Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: writer

  • The Great Fire

    Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of life; turn her back on the War, which is, as we see, unending – ‘the inextinguishable conflagration’ – and write, at last, ‘Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.’

    Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death; of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration.

    These hours would be lived to the full. Years of hours would follow, but not this. He had felt their chance passing; she too, in fear. For this he had travelled to the airy, empty harbour where, like a legend, she lay in a mildewed swing-seat, waiting. As surely as if she had leapt from a planked deck into the ocean and swum ashore, she had jumped ship for him. Ten thousand miles had been retraced, down to the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name.

    Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.

    ~ Shirley Hazzard.

  • welcome, Auntie

    I’ve joined a Facebook group which posts pictures of people’s dogs. The rules are long and repetitive: only dog pics and pics of dogs being doggish and cute: no lost dog posts, no questions about dog food… just hounds.

    In the last week this group has taught me all kinds of new vocabulary. Boop is the thought dogs have when they come up and touch you with their nose. A blep is where they stick out their tongue a little bit; a mlem is when they stick their tongue out further. Well today an older lady posted in public in the group, “Auntie! You are now part of this dog group. Please enjoy the dogs’ cute little antics!”

    Within seconds a woman had come along to comment, gently, “Maybe just send her a private message.” I commented, Hi, Auntie! and my comment now has 40 likes. Meanwhile a thread of joyous appreciation has unravelled, so divine: 460 likes and over a hundred people have posted pictures of their dogs for Auntie. One is of a labrador gambolling toward the camera and it says “Running to say hello to Auntie.” “This is Cecil, he says Hi Auntie.” “Welcome, Auntie!” One man wrote, “Now we are all Auntie’s Nieces and Nephews” and attracted a trail of love hearts under his comment. In between people are tagging their friends and coming back to the thread to muse OMG so pure! This thread! Those comments, tho. Sometimes I truly adore you, social medina.

  • apple a day

    Saturday night, home with the one I love. We cycled over to the Korean grocers’ in the freezing cold mist to get ingredients and I made soto ayam, my favourite Javanese chicken soup from childhood. He is nutting something out for himself on the guitar. I read him something I had written earlier, while he was shredding the chicken. Then we lay down for a while in silence and after a long time I said, want to hear the song I wrote on my phone the other day? I can’t remember how it goes. And he listened to it and then said, Cathoel just drop the ‘& the New Government’ and publish your songs as Cathoel. I said, but why? It’s my favourite band name of all time! And so then he told me why, mentioning some features of what he hears in my voice that made me curl my toes with delight.

    The song, I tell him, reading off the tiny screen, is called In the Human Senses of the Word. He closes his eyes. Outside the window it is silent and completely dark. I can see a few lights on in a few other houses. What’s your day like right now? Catch me up.

  • to her hinge

    Just found a line in a notebook which I wrote, on July 15 last year, and I’ve no idea what I might have meant by it. ‘In the mornings/we are proud of his everyday miracle together.’ Is it about sex? I guess it must be. My relationship was in the throes of some difficulties and a page later on July 20 I find, ‘his insignificant other.’ Then a cry from the heart, not mine, but which I wrote down after it came from the mouth that had applied itself to another woman’s hinge: “My beautiful Cathoel.”

    Even then, I was glad of the possessive.

    To be possessed, whilst remaining free and sovereign: isn’t this the essence of sexual love.

  • new under the sun

    Walking through the park in the unexpected sunshine yesterday I realised suddenly: strolling through summer in Berlin is like strolling through an off-duty circus. People are riding bicycles with no hands, they are taking turns practising walking slack rope, one man is playing the tuba and another is set up with his slap box between his knees. Two Turkish drug dealers have set up an adorable ‘office’ with a plastic chair, an empty red milk crate on its side standing by the path, and a dull red singlet bag bin hanging from a handy branch. It is so patently an office and the office Open that we both start to laugh. On the rolls of concrete piping downhill people are teaching their dogs new tricks. It’s too cold for barefoot.

