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jazz, godliness…

I’ve cycled past this jazz club in town maybe half a dozen times & never had the nerve to go in. Today in the afternoon sunlight both the doors were standing open and, oddly, two tables with bottles of soft drink stood at the entrance guarded by ribbed plastic cups. A handsome-looking man was pouring. I got off my bike. “Is this – open? I mean,” looking at the people in coats milling around inside, “are you… rehearsing?”

He flashed me with his blinding Amway grin. “It’s a church. You’re very welcome.” I stepped back. Looked up at the sign. “It’s not a… jazz club?” “It is a jazz club, just not today. But we have lots of music!!”

Who could put their faith in a church that’s willing to use disopsable cups? Looking back, I could have given him many better responses, the least of which might have been, “My only religion is jazz” (a lie). Instead I had that protective feeling one has around people who seem to look out wistfully from inside their own club and wonder why more don’t join. “Jazz,” I said, “godliness…. they’re related.” And we waved each other off, a pair of heathens, neither one willing to convert.

March 31, 2013
structural violets

Group of academics at the breakfast table, they are five women and one man. “So it involves all of my areas of interest,” says one, “gendered language, and… I’ll be doing some structural violence…” She rolls her hand to indicate these topics are known and need not be enumerated. “Oh, interesting,” says her nearest neighbour. The group is companionable and everybody is talking at once. But as soon as the man’s voice is heard (“I did my thesis on that. ~My first thesis,”) everybody shuts up and when I look up they are five women listening in silence, clasping their cups to their bosoms in two cases, gazing at him as audience. In the tiny elevator I encounter one of the women and tell her what I saw. We ride up through the building in peels of laughter. She is clutching a muffin in a napkin, minutely nibbled. “Oh,” she gasps, “thank you, that’s really interesting! Oh, I’m going to reflect that back to the group.”

March 31, 2013
Jazzpenhagen

I’ve cycled past this jazz club in town maybe half a dozen times & never had the nerve to go in. Today in the afternoon sunlight both the doors were standing open and, oddly, two tables with bottles of soft drink stood at the entrance guarded by ribbed plastic cups. A handsome-looking man was pouring. I got off my bike. “Is this – open? I mean,” looking at the people in coats milling around inside, “are you… rehearsing?”

He flashed me with his blinding Amway grin. “It’s a church. You’re very welcome.” I stepped back. Looked up at the sign. “It’s not a… jazz club?” “It is a jazz club, just not today. But we have lots of music!!”

Who could rest their faith in a church that’s willing to use disposable cups? Looking back, I could have given him many better responses, the least of which might have been, “My only religion is jazz” (a lie). Instead I had that protective feeling one has around people who seem to look out wistfully from inside their own club and wonder why more don’t join. “Jazz,” I said, “godliness…. they’re related.” And we waved each other off, a pair of heathens, neither one willing to convert.

March 31, 2013
you sneak up, & I’ll sneak

Years before I had driven from Adelaide to Melbourne with my then partner. We towed behind us the tower of terror: all of our possessions lashed to a homemade trailer. His possessions were mostly tools and mine were mostly books.

In a seaside town we stopped with his best friend and her husband. They had a four-year-old boy and he and I fell in love. The grown-ups strolled on ahead down the wickety dunes, talking and idly watching the seagulls wheel overhead, and the two of us scampered and bolted, climbed under and hid. We found things in the sand which have no name. We found soft glass and seagrapes, rusted and tasting salty.

We burst back onto the roadside with its sparse traffic, three heads disappearing far out in front. In a rush of inspiration he turned to me: “I know! How about, you sneak up on your daddy, and I’ll sneak up on my daddy!”

I remember the feeling of protective love that washed me in that weird warm moment. I was so frightened of seeing the hope and ambition, the trickery, fade from his eyes and their expression subdue and dim. I was frightened he might suddenly realize: Ach no! You’re one of Them! But we did it. He sneaked up on his daddy. And I sneaked up on mine. Ambush!

March 30, 2013
Jared Diamond

Picked up the most marvellous book, it’s by Jared Diamond & it’s about traditional societies (which, he points out, survive in partial form in even the most harried industrialized landscape and were universal to us until 11,000 years ago: a blip). He says how some things ‘modernity’ does better and some things, tradition. Like a bolt of cloth falling from a high shelf it struck me when he pointed out that all of psychology is based on a very narrow sample: mostly, undergraduate American psychology students, who were the ones most available to undergo tests and to fill out questionnaires. He cites the acronym WEIRD: Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

The name of this book is The World Until Yesterday. How people picked up their babies and carried them upright with lots of body contact. Babies learned the world at eye level. How your chances of being killed by falling out of a tree or by having a tree fall on you were rather high. When I was a child in Jakarta we heard about a tribal man to the north, coming home from the village meeting through the familiar jungle who was eaten, whole, by a large snake. His body was cut out of its belly entire after the animal was captured.

March 29, 2013
great parents, both healthy

I shared a restaurant nook tonight with three dinosaurs in suits, entertaining a young lady. The young lady was “three weeks pregnant” to the oldest dinosaur and hardly said a word. (“We’re not telling anybody yet.”) He sat with his arm linked loosely round her chair, establishing claim, while parsing the charms of various female executives as lazily as though picking his teeth. Gosh, I disliked him. Several times his voice rose on the repeated phrase “these ridiculous wind farms.” He talked about firms being “ripe for the picking” and a “young” female CEO of “42 or 43” who inexplicably had become suicidal when her high-riding company suddenly collapsed. The three of them leaned back to dismiss, one by one, the possible “real” reasons for her despair: Great parents, both healthy. She’s got a sister, they get on. She’s in a plum position, the world is her oyster. She’s charismatic and, frankly, gorgeous. The little wife sat with her hands folded under her chin during this recital and her baby, I guess, nestled under her ribs getting used to the uninterrupted sound of its father’s voice as he laid out the state of things for the education of the room at large. Oysters and plums. Niggles & Pimms.

March 28, 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
cradle of many things

Cycling home under a high full moon through a dark city so cold it’s as though the streets stand motionless under water. Northern Europe, cradle of so many things, including me. The buildings stand serene on street corners, unafraid of waiting. Traffic sporadic, roads wide and smooth, trees utterly leafless with branches standing separate and bare against the sky but, if I were to reach up and drag one down, already the infestation of buds and bugs that’s Spring.

March 27, 2013
allure

Went out early, the sun through my window a lure. My favourite chic but drowsy wine bar cafe was playing Billie Holiday. Unusually it was filled up today with dishevelled, sleep-drowned people. A shovel-load. I was one of them. We sat in a row sipping & pecking at our breakfasts like a mess of half-fledged birds.

March 26, 2013
with my bare hand

Interesting coincidence between the accidents of physics and the compulsions of human nature: so often when a glove falls, in the street, like a leaf it will lie palm-side-up, as though its fortune is about to be told. That way when you walk past these lost lonely single gloves they are usually in postures of imploring, or appeal. It occurred to me retrieving my own glove outside my door that a nice filmclip could be made by stooping and dropping a coin or small offering – even a leaf, perhaps, as Balinese do – in the palm of each glove, randomly about the city.

March 19, 2013