Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: freedom

  • kink shaming

    On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.

    As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.

    I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?

    It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.

     

  • May Day, May Day

    Two people made fuck, out on the concreted area in front of the apartments. I recognised the act by her cries. He had her sprawled over a car bonnet with his hand around her throat, and for a few minutes I watched clenching my fists. Were those cries of despair? Is she ok? Do I need to rescue this woman from rape?

    But then she got up and staggered before him for a minute and lifted away her skirts on either side like a ladybird’s tissuey inner wings. The pale curves of her bottom and thighs were perfect with youth, like two slices of soft long pears from a can. She presented to him her hindquarters and bent herself forward with yearning. He drew her back into his lap and then, skewered, she twisted herself round to kiss. Now and again someone walked past them and they simply froze in place, his place just now being immemorial. A couple of girls strolled by with their cell phones lighted and I feared a filming, an aggression, a posting which would attempt to shame, but the girl walking just ahead lifted her phone and continued a conversation without, apparently, noticing the two there who were holding down the fort. He lifted her jumper to cup her breast. It is cold. They rearranged themselves again and she spread herself on her back on the shiny car, her legs like searchlights. Next morning I went down to buy bread, because we are Germans now, and passed the chalked square for a parked car where they had set each other alight. The big sprawling dark car was gone and in its place a tiny blue and silver rechargeable, as though the yelping congress in the night had already borne its fruit.

  • jet laggard

    I wonder if anyone else has trouble adjusting after travel, it would be reassuring to me to hear about it if you have. It’s more than just jet lag. Arriving in Brisbane I was paralysed for days with a kind of deep-down soul sickness that made everything strange. The familiarity made things seem stranger. When I first got to Bangkok six weeks later, on my way back, I felt felled like a tree. Spent two days asking myself why on earth did I want so desperately to come here, where I am a stranger, where I speak only three words of the language, where I know nobody. Then when it came time to leave I cried all the way to the airport, my throat stinging. I had fallen in love with the dense tropical world in the rainy season that is familiar from Jakarta in the lost land of childhood. Berlin unfolds its sweet insouciant self, the guy in the topless gleaming car who drove by awfully slowly, his back-seat passenger a giant stuffed elephant, its velvet trunk resting familiarly on his shoulder. The man trundling past in a wheelchair by shuffling his feet rapidly forward on the ground, a beer stuck lewdly upright between his thighs, tattoos all up the sides of his neck and around under his ears and he was singing in a thick accent, absently to himself as he went past, “I did it… myyyy wayyyyy.” Yet the salty parks and shifting low green German trees hardly reach me, I feel estranged and alienated, the apartment in which no one has now slept for two whole months smells of masonry and dust and I can hardly leave my door, not even when the sun shines, not even when I know this won’t any longer be very often the case and that though a Brisbane winter is a winter in inverted commas I have actually by staying away so long let myself in for the nightmare that makes me want to lie down and cry: a year of continuous winter. My dislocated finger which was unattended two weeks while I was in the tropics has begun to sting so badly it wakes me out of my jet lagged sleep. I wonder if I’ll ever play guitar again. I wonder where I’ll live. I wonder what would have happened to a homebody like me if my folks hadn’t moved me from the town where I was born (Melbourne) to the desert on the far edge of Australia (Dampier) when I was eight months old. I learned to walk there, on the sand, and there is somewhere a picture of me and my Dad walking away from the camera side by side, my hand reaching right up and his reaching from his tall shoulder all the way down so we could hold hands. It was hard to leave him when I left. I felt the tearing in my chest as I stood up and walked away.

  • four years ago today

    Walked into a Turkish convenience store late on Friday night, they sold water pipes as well as a dazzling array of alcohols and sundry sweet snackettes… behind the counter stood a very untall & wizened woman wearing a scarf, her hands on the counter at chest height in front of her, and beside her a large, slightly slavering dog, standing on his back legs with his forepaws folded on the counter. I said to him, “Excuse me. Do you sell yoghurt?” She said to me, “Sie haben eine so schöne Stimme, eine richtig wunderschöne Stimme. Bitte singen Sie weiter.” But I was too self-conscious to keep singing under this barrage of compliments. We talked about the dog and his jolly helpfulness & how tidily & sweetly she kept her shop and then as I was leaving, she called after me, “Keep singing! Always keep singing!”

