A friend who was enamoured of it took one of my books to Hong Kong, and tried hard to get the lady in the passport booth to stamp it. She would not be persuaded. Instead I received a series of postcards through the mail: Dear Cathoel, it’s a beautiful day in Hong Kong and I am taking your book for a stroll by the river. Dear Cathoel, your book and I are having chicken noodle soup on the markets.
Call off the search! I think I may have found the world’s heppest hipster. All those people complaining that they’re not one can relax: this guy blows you out of the water. He is tiny and slight – built like Prince – and perched on his front steps in a crowded cafe street, wearing skinny black jeans, elfin boots, and a cunningly off-the-shoulder stripey sailor’s jumper. He caught my eye because his elbow was pointed above his head at a most uncomfortable angle – like an alerted bunny’s ear – as he gave himself a beard trim, slowly, searchingly, luxuriously, into a bevelled mirror on his lap, using a large pair of silver antique dressmaker’s shears.
Today I had to face some things inevitable but leaving pain. They are not my fault nor anyone’s and there’s nothing I can do about them. But it’s ok. You know how you grapple til you get to grips.
While I was grappling I walked the streets. As I walked I passed a very well-dressed woman talking with an equally well-dressed man. They were speaking in English. As I passed, she said: “and sometimes I feel like I could just lie down? and cry? You know?”
The clipped question marks at the ends of her sentences showed me a desperate soul. How courageous to tell it all to this man who had on a leather jacket and who when she said these words put both of his hands behind his back. I wove round some parked bicycles and came up beside her. “Excuse me. Did I just overhear you say, sometimes you want to lie down – and cry?”
Her eyes were blue and spiky with mascara. To her infinite credit their pupils did not shrink at this accosting by a stranger. “Yes,” she said.
I put my hand on her arm. I have no shame. “I feel that way too… sometimes. May I just say – as a stranger – please – just do it.
“Find someone who can hold you, and really hear you -” (we both inadvertently glanced at the well-dressed man, hovering nearby with a studiously disengaged expression on his face) “- or maybe a counsellor, and just do it. Don’t try to be brave.”
She was wonderful. I just loved her. Her face crumpled into compassion – for me. Women are incredible. “Oh,” she said, “that is so kind of you.” She put her hand on my arm too, as though we were dancing. “Oh thank you.”
As I walked on I felt the tears on my own heart lift and leave. How can this world be bad, that has such beautiful persons on it?
In 1999 I published my first book. A week later the girlfriend who used to live across the road returned to Brisbane from the desert and said, do you wanna make a road trip? We set off on retread tyres and with (it turned out) not enough tools to help out when things went wrong. Just outside Toowoomba (an hour west) I phoned my Mum. “Mum the van’s overheated! We forgot to check the water.” Anyway we made our way west, west, west. Spent the night in a grand hotel in Longreach with verandahs broad enough to foxtrot on. In the morning I stashed my packet of tobacco in a potplant and that is how I finally quit smoking.
We spent the third night in Alice Springs. By this time we had bonded and had told each other our life stories. I read her passages from my diary. She told me stories of her abused mother’s fight to shift her relationship with the now aging grandfather, using delayed cups of lukewarm tea, passive-aggression, and humour. Only 700km to Uluru (‘Ayers Rock’): we were on the home stretch! It felt like our own driveway. Then we blew a tyre. Like superheroes we got down and changed it, yay for us. Then we blew another. Two people who were travelling round Australia in a mobile home stopped to help us. The man was seamed and nuggety, he said, Don’t you girls dare go a whisker over 30 kays, now: you’ll blow the tread, and then you’re really rooted. So we crawled home to the tiny community of Mutitjulu where she worked – the short drive took us more than seven hours. We daren’t stop. When one of us needed to pee the other took the wheel and we hung our bottoms out the window. She was still smoking but somehow, I had lost the knack. I had last left Uluru when I turned 21 and quit my tour guide job. I spent ten days in a dream of homecoming, rolling myself naked in the red dust of an evening, walking out the door or her little house, magnetically drawn, almost every time I glanced up and saw Uluru. Crouching there like something, someone, it’s unsacred to speak of. I found the tiny second hand shop in the resort, run by a ranger’s wife, and consisting of things the high-turnover staff had left behind. I bought old-man’s underpants and a singlet and dyed them to form a swimsuit. After that I swam laps every day in the Sheraton pool. A rich lady befriended me at the bar and confided if you showed up at the front desk with enough confidence, you could ask them for the keys for a ‘poolside room’ (that is, on the asssumption that your own room was too far away upstairs) and so that is what I did. I lazed in the big white beds and had baths. I wrapped myself in dense velvety white bathrobes every day. I met interesting people from faraway places. And I kept going back to the sacred place, every day, every day. One night I cycled round the base as it grew dark and had to follow a very merry carload of local men home: I could not find which sandhill concealed the community. Never been so glad to hear a booming generator.
