Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Australian traveller

  • New York is hard to write about

    New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, a creature of its own. I have every day many tiny full ripe conversations with strangers on subways, in pharmacies (they sell vitamins shaped like Darth Vader’s head!), in bookstores. Sometimes we talk for a little while, like the Hispanic man with his huge happy smile on the way to Yankee Stadium with his kid, his young pretty wife who spoke up now and then “when there was least danger of it being heard,” his two mates who were African American. I love the Bronx-bound trains where racial normality prevails, exposing the patronising lie of that persistent white-privilege word ‘minority.’ He held up the flattened round ball of black when I asked about it, turning it to show that its two steel antennae were its little legs. “I thought it was an alien,” I told him, pointing, “I thought maybe it was your little pet.” “It’s a speaker,” he told me, turning it upright on the grimy floor to show. “When we get there, we going to listen to some music. My little girl loves it.”

    Oftentimes when you have some exchange with a New Yorker you will both turn away afterward, so as to show – or so I think – that there is no harm, no foul, that we are both not crazy people, the city has not unhinged us and there is no intent to latch on and keep talking once the moment’s gone. You might both say, See you later, when one of you climbs out, and I always find that beautiful and moving. And how at the checkout at the grocery store it is normal, it’s friendly, to stand and chat whilst buying but if I were to stand another five minutes, chatting on as the next customer piled their bags, I would become instantly a freaky aberration. All that openness and friendliness now has an agenda: we recoil. And in fact that friendliness and openness often does have an agenda: I want all beings to be happy. That is my secret and now it’s out.

    We walked clear up the centre of Grand Central Park, as my German-speaking companion calls it, til we reached the tiny walled gardens of the Conservatory Garden by East 104th Street. There is a lily pond there where water lilies bloom in threes: pink, and hydrangea blue, and a strange candling white. Fish churn under the water now and then and two gentlemen who bought them, from a shop in Chinatown, and who have wondered, they tell us, every year what to do with the koi when the pond is drained for winter (“they can survive underneath the ice”) stand feeding them, occasionally, lavishly, from a crinkling foil bag that says colour enhancing preparation. This whole day is colour enhanced, to me: I have in my hand the middling growth of a breastplate I’m building on a scarlet leaf that was just lying on the path by the lake, splendidly maple-pointed, and every time I find another blue or purpling spray of berries, a tiny lavender or soft pink flower, I pluck it (“darf ich?”) and add the stem to my thumbsward of stems. The day is purple and blue like a beautiful bruise. The grey winter days have cleared away and we are out, everyone is out, we’re all bleeding into each other in the sun. We are urban animals, we can survive under the ice. The beautiful young Black prince staring at his black sneakers on the subway, wearing his trackpants as though they were a suit, who held himself tensely waiting for the demand when I said, Excuse me. You have such a beautiful, striking face. I think – if you were to go into a really good quality modelling agency in Manhattan – they might be very excited about you. Then I turned away to my friend, to show him this is not a clumsy pick up, the agenda is transparent and shown. My friend said afterwards, casually, relieving me, “That man was smiling so much to himself all the rest of the ride. What did you say to him?” My first time in New York, scared and determined in 2011, I spoke to a tiny white-haired lady on the Harlem bus. This was my first foray into Madison Avenue and the expense had exhausted me. The legions of unhappy looking children, presaging an article I read later online which said How to Tell if Your Child is Spoilt. Question one read: do they find it impossible to be happy? When I climbed on the bus, drawn by the enchanting name Harlem, its juicy community sound, its soft music, this tiny lady was sitting opposite. I said, You’re so beautiful! And she looked startled, to my surprise. “No one’s ever told me that before,” she said. I said, “What? I would have thought people would have been telling you, all your life. You are a beautiful woman.” We gazed at each other til we both had tears in our eyes. I have thought of that lady and her seventy years’ bloom. I have wondered what kind of fears lurk in the hearts of men and families, that we cannot say to a beautiful woman, or man, this is your just tribute.

