Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: jetlag

  • knowing one another in the dark

    Knowing one another in the dark: this is life in the wintertime, in Germany. Three days ago the late summer turning purple in Central Park; tonight the moist grey soft air, the dark day, the lighted bicycles on the path. I have only just realised in Berlin we are on a latitude with Alaska; New York is on a latitude with Spain, a far sunnier prospect.

    It felt strange to me, coming home to a home that is no home at all, where I’ve lived less than three years in total and always in spates, looking over my shoulder to the next project which had to be done in Copenhagen or in Madrid, or back in Brisbane. My father has cancer there and I’m here. My nephews are growing up there and I’m here. My cat lives over there and I’m here. For a cat who spends her afternoons tormenting tiny tropical lizards and basking in the endless pouring caramel sun, I remind myself: relocation to an indoor apartment life in northern Europe would be cruel. But she’s so soft and we used to sleep tucked into one another. When I was ill and alone once and could not very often struggle out of bed, this cat licked me, with great earnestness and a harsh tongue, all over, like a giant kitten until to her satisfaction I was clean. She is a wonderful companion but a horrible correspondent. I mourn about it over the phone to my mother in Brisbane, to make her laugh: all these months and not one phone call… Not a postcard… “She is scuffling at the receiver,” my mother says, and I hear soft scratching sounds. “She hears your voice.”

    At JFK airport everybody was white. Everyone except the wait staff, the security personnel, the cleaners and the guy emptying the trash. At the security gate he lifted a large plastic bag of plastic bottles of water from the bin and carried it away: I watched the glinting light that is really a terrifying form of the endless dark that will take us all underwater sift through all that plastic and bobbling trucked water and thought, America… it’s be part of the solution, not part of the dissolution. We ate a meal and the waitress brought us so many paper napkins my knife and fork fell off the top of the pile. Wait, she hadn’t brought a second set of – yes, she had. A second tower of waste paper stood across the tabletop and this tree graveyard was all for me. They hand you napkins when you order a coffee. They use polystyrene. Let’s not talk about that.

    At length in our airplane by which I am responsible for far more pollution than any squanderer of napkins can ever claim we left the land behind, at Nova Scotia, and began our crossing. The dark Atlantic. Thickened up with polystyrene chunks that never break down, only into smaller chunks of polystyrene foam. And roofed, increasingly, with a dully cluttered sea foam of plastic bottles, mostly the bottles in which Americans have bought water.

    Germans buy water too. Recycling the bottles is only a partial improvement. We landed at Tegel, the gloriously Soviet styled airport which was actually part of West Berlin. Germans streamed past with their big square heads looking serious yet warm. They recycle. They carry their empty bottles back to the place they were purchased and retrieve tiny amounts of loose change. There are no returned soldiers sleeping on subway platforms. Instead, in Berlin there is a Coldness Bus that travels round on frigid nights collecting homeless people who might otherwise perish in their sleep. There is something here to learn, for you, America, I think, and also for us, Australia, where we lock up desperate families behind razor wire and have turned landfill production into a sport. The clouds of pollution and damage are closing around us and we need to learn to know each other in the dark.

     

  • New York meets Berlin

    It’s 3am now in New York but when we landed in Berlin, it was 7 o’clock on a sunny Sunday morning. It is colder. I am tired. My first time arriving in Berlin from the States and the subway, the U Bahn, seems immediately different. People are different and I can’t put my finger on it. “Thinner,” he says, and I gasp. He is right. They do not seem to be eating themselves to death. They are playful with one another, with strangers, in a way that seems to me to take a different kind of things seriously. They chatter and laugh, fall asleep, excuse themselves to one another as they pass. There is a different kind of facial expression, something hard to quantify. There are many many fewer really giant large people. They seem, I don’t know if it’s more alive or simply more awake. I do not cherish myself making these observations but in between the long spells of sleeping sickness on the swaying bus and the whispering silky smooth train I keep noticing. The train platform is not a kind of caged forest. It feels spacious and light. I didn’t expect to feel this way. There is a lot less staring into phones. People look to me fresh somehow. They seem grimmer and less disheartened.

  • an apple tree with one of its seeds

    So cold and empty at the heart today. I feel all the little threads connecting me to everyday life in the usual world – the usual world of Brisbane, that I grew so painfully and slowly reattached to after some 13 years away – have been cut, or burnt off and I am gliding in tiny jerks across an endless sky of winter, white sky, moored in this tiny white room, which sits five floors up and blank-eyed with windows, looking out on all the whiteness as though they were just another wall. I went for an early morning walk with a man and his dog, I chatted for over an hour with a friend who makes music in New York, the day started out clean and entire and I had been thinking how the jetlag was passing off and the climate shock was gone. But today was overcastled, grimy, grey, people walking stoopingly. My old winter boots that I’d left behind so gladly in Berlin when we flew south had little leaks in their soles which I had forgotten, the streets seemed to me endlessly stony and the only green things have cast off their veil of leaves and stand trembling naked, black and greasy with rain. By the side of the canal we found a giant apple tree leafless and bare studded with large red apples gleaming slightly, like lamps. A couple of apples had fallen from its black branches but they had not fallen very far. Apples don’t. The flights of stairs home seemed endless and I peeled off my shoddy boots and climbed back onto the island of bed, white bed in a white room adrift in a white sky, and lay disconsolately fingering my hair, feeling its wiry wintry dryness, fingertips stumbling over the wretched knots like berries in the snow.

