us, every year what to do with the koi when the pond is drained for winter (“they can survive underneath the ice”) stand feeding them, occasionally, lavishly, from a crinkling foil bag that says colour enhancing preparation. This whole day is colour enhanced, to me: I have in my hand the middling growth of a breastplate I’m building on a scarlet leaf that was just lying on the path by the lake, splendidly maple-pointed, and every time I find another blue or purpling spray of berries, a tiny lavender or soft pink flower, I pluck it (“darf ich?”) and add the stem to my thumbsward of stems. The day is purple and blue like a beautiful bruise. The grey winter days have cleared away and we are out, everyone is out, we’re all bleeding into each other in the sun. We are urban animals, we can survive under the ice. The beautiful young Black prince staring at his black sneakers on the subway, wearing his trackpants as though they were a suit, who held himself tensely waiting for the demand when I said, Excuse me. You have such a beautiful, striking face. I think – if you were to go into a really good quality modelling agency in Manhattan – they might be very excited about you. Then I turned away to my friend, to show him this is not a clumsy pick up, the agenda is transparent and shown. My friend said afterwards, casually, relieving me, “That man was smiling so much to himself all the rest of the ride. What did you say to him?” My first time in New York, scared and determined in 2011, I spoke to a tiny white-haired lady on the Harlem bus. This was my first foray into Madison Avenue and the expense had exhausted me. The legions of unhappy looking children, presaging an article I read later online which said How to Tell if Your Child is Spoilt. Question one read: do they find it impossible to be happy? When I climbed on the bus, drawn by the enchanting name Harlem, its juicy community sound, its soft music, this tiny lady was sitting opposite. I said, You’re so beautiful! And she looked startled, to my surprise. “No one’s ever told me that before,” she said. I said, “What? I would have thought people would have been telling you, all your life. You are a beautiful woman.” We gazed at each other til we both had tears in our eyes. I have thought of that lady and her seventy years’ bloom. I have wondered what kind of fears lurk in the hearts of men and families, that we cannot say to a beautiful woman, or man, this is your just tribute.

     

     

  • your huddled masses

    New York I am going to climb right up in your lap and press my face to your grimy heart. Where five hundred million faces have been imprinted before. The photobomber in your every selfie sweet New York. Asking scarves of passersby do you know who invented ‘photobomber’. Who invented ‘selfie.’ Brilliant language. Melted together and down in such scaldrons as New York, hell’s diner’s kitchen with menus that could make you cry.

    Chickens reared in tenements and boiled in oil with feathers still in place here and there, wispy in their tender pimpled armpits. Chickens crumbed and larded like the pilgrim invaders who thought to teach those natives a god or two in a sky already crowded with gods. Chicken homefried and served with waffles, side of fries, with bacon, with maple syrup, bitter greens. Those greens are grey. Everything green is grey. Everything khaki is red, white, and blue.

    New York I will be the umpteenth mascot for the day, with fur between her ears. We’ll be two tourists without their guns. That’s if we make it all across the ocean of Atlantis city sunk for its sin in a droning tube with nothing holding us up, my hundredth flight, the one not piloted by a male-pattern-entitlement first officer whose girlfriend left him so he watches everybody board, three carrying babies, and decides again: I will do it. I will drag the whole world down.

    Spectators at a suicide aflame: the headline, neckline, wasteline, wantline. Today we will cross the oceans intact I pray, sift on that trash heap of lilies who reap and weave incessant labour nonstop and who sleep in the street if at all and have built a Museum to the idea of Sex. A green pond. New York. I’ll be in you and you’ll be you. I’ll be dancing: the song soon, soon, soon. (That’s Korean for now. Now. Now.)

  • New York, I fucken love you

    In New York we stayed off-island, on the sprawling mainland of the USA. I found it thrilling to go walking in the early morning light, while everyone was sleeping, admiring the funny little wooden frame houses and hanging over retaining walls at the back of the hill in Union City. From up high there you could see the green troubled plains spurting with industry chimneys which defined the settlement, the invasion – a train was snaking by across an immense landscape the first morning and I said to myself, this is where America begins.