     

     

  • the ride home was the best party

    Imagine a lake. It is vast and extends, if you swim out to the middle and gaze round, at either end as far as the horizon. We set off very early in the morning from town and have cycled for hours, climbing endless sandy paths. It’s ferociously hot, nearly forty degrees, we have left the last village and are deep in the pines. With my narrow city tyres I have to climb off and push, slaloming again and again in the hot sand that grabs my wheels like bulldust in the outback and I sink aside and slew. The closest railway station is by now a long way back. Even where the path is harder, juddering pine cones tumble over the ruts. They are numerous and tiny, an infestation of bronze, authoritative and resplendent against the dense matting of their own gold blonde needles that lie in great drifts on the banquets of deep green moss.

    Occasionally the trees stir and everything smells of lemon pepper from the pines.

    We have reached the water and taken off our clothes, a duck floats past out on the artificial waves serene and glowing-eyed. A butterfly feeds for butterfly hours at the prongs of cow parsley nearest the edge. The underside of the bank is eroded and when a boat passes I see why. The slopping of the waves against the bank’s underside, a chain of caves under the roots, resumes a slurping, dragging slow ruction like the sound of sex. Two white swans sail under the sloping belly of a white boat, its glossy wood striped by the green tree stems lying along the water like city lights. On the back of the white boat a golden man is balancing naked, poised to jump.

    This was a month back, one of the last hot days. We would catch the train as far out of town as it goes, then cycle on to the garden house where our friends spend their summer weekends at the edge of the forest by a lake. We cycled all day, stopped and swam, took photographs, arrived late and everyone had eaten. A cluster of a dozen bicycles stood inside the gate at the end of the road. A winding path engrossed the grass under tall dark trees to the little handmade house. We passed a kind of treehouse built up high above the sweet old-fashioned bathroom which had a tiny verandah, and later I took my drink up there and climbed the narrow steps and sat looking out at the night. I could feel the forest all around, its siftings and shiftings; its damp.

    All day long travelling through green tunnels, further and further, deeper and deeper. A party in a forest, now settling to drowsy hums. The candles and lamps lit long after dark, the trellis glowing golden in the flickering green with a row of tiny lanterns in the vine. The little boy, maybe four years old, who wanted juice when all the juice was gone. He stood between our host’s knees in the open doorway of the fridge and gazed in. The large poodle thrust her head eagerly over his shoulder and all three faces were lit as the man showed him, patiently, what each bottle contained. A speckled rope of tiny bronze lights wound up the trunk of the tallest tree all the way to its distant canopy. The boy must be put to bed, slowly and peacefully, by both his parents at once. His father carried him into the magic tipi and his mother laid him down. He was so little. They knelt over him and it seemed they were talking to him. The little boy at the centre of the universe. I could not hear their soft voices but I watched from the candlelit table, fascinated, filled with terrible soft yearning. His mother had taken him on her knee and sat cheerfully on the luggage rack of someone’s bike, when we went down to the lake that afternoon and lazily swam. Now she lay down and curled herself around him, and the father sat back on his heels and they all three waited for sleep to come.

    Late in the night the German voices began to blend into a fairytale nonsense tongue and I grew sleepy. I got up and went quietly up the back of the garden to the tipi where the little boy lay. Next to the softly sleeping boy I lay on my back, with my ankles crossed, in Kinderparadies, my eyes open and all the trees leading me up into the dark glinting complexities and simplicities of night. “Who’s that,” the mother asked her husband quietly, “in the tipi with Thomas?” “It’s me,” I said. “Ah…” And I lay there close to sleep myself, not just his but my own, until at length I heard people standing up and getting wakeful and we gathered all our things and took our bikes from the flock of bikes inside the gate, and we all mounted and swooped off down the hill towards the water.

