you can find them in the oddest places
i did a writing workshop in copenhagen and ended up reading out one of my pieces to an audience. i think i probably rushed it as usual, but the people who assured me they’d gesture if i needed to be louder or softer or slower didn’t, so i guess it was ok. it seemed well received, at the start of an odd program of readings, performances and bands. the piece itself was ten minutes, i think, of continuous writing prompted by the title, which was a line chosen out of a previous exercise. then i had a couple of hours to try to edit it and write it out, while rushing around and doing other things like watching a film in a dark room. here it is.
you can find them in the oddest places.
Frogs. Happiness, or moments thereof. Places you’ll remember forever, and always think of when you need a bottle of latex, or go round a certain shaped curve in the road, bending through the trees just so.
Take as I find. The impulse to write. Maybe it won’t stay but maybe it will, maybe it will change and become the structure for something more useful. Because I’m not sure that compulsive writing is useful, even if the ability to write is. Notebooks to my specifications are available in some countries but not others. The books I currently require in order to feed my habit are A4, stapled, lined, margined. It was not always so. To record the threads of interpersonal relationships and try to weave some sense of my place in the social world required blank A5 pages with a satisfying weight, even spiral binding and – it turned out – a resilient, bright yellow plastic cover. Before that, any attempt to spill onto paper or record my movements were densely written on loose leaf A4 photocopy paper, both sides, often wound around the thick block characters of a hitching sign; or, even denser and likely in pencil, in margins of other work, on the backs of envelopes or even bus tickets. My elegant notebooks sat at home unused, scaring the writing out of me any time I would turn than first, blank page. But this, this worked; something connected and felt tip pen met lined paper 213 pages ago. A field full of daisies, Macedonian food by the side of the truck then gorging on forced cherries in the cool room on a hot day, the circular stairs up a four floor op shop, zig zag edges revealed. Scenes from a life that is mine when I’m here, but may not have been once I got home, but that they are recorded here, made real and thus also lodged, legitimately in my brain. That the only street sign I found in Skopje directs one to one street, one bridge and a gynaecological clinic is not a dream, though having to kill people for some important reason is, and I know that it was brought on by someone coming into my room and cleaning and tying up my toilet. Reality really is stranger than fiction; how would I ever make a story of this material? Being grateful for my life that I escaped Italy, the subtle feeling of wearing my first beard, as ephemeral, more intentionally, than my bowtie that is really, probably, gone; will it have the same eventual impact on my psyche? Translating Slovenian poetry without knowing the language, sliding through Austria on so much goodwill that I barely saw the country. Recovering five-year-stolen bags and running down a Czech highway through the pelting rain with them, broken shoes and pants dumpstered in Montenegro.
Soon, too soon I will take my lined, stapled, A4 notebooks home and make a new stationary choice for a new sheet of life.
as if we were free
one of the things i got to do overseas that i haven’t for ages, was performance. in berlin i joined in a drag king performance at the very last minute, apparently there was footage filmed but i haven’t seen it. i also read out a poem. it was translated from slovenian and it took a lot of editing before it was readable, i only got the printout a day before, and i spent all that time walking around berlin, overshooting my destinations as i read bits out loud, gesturing the emphases with a red pen in hand. noone thought to mention that i’d be juggling a microphone too. five minutes before the show i find out that the translation was done by one of my new friends, and she didn’t like my editing, but she ended up agreeing that i had as much right as her to interpret a translation. and besides, it was about to start. here is the version i read, more or less.
As if we were free
Urška Strle
Somewhere in the centre of the small neglected town, which is, at the same time the capital of some small but relaxed East European state, in a newly cobble embellished street in the inner city centre where they just closed two pubs and a bookstore, I have met a man who ordered himself Culture as if he were ordering coffee with milk.
I have to confess, the cobbles are perfectly laid down, all the gaps are carefully clogged with quartz sand, and at the edge it is possible to recognise a slightly rounded pattern. In short, the street of some small neglected town, which is at the same time the capital of some small, cramped, and relaxed South European state, looks like the idyllic image on an old postcard.
Old bakeries arise in all parts of the town like mushrooms after the rain, as if they had decided one day and achingly wrested themselves out from old corner houses where they had modestly waited for decades unnoticed for their grand arrival, and which, on their frontage proudly show the inscription “Old Bakery”, which even more contributes to this idyllic look. I guess I’ve hurried past them for years and years without even noticing. I’ve walked past exactly this old bakery on the corner of this small idyllic street with carefully laid cobbles in the centre of some small neglected town and so on and so forth.