    The name of Union City gave me thrills, and every time I passed the Madonna-blue Union City Laundromat, filled all day long with Hispanic mothers and their children, settled in and gossiping while they fold, the greatest song by Blondie came through my head: power, passion… plays a double hand. Chrissie Hynde, consummate rocker, was interviewed and the journalist said, New York, punk rock women, you and Debbie Harry, ya know… The hissing intake of breath was almost visible on the page. With evident restraint she said, Well… I actually write my own songs, I play an instrument…. Blandly the unhearing journalist persisted with her. “What’s your favourite Blondie song?” I don’t really have one. “Aw c’mon, you must have a favourite Blondie song.” “Oh, must I? Ok… that, like, Union… Union City thing.” That’s what ran through my mind every time I came home along the avenue and passed the dreadlocked barber who is always trying to get my friend to jam with him, the sky blue launderette, the falling-away streets of the dingy houses, and the kids sitting out front on their stoops playing dutifully the games that can be confined to a palm-sized screen.

    New York is a strange and dramatic thing, as much an event as place, a complex of unending events telling stories of itself all day as it rolls round the tilt of the earth, helping to tip the planet perhaps a little further (so it seems) with its wealth of heavy buildings, giant prongs struck into the stone, its thin crummy soil and the island extended by refuse and landfill in the sea, its sprawling park immaculately mowed and spread with bikinis, its returned vets disabled by war and grief and sleeping on the subway on cardboard, its screeching underground trains, its spires into the blue eternity, its forever sleepless bleariness, jostle, crowd, and lace. It exists in all our minds even when we can’t touch it – like the internet – and have never been in it. The dream city hovering forever in your mind gets on the instant dispersed, it never exists again, and the real place you find yourself almost flattened by is more than you even imagined, like nothing you’ve ever known, yet punctuated with known experience like the Monopoly board come to life that is London.

    It was four years exactly since I went over for six weeks to record my first album, gathering a strange international collective of musical souls (the New Government) to work with me and dragging in some of them literally off the street where they had cat-called me and I said, “Hey. I need backing vocals.” Some of those people I will never meet again and some are now among my dearest friends: the guitar goddess who teaches in the West 30s, upstairs from the studio in which we recorded our album Hey, Big Splendour four years ago. Four years exactly. It felt strange to be going back to the same rooms, the same streets. I ate street meat here from a cart, I had a conversation with the man who said, You look like. On this much more recent return visit we stayed with her, in Union City on the Jersey shore, and every day we rode home on the jitney which leaves from outside Dean & Deluca’s every ten minutes all night and all day. You pay the driver in dollar bills – $3 – and he folds the notes in greasy fans stashed in the open-sided cup holder by his steering wheel, you climb aboard and you’re the only white folks on the bus, a more normal kind of normal, in the tunnel you pass a brother jitney from the same company that’s broken down, he takes the corners like a racing driver and at the unofficial stops he lingers, hoping more passengers will show up to make the ride worthwhile, and if he takes too long to get going a huge black lady up the back will sing out, Let’s go!

    Let’s go! A week from today I’ll have landed in New York – and be up in the Bronx – where I have never been before, staying with someone neither of us have ever met. It feels like entering the world’s filthiest cathedral. A fortnight to walk the streets, record maybe two or three songs towards an eventual new album. I hope they’ll be filthy with real soil and not just street grime, I hope they will ring and chant and stomp their feet, I hope they’ll be just divine.

  • the ride home was the best party

    Imagine a lake. It is vast and extends, if you swim out to the middle and gaze round, at either end as far as the horizon. We set off very early in the morning from town and have cycled for hours, climbing endless sandy paths. It’s ferociously hot, nearly forty degrees, we have left the last village and are deep in the pines. With my narrow city tyres I have to climb off and push, slaloming again and again in the hot sand that grabs my wheels like bulldust in the outback and I sink aside and slew. The closest railway station is by now a long way back. Even where the path is harder, juddering pine cones tumble over the ruts. They are numerous and tiny, an infestation of bronze, authoritative and resplendent against the dense matting of their own gold blonde needles that lie in great drifts on the banquets of deep green moss.

    Occasionally the trees stir and everything smells of lemon pepper from the pines.

    We have reached the water and taken off our clothes, a duck floats past out on the artificial waves serene and glowing-eyed. A butterfly feeds for butterfly hours at the prongs of cow parsley nearest the edge. The underside of the bank is eroded and when a boat passes I see why. The slopping of the waves against the bank’s underside, a chain of caves under the roots, resumes a slurping, dragging slow ruction like the sound of sex. Two white swans sail under the sloping belly of a white boat, its glossy wood striped by the green tree stems lying along the water like city lights. On the back of the white boat a golden man is balancing naked, poised to jump.