    I was writing in a cafe this morning when a joyous gurgle caught my ear and I glanced up. Two men, both burly, both bearded, both wearing baseball caps, were standing one at either end of the long counter laden with cakes, each of them holding up an infant. It was comical to see them so strongly mirroring each other, in their outfits, in their body types, and seemingly unconscious of it. As I watched, the one on the left, who was ordering, held up his baby and made it wave to the other baby at the other end of the counter, waiting. The babies gazed at one another and gurgled. Behind the counter the staff were laughing. This was our third sunny day since October. It’s easy to laugh when the sun is out.

    I was so immersed later that when after a long while my second coffee hadn’t arrived I had to ask myself, did I actually order that? Or did I… just dream it? The recollection had sunk like in water, leaving absolutely no trace. I went on writing. A shadow fell over my page. I could feel all my concentration tightening til he was gone. This is the man, one of two men who come in, visits every week two or three times collecting donations for his wellbeing. This one sells Motz, a street mag for homeless people’s income, and the other sells little slips of paper on which he has written Inspirational Poems of his own. To be interrupted when pen is moving across paper and I have the next five sentences stacked precariously in order on the prong of my thought as I shovel forward diligently – it upsets everything and then all the sparkling world is gone. I have been this way since childhood and no matter how I tried to unlearn it – my mother would say, why can’t you just answer the phone and then go back to your writing? – I can’t. So I was relieved when the guy, to whom I have explained two or three times this need, moved away. But he struck at my heart all the same. He is so unpretending, so humble, so courteous. The next two tables engaged with him but no one would give him any money. This is a hipster cafe, which I choose for its Australian staff and because they play the languid tunes by which concentration is most possible. I am there for hours each week. I thought about how it would feel to come in out of the sunshine on this glorious day, everyone littering the pavement with their expensive prams and their lovely bicycles, and to ask round a place in which people in their new clothes, and Cathoel, are feasting on ten-dollar breakfasts, and to be told: no, I’ve nothing for you, I can’t help you.

    I could, but I won’t.

    It would feel excluding, is how it would feel. And yet he thanked each table of twenty-five-year-olds calmly, wishing each in turn “Schönen Tag noch,” a beautiful rest of the day. At the doorway I caught up with him, where he had paused to talk with the German girl sitting in the window. She was reaching for her purse so I waited out of range, not wanting her to think, oh – that other woman is giving something, I needn’t give him then as much. I put my finger on his sleeve. “Ich wollte Ihnen herzlich danken, dass Sie mich nicht unterbrochen haben. Das ist wirklich lieb von Ihnen.” I wanted to thank you from the heart (Germans say), that you didn’t interrupt me. That was really lovely of you. His face broke into a wizened smile, though he is young. He put a hand on his own heart. “I recognised you – and that you have told me you are working -” I said, “I so appreciate it. You know if the concentration gets shattered, then everything is gone.” He said something I couldn’t understand, maybe that he does know this, he writes, also. Ah, I said: then you know! And we regarded each other with a terrific fleeting fondness. This is possible in Berlin, I find more of it here than I have found anywhere, even on the terrible subways of New York. I gave him some money, not much, about the price of a coffee, and was aware of the self-serving hope that he would take this as confirmation of our agreement rather than incentive to interrupt me the next time. The guy with the poetry is harder to deal with, with his lambent eyes. I cannot bear to be interrupted to read his verses whilst struggling to write poetry of my own.

    I told my companion about this experience, he knows the guys I’m speaking of, and we turned out of the park at the end and came into a thicket of streets which led loopingly round to the big second hand emporium with its American flag changing room curtain. A cardboard cutout stands sentinel in the booth, Second Handy Warhol. It is a relief to need cooler clothes at last. I bought a stiff denim dress which feels like you’re wearing a little sailboat, it stands out like canvas in a gormless triangle and I feel about five years old standing in my bare arms and legs which have been covered since Autumn, I will need to wear several layers underneath this frock until probably June but it yields the promise of Summer to come and the long glorious evenings, the bald European sky.

