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.
Tag: friendship
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beautiful is who you are
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defender of the vulnerable
I had a beautiful friendship once, with a woman who is also a writer. We read each other’s works in a kind of ecstasy of communion, making notes at every page. Our conversation was easy and delving, muscular and gracious, exploratory and frank. Then men who wore make up began appearing on the covers of magazines, complaining of oppression. Soon it was a lesser crime to rape than to call the rapist ‘he.’ My friend, who is older and perhaps old-fashioned, seemed terrified of falling out of grace. Her support of these men was tireless. She began following me into strangers’ conversation, making public denouncements: “I wish to publicly dissociate myself from Cathoel’s hateful views.” I am sad at the loss of this intelligent friendship and last week, after a lag of two years, I wrote to her. She wrote back still angry, and this is my answer.
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Ach. I’m sad to see your salty wit and elasticity walled up in this frigid, pious convent.
What interests me about these eagerly conformist cries of Hatred! Hatred! is this: do people imagine their gender-critical former friends are too dishonest to recognise the magma of long-suppressed hatred that now finally has an excuse to pour out? too cowardly to name it? or too stupid to see it? Must be one or the other.
What an aching relief it must be for such people – finally to have found an outlet for the loathing of humanity we have been carrying around in secret for so long. Finally an escape valve for this pressing desire to bully and persecute some tiny, ultra-vulnerable minority. Orgasmic! You can almost taste it.
It’s a cult. A well-funded, white-privileged, male supremacist cult. You have been brainwashed and you sound increasingly ridiculous.
I hoped you might have read more widely since we last spoke, and evolved your thinking. I hoped to reach your better nature and that perhaps you might have had the generosity to tell me, I miss you, too, although we disagree. It’s sad you have simply seized on this opportunity to finger-waggle with such schoolgirl piety, trying to condescend to me about my supposed hatred when in fact even the mainstream conversation on this issue has now moved on and your recited certainties sound dated and ill-read.
You don’t see yourself as the brainwashed handmaiden of a privileged patriarchal cult. You are a defender of the world’s most vulnerable: misunderstood narcissist white men.
It’s a noble position. If somewhat replete with the blinding intoxication of self-righteousness.
What if some men are so privileged they experience being told there is anything they can’t have (the capacity to be a lesbian, for example) as hatred?
Every cell in our body is sexed and this does not determine who we are. This statement of reality is not hatred. I don’t have much hatred in me. Don’t have much capacity for it, being very much occupied with its opposites: attraction and curiosity, humility and devotion. But it’s interesting that in your defence of other people’s right to assert as reality how they feel, you feel entitled to tell me how I feel. Pippa Bunce, for example, the Credit Suisse banker, feels like a woman on 3 days of the week. I say he’s a man, an over-entitled, spoilt, middle aged wealthy man who rose through the ranks on male privilege and does not now offer to take the usual 28% pay cut (or get asked to make the tea) on the few days of the week he feels female. I say he should be free, as should everyone, to wear what he likes and express himself as he wishes, because men can be anything.
You say that’s hate.
So Pippa Bunce is the authority on his own feelings, but you are the authority on mine.
You seem to have no interest in reading or conversing widely in this intricate, complex, and evolving social conversation – you have your slogans and you just know they’re right. You don’t need to make friends or make peace with diverse genderqueer, gender fluid, trans, and gnc acquaintance, as every Berliner does in this most transgressive city. You don’t witness the pleading of confused baby lesbians trying to excuse themselves for the unforgivable transphobia of not wanting penile intimacy, the scorn and scolding they are subjected to. Within the echo chamber of this prissy, shockable, powerfully vocal cadre you are safe from thought.
These last two years I have been spending months at a time in Ghana. Ghanaians’ polite bafflement when I try to explain to them what is going on in the West is mortifying and edifying. What does it mean to be transgender? or demisexual, or any other label brewed in this rage of frothing narcissist fervour (a round hundred of them are listed below – not by me). To my African friends, it means – white people stole everything from us and they’re still not happy.