    This was a month back, one of the last hot days. We would catch the train as far out of town as it goes, then cycle on to the garden house where our friends spend their summer weekends at the edge of the forest by a lake. We cycled all day, stopped and swam, took photographs, arrived late and everyone had eaten. A cluster of a dozen bicycles stood inside the gate at the end of the road. A winding path engrossed the grass under tall dark trees to the little handmade house. We passed a kind of treehouse built up high above the sweet old-fashioned bathroom which had a tiny verandah, and later I took my drink up there and climbed the narrow steps and sat looking out at the night. I could feel the forest all around, its siftings and shiftings; its damp.

    All day long travelling through green tunnels, further and further, deeper and deeper. A party in a forest, now settling to drowsy hums. The candles and lamps lit long after dark, the trellis glowing golden in the flickering green with a row of tiny lanterns in the vine. The little boy, maybe four years old, who wanted juice when all the juice was gone. He stood between our host’s knees in the open doorway of the fridge and gazed in. The large poodle thrust her head eagerly over his shoulder and all three faces were lit as the man showed him, patiently, what each bottle contained. A speckled rope of tiny bronze lights wound up the trunk of the tallest tree all the way to its distant canopy. The boy must be put to bed, slowly and peacefully, by both his parents at once. His father carried him into the magic tipi and his mother laid him down. He was so little. They knelt over him and it seemed they were talking to him. The little boy at the centre of the universe. I could not hear their soft voices but I watched from the candlelit table, fascinated, filled with terrible soft yearning. His mother had taken him on her knee and sat cheerfully on the luggage rack of someone’s bike, when we went down to the lake that afternoon and lazily swam. Now she lay down and curled herself around him, and the father sat back on his heels and they all three waited for sleep to come.

    Late in the night the German voices began to blend into a fairytale nonsense tongue and I grew sleepy. I got up and went quietly up the back of the garden to the tipi where the little boy lay. Next to the softly sleeping boy I lay on my back, with my ankles crossed, in Kinderparadies, my eyes open and all the trees leading me up into the dark glinting complexities and simplicities of night. “Who’s that,” the mother asked her husband quietly, “in the tipi with Thomas?” “It’s me,” I said. “Ah…” And I lay there close to sleep myself, not just his but my own, until at length I heard people standing up and getting wakeful and we gathered all our things and took our bikes from the flock of bikes inside the gate, and we all mounted and swooped off down the hill towards the water.

    It was nearly midnight, all the houses’ lights were dark. Freewheeling down the hill and making swoops of joy I realised: I was the only woman setting off to swim. My swimsuit in the bottom of my bag, damp and uninviting. At the little meadow by the lake I let my clothes drop in the dark and walked into the water unadorned and very slowly; and a soft furry nudging at my hip was Fleur, the lovely large piebald poodle, pressing herself to me as we went in together. “Oh!” I said, “You’re coming in with me, are you, lovely girl? And it’s just us girls.”

    The water was silent and reeds stood quietly at either side of the shallow beach, only a few metres wide, where we stepped in. The men were joking and teasing behind us and joined the water gradually. The lake lay black as pitch to the horizon around us. The sandy bottom is soft and forgiving, as though filled with salt. Nothing dangerous lives here: I kept telling myself.

    I turned my face up and could see the stream of stars, a river of frozen timelessness of which the dark clotting trees low on the ground were banks. Afterwards for the joy of silence I left my bike lights switched off. At the crossroads we set out to the left and our companions set out right, Goodbye! Thank you! Goodbye! Through the little village we were joined by another couple on their bikes, who came out of a side road silently, she had lights on and he hadn’t, as though we were their ghosts, or they ours.

    We entered the forest, at the edge where it envelopes the road. The little train station lay the other end of this swarm of long-limbed trees, other side of the dark. It was so late at night and so quiet. The wheels. I left my light switched off and plunged in, following the leader bike whose own light swooped graciously, five bike lengths ahead. Everything was invisible around me but the sense of the tall trees, running for miles on either side. Riding fast I was enveloped in a blackness absolute and reaching, the forest spirits catching after me. I must trust that between his passage and mine, nothing will have changed, no dark animal jumped into the path with its big arms out to block and to swallow me, without a trace or sound.