  • collective noun a couch of potatoes

    I have no depth and everything within me is shallow and small. I waste this only thing time. I spend it as a charity on stultifying trivialities all pettifogging at the window’s pain like untrue love. I show off and on again. I’ve nothing. Not even that nothing. Only what is left by boiling too many bones too long: mostly, scum and smell and the evaporation of beauty; mostly, strong dark waters no one would drink, but for their health.

    I sit here, boiling far too many suns. But only as they fall across the water, winglike, saving daylight. Using words like jewels to deflect my nakedness and shame. A continual dinning sound like tinnitus, bling! bling! bling! Body fat and gemstones, a clattering cup’s old soup. Using time like words which can be flattened silent to the page. A couch of potatoes. A combine of harvests. A chapel of waysides. A nun of that.

  • smaller than you might think, vaster than you might imagine

    I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and I carouse the seaming waves, always looking out for something that can survive the dark salt water, that can breath underwater and emerge intact and stronger, softer, something that breeds new life like a manatee mistaken by desperate sailors for a comely mermaiden.

    I use this pen for prose, ideas, letters, postcards: everything except writing poetry. Poetry I find can tend to purple and bruise when handled too finely. It needs plainer tools. I write it like a shopping list, unafraid of whatsoever cravings might find their way onto the page there. I know that like tormented fruit plucked over by too many hands the cliche and banal trueism will rise to the surface, overnight like cream or over many weeks like flaws on a false politician, and I can pick it over and scour it out and glean from it that which is manifest, worth its weight in oranges, weighty but not too weighty, worthy.

    All writing of poetry is worthwhile, we ought never to stop ourselves in the initial act. It’s got to be good poetry, though. It’s got to be rewritten. Real and true. You have to be able to jettison those ragged phrases that wear out their welcome in the mind, the ones you tend to mumble over on the final read-through. Poetry is more infested than perhaps any other art form with pretenders who use its name to shield their cowardice, their apathetic shouting, their lame attention-seeking, their emotional lies. Overstatement, fancy language, lack of conviction, boring ideas or endless self-description buried in ornate and impenetrable prose (yes, prose) – it’s all being displayed under the name of poetry and I think that puts a lot of people off. I think if much so-called poetry were performed under the name Songwriting – a related art we mostly tend to feel far more confident in judging – people would fold their arms and tip their heads, say, “You’ve not been playing guitar that long, have you?” Or, even worse, “I don’t believe you mean that.”

  • bathitudes

    I was so tired. I rang my mum. We rarely speak. I said, it’s me, I just wondered, are you out tonight? Only I’m feeling so worn through, and I want to have a bath, I thought maybe I could use yours but I’m feeling antisocial, I just want to be in the water.

    Mum said, We are home, your auntie’s here, but I can explain to her you don’t feel like socialising, come round and just hop in if you like.

    I rolled up a towel and piled into the car. It was one of those stately nights in the sub-tropics where the clashing leaves have stilled and the screechbirds are all sleeping, only the runnels of little fresh breezes disturb the grasses as they roll across the ground. At my parents’ house the lights were on upstairs. I let myself in and turned on the taps. Ran up to say hello and give my aunt a kiss: this is the same Christian auntie who once told me when I disagreed with my mother that I was possessed by the devil. “You look so beautiful,” I told her. My mum gave me a plate and some candles in little tin bowls. She gave me a box of matches. My father was watching tv and didn’t turn, though he said goodbye to me as I left, an hour later.

    The feeling of sinking into a vessel of hot water. Of being only “a vessel sunk in a much larger vessel.” The feeling of peace: at the same time blood’s horses drum like a nearing army through the passageways of my heart. The heart leads its merry crew all over my body. It leads away and it lures them back. I lean back and close my eyes, candles flare on the outside of my lids, the all but too hot water rises on my chin. The tap drips. It drip-drips. It drip-drip-drip-drips. I am the only one alive in this valley of slow heat, I am guarding the entrance to my heart, hearing the horses.