    It was nearly midnight, all the houses’ lights were dark. Freewheeling down the hill and making swoops of joy I realised: I was the only woman setting off to swim. My swimsuit in the bottom of my bag, damp and uninviting. At the little meadow by the lake I let my clothes drop in the dark and walked into the water unadorned and very slowly; and a soft furry nudging at my hip was Fleur, the lovely large piebald poodle, pressing herself to me as we went in together. “Oh!” I said, “You’re coming in with me, are you, lovely girl? And it’s just us girls.”

    The water was silent and reeds stood quietly at either side of the shallow beach, only a few metres wide, where we stepped in. The men were joking and teasing behind us and joined the water gradually. The lake lay black as pitch to the horizon around us. The sandy bottom is soft and forgiving, as though filled with salt. Nothing dangerous lives here: I kept telling myself.

    I turned my face up and could see the stream of stars, a river of frozen timelessness of which the dark clotting trees low on the ground were banks. Afterwards for the joy of silence I left my bike lights switched off. At the crossroads we set out to the left and our companions set out right, Goodbye! Thank you! Goodbye! Through the little village we were joined by another couple on their bikes, who came out of a side road silently, she had lights on and he hadn’t, as though we were their ghosts, or they ours.

    We entered the forest, at the edge where it envelopes the road. The little train station lay the other end of this swarm of long-limbed trees, other side of the dark. It was so late at night and so quiet. The wheels. I left my light switched off and plunged in, following the leader bike whose own light swooped graciously, five bike lengths ahead. Everything was invisible around me but the sense of the tall trees, running for miles on either side. Riding fast I was enveloped in a blackness absolute and reaching, the forest spirits catching after me. I must trust that between his passage and mine, nothing will have changed, no dark animal jumped into the path with its big arms out to block and to swallow me, without a trace or sound.

    When we arrive at the station the train is there, silent like all German trains. A dishevelled man standing with his dirty backpack on the platform is accosted by two blonde girls who climb out to say, Excuse me is there a late-night shop nearby? “Here? I doubt it. What do you need?” “Oh. We only wanted to buy some water.” “But this is great – look!” Opening his pack. “I have gallons of water. I made a bet with my friend that I couldn’t sell all this water before dawn. One euro per bottle. And would you like this free magazine?”

    We lean our bikes up against each other and fumble at the ticket machine. We also buy water. We also decline the free magazine. It is one in the morning: yet again the first morning of the world. I slump down in a corner seat and with tiredness and satiety am almost swooning. I am thinking of the tall trees high above the tipi, whispering night sounds to themselves, the voices of the party adult and dark, the eyrie on its grassy rise, the sleeping child lost in no doubt the safest, nicest feeling in all the world tonight. Under my seat the pulsation of the train’s workings begins to climb, all doors are wide open still, and the glass breeze fills the cabin with freshness as if it were light, again and again, and then again and again.

  • blue last

    The sun is shining over Berlin today and I feel so glad of the blue it lights. All too soon it will be dark all the time, a world half-awake, candles staining fogged daylight windows and all the birds have flown except for ducks, pigeons, sparrows, swans. I wonder how it feels in the heart of a tiny brown bird, to cock your head on the grass and study the inner knowing that will bring you sweeping up into the slipstream to sail south, a sailing that’s more a machine, a relentless effort, the seamed world a faraway town under your belly feathers and your dream map: that you’re on the right path, that you have twelve days’ further of flying to go, eleven, eight, five, three. Imagine the chatter when everyone gets there first. Imagine the mournful little spaces here and there in the loud crowd of trees where one voice or another bird’s is missing, deleted by accidental death during the year or maybe simply falling out of the sky on the way over. Plummet. All labouring down the round world to beat the icy creep of winter, that consumes everything edible and buries all the seeds.