Suddenly an unbearable paranoia came over me, I got the feeling that somewhere out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of crinoline, and suspiciously I glanced towards the boys in white shirts with black bowties who were picking up the garbage. It appeared to me that time is curving itself as to the pattern of the new cobbles and that we will all find ourselves on that everlasting postcard from the end of the 19th century. Hastily I dashed towards the closest boy, that is, to the left edge, I ripped myself through the yellowish cardboard, and with a crash I landed in front of the doors to the pub which had, in the meantime, already disappeared in another reality.
To eat in this slovenly pub, which displayed insignia as a rallying point for all the enthusiasts of the sautéed potato, was akin to some special kind of masochism. Gnocchi Bolognese turned into spaghetti with tomato sauce, omelette with ham and cheese always remained without the latter two. The bills would be circulating around, they would be counted and discounted and finally there would come the conclusion that there are either too many or too few bills, the cash register is too far away and the next group of naïve tourists are just enough confused, hungry and tired and above all helpless in front of the board, on which specials of the day were written in complicated script.
But the slovenly pub that served for some special kind of masochism disappeared in that other reality, which was, to top it all off, mine. And there is no worse misery than when a person loses her own reality and therefore clings desperately to the handhold of some slovenly pub which went bankrupt, together with her lifestyle.
In the reflection of the filthy abandoned windows of my ailing lifestyle, I saw a mayor. All round and contented he was wiping sweat from his working face on the golden chain on which the city keys were jingling. He was shepherding a small squad of captured guest artists, some stoic, homeless ‘erased ones’, and from his pockets electric cables were forcing their way out, cables which NGO workers for the purpose of some obscure literary event negligently left in the middle of the street in the inner centre of the small neglected town, which is at the same time the capital of some small but relaxed Central European state. He ordered Culture as coffee with milk, and then stirred with a teaspoon an empty cup and grumbled about the bad taste.
I might be extremely happy about the new cobbles if I had to cross them in high heels, but, I think, the magic of the moment was ruined in the second when, under the sole of my beaten up sneakers, quartz sand creaked. Maybe my face would have lightened up if I had been on these new even cobbles with nicely clogged gaps and a slightly rounded pattern pushing a pram that would be running smoothly. But I just stood there at the beginning of that small street in the centre of the town in those damn beaten up sneakers, I was pacing around nervously, under my feet, quartz sand was nastily squeaking and I stared at the abandoned windows of the pub. All this with a newly cobble-embellished street of the inner centre of the small neglected town, which is at the same time a capital of some cramped but relaxed newly joined European state, and there was not a single space left for me to go.
washing machines
sitting here with the door open, listening to the sound of the washing machine.
i used to get very irritated by that sound. it’s quite loud and intrusive, it’s in my space and i don’t always have control over when it runs.
yet now the sound has associations of not only chores and hassle, but comfort, order, efficiency, white.
in two months of travel such a machine was the rarest of commodities. i got access to one exactly twice. i thoroughly enjoyed running round the continent, sleeping in tents or trucks, washing in hand basins or not at all, eating what i could find and being free. it’s an amazing, vital experience, but it’s not easy. i came to appreciate the comforts i was occasionally offered, and the epitome of comfort was borrowing a fluffy dressing gown while every scrap of fabric i owned was in the wash.
a washing machine is of limited value if you have no soap, no way of drying the finished product, no privacy in which to change, no security to ensure your clothes are safe as they dry or no way of cleaning yourself satisfactorily before you put the newly clean clothes on again. yet my new friend in austria and my old friend in denmark had homes, calm white airy apartments where they kept their entire lives, neatly organised and appropriate. sufficient, functioning. comfortable, available. as a guest in their homes i enjoyed beds in rooms with doors, consecutive dinners and breakfasts, conversation and assistance, internet and phone access and real showers.
over two months i got several other showers, varying degrees of local knowledge, food, beds and doors some good some questionable, but for everything to come together was unbelievable; i can no longer take it for granted.
i’m sure i won’t retain this attitude to machine noise through all the inconsiderate times that it gets run for other people’s clothes, but something has changed. i still maintain that home is where the sewing machine is, but maybe there’s something to be said for a washing machine too.
kate's adventure 