Wild Sovereign Development Site

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  • street friendships

    I just fell into one of those instant street-friendships that sometimes lead somewhere and very often don’t. It is so lonely & exacting trying to make a life in a completely new city, I seem to have been doing it over and over the last ten years as I wonder: where is it that the tribe of people ~ who are poets, and deeply sensitive & reflective, and are peace-loving activists, and like to laugh and dance a lot, and care about the world and all who sail in her ~ find their home?

    So this was not a moment too soon. I’d come out of the Underground and was tramping through the snow which has mounted so rapidly all day today. A woman beside me suddenly spoke. “What? Is this Christmas?” She indicated the white sky, the buried trees, the white-piling pavements. “Yes,” I said, “and I was just noticing, I have never seen these kind of tiny snowballs before – they’re not really flakes – they are like drops of water.” “Stimmt,” she said, musingly, gazing at the tiny white balls crunching underfoot. She is a yoga teacher and teaches art therapy. We reached the snowy markets and parted. There were all kinds of activities this weekend, she said, to celebrate Spring – such as it is – and would I like to have coffee in this gallery cafe her mate runs and go for a wander. Well, as it happens yes, I very much rather would. Thank you, snowboat universe.

    H2O HoL sugarbowl

  • they were herded

    they were herded

    Gleis Siebzehn (Platform 17). Here is where ten thousand Jewish Berliners were herded onto trains. Only very latterly (1991) was a memorial opened. It is very simple and harrowing. No names, just numbers all the way down the platform: 29.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. 30.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. The second place name refers to the ghetto or death camp from which human beings never returned. The numbers are staggeringly ambitious: 938 people in one day; a thousand. Towards the end of the war they grow pitifully small: 32. 27. 26. 24. One of the panels has a yellow rose cast on it and on the ground behind it, among the birch trees now growing up through the tracks, last week’s yellow rose lies discarded in the snow; beheaded by its fall, in fact.

     

  • only Kneipes

    Went out to a bar with a new friend who is musical, Tuesday nights is quiet night in Berlin so we walked and walked, trampling snow that had reached that pearly soiled colour that is not grey nor is it brown… so beautiful, it’s my new favourite colour, most of the restaurants were closed and only Kneipes and bars left trading and we walked into bar after bar to be beaten back by the solid wall of smoke. The one we loved I had been past many times, a sign in the window says Street Musicians Welcome and after we had fetched our beers to the bar’s corner couch and made friends with the shy, elderly bar dog who curled up under my friend’s musical hand two fellows walked in, festooned with instruments though – when I focused again – they were carrying only one party apiece. Dude with a beaten-up double bass, dude with a steel-strung guitar. They had a beer then they sat at the corner of the bar on stools and set up this most wonderful racquet, a quiet riot of music like water that runs underground. The bass player was fearless and gentle and had this fuck-it air, I don’t mean he don’t care, I mean he would do whatever it takes to get the sound. Would slap, would percuss, would pluctern, would bowie. The guitar player almost honed himself to one note. We were entranced. The dog fell asleep. The girl who had served the beers came to perch on the end of the couch and lit a cigarette and curled her legs. Walking home the streets were the streets of the quietest sleeping city in all the world.

    When they finally brought their first song to a close, it was wordless and almost twenty minutes long, compelling, the guy playing bass held his hand out and announced clearly, “My friend So-and-So is playing guitar with me this evening.” The guitar player shook dreadlocks off his face and held his hand open, like a limp version of one of those guns that says, >bang<. “My friend Charles is playing bass this evening.” But before that the two of them clasped their curled fingers together for a tight moment and then each picked up his beer and they clinked.

     

  • everything soft, and white, and powdery

    everything soft, and white, and powdery

    Tramping through the fresh snow, everything soft and white and powdery. Like daylight the snow lies unequivocally on everything. Six bursting, screeching, whumphing shapes pass overhead like white explosions and resolve themselves, by a process of frantic backpedalling, into swans. As they land on the water they one by one become graceful and fleet. I smile at the tall man opposite, who stops. “I know you! I know your face.” “Well, I don’t think so, I’m Australian, I’ve only been here a few months.” “But I know your face! Pretty face, you’ve got. Can I take it?” He holds up a camera with a large, open lens. “What for?” I say. “Nicht zum verkaufen,” he assures me (not for selling), “just because I’d like to.” He shows me the picture, my kilos of red scarf and ridiculous beanie. Around us the world is white and a golden dog plunges through the fresh snowdrifts, spluttering. The swans have forgotten their panic and sail like perfection under the very old, arched green stone bridge.

