In a little Hungarian cafe I found a tourist map of Budapest. It very much resembles the summertime map of Berlin. All-night “party with a capital P” hotspots, hostels with wifi, a Sunday farmer’s market “to soothe your hangover soul.” When I got home, a trail of smashed-up pieces of coloured foil lay glittering among the autumn leaves through the house door. Revellers have taken over the world.
The back of the fold-up map has a kind of jokey phrase book that made me feel I had never been young. Spelt out in comic-font phonetics are the translations for “Yeah, whateva,” “Good penis,” “Please may I fondle your buttocks” and “Harder, faster, now.” “How much for him/her?” gave me chills. By the end of the page the insouciant mood has soured into something more like desperation:
I’m having a heart attack
Don’t harrass me
I’m thirsty
My bum hurts
I’m drunk
Never again
Help me
Fuck OFF
Don’t stop
Goodbye
Once more
I’m lost
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Berlin 2013. Found among some old stories.
Tag: modernity
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revellers have taken over the world
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Daddy why is your face rectangular
Just walked past a cafe table where both parents had their phones out & were intent on… something, something elsewhere. Meantime the year-old child they had produced in an offline moment gazed at one and then at the other, seeing their faces round the back of a screen. When I next passed the mother was rootling in her mum’s bag for something for the kid and Dad was holding both phones, like a smoker with two cigarettes.
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stitch grandeur
In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You can dance on street corners. One of the blisses of living here is that everyone is stranger and no one’s a stranger: my lifelong habit of conversing with passersby as though we were resuming a discussion only briefly interrupted is welcomed and usual, it’s easier, fine.
I had never seen anyone embroidering on the underground. Sleeping, yes, fighting, putting on make up; drunk men banging in unison their fists on the roof of the carriage on their way home victorious from some football game – those were English men, ‘educated hooligans’ – and people jump on and sing, for money, or make speeches, and sell things, or just beg: and the man on the U1 who shows mutely his malformed and tiny index finger that pokes the air like a children’s puppet, the more whole hand holding a grimy crumpled cup for coins. A week ago there was a can of green peas, with a spoon standing in it, empty and neatly tucked under the corner of the seat were someone, presumably, had been eating them from the tin. To say it took courage to pull out my embroidery seems ludicrous. But so it felt.
It is an egg I drew freehand, a world egg, and have been filling with gradual slow stitches ever since. The egg shape is crossed with a bulging peace sign. I started it to sew for my suitcase, a new suitcase, khaki swirling, for my first trip to New York in 2011. The suitcase was a present, its army camouflage motif bothered me. “I want to sign that there can be peace, there can be love, that I am not part of the army,” I said, stitching next to the Brooklyn nightclub singer who at the request of our mutual friend was putting me up. We had bonded. We’d spent long hours sitting side by side on her bed, talking about our lives. “But,” she said, “you are also a warrior.” And hugging me, on her stoop opposite “the park” (an all-concrete basketball court) in the snow. She was smoking, and her voice was deep and compelling and rough.
I made that trip, and another, longer trip, with the peace egg still missing from my luggage. Now in Berlin I have decided it is time to get it done. So on the underground I pull it out. With trepidation but not sure why. The first thing that happens is a good-looking, somewhat raddled man whose tangle of hair attracts me gets on and sits opposite. We are the only two people in the carriage. Noticing my stitching he says, terrifyingly, “This city belongs to us True Germans.” Nods many times. I try to smile, neutrally. His arm goes up in a blessedly hybrid but tyrannical salute. “We belong here. All of those foreigners need to just get out. They should go.” I say something, noncommittal and small, afraid of what violence I might bring on myself if my accent or choice of words gives me away. Then nodding also I get up and slide from the carriage, clutching the fold of canvas and my hidden needle.
Real Germans sew in public. I felt I had identified myself with a certain kind of wholesomeness, or primness. The screaming mess at the back of my tapestry, with its gouts of wool and complex knotting clots of colour hardening the cloth, embarrassed me. It was so clear to anyone looking on – which they did – that I was a rank beginner. Perhaps that’s why the man in his seventies who had been strap-hanging nearby finally swung his upper body over me and confided, in a shy, sweet voice, We used to learn embroidery in primary school. We made cross-stitch. (Modestly, with a soft pride): I was really good at it.
