Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: candlelight

  • the narrow rainbow

    So the skies are white, the rooves are grey, the buildings brown and cream… the either dreary or soothing winter pallet of Germany is restful to the imagination. In every cafe, candles flicker. Little pots of gold.

  • I wish I drank more

    Accidentally went into a restaurant for dinner in which I realized too late all the men were wearing suits. I tore off my two layers of wool, hot from walking, and sat there in very shabby jumper with a t-shirt over it which I sleep in, pressing slices of bread into a bowl of olive oil, reading the menu. I felt so tired and overcome by thoughts I could barely read menuese: a first-world problem. My elbows through the sapped weave of my jumper stood on sharp crumbs on the white cloth.

    The waiter was an exhausted but mildly gleaming Woody Allen man with a soft sunken pavlova of hair not quite reaching the centre of his scalp. He brought me wine. I polished the excess oil into my fingernails and admired them by candlelight. At the next table a woman about a decade older than me was unleashing her ribald laugh for the delectation of her companion, even older still. She glanced at me over his shoulder and began to whisper. Her eyes were fixed not on my face but on my peeling jumper, my bony wrists thrust from it like over-plucked hens. “Unglaublich,” she said, “unbelievable.” I am shy and had stood outside the teeming with smiles restaurant for fully five minutes working up the courage to come in. But I let my eyes fix hers to let her know that she’d been understood. She looked away. It was almost fun. I watched her for several minutes while she looked everywhere but at my face. The power one gains by being (sometimes, not always) unafraid to look someone in the eye. The uninterestingness of power except as a kind of parlour trick, or party favour. The banality of parties, at which everyone who’s best dressed can resemble a tricked-out and groomed dog, leashed and booted, with a lampshade on their head.

    I wish I were a bulb, tonight. Either a “Glühbirne” or else the kind that grows under the soil. I wish I were a better dressed kind of human, or that I sometimes combed my hair. I wish I were 21 and radiant. I wish I drank more.

     

  • between the fingers of Fidel Castro

    between the fingers of Fidel Castro

    I know an eighty-year-old cafe where the day passes smooth and coiling as molasses poured out of a dented tin. I sit in the smokers’ room, not because I smoke but because of the candlelight and conversation. Today I stopped at an antiquarian bookshop that has trestle tables out front. A recent conversation reminded me I had never yet read Machiavelli’s The Prince. The bookseller had two copies, an Everyman and a Penguin; two different translators; a quick skim decided me I would buy both, and I carried them to my favourite table and curled up there, thinking if I read these two versions both at once, maybe I’ll be able to triangulate.

    I read very slowly, laying each book face down at the end of a chapter and taking up its companion. Three tall, lanky, and very good-looking men came through in waterproof jackets, carrying boxes and boxes of lettuce and potatoes. Afterwards they sat down at a small table under the pastel portrait of Fidel Castro (cigar) and drank coffee and argued for over an hour. I tried something new off the menu: it’s German food, everything is new. Fidel Castro’s fingers resembled an abstract of a human hand carved from potato. Everything carved from potato. After the War Berliners relied on an American Rosinenbomber (the “raisin bomber”) dropping boxes of foodstuffs and dug up the forest called Tiergarten in order to sow vegetables. I thought of the various cafes I know in Brisbane and wondered how it will feel to adjust. The temperature has plummeted, and isn’t that a most marvellous word: like a fruit yet unripened on the branch, that finally gives in and plunges to the ground. Last night returning from a long forest hike it was perishing, four degrees. I ate my Weisswurst and Brezel and thought about the differences between reading in a cafe full of other people reading, and the dinner experience of last night, in an unreconstituted jazz and blues pub, where the cute barkeep turned down his infestation of immemorial blues and turned on a large white roped-up screen. Oh, God: Tatort. The awful detective show Germans watch as Sunday religion. Somehow the roomful of unstirring people watching a fourteen-year-old girl’s character get raped – the oldest man put his head into his hand, others watched unmoved – was so blinding and so effing awful, we got up and left. That household full of habitual viewers sharing the dirty hot tub of popular TV had somehow less in common than the people crouched in corners at my newly beloved red checked clothed cafe: reading newspapers or, in three cases, books, we were each of us turned away from our commonality but yet reminded me of swimmers foraging deep in the saltiest water, where the sunshine is sweet, where the strands of warmer and colder waters pass over one’s legs caressingly and there is always something further to be discovered. In only the one ocean, in always the one sea.

     

  • to stars

    to stars

    In an unpretentious Italian restaurant where all the pasta had been made by hand, the chatting-family atmosphere fell into something much deeper and richer and darker. A cellist had walked in and in his overcoat sat down on a backless chair in front of the servery and began to play. Something, I don’t know what. He drove his fibres of unholy sound into the great grail of all of us, each of us, like an ochre long-blown off the palm of his hand. I saw the small boy with dark lozenges of eyes climb down from his chair at the corner table in the second room and go to stand, unconsciously in the waiter’s path, his head a jar for the tadpoles of surety this man was making for us. He stood and stood, listening and watching, lost to every other thing. Behind him his parents and their friend kept chatting and only the older, grizzled, quizzical looking man at another table let his gaze rest on the little music lover so fondly, brimming with acceptance, and I let my gaze rest on him in turn and the music rested on all of us, like snow, that spares no needle in the pine forest and lifts its shifting darkness turn to stars.

  • 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. *@,)