A small scream from the other room. “What? What?” “Can you come here?” On the rug is lying toes-up a small, lucid-bellied, iridescent, recently murdered gecko. Its tail has been severed to a bloody stump: it didn’t just drop, it was ripped off. By its extreme corners I pick up the rug and gingerly carry it to the ferns. “Tisch! Tisch! Where are you, you little cat-monster?” A cat-bell is no use to a lizard. We both stand over it mournfully, uselessly. “Poor little dragon,” he says.
Blog
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stop stopping the boats
Could our fear of brown-skinned asylum seekers with unfamiliar cultural origins actually be self-hatred? Years ago it was embarrassing in Australia to confess to “the taint” of convict ancestors. Then it came to carry a cachet. It’s true we would undoubtedly respond with more compassion as a nation if boatloads of stricken Finns, Belgians and Scots were finding their way to our shores. But I also think we are not a confident nation and this reflects in a kind of arrogance-paired-with-self-loa
thing. It is sad to hate boat people when we are boat people. More than 90% of us are descended from recent migrants – that is, arrived within the last two centuries. And the waxy hysteria over a few hundred vessels reminds me of the hatred of sexuality which infests certain fundamentalist churches: the Catholic Church, for example. No hatred is more personal, more poisonous, than the mother of them all: self-loathing. -
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.
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we three bears
I love that porridge rhymes with forage. It feels like you would go out gathering the stalks of grain, and carry them home, and then brew them up over a fire in milk and eat them. Feels both cosy and adventurous.
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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.
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revenge on autopilot
Today I was sharing a cafe table with two pilots who spent the entire time talking about the missing jet. Their talk was loud and showy and handsomely studded with jargonese. They kept glancing over, and shifting in their seats; I felt that they needed an audience and so I was on their radar. (See? It’s contagious).
One tried to enlist me in his smiling sarcasm when his know-it-all mate discoursed at enormous length with the barista about coffee origins. “Are we drinking coffee?” he asked me, rolling his eyes, “Or wine?” “Well,” I said, mildly, “but it’s nice to enjoy it, right?” It’s so difficult, so impossible, to keep one’s thinking clear of the deeply embedded invisible gateways, like ha-has, imposed by cultural expectation. How obsession with the provenance of soured grapes can be permissible, even compulsory, but an enquiry into how your primary drug is manufactured and grown is dismissed as snobbery.
It was, of course, snobbery: they were performing, uninvited; this is tiresome. The cafe was small and their voices rang. Five staff members ran to and fro; a laneway den down deep in the canyons innercity. I seemed to be reading in the Financial Review how one of Andrew Forrest’s companies made a claim to extract minerals from under the soil of his personal property, his farm; another of his companies, the mining concern, has blocked it with time-wasting “inquiries”. The corrugated rubber, mined from rubber trees, on the wooden sole of my clog suddenly scraped loudly against the foot of our shared table, making an explicit, ripe, farting noise.
By refusing to enact the required Accidental Fart Noise Disclaimer behaviour, I exacted a tiny, petty, and useless revenge on my visiting male experts. You’re supposed to deliberately but as if unconsciously make the same noise a couple times more, to make it clear That Wasn’t What You Think It Was, that was the chair leg. The pilots stared, only for a moment, surprised out of their theories by my apparent demonstration of unabashed personal jet propulsion. Hey, did she cut the cheese? My own flight veered secure in its inexplicable darkness to the right, to the west, out of reach of either the transponder or the secondary radar and reflecting the dim distant starlight on its flanks and back like a turtle travelling inevitably, laboriously, in deep privacy from one tiny unclaimed island to another, by itself.
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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.
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from here to paternity
Brother has a new baby and is taking paternity leave. In the struggle over dinner to translate the concept it came out wrong & I pounced. Eternity leave! That’s when you just walk out and you’re never going back. ‘You can take this job & shove it, I’m going home to my family.’