Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: longing

  • pity flamingo

    Every week I cross town on the train and we pass a tower block of identical grey-frame units which have grey balconies. One balcony, at eye level with the train, has a bright pink inflatable flamingo hanging like a lurid fern, I guess somebody went to Florida or Havana and brought it back with them to bring back the tropics. It doesn’t look tropical. It looks more defeated. The air has shrivelled out of it, or perhaps shrunk in the bitter chill of Berlin’s below-zero winter. The bird sags, motionless, its head drooping over its breast and hanging down to the shrivelling feet.

    Poor tropical bird, alone trapped in glassy Berlin and its colourless end of year season, after all the other bright birds have vanished down to the southern shores to caw and preen.

    Snow lies on the ground in greying patches. Hardened scars of black ice have been strewn with sharp pocks of gravel from the big grey plastic bins. This fake bird is the only pink thing. Apparently flamingoes, naturally flamboyant or perhaps insecure on their wavering stalk legs, will not make babies unless a crowd of other bright pink flamingoes stands round them watching.

    Zoos have had to set up elaborate peacock tails of mirror to encourage them to breed. Gazing out at this sad blow-up bird sometimes I think about staging an intervention. What if every passenger put on a pair of Edna Everage sunglasses. What if we all stared out the windows and flapped our arms. Maybe the dying flamingo would stir on its still leaf of string. Maybe the neck would waggle and stretch, and the tiny head come up again to display proudly its improbable and superciliously curled coconut ice pink swan lip.

    But Berlin’s trains are courteous and pragmatic. People stand back tiredly to let each other on. This week I’ve passed a junkie shooting up right into the arm, against a pillar at my nearest U-Bahn station; five people in a row who were all reading books but seemed unaware of each other; and a sturdy Polish tourist who rolled, under my nose, a plump head of ganja into his palm so that when we all got off the train, he could light it.

  • the indivisible splendour

    Thinking of love today and how it has such deep transformative power in our lives. I so long longed for people who would understand me and be willing to be understood. Those friends and those loving acquaintances are everything to me, the topsoil on the earth’s surface or maybe the oceans which caress its journey, ‘the dance in its lonely walk.’

    This body is pining in me for its home
    that seats its hollow floor with ships, swinging and sighing,
    surging and sighing
    like birds with weighted wings
    that seeds its lonely untended beds
    with salt, to raise the precious produce of the sea
    I look back, and long to dissolve myself
    back home into the indivisible splendour of the water
    that sheathes the burning earth
    the dance in its lonely walk

    ~ from Adrift, published in Going for the Eggs in the Middle of the Night 1999

  • the wind was rising

    “The wind was rising, so I went to the wood. It lies south of the city, a mile from my home: a narrow, nameless fragment of beechwood, topping a shallow hill. I walked there, following streets to the city’s fringe, and then field-edge paths through hedgerows of hawthorn and hazel.

    “Rooks haggled in the air above the trees. The sky was a bright cold blue, fading to milk at its edges. From a quarter of a mile away, I could hear the noise of the wood in the wind: a soft marine roar. It was the immense compound noise of friction – of leaf fretting on leaf, and branch rubbing on branch.

    “[…] Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac. […] I felt a sharp need to leave Cambridge, to reach somewhere remote, where starlight fell clearly, where the wind could blow upon me from its thirty-six directions, and where the evidence of human presence was minimal or absent. Far north or far west; for to my mind this was where wildness survived, if it survived anywhere at all.

    “[In 1990] the American author William Least-Heat Moon described Britain as ‘a tidy garden of a toy realm where there’s almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it. Where the woods are denatured plantings. The English, the Europeans, are too far from the wild. That’s the difference between them and us.’”

    ~ Robert Macfarlane, opening The Wild Places

  • colourful, gleaming, a fresh crate of stairwell

    I walked home at last through the markets and by the time I got to the street door of my new home I was struggling with parcels, camera because things kept flinging themselves at me in their peculiar beauty and a heavy bag of books from the discount box outside a wonderful bookshop I’ve wanted to step into for ages, and I had. At the door I met this man who was one of those so beautifully made, sculpted, just beautiful men built like manhood, his arms bare and brown and his black hair well cut but not obsessively groomed and his shoulders taut as he held at chest height a wooden crate of market vegetables, colourful, gleaming. You know how your breath kind of stops. He reached over me as I leaned my bicycle and fumbled the key and just – pushed – the heavy Haustür open for me, slid past, stood at ease with his lovely boot blocking the door from slamming on me. I said thank you and cambumbled myself and bike and packages inside. At the stairwell we bottlenecked and he was behind me as I hoisted up the bike and looped my book bag over one arm and climbed the wide stairs, measuring the treads with his comfortable, go for miles fit and perfect pace. I knew that he had seen my awkwardness and would be used to it and would take it as his tribute. As we both turned at the landing, me and my bicycle with him and his fruit behind me, he said, “Schönes Rad!” Lovely bicycle. Mine is on the first floor and by the time I’d worked out what he’d said (“He spoke to me!”) we were at my door. The suggestiveness of doorways flickered through my mind as rapidly as a fish and I fumbled my key and said, “Ja. Stimmt.” Yes: true. And he smiled and I smiled and he went on up the stairs and knocked at my upstairs neighbours and beauty is an accursed gift, I remember the luminous days of my own moon when people would stop me or cross the street to tell me what they had noticed about my body, my face. Your hair, your feet, the way your hand pushes back the door: inside this world of collapsed longings which fan out into every promenade and every boulevard you enter and entice and somehow enlist people, the whole world, in your sharedness, even when you are not thinking of it and when you are mournful or hurrying or bored: that is the fanfare beauty gives to our everyday, like a flag streaming across the peerless sky that gives weight to its innocent unmeaning blue and makes it for a moment everything and perfect.

  • hungry in Spain

    I saw three Spanish boys doing parkour in the gardens. I have run out of money and am hungry: it’s temporary. To a Spaniard gardens means a large, bare, gravelled expanse with formally clipped hedges and dark, clotting trees. The smell of the cyprus is familiar from home. I sat on a bench under the trees and watched these boys for half an hour. They were trying to climb a sheer twelve-foot wall using their speed and hands and concentration and willpower. To my right a couple in puffer jackets were smoking some excellent weed. I sat watching the three boys in their baggy grey pants intently concentrating, doing it for themselves, and was overcome with dark sexual longing. I adored them. They went at it over and over, always exactly the same, one of them actually scaled the wall and stood on top clutching the railing with both hands before he dropped lightly back to earth like an angel, I thought: were it not for tree-planting and feeding the hungry I think this would be the noblest pursuit a young man can throw himself into, in this messed-up, traffic-scarred, urbanised world.

    A child of four or five threw his teddy up in the air again and again for his mother to catch and hurl back to him. His teddy-loving days, I thought, are numbered, and not high. Another couple hid inside the boy’s parka hood and with intense delicacy grazed on each other’s faces. I saw a man cycle past guiding with one hand the back of his child’s tiny bicycle, he had a large paper butterfly she had hand-painted with sparkles attached to his backpack and flapping. Spanish girls with their luscious long hair. On every corner a hairdresser, a pharmacy. The underground train which is livid with voices laughing, chatting, like a big, relaxed club. The five elders sitting side by side, four men and one lady, formally attired and letting the last drops of sunlight fall on them along the lip of a large statue, in granite, of some soldier or some prince.

  • quiet heart

    quiet heart

    When I walk between the quiet cottages and see people with their heads bowed, eating dinner… I can feel the wildness in my heart and I feel like a teenager, it feels like rage.

    H2O HoL brleave scrap stall