Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: ageing

  • at boyfriend school

    What bothers me most about getting older is losing that glorious, elastic authority which I used always to use to shame men out of behaving boorishly. This afternoon we came through the park and passed the boules courts along the riverside, ruled off with low fences like dust baths for human sparrows, and I was collecting blossoms from the various flowering trees, the Spring has waited so long. The park was full of drug dealers and pregnant women and dogs, everywhere dogs. It all seemed glorious and I collected eight different kinds of blossom. Finding a second bush with the same flowers as a sprig I had already collected, I went up to it to make my little sprig kiss a sister flower still attached and growing. Saying, “Sistah! Hey sis!” and making smoochy noises. Then at the next hollow where the table tennis tables are set up I found another bush with the same flowers and went over to it, making kissing sounds – my companion said, mildly, “Are we going to be doing this all the way home?”

    Alongside the boules courts we passed a man unzipped with his back turned, right there among the people, women, children, men, dogs, he had barely bothered to shunt himself into the bushes and it seemed so arrogant, so rude. I stared at him, turning my head as we walked past until he looked up and then I could say, witheringly, “I can see you!” He stared back, a complex expression crossing his face. I believe I read him perfectly. I said to my companion as we walked on, “You know – this is perhaps the most galling part about getting older. I lose that natural kind of authority of gorgeousness. Ten years ago he would have gone, Oh my god, that beautiful woman! and I have disgusted her! I’ve lost status in her eyes.”

    He murmured appreciatively and slung his arm around me. But I didn’t want his compassion, I wanted his incomprehension. After a few dozen more steps I nudged him. I was grumbling. “You do realise that now would be a great time for you to say something beginning with, wait but Cathoel you are a beautiful woman?” He laughed. “Jeez,” I said. “Didn’t they teach you anything in Boyfriend School?”

    “Cathoel,” he said, “you are still a very beautiful ~”

    “Nope!” I put up a hand. “Do not use the word ‘still’!” But he wasn’t done. Unperturbedly he carried on, “~ and you will probably be beautiful until the day you die.” “Ahh,” I said, my breath sailing out of me like a breeze, and then I felt my body relax and my face grow warm and I snuggled back under the crook of his arm, where I like to belong.

  • Dad and Ian

    Dad’s number is 0412 195 957. Mum’s number, obtained in a different year and from a different phone company, is separated from his by only two digits. For years their numbers were almost the same and then Mum put Dad’s mobile through the wash and now Dad has cancer in his blood. The doctor’s stopped the chemotherapy because it wasn’t working, but not before it turned their home life medieval. He had radiation, hormone treatment, then the magic pill. He will be dead before I ever get home.

    Dad has a close friend from childhood called Ian, not the Ian in this picture. They were lifesavers together on the Gold Coast. Tonight I heard that Ian has inoperable cancer in his lungs. My brother sent me a photo of Ian coming out of the water at Little Burleigh looking hale and strong: he sent a photo of the four dozen young men lined up in their wrestle suits. This is how men were built in those days, I thought: before McDonalds. As I lay down and closed my eyes a strange calming image flooded me. I was thinking about the two friends who now have known each other longer than they’ve either of them known anybody else, just about; so many people have died. Their generation is at the wall. Their bodies are crumbling. I knew Ian was in town for a while to spend time with his children, our playmates on the long summer holidays at the beach, and I thought: what if someone could bring the two of them together, if they both wanted; and then discreetly disappear; so they could have a beer or a cup of tea with no one fussing around them and being social; and face the horizon as it approaches. Dad told me once years ago how when they were lifesavers they were both out on their boards beyond the breakers, where the water is green and tilts; a huge shark went cruising past his feet. He said he wasn’t scared. It was just a part of being in the water.

    I always thought once you step into the ocean, you are in their territory. They know the places we cannot map and can eat the things we are. They have no mercy, so far as we can understand it. They maybe don’t even have fear. But once you leave the sloping beach and paddle out past the breakers you are out of the reach of land and you have stepped into the wild.

    .

    My father was born during World War Two. It’s hard to imagine he minds being deprived of his mobile phone, the constant connectivity that keeps us bobbing on the surface of our minds like so much trash.

    For the first time now the living outnumber the dead, things will only get worse; it is a strange and insecure world we have made, top heavy and crumbling fast, like a breaker. We are a web on the surface of a world we have ruined and let ebb, and filled its clear salt waters with our junk and emptied them of all life using nets the size of dead cities. We are a glinting and reflecting shifting roof of plastic bottles for the endless ocean which needs no roof.

    When I went to buy a futon in 1996, my father had the only mobile phone I’d ever seen. He lent it to me, so that he could call me later to come and pick up his car. I shoved the phone in my bag and forgot it was there.

    The futon I chose was so comfortable after I lay down on it I fell into a sound sleep. A strange blaring noise woke me, repeated and insistent like a tiny tugboat. People around the shop were stirring and saying to one another, I think your mobile phone is ringing. That’s what we called them in those days, two words. I said when asked, loftily, Oh no – I don’t have a mobile phone. Then, mortified, recollected that I had, and this was my father, ringing me on it. His phone and his car were in my custody.