Have you not wondered why the world’s most violently homophobic nations have women’s football teams filled with trans-identified males? Have you ever asked yourself why in the West, all the most famous transgender people are men? Why almost all of the prominent spokestranswomen are white?
Telling a child they were born in the wrong body is abusive. I can’t see how anyone’s body is ‘wrong.’ It seems to me mutilating and medicating our bodies in search of the authentic self makes no sense. It is the outmoded and conformist gender roles, which fit no one, that have to change – not individual people who cannot fit them. Sterilising children (often gay, lesbian, and a large proportion autistic) seems to me a savage punishment for non conformity. Poor Jazz Jennings, the trans poster child now an adult and taking a year off before Harvard to wrestle with his misery, has ‘remembered’ under hypnosis (filmed and broadcast, because even in therapy he doesn’t deserve privacy) his alter ego as a lost young gay man terrified of not being accepted. Now his gametes will never mature and he will never experience libido or orgasm. He is cut off forever from some of the dearest intimacies human beings can share – and all because he liked boys and wanted to wear sparkly dresses. So insidious is our culture’s corrective homophobia that we’d rather a straight girl than a gay boy. Meanwhile, lesbians are being dragged away by police from Pride parades for daring to express sexual preference. Their dating sites are infested with sexual predators displaying ladybulge. For as soon as we say Trans Women Are Women, sexual rejection of them (ie sexual orientation) becomes transphobic. Lesbians have been told forever that they just need a good fucking and this is the latest manifestation of that creepy male sexual entitlement. It’s corrective rape.
No one has a gender. People have individuality, and to me that is precious. There is no such thing as trans. No one is cis. What woman would identify with the passive, demeaning, pornified gender role thrust on us. The singer Sam Smith now thinks he is a woman because he likes to dance. It’s so insulting. If you can’t see the awful sexism of this whole idea: that women are like this, men are like that, so if you are like that you must really be a woman – I don’t know what to say. For the sake of your public dignity and our friendship I would like to suggest you do some reading. Try Lily Maynard, whose daughter was trans, and Miranda Yardley, who is himself trans. I will hope for the reassertion of the kindly, salty, witty, sceptical, and generous soul I fell in love with which made me want to get close to you and be your friend. You are an idiot and I miss you. Goodnight.
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to the friend who couldn’t quit
I still spend an hour every morning coughing earnestly and can’t laugh without coughing. I thought I was trapped for life. So I hear you and I just want to say: nicotine cravings last four minutes in the body. The rest is mindgame. If you can ‘delay, drink water, do something else’ for four minutes at a time…
Well it feels like you’d be losing your closest companion and beloved/loathed best friend, but what I found: that forest fire I dreading walking into turned out to be a wall of flame like in Hollywood and I walked through it so much faster than I could have believed. And: I have literally never missed it. Not once.
You can. If you ever really want to – you will. Think of all those years you never missed it before you started and… I hope you might feel ready one day, so that the rest of us can treasure and enjoy you, for longer.
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a trans man
Yesterday when he asked I told a trans-identified friend over coffee, No: you’re not a woman. I told him how male-privileged he sounded, to me, when he dreamily explained playing around with his prescribed hormones so as to reconstruct the experience of a menstrual cycle. He felt the reason he wasn’t experiencing it for real was to do with age – “at 54 if I had been born female my menstruation would have stopped by now, anyway.”
He is a kind man and would never intrude himself into female change rooms or bathrooms but has appeared in local films and performances about vulvas and about womanhood. I was nearly in tears, we both were. He explained how much it hurts him that I cannot accept that his dysphoria, with which I empathise, makes him female. And I explained how much it hurts me for him to think he knows what it is to be female better than I. I told him it made me feel like to him I’m invisible.
When he was telling me I surely don’t believe I get to define him, and I was dealing with the familiar, programmed feelings of feminine accommodation and trying to think clearly, it all of a sudden came to me: it’s not me sitting here telling you I know better than you do who you are.