I took copies of my book into the newsagent and they said, yes, they would buy some and sell them. I went out dancing on the same dancefloor I’d loved when I was 20, and danced til I could barely remember my own name. When I was ready to come home, there was a problem: at that stage I had never owned a car, and saw no reason to carry my driver’s license in my purse. So as well as no shoes I had no photo ID. There was a tiny library for staff and the librarian was a Justice of the Peace. I explained to her my dilemma. I showed her the book, whose title is Going for the Eggs in the Middle of the Night. I showed her how the poem titles were printed in my own handwriting. And how it has photos in it of our family when we were kids, photos of me and taken by me as a child. “Ok,” she said, “it’s you.” And after she’d signed an affadavit I was entitled to buy a plane ticket and fly across the detailed and sumptuous red plains, to Brisneyland.
I went upriver two nights ago with a box of matches in my pocket. It was overcast and just beginning to get dark. Went down a green gladed path that I know and found the place I’d found before. I’ve never seen anybody there but once there was a girl playing her guitar on the next promontory, sitting on a fallen tree with her hair falling over her face.
As I went I collected twigs and dried stalks and small fallen branches. I made a bristling bundle with each hand, I stretched my palm to carry more. At the place I built a fire. Last week someone had played a game there: twelve squares deep and ten squares wide, etched into the dirt, it had three teams: one playing with smooth stones, one with dandelion flowers, one with short sticks each piercing a leaf.
In front of the fire I sat down to rest my back against a tree. The water rushed behind me, rushing rushing. It had begun to rain, not too heavily, I put on my coat and let the tree shelter me. A blue egg had fallen from the nest, egg-blue and speckled. On the inside its broken shell was white as teeth. Last night I took a different way and when I came to the clearing downstream where a bench and firepit have been built, in front of the bench someone had made a heart with stones. The stones said: “I <3 ..." The inner body of the stone heart had been filled with clumps of moss, and every few inches the green dense moss was punctuated by a golden dandelion flower. Again it grew dark, and again it rained, and I sat and watched by the water.
Bizarre visit to the local physiotherapist today. For one thing, we speak different languages, and the overlap (in creaking German) was slim. It took us a while to understand each other. At the top of his full-length consulting room mirror was a Post-It note with a downward arrow, which said, “This is what a person who is loved by God looks like.” But we didn’t get to talking about God straightaway. First he had to ask, what is the matter. I summarized the very ill-advised dance improv manoeuvre which originally tore my knee. The physio ran away with my first half sentence, making sketches to explain, building rapidly a diagnosis that showed the problem with my ligaments. “It’s not the ligaments,” I said. I finished my sentence and off he raced again. This happened five times before he grasped what was the matter.
Ok not a good listener, no worries. I told him what I think (after various scans & examinations) is going on and eventually he heard me. “Please take off your jeans.” Then I sat in my t-shirt while he asked me about any previous illnesses, the age of both my parents, was I married, etc. During this time the physiotherapist’s ten-year-old son wandered in and was kissed by his father all over the top of his head. The boy left. I lay down. The physio asked if I would consider giving his son English lessons, “for his pronunciation.” He reached into my knee and began inflicting intense pain, good pain, pain which bore out his relieving theory that there was nothing wrong inside the joint, it is just that the muscle is cramped. “What religion do you have? Are you Catholic?” I blinked. “I don’t have any religion.” He looked grave. “We say, there are two ways to live. The good way. And: the bad way.”
