Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: street life

  • when the snow

    The dog and I went out for a late night walk. The rest of the world is his toilet. It is snowing! It must have been snowing now several hours. The purity general, all over Ireland.

    I walked along the still, dark canal following his trail and we passed not a single person. The unbroken white page of the path, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and now. Walking gingerly, in my ugg boots and pajamas. Snow fell in my hair and lit its tangles, snow fell into the hood of my coat. I scraped a handful an arm-length long of snow, showing the black German soil underneath. I hurled a snowball at a tree, black tree, the world a silent movie.

    On the black water white swans lay like popcorn milling and distinct in the perfect night. The trees overhanging the water were rendered all postcard-immaculate in snow’s quietude, every branch of every tree the chosen branch of the chosen tree. Oh, the perfection of freshly-laid snow. A swan sneezing three hawking gasps under the stone-arch bridge sounded like a car that’s reluctant to start. Swandom: it isn’t all elegance. But they swim silently and sleep in a coil, wreath of snow, and the snow unlike rain falls so quietly. It is a powder and a liquid. You can harvest it, solid one moment then gone, on a night walk where everything’s blessed by the freeing fresh cold and the silent houses stand like mirages. Hold back your head, hold out your hand. After we turned at the corner I lipped up several little swanlings morsels of snow-white snow off the greensteel spikes guarding the soft white stone church. I thought, this snow is heilige snow.

    A Swedish friend had come by earlier in the night and said, lounging back on his chair, your apartment is like a little boat. It has big white windows and outside no lights, you see only the stars. We came in after midnight from the white world without and set sail once more into silence of unending black water, the vast night, the sea of tranquility. Blessed honeyside of the moon. Winter has arrived at last and like the Spring rains in the steaming tropics it brings with it privacy, silences, long dark salty solitudes. I am a dormant seed tucked in my blankets and this tiny ferry still crossing the water, a little, led barge.

  • the black hamburger of weddingworld

    On the bus coming home from our forest walk we passed a billboard for Hochzeitswelt: Wedding World. My partner says it’s a giant sales emporium but I am convinced it is some kind of fun park. At the market hall we got out and walked. I was noticing the graffiti – hereabouts is my own minute but weirdly lasting contribution to Berlin’s conversation, in chalk, a grammatical correction: I added an apostrophe two years ago to someone’s vehement caps-lock scrawl WONT DIE IN SILENCE. On a windowsill stood a half-eaten hamburger, which at first glance seemed to have molded over. I started think of the experiments people do with processed food where you stand a burger under a glass shade and months later it has not rotted. I remembered the droll jazz lover I befriended in an Ethiopian jazz cafe in Melbourne who rather lucidly summarized this result: If microbes won’t eat it – neither should you. Whilst putting all this together in my mind I realized there was something strange about this burger’s black mold. It was paint. Trailing up the pebblecrete wall to the sill was a long swab of black spray paint, part of the grafitti. A man in his sixties, splendidly dressed in a mohair overcoat and Russian fur hat, stopped to see what we were looking at. I showed him. He rocked back on his heels to laugh. As we came round the next corner my partner, formerly a product designer, said, looking up at a sign he had made for a local late-night kiosk, “Really I think I did a good job on that one. It’s so eye-plopping.” “It is,” I said, with difficulty, “really it is eye-plopping.”

  • 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.

  • grafitti cake & cold wind

    Walking past yet another housing estate whose walls are festooned to arm’s length with torn posters, glued art, endless tags. A small, modest sign up top reads: Nothing is to be stuck on here. “Nothing is to be stuck on here! Yeah… so I see.” “Yes… it’s hopeless.” “No, no. I think it’s absolutely hopeful. Beautifully so.” We walk past another building which reads, in part, Love is not a private possession. We wait for the dog, who is snuffling round a tree trunk with great assiduity. How does he know how to measure out his urine so as to have a little to offer every staging post and chat point, but without finding himself trapped back in the apartment all night with a half-full bladder. “I guess every young man has to have his tag. And then he has to stop on every corner to pee a little bit and mark it out.” “Just imagine if every young man had his favourite plant. And everywhere he went, he just had to plant out some of those plants, to make his mark on the place.” “Place sure would be green.”

  • the lonely honest man

    A man on the street broke my heart open and I can’t stop thinking about him. We had turned a corner heading for my friend’s atelier to surprise-visit her, when out from behind a parked car bounced this large, bounding, fierce-looking black dog. We both stood in front of our much smaller dog and got fierce in turn. The dog’s keeper ran down the street shouting something it took me a while to understand. He was calling, She won’t hurt you! She won’t hurt you! He drew abreast, out of breath, and began to explain his dog was always over-friendly, people got a fright, she wouldn’t hurt a hedgehog, she’s as gentle as milk. In Germany most milk is super-heat-treated longlife and tastes faintly of benzine so I take this with a bar of soap. But the two doggies were gambolling together merrily and the size of the big black hound was no way her fault.

