In this edition: cemeteries, erotic art, and my family’s favourite joke
Hey friends: this edition deals with some difficult topics about death and sex that might make for difficult reading. Be kind and gentle to yourself, and maybe give this one a miss if those are tricky topics for you. I’ve tried to be careful with you and with myself, too.
Easter is a weird holiday, isn’t it? Germans have asked me a few times why it’s called “Good Friday” in English, which, good question, I know it’s because of the archaic use of “good” meaning “holy”, but it does really sound kind of messed up. It’s a four-day holiday that broadly goes: day about death, day to recover from death & chill in a tomb (and do groceries), day about new life, day to… recover from new life? I didn’t do much this year, but I spent one day appropriately wobbling along the line between life and death by anxiously repotting several of my plants who are suffering from an abundance of life in the form of these god! damn! fungus gnats!!, and also some enthusiastic mould on exposed roots at the bottom of pots.
“Well, it’s Easter Saturday*,” I told my plants superstitiously, gingerly trying to separate them from the parasitic freeloaders and accidentally snapping sprouts and roots, “so if I kill you today you’ve still got tomorrow to resurrect yourselves, since that’s the general energy of Easter Sunday.”
There are some things to say about death at a time like this. When I started this newsletter three months ago, I had some kind of idea that I’d be writing like… cheerful stuff. Or at least, things that are kind of soothingly non-confrontational. I wrote it in the description section as “Stories and other small magics; The kinds of things we need to get through the woods and the winter and the world.” Whenever I start writing a new edition, I think about that goal and wonder what I really meant by it, and whether I’m going to stick to it.
But I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently that delve into topics that I’d maybe normally shy away from, or feel deeply weird about. Some of them even arise out of the newsletter itself. Others sprout from unhappy situations like the deeply suboptimal date I went on a few weeks back that left me wandering around the western suburbs of the city at 11pm and crying on the phone with my mother for an hour; fertiliser that’s subsequently produced some of the best conversations I’ve had in months.
I used to flirt with the idea of being enigmatic. Being the person about whom people would say, wow, she’s so mysterious, so full of secrets, how compelled and intrigued we are! Wow, she’s revealed so little of herself, there is nothing here to criticise, how flawless! It was never a particularly good brand fit for me (last Tuesday I met this girl while hiking in the woods and within two hours we’d talked about therapy, our family histories, and our commitment issues), but there were times when I tried it to one degree or another. Ultimately, of course, as my friend Rebecca says of my persistent habit of falling for cute musicians, “That’s an immature impulse, Caitlin, and you need to move beyond it.” Rebecca will have to keep being disappointed by my romantic inclinations, but I do think that every step I take towards honestly reckoning with my own desires, failings, and idiosyncrasies by bouncing them off the ears and hearts and minds of others is a step towards something… interesting. More interesting than whatever enigma I was trying to be, certainly.
So this edition, let’s talk about some of the stuff we don’t talk about.
(*Sorry, SORRY, Holy Saturday, Easter Saturday is in fact today, the Saturday one week after Easter weekend, and her full name is actually The Bright and Holy Septave Paschal Artos and Octoechoes Saturday of Iscariot's Byzantine Easter Eve and she will take her artisanal sanctified ox-milk latte without foam, thank you so much. Christianity, go lie down for a bit, will you?)
Last Rites
It’s not that I avoid the topic of death, necessarily, it just feels like one of the hardest topics for us to talk about, generally speaking – even (especially?) when we’re thinking about it more than ever for pandemic reasons. Do you know people who are good at talking about grief and death and stuff? Can you think of examples? I always struggle. And then I overcompensate for the struggle by talking too much, thinking that if I hit on the right thing to say, if I can remember something comforting or helpfully pragmatic someone once said then I will stop feeling anxious and bad and like there’s something that needs to be done.
My birth mother (my first mother; I’m lucky enough to have a second) died when I was five, which is the kind of thing people will reflexively say “oh I’m sorry” about for the entire length of my life and I will simply never have a good response to that. (“Yeah”/“Oh, it’s okay”/“It happened a long time ago”/“Thanks”). Which is okay! Both I and the other person get to experience the deeply human phenomenon of being a bit mutually awkward together about death for a few seconds (or minutes, if we’re really milking it), and then we continue onwards.