    Birds know Berlin only in the sun. In Switzerland climbing a mountainside by steep red rail with its leather seats my friend said to me, in the dim clatter of the neck bells wooden-tongued and serene, the farmer can tell – if one of his cows is missing – he hears it from the herd in their song. Penguins find their young among twenty thousand birds all milling, every one screaming. I will search all winter for the one whose voice is silenced to me, out of my earshot, out of reach, a sweet subject I cannot leave alone like a sore tooth, a tree falling, a shot out of frame.

  • good wipe ratio

    Feeling a bit unsettled and displaced today in unfamiliar Berlin humidity and the eventual but sudden storm, I got into a conversation with my love about Australia which seems so far away and I feel so denuded of it. I got out photos of my little cat and began to paw over them. Outside his big windows the thunder was rolling long, loud, and distant. I said how it’s so hard to imagine being back in Brisbane or Melbourne right now. He said how he sometimes wonders could he ever settle in Australia at all. “It’s the wipe. Especially the wipe of your government.” After a few seconds’ freefall I worked out this meant the vibe. It’s your vibe, Australia.

  • cold but sweet

    Finally experienced the piercing joy of eating ice-cream in the freezing cold, I always used to wonder why people would do that. But tonight I walked into this swanky ice-cream bar where the guy had just taken all the plastic rims off the deep buckets, presumably to wash them, and he was puzzling over putting them back each in its right place. I said, “Do you just take them off sometimes and put them back all different, then, just to confuse people?” And he gave me his slow, shy smile. “…No,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “No,” I said, fondly, “because that would be silly.” Only I think I said “weird” or “freaky” because I always think “komisch” is going to mean “comical” then I remember it doesn’t. He didn’t take it amiss, thank god. There is not enough room in a passing pleasantry to say, I didn’t mean that as a passive-aggressive attack, it just came out wrong because my German is faulty. He had a service-smile and then a shyer, boyhood smile which he gave out only sparingly, from under the shelf of his brows. That was the one I remembered and will carry, which slightly alters everything. We’re in this world together! Each of us, gazing out, going: Wow, far out. We exchanged a look which acknowledged this. So then he gave me my ice-cream cone wrapped in a serviette and I ate it walking home in the cold, cold wind.

  • when the snow

    The dog and I went out for a late night walk. The rest of the world is his toilet. It is snowing! It must have been snowing now several hours. The purity general, all over Ireland.

    I walked along the still, dark canal following his trail and we passed not a single person. The unbroken white page of the path, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and now. Walking gingerly, in my ugg boots and pajamas. Snow fell in my hair and lit its tangles, snow fell into the hood of my coat. I scraped a handful an arm-length long of snow, showing the black German soil underneath. I hurled a snowball at a tree, black tree, the world a silent movie.

    On the black water white swans lay like popcorn milling and distinct in the perfect night. The trees overhanging the water were rendered all postcard-immaculate in snow’s quietude, every branch of every tree the chosen branch of the chosen tree. Oh, the perfection of freshly-laid snow. A swan sneezing three hawking gasps under the stone-arch bridge sounded like a car that’s reluctant to start. Swandom: it isn’t all elegance. But they swim silently and sleep in a coil, wreath of snow, and the snow unlike rain falls so quietly. It is a powder and a liquid. You can harvest it, solid one moment then gone, on a night walk where everything’s blessed by the freeing fresh cold and the silent houses stand like mirages. Hold back your head, hold out your hand. After we turned at the corner I lipped up several little swanlings morsels of snow-white snow off the greensteel spikes guarding the soft white stone church. I thought, this snow is heilige snow.

    A Swedish friend had come by earlier in the night and said, lounging back on his chair, your apartment is like a little boat. It has big white windows and outside no lights, you see only the stars. We came in after midnight from the white world without and set sail once more into silence of unending black water, the vast night, the sea of tranquility. Blessed honeyside of the moon. Winter has arrived at last and like the Spring rains in the steaming tropics it brings with it privacy, silences, long dark salty solitudes. I am a dormant seed tucked in my blankets and this tiny ferry still crossing the water, a little, led barge.