Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: community

  • today

    Today in Berlin I found a hand-blown wine bottle so beautiful I had to pick it up to carry home. I saw an elder descending the stairs from a sushi bar painfully and slowly. He crossed the pavement, leaning on his stick. To my surprise he came up to a bicycle and dropped his satchel in its basket. His hands must have been trembling as it took him some time to thread the walking stick diagonally through the carrier at the back. He set off walking, slowly and painfully, pushing his bike and I thought: ah. Perhaps he uses that as a kind of walker, perhaps he’s not willing to face yet that he needs support. But I was absolutely wrong. At the roadside he stepped gingerly over the crossbar and set off, turning uphill within a few yards and pedalling slowly but steadily home.

    I saw a busker on the markets who had attracted a little, attentive crowd. He sang Rocket Man and people clapped. Then he said, This next song is one of my own, and that’s when everybody began to disperse and turn away. In the crowd was a man in his seventies huge in a wheelchair who was wearing a kind of childhood dress-up box version of a Native American feathered headdress. He was tapping his scaly, swollen foot. Riding home I passed a bride, in her ivory tower of gown, sitting at a trestle table on the roadside with three blokes casually dressed in black. The four of them were laughing and opening two flat boxes of pizza. I saw a biker couple lounging over beers and she had the heel of her cuban heeled boot raked up at shoulder height on the railing.

  • hand to hand

    I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought of the writer friend whose multilingual office reverts from “Tom,” “Iris,” “Nancy” etc in English to “Herr Geltrausch, Frau Petersilie, Fräulein Kartoffelpuder” when they switch to German again.

    I am learning, with reluctance, the kinds of boring German words which mean “cancellation fee” and “referral” and “health insurance.” She measured the ring finger whose persistent swelling since it was ‘ausgekugelt’, that is, the marble popped out – dislocated – in Brisbane in July, makes it difficult to bend and refrained from making the insensitive joke other hand therapists have made, which is that if I want to marry I will have to wear the ring on my thumb.

    She asked what do I do, and I told her, I used to play guitar, and we both looked down at the swollen sore knuckle and I started to cry. Germans are often so compassionate. But they’re formal. In the waiting room a special chair for children was piled with comical stuffed animals, each in its own way an expressive beast. The sun shone through the window like the first day of Spring. It is cold but the ice cream shops have opened and as I walked home I passed junk shops which have laid out their junk for the first time since September. In the waiting room of the physiotherapist practice numerous framed notices began, formally, “Very Honoured Patients and Patientesses…” then invited us to help ourselves to coffee and tea, therapeutic toys and basins of lentils to sift through, heat pads and cold pads, filtered water, and biscuits.

  • welcome, Auntie

    I’ve joined a Facebook group which posts pictures of people’s dogs. The rules are long and repetitive: only dog pics and pics of dogs being doggish and cute: no lost dog posts, no questions about dog food… just hounds.

    In the last week this group has taught me all kinds of new vocabulary. Boop is the thought dogs have when they come up and touch you with their nose. A blep is where they stick out their tongue a little bit; a mlem is when they stick their tongue out further. Well today an older lady posted in public in the group, “Auntie! You are now part of this dog group. Please enjoy the dogs’ cute little antics!”

    Within seconds a woman had come along to comment, gently, “Maybe just send her a private message.” I commented, Hi, Auntie! and my comment now has 40 likes. Meanwhile a thread of joyous appreciation has unravelled, so divine: 460 likes and over a hundred people have posted pictures of their dogs for Auntie. One is of a labrador gambolling toward the camera and it says “Running to say hello to Auntie.” “This is Cecil, he says Hi Auntie.” “Welcome, Auntie!” One man wrote, “Now we are all Auntie’s Nieces and Nephews” and attracted a trail of love hearts under his comment. In between people are tagging their friends and coming back to the thread to muse OMG so pure! This thread! Those comments, tho. Sometimes I truly adore you, social medina.