    ~ beginning of my second month in Berlin, second date. We held hands and took it in turns to walk blindfolded round the city. Later that week I wrote:

    Tomorrow I am moving ~ boldly! ~ into a sublet apartment of my very own, here in Berlin! I was only here for a week but I have staid & staid ~ and so it is the last day in the sweet sunny breakfast room with its big basket of soft-boiled eggs, tucked in a cloth ~ the man who serves coffee came in to clear and I went over to him and touched him on the arm. “I’m moving out tomorrow, and I just wanted to say, thank you for the ~” ~ floundering in my early-morning German like a shallow foaming surf ~ “the service?” he suggested ~ “the um,” I said ~ “the table service?” he wanted to know. “The love,” I said, finally. And then ran away back to my table. Every morning he brings me a pot of hot water & some honey, my life in Berlin has been far cosier since I discovered that chai tea is called “yogi tea” and that you can buy it in bags at a Bio Store.

  • the oliver twist

    I have a friend who teaches piano. Today she said to me, “I have two students now from Australia. And both of them are called Oliver.”

    “Wow,” I said, “how many Australians called Oliver can there really be? There’s only like twenty-five million of us.”

    “Not that many,” she said, “because they’re all over here.”

    “They’re Oliver here,” I realised, making us both laugh, yay me.

    There are so many Australians in Berlin, I hear our accent in the streets. And three of my Berlin friends are Kiwis, which means that one in a million New Zealanders is not only living in Berlin but is within my own personal circle of acquaintance. This seems so astonishing and improbable.

    We were heading towards the door and she held it open for me so that I could carry my bike through. I was thinking of the election in five weeks which will hopefully depose inhumanity in Australia in favour of humanity; and how I hope all these Berliner Australians will get to the booths. I thought about our strange and resonant homelands so far away and as we parted at the foot of the stairs I burst out, “You know, sometimes I kind of get the feeling, like – who’s looking after the place?”

  • don’t shoot

    Jeez, America, stop shooting each other. At least in Australia we only drown refugee babies, jail children, beat young Indigenous men to death in jail cells with phone books.

    I am thinking today of the Albanian security guard who came out of her way to welcome us to the Cloisters, a museum in Tryon Park which seems to have salvaged all the bits of bombed-out churches and cathedrals in Europe that had survived, as splinters, the War to Unending War. We saw the daunting entry price and had retreated to the entrance hall to confer. “We have our tours available in German,” she told my companion, twinklingly. Then, turning to me, the Australian, “I’m not sure we have anything available in your language.”

  • the pickling palace

    The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and then the Friday afternoon traffic will surge up the hill again to carry them away. He says something and she says, “You are fucking kidding me.” “No,” he says, something something. “You’re just making that up!” Her incredulity is a dare. Climb this tree for me and bring that fruit. He says, “No, I’m deadset serious. Anything you like.” One of the other blokes says something and then the girl begins to sing, or chant, like she was at a football game: “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus.” The positive guy sings something over the top of her, harmonizing. He’s making it up. He’s fucking-kidding her. Their verandah falls apart in a seething heap of laughs just as a truck roars down the road. When the noise clears he is saying, aggrieved, “…been doing it all my life.” I know that feeling, I have too. I have just got home from a delicate day of negotiations in my unconscious and as we swept over the bridge with its hanging-lantern streetlights and banners I felt a song unbrew in me. I sang it out the window in handfuls of confetti and as we pulled away from under the biggest fig tree, that the road goes around (the greatest kind of road), I said, to my long-legged companion who was driving, “Did you see that girl on the corner, the beautiful girl, with the guy who’s just so in love with her?” “Yes,” he said, his voice warm as if fond of them. “How she was just standing there in her little purple dress,” I said, “holding the orange flowers he brought her. He’s looking at her so carefully, he’s in love with her every little gesture. She’s not even noticing, telling him something, he’s in love with the way that she says it.” “So is she in love?” he wanted to know. I said, “Could be. But she’s not thinking about it, she is remembering something that happened and telling him. So it was hard to tell.”

    We drove round a sweeping corner prickly with pedestrians. We had watched a giant ibis as it took off from a street sign and flew the length of Charlotte Street, its white wings insignia. The prosperous tropical colonialism and sandstone and big bunches of trees made me feel at home. I wound my seat back and propped my foot out the side window. I said, sentimentally, “Both of them standing there with their bicycles.”

