Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: freedom

  • dancing, just dancing

    Dancing in the dark. It’s so beautiful. I heard about it back in Melbourne, where it was born (and so was I), and just kept not going because I felt too shy to go on my own. In Berlin I signed up for the No Lights No Lycra facebook page and waited for them to organise an event but they never did. Finally last Tuesday the old Ukrainian Community Hall in South Brisbane with its solemn Cyrillic listings in gold of every president since 1949 and its overpowering fake floral stench from the immaculate brown-tiled bathrooms downstairs came through for me and truly delivered. A girl in a slouchy beanie stood bopping on the pavement, holding an envelope. “You here for No Lights?” She slipped my five dollars inside her envelope and pushed the door wide. “C’mon in, we’ve just started.”

    Inside the dim foyer were big double doors. I went through. The darkness bloomed all around me like mould, soft and plentiful. Oh, the delicious sound, oh, the song I had not heard in so many years and which swept me away like laughing salt water. The song took me by the throat because I used to love it, in the day, the day when days were nights and I was only waiting for the soft darkness to fall. I remember driving to a club I loved and smiling at the doorman whom I knew from a Government lecture at Uni and who never charged me, and just falling onto the dancefloor and dancing until I had to go to the bathroom, until I needed a drink, until they closed. The dancefloor was tiled in black and white and I was very often the only one on it. I didn’t care. Alcohol helped me to get there. A man said to me once in a park, I know you! You were dancing at the club and you smiled at me. But I hadn’t even seen him, I was smiling at god. I was god. The music was everything.

    In the darkness the first song made me dance and very quickly the dancing made me cry. I remembered all the times I had wanted to dance and couldn’t. I realized: nobody can see me! I’m invisible. I’m hardly here. I felt the hot freedom pouring like molten sand through me and through me, like glass, a kind of tide of revelation, only me in this full space, me and the lyrics, me and the bass. And as I realized the extent to which I always feel observed, counted, and noticed, and to which I hinge and hem myself, and won’t let myself go, it all got too much and I started to cry. The crying lasted only a moment, a long moment, then the next song took me in its arms and I got this big broad grin across my face, a grin that almost hurt, that lasted several songs before it disappeared without my noticing it.

    By the time that boring song came up I didn’t care, I was dancing. My feet came up towards my chin, I flung my shoulders like a bird. I shuffled forward between the blurs. Ever so slowly as my eyes arrived I could make out through the teeming darkness people in a trance of dance, their arms flung up, their heads hanging low. People hopping, jumping, one woman just strutting in a long walk back and forth from one pillar to the next, making a shadowy sashay. Just for herself. She didn’t need to be anything, do anything. Everybody looked absorbed in their own element. I was dancing. We could not make each other out except to keep from colliding. Somebody laughed. Somebody set up a clap and its contagion caught across the wide old hall.

    I noticed the second Tuesday something that felt really familiar in me but which I had never consciously seen before: that a lot of the time my dancing involves throwing myself slightly off-balance, so the dancing is more like a falling, a forever falling. Just in time I catch myself, I stave off the floor, I rescue me.

    Spun on the spot like a floss I faced the back. The thread of light under the double doors and upright in between them reflected dully on the dim floorboards, resembling an upside-down cross. At the end of every song we grew still and soon another song started. Some were from the 70s, 80s, some were woven by machine. I went out to get cool air under my shirt and let the sweat roll between my breasts and pool in the tiny belly button cave and run down my arms; the night breeze struck me like a soft tree, ineffably; across the road in the old church hall a dozen drummers had set up a racket, independently, a rhythm, they sounded like they were conducting ceremony rather than just rehearsing. I walked round the hall and peered in on them before plunging back into the throbbing, dancing dark. “Last song!” she cried and everybody whooped. At the end of the hour a small light went on up the front and people gathered along the side bench for their bags. As we left two by two or singly or in threes the girl with the beanie was there, gallantly holding back the door, greeting everybody the same: “Nice work, ladies.” Only then as the street trees dipped over the road tropically did I parse the vision I had seen but not really noticed, when the lights came on: these people are all women – it is us who dance, it’s we who want an hour off from being seen, we are here to hold our freedom in our mouths like berries too many to swallow, the jaw dislodges and the voice unhinges and juice rolls fatly and purply downhill, over the hills and valleys of me. Of you, who is me.