It’s meant that death has felt like a quite immediate component of life for most of my remembered existence, though. Like, around the same time as she died, I also realised I would die, and so would everyone else; although, like most people I’m not like… reconciled with that fact, at all. Essentially I spend a decent chunk of my time going OH GOD MORTALITY OH NO, like any well-balanced and definitely fine and okay individual.
The thing is, I think death is somehow more integrated into the architecture of life in European cities than it is in Australia. When I first lived in Uppsala, I was living right next to a big old cemetery, in which the buildings of my university faculty were nestled, so I crossed through it almost every day to get to class. Cemeteries are everywhere here, and I love walking around them and looking at graves. I love that on All Hallow’s Day people light candles on them, and spend time there, and transform the names and dates and handful of words back into remembered people.
Nele and I walked through the cemetery up in Pankow last week, and took a break on a bench in the sunshine. She told me her grandmother is buried in a family plot in another state.
“But I don’t want to be in a family plot,” she said. “I want my own stone.”
“I don’t even think I want that,” I replied. “Just cremate me and put some of me in a nice river, and some in the ocean.”
“Oh no. I want to be in a coffin.” Nele squinted a bit against the sun. “I like the idea of being in there. Decomposing. People can come to visit me. I’ll be in the same cemetery as the family plot, so we can still talk, just… you know, I want my own space.”
I frowned, looking at the headstones in front of us. “You know, gun to my head, I could not tell you right this moment where a single one of my grandparents is buried. I think they’re mostly cremated. I have a vague idea that there’s a big cemetery somewhere in Sydney. But I’ve never once been to visit them… or any of my relatives, other than Mum, actually.”
Mum was cremated. We buried her ashes on the farm we had when I was younger, in a sealed concrete box, under a rock overlooking the valley. There was a plaque on it. It was a nice peaceful spot, a good little walk from the home paddock, and I used to go up there whenever I was at the farm. When we sold the farm about fifteen or sixteen years ago, the box was dug up, and we took her ashes down to Sydney Harbour, and scattered them off Lady Macquarie’s Chair. There is something deeply surreal about holding someone’s ashes in your hands; something more surreal about holding the ashes of the body you came from. They are very dry, a bit like heavy shredded paper, and there’s a lot of them.
“It’s weird though, isn’t it – I think I’ve just somehow internalised this thing of, I want to have the same kind of death rites as my mother. Like, I never got my ears pierced, like her, and I want to be cremated and scattered in the water; just the things you inherit from your parent without really thinking too much about it.”
Nele looked at me. “You know… the laws are really different in Germany. You have to be buried in a cemetery. You can’t have an open casket viewing. It’s really strict. Like, they don’t just give you the ashes after they’re burned.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah, scattering in a river… isn’t a thing here.”
I sat somewhat stunned at the revelation. I’ve been here all this time and never really thought about that. I even came home and probably did some interesting things to my search history algorithms by looking up laws on dead bodies on two continents.
It’s there in the laws for Berlin, which are very detailed and thorough. You gotta go into a cemetery, and there are a bunch of procedures before that, and you can’t be cremated if there’s any suspicion of death by non-natural causes (in case they need to retrieve you for evidence later; there go my dreams of leaving a Clue-esque mystery behind me). Meanwhile New South Wales is out here with not-at-all-suspect how-to guidelines for shallow graves and tips on checking the wind when spreading the ashes at sea. You can bury a body anywhere you like on private land, as long as there’s more than five hectares and you’re not contaminating any water supplies. Australia: what a place.
Back in the cemetery, we sat for a while, thinking. The rites for the dead are actually for the living, of course; they’re the ones who need them. I remember the funerals for the grandparents I was very close to, even if I’m not sure where they’re buried. Burial feels like something else, somehow. I’ve had this conversation with my brother Declan a couple of times, and we’re in agreement: strip us for any and all useful organs to donate, burn what’s left, throw a good party. After that? Well, one way or another I’d quite like to find my way to the sea; whether those I leave behind are willing to get into some heist-like shenanigans to make that happen is up to them.
The Sculpture
Speaking of cultural divides, here is a piece of art that I think about every single week, possibly every single day:
It’s situated in a Biergarten on Sonnenallee, almost exactly halfway between my place and Julian’s, so I pass it at least once a week. But I also generally think about it a lot. The first time I saw it, it was dark and the whole thing was illuminated, and I stood glued to the street and stared at it for a really long time.