    When we arrive at the station the train is there, silent like all German trains. A dishevelled man standing with his dirty backpack on the platform is accosted by two blonde girls who climb out to say, Excuse me is there a late-night shop nearby? “Here? I doubt it. What do you need?” “Oh. We only wanted to buy some water.” “But this is great – look!” Opening his pack. “I have gallons of water. I made a bet with my friend that I couldn’t sell all this water before dawn. One euro per bottle. And would you like this free magazine?”

    We lean our bikes up against each other and fumble at the ticket machine. We also buy water. We also decline the free magazine. It is one in the morning: yet again the first morning of the world. I slump down in a corner seat and with tiredness and satiety am almost swooning. I am thinking of the tall trees high above the tipi, whispering night sounds to themselves, the voices of the party adult and dark, the eyrie on its grassy rise, the sleeping child lost in no doubt the safest, nicest feeling in all the world tonight. Under my seat the pulsation of the train’s workings begins to climb, all doors are wide open still, and the glass breeze fills the cabin with freshness as if it were light, again and again, and then again and again.

  • exit stage always right

    Is Tony Abbott ‘a good man’ as Finance Minister Mathias Corban has it? Yes, if you perceive society as a fragile glass ball owned by the educated, which needs to be stringently protected from destruction by the uneducated and poor

    Does Abbott deserve to be given ‘a break’? Don’t we all? But what lucky break has this man not already had and exploited? A good education. Raised male, English-speaking, and white. A supportive marriage, healthy children. Meanwhile he has spent much of his career depriving other people of such boons. I’d like to see the lucky breaks more evenly distributed.

    To those who mourn his political passing, I’d say: I think it’s possible to support women leaving violent husbands, to support Indigenous self-determination and the arts, to build renewable energy sources whose economic demand is climbing and to fairly tax miners and manufacturers, without ruining the world as we know it. I’d say more moral generosity is what this world needs right now. And to those who feel they hate the man, I’d say: you can’t beat them by joining them. Hate is the refuge of those who have forgotten or are hiding their kinship with this real fellow human. Us and them thinking leads to dehumanisation of asylum seekers, neglect of homeless children, deaths in custody, rapes. I’d say more moral generosity is what this world needs right now. We can all contribute that.

  • house of gingerbread

    So it’s Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard’s insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls his writing landscape, in which women are conveniently passive, ‘Greeneland’. The descriptions in passing of her ease with her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, are so beguiling. They sit and talk a lot, often about what they are reading. Greene soars in like a small eagle who casts a large shadow.

    The world is run by noisy extraverts and tonight three of them had a bang-up row in the Hinterhaus, the building at the back of this courtyard. Glass was thrown. Police came pouring in with walkie-talkies at the ready. Now all is restored and the night has taken possession of the leaves and every sill. Far up in the corner of the highest apartment two facing windows are joined by a little covered bridge, for their cat. I had coffee today with the woman whose apartment I am leasing, who has moved to Vienna to make a film, and she said her cats (who travel everywhere with her – to Berlin and back by train; she takes them on set; she takes them to the beach) have a little case which they climb into so she can carry them down to the garden in the back courtyard every day, to play and explore and pounce and poo. She knows they are ready to go out when she comes into the hall to find them sitting quietly in their windowed carry case – “it’s like their bus.”

    It is beautiful to have a home and to stay home in it. It is a lamplit evening. I have the double doors open onto my tiny balcony – Berliners call this “Balconia.” The land of summer, of lurid sun umbrellas and bright geraniums in pots.

    Recently I passed a guy tenderly polishing his very fancy bicycle, outside the discount markets where junkies drift like zombies underwater. Gee, I thought: that’s a fancy bike he’s got. On my way back the same guy was pushed up against a police van. The beautiful bicycle was nowhere in sight but the back of the van was wide open.

    The dwindling end of the long twilit nights which seem to trail into evening like cloud drifting for the horizon – the endless days, blue and filled with pleasures – I have loved these nights. I have loved all these days. Now when the sun clouds over and the sky bleeds grey I start to panic, just a little, just skimming over it, dipping into it with one wing: is this it, then? is this the last of it? No more blue til May – or June? I know what we are in for. No more birdsong. The leaves fall to the ground. The grounds turns to iron. The limited colours, low white skies.

    The outdoor cinemas are closing. I saw candles in the windows of a backstreet cafe today. I wore a scarf in the afternoon sun. These little deathknells make me sentimental and bleary, like a Dickens character. Little Deathknell, and the Year That Took Three Months to Die. I’m standing with one leg on the ground and one in the rippling cool water. My bookshelf glows in the lamplight and I feel unafraid of the cold.