    I bought this week a German sim card, after a year and three months here without one. I am wary of giving anyone the number. I think of the life I had, once I had slipped its leash, as like telling the household I’m just going out for a walk. Unless you take your phone along – no one can know where you are. No one can call to say Stop for milk or You are late, and so you can browse and forage and glean and sift through your thoughts like hot sand that sparkles neverendingly and forever through your fingers which are dry and brown. It makes me sad that my father doesn’t have a phone now and that it seems hardly worth replacing it. It makes me proud for him, and happy, to think of him slipping the leash, gazing at the sky, listening to the birds.

    On his verandah with his afternoons all to himself he can see the horizon from his long cane chair which curves like a Malibu board. But the chair is so low and Dad struggles to get out of it. He cannot make it to the landline in time if I call him from my strange time zone in another season; efforts to reach him seem futile. From his supine position the verandah rail is his horizon. It has snuck closer in his sleep.

    On the far side of the world where the water is cold I stare and stare towards the south but it’s slipped round the curve. I hear nothing, and I see nothing, and I get these occasional emails. My father who then was the love of my life with his fearless innovations and his steady carpenter’s hand has stepped off the coastal shelf now, he is out for a walk and he may be some time, he is going where we none of us can follow and I don’t believe he will ever meet us there; he’ll be gone; he has stepped into the wild.

  • stitch grandeur

    In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You can dance on street corners. One of the blisses of living here is that everyone is stranger and no one’s a stranger: my lifelong habit of conversing with passersby as though we were resuming a discussion only briefly interrupted is welcomed and usual, it’s easier, fine.

    I had never seen anyone embroidering on the underground. Sleeping, yes, fighting, putting on make up; drunk men banging in unison their fists on the roof of the carriage on their way home victorious from some football game – those were English men, ‘educated hooligans’ – and people jump on and sing, for money, or make speeches, and sell things, or just beg: and the man on the U1 who shows mutely his malformed and tiny index finger that pokes the air like a children’s puppet, the more whole hand holding a grimy crumpled cup for coins. A week ago there was a can of green peas, with a spoon standing in it, empty and neatly tucked under the corner of the seat were someone, presumably, had been eating them from the tin. To say it took courage to pull out my embroidery seems ludicrous. But so it felt.

    It is an egg I drew freehand, a world egg, and have been filling with gradual slow stitches ever since. The egg shape is crossed with a bulging peace sign. I started it to sew for my suitcase, a new suitcase, khaki swirling, for my first trip to New York in 2011. The suitcase was a present, its army camouflage motif bothered me. “I want to sign that there can be peace, there can be love, that I am not part of the army,” I said, stitching next to the Brooklyn nightclub singer who at the request of our mutual friend was putting me up. We had bonded. We’d spent long hours sitting side by side on her bed, talking about our lives. “But,” she said, “you are also a warrior.” And hugging me, on her stoop opposite “the park” (an all-concrete basketball court) in the snow. She was smoking, and her voice was deep and compelling and rough.

    I made that trip, and another, longer trip, with the peace egg still missing from my luggage. Now in Berlin I have decided it is time to get it done. So on the underground I pull it out. With trepidation but not sure why. The first thing that happens is a good-looking, somewhat raddled man whose tangle of hair attracts me gets on and sits opposite. We are the only two people in the carriage. Noticing my stitching he says, terrifyingly, “This city belongs to us True Germans.” Nods many times. I try to smile, neutrally. His arm goes up in a blessedly hybrid but tyrannical salute. “We belong here. All of those foreigners need to just get out. They should go.” I say something, noncommittal and small, afraid of what violence I might bring on myself if my accent or choice of words gives me away. Then nodding also I get up and slide from the carriage, clutching the fold of canvas and my hidden needle.

    Real Germans sew in public. I felt I had identified myself with a certain kind of wholesomeness, or primness. The screaming mess at the back of my tapestry, with its gouts of wool and complex knotting clots of colour hardening the cloth, embarrassed me. It was so clear to anyone looking on – which they did – that I was a rank beginner. Perhaps that’s why the man in his seventies who had been strap-hanging nearby finally swung his upper body over me and confided, in a shy, sweet voice, We used to learn embroidery in primary school. We made cross-stitch. (Modestly, with a soft pride): I was really good at it.

    As she got off at Wittenbergplatz a lady clutching her hands before her chest paused to say, It’s hard, isn’t it, keeping the tension even. Yes, I said, relieved that she had articulated this issue I had only half-noticed myself noticing. You need an embroidery hoop, she said. Oh! I said. I really do. Thank you for mentioning it. Then I carried the feel of her all the way home. There is something innate, I think, in us – in me – which responds to the wisdom of an older woman, however pragmatic and small, however tentative, because it is what we are missing wherever else we look. Sneering at age, excluding the oldest cultures, enslaved to the young and the new; literary festivals falling over themselves to include schoolkids’ first raps at the expense of experienced writer elders; orchestras staging dismal photo shoots in which fiddle-clutching violinists leap uncomfortably. The trouble with hip is, it never lasts. I long for the inner knowing, the voice of experience, the hip replacement: the lasting.

