Monkeyless Cathedrals

"There's a monkey holding an orange," she said. "It's supposed to represent the Kingdom of Animals. At least, that's what I'm told."

Back and forth and around and around I searched the windows, paintings, carvings and statues of St Barbara in Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. Others in my group searched with equal diligence. There was no monkey. Biblical scenes, saints, sinners and martyrs aplenty, but no monkey. I was disappointed.

Stepping inside the Salisbury Cathedral a neat little woman in a green sash honed in on me with a smile. "Would you like a leaflet? It's a little map with a suggested route. In-" her smile faltered. "English? Or...something...else?"

I smiled. "English will be fine."

"The monkey, if you can spot it," reads the pamphlet, "resides high up in the South Quire Aisle, poised to hurl a nut at those entering the Vestry."

Up and down the South Quire Aisle marched I, neck painfully bent and eyes straining to make out the gloomy arches above. Biblical scenes, saints, sinners, martyrs and tombs aplenty, but no monkey. I was disappointed.

There are no bears in America.

There are no monkeys in cathedrals.

Advice to Writers*

The showers in this hostel looked decent. Fair sized shower with good space in which to dry off and get changed, enough hooks to hang everything up and hot water that did not run out.

They are their own rooms, however. Not a cubicle door in a larger bathroom, but sealed up like broom closets. A door with no gap at the top or bottom.

And, as it turns out, no ceiling fan.

Once out of the shower and in the steam, I couldn't actually get enough air in, that's how dense the moisture was, having nowhere to go.

I also could not actually get dry. Within seconds of a towel scrub I'd be wet again, not damp, but wet.

Writers: always have a towel big enough to make a dash to your next safe haven.



* And by 'writers' I mean 'everyone'.

Other Nutrition

I fell out of a doze and beyond the bus window were fields and slow hills that disappeared into hesitant rain. Green grasses, yellow grasses, lines of vulnerable trees. Fences of wooden beams surrounding barrows. A whole sky. Police tape tangled in a tree's fingers. Winter apples on leafless branches. Crows and pheasants picking at turned dirt. A bemused flock of seagulls sitting among the sheep. Moss and lichen on all walls. School uniforms at the bus stop. The wait staff laughed at my desperation for a cup of tea and beamed at my reaction to lunch. Pedestrians lacking urgency.

New eyes. New breath.

Walking up Milford Street I heard birds.

Think Champloo

KONG HEI FAT CHOI. GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI GONG XI etcetera etcetera etcetera...

There are obvious things that are missed when traveling. Less obvious absences make themselves known over time, when you are unprepared for their arrival.

I miss my clothes. Which is more to say, I am getting sick and tired of wearing the same clothes over and over. Three months of two pairs of jeans and rotating six tops. I miss dressing myself up. I miss looking pretty.

(Anyone who leaves a comment that in any way attempts to assure me that I am pretty regardless will have their comment deleted. Not seeking compliments.)

This does in a way feed into mental well being. Poppy summed it up wonderfully in this post;

"When I sit down and go through the ritual of of painting my nails, doing my makeup and hair, and putting on a pretty outfit, I am allowing myself to feel like I am worthy of spending time on myself."

It is nigh impossible to accomplish this when dragging yourself from hostel to hostel with a limited and purely functional wardrobe. It may be mistaken for vanity, but not being able to put together nifty little outfits and step out knowing that no matter how I feel about my body, my clothes look faaabulous does make it a little harder to feel good about myself. As I am now, with my dino chucks, jeans, and a plain long sleeved tee, I'm pretty mediocre.

I miss having a desk. They're under-valued items of furniture and do not feature in any hostels or hotels. Sitting here in Starbucks eating their wifi, and my hands and shoulders are most unhappy with this table. It's even worse back in the room - not even a table to speak of.

I read on the train today. Perhaps I've been in London long enough to feel comfortable knowing where I am, that I did not have to keep observing those around me or checking the next station incessantly. Fear of motion sickness had stopped me from trying before, but I managed it today without nausea, and it was wonderful. Such a normal, ordinary activity. More than opening a bank account, buying bus tickets and organising my mobile, this felt like an achievement. The first cut in carving out this world and making it my own.

There is fresh milk in England. The continent does not seem to do fresh milk, another little thing I took for granted. There is no sour milk either. Beware of sour milk. You will pass through foreign lands and pick up cartons that look like milk, only to find you have poured something that is most of the way toward being yoghurt into your tea.

In Iceland, do not buy the a + b milk.

In the Czech Republic, do not buy the green cartons.

You have no idea the heartbreak. No idea.

