Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: streetlife

mouth bandit

Some days I really miss my cat. She is grey & downy and is a right little snuggleupagus. She’s also a kind of miracle cat because she got lost one night, this was in inner Melbourne, and stayed lost for five months until one day someone rang in response to one of my posters, saying, I think your cat is living in our backyard. She had survived as a street cat and was thin but unharmed. Whilst not living in alleyways she likes to harvest unattended hair elastics from the desks of working poets and will carry them about in her mouth for hours, tirelessly playing fetch…. like a little dog. I love her but we always had two separate piles: mine (to hold my hair back) and hers (a bit manky from being scuffled and chewed).

One thing I love about cats is their ambition. I would see her crouched at the foot of a wall, every fibre bristling with concentration as she sighted up a browsing mosquito or a shadow under the ceiling. “I can take that, I can totally take it!” And yet they seem to have no other desire than to laze. Most important of all is: be comfortable. Always be comfortable.

April 30, 2013
a-biscuit, a-basket

O, the sweetest! Boy pedalling through the old part of town with his girlfriend in a wheeled box fixed to the front of the bike. It’s intended for children. He is wearing jeans and a stripey shirt and a little pork pie hat. Her blonde hair spills over the back of the box, she is tucked up in a blanket and eating a biscuit. At the traffic lights he slides forward off his seat and onto the ground, bends to give her a kiss in the small of her neck.

April 29, 2013
with my bare hand

Interesting coincidence between the accidents of physics and the compulsions of human nature: so often when a glove falls, in the street, like a leaf it will lie palm-side-up, as though its fortune is about to be told. That way when you walk past these lost lonely single gloves they are usually in postures of imploring, or appeal. It occurred to me retrieving my own glove outside my door that a nice filmclip could be made by stooping and dropping a coin or small offering – even a leaf, perhaps, as Balinese do – in the palm of each glove, randomly about the city.

March 19, 2013
through snow

a bell dings behind me, I step aside and watch the beautiful line of a bicycle’s tyres, drawing like dark pencil on white paper through the snow

March 10, 2013
you want a peace of me

Tonight I intervened in somebody’s love mess and may well have made things worse. I had cycled through the lit tunnel under the bridge four times for the sheer joy and came out blinking into the stormy-seeming piled sky, alongside the frozen-over river. I heard a shout. A tall man was dragging his much smaller girlfriend by the collar of her coat, shaking her like a puppy, while she cowered and pled. It took a second with her face hidden and in the dark to ascertain this wasn’t mutual horseplay. Hey, I shouted, then really bellowed HEY! Leave her alone!

She was shrinking inside her clothes and he was a shrunken king, big in the body but small in the soul. Hey! I cried again, and he paused in his torment to shake a big fist at me. I don’t know what “You wanna piece of me?” sounds like in Danish, but then again, I think now I do. I was yelling to her, trying to speak slow and clear, praying all Danes understand English: Walk away! You, girl, please! Just walk away. Two other women huddled in the bus stop asked, what was going on. By now the fraught couple had retreated (first rule of evading attack: do not go where he leads you) behind a big tree and she was crouching on the ground like a servant, in her fur-lined parka, her supplicant head bent as he yelled down at her and she took it. After a while seeing he was being watched the coward started gentling and soothing, he crouched opposite and the young woman in the bus stop said, naively, It’s alright now.

We daren’t go any closer. Their stronger-minded friend walked past, I didn’t catch her name but the other two girls called out to her and she said, Well, we don’t know what kind of guy he is. I said, I think I know exactly what kind of guy he is. Well, she said, but if he has a gun – or a knife –

They must have called the police because the three of them climbed on their bus when it arrived and moments later a police officer with a piercing flashlight lept out of a car. He talked to the ‘man’ and his female colleague talked to the woman, who had her back turned from shame, and the upshot was the couple climbed into his big black SUV and roared away. We can do nothing, the policeman said, if she stays. People are grown-ups. Yes, I said; she has to want to walk away. Exchanged cards with the lovely-faced Persian guy who had climbed off his bicycle and he said, Next time you come to Copenhagen, you don’t have to stay in a hotel. Nonetheless… I think I will. I think of that girl, home with him now, cowering and pleading. May she find the strength that’s inside us all. May he. And stop your bullying.

March 1, 2013
I can escape! if you’ll only believe in me

I was standing on the Underground platform just now gazing at a poster for a guy who calls himself the New Houdini. His hair was frosted & his hands outstretched imploringly: I can escape! If you’ll only believe in me! A voice came at my elbow, from a very small, very elderly man: “Might I offer you something to read?” He spoke so humbly I could hardly hear him.

Now, ordinarily this would be an ideal question from a stranger. But the highly-coloured brochure he held out looked so familiar. I laid my hand on his upper arm as gently, as affectionately as I could. “Geht’s um Gott? (Is it about God?)” Yes, he said, nodding soberly. I had the feeling of reaching round in the back of my brain for any extra shards of kindness that might be lying about unclaimed. “You know… I think perhaps I might have read that one before.” He nodded again and turned away, back to his tiny wife who was wearing a soft pink beret, hand-knitted, and was also carrying brochures. With a pang in my heart I watched them conferring, about, perhaps, who they might approach next. He had offered me his treasure, and I loved him for that.

