She sits and waits.
Day by day the rot climbs a spine-knuckle higher,
rising like smoke.
She is the thigh-hair of old women,
their skin-stretched ears and yellow eyes,
calcifying.
She sits and waits.
She plans her funeral march:
I shall dress primrose and every face shall weep.
©LS 2012
I crossed another item off ‘the list’ today by completing my RSA training. So that I didn’t lose my mind in the bureaucratic vortex of the Westfield Tower on William St, I scribbled away during the six-hour seminar. These are some of the disjointed observations and thoughts:
It’s 9am and I’m waiting for the RSA instructor to start speaking. His name is PAUL CLARKE, apparently (according to the AV of a policeman in a high-vis jacket pointing to his name in superimposed text).
The room is silent: there are 17 of us in here and counting.
Now 19.
People are either staring ahead of them blankly or flicking listlessly through the
NSW RESPONSIBLE SERVICE OF ALCOHOL COURSE STUDENT NOTES
PAUL CLARKE is making a fuss, trying to herd the tables into straight lines like it’s a crowd of disinterested water buffalo.
Two French girls with thin faces are sitting opposite me.
I can see into the adjacent room where another instructor is stretching in his seat, lifting his rolls of fat like you would a bag of onions.
A girl sitting on an adjacent table is staring at me – I can feel it’s heat on the side of my face. I don’t know that she’s ever seen colour before. She’s German.
PAUL CLARKE’s favourite phrase is “it’s a double-edged sword”.
Isn’t it stunning that evolution has designed us as two puzzle pieces that need to fit together to make another human being? It’s like Nature sat down and said: “What is the most rudimentary and yet poetic way that I can make this happen?”
PAUL CLARKE has just told us that he also works part time in an RSL. He’s got a slight belly and a round jaw. He has the curves of boyhood about him still.
My feet are bored.
PAUL CLARKE is quite proud of his self-coined phrase: “the see-saw of death”, which he uses to explain the correlation between the alcohol percentage and the level of consciousness in any one individual.
I’ve realised that it’s impossible to say “sobers us up” quickly on repeat.
PAUL CLARKE’s very witty, according to PAUL CLARKE, summation of the concept of “beer-goggles”: “You go to bed with the princess and wake up with a dragon.” I think I just heard one of Germaine Greer’s ovaries burst in anger.
PAUL CLARKE gives his RSL regulars a lift home if he’s leaving at the same time and his second favourite phrase is “100%” as a substitution for ‘correct’.
There’s a boy in this class with a stunning scar that reaches from his bicep to his elbow. It’s like his skin was putty for a moment and someone skidded their hand across it, making it ripple unevenly, and then it set again.
Sometimes, words just don’t cut it.
Getting the train I often have the intense mushroom-cloud sized desire for all of the inter-carriage doors to open simultaneously to create one unbroken line through which you could see an unbroken line of commuters breaking out into spontaneous dance. Like this. But in a train.
This morning I saw, again, older women pulling themselves along invisible cords, helping each remain upright whilst they negotiated the moving space.
I saw a Chinese man walk on with a set of oversized purple headphones, which looked like metallic ear-warmers. They acted as a sort of frame to the plum-coloured birthmark that had seeped across his face.
I saw a just-beyond-middle-aged couple walk on, hand in hand, both slightly overweight in matching too-tight striped polo shirts. They held hands even when they had seated themselves and whispered into each others ears like schoolchildren.
I stared at my shoes self-consciously for a lot of the trip – I was suddenly aware of how ‘the gaze’ is perpetuated in a train carriage in a way that is almost impossible in any other space.
‘The gaze’ is that social contract by which, by making eye contact with a fellow human being, you both acknowledge their presence and the fact that you are co-existing with them in real space and time.
This may be why we so seldom make eye contact – how much easier is it to look at a screen/book/train map than accept the responsibility of being within a metre of another human being? It avoids the absurdity of standing within breathing-down-your-neck distance whilst straining to contain yourself within your own space-bubble. Make eye contact and it may pop, leaving you naked and exposed to the conversational elements.
I suddenly realised this morning, sardine-squashed in with 17 other breathing bodies, that the mirror-like train doors only multiply this absurdity onto an almost grand scale. I couldn’t look at the doors without catching the reflection of another gaze. I found my eyes sliding over people/mirror-people like an eel.
I felt almost ashamed at my complicity in propagating these space-bubbles.
I am going to start using this space as a black-hole (for that, really, is what cyberspace feels like) sounding-board for the next project that I am working on.
I have set myself a challenge. By the end of the year I am going to do a public reading of a readable draft of My Name is Truda Vitz. This is a one-woman show about my grandmother, Gertrude Vitz (who everybody called Truda), and her escape from Nazi Vienna in 1938 at the ripe old age of seventeen.
I never met Truda – she died of breast cancer a month before I was born – and as a result I have always been totally fascinated by her. This seventeen year old girl escaped Vienna on a train by herself (whilst her father, Ernst, fucked off to Cuba with his mistress Else) to arrive in England, where she was immediately registered as an enemy alien. We still have her Alien Registration Book, which has entries such as “Gertrude Vitz is granted permission to own a bicycle under the Alien Movement Restriction Act 1940”. We all know what a threat adolescent Jewish girls posed to the safety of Mother England, right? Her only means of survival initially was the contraband jewellery that Ernst had covered her in before she got on the train. She not only survived alone, in England, for seven years by herself but she also put herself through a science degree at London University. This is where she met my grandfather, Geoff Satchell, who was her biology tutor. They married, had my Dad, and promptly moved to Dunedin, which is geographically absolutely the furthest place that you can get from Vienna without skirting Antarctica (a little-known but true fact: there is a massive Jewish-Viennese community in Dunedin, all because it’s the polar opposite of their home-town).
This is what I would like the show to be about, particularly focusing on that moment of transition between being a young adult, and being able to pursue whatever potential or lack of potential you may have had, and becoming a refugee, where fear is the driving principle of all of your actions.
So.
I guess this is the start of tracking this process.
Let’s see how it goes.
vimh 