Berliner to Brisbaner, who has urged him to cross against the lights, at peak hour, right in the middle of the city: Ah no thanks. I don’t like jail walking. Not with so many police around.
Brisbaner: (folds her face into his shirt feeling the weakness of language adoration take hold.)
“I’m not racist or anything, but… [racist remark]”
vs: “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [women are people too.]”
Why is it still embedded in our use of language that we need to apologize for opposing hatred of women the same way we need to apologize for hating people of other races?
Are ignorance & arrogance the same thing? I think they are. My friend and I argue. He says, ignorance goes inside, arrogance goes towards the outside. Yes I say; but as you destroy your ignorance, as you realize we are all connected and part of one another, it becomes impossible to be arrogant. (Arrogantly I am thinking: I’m not arrogant!) Well but then, he says, you become cynical. And then… you become sarcastic. I’m not cynical, I remind him (arrogantly). No, he says: you’re not. And you’re not ignorant.
I am preening. But! he suddenly realises: you are far more arrogant than me! Yes, I say proudly, it’s true, I am. I’m a horrible snob. You have Adelbrain, he says, synthesising a new German-English compound: aristocrat’s brain. I have no money and come from a family of farmers but I realise: this is true. Leaving the room he says over his shoulder: No. You’re not arrogant. You’re just a queen. Perching four splayed fingers over his breastbone like an insect walking on an upright wall of water he explains: Birthright.
Queen Latifah, I have heard, calls herself so because she believes every woman is a queen. Similarly I began in my 20s signing my name Cathoel Shero, having made up the word ‘shero’ to serve as an equal opposite to ‘hero.’ Here’s a cartoon I made for it in 1999. In my mind I was imagining every woman signing herself Sarah, Blessed, Dewi, Dagmar Shero: a race of super women. I thought by recognising the dignity in ourselves and calling it out, being unafraid of our strength, we could call up men all around us to be heroes. Kings and princes. Titles would be common as muck. We’d all be happy as pigs in straw castles. My theory fell to pieces when I discovered Oprah Winfrey had invented the same word around the same time and instead of feeling pleased ~ the light is rising! ~ I was annoyed. This self-centring response felt not very sheroic; not very princely. But I like to be queen of my own inner world and I like that other people are king and queen of theirs.
A German friend trying to understand a phone call from a Polish colleague just asked me could I stop typing… as I was rattling away at a fine old pace and it was very distracting. I learned to type on an old manual typewriter where you had to exert actual pressure to get the keys to move… so my typing is, he has said, like “a herd of gazelle.” Afterwards he apologized, in faulty idiom. “I didn’t mean to smoosh-smoosh you.” “Ah it’s ok. You can shush-shush me. I know I get overexcited, writing.”
On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”
Sauntered past the op shop where I bought some stuff yesterday, in the sun this afternoon, whilst wearing most of it. A lovely lady with white winged arms and white winged cheeks (a Twenties bob) was sitting out the front, resting and sunning herself. She showed me by gestures and impenetrable dialect, O! You look good in that… thing.
That Thing is a cute pair of dark denim dungarees I found in the half-price pile, when it finally got too hot for the winter layers I brought from Melbourne in November. In English I told her, Thank you! Actually I bought these from you guys yesterday!
Ok! she said, fanning herself. And this, I told her, tugging at my skintight navy and white striped top underneath. Cool huh?
Ok! she nodded, plucked at the fabric, smiled. Is pretty! Very good!
See I’ve been travelling – from Australia – for so long now…. I only have winter clothes. I showed her my feet. See my winter boots? See? My winter socks?
Ah! she said, ok! I see! Is very good!
I love the church ladies. In Brisbane I lived round the corner from an oppie which was run by the Uniting Church and had a genius for fastening on the unlikeliest stuff to price very high (suitcase in the window like a large sucked caramel, its sign saying “$20. No less. VINYL.”) It was staffed by a wonderful variety of ladies and I wished every one of them could be my grandmother.
Robert Peston’s preface to Sian Busby’s posthumously published last novel, as quoted in The Guardian. He transcribed the novel from her notes after his non-smoking wife had died of lung cancer. “My motive was selfish: I wanted to keep talking to her. I still do.”
He writes: “Life became punctuated by terrible shocks and emergencies. Yet those who met her at pretty much any point in this ordeal encountered the Sian they had always known: solicitous, supportive, witty, insightful, unselfish. The cancer did not haunt us. If anything, it helped us understand what matters in life: family, first and foremost; work that fulfils; friends, beauty and fun.”
As I read his words it occurs to me everything he values most highly in the face of bereavement is love. Even beauty is a form of love: isn’t it? A mechanism for our appreciation? “Work that fulfils” is our service to the world, as well as to our own character, daily life, and development. Love is all.
I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? I never correct my friend because every time I hear “this cost me almost fifty bugs” it makes me so happy.