As she got off at Wittenbergplatz a lady clutching her hands before her chest paused to say, It’s hard, isn’t it, keeping the tension even. Yes, I said, relieved that she had articulated this issue I had only half-noticed myself noticing. You need an embroidery hoop, she said. Oh! I said. I really do. Thank you for mentioning it. Then I carried the feel of her all the way home. There is something innate, I think, in us – in me – which responds to the wisdom of an older woman, however pragmatic and small, however tentative, because it is what we are missing wherever else we look. Sneering at age, excluding the oldest cultures, enslaved to the young and the new; literary festivals falling over themselves to include schoolkids’ first raps at the expense of experienced writer elders; orchestras staging dismal photo shoots in which fiddle-clutching violinists leap uncomfortably. The trouble with hip is, it never lasts. I long for the inner knowing, the voice of experience, the hip replacement: the lasting.
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through Glass, darkly
Philip Glass: a man who halfway through his own memoir, written by himself about his own life, can start a paragraph with: “But look at it from my point of view…” The innocent jostle of his ego crowds every page. He takes up plumbing as a day job in order to support his children, whose appearance in his life occupies one small paragraph out of 396 pages. He and his friend simply walk into the local plumbing emporium whenever they hit a snag and ask “for supplies and advice.” He recounts the time and energy spent by these professionals in training him and his friend and then says, “We taught ourselves basic bathroom plumbing this way.” Having reframed their teaching as his own auto-didact determination he then further undermines it with, “We weren’t that good at first, but it wasn’t that complicated, either.”
Eventually Glass gets work under a proper licensed plumber, an older man who presumably has taken the time and trouble to earn his own certification. Everything works out smoothly for about three years, until one day an artist friend of Glass’s offers him more interesting work at the same price. He immediately dumps the plumber who has spent three years training him: “That was fine with me and I began practically the next day.” Audiences in Europe who didn’t like his music are described as “a bunch of yokels there who didn’t know anything about world music or even new music” – “They didn’t know anything.” How I wish there were a stronger alignment between good work and great character.
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in The Circle
I decided to stay home from the Writers Festival and read, all weekend, in the hammock. Yesterday I read three Mills and Boons, today I am reading a novel by Dave Eggers. The writing is so beautiful it’s almost a liquid. It is modest. It does not proclaim about itself. It’s blood temperature, so I can move through it without noticing. But every now and then I turn the page and read some startling description that has to be reread aloud, like the summing up of the book’s character Mae, offered to her by a woman sitting in a deck chair, with her eyes closed, on a boat.
I am that woman today, moored near an island. Outside of the hammock world, which is permeable, storm clouds mass up on the horizon behind the big spiky city. The camphor laurel tree whickers and sways. A sudden gust casts down a spray of its gentle, tissuey blossoms on me, and its red-veined leaves.
A seed falls into the seam of my book and I tilt it and shake it away. The sky is blue but clotting with piled hulks of soft-serve cloud. It’s always blue but only when lit. As I watch, it grows colder, and the blue begins to sour into a sweet daytime stay-at-home white. A lamplit day, an indoor day. I’m outdoors, slung on a sharp hilltop. Outdoors is always blue but whitening now and filigreed with the leaves’ underbellies, which churn in the wind like a school of fish, and closer to home by the large open net I am lying in. Sky in the gaps. Today my own writing is not modest, it’s first-drafty like a camp bed slung between two trees, it takes a fancy word like ‘filigree’ and cuts it right open, filleting like a fish whose screams outside the water are conveniently inaudible. The writing and the day and its transience fill me with greed and contentment. I’m full’o’greed. My thoughts are sounds that make no sense and I’m so comfortable. Outdoors, and at home, all day.
