Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Europe

  • the c-u- in court

    Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into a bag and thrust it at me, saying, One Euro. A little further on, a stall of organic produce, flecked apples and satisfyingly plump brown mushrooms. “I’d like 400g of those please and a lemon and a….” Reaching into my stash of German words I realized I’d no idea what is the collective noun for leaves of spinach. A bunch? A bouquet? A posy? I can’t say any of these things in German. “… a piece of spinach, please.” She was already stacking it into the bag I had handed her. “A piece! I like that.” “How would you normally say it?” “Ah, well… I’d like some of that spinach, or a little of your spinach, or a bag of spinach… But I like ‘piece.’”

    In German piece and peace are different sounds but I do love the way they have named their cemeteries: literally the resting place, “the peace court.” Court as in shared space: courtyard. So I guess höflich (polite) means really, courtly. God… that was exhausting. But at least I have a mountain of strawberries to fill my bath.

  • olivewood

    On the market I bought a tiny chopping block made from olive wood. It’s dense and silky and only a little larger than my spread hand. I was about to hand over the money when he said, Some of the trees are 500 years old! How is that a selling point? My eyes filled with tears. 500 years? Yet someone’s hacked it down to chop onions on?

    The guy explained. When the tree stops fruiting. They plant a new tree. So the old one. Has to go. A few stalls later I bought a bottle of cloudy oil pressed from some other olive tree. In a furniture store in Adelaide my friend and I found foldable patio settings carved out of ‘plantation teak.’ Teak too takes hundreds of years to mature. I remember how bleakly we marvelled at it: What prescient person realized, half a millenium back, that one day we would need stands of teak? Why is there not a statue to this innovative forester on every town square and in every school?

     

  • knifegold

    An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks.

    One was called Coia and the other something even more beautiful which I forget. They stood there in their pigtailed dreads and ludicrously cute knotty woollen hats, relaxed with hands in pockets, offering one carrot after another so I could slice and scrape and find out all the properties of the knives laid out like eyeless sharks on the flowered cloth. Thinner, lighter blades go through things easily and are best for small vegetables and watery stuff (like fruit). Denser blades suit heavier applications like meat and potatoes and bone. You can sharpen your blade every six months or so on the underside of a ceramic plate, and Coia demonstrated for me what the sound should be like (a kind of tabla whoomph). A few stalls along the Turkish keycutter had a whompa-slupf, whompa-slupf going from behind his counter somewhere and I stopped to ask is that music? Or is it a machinery.

    Turns out it’s a machinery. But it had this sort of repetitive organic quality like two taps dripping at a sink that made me want to record a sample and build something over the top of it. Key music, knife music. Market friendships. Golden lights.

     

     

  • like lamps

    like lamps

    Just now walking down the street the most miraculous small experience. It’s growing dark and the shop windows glow like lamps. I came out of a side street full of bars and cafes onto a shopping strip thronged with parcels. Among the clots and clumps of other people approaching from the opposite direction I met eyes with 10, 12, fifteen, twenty strangers: we each of us looked into each other seriously, momentarily: and it felt like we exchanged between us something palpable. Sometimes the early dark and gloomy days here crush me unbearably. Other times it feels like the civilisation that has built itself here and endured and spawned so many writers, so much beauty, so much music and art, says: we have woven something here. We light our lanterns as the cold closes in. We endure and turn our endurance into a survival and our survival into a flourishing life. We defy you, winter! We defy you, death! We defy you, lack of meaning!

    Even as I think this I am wondering, too: is it not in fact death, and decay, and winter, that give meaning to life, and evolution, and spring? Seems like it is and I am only too frightened within my own mortal mind to see it.

    h20 HoL cobbles puddle copper