Die gibt's immer noch!

 

 

Vieles hat sich in Deutschland seit meiner Abreise in 1965 sehr verändert - oder besser gesagt, sehr verschlechtert - aber anscheinend gibt es diese alten Litfaßsäulen immer noch.

Vor unserer Etagenwohnung in Braunschweig am Cyriaksring 47 stand damals solch eine Säule und als Kinder warteten wir immer gespannt auf den Mann der jede zweite oder dritte Woche mit seinem Fahrrad kam dass hoch belastet war mit Plakaten, einem großen Eimer voll mit Kleister, und einem langen Besen mit dem er dann den Kleister auf die Säule schmierte und danach die neuen Plakate anklebte und abglättete. (Und da dies ein 'blog' über Deutschland und in deutscher Sprache ist, verwende ich auch typische seitenlange deutsche Schachtelsätze.)

Ich erinnerte mich später wieder an die Litfaßsäule als ich den Film 'Der Dritte Mann' sah, in dem Harry Lime seinen Verfolgern entkommt wenn er in eine Litfaßsäule verschwindet die in die Abwässerkanäle führt.

 

 

Heute erinnerte ich mich noch einmal daran als ich das unterige Foto auf der facebook-Seite meiner alten Heimatstadt Brauschweig sah, denn dort stand immer noch eine dieser Litfaßsäulen auf dem Fußweg vor den Mietkasernen. In einer solcher Mietkaserne war ich aufgewachsen und wäre vielleicht auch noch alt geworden sein, hätte ich nicht mein Glück gesucht (und auch gefunden) in Australien. Glück braucht der Mensch!

 

Photo courtesy www.unsere-alten-zeiten.de

 

Aber ich bin dennoch froh dass es diese alten Litfaßsäulen noch gibt.

 

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Next time is next time; now is now.

 

 

A haiku is a traditional form of short Japanese poetry that captures a single fleeting moment in time, often focusing on nature and simplicity. You know, something like master poet Matsuo Bashō's "An old silent pond... A frog jumps into the pond, Splash! Silence again."

"Perfect Days" is a haiku on the rhythms of daily life and a life-affirming meditation on simplicity. It's a beautiful and moving description of how we can find clarity, acceptance, and joy by embracing the current moment and allowing our lives to unfold one day at a time.

Throughout the entire two hours of this movie, we stay together with our protagonist Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, as he lives his life of quiet, lovely solitude, one moment at a time. There are no flashbacks, no exposition dumps, no cutaways to another time or place.

We never leave Hirayama’s side, and Hirayama himself never strays from being truly present in every single moment. The following video may open a door to better understand this movie, although I suspect we will all see something different in this movie that speaks to us.

 

 

I lived most of my life for all those countless tomorrows. Now that there are not many tomorrows left, I regret not having lived my yesterdays more deliberately, not having watched the sunlight shining through the leaves of trees, not having given myself to the invisible, transcendent beauty of the moment that only exists in the here and now.

Next time is next time; now is now.

 

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Jeder stirbt für sich allein

 

 

Who in Moruya reads Hans Fallada? There it was, a dog-eared copy of "Alone in Berlin", which is the name of Hans Fallada's book "Jeder stirbt für sich allein" in its English edition (or "Every Man Dies Alone" in the USA).

Dog-eared or not, I picked it up to give it a new home at "Riverbend", alongside "Little Man, What Now?" and "Who Once Eats Out of the Tin Bowl". But back to "Alone in Berlin" which is based on the true story of working-class husband and wife Otto and Elise Hampel who, acting alone, became part of the German Resistance. It was one of the first anti-Nazi novels to be published by a German after World War II.

 

 

After I had picked up this dog-eared book, I saw my German GP, who removed the sutures from a biopsy he had done last week. "Better a biopsy than an autopsy", I'd said, and let him have his pond of flesh.

 

 

The results came back with a "nothing to see here", which made me feel relaxed enough to ask him if he had read Hans Fallada. Of course, he had, as he had grown up in Russian-occupied East Germany, the GDR.

 

 

The book was also made into a movie, an English version which I have on DVD and which is available on YouTube only as a trailer, and a much better German version which has been uploaded to YouTube in full.