  • when nothing really mattress

    Being back has been all too much. My body is toiling through an endless misery of sudden change and dark culture shock. And it feels like during the four days I have been travelling underwater, through endless airports and then a change of climate, into dark short days and misty frozen nights, the Western world has caught fire at both ends – America seems to have exploded in all of its underlying injustices and Australia has now from what I can gather officially turned its back on the Refugee Convention of which we were originally one of the instigators. Berlin is overwhelming and dirty and livid with struggle and grime. The two of us have been sleeping, incessantly, on a narrow mattress which requires everybody to sleep on their sides and all turn at once. At intervals we get up and stumble about in the cold, following the dog whose yipping almost split my ears when we first picked him up. My partner got on eBay and looked up mattresses. He has bought a decent, little-used bed for a price we can afford. The guy is about to go away for the week up to Cologne. Oh god, seven more nights balanced on our sides. “Well,” said the mattress owner, “why don’t I leave the key to my apartment down in the garden house and you can pick it up and come take the mattress away.” “Okay…” “Just take the mattress,” he said cheerfully, “try not to take any of the other stuff.” Some people really rock.

  • crop of the air

    I got up in the middle of the night and went over to the window. It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was half-past five in the afternoon, I had slept from nine til five because right now sleep is my job. You can’t tell because it’s dark already, but not quite. It never gets quite dark, there is always as I noticed in England years before this the glow on the horizon of the next town; the lights infect the dark and it feels like it’s mutual, in wintertime it never gets quite fully light, really, either.

    Half-awake I scrabbled at the curtains a bit. He said: What are you doing? I fell back. I said: I thought I should get up and close these curtains properly, I thought, in the morning a bright shaft of light is going to come through that gap and wake me up. But I realised I was wrong. Mm, he said, it won’t get light til late, maybe 8 o’clock. And, I said, it’s not going to get bright at all. No, he said ruefully, and we went back down into the chambers of sleep, the lost city of all those who are dead to the world.

    A lit sign at Abu Dhabi airport said, Last Chance to Buy. To me this had a kind of ectopian ring, if ectopia can be the reverse of utopian. Beside the sign were many golden products ranked in serried rows. Bottles of perfume, bottles of booze. Last year when I was there they had an aqua-coloured lightbox showing the wistful face of a child gazing out of her window and the text said, At any one moment there are 450,000 people in the air. That image of the city of souls who have left the earth yet plan to return, and the image jetlag plants in me of half the world sleeping in their bed-tombs under the water, as the sun splashes its giant curves up and down the round walls of Earth and drags them on, made me think again about how air travel feels like being away at sea. I guess it doesn’t last as long. But the feeling of being returned safely to dry ground is just as dull and amazing, just as blessed. The dangers are the same: you could fall overboard and be eaten, you are out of your element, you could drown. I suppose you really wouldn’t get eaten in midair but you could drown in the air, gasping for ground like a fish drawn against its fire of will onto the deck, you would fall and keep falling and take many miles to die.

  • brisbylvania

    brisbylvania

    Brisbane screams and Berlin roars. Can that be what it is. I ask what do you notice and he says, It’s noisy. Brisbane is noisy and Berlin is loud. My anxiety for formulations. Can there be two towns more unlike. We can hear the freight trains on the opposite hill, buildings are no barrier. Everything is liquid, the hills, my heart, the air, my fears. So many new buildings on the way home from the airport. The tender awfulness of long haul travel, the heart that stays a leg behind. The Inuit woman who said to my writer friend at a first nations’ conference in Canada, Stand on the tarmac and holler out your name so that your soul can find you. The sense that my soul cannot find me. The walk in the dark at eight a.m., which is midnight, down along the river between high screaming trees. The frantic squealing purr of fruit bats. They are huge. The slinky broad river in no hurry to get anywhere. The long roads of hideous Eighties buildings, the tradition of tearing things down. And the empty lonely streets. The lava of cars. The shimmering stench of fuel. The yowling thin cat who purrs as soon as I put my hand on her but keeps her neck high and her ears laid back. The overgrown undergrowth. Of nature and of business. The ruthless wretched finds. The mud and mangrove flats, the sense of things nesting and hidden. The screaming air. The shaft of sun through 6a.m.’s window that is too strong and heats me unbearably, heats into me, the stickiness of me from sleep, I have to shelter from myself in the walls.

    The flimsiness of buildings, walls are no shelter at all.

    “What do you notice?” “It’s so alive.” Not for me. Ghosts of everything, everywhere I look. Ants on the jar of ironbark honey unopened. Everything is teeming with the sense that life is brief, unasked for, lacks deliberation, rots from birth. The blood under the river. The lingering spirits in the trees. The desire to climb and to recline, the rough bark on my dry-skinned face. The passport officer who says, “Thanks, guys.” Peaceable, welcoming, stolen, so laid back. Noisy, rampant, tangling up towards the money. Mining town, rainforest trading camp three days’ journey up the river, flimsy stadium, boat. Leaking boat. Oyster shell. Sharp, sour, over-sweet, festering growth spurt. The few people, who don’t respond when I greet them. Pedestrian place of real estate dreams. This awful, deep, disorienting fatigue. Lost world of flowers, big, as scentless as fabric. Put up adventure and find some shade. Where is art. I mean the sap extruding from the living blood. Not what the anxious local government says is art. The money and the festivals, arranged rather than brewed. The thrumming art of things, the compost heat of ever regeneration, the shelter of the water, the tireless tides. Down among the mudflats. The 1950s. Motor city.