    “She’s 13 years old,” he explained. Garrulous. My partner was looking at the dog closely, then at the man. “Did she… didn’t she used to live on such and such street? Over by the park.” Yes, said the guy, she belonged to someone else then. “Yes… Punker dog.” Well, he said modestly: not exactly a punker dog but he had rescued her from this large co-op over by the markets… “This is Sheila,” he said, nudging her with his calf.

    “Hello, Sheila,” we said. The man went on to describe some more about her and her gentle nature, how long he had had her. I was feeling tuckered out and my attention soon waned. As we parted he said, it was nice talking with you, and then called out something else which I answered, to my shame, with a fake laugh and a generalised kind of “yeah, right,” because his German was too quick for me and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out what it was he had said.

    As we walked on past the florist with its three kinds of pine branches for sale in steel carts out front and its purple pots of heather, I asked, “What was it he was saying at the end?” My partner repeated it. “So was passiert nur selten in meinem Leben.” Such a thing happens only rarely in my life. That is, people are seldom so friendly to him and take the time to chat. I groaned and looked round. The man was, of course, gone, with his big goofy dog, back into the labyrinth of endless cold stony streets. How honest of him, how honourable. How kind and sweet and how little I’d deserved it. Because while he was remarking, like a good-hearted human, that a conversation – even so brief of a streetside conversation about dogs – was a rarity and how nice of us it was to talk with him, when he himself brought so much attentive curiosity, so much willingness to share his history and to lay people’s fears like rice to rest, I had been growing bored and wondering, how much longer do we have to chat with this fellow and his dog, my back is aching, I just want to go home. Now I wish I had heard him and had answered properly. Had given him a hug. Had said, Yes, it’s true: my friend, we are all lonely at heart.

  • he who comes for us all

    Walking under the devastated trees the afternoon after a huge storm, their fresh scattered blossoms and leaves all over the pavement and all over the road as though some glorious festival has been by, I passed an elderly man walking with a stick, painfully it seemed, his upper body listing forward. As we drew near each other I wondered how bitter it might feel to be passed, without effort, by a member of what he perhaps thinks of as the fairer or even the weaker sex. He turned his turtle head and I said, Hi. On the instant a warm gleaming coal awoke deep in his eye, he had beautiful, unusually large, well-spaced brown eyes, and as I passed him I noticed his posture had changed. He was walking almost upright and seemed struck by pride in himself, joy in life, something of that sort I could see it in his gait. I thought: it’s crushing the way we treat our own elders. I thought: The meaning of life is love, what else can it be. I don’t understand why people keep asking. And as I flung the gorgeously aged garden tools someone had left in a pile of trash beside the road into the back of my ute, disturbing the spider who lives there on her quivering and much-travelled web, and slung myself behind the steering wheel and roared off I was crying out in my heart: I say this every day of my life, I will keep saying it til I die: we need to be kinder to one another.

  • bar none

    Seems to me when you have yourself a brow bar (they only do eyebrows), a blow-dry bar (they only dry hair), and a tanning salon (they brown people) in the one block, it could be your locality is suffering what we might call First World Problems Syndrome. Meanwhile, in Arnhem Land…


  • I’ve been beautiful since I was nine years old

    Being shoved up against the train windows by a much older man whose friends looked on and hooted. Waking up as the blankets were stripped off my upper bunk and the passport controller’s flashlight swept up and down my body. Having to leap from a moving car on a back road after accepting a lift with a girlfriend from two seemingly friendly, laid-back university students we had been chatting with for some time. Having a man grab and wrench my breast as I passed. Innumerable insultingly degrading sexual suggestions, often from immaculate men in suits. Erections pressed up against me by hairdressers, fellow commuters, shoppers. Being lifted out of the way every time the manager at the place I waitressed needed to pass. I was fifteen. Being called sunshine, baby, darlin, hot lips, sweet mamma, etc etc. Being called “that.” Being spoken of and numerically rated by men who address their friends rather than me. Having various uncles slide their hands up my leg and one of them tell me, “You are so beautiful I can see how uncles might have Funny Feelings about their nieces.” Being told this year by a male gynaecologist he finds me “too erotic.” Facedown in underwear after a massage feeling an elderly, frail physiotherapist recommended by a trusted (male) friend plant a kiss on my outer butt cheek and then crow to himself, “I’m allowed to do that, because I’m your Uncle So and So.”