    I opened all the windows and drove silent home. Thinking about a man who courted me by visiting with drugs. Who used to ply me with pot and I always accepted it and we would talk about music for hours, hours and hours and hours, maybe playing one song over a third, a fourth, a sixth and seventh time to see through the weave. He said to me, When you perform, remember: it’s all in the approach. It’s in the way you walk over to the guitar. I nodded, I had no idea what he might mean. And I got up and danced, irresistibly, through my own house like a thicket of books and ideas dense and shifting like sleeping cattle swaying upright, he loved to watch and I didn’t care, I let him, I’d forgotten him, and once I danced up in a sprung crouch onto the kitchen sink, under the taps, flicking the wall with my flat hands, I played the house like my instrument, I ran out on the verandah and threw my head back my mouth open where the rain poured down from the broken gutter and that night when I came in again and the song had ended my suitor was lying back in his chair, looking very grave, his long fingers a tent, and he said, “Yeah, I know you got the voice, like I said; I realize that you’re this big poet and all. But in my view: you are more yourself in the dance than in any other form.”

  • tattoo virgin

    Wandered into a cavernous caff in West End and the girl there was showing me her tattoos. I am squeamish and have never pierced my ears. Tattoos are beyond me, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. We stood poring over her long brown arms, turning and tracing the story which evolved from something simple into something faceted. “It’s nice talking with like-minded people,” she said.

    I thought about this word like-minded and what it means. The people I hear using it seem to be people I feel comfortable with. I wondered is it just what I’m hearing, or is it that people who use this word tend to be people I get along with and like. Is it a less judgmental and more fluid term than for example “they have values I respect.” Is it less confining and more welcoming and free from expectation than the older “we have a lot in common.”

    This girl bristled with insignias I don’t desire or share. There was an age gap. We were strangers. I was her customer. What was it that lept the gap in such a brief conversation, that left us feeling comfortable, feeling even a mild affection? How did we divine our like-mindedness? Well, through expression and language and tone and eyes, the languages of the soul and body. Does like-minded maybe mean not so much “our minds are alike” as “we both tend to like people’s minds”?

    I think about the conversations I have with the people I would call “like-minded.” Every week, some spark, and some do not. There is something exploratory. An acceptance of difference. A failure to require the stranger to conform to a recipe either of us have arrived with, or that has been ready-handed to us.

    In the miracle bowl of my brain and the miracle foreign world of hers, something gleamed. There was an element like sunshine or moonlight or rain that we could enjoy in one another that was universal and therefore shared. The sparkling sea of rain that sloshes round a souvenir: an experience there are more than fifty words for: two separate worlds stood side by side for a fleeting instant, worlds transparent yet ineffable, in a shared kind of frame, like snowdomes for entirely different monuments.

  • tall & straight-sided

    tall & straight-sided

    Tonight I saved somebody’s life. I cycled past a table on the mall where Scientologists were practising Scientology, just right out in the open as though it were nothing, were not based on shame & rooted in a foul, deliberate dismaying of the self. A beautiful, sumptuous, exquisite black woman sat paying attention and nodding as she was told wonders (presumably) that could be hers ~ the stance of her head & the slightly tall straight-sided hat she wore reminded me, at least, that she is an African queen. I cycled past. My heart roared in me. I swerved and slowed and circled round. When I went back to her she was still listening to this lanky dude in a red Scientology t-shirt. It seems to me funny that only McDonalds ~ almost endearingly ~ are not aware that the prefix ‘Mc’ does not denote corroboration (McFeast, McProfit, McCafe). He wore his Scientology t-shirt & she wore her splendid self & listened. I stopped beside them and waited for the courage. I’d a fear he might reach out some big butterfly net and trap me in glass forever. I leaned over to her over the neck of my bicycle. “This is a cult. And you are beautiful. And there is nothing the matter with you.” I know they start with personalty ‘testing’: presumably, everyone fails the test. The beautiful woman laughed; I spoke in English: she answered in German, “danke schoen”. Hearing me, I hoped; herself, I truly hope.

    H2O HoL tall & straight-sided

     

     

  • kingship vs kinship

    kingship vs kinship

    I hated twitter for a long time before I realised I knew nothing about it. What a snob. I had pictured a whole lot of people chatting about nothing – but had no personal experience to back this up. So over December and January this year, I conducted a twitter experiment.

    First I opened an account @cathoel and started saying things into the void. Like an ignorant guest at a dinner party who speaks without waiting to listen. I’ve since discovered a lot of people do this – broadcast rather than tune in. Me, me, me.

