Yesterday I was reading the paper over coffee in a huge, bleak market hall in Berlin. The place has all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, it was raining hard outside and had turned bitterly cold. I was reading about the coward shooter in Vegas and had screwed up my mouth. He shot from behind the curtains. He had no courage and no manhood. Next to me two people browsed on their phones, one of them breastfeeding a baby. All of a sudden a familiar hoot rent the air. The guy flipping pancakes at the next stall was singing along, joyous and loud, to the Rolling Stones riff everybody recognised, the oooh hoo hoodoo hoodoo hoo from ‘Miss You.’ I looked up, people looked up. It was as though John Travolta had come strolling in, jive talking, with his panther grace and his hands in his pockets and leaving a trail of tiny sequins.
Tag: rain
-
walk on ice
Last week I stood on water for the first time in my life. So eerie. My friend rang, saying, there are people on the river! and I ran down to look. There they were, casual as anything, crossing the water from side to side. Today it is raining in a dreary way as though the clouds were melting and it occurred to me, so warm was it when I left the house, that it cannot be winter for ever. It seems like it’s going to be: but it won’t.
-
everywhere at work
Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of a bitter, long winter. In the front corner of the yard are two spindly chairs, their feet looped about by overnight chains, standing perkily either side of a carved concrete round-topped table. A big quiet tree separates this lovers’ corner from the rest of the empty restaurant. We sit on the two chairs and watch quietly as the night evolves imperceptibly round us. This couple are walking their dog. A car is passing in a haze of invisible rain drops. This large tree on which I rest my hand is growing, sap rising, leaves unfurling and sprouting from the trunk in several places. Life is everywhere at work and leaves its carcases and traces.
-
golden lion
I went upriver two nights ago with a box of matches in my pocket. It was overcast and just beginning to get dark. Went down a green gladed path that I know and found the place I’d found before. I’ve never seen anybody there but once there was a girl playing her guitar on the next promontory, sitting on a fallen tree with her hair falling over her face.
As I went I collected twigs and dried stalks and small fallen branches. I made a bristling bundle with each hand, I stretched my palm to carry more. At the place I built a fire. Last week someone had played a game there: twelve squares deep and ten squares wide, etched into the dirt, it had three teams: one playing with smooth stones, one with dandelion flowers, one with short sticks each piercing a leaf.
In front of the fire I sat down to rest my back against a tree. The water rushed behind me, rushing rushing. It had begun to rain, not too heavily, I put on my coat and let the tree shelter me. A blue egg had fallen from the nest, egg-blue and speckled. On the inside its broken shell was white as teeth. Last night I took a different way and when I came to the clearing downstream where a bench and firepit have been built, in front of the bench someone had made a heart with stones. The stones said: “I <3 ..." The inner body of the stone heart had been filled with clumps of moss, and every few inches the green dense moss was punctuated by a golden dandelion flower. Again it grew dark, and again it rained, and I sat and watched by the water.
-
knifegold
An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks.
One was called Coia and the other something even more beautiful which I forget. They stood there in their pigtailed dreads and ludicrously cute knotty woollen hats, relaxed with hands in pockets, offering one carrot after another so I could slice and scrape and find out all the properties of the knives laid out like eyeless sharks on the flowered cloth. Thinner, lighter blades go through things easily and are best for small vegetables and watery stuff (like fruit). Denser blades suit heavier applications like meat and potatoes and bone. You can sharpen your blade every six months or so on the underside of a ceramic plate, and Coia demonstrated for me what the sound should be like (a kind of tabla whoomph). A few stalls along the Turkish keycutter had a whompa-slupf, whompa-slupf going from behind his counter somewhere and I stopped to ask is that music? Or is it a machinery.
Turns out it’s a machinery. But it had this sort of repetitive organic quality like two taps dripping at a sink that made me want to record a sample and build something over the top of it. Key music, knife music. Market friendships. Golden lights.