Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: emotion

  • beautiful is who you are

    I came to visit a Ghanaian friend who runs a very tiny, very humble business. When he had no customers he came and sat down. He saw tears in my eyes and leaned forward to plant his hands flat on the table and make me hear. He said: Cathoel, the strongest woman I’ve ever met.

    We sat by the big tree with the sky drowning our heads and he said, I don’t want to see you cry like that. The rainy season has started at last and due to climate catastrophe, it is months late. I love the rains. I told my friend, it is a luxury to cry. I am many miles from home and to be able to show such strong emotion and not have to hide it from someone, thank you for this gift. He knows I am newly single and the guy who had pursued me many months has turned out to be a fawkes. One thing I cherish about you, he said: one thing I love about you. Open hearted. To look at the world and see its beauty, to want to share that looking. When I sleep, I can’t sleep. I’m always thinking, where is she, is she ok? You are always on my mind. He said, how many people come out this way.

    In Ghana, men come forward as soon as they see any woman unclaimed. All of our friendships turn out to be courtships. The night was withering its breezes all around us and I could feel its slim clouds passing. I began to wonder were we under some kind of spell — the spell of communion, the spell of know each other. You are beautiful, he said, you’re a beautiful woman. I took hold of a plait of my hair and held it. Its smoothness and the fluid stout solidity in my hand. My hair has silver threads like a costly embroidery and like an embroidery they are not real silver. My hair is turning white, I said. No, said my friend, what I mean is: beautiful is who you are. 

    I sat there in silence. You are a beautiful woman, he said, and you will always be what it is. No question about it. I can’t think what other words to use for you.

    Walking home I passed a spot where a local woman with whom I have a fondness was sitting with a group of quiet men. Two of the men were speaking in German, she called me over. He’s not with you this evening? I told her why not. And my friend said, Wow. Well. You need good people around you. She introduced me and I had sweet and intricate exploratory chats with each of her friends in turn. It felt so easy. Sitting under the thin sketch of moon with a big dark tree staining the dark night like a hand. Some women walked by and they greeted each other, I learned the Ewe word for home. Efui. I don’t know how it is spelt but it has a whistle in the f. I stashed it carefully in my modest stock of local words, a few in Ga, a few in Pidgin, a few in Twi.

    The same women walked by more slowly in the opposite direction, one of them had dropped her money and they were prowling the streetside to find it. At our purple plastic table the five of us sat talking. Our conversation was quiet and in four languages, plus Pidgin. One of the men my friend is friends with is a Ghanaian German teacher from the Volta Region who speaks Ga and Ewe and Twi. And I was bathed in the iridescent sense of being among philosophers, not those who use thought to keep life at arm’s length but who make use of conversation in order to swallow it whole, in order to bathe in it and swim right out into it. Conversation is the gift and prejudice of our natural human world. It’s what we’ve lost. It’s what loving relations of any kind regain: a business partnership, a neighbourly friendship, teamwork, collaboration, sharing a bus shelter in the rain. And I was thinking how a marriage is a deeper conversation: that’s what it is. You start talking with some stranger at a party, or at work or in a bookshop, and the two of you just want to keep talking. Before too long it seems your conversation has become precious and it now engrosses kissing, and all the kinds of touching two lovers can invent, which like stories, like songs, are numberless. Your conversation together is interrupted by misunderstanding, or deepened, and interrupted or deepened again with each child and you must now pay attention to the business you have built together, the garden you have grown, the home you tend, the songs you write, the holidays you plan. Sexual closeness is a thread in the conversation and so is sleep. And so is cleaning the house. And one day when you are quiet with age the two of you are going to sit down once more once the business has closed its doors and the children you raised have gone off into their lives, and you’ll resume the intimacy you first started out with, enriched and grown deeper by the years stretched in between.

    You are far out on the wild black sea on the long journey you have built together and wherever you are is always home.

    My three new acquaintance were funny and so interesting I had to keep reaching for my bag to jot things down. The Ewe man insisted he must hear the song in Ewe I had recently recorded and I sang it for him. I said, I have the feeling I maybe sound like an Ewe who has had a stroke, or a little bit drunk. No, he said, judicious and slow: I’ve never heard anyone get so close. And then he tipped his head. Is that really all your hair? I had loosened the elastic and released it like a thick fur collar too heavy to wear during the day. I grabbed a handful of it and tugged my head sideways: Yes. I grew it all myself, in my own head.

    The third man was older and a journalist. He had travelled. Now he was recently retired. He told me, I don’t know what I am going to do now but I know there’s something, and I keep searching for it. I thought of everything I have encountered in Ghana and how I could never have known any of it before I first arrived. So I said, why not just wait to see what comes. Let it emerge. You cannot know it til it arrives. He said, I don’t know how it will arrive when I am sleeping all the time. And I said, napping is perfect for awaiting insight. Because in each new day you get several of those littoral dream times when you’re half woken and your deeper mind can speak to you. Your wild mind will seed ideas you yourself cannot conceive of and let you loose into the radiant last adjunct of your life. Yes! he said. He grabbed my hand and raised it like a trophy we had won. You are a natural conversationalist, my Australian friend! You, too, I said, rejoicing. He called our friend over and in her floral dress she came, riding on her big haunches, all woman and then some. The man set my hand down as carefully as though it were blown glass. My friend sat down and settled her skirt around her knees and he sat back and opened his arms. He was smiling. In any group of people, he said: Cathoel is going to be the heart. 