    My first interest was as a poet and writer – could such short morsels be a form of discipline? I sent out a few instant poems, line by line. Eventually I noticed that other tweeting poets interlarded their own work with banners & brandishings. “Come see my blog! I got published in Magazine X! My poetry’s great!” So I set another little candle in the water, @cathoeljorss. Plain poetry, no chaser, no commentary, no celebrity.

    As with facebook, it took me some time to work out what twitter could be for, in my world. Imagine television was invented right now. Wow! You might sit in front of it for a whole day. You might be going, Jeez, this is amazing, how incredible, it’s… kinda boring though. Much of twitter is like daytime television, only worse.

    After a while – if you stuck with it – you might start to discover the streams of cooler water, the refreshing elements that interested you. Animation. Arthouse movies. Indigenous programming. What I did was found someone whose approach I liked and then mined their list of ‘follows’ to find more interesting people to ‘follow.’

    I still can’t say ‘follow’ without inverted commas. It feels religious. I am not looking for a leader and I don’t want anyone to follow me. I think it’s retro. I think humanity and history are both at a stage where we need all hands on deck – everyone’s wisdom is essential, and the unheard voices are the ones we most need to hear. As the Transition Towns groundswell puts it, we need to start “harnessing the genius of the community.”

    With this in mind I went back to twitter and opened a third account: @exmalcolmfraser. Malcolm Fraser is a former Prime Minister I admire because (in part because) at the Ideas Festival in Adelaide in 2003 he said, to a packed house, he felt more kinship with the Labor leaders of the day than with his own former Liberal colleagues. He said he wasn’t sure how much the Left in Australian politics had just shifted to the conservative Right – and how much his own maturity as a person was evolving so that he had become more and more compassionate and humane. I admire his humility and his kindness, expressed in action.

    The tagline for @exmalcolmfraser is “an invitation to elders, mothers, statesmen, and all indigenous cultures to speak on public currents & events.” Which brings me to a difference I have noticed in the way I use twitter as opposed to the way it is most commonly used. I have little interest in promulgating Brand Me. I am a person, not a brand. I like my own work to be credited and read but I am more interested in society as a whole – @ustopia – and it seems to me by evolving several, more specialised little channels on twitter I can save people time so they get to subscribe to the one that interests them the most. I feel this new tool, still unwieldy in our hands, has a powerful potential for addressing one of the main issues that seems to me to be causing all this destruction and grief. Which is:

    We’re not listening to each other! We’re not hearing one another. An Aboriginal man peacefully protesting is bundled into the paddywagon as though he were a danger to the state. Indigenous Brazilians are driven off their land. Older women are routinely invisible, all the knowledge, all the love, all the adventuring they have amassed just swept aside as of no value. Environmental crises: we have a lot of the technology we need. Innovators have invented cars which run on recycled cooking oil; fans that mimic nature’s own whirlpool shape and don’t waste energy in heat pollution. City councils have reduced property destruction by putting ‘victims’ (an elderly lady whose fence was defaced) in contact with ‘perpetrators’ (a young man with no strong female role models who is now required to do her gardening). It’s all about making the links.

    I feel life is abundant and we have all the solutions we need. We just need to communicate. Including opening ourselves to the grief, anguish, wit and anger of our own hearts as well as the hearts of those around us. A patriarchal or matriarchal community survives on kingship – one central figure whose loss (hello, North Korea) causes everything else to dissolve into chaos. A sustainable community thrives on kinship – many weak links – like the internet. When the Egyptian government tried to shut down the web, there were plenty of individuals offering their own broadband accounts, opening phone lines etc to find ways round. This is subtle and powerful. It reminds me of language, perhaps the ultimate democracy outside of death itself.

    Language is not built by any one person: it is a treasure trove collected by many hands. Anyone can invent a word – Shakespeare has, Margaret Thatcher has, I have. No one can dictate that their word shall remain in use, or mean what they declare it to mean. So on twitter I have also opened @dictionarme and @inventedword, the first: to invite new words invented by anyone, the second: to offer up words I have invented myself. I am interested to see how these new technologies will evolve. I suspect they will grow as a joint effort, with flashes of illumination cast by individuals. I suspect this is true of our world in general, if we are to survive.

    The longing for a messiah is understandable, but dangerous I think. If there is a god, it is all of us together. Us is god. We add up. We are each necessary. We each contribute something unique. Individual responsibility – that is, individual freedom of action – is for me one of the most joyous lessons life teaches.