It was not as significant a relief as I expected it to be, to finally be in the land in which my native tongue originates and is named after. I can ask complicated questions and understand complicated answers. Hell, even simple questions. I can read all signs. That perpetual self-conscious embarrassment that I am monolingual and force people out of their native tongue in order to communicate me, so heavy and shameful, now gone!

The price being, I can understand everyone. Everyone. All the time. Now, sitting on the train, waiting for the bus, standing in the Natural History Museum, buying a cup of tea, I am surrounded by the everyday conversations of everyday concerns of everyday people, and I cannot keep all these voices out of my head.

Overwhelmed, and so I am fleeing the city. Tomorrow I'm getting on a bus for Salisbury, and from there to Bath, and from there, who knows. All want is a greater presence of quiet in my world. And then, perhaps some colour, something other than stone in all the shades of civilisation.

I will circle around the west, return to London to pick up my National Insurance Number and bank card, and then make my way north, hopefully closer to a place in which I can stop, and space I can call my own.

Now, Then, and Soon

Now I'm behind on video blogs as well as blog blogs and pbbbbbbt I give myself permission to not give a flying fiddlestick.

Now I am in London.

Now I am convalescing. At least, I am trying. This being sick business is utter horseshit. The fever and chills are done, got that out of the way in one night, yet the aches are still hanging around and the weakness, by Belanos, the weakness! Didn't rouse myself til 1 in the afternoon, didn't get out of the house til 3, only walked to the British Library to see da Vinci's scribbles and Brontë's scribbles and Lennon's scribbles and had to had to had no choice in the matter but to sit in a cafe afterward, drink a drink I didn't want simply so I could sit, and it wasn't really sitting it was slumping, and I was addled and exhausted and somehow that made my drink confusing, and twice the server came over to check if I liked the drink. Then I attempted grocery shopping. I was confronted by many types of butter. Brain was unable to make decision.

Now I am ensconced once again in my room, with a near 20 year old black cat with a cataract and I can hear a child crying and I don't think anyone else is home.

Now the business end of my quest begins. No one asked for proof of funds when I entered the country. The immigration officer was perhaps distracted by the fact that after clearing me she would be on break, so she cleared me right quick smart.

Now all the 'deal with it when the time comes' are coming in to land. Such as, if I do not work in an office, what work will I do? With my physical limitations, what work can I do? Am I really capable of winging it or will uncertainty be too much stress?

Now I am tired.

Now I am going to bed.

The 365 Project

As with a great many other people, on the first day of the new year I started upon the 365 Project, the purpose of which is to take one photo every day for a year. Which, you know, I'm tooling around in exotic locales, this isn't exactly a challenge.

Posting one photo per day, however...

If you are interested, the photos are going up on my flickr account here.

My own self-imposed rules:

1. iPhone photos do not count.
2. The photo must be taken on the day (forgiven if unable to upload on the day).
3. No doubling up with posting on the blog.
   

Aural Transport

The table is tiny, an old sewing table still with wheel and pedals so I cannot get my legs beneath. The restaurant, 'U dwau Maryí', has only the one patron.

These windows look on the Vltava as it wends through old town Cesky Krumlov. Dark. Freezing. Raining.

This particular peace, breadth of river, infinite rush of water, throws me back to Nikko in Japan, a mere day after the typhoon, lying on the tatami mats and listening to a different breadth of river, a different endless rush of water.

And yet, the same.

Vltava by sirtessa

The Beggars of Prague

The beggars of Melbourne are gaunt and bloodless, wearing stained tracksuit pants and the stereotypical visage of a junkie. They shamble, always a list to their posture, and leaning forward to ask you for change, voice nasal and monotone and barely waiting for your refusal before moving on.

The beggars of New York have meat on their bones and less stains on their clothes. They work on captive audiences, entering the subway and narrating their tale of misfortune to commuters over the roar of the track and train beneath. Some of them sing. The majority stand with straight spine.

There are no beggars in Reykjavík.

The beggars of Berlin are small women with beautiful faces and dark hair bound in scarves. They may or may not have a small child with them. They ask if you speak English and present you with a hand-written plea, and follow your retreating footsteps with "please, please, please."

The beggars of Kraków are similar to those of Melbourne, but wear the mien of the alcoholic instead of the junkie.

The beggars of Prague say and do nothing.

The Birds of Reyjavík

"Forever let this place be a cry of despair..."

It was a beautiful day, such an unnaturally beautiful day.

"...(and seemed to confirm Chamfort's dictum that a man must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead)..."

— The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton

The Year of Folding Hands

I haven't written up an end of year review for a few years now. Things fall apart. My control, or, my sense of control over where I am steering my life has slipped from my grip. A lot of things have slipped, and even more things I have let slide.