Hey listen: wow.
Hey, hey. Listen: wow, though.
Listen, if ever there was a way to make sure people remembered their Greek sagas, Leda’s orgasmic neon silhouette being (consensually, by my reading of it) ravished by Swan-Zeus is it. It does, given its location, really rely on a lot of assumed context though. You can’t always get down into the Biergarten or close enough to read the plaque to find out that it’s actually Classical Mythology, you philistine, but you sure can see the sculpture from a distance.
When I look at it, I try and imagine what it would be like to have grown up in a city where this sculpture existed in essentially a public space, next to a main road. It’s probably not fair to compare Berlin to Sydney – Melbourne is a better fit, socio-politically – but really, anywhere in Australia. Heck, let’s try and imagine it in Sydney. It went up in 1996. I’m trying to visualise myself as a seven-year-old, encountering this artwork and the conversations around it. I think about where it might have gone up; somewhere near Waterloo or Botany, perhaps? It’s just so difficult to integrate: fundamentally, Australian society was and is far too conservative to conceive of it ever making it past the first proposal. All I can see is newspaper headlines in point 150 font and politicians with their mouths open and the forehead creases of the middle class and the folding-unfolding hands of people on talk shows and the word “minister”, both religious and political.
Australia does not imagine itself as prudish. It is not imagined by others as prudish. (It is imagined by others as full of white people with surf-tousled hair and grins and wide, incomprehensible vowels). Australia is in the middle of a reckoning about sex and power and gender and violence. Australia is the PE teacher who’ll defend boys leering innuendos as “a bit of harmless fun” and repeat the jokes to his mates later at the pub, and then get flustered and irritated in sex ed class when he needs to say the word “vagina”.
I gave myself the topic of “Taboo” to write about this week, to tackle things I find tough to talk about, and then – surprise, surprise – it’s taken me longer to write about. I stopped writing this piece, over and over. Then I decided to therapise myself a little: pulled out the acrylic paints I bought a couple of weeks ago, put on some music from my sexiest playlist, and just put colour to paper quickly and without plan until my thoughts started arranging themselves better.
Look, my first pass take, the instinctive response at the top of my head when I see the sculpture of a woman and a swan having sex, is incredulous humour. Making or maintaining a joke is the most acceptable approach to talking about sex in Australia. Making a joke about sex is the most acceptable approach to gaining social capital in a lot of situations in Australia. I lived in a college in Sydney where once a week, students would be forced by older students to give thinly coded speeches about their sexual exploits in front of their classmates and college staff. I lived in abject horror of ever gaining the attention of these older students. That was also far from the worst cultural artefact of this institution. I left after one year.
I think about my instinctive responses a lot, especially the ones that are so obviously culturally influenced. Sometimes I can track little shifts in my cultural conditioning through language – Julian pointed out a couple of weeks ago that I now unconsciously say “ne’?” at the end of sentences, a German habit. After 18 months in Sweden, I’d adopted the active listening sound “åh” (sounds like “aw”, but more often mistaken as a “huh?” so people repeated themselves a lot). My Australian ones are more entrenched, but less obvious to me, except for my deep need to say “how’s the serenity” whenever I’m outside the city, even when literally nobody understands why.
The temptation to be enigmatic comes from the collision of desire with the entrenched and instinctive knowledge that this desire could be weaponised against me.
As violence, yes. As a violation of my boundaries, often. But perhaps cutting even closer to my everyday fears, as ridicule and disdain. If I never wanted anything very much anyway, I am neither responsible for it, nor can it be taken from me.
Because the sculpture is only partly lit at the moment, the swan loses a lot of its shape. Decapitated, the wings look instead like some kind of ecstatic fire shooting forth from Leda’s groin. She’s looking at the sky. She does not care who’s around, or who can see her or know her or write think pieces about the egg that, I’ll be honest, really really bothers me in my very skin. With the swan less literal, the myth and its ambiguities fall away, and instead I just see her, frozen in pleasure. And I come back time and again to look at her, and I stop worrying about who might see me standing there, gazing, indulging my curiosity.
I’m not really going for some statement of cultural relativism here. My point is not, “Europe/Germany/Berlin is so Enlightened and Liberated!!” (it’s not). Betül stood with me a few weeks ago and looked at this statue and I said the thing about imagining it in Australia, and said, “I can’t imagine this being in any city but Berlin,” and maybe she’s right.