    When the water got too hot I climbed out, trembling, and stood on the mat to wrap myself. Letting myself out the side door I came onto a dark cave formed by the verandah’s overhang, shelved between two rows of bushes, the house next door almost non-existent in the greenery. I lay back in an old cane chair and let the heat steam off me into the cool dark night. I thought about a song I had written long ago. Back in the bath I began to sing it to myself. One feels like a child, singing privately in the bathtub.

    “Sailing by/with colours high/and feathers to the knee,” went the song. After a long time I got out and dried myself, gathered my pen and the densely-scribbled Vietnamese restaurant receipt off the closed toilet lid, blew the candles out all at once. I put my clothes back on. Hot, hot. Calling up the stairs, “Bye! Thank you! Good night!” I escaped the house. Escaped all houses. My little truck was a vessel for mountainous voyaging, a bark that fears no storm. We drove home. We crossed the bridge, where my grandfather died. On my windscreen I carried all the lights, each one by one briefly flared and weightless, and then gone. The cliffs above the city were sentinels still, peopled by large rigid flowers of the porcupine bushes that shoot up into the cloud, by a late-night climber carrying his pack, by people desultorily talking. The pool of night left no tone untuned and no thought furrow fallow, no mere impossibility implausible. Back at home at my own house I parked out front under the long palms. I was weak with the water and with the depth of the night. Now I can sleep for a thousand years, now.

  • his scarlet-helmeted warrior

    I had a pen name, once, after I wrote two excruciatingly awful romance novels thinking this would for sure be my road to steady income. Submitted them with great condescension to Mills & Boon and they wrote back, saying (and I paraphrase) “We wouldn’t publish this shite even if you paid us.” I was so disappointed cos I had this great name all worked out: Kenya Madresson.

    However I am proud that one of those trite novels was written in a week. I had flu and was down and couldn’t get anything done. Said to myself, I bet I can write a book in a week. So I did. Three terrible chapters every terrible day. This was when I was 26.

  • the bouncer in his castle

    Sat for half an hour watching this bouncer refusing entry to a drunken girl who had evidently no ID. She tried to show him all her tattoos, including one on the base of her ankle, talking earnestly, presumably explaining how could I possibly have so many tatts, and not new tatts, if I was underage? She pulled out a limp, folded ten-dollar note and tried to hand it to him. She leaned on him and cried. The bouncer was an Islander man with beautiful soul in his face. He held her upright and pretended not to see the ten-dollar note she waved at him. Every time she showed him a tattoo or pulled out her purse to try him with her ATM card he attended, patiently, to what she was saying, refusing to let her drag him into an embrace, smiled, seeming amused but not at her expense. A student of humanity. How I loved him. It was a solid half-hour before she gave up and wove off down the street on her patent white heels, and by that time the flaccid ten-dollar note had made several more appearances. Inside the club two rival brides were dancing with their bridal parties, not actual brides but brides-to-be, each wearing a white veil over a stripper dress and one of them dancing with an inflatable, naked, anatomically correct groom who gradually deflated as the night wore on. When we left I saw one of her bridesmaids clutching him, just half a man now, sitting dispiritedly in a corner nursing her umpteenth umbrella drink. I stopped on the way out to thank the bouncer. “Man, you and your colleague, you are really generous, kind, patient people. I saw how you dealt with that little girl who wanted to come in and was crying. You were really good to her. I was watching you.” His eyes were bright and he smiled hugely. He said, “You know, I was just talking today to Lifeline and I realised, my sister died four months ago today.” “Oh!” I said, touching his arm, “I’m so sorry.” “It’s ok,” he said, “she’s in a better place now, she was a heroin addict.” “Oh, god,” I said. “That’s really sad.” He kept smiling, his eyes liquid. He gestured up and down the street. “You love the people, you love the life…”