    Perhaps this is a way forward for our giant interlocking crises as well. Energy: nuclear is an attempt at a silver bullet solution. It seems to me more likely we will work well with a patchwork, co-operative approach: stop wasting the 30% that burns off in heat and office buildings lit all night. Solar panel on every house. Wave power where there are powerful waves. Wind power where there is powerful wind. Similarly the water crisis: governments boast they are building “an $8bn desalination plant” to appease those who say, as though praying, “the Government’s gotta do something.” A gentler, more lasting and more effective solution again seems to lie in ‘a bit of each.’ Replace washers so your taps don’t drip. Move agriculture to areas where it is suited – no more growing rice in the desert. Industry to reduce waste. A water tank on every house. The wonderful thing about this approach is, it starts with me as well as you, we’re all in it together, and we can start now. Let’s.

  • waste land wastes us

    In a sense it is true that every inch of every block of every city centre we have is wasted. As we’ve made a lot of cities – that’s a lot of real estate.

    That’s real as in ‘commons’, ‘waste land,’ ‘abandoned land’, ‘no one’s putting it to much use.’ Oddly enough the same is true of many exceptional souls amongst us. True of each of us ourselves – to differing extents, and having had different opportunities. How can I bring all that I am to the world? Because otherwise I’m welshing out on a contract. The world needs you to be you.

    Vacant land, abandoned, covered, skirted. We’ve got all these little beaches & lofts of it. Imagine it inhabited, thriving, farmed. A bearded man for years in Brisbane tended an extended family of parcels on the slope between the roads, among the sprawling Moreton Bay fig roots. It’s easier where there’s a tree. Like Charlie’s Bamboo Yard, which nothing is like – a song, fruiting and faced in luminous toy gardens by the bamboo where the industrial lots meet the river, in LA*. Charlie locks gates now against simple-minded defacers but when he’s there – he made it for people to enjoy, and as his home. I loved it & I’ve never even been there.

    Why can’t any displaced person and most surely any indigenous community take up an unclaimed patch of land – as European settlers did in the year hereabouts in the far-distant land of notsolongago – and tend it? Make a sweet place: where they can feel comfortable, something they can profit from if they wish and greet the world from if they wish to? Where I grew up, there were street stalls: I miss that pleasure to walk past & walk amongst too. We have a lot of waste patches, unlike poorer countries. We got space. Pioneers can take up a claim. So it seems (look about you). Surely, then, they can build a claim shanty (look behind you). If they so desire.

    To me anyone choosing to live this way offers so peaceably their own effort, authority and stewardship over some nook that they ought to be cherished, thanked, left intact. Independent, equably respected. Any buffer community that could thrive would only be an unthanked boon, surely, for the morale, sensibilities, and sense of personal urban grooviness of many city dwellers travelling about our own business.

    The individual food-cart, the foldaway business in our nearest countries show the myriad ways a person without premises can be sovereign in his own manhood, in her own womanhood. In Melbourne fellows cartwheel through the traffic at the lights as if it were surf, tilting an almost irresistible bottle & squeegee toward windscreen after windscreen, light as a barista with the froth. They feel great about themselves, I feel great about them, it’s all good, we smile. Interacting with diverse and sifting communities can help us find out how we feel about each other and link actions with beliefs and in an amazing number of cases, this proves to be a good thing.

    Men in Adelaide, on foot for long distances in the heat or the cold, barrel a trolley bulging with ingenious spinnaker to sift every gutter and bin for recyclables. There are many forms of service everyone benefits from, that take a kingly humility and resolve, leave a man sovereign, and do the rest of us a gracious service.

    In a self-realised community, we all take our part of this beautiful effort. Look at traffic – a web woven, to an astonishing extent, of mutual co-operation.

    When you look up – way above the street there’s as much outdoors in any CBD as there ever was. Like allotments, the outdoor blocks are raised individually to roof level then neglected. Most of any city’s veges & all of its aquaculture could be grown in the heart of its sky. A local transition group here can farm this – another over there – transition groups are forming all over and I’ve met two groups who lost members when locals showed up itching to get stuck into some transformative, world-regenerating project & there was nothing but meetings to offer them. It’s what people want to do – and we lack opportunity: be engaged in some way that’s real in our community. Here’s one way. Surely food that is organically grown but inner-city farmed yet eaten within hours cannot be worse for me than sprayed since a seed & sprayed to last on the shelf. Historians say, “neglect of history is a form of despair.” Howard Thurman (1899-1981) said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”