In Berlin, in a hostel in Kreuzberg, in the kitchen, with two other travellers sitting behind me, eating pizza they fried because the oven is broken, speaking with Australian voices, from Melbourne, from Frankston. A dorm room full of drunken snores entering in stages. Bad sleep makes itself at home in my joints. These are aches deeper than the dimensions of my body.

There is no quiet, peace, privacy. Alone without solitude. I am run ragged by people I have nothing to do with. They judge me because I do not want a beer, I do not want to chat, I do not want to go out. Not with them.

The people I want to be with are on the other side of the world. I am as far from them as it is near possible to be, and that is my doing. Christmas passed, New Years is passing, summer will pass, and that I have not spent my time in their company is a wistfulness sharp enough to blossom into regret.

I have seen a Southern White-faced Owl, a bearcat moving, Manhattan lights from the Empire State Building, a Gutenberg Bible, Christopher Robin's original stuffed toys that became Winne the Pooh, the biggest meteorite, the Northern Lights, the leaves change in North Carolina, a bald eagle hunting ducks, rats in a New York subway, mice in a Berlin U-Bahn, Nefertiti, the holotype of Archaeopteryx, DNA, the black beach, walked into a glacier, lost myself in medieval streets, stood in the Nuremberg palace where the Roman Emperors would reside, touch bullet holes and the Berlin Wall, watched polar bear twins dunk each other, watched manatees do nothing, touched the ash of new volcanoes, climbed through a lava tunnel more than a kilometre long and 5000 years old, seen shooting stars over the Atlantic from both sides, and bought a train ticket to Poland without speaking English.

I changed medications over and over this year. I had tests, I failed tests, I lost hope. I was passed over for permanent position for the job I was in three times. I moved back in with my parents and sacrificed my kingdom. I was told therapy couldn't help me. I did not write. I did not read.

I found friends. I misplaced friends. I found lovers. I refused lovers. I was a good friend. I was an unreliable friend. I was a useless enemy. I hurt, and was hurt in turn.

Church bells, ambulance sirens and free-range fireworks are the soundscape of Berlin.

I have left my job, and my home, my family, my dogs, my friends and lover. I have left the city of my heart. I have left everything I knew, and knowing everything I know, threw myself into everything I didn't know.

There is not so much different here. There is not enough different here.

When running from yourself, there will never be enough distance.

It has just gone midnight back home. My heart is in pieces scattered in a handful of individuals so far from me, in a different year to me now. Moving on without me. That is what life does. It keeps going, whether you keep up or not.

So many hands have been folded to get me where I am, in a position may would envy. I am told I am brave, when people look at what I am doing, but I am not. My demons simply come from other angles, and I am running and running and failling to escape them. So many hands folded, in external pragmatics and internal commerce. I am so compromised I no longer know how to define myself. There is no way to identify what is of my own making and what has changed because of medication.

I know I should be enjoying myself. I know I should be exuberant, wild-eyed with curiosity, delight and horror. I know the sight of snow on those plains should have brought me to tears. I know standing on a railway platform at night should be an event to record, remember, in every country. I know I should be learning, learning, learning, soaking drinking saturating myself in the world around me, for all these contrasting details, all these mundane little surprises, all the earmarks of my ignorance and all I have yet to learn-

But I am not, I do not.

New experiences and learning were to feed future writing. Without that purpose then what I experience has no point nor potency. This is an awareness I cannot shake. There is no purpose I can assign to my existence. It is all time wasted in agonising seconds.

I am tired.

I am here because I could not be at home. Now I find that I do not want to be here, and I know of nowhere else to be.



May 2012 fear you, respect you, and treat you with kindness.

<3

3 set free, 1 imprisoned

Burnout - Rebecca Donner & Inaki Miranda

From DC's Minx line, comics aimed at girls. Coming of age story, girl with broken family starts up with a new broken family. Decent, but pieces of emotional development felt forced for the sake of the story. Art work palatable. It was exactly what I needed when I bought it, something to dive into, that would not challenge me greatly, and take me out of myself. I release it to the wild (aka, the book exchange shelf in the hostel).


Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District - Ben Katchor

Had I been in a less fatigue-faded state of mind this book would have tickled my absuridism gland into hysterics. Each page a single piece, a sliver of story, or a train of thought before it is derailed, of strange and pointless things that are given accolades and attention. As it was, however, I am tired and more than a little misery prone, and all I could see in the pages was wasted time, wasted lives, mundane small narrow pointless useless valueless worthless. So I closed the covers, and I set it free.


Lori - Robert Bloch

A reprint of a book originally released in 1988, I bought it because I confused the author with Lawrence Block. So. My mistake. Riddled with typos, a plot that made no sense, and shit characterisation. Shit. Like scrotum. Did I mention the plot made no sense? And talk about forced emotional development. UGH. MAKING MASSIVE JUMPS TO CONCLUSIONS LIKE GRASSHOPPAAAAH?! If the book had a face, I would have punched it. Except I am not violent and it does have a face and I respect books, so I did not punch it.