 

Click here

 

Having limited my book purchases in Moruya to just four - Fallada's book "Alone in Berlin" plus Bernhard Schlink's "Homecoming", Tony Abbott's Australia - A History", and "The Fourth Revolution - The Global Race to Reinvent the State" - I thought I stop over at the Mogo Bookshop. The shop had been closed ever since its original owners, Helen and Patrick, had been forced into early retirement by the onset of dementia.

The new owner is from Cape Town in South Africa, and so we talked about Cape Town, which I loved and where I had almost taken a job after leaving South-West Africa, and about South African writers. Did she have any books by J.M. Cotzee? She did, and so I bought "Summertime".

What a small and wonderful world it is! The Mogo Bookshop is now on my list of places to visit whenever I tear myself away from "Riverbend".

 

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Standing room only

 

 

Another hot day made me spend it in the cool library. All double-brick, high ceilings, and with heavy velvet curtains blocking out the sunlight turns it into a naturally 'air-conditioned' refuge, even though it's standing room only.

As I slowly worked my way through all those books that had piled up on the floor over the last few months, I reflected on how empty life would be if I were unable to read. And then, I don't know how, I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh's short story "The Man Who Liked Dickens", in which, deep in the Amazonian jungle, one man becomes the prisoner of another who has never learnt how to read, and must read to him the entire works of Charles Dickens in daily instalments in perpetuity.

 

A dramatised version of the sbort story

 

Evelyn Waugh later expanded this short story into his book "A Handful of Dust", changing the names of the two protagonists from Mr McMaster and Paul Henty to Mr Todd and Tony Last. The movie of the same name - click here - also includes the story towards the end, starting at 1:35:00.

Read the short story here, or do a Mr McMaster and have it read to you:

 

 

I shall continue to work my way through those books so next time I seek refuge in my 'air-conditioned' library, it won't be standing room only.

 

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As long as we live, they too will live; for they are now a part of us as we remember them.

 

 

A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them ..."

"The ultimate touchstone is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

Which is how David Whyte described the word 'Friendship' in his book "Consolations". And what a fitting description it is of my best friend, Noel Butler, who bore witness to my life's many trials and tribulations for almost thirty years, until his untimely death in August 1995.

Basically your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together.

If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. Even if you talk about them, they are beside the point. Stripped, humanly speaking, to the bare essentials, you are yourselves the point. The usual distinctions of older-younger, richer-poorer, smarter-dumber, male-female even, cease to matter. You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn't matter either. Only the meeting matters.

Noel Butler was such a friend. We first met aboard the liner PATRIS in 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany. The PATRIS had been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea but, following the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel, the Suez Canal closed and the ship was re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope.

However, the many New Guinea expats who had already booked, Noel amongst them, still joined the ship in Sydney. As did Graeme Bell's All Stars Band. And so for the next four weeks I would sit in the ship's Midnight Club and listen to the many yarns of high adventure told by those larger-than-life New Guinea expats while Graeme Bell's All Stars played their ragtime music.

During the day, Noel and I would sit on deck for hours, hunched over a chessboard. Our mutual love of chess and my interest in New Guinea started a friendship which lasted until his death thirty years later!

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent mostly in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland.

I had come up to PNG in late 1969 and worked there for several years. During this time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma. Then it was my turn to spend Christmas 1975 at Wewak but I could only stay for a few days as I was already booked to fly out to Tehran in Iran.

Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea", a sentiment we shared.

 

 

Some friends are more or less replaceable with other friends. Noel was not. I last heard from him sometime in April 1995. He'd sent me a funny "Childers by Night" postcard which was all black except for those words. On the back he had written, "Hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this; mine is but that's inevitable." I was then far too young and far too busy and far too full of myself to think that this was more than just a funny card. Four months later, Noel was dead.

Again, to quote David Whyte: "... an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way ..."

My friendship with Noel has continued for more than thirty years "in a silent internal conversational way". Today is his birthday, which we never celebrated because we never knew each other's birthday. We never allowed our friendship to become too sentimental. We had both been loners for most of our lives and didn't want to be reminded of our non-existent home and family. It's something else we shared.

 

 

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