Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: violence

  • eternity’s train

    eternity’s train

    Because I have lots of fears I am constantly setting for myself little and large tests of courage. Where I am staying backs onto a river and it’s out in the country and quiet. So tonight as it grew dark I set out for a walk along the bank.

    This might not sound very scary but the path is narrow and in places, eroded, and more importantly as it grew dark I had a nervousness of who might be lurking in the woods. I said to the trees as I stepped off the narrow footbridge onto a sandy, forested island, Protect me, trees. The water raced by at my side, gleaming and opaline, milky and green, crying out its river sounds. The bushes growing over the path are very often spiky; I think if I were a shrub growing around so many beavers’ nests I would be inclined to be spiky, too. I let my feet fall as quietly as I could. Rounding a bend in the path I saw firelight fluttering up ahead. I stayed quietly behind the screed of trees, knowing that while I could see them I would know that they couldn’t see me.

    Three men; young men; really, boys. One of them was building the fire. The other two got up and flung themselves into the fast-moving current, surfacing with howls of pleasurable dismay at the cold.

    I went round the path to where the boy stood, pulling leafy branches off a pile behind him and stacking them on the blaze. His fire of course was very smoky and looked like it wouldn’t flame so high for long. I was almost upon him. I said, in English, Hi, just loud enough that he would turn and see me before I got too close. As is usual with potential aggressors when you face them, they are a human who has worries of their own. Of course, I had seen that from many yards away, otherwise I would have taken a different path. He said, Gruezi, looking a little nervous, himself, and I said, Gruezi. When it was almost dark I crossed a railway bridge with the water piling and piling round its piers. It was foaming so loud I did not hear the train. It came rushing out of eternity into the moment where I lay, my belly exposed to the armies of darkness, lay in rigid smooth standing position, facing the train and with both my hands holding the narrow railing, there is only a meagre though adequate walkway built alongside the track, high above the river, and people’s faces and meals were passing in the dining car in shuttling fashion segmented by the fast windows, only an arm-length or two arm-lengths distant. Without meaning to I shrieked a long scream like a train’s eerie whistle. The train passed in seconds and I crossed over the high bridge, recovering, thankful.

  • find your kind

    Heart-curdling rage in the city today. I was in a crowded shopping street when a man began to roar at his son. He was bantam-weight, wiry, blond, apoplectic: the boy looked six or seven at most. His little sister, used to keeping out of it, hung her head and looked away. Around them hundreds of people turned their heads – it was loud, roaring, full-bore, insanity’s volume. Shopping bags rustled, buskers busked. I stopped. A teenaged boy on a bicycle stopped too. I laid my hands flat on the air in front of my stomach, a placatory gesture. “Please,” I said. “Calm yourself. Your children are frightened.”

    He didn’t hear, didn’t answer, knew in that instant no one but themselves and his own swollen, massive entitlement to rage. He roared and roared, putting his face close to the child. The boy was bent double, both his arms rigid, pulling back and curving his body away from the danger as far as he could. The man held him by both hands in one large fist, the other hand making big threats in the air. I exchanged glances with the boy on the bicycle. I put one hand on each little dark head, smoothed and cupped them. Their soft hair, their stiff little faces. “There’s no need to shout like that. He can hear you. We can all hear you. You’re frightening him.”

    Giving me a vile look he dragged the child away. The girl followed willingly, willlessly I suppose. The man was blond and Nordic, red in the face; the little children looked to be Moroccan maybe or Egyptian. To my shame I was wondering how did this blond man get hold of these two small, dark children. Perhaps he was married to their mother. Perhaps they were his by blood, though none the more his to abuse and to frighten. Perhaps they were adopted. Maybe, stolen. I walked round the corner where they had gone, fretting and wondering, my heart a drum. The teenaged man on his bicycle came behind and I saw him swoop past the man and call out something. The man shouted back. My ears were filled with an army of blood. Making a determined effort I crossed the narrow laneway and caught up with them. “Sir,” I said, “sir, do you speak English? Please stop. Let me talk to you.”

    He turned and snarled, he raised his fist and planted it two feet from my face. “You’re not from here,” he sneered, “you know nothing.” I said, “Listen. You don’t need to frighten your children. Look at them: they’re terrified of you. Be gentle. Be kind. Find your kindness. Please!”