At the end of the day (at the start of the evening), the sculpture and I stand across from one another, each a product of the cultures that created us, each in our own way saying things about the worlds that still shape us. And despite my insecurities, of the two of us, I’m still the one with agency, being… you know, alive and all. I just have to figure out how to make it feel like that’s the case.
The Penguin Joke
The other thing that happened last weekend was that my tiny small little baby brother Jem turned 21. We haven’t lived in the same city since he was seven-almost-eight, and we don’t talk that often. When I video called him on his birthday, it was like “Hey I’m still half-asleep!” “Hey happy birthday!”, and then we spent a lot of the time just waggling our eyebrows at each other. It was very wholesome.
Our other two siblings travelled to Newcastle to spend the weekend celebrating with him. Bethany had customised t-shirts made for them all, with a penguin on the back, and then a line written in very small writing – something Jem had said many, many years ago.
When I was turning eighteen, and Jem was seven, and Declan and Bethany both fourteen, our parents separated. I think the story you often picture with that is like, “Mum and Dad aren’t going to live together anymore, but things are going to stay as much the same as possible and it’s all going to be okay.” This wasn’t like that. This was Dad staying in the house and the rest of us leaving, staying in friends’ houses for weeks, scattered around the city until we found a new place to live, uncertainty and exhaustion and recriminations. By the time we found a new place and got settled in, Mum had made up her mind: we needed a fucking holiday. “Listen,” she told the travel agent, “just make it really soon, and make it really, really easy.”
Lindeman Island, the travel agent told her, on the Great Barrier Reef. It’s a Club Med, you can put the little one in kids’ club, you’ll have everything taken care of, meals, drinks, the lot. “It’ll be cheaper if we pretend you’re under 18, you just won’t be able to get alcohol, you don’t even like drinking alcohol,” Mum said to me. To clarify: I was in the middle of my final high school exam preparations. It’s true: I almost never drank. But I badly wanted to be able to drink overly sweet cocktails on an island!!! She relented.
And good thing too. Lindeman Island was the kind of place that typically attracts the most WASP-y, clique-y, “oh yes we’ve been coming here for YEARS”-y, obnoxious nightmare people around. We made: zero friends! We drank: many crème de menthes! It was: very weird!
Jem hated the kids’ club. Usually we’d have to pull him out of there halfway through the day, at either his insistence (“It’s DUMB and BORING” – a huge mood) or the organisers’ (“He’s a little too energetic for us today!” – please remove your tiny reckless fiend from our care). But on the last day, the kids’ club put on this performance for everyone in the dining hall. Let’s all gather round and watch the cute little show! Bethany, Declan, Mum and I sat together in one corner. We brought our cocktails with us. (Classy).
It had all the usual components of these concerts: a dance piece, and a song or three, and then the lady giving the announcements – smile smile smile – said, “And now! Jem!” Hand sweep. “Will perform some jokes!”
Well, well, well, look who’s Mister Participation all of a sudden.
My angelic, golden-curled little brother stood up. Took the microphone. Took the whole stage. Flashed the polo-shirted audience his sweetest grin. Held for effect. “Knock knock,” he said.
There was a pause. “Who’s there…?” murmured a couple of parents. “WHO’S THERE?” called Bethany.
Jem took a breath, and then, holding eye contact with every person in the room, said very clearly into the microphone, “Penguin bite your penis off.”
Have you ever seen pearls literally be clutched? It’s a real treat! It is really, really fun to watch a roomful of people have literally no idea how to respond to a small child with a microphone. The other kids looked uncertainly at their parents, unsure if they were allowed to laugh. There had clearly been no dress rehearsal of these jokes, judging from the look of horror on the organiser’s face.
Silence, for an exquisite moment.
And then: the four of us, off in our corner, crying with laughter, clapping as hard as we could, letting out a “whooo!” when we could catch our breath. The other parents: scandalised, upset, applauding politely. Jem: satisfied, quickly ushered off stage, and throwing a triumphant thumbs-up as he went.
I loved your emails and messages after the last edition SO MUCH. It’s so helpful to hear from you, I’m always a little stressed when I publish, and tempted to take Danny Lavery’s approach to making sure I’m getting enough validation. Anyway, please keep talking to me, you can also come chat in the comment section, if you’d like!
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