Setting this fucker free. I pity da foo' who picks it up.


The Ganzfeld #3

This, I am keeping. The magazine has since been discontinued, which is a shame. It was full of wonderful odd angled articles that, to me, shared a common focus on examining a point of wonder. Not all wonder is good, nor enlightening, but it is all wonderful and interesting. Particularly taken with the piece by Rick Moody. This was included in the box I just sent home.

All items bought for half price at Modern Graphics, a fabulous comic shop in Kreuzberg. Found it completely by accident. Solid range of German, French and English books available. If they're open tomorrow I may have to go rummage some more.

The 3 free books are going on the shelf at Baxpax Kreuzberg.

I am tired, and although I have barely pecked at the surface, I confess I do not feel any great need to explore Berlin further.

"Of death and epiphany together, let us say nothing. That's the space of the romantic, and the romantic always features an especially high body count."

—Canon, Rick Moody, the Ganzfeld #3

And yet without decoration.

The Neues Museum was born from the destruction of the old. Bombed in February 1945, the greatest of treasures were safely hidden in the zoo, and all else was incinerated and crushed.

The old museum lives in the new, with salvaged pieces of ornamentation pressed into the walls where they would have been, surrounded by new and blank plaster, so that the ghost of that majestic hall lives superimposed in splinters and fragments over the present day.

There are bullet holes in the walls that did not require replacing



The story is not only in the contents of the rooms. The foundations have memory.

little lights, a little light

I went walking, and found a little galaxy. I took a slice of time and froze it into a visual representation, which I then converted into 0s and 1s, and now I am putting it here, for you.

The Responsible Adult

That's the mark of a true adult; total responsibility for self. It is a mostly exhausting process, sadly, and much of the time the rewards feel few and far between.

This isn't a reward as such. Traipsing about the world is an incredible luxury. Awareness of this cannot and should not be undone, and the opportunity not taken for granted.

At the same time, the only person responsible for me is me. I make my own decisions, pick my consequences and get to choose which regret to live with.

Tessa, come Boxing Day you will have been traveling for 2 months, the longest you've ever gone, and there is no known end to this. You were not at full capacity when you left home, and haven't operated on such for too long. To this journey you've assigned some purpose. There is something you need to prove, but what, and to who, you do not know.

You are not as strong as you think you are. It is okay to admit that.

While in Berlin, I give you permission to do nothing. Go out and tourist your little butt off if you want, or stay in the hostel dozing on the couch between cups of tea and look only out the window.

Ask nothing of yourself. Test nothing. Challenge nothing. Be nothing.

And maybe we'll get through this.

Some Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and those Nürmberg drunks I mentioned earlier.

There was a soccer match on the other day. Footy fans and drunks - these are things that Australia and Germany have in common. Unfortunately.

Small hours on a German station, MAKE VIDEO BLOG

If you're going to watch any of these stupid videos of mine, watch this one. The South Coast of Iceland is just gorgeous, the little glimpses provided in here don't even give you a taste.

While I was standing inside the glacier I took my glove off to run my hand over the ice, and started laughing, as I do when something delights me.
"It's dry!"
"Yes," said the Dutch Man still lingering. "It is ice."
"Yes, but it's dry!"
He nodded, and stated again, a little slower, "it is ice."
There was too much of a language barrier between us for me to explain that where I come from, no ice stays dry.

The Perils of Hosteling

There is no microwa- THERE IS NO MICROWAVE IN THE KITCHEN?! WHO DOES THAT?

There are three beds in my room. The other two are taken by a couple of German guys.

I have to admit, even though I try to be chilled and non-judgmental about exactly that sort of situation, I raised my eyebrow. Most hostels are all for keeping the sexes separated, which I imagine just saves everyone a whole lot of potential hassle.

Eh, I told myself, eh. Do not be uncomfortable unless they give you a reason to be uncomfortable (although I did grumble about the idea of having to leave the room every time I wanted to get changed, pfffft).

They reeled back after five in the morning, giggle-drunk and trying and failing to be quiet with such ridiculous earnestness I had to hide under the doona so they couldn't see me laughing at them. These boys, they be okay. Getting home so late was a bonus, I got some alright sleeping done.

When I woke up, I had to punch down a laugh again. Drunks do not know how to drive doonas. The guy opposite me was face down on the mattress, with one corner of the doona bunched up around his face and the rest thrown on the floor. He was only in his undies. I was tempted to take a photo. The other guy had managed to keep the doona on the bed, but he had wadded it up and was spooning it. Also only in his undies.

In this situation, I am the menace.