    He made a feint at me, not meaning it, just wanting to put me off. “Fuck you,” he shouted. “Fuck off!” I cupped my hand round the little boy’s nape. Probably he spoke no English at all. “Are you alright, little boy? Are you ok?”

    The poor darling. His father, the monster, dragged him away, gesturing curtly for the girl to follow. He was still detailing to the child in coarse roaring snorts how the boy was at fault, was faulty, would amount to nothing. I hope for the boy’s sake he saw that of those six hundred people who didn’t know what to do, there were two who could not accept he be treated that way. It’s not ok, you are someone, you exist and we can see you. Maybe that is a candle that keeps him alight until he can run away into the world. I did nothing, I made it worse, it’s not about me. Despairing I bellowed after the man, a last effort: “Be a real man and protect the children!”

    A girl came out of a shop, wondering. I showed her what had happened – the boy dragged around the corner, disappearing now, hanging back as hard as he could. She said, “Oh, my god. How could he.” We stared into each other’s gentle, sane eyes. “If he’s that loud, in public,” I said, slowly, “if he feels that entitled to shout and scream in the middle of a Saturday afternoon right here – imagine what he’s like at home.”

     

  • Game of Drones

    Game of Drones

    Just watched the opening episodes of Game of Thrones. Until recently I imagined it was a video game: a world all but invisible to me. Turns out it’s a television series.

    Melodrama. It’s a kingdom of sighs, and costume. I’ve never seen such a celebration of unthinking brutality. Well, not since A Clockwork Orange. It doesn’t just document, it glories: beheadings, rapes, all filmed in lingering detail. A small boy is pushed out of a window off-handedly. The script is littered with casual misogyny. A man wakes up among his dogs and his enemy sneers, “Better-looking than the bitches you’re usually with.” “Soon enough that child will spread her legs and start breeding.” “Thank the gods for Bessie, and her tits.”

    The kingdom is populated entirely by supermodels. There’s a lot of modern slang and the bad characters and good characters have neon signs above their heads. The good have an edge of self-pitying martyrdom, the bad have sensation instead of feeling. If there ever is a dystopian future in which this kind of glamorized yet boring reconstruction of some imagined medieval past holds sway, people like me will either be queens or court jesters or we won’t last very long.

    H2O HoL mahjong tiles

  • no news is good

    no news is good

    Watching television news for the first time in several years. Things have changed. The screen (huge!) is split into seven sections with different background footage, text, or video showing in each of them. A continuously changing crawl line along the bottom distracts attention from the main ‘story’, with unrelated headlines. There’s even a graphic indicating the state of the stock exchange at allegedly this very moment. (My investments! My fleet of investment advisors! My inflamed self-importance!) The ‘story’ is about the arrest of three more suspects in the Boston bombing and the reporter on the scene seems to be speculating & conducting her own investigation. Her storytelling is looping and diffuse. But it’s hard to notice that because of the intrusive text flashes & gripping minute-by-minute footage of a black van being backed very slowly, over and over again, into the garage of a large building. What the hell is going on? This show seems intended to make the viewer feel like they are the centre of operations in some big detective show. In fact the information given, before boredom and frustration drove me from the room, is minimal and almost meaningless. As though it were a gossip magazine the ‘news’ describes the appearance and apparent mood of the suspects. They talk to ‘neighbours’ who say I’m shocked, this sort of thing doesn’t happen here, etc. I have never looked to television news as a font of insight and wisdom but still: the level of stupidness seems to have risen markedly.

    If you have a TV and if you feel that watching this stuff is helping you ‘keep up to date’: maybe think again.

    H2O HoL turkish erode floor

  • structural violets

    Group of academics at the breakfast table, they are five women and one man. “So it involves all of my areas of interest,” says one, “gendered language, and… I’ll be doing some structural violence…” She rolls her hand to indicate these topics are known and need not be enumerated. “Oh, interesting,” says her nearest neighbour. The group is companionable and everybody is talking at once. But as soon as the man’s voice is heard (“I did my thesis on that. ~My first thesis,”) everybody shuts up and when I look up they are five women listening in silence, clasping their cups to their bosoms in two cases, gazing at him as audience. In the tiny elevator I encounter one of the women and tell her what I saw. We ride up through the building in peels of laughter. She is clutching a muffin in a napkin, minutely nibbled. “Oh,” she gasps, “thank you, that’s really interesting! Oh, I’m going to reflect that back to the group.”

  • you want a peace of me

    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.