February 23, 2013
the dreaming

You see, I am still living in the dreamtime, where my ancestors are my brothers & sisters and trees my playmates. Sometimes I’m wiser and sometimes they’re wiser. We hold hands on the street. There are streets everywhere and everything is streets. Sometimes the world overwhelms me. I cannot move & I cannot speak, cannot use the keypad & the online booking form & can do nothing to understand anything at all. Would follow a guttering candle flame for miles along the quiet river in the dark. Stare in through the golden windows, row after row after row after row, longing for a way into the wilderness. That is the only world that tames my heart. I’m so lonely, I’m only longing, and I cannot settle. Underneath it all there is a roaring like fire or water.

February 22, 2013
like lamps

Just now walking down the street the most miraculous small experience. It’s growing dark and the shop windows glow like lamps. I came out of a side street full of bars and cafes onto a shopping strip thronged with parcels. Among the clots and clumps of other people approaching from the opposite direction I met eyes with 10, 12, fifteen, twenty strangers: we each of us looked into each other seriously, momentarily: and it felt like we exchanged between us something palpable. Sometimes the early dark and gloomy days here crush me unbearably. Other times it feels like the civilisation that has built itself here and endured and spawned so many writers, so much beauty, so much music and art, says: we have woven something here. We light our lanterns as the cold closes in. We endure and turn our endurance into a survival and our survival into a flourishing life. We defy you, winter! We defy you, death! We defy you, lack of meaning!

Even as I think this I am wondering, too: is it not in fact death, and decay, and winter, that give meaning to life, and evolution, and spring? Seems like it is and I am only too frightened within my own mortal mind to see it.

January 6, 2013
hipsteroid rage

The problem of hipsters. Nobody is one, yet everyone complains about them. It’s a bit like environmental damage: everybody thinks someone else needs to change.

I am listening to the couple at the next table lament how hip this neighbourhood has become. On this leafy street they can no longer find a seat, on a sunny Saturday, and it’s all because of hipsters. The woman has a chic-knotted green scarf and little red shoes. But that’s just the trouble: if I say, yeah, I wish I were cool enough to qualify as hip but sadly, I lack the raw materials… I come off sounding like I wanna be *too* cool ~ hip enough to not even care about not being hip.

Like my neighbours, I like a quiet street which is not too crowded with popularness. Yet I want the cafes to be good enough to draw such a crowd: Great coffee. Decent service. Music that doesn’t depress me. Essentially I am wishing failure & suffering on the businesses I claim to support: or partial success. “Emerging artist” status.

It’s like indie bands. One must discover a talent that is great enough to be worth a thorough listening; but not so great that it’s filling stadiums. Like infinite growth on a finite globe, this enterprise seems to me destined to failure. And failure is to hipsterism as stubble is to chic: a whiff of it, you’re a groovy artist. Too much and you’re under a bridge. Hipster or dumpster. It’s bloody brutal.

The other problem with hipness, or as I think of it, ‘atmosphere’, is it requires a willing peasantry. This groovy part of Berlin is enjoyable because of its mix of cultures and the picturesque and endearing ways that troubled souls, drug addicts and unorthodox people fill the streets with life. I don’t see any of these hipster-allergic folk wanting to move to the suburbs, or to genuine country communities where there may be very few artists. Other human beings serve as background scenery: a form of tourism. The scenery’s got to be grating enough to be ironic, to set the heroic Self free in bold, beautiful relief against its lesser-talented background. Like Park Slope.

January 3, 2013
eros unregulated

On New Year’s Eve after a quiet dinner party at the home of a Romanian artist & Swedish poet, I climbed the round hill that gives Kreuzberg its name: cross mountain. In the dark it resembled Borobudur, with heads facing outwards as far as the eye could reach like ten hundred white buddhas. Three different, unevenly consecutive countdowns announced midnight’s arrival: I was tempted to start a fourth, even more raggedly: Zehn! Neun! Acht! 7! 6!~ Looking back as flares lit the sky I noticed something strange: though walking here we had passed through dozens of gaggles of Turkish dudes with their mini rocket launchers & quivers of searing flares, this crowd was Caucasian entirely. My companion looked thoughtful when I remarked that I could not remember ever being in such a homogenous crowd. Maybe it’s more segregated here, he said at length. Hmm maybe.

Meantime the most unregulated fireworks display in living memory had gotten underway. All around us people let off Roman candles and stepped back (with difficulty) to let lighted rockets propped upright in empty champagne bottles go off. Within seconds of the first countdown the entire city rim was alight. I was laughing with jubilation, such a night: for ten minutes or more the crowded mountain was the sparkling centre (from the viewpoint of those on it) of a sparkling city, its whole horizon lit and sinking and sparking and burning with explosion after explosion. I’m not describing this very well but the effect was just transporting. We screamed and hollered. People waved giant sparklers. And every ghost in the vicinity picked up its tatty skirts and hiked out of there. 2013::EROS.

January 1, 2013