  • supermantra

    We were on the markets when a tiny, white-haired lady came up to my partner and offered him a brochure. “Save Victoria Park!” she said. He is two metres tall. He looked down at her with his arms full of leafy vegetables and said, very gently, in a deep voice, “I will.” “Oh, thank you!” As I watched, her whole body relaxed. She believed him. She laid her hand trustingly on his upper arm. From the juice stall behind us Bob Marley was still singing, One love… One heart, a song he started singing forty-odd years ago and he has not given it up yet. As we drove home we both had that song caught in our heads. I said, “That lady! She looked up at you so sweetly. ‘Oh! It’s Superman!’” He laughed, singing, filling in the lyrics he didn’t know with only a slight hesitation: “One love, one soul…” “One love, one groove…” All the vegetables nodded on the back seat whenever we went over a bump, frondy and inviting and waiting to be sliced for German soup.

  • that lamp

    I have a lamp that is shaped like a shell, was in fact a shell, is a home for a strange and retiring sea creature long now gone. It glows almost red when you plug in the bulb, a beloved’s ear with light behind it. Lately as the days are tropical cold and dim and windy we light the lamps tagsüber. Near the beer factory is a tiny art printer who lays on canvas and on fine rag paper people’s photographs and paintings. We left the lamp on at home and went out. He showed me some of his work. He opened a drawer and let me roll some of the beautiful paper in my hands.

    Nearby is a tucked-in kind of cafe which you can barely see from the road, it is screened. Inside is like a secret fish tank. The chalkboard says You like cake. We make cake. Cake CAKE. We ordered cake. “Eighteen fifty,” said the guy. Cake is expensive. I said, “Now that was a very good year.” “Huh,” he said. We sat down and went over the book I am bringing to print this week: page after page of it, is it still beautiful, does it still hold. You’re looking for the tiny cracks and nail holes that let seep gradually the water. At the far end of the place a handsome man lay back in his chair. Stroking lazily his little device. He didn’t lift his eyes off it. His daughter dressed from head to toe in pink ballerina costume lay in a pile on the concrete playing dreamily with blocks they have stacked down there, singing and rousing on herself. She was in her own world, he was in someone else’s. Two men came into the cafe and I heard the guy recycling my pale joke. “19.90,” he said, “now there’s a good year. You’d be finished school, out into the world…” Behind my back I could almost hear them gazing at him blankly. I felt bad about the failure of the wordplay I’d transmitted, as though I had set him up.

    Later the night turned out fresh and enchanted, so strange, those nights that bring home the spirits from the deep sea and the mountainside. I lay in the hammock between two large trees, watching as the wind rustled and tumbled like cities through surf, down to the bony ground again and again, carrying in itself everything whole and real, everything breathing. This month I don’t know if you’ve noticed but again the full moon was full or albert full for days and days. This always feels like some kind of special benediction to me, as though we have been given a treat, like we have pulled off a trick somehow and gotten away with something.

    I should end there but there is something more to say. You know the night? In the night if you lie in a hammock you are in the air, you’re in the water. I gazed up, mostly with my eyes closed, into the depths of the tree, the sparring webwork of the lazing bed, the night itself drawing its fleece across the stars. It felt like one of those nights you could climb up into, curled as I lay curled, and the night would heal itself round you seamlessly and simply carry you away.

    When I came in my partner called me over to his screen. He loves the new. He wanted to play me a piece of music, piano music. We were silent, listening to the climbing sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, I said, it’s beautiful. He said, “It’s the first piece of music not composed by human~” “What?” I stood up. I think I was shouting. “Why did you play me this? Why did you?” “What’s the matter?” “Why do you show me this stuff?” “I thought it would make you feel good! It’s not scary, it’s just beautiful. Listen how lovely that is.” When someone who understands doesn’t understand: the world is a cyborg desert already. I said, “I can’t take it. I can’t live in a world where machines compose music. I can’t live.” An ache spread inside my chest, despair, hopelessness, rage. Within me I felt the impaired moon, the night, the thoughts of serene pursuit drain like soap scum away. Poke the pearls and they are merely bubbles, evaporating, the >plink<. Someone let the plug out of the sky and I felt all the buoyancy of things drag slowly down, my heart is hot and sore and sleep seems more oblivion than restorative hammock in a sea of quiet leaves which sparkle like near stars.

  • this cat the sun

    I think this cat’s favourite person is the sun. She believes everything he tells her and is willing to let him whisper into her belly and long ears for hours. I don’t think she realises he is distant, to her he is close. And I don’t believe she cares that he sprawls his favours indiscriminately. He is her sun and that’s all that matters here.