It’s you. You are telling me, telling the world, telling yourself you know better than I do what makes someone a woman. You think you, born and raised male, a man whose very skeleton if dug up a thousand years after our lifetimes, whose dental records show you to be male, get to tell me, tell all women, what we are. And that we daren’t exclude you.
I told him all women experience dysphoria. All of us are told constantly our bodies are wrong. It was a very sad and painful conversation and I told him I admire his courage for living radically outside the masculine patriarchal role. Nevertheless he interrupted me repeatedly, grew angry when I disagreed with his pronouncements on reality, and claimed greater ownership of science. Male, male, male. And he seemed very preoccupied with the difficulties of living outside the male role and had not one thought to spare for the scorn and violence experienced by butch lesbians who eschew the performance of femininity.
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parcel in cloth
One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly climbing out, he lifted the man’s parcel wrapped in stained cloth – perhaps his stall – from the front passenger seat and set it down on the pavement. Then the two of them lifted it without a word, one side each, and settled it on the man’s head so he could carry it home.
I saw a little boy tapping my Ghanaian boyfriend on the hip, offering a coin. “Boss – you dropped this.”
Sometimes I think about Australian cities where these days people barely say hello. I think about New York, where I first visited in 2011 and New Yorkers were always saying to me, “You Australians are so friendly. In New York we hate each other.” Then I wonder how much of my experience of being in Ghana is filtered through the privilege of being a relatively well-off visitor, a white woman, someone from whom everybody can potentially benefit.
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jarred honey
A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in town and he handed me a plastic bag with her rolled picture. Today in Ghana I got an email from another of her friends. She was a wonderful person and most beloved. This friend says she left a letter behind for me. Would I like it posted. I am so sorry my darling friend cannot know what she meant to us and did not survive long enough to have meant everything she was and had, to herself.
We met dancing. And at a certain point in the dance we sat down in pairs and she and I told each other the innermost stories of our lives and we both cried. That communion, when two foreign souls can grasp each other. When the self of this new person feels like paper or crumpled cloth or scatterings of cut grass on fine sand. I live for those times. She died, perhaps, for want of them. I will never forgive myself for having been too sad to reach back to her when she called out to me. I’ll never forget.
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pedalling home
Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. I had jammed on my brakes.
He actually flung his legs up in the fall and took a few tips to settle, like a rocking horse set rocking. “Alles okay?” I leaned my bike and ran over. He was getting up painfully slowly and had that embarrassed expression that usually indicates want of serious injury. “Die Kante…” he explained as I reached him, the curbside had a camber…
Falls, as we know, can be deadly in the elderly and I remember that Leonard Cohen had a serious fall, as so many older people do, in the days before his death. I remember locking myself in a wardrobe to cover my face and howl, when I heard that he had died, two weeks after Dad’s funeral. Our St Leonard of Koans.
Shakily restored to his own feet, the man immediately turned to pick up his empty bottle and popped it in the open mouth of the brown bottle sorting station. They have three colours and beer bottles commonly have worn whited shoulders from rubbing companionably up against each other on all those trips back to the brewery and then the store. Och, Germany: you slay me. It’s like a magical land in which everyone behaves the way I’ve always done: we’re all in this together. I had just passed a crossing where another crash heralded a tipping bicycle, whose basket was filled with neatly sorted bottles, possibly heading for this same recycle station. They started to bounce and break all over the cobblestones. Before I could react a dozen people had swooped in to help, propping their own bikes and stooping like long-legged birds.
I asked the elderly man, “Sind Sie verletzt?” Are you hurt? He passed a hand uncertainly over the crown of his head, showing me where there might be an injury, and in response to this mute plea for mothering I passed my own hand very softly over the tender scalp, as downy as a baby’s but for the sparse, short, grey, bristling old hairs. “How are you getting home?” I asked him, “you’re not driving, are you?” We stood there assuring each other. I told him the skin on his head was not broken. He told me he would be sure to be careful getting home. “Just be tender with yourself,” I told him, as I should rather more often tell myself.