The bad way, it seems to me, involves ceaseless physical pain. Sometimes it wakes me out of my sleep. It’s a small kind of hell. “How’s the knee?” I asked him, pointedly, to bring him to the task. He had stopped massaging and was leaning on the sore leg, gesticulating. The weird thing is that when he stuck with it, his ministrations were lucid and effective. He worked his way into the joint and eased it, more professionally but in the same way as I have been instinctively doing. When he looked me up and down and said thoughtfully, You’re built like a mannequin, he wasn’t being creepy. “Know what I mean? Like a model? Like… an athlete?” (Yes, I said). “And when you were a teenager, clearly you would have been: Wow! Pretty as a picture!” (He flicked his loose hand as though shaking off water, to convey to me how goodlooking I used to be. Yes, I said. And sighed) ~ When he said all of those things, he wasn’t being grisly. It was said benignly: innocently, almost. A simple observation. Never mind the fact that his fingers were under my kneecap and I was lying there in my underwear.
I might have forgotten to mention the skeletons. They were the first thing I noticed, apart from the Post-It on the mirror. Just plastic, educational skeletons – but somehow he stores them in an open-weave kind of hammock, suspended directly above the treatment table. I was gazing at them as he concluded his appearance-based theory of diagnosis: “I think you’re just athletic, and you’re fit and strong, and your muscles would naturally cramp up.” (Makes sense. And *of course* it would have happened a lot more – or is it less – when I was prettier.) He asked me to turn on my stomach. He dug his fingers into my shoulder, which has also been sore. I am stoical about pain but, man, this was pain. I did not cry out. I opened my mouth and rolled my eyes at the row of musculature posters. He dug his fingers in further and I gasped. Then he swooped down so that his head was level with mine on the table, and said in my ear, “Jesus said ~”
Who?! “Jesus said, I am the vine. I am the roots and the trunk. If the branches are cut off from the roots, no grapes can grow.” Finally he let me sit up. The pain in my knee began to ebb, more than it has for months. “You see, Jesus is the only true teacher.”
Like a traffic cop I put up my hand. “Actually, there have been lots of teachers. Plenty of great teachers. And not all of them men. Some are even alive today. The Dalai Lama for example.”
He picked up the clipboard with his sketches of my ligaments and sat down beside me to draw the roots, the vine, and the grapes cut off from the source, apparently believing I’d missed the metaphor. “No other teacher rose from the dead,” he told me. “I get it,” I said. “I understand that this is what you believe. But I don’t believe it.” “What do you believe in, then?” I hardly knew what to say. “I believe in people. I believe in nature and people. I believe people’s hearts are full of love and that we want to be good to one another.”
“If you’re cut off from the vine…” But I stopped him. My knee was throbbing. “Have you not noticed something? All of these teachers say the exact same thing. They say, love. They say, be good to one another, try to understand, treat as you would be treated.” We stood up and he put out his hand to shake mine. “I’m a philosopher at heart,” he said, unexpectedly. Walking me back down the corridor to Reception he asked was the little girl I’d been playing with when he came out to fetch me my daughter. “But you looked so happy together!” He asked about my health insurance and when he worked out I don’t have any, because I am not Swiss, said, “Then give I you this session gratis.” “I think you will find that in a few days,” he said, “all of your pain will have vanished.”
I was following the river on a very narrow path, about a foot wide, and it was bumpy. Tree roots, little soft holes where the soil has rotted away with rain… You know how you think, Gee I should maybe walk this bit? Or, “I hope I don’t drop this,” etc. And then: >whoooo…< I found myself peeling sharply outwards, dipping, losing balance, falling over the bank.
You have those two seconds which feel like ten where you get to think, Which way should I fall. I fell towards the bank, tried to fall upright and loose. As this was happening I swore, in German. Why not English. Then I was wedged, still on my bike, between the river and a handy leaning tree.
I had hardly time to wonder why "Scheisse!" and not "Crap!" before a party of four Swiss people on hardy mountain bikes came through the mist of trees. They were lycra angels in the afternoon sunlight. I handed them my bike and then two arms came down and two women - the men were busy marvelling that I had landed so fortuitously - hauled me up on the bank. A drop of about five feet. They lectured me but only very briefly and kindly. Those are really the wrong tyres! Are you sure you're ok? It felt cosy to be roused on by rescuing strangers.
On the way home I passed various other people using all different kinds of devices. A girl on a skateboard. A woman jogging, in earbuds. A couple sluicing gravely along on the asphalt with those stocks you use to push yourself on snow, for all the world as though they were skiing. I passed a truckload of army recruits who waved and smiled and when I waved back burst into ribald laughter. But my favourite was the guy gliding between two fields of cropped green stalks who appeared to be travelling on a moving walkway, who was, of course, on rollerblades.
