Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: gorgeous

  • København

    København

    København magical, sunken in the deep, dark water like a turtle from the undersea land, and all of these strangers (to me) riding the waves on its back. The water stretches away into the dark, black and pulsing with lights. Candles in the windows, restaurants which opened in 1694, boats creaking in the wind which have sailed past the horizon, although the horizon keeps moving and we know it. It is our own. At the rim of the sea equidistant, seemingly, all the younger lands I’ve known in this dark and troubled lifetime, where everything I touch turns to silver like leaves. At the rim of the world darkness falls away, falls away but here it is so dark the stars crust the harbour sky like satellites. Creaking of the trees, creaking of the hawsers, creaking of the wind. *@,)

     

  • finally, in Europe

    finally, in Europe

    I’m in Copenhagen. It’s so beautiful. Went out walking in the albert-full moon and feel I am finally in Europe. Everything built is fine & old, and all of the landscape is sculpted. The soil is dark and seems fine & light, beautiful Country in a solemn, calm, minimalist sense, more dry South Australia than lush Queensland.

    How I got here was, hopped on the wrong train on platform 14 at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and was carried several miles into the region of Whereonearth as I slowly realized my mistake. Went pale and sweaty with panic, leapt off at Whereonearth and scampered back to Berlin in a cab. The blessed Deutsche Bahn which runs on time like oil on water was blessedly late; forty minutes late! hooray, got on the right train. Travelled all day through increasingly Protestant countryside with this dark soil like crumbled bread and then, so exciting, the whole entire train drove very slowly onto a huge ferry and we all got off and rode in silence across a featureless expanse of water, greeted by waving wind towers on the Nordic shore, sky white and hanging low, out into the fresh cold misty Danish countryside. The coins are so heavy and beautiful when I was given change I had to hold them in my hand and turn them for long moments. I found a restaurant with a wall of old glassed bookshelves where they flame crepes at the table. I found a park where the sweet gates came up to my knees. I found the harbour. The haven. København.

  • manhood: let’s rejoice

    manhood: let’s rejoice

    Six beautiful teenage men were doing parkour across the roof of the sunken restrooms by the harbour. Ropes gently knocking against masts, land-passengers drowsing at cafe tables in the sun, and this buoyant half-dozen pruning their dedication, lightness, skill. It was wonderful to watch. They do it in total silence, wearing soft shoes and baggy trackpants. You see a guy size something up. He makes an internal decision: ok I’m going to take a run up from back here, leapfrog that bollard, then run up that wall and stand upright without using my hands. He goes and does it, successfully. Or, he falls back into a relinquishing roll and laughs softly to himself. God, they were beautiful to watch. I loved how they tried again and again; how they lept across danger and scaled things without a word; how they never paused to congratulate themselves nor erupt in applause, nothing aggrandizing, nothing loud, it was for the skill and the joy of it and utterly silent apart from the brown-haired boy who always said to himself, in English, as he made the last effort: “God, someone’s after me, Oh no! someone’s after me.” Manhood is not extinct, let’s rejoice. Manhood is instinct.

    h20 HoL manhood, let's rejoice

  • the man with bare fingers

    The man with bare fingers playing guitar at the riverside markets, in the snow. He is playing a languid, spooling version of “I’ve Done All the Dumb Things” by Paul Kelly. In his hands it sounds musing rather than regretful. The two Australians drifting in front of me hatless, talking about parties. The boy who writes in the same cafe as me and who gives a shy smile as he passes on the street. The candlelit cafe playing Echo and the Bunnymen: “The Killing Moon.” The shivering persons who have to go outside for cigarettes. The lovely guitarfurl at the end of the song. The manuscript with biro marks all over it.

  • built from junk

    built from junk

    I wonder if the reason we are all so fascinated by vampires is that we are vampires, slowly draining the blood from our land.  By our habits we suck the life out of the soil, the seas, and each other, turning workers into slaves in distant countries, buying surface sprays that promise to transform our homes into havens of immaculate lifelessness.  Is that why we want to see this as desirable and glamorous?  Is that why we long to confess?

    It seems to me equally understandable that we are experiencing gluttony (obesity) as a leading cause of death, and sex as ‘an addiction’.  These are the functions of survival: we need to eat, and we need to reproduce.  At present our survival is threatened.*  So naturally we can’t stop eating – or dieting, in some cases.  We can’t stop thinking about sex – including all the primping, dyeing, shopping for killer shoes, posing, and choosing facebook profile pics.

    I realise ‘we’ is a convenience, a generalisation so broad as to have very little meaning.  But I mean it.  We are in trouble.

    On the high street I have been noticing a giant poster advertising skinny jeans.  The models stand in a pouting row, bare-breasted, coyly protecting their chests with splayed and manicured hands.  These are porn poses – the kinds of postures that ten years ago I would have never have seen, unless I had sought them out in specialist magazines.  Now they are normalised on the high street, a flagrant yet oddly unsexy display.

    Selected through a punitive auditioning process, photographed at the pinnacle of youth and freshness, these beautiful girls are highly socially desirable.  To get here they have passed through the eye of the needle: dieted, dyed, denied themselves.  The four of them embody what every eight-year-old girl dreams of.  Yet on closer examination they seem weirdly unhealthy.  That glowing skin tone has been artificially applied.  Round the midriff they are pudgy with incipient rolls of fat.  These beauties are not built as their mothers were out of fruit and fibre, vegetables and meat.  In fact they are the first generation raised on hormones and additives, preservatives and complex fats.  They are built from junk.

    As Michael Pollan points out, processed foods that do not break down on the shelf are not in fact foods at all.  And if microbes won’t eat them: neither should you.  Drifting down the alleys of supermarket aisles in a torpid trance of sugar overdose, slow-moving with fats, we are all busy building ourselves out of junk.  If fashion models show signs of deterioration at their physical peak – what does that say about the rest of us?

    …………………………………………

    *To those still clinging to the driftwood of climate change denial: your arguments are built from junk.  If science is mistaken. If our actions, unprecedented and massive in scale, cause only some tiny fraction of the natural cycle of climate change. Therefore it’s overwhelmingly urgent we make every effort in that tiny percentile we influence. Use your logic: it’s imperative. All hands on deck at this point. You’ll be welcomed.