Nearer home I chatted on the phone for a long while with my dear friend, on a park bench under a stand of trees which were shedding their golden leaves as I watched. The light was just so. I found a stinking dog shit smear on the back of my hand, and made a face and started wiping it off on the grass, still talking. On the far side of the square a street dweller pulled from his breast pocket a little packet of paper handkerchiefs and drew out a fresh one and offered it to me. He bowed. I crossed over there and took it, still talking, thanking him.
During the phone call I watched two dog owners whose dogs – one large, one small – had woven an enthusiastic wreath running counter-clockwise, passing the leashes over one another’s hands. They kept trying to untangle the beasts but the dogs running clockwise sniffing one another’s butts had passed into a blur. I saw a toddler pitched forward and running on the balls of his feet as he approached the road. There were no cars coming and his mother looked on unworried from a few paces behind but nonetheless a young girl stepping onto the pavement with her friend stopped her body in front of him, forming a kindly barrier. She stood mashing her feet and chatting to him, distracting him and making it a game, then stepped aside without a word when his mother had caught up with him and he was safe.
This communal parenting moves me to tears. I told my friend and we both laughed with joy. I described to him the two dogs blurring themselves into a wreath on the cobbles, their owners doe-sie-doeing from above. It was dark when I put my phone back in my bag and walked uphill past the man who was still standing by his bench, with his beer, gazing up into the trees. He had on a leather hat with a feather to its brim and standing by him was a trussed wheelbarrow loaded with his things. I had gathered all my groceries in two hands and clutched them to my chest to stop them falling. “Thanks again,” I said, “for the handkerchief,” and the man said, ascending to the familiar or affectionate you, “You’re very welcome,” and I said, matching his informality, “That was love of you,” das war lieb von dir, and he bowed and pressed his hand upon his heart, and I pressed my crowded with bottles hand over my heart which was cluttered with a jar of honey, a bottle of biodegradable cleaning spray and a heavy bottle of milk; the other, free hand was splayed to keep hold of a second jar and a second bottle and I pressed the glass into my heart and we smiled at each other, at the end of an autumn day so beautiful it would make you want to resurrect belief of some kind in some kind of deity.
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Ghanaity
Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.
It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.
Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.
So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.
What are you learning?
O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.
You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.
The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?
Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.
Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.
Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!
But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.
Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.
Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.
The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.
We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.
Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.
It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.
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for you, now that you no longer need it
My friend has died. She was very courageous and had cancer. She was a photographer, a maker of exquisite works. She was Dutch and chose euthanasia when the pain she was suffering became, after months, too unbearable. Now her partner is left alone to garden.
She was wise and quiet in her mind, an insightful, shrewd, kind, passionate person. I just adored her. The world since I’ve known her has felt illuminated by her presence. The sense of her presence among us: you know, those so rare people.
Tonight we are making a chicken curry very slowly and brewing up a panful of chai masala and my kitchen, where my friend and her partner once sat with me, smells of spices. My throat aches for her. I am crossing to the machinery in the next room to play Gurrumul Yunupingu’s song Bapa four times over; finally my companion without a word gets up and sets it to continuous loop. Thinking of the songwriter, who also could have died this week. Thinking on his experience in the Royal Darwin Hospital and of my friend, can she really be gone utterly, and of how we treat each other, can she really just – be gone, thinking of the Aboriginal belief that our soul goes into the soil, into the stones and trees, into the earth where we got born. Sometimes a mother rubs her newborn child in the red dirt, or in the ashes from the fire, to teach its soul – I think – where to come home to. It seems to me a woman who lived all her life in the one civil, intelligently run, beautiful city might be a beneficiary of this cool, loving, compassionate, scientifically realistic and empathic prophecy.
The dead. Now we outnumber them for the first time it seems to me we must be particularly tender and respectful of the world they have left us, which their bodies have built, which their bones and blood constitute. I miss you, I miss you, I am crying out over the sink for you and you’re gone now and I miss you, I miss your company, your voice and your eyes, your dear creatureliness.