I feel tearful this morning and my chest is aching with grief. Luckily my housemate & host made us both laugh just now by describing, with infinite wryness, the ruthless player she is partnered with today (“I have to go all the way to Zurich & then it’s like the Olympics”) before leaving with her tennis racquet strapped to her back. She’s been playing tennis for sixty years and hasn’t tired of it yet.
Sitting in the sun I think: how long will we be able to go on? There are big valuables at stake. Our generations have melodrama imposed on our lives. I’m not even counting the nuclear-fizzing bully boys chucking tantrums, the banker boys stealing from the public: there is no room in my heart for them, I am grappling with my grief about the slow death of everything.
The tremendous, repetitive work involved, in keeping it human-sized, staying awake, conducting one’s own modest, moral, individual life; the effort of planning anything at all (‘get out of bed, revise the poem’), of keeping hope lit. A gigantic assembly line, you have to keep fitting a million tiny metal and plastic pieces meaninglessly into place, just in order to glimpse the holiday of a corner of blue sky from out of the window. We’re all bound to it together, but it is somehow the loneliest thing. I can’t describe it at all. What I wanted to say, to somebody – anybody! – when I woke up this morning and heard the bird heralds of Spring, is: there are the big griefs of mourning lost species, and the missing wild places, the shaven forests and the lopped-off hills; and the deterioration of our daily bread, air, soil, fruit, eggs, and water. There is the horrifying fear of the future, overwhelming, paralyzing: a fear we must put aside and act on at once if anything is to amount to anything at all. There is the frustration of having sung this song too long, the boredom with it, the continual assaults from hopelessness. I get on with it. I rinse the poisonous dishwasher gleam from my cup, and make tea. I look all the big questions in the eye and tell them, I’m not afraid of my fear of you, I know you, I know you are there. But today the worst thing is the tiniest thing: my resentment at the pollution of my own daily dreams and the way I try to plan my day, by the wailing of the world’s biggest questions in context of history’s biggest mess. The siren interruption of alarm, that is the call not of sodden & beautiful temptresses but of ever-growing emergency.
Ambulance. Ruined police. Fire!
Self-pity, so small and overwhelming, fades out as I type these words. The sun has settled on my neck. The traffic from across the hill hollers, the birds are exhorting, exhorting. “This is my tree,” they say: “fuck off!” Or, “Hey, wanna root?” Or so an ale-drinking friend once translated for me as we sat on my verandah and listened to the trees. He has since sunk into brain-damaged tremor for he could not stop loving his escapism. I have wrestled with that. I try to remain clear and whole. Love is impatience and patience mixed, love is a bicycle in an airplane, love is endurance.
At the top of a very high hill yesterday, what in Holland or Denmark would be called a mountain, with a view over all of Switzerland ~ so it seemed ~ my friend taught me to peel dandelion stalks so that they spring into pretty green silvery curls. Behind us a family with very young parents were playing hide and seek. They had built a fire and the father, when we showed up, was juggling with three sticks. As we sat on our sedentary bench facing the green nation, he sprinted round in front of us and flung himself panting on the ground, his eyes gleaming, intent on the figure of his youngest daughter who was counting “eis, zwöi, drü, vier, füf…” Our legs and the legs of the bench blocked him from her and pure animal concentration blocked him from us. It was as though he didn’t see us. My friend gazed down the length of his back then flung her spooling dandelion out into the green. “We used to play that when we were children, too,” she said to me.
Scampering down the steep stone steps to gain the river path I met our neighbour, skulking behind the boat shed. He was smoking pot. I told him so. “You’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and we talked for a while about stinging nettles, and daisies. After that I walked for maybe an hour and didn’t meet anyone else nor their dog. Except for five shadows lurking on the other side of the river, sifting back and forth mysteriously in front of a huge raging fire they had built. The flames were leaping high and the mound of wood they’d set fire to was tall and triangular. This was under the long high roof of a storage shed thatched with bark tiles. Not thatched, exactly. I thought about the impenetrable Swissness of things, imagined the secretive signals by which they would have arranged they would meet up. A train went past a long distance away and at the same moment up on the hillside someone unseen let out a huge, scarifying shriek: the kind you let rip when the forest is all around mystifying you with its trees, and the sun won’t last much longer, it is time to be heading home to the domesticated landscape but for these few moments you are you, you are ancient, you are wild, you are free.