Down the street aways two crows seem to be boasting to each other. Ark, says one. I don’t believe you, says the other. I lay the book down open on my chest. Willing to be dragged through the day by my own brain and by another brain’s writing and communion. The grey cat, who is herself a hammock, turns into herself, bristles, and sighs. Far behind the big boat of this city and its festivals I ride the churning water. A long time later I pick up the book again, wishing it was heavier and fatter. I will read to the end today, then read it again, I’m so glad and relieved that greatness exists still among us, that it won’t all die when Shirley Hazzard dies, that it didn’t all fold down into the grave with Elizabeth Gaskell and her “kindly spirit that thinks no ill [and] looks out of her pages irradiate.”
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comfort reading in a world gone wrong
My comfort reading is romances and children’s literature from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. What I find comforting is that it describes a world I can recognise, whereas the world outside my door feels oftentimes too jarring to be borne. What’s disorienting about it is what’s sprouted and what has been lost. Today I read a novel written by Pamela Whitlock (15) and Katharine Hull (16) and which they sent, with temerity, to Arthur Ransome as he was their favourite author. Ransome fell in love and persuaded Jonathan Cape to publish it. Like most English children’s stories of the time – this one published 1937 – it is the story of wealthy, bored white children on holidays who seek adventure. The world they move in, on ponies and by bicycle, on foot and occasionally by boat, rises off the page crackling and ripe. There is more life in the world then than there is now. “As she dashed through the heather, furry-tailed rabbits scuttled from their earthworks and green lizards slunk from beneath rocks and slid into patches of sparse grass. Kestrels and hawks winged ceaselessly to and fro in the vast sky. Jennifer ran on and reached a pile of boulders. (…) Where was the herd of wild ponies?”
I don’t know how to put out my hand to the world I so loved and which seems to be slipping, unadvertised and increasingly silent, into liquid and so down the drain. On the way to the grocery store and back I pass people sitting staring into their phones. That lost world must be somehow captured in there, or seem to be, as the wild ocean can seem to be present in large round windows in a rich man’s office wall. Not perhaps its shimmering life and deep sweet sweating intensity, but merely its unpredictable sameness, its free-running ever-altered landscape, its uncontainable never to be urbanised tribal sense of joy and discovery. I miss that and I want to find it outside my computer screen, a porthole on a world now merely mythical.
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bushel of sanity
When I walk downhill carrying my computer and the old man sitting underneath the tree nods when I say, marvelling, There’s a lovely butterfly clinging to the underside of that hedge, brown one, just hanging there, and he says, Yeah, they coming round, this time of year, I feel like there is sanity in the world, humanity, generosity, kindliness, sense. When I offer my handful of deep pink lillypillies to the girl with the blond mop who makes my coffee and she has lived in Brisbane all her life and had never heard of nor even seen them, and makes me eat one before she will try, I feel like we are building ourselves a hell in which no one can be happy and everyone addicted to their gaming, shows, anti-depressants, painkillers, grog, psychotic energy drinks, caffeine and sugar and fat, and that we have dragged everything living under this falling cliff face with us – all is lost – there can never be any kind of kind world again except what some few shivering survivors might build, round a fire lit in an old fat 1990s television case, as the waters around them surge with bodies and trash.
The loss is most likely not so cleanly apocalyptic as that, it is rather a creeping, board-meeting, bargain-hunting thing. Since my childhood so much beautiful is gone. We live as though we have forgotten. I remember when you set out for a walk and did not take your phone along: you were untraceable, in the elements; you had stepped into the wild and imagination lit from tree to tree and trundled like an old monkey behind you. But the blond girl in the coffee shop obligingly replays the song that was finishing splendidly when I came in, she is excited, “It’s my favourite song at the moment,” and I read down the sides of their stacked takeaway cups a series of excerpts of someone’s writing, and the clattering jackhammers chatter in the treetops as another giant building is assembled down the street, I can draw no conclusions about anything and I too know by font three thousand different brand names and recognise only a few hundred kinds of plants. The same scarlet beetle drops on my keyboard as greeted me last time, its yellow feelers waving like stalks of pollen in the air, sensing things I cannot know and having no urge I guess to check its emails, write back to anyone, wonder what it is really doing with its life or order more coffee. I feel so hollow inside and so strangely, ridiculously thankful this creature is warming its thin case of body on the quiet warmth of my machine.