  • he who comes for us all

    Walking under the devastated trees the afternoon after a huge storm, their fresh scattered blossoms and leaves all over the pavement and all over the road as though some glorious festival has been by, I passed an elderly man walking with a stick, painfully it seemed, his upper body listing forward. As we drew near each other I wondered how bitter it might feel to be passed, without effort, by a member of what he perhaps thinks of as the fairer or even the weaker sex. He turned his turtle head and I said, Hi. On the instant a warm gleaming coal awoke deep in his eye, he had beautiful, unusually large, well-spaced brown eyes, and as I passed him I noticed his posture had changed. He was walking almost upright and seemed struck by pride in himself, joy in life, something of that sort I could see it in his gait. I thought: it’s crushing the way we treat our own elders. I thought: The meaning of life is love, what else can it be. I don’t understand why people keep asking. And as I flung the gorgeously aged garden tools someone had left in a pile of trash beside the road into the back of my ute, disturbing the spider who lives there on her quivering and much-travelled web, and slung myself behind the steering wheel and roared off I was crying out in my heart: I say this every day of my life, I will keep saying it til I die: we need to be kinder to one another.

  • birthday

    It’s going to be my birthday on Saturday, along with perhaps 19 million other people. Good Lord, though – how did this happen so fast? Heard a guy saying the other day, and I think he is right: days are long & years are fast.

  • buying the cow

    The guy before me loaded five litre bottles of milk onto the counter at the BioMarkt, the organic store. I said, You know, it might be cheaper to buy a cow. He said, Well, we thought about that, and the two of us smiled at one another. The girl who was serving has prominent front teeth and a mousey, rather shy face. She started laughing and couldn’t stop. She was still laughing about the cow when I packed up my groceries and bad her goodbye and the guy with the milk had let the door swing behind him. I guess because of the link with the dairy products this reminded me of an incident when I was working on the cheese stall on an outdoor market in Britain. I was 23 and my boyfriend had that day turned 32. He was a bit of a drama queen and spent the day sagging and sighing. Two tiny old ladies who used to visit every week to buy “a quarter of a pound of mild white” cheddar asked him kindly, “What’s the matter with you, love?” He looked downcast. “I’m… *thirty-two* today.”

    I will never forget their reaction so long as I live. Unless Alzheimers. Well, they laughed. They cackled. They slapped each other. One of them fell against the butcher’s glass opposite and banged herself on the thigh repeatedly, crying tears of laughter. It was the funniest thing they’d heard in months. My boyfriend looked foolish and I began, or so I hope, to look at him differently, more narrowly; in between bouts of mirth the ladies were gasping, “Thirty-two! You’re a child! You just wait! You know nothing!”

     

     

  • picked it up & have kept it

    Walking along a quiet street feeling grumpy I heard a loud, juicy burst of fat laughter. Coming towards me was a man on his phone, shortish, gleaming, African, with laughter rolling through him, like a wisp of weed rolling in the sandy sea. Further down the street I saw a dog waiting in the laundromat, wistful with big eyes turned to the door, and passed a middle-aged punk whose hair had almost entirely balded away. But he had worked the few strands growing over his forehead into a messy quiff, stiffened with product but still with his own native old man’s/little boy’s curls escaping, as though he were saying to Death “You’ll never take me alive.” Coming back to the house I found a small square of white paper stuck to the cobblestones, entirely blank on both sides, and I picked it up and have kept it.

  • Clive James

    Perception is a funny thing. I’m feeling, though cheerful enough, somewhat tired & old, chubby & worn. Men are looking at me. One of them twisted his head to look back and came close to walking himself into a pole.

    Another time I was feeling all fresh & funky, I had on this beautiful green print sundress, I scampered early out of the Adelaide Writers Week crowd and began lolloping up the hill. I was laughing with shame, having just inadvertently told Clive James I thought his poetry was quite good, “especially lately.” Argh. As I passed a group of people sitting on the low wall a young man raised his head and sang out, “Ew! You’re old. Get away from me! I hate old people.”

    That was fifteen years ago. Today it’s all smiles & waves. Is it the dungarees? The grubby sandshoes? The sunshine? The moon? Billy Bragg puts it neatly, mortality: “Like a pale moon in a sunny sky/death gazes down as I pass by/to remind me that I’m but my father’s son.”

     

  • a hill of beings

    a hill of beings

    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.

    H2O HoL blaring tunnel

  • riverside grave

    riverside grave

    A melancholy day. We visited the grave of my friend’s husband. The room where I am sleeping is filled with his things, fishing trophies he won and a fearsomely engraved pewter hard hat with his name on it and, from underneath as I gaze up at the glass shelf, a space where his mind once was.

    The graveyard is peaceful and small. It’s by the river. Big gates are closed but not locked. I asked did she want to be alone but no, this was a maintenance visit. Side by side we crouched down and plucked all the dead heads off the hyacinths growing over him. In another part of the graveyard an elderly man was drifting, carrying a candle in his hands. My friend looked surprised when he greeted her and told me afterwards, he had grown so thin she wouldn’t have known him.

    H2O HoL soul explosion gutter girl