  • our neighbour grief

    Coming past the apartment below me I heard from the stairs the unmistakeable noises of grief.

    Fresh, recent, still shocking grief. It was new, and she was pleading with him. I stood hesitating on the steps. He had just delivered some devastating blow and her voice rose and I heard how clearly everyone must have heard me, all this year while I’ve been grieving.

    I could hear how it hadn’t quite sunk in, she still sounded like it might all go away, if she could reason with him – with death. With Fate. Oh, denial. Your friendly, obtuse embrace, like a bear hug from a family member we don’t quite know well enough and aren’t comfortable with.

    It is autumn and I pass a tree which seems always to be filled with birds. This singing tree is in the street where my former lover lives and which I pass down every week on my way to life drawing. I showed him the tree one day, five years back when we were courting, and remarked what good fortune it made to have a pretty, mop-headed tree shaking its tresses in your own street. “I’ve just never seen it,” he said, looking blankly at the coffee shop beside it where he bought his coffee every morning on his walk.

    That love is in the past now which is the natural goal of everything we have and are. I kept pedalling and a man with golden hair flopping over his face said, Careful there. Your skirt is in the spokes. “That is so love from you,” I said, using the German formulation and the Berlin-informal friendly ‘you’. And he went on with his guitar strapped to his back and then another man passed, riding with his hands folded in the pits under his shoulders and whistling.

    That night I tidied til everything in my house was sweet and in its good order. I chased down the characteristic daddy long legs of my own hair which dance around the corner of any house I ever live in, collecting fragments of dust and leaves which have dropped from the ferns as they dry. I ran a bath, which entails literally running – back and forth with saucepans and kettles filled with hot water from the stovetop to fill the tub. I whipped by hand a stiff batch of Dutch peperkoek, a spiced pepper cake whose batter is so thick you have to drag it with pastry hooks, if you have them. I battered the cardamom pods, the peppercorns, the anise stars, the cloves and the ginger with my pestle and later when I’d subsided into the brimming bath, my legs disappearing in the steam, I rolled fingerwads of peperkoek mix in my mouth thoughtfully, the raw batter, and the spicy sharpness had such fire it stung the insides of my cheeks and my tongue. Outside, the griefs of the world carry on and roll over us as they inevitably will. I’ve had griefs of my own, this year and last year and other times, continuous at some times like the waves that slap the incoming water traffic of the tide as they recede. But in my bathtub there were only the gentlest and the smallest waves, as the world slowly sunk to salt and storms for miles all around.

    For Alison Lambert and her son

  • the two languages of dream

    I went to a strange and interesting event which was sentimental and yet truthful and moving. Afterwards we stood around in tiny groups and two men who had spoken out about crying in public put their heads together and let their voices drop low. A woman who is four weeks fresh in Berlin said to me, “What do you do?” And I answered, like I always answer, “I write ~ ” and then wondered, as I always wonder, how to best finish that sentence. ” ~ poetry and jazz,” I said, and she said, peerlessly, “Oh! But those are two such beautiful languages.”

  • jazz bar, balconies, bikers, busker, moth, Madrid

    The moth which landed in the glossy black curls of a woman sitting on the Metro so lightly and delicately without her noticing, and which spread its dun linen wings like opera skirts to reveal the sheer, white gauze underneath. The two boys who jumped on and played joyously, their guitars facing belly to belly. The long, arching trees filling curving streets with greenery and palpably articulating the breeze into soft whistles and dim spirit presences, into a welcoming and retired song, almost a language. The man and woman whose voices caught my attention from above and whose conversation diagonally across from his first floor balcony to hers on the third seemed frank and gossipy, reflective, unhurried. The jazz bar with windows open right onto the street and spilling glorious plants, which served gin and tonic in round-bellied goblets with surprisingly sweet, chewy, nutlike juniper berries bobbing against the cubes. The lovely dog opposite, above the antiquarian bookshop, who stands on the balcony and gazes up and down the street with such a mournfully intent expression; the man playing a baby grand under a white cloth in his open window and gesturing to his colleague, playing violin, and the crowd of silent witnesses standing with their phones and faces raised on the curving road underneath. The security guard reading a volume of poetry on the underground, so intent he almost missed his stop. The three tiny ladies chatting loudly and volubly on the train who parted with light, smacking kisses at Nuevos Ministerios. The BMX bikers who practice outside the opera house every day, every day, waiting their turn and daring each concrete bench and set of steps to rout them like ballet dancers swimming far out to sea. The low doorways and Metro tunnels against which my sweetheart has to watch his head. The expressiveness of public life with a girl flying into a passion of sobs at the post office counter, a woman crying openly as she was talking on her phone walking through a crowded restaurant district at lunch time. The yoghurts brewed in little glass pots desde 1992 which we top with strawberries, blueberries, bananas; the milk section of the supermarket which is on shelves unrefrigerated because everybody likes powerfully adulterated longlife milk yet luscious, unpasteurised, handmade yoghurt. The quiet, hot siesta hours when shops are barred and windows shuttered and the Metro crammed to the gills. The people who gaze up so curiously, so unjudgingly, at me and my two metre tall lover as we bow our heads to enter the train. The busker in orange top hat who tied his dog to the railings and turned aside into a shop window to tune his guitar. The little backstreet shops which build guitars and the man with his cardboard box desk on the shopping street who carves crosses out of two sticks and binds them together to sell, one after another, he was here at Easter and he is still here now, filling the paving creases with whittled shavings as though there can never be enough crosses in the world and he must fill the lack.