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • Department of Honour

    I just acquired the most beautiful new German word. We are discussing privilege and a new acquaintance says he has to do something ehrenamtlich – oh, how divine, can ‘ehrenamtlich’ mean ‘voluntary’? An ‘Amt’ is a bureau, government department or office. But ‘Ehre’ means honour.

    Germany is overrun with Amts. Ordinarily they sound faintly menacing: the Ordnungsamt, Department of Order, takes care of ticketing people’s unlicensed dogs, illegal parking &c: a histrionic graffito in the local drug park screeches, in orange, Ordungsamt = Terror!!. Online I find a website called Ehrenamt Deutschland, which offers a definition: honourable offices can be anything which is performed “freiwillig, gemeinwohlorientiert und unentgeltlich,” that is, anything that is pursued of one’s own free will, is oriented towards the common good, and is unpaid. The formality makes it sound almost stultifying but there is all this generosity and warmth beating away underneath.

    As Australia turns itself into a vast gulag for imprisoning children, and other countries up and down the escape corridor into Europe close and razor wire their borders, Berliners are opening refugee cafes, holding garage sales and donating food, organising ‘Asylum Seeker Airbnb’ to help match people’s spare rooms with exhausted new arrivals. I find it so moving to think that by teaching German once a week in the giant refugee camp that was once the old Tempelhof airport, this Berliner becomes part of the Department of Honour.

  • what ate New York

    The film poster that has Godzilla tearing up great chunks of the city and eating alive New York City should have been a giant Pacman, I think. For technology has eaten New York. And not only New York: Copenhagen, Madrid, Berlin: these are cities where I have witnessed this carnage, sinister and almost silent. We noticed it on the plane, a ride through the sky which has transformed from what was a quiet space, a time of dreaming and half-sleep, into a wilderness of seatback screens. Everything flickers. People feed themselves perpetual stimulation by the handful, like a supersized bucket of chips. As soon as we land out come the phones. Soon the aisles are crammed with people stooping under the bulkhead and standing over each other, so intense is their desire to be free of the traveling life and meet with the destination city, yet all have pulled out small devices and are keenly, yet dutifully scrolling. Oh, the dullness, pervasive and wee. Why travel five thousand miles through the ferocious universe only to read up on what’s happening at home? Instantly to rejoin the same long conversations we were wrapped in on our own soft couch.

    We drag our cases to the A Train. My heart is pounding. This line is the subject of so much damn jazz. But when we get inside and the familiar orange seats are filled with black folks, every one of them inimicable, cool, and beautiful, the place proves to have changed somewhat since 2011. The suddenness of these changes and that nobody notices sometimes makes me despair and grieve. I miss my community, who have turned away from each other. Now even in the most exciting city anywhere, every third person is staring down into their lap, hung over the miniature news from elsewhere.

    Used to be I was the annoying or crazy one, preoccupied and dreaming in a hyperalerted world, clogging up the pavement as I stopped short to stare upwards, to notice detail or jot things down, writing as I walked, holding my breath, my train of thought, my pen. Now I’m the passenger in everybody else’s aquarium world. In the street, people scroll as they stroll. City that never sleeps seems halfawake. And it’s all so iconic. The subway car that looks like every movie scene, the puddles and paddocks of outermost Thingie Island where the airport lies marshily. The Rockaways, Blvd and Ave. “We are passing under the East River,” I report. “We are passing under the World Trade Center. A lot of people died here,” reading the map, my eyes filling with sentimental tears. “True,” says my companion, “and then their friends went out and slaughtered many, many, many times more around the world.” After an hour of train travel, after nine hours of airplane travel, after an hour of bus travel in Berlin we come up out of the subway station at last, at 42nd Street, and the noise – the smell of French fries and traffic and metallic dust – the people and the way they pass, the hoardings, the sidewalks, the way they hold themselves – both of us standing their marooned by suitcases, we each burst into tears separately and hug across our baggage.