    H2O HoL everything white and fresh

  • hot pink banners

    hot pink banners

    Tomorrow I take the train back to Berlin, traversing again this ancestral landscape. What a beautiful week it’s been, I’m so thankful. A girl in a sunstruck cafe told me that Denmark is the happiest nation on earth. “Our third year running!” Every time I remember our conversation I mishear it as “friendliest” and have to correct myself. We got to talking because as I was falling into drowses in the afternoon sun through the window a buoyant demonstration flowed past, stopping and starting in laughing clots. It resembled a dance party or flash mob. Lots of young people dressed in black & carrying hot pink banners. What were they so, uh, angry about? She looked wry. She almost sneered. “Well, they are students – like me – only I live in an apartment and pay my own rent – these guys live with their parents and the money is so good, unbelievably good – the government’s cutting it back – we are so lucky – the world is in recession.” I studied her, she was very beautiful. What are you studying? “Law,” she said. I thought of all the Aboriginal students in outback Queensland who would love to go to university or even high school. The little girls in Afghanistan who are barred from owning books. Malala. Those of us who have this spilling, squandering, golden good fortune ~ let’s be kind with it. It may not last and it’s really not rightfully ours. Let’s keep handing it on, like coin. Hand to hand.

    H2O HoL archway to the castle

  • gaga for vintage

    gaga for vintage

    Today I found a vintage store which glowed like a lit jewel box. Tried on this swishy 1960s poolside gown and just as I was leaving, with it wrapped under my arm, an intricately worked savagely pelted weskit of some ancient skin seemed to wiggle itself in the window at me. It was hairy. It was red that had faded to pink and indescribably beautiful. I took my coat off again and unwound my scarf. “You can tell people you bought it in the store in Copenhagen where Lady Gaga shops,” said the elegant girl. “Really?” I said, “Lady Gaga was in Copenhagen?” She said, “She made us close the store because there were too many fans. After that we kept seeing our outfits turn up on stages right across Europe.”

    I told her the story of a cute guy who worked at the swanky local grocer’s in Melbourne, how I burst in there one day saying Guess what! Yoko Ono is following me on Twitter! And he said, unimpressed, “Lady Gaga’s following me.” I checked it out and it is true. He has ten followers and her blue-ticked official account is one. He is incredibly good-looking and perhaps he caught her eye. Because beauty is like royalty: one in the eye for the beholder, or beer-holder, depending on circumstance.

    H2O HoL vintage gaga

  • Neil Young’s baby

    Neil Young’s baby

    This cafe has changed its muserly, miserly, whispery music for Neil Young. He owns the business. His voice is quiet but sure and it penetrates. People gain confidence in such good musical hands, or seem to, and soon the hushed conversation level has risen like water roaring and the blond baby sitting on his mamma’s lap inside the window has piped up too, being part of things. “Ahb!” he says, dancing his feet: “Ah, ahb!”

    H2O HoL breakfast candle

  • through snow

    through snow

    a bell dings behind me, I step aside and watch the beautiful line of a bicycle’s tyres, drawing like dark pencil on white paper through the snow

    H2O HoL bicycle thru white snow

     

  • København

    København

    København magical, sunken in the deep, dark water like a turtle from the undersea land, and all of these strangers (to me) riding the waves on its back. The water stretches away into the dark, black and pulsing with lights. Candles in the windows, restaurants which opened in 1694, boats creaking in the wind which have sailed past the horizon, although the horizon keeps moving and we know it. It is our own. At the rim of the sea equidistant, seemingly, all the younger lands I’ve known in this dark and troubled lifetime, where everything I touch turns to silver like leaves. At the rim of the world darkness falls away, falls away but here it is so dark the stars crust the harbour sky like satellites. Creaking of the trees, creaking of the hawsers, creaking of the wind. *@,)

     

  • finally, in Europe

    finally, in Europe

    I’m in Copenhagen. It’s so beautiful. Went out walking in the albert-full moon and feel I am finally in Europe. Everything built is fine & old, and all of the landscape is sculpted. The soil is dark and seems fine & light, beautiful Country in a solemn, calm, minimalist sense, more dry South Australia than lush Queensland.

    How I got here was, hopped on the wrong train on platform 14 at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and was carried several miles into the region of Whereonearth as I slowly realized my mistake. Went pale and sweaty with panic, leapt off at Whereonearth and scampered back to Berlin in a cab. The blessed Deutsche Bahn which runs on time like oil on water was blessedly late; forty minutes late! hooray, got on the right train. Travelled all day through increasingly Protestant countryside with this dark soil like crumbled bread and then, so exciting, the whole entire train drove very slowly onto a huge ferry and we all got off and rode in silence across a featureless expanse of water, greeted by waving wind towers on the Nordic shore, sky white and hanging low, out into the fresh cold misty Danish countryside. The coins are so heavy and beautiful when I was given change I had to hold them in my hand and turn them for long moments. I found a restaurant with a wall of old glassed bookshelves where they flame crepes at the table. I found a park where the sweet gates came up to my knees. I found the harbour. The haven. København.