    Being grabbed between the legs from behind as I walked off a dance floor, by a man I’d not even had eye contact with. Being followed. Being crowded in doorways. Being told “Ohhh, I love your eyes,” by a man staring at my breasts. Being asked a thousand times, in injured tones, “Hey, where you going?” Being wolf-whistled, cat-called, followed in slow cars. Having my drink spiked at a nightclub, fighting off the swarming feeling of faintness, and later hearing from a friend that she had woken up in the alleyway behind the club. Being attacked whenever I speak up against misogyny and called frigid, ugly, a bitch, a lesbian bitch, accused of man-hating. I had a fork shoved into my butt as I leaned across a broad table of well-dressed executive couples by a man who said when I turned, “Are you done?” Waitressing felt so hazardous. A sweet, shy, tiny elderly man tunnelled his head under my arms to nuzzle my breasts, in front of all his family, as I was leaning across the table with my hands filled with platters of hot food. I looked down and he was smiling up at me with a blissful expression of entitled boyish naughtiness.

    I am a shy but fairly outspoken person and am protected, to some extent, by my strong and athletic tallness. I’m taller than most men. Talking to other women shows these experiences not to be very unusual. It’s endemic. For many of us it spreads across our entire life from the age of eleven or twelve. I’ve tried a range of responses. Ignore him. Pour his beer over his head. Report him to a bouncer. Yell at him. Most times men seemed gleeful to have gotten a response; sometimes the lack of a response seems to invite further harassment.

    If you are a man, picture to yourself how intimidating any one of these experiences might feel. Now picture a barrage of them, week in week out, regardless of what you wear or of how you conduct yourself. The only way you can escape this treatment is by sticking close to another man, who owned you first. There’s nowhere safe.

  • superpow

    I think maybe my superpower is interfering in other people’s lives. I pick up their rubbish. I make faces to cheer up their miserable kids. Not only do I do it but I feel like it’s my perfect right, kazam, kerpow. We went out for dumplings. The table next door were depressing. He sat sprawled in his own homeroom slump, scrolling endlessly through the blackened thicket of his fascinating phone, actually holding the device up to his face while she ate stoically from a bowl of poached pork gyoza so that the back of the phone covered half his face, a carneval mask. The girl pulled out her wallet at the end of the evening. I said, Excuse me. Politely she leaned over. The boy was in earshot. I said, You’re really beautiful. And you seem interesting. Her eyes came to life. Thank you! she said, warmly. I said, I think you deserve a better relationship than one where the guy drizzles through his phone all night while you are out with him. And I wanted to tell you that. Ok, she said, um, fair enough. Thank you. We walked home slowly in the light dark rain and passed two signs that reminded us of underpants. One was an A-frame set out sturdily in front of a kebab house, and the other hung from the awning of an old shop now a restaurant. I said, pointing, does that photograph remind you of underpants? The photograph was of a segment of Grecian columns. Yes! he said. With the… and the way it sort of… Exactly, I said, lengthening my stride. Underpants.

  • buy a smoke

    I went and sat in a church for an hour. Outside and around us the traffic and screaming world swirled. I sat limply, examining nothing, letting my gaze rest like butter on the high colour windows and glowing long pews. God was there for me, the god who is not grand but great and not distant, proclaimed by all the world’s most dangerous people and who doesn’t really exist, I think, but to whom I somehow cry out in moments of deep joy and crushing down grief. I gazed at the flowers, the candles, the keys of the lovely old organ. Afterwards trailing up the street with a frangipani tucked in my bag I smiled at two celebrating ladies, with their backs to a wall of constructing industry, all the ingredients of their afternoon laid out: smokes, supermarket catalogue, bottle of a possibly mixed fizzing drink. “You look beautiful!” said the younger one; I nearly fell over with surprise. I mean, I tripped. I went into the post office. “Has this got a battery?” she said. “It’ll go by road but not by air.” “Ok,” I said. I paid for the parcel. In the Chinese grocer’s I brushed my knuckles across all the fronds of the barrel of brush brooms to choose by the feel which I would carry home. Paid four dollars and balanced it across my arms like a bayonet. The Aboriginal man who spends his afternoon by a tree on the hillside said, How are you. His mate, a red-faced white man with a spreading lap, said, judgelessly, “Saw you eating something off them bushes there.” “Lillypilly,” I said, “you want one?” And uncurled my hand to show a pink-stained palm lumpy with fruits. The first man reached across himself for a pocket. “Buy a smoke off you,” he said. I said, as I always do, “I finally quit! Sorry ~” and spread my hands, because my first thought is not to make a smoker who’s not yet quit (every smoker) feel bad in their still smoking cave. Around us the afternoon was fresh and untamed. Up the hill little houses crept, clutching their gardens. The two old men had a bag of wine plump between them like a jellyfish beached and slowly dying in the sun. I went on up the hill and behind me another climber approached, this time a man in a suit, already reaching into his breast pocket as the old man sang out, “Hey, Michael!” “Heya, Marty.” “Buy a smoke off ya?”