    The lights, cameras, action are all around. We drift through the traffic of souls, uncounting. This explicit town, alive in all our dreams, overwhelms with its gross drama and chaotic splendour and decay, while at the same time it speaks to everyone individually. We find the New York Times, Dean and Delucas, the cafe. We find my friend, her black hair everywhere and her familiarity so moving. Even she, an artist, a true lifelong artist, ravels her phone at every opportunity. We buy burgers and a jar of beer, at the counter I worry we are taking too long to order and look up. There she is, hunched over her phone, as thought it were a knot in her hair she is unable to stop from worrying and untangling. Oh New York! Oh humanity! Come back to me! I miss the dreaming, the uncertainty, the hesitation and lostness. This striving, blaring, rushing, overstimulated community premium among the anthills we have built over the world is a place I experience through the dreaming comb, the honeycomb, of sweet nature, and the wild. Within eight stops of the Howard Beach station where the airport train meets the A train I have given up my seat to a pregnant lady and he’s given up his to an elder woman who rewards him with a sweet seamed smile, we’ve admired the pretty girl with green-tinged hair who has filed her front teeth into sharp vampiric points, I’ve passed on the name of an excellent book to a women who accepted my scribbled note and stashed it in her pocket, have told four people how beautiful they are, the tiny lady whose friend took his seat has paused at her stop, the stop before ours, to say, You have a nice day, now, and the beautiful man whose face was so somber and cold has smiled, shyly and ironically, when I said as he got off, You are a really beautiful man and I hope you have a really beautiful life. He said, drawlingly, Thank you. I love him.

  • by appearance

    A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who’s been called too big all of his life. I’d say 6’5″ or 6″. As we both sat down on opposite benches he pulled out a book and started to read. I was reading, too, in fact, hearteningly, several books appeared on that ride but the truth is I spent as much time stealing covert glances as concentrating on Mary Stuart’s court. This man was dressed in giant red sneakers, a sloppy, comfortable tracksuit, baseball cap. He was black. In America I imagine he’d have been in danger of being shot for the crime of Being Tall Whilst Black. The expression of gentleness on his face and the shy way he held his head, his utter concentration on the page, made me love him. The temptation to go up and say, Excuse me, you just have such a beautiful, gentle spirit I just wanted to say hello, was very strong. Only respect for his reading and his solitude prevented me interrupting him as I got off. And I didn’t want to make him speak out about himself in front of all those people when he was staying behind and riding further, and I was leaving: it seems aggressive, it would have made him conspicuous in a lifetime where clearly conspicuousness had been a burden. I would so have loved to know what he was reading.

  • this song’s about

    Someone was asking for songwriting ideas and I came up with these. Ideas are easy, it’s the completion that stings.

    Pushing your bicycle past a house where a particular song is playing.

    Seeing a cloud in the shape of something you love, or fear.

    A leaf falls in front of your feet and it makes a sound that reminds you of…

    Waiting at the traffic lights I thought I saw you but….

    The shadow of a church falls into the street, is godliness tipping into traffic?

    Our Prime Minister tours the world like a beauty queen clutching his inadequate speech. Insulting people is his superpower.

    Why we all love the Dalai Lama and conflate him with David Attenborough.

    Imagine being Brad Pitt’s brother, “the homely one.”

  • people’s republic of woodford

    Woodford. What I forgot is that it is less of a festival, more of a place. Wherever you go and whomever you see, the valley grounds hold everyone up to the sky and in the natural amphitheatre right up back the venerable trees stand watch. It must be ten years since I was there, the farm is becoming a forest. I looked for the three trees I have planted and could not, as ever, recognize them though I know which creek they bed. People streamed past dressed as butterflies, faeries, warlocks, saggy pyjama case bears, acrobats. A girl in a hammock turned her head and smiled the slowest smile. Children who had just learned a skill in a workshop busked it. Last time I was on this land was for the Dreaming, a festival of indigenous cultures from around the world. That was in winter and only lasted a few seasons of massive fire pits attended by volunteers. My MCing friend said It’s a good day to come, the dust has settled yet it’s not actually raining. At the gate I was nervous, a reflex response from the old days when I always had to perform. This was my first festival as a punter. The ease! We saw in the year on a hillside opposite a booming stage spilling execrable local dub (“all the people are here & the people are grooving, we got the music and the music is soothing”) and then, because someone had decided they would book a Hogmanay theme, blithering Scottish dance music. I have inherited Scottish blood but musically, no Scottish soul. It struck me as comical: imagine the Scottish composers composing this music: they’d have been saying to themselves, Well, we’ve got the solid wall of screeching bagpipes. But it’s just not screechy enough. I know! Let’s add in a screechy fiddle or two! And wait, we can also have screeching penny whistles. It’ll be magic!

    Quiet on the hillside soaking in the presence of the large, grave, lit trees I was glad when a girl came on and announced, “I’m here to calm you down.” She sang a lovely slow ballad and then everybody across the whole site lit candles and stood or sat together in a three minutes’ silence. I stared into my candle and cried, in silence. The wax burned down leaving little fiery blobs on my palm and I peeled them off, in silence. The flickering silence swept all down the hill and you could hear and more, feel it extended over everybody, not one person broke trust to bellow Happy New Year, everybody “set their intention” as the girl handing out tiny turreted birthday candles had advised and I could feel the piety, the wishes of a dozen thousand all resembling one another. Afterwards the band invited yet more people on stage and in front everybody danced. The set-up between the acts was filled with tap-dancers. Body percussionists led the crowd: “Peace and rhythms!” A bare-chested boy tumbled down the hill turning somersault after somersault. A man climbed up past us, almost bent double from the gradient, dressed in a suit made of light bulbs. Five girls stripped off their clothes and danced naked under the new moon, repelling with raised hands the lit LED necklaces with which an infatuated boy wanted to garland them. The grass was filled with tiny creatures biting and climbing, we were barefoot like the moon. The t-shirt I coveted on a bamboo stall had a tiny figure in silhouette standing with a walking stock, head thrown back, among the giant trees that here surrounded us like immense quiet candles and its legend ran along the ground, legend like a snake, Respect Your Elders. Coming down from a noisy dawn in a noisy trail of irreverent pilgrims we rounded a corner and a really drunk man coming uphill said, beholding our two great heights (“Oh look! A giant!”), “Oh. Wow.” Then he folded us into a big drunken hug, a kind of Come here, you, and the three of us murmured into each other’s shoulders “Happy New Year. Yes, You too. Have a good one. Have a great one.”

     

  • new year’s stain

    I was uncomfortable at Woodford to hear the Tibetan monks who had been hired to chant the festival’s “Dawn Ceremony”, alongside the thrilling singing of Tenzin Choegyal, being largely ignored or at best treated as background muzak while many people chatted and caught up, hugged loudly and with much syrupy performance, anointed one another with detergent bubbles and photographed one another. As the sun slowly rose and Tibrogargan was revealed giving the eternal thumb to the sky I wondered whether any other performers of the 2000 who comprised this six-day event would have been treated so rudely. Drunken revellers walked and stood in front of seated and even meditating patrons just in time to catch the peak moment – the sun’s disk coming up over the horizon – and with no sense of quietude or of having intruded on a gathering that had formed hours earlier. The main aim seemed to be to get a good seat. I kept thinking, people have no sense of the sacred. Then after a while I began to marvel that even the most oblivious people, even people who will ensconce themselves right next door to non-smokers and then light up, even those who call across a quiet crowd to their friends and then unfold crackling groundsheets right in the “front row”, really do have some sense of the sacred, however deteriorated – otherwise why would they be there? why not stay on at the Pineapple and dance some more? why not go home to their tent and fill the campground with dubstep? We were all drawn to that hillside to see in the year. We were all there to observe something – but I had a feeling that something was more observant than us.