Letting go

An unexpected surprise to start the day. The wacky editor of a small obscure online e-zine that publishes flash fiction is sending me $20 because he wants to publish a little piece of 400 words I wrote, all about a kind of desert mirage called a Fata morgana, packed holiday lunches with hard-boiled eggs and no salt, a prickly pear that grows near the Tropic of Capricorn and how to keep tennis socks white. I cannot believe anyone but me would want to read  that paragraph (and nobody but me would have written it!) but there we are. I shall use the money to buy a book of poetry.

My stingy but regular-source-of-income overseas publisher wants  me to rewrite  a long chapter from scratch and says he never pays advances and isn’t sure he likes anything I have written in the last six months.

Never mind! As I wrote to someone this morning:

I was wrong to go on about the editing and the difficulty, sometimes I forget why writing is such fun. Creativity is oxygen, a great rush of energy and passion that comes out when we write. It isn’t really about perfection or getting published or validated by someone else. It is about finding your own voice and having something you want to say. I didn’t need anyone’s permission to call myself a writer, I just had to sit down and write.

And for many years I couldn’t just sit down and write because I was too busy drinking. The occasional spark of creativity  was always being extinguished by soggy drunkeness. Rejection was too terrifying to contemplate, so I didn’t like sending off work to publishers. I preferred to spend my days correcting  and  editing other writers whom I envied and resented, taking no risks and  just killing the dream within, drowning my own passion for language and the longing to write and be read.

Hiatus in creative reflection because the washing machine, a cruelly unreliable and inscrutable mechanical beast at the best of times, leaked soap suds everywhere and then short-circuited while plunging the house into darkness. I briefly wondered if it might be easier just to electrocute myself and die a sober, quick if undignified death rather than try to get an electrician out in the hinterlands beyond civilization to come and fix it. (As an active alcoholic I was always very keen on sudden death rather than a slow and laborious  solution.) But along came the electrician Rudi and  I made him breakfast while he looked at the White Sudsy Killer. He had some extra toast and marmalade, said he thought I should get a new washing machine and  then checked the electrical connections and said the house is a death trap, charged me a few lifetimes’ worth of savings and went off whistling the theme tune to some Coen brothers’ movie.

So let us be grateful for another day’s reprieve from alcoholism and  electrical shock  and think about the great unmatched short story writer Chekov:

In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealisation, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness.

I’m enduring a series of recurring nightmares in which forests are being chopped down and each tree is destroyed with its story untold. There are also school bullies in playgrounds threatening invisible playmates, empty swings that rock invisibly with no children playing. And a melting dark green  glacier that is trickling through rocks and shale like a weeping mountain.

So much  of sobriety is  about learning to live with one’s own inner discomfort zones. Yes, life gets better (how could it not?). Yes, there are new relationship opportunities. Yes, the creativity takes on new impetus. But growth hurts. Feeling the rawness of impending loss and living with  issues that  remained unresolved for years, well, it hurts. I go around with psychic grazes on my knees and adolescent growing pains I should have negotiated and  worked through decades ago. But better late than never.

All weekend I have been nibbling on a hunk of creamy Gorgonzola. So rich, dense, creamy, luscious, smelly, melting, that it makes me feel faintly nauseous with each mouthful and no doubt  adds gothic oomph to the damn dreams. Why can’t I say ‘Enough already!’ to my belatedly adult self and give the digestive tract a chance to calm down?

My small brown dog was bathed yesterday and  went out and rolled in the dust under a rosemary bush and now she has infested herself with sand fleas and  won’t stop scratching and biting herself. The other dog, who was also bathed in special hyperallergenic shampoo looks like a cream caramel puff and is lolling around like a French courtesan, shedding silky white fluff on dark tapestry pillows.

Monday morning irritability: another minor discomfort zone. I have an empty sheet of paper in front of me and I must  write something that may eventually be publishable. I must write a long email  all about money matters to  an unsympathetic publisher. I must pay bills.

And on the other hand. Somebody I thought had no desire to get sober has just celebrated six months and I am surprised and very very pleased. There are sweet cold plums in a blue dish in the fridge, rather like a Wiliam Carlos Williams poem I can’t fully recall. When I opened the study windows this morning, the warm breeze blowing across the fields smelled like honey. There are two baby eagles flying back and forth between oak trees on the far side of the fields. I have a gift of Assam tea for my friend Char, who  prepares her morning cup of tea like a robed monk honouring an obscure Zen tea ceremony in Kyoto. Life in sobriety is good, she says with feeling.

And then the heat broke, sudden cooling and the earth damp with dew,  the fields sweet-smelling, some hint of eucalyptus on the wind. I woke from a dream in which I was sleeping on straw mats amidst dozens of scary little red-brown scorpions but woke up unstung and then  I opened my eyes and thought: it is going to be all right. I know in my heart of hearts that there is no need to drink, ever. But there is also no need to live in fear and  distrust. I need to be more receptive and  accept  the losses, accept what  may come into my life and show me how to grow. There are no certainties, ever, but there is so much possibility.

In the kitchen, my housemate  was scrambling eggs and singing some tuneless and unrecognisable song. My small dog who was taken to the vet yesterday because she threw up and looked peaky, was growling at the other puppy.

 ’There is nothing wrong with this dog,’ said Dr Ilse the vet. ‘What a beauty and such spirit! She probably bolted her food and had a little puke.’ I don’t even want to think what we paid for that compliment.

Last night we went out to supper with Pam S who would love to have us as tenants and gave us a meal in the house that may or may not be free for us by the end of the year. She has given up salt and any seasonings for the sake of her blood pressure, so the cold  boiled chicken and  steamed beans and  cold boiled poatato tasted pretty much like an invalid’s last meal. But she had a wonderfully ripened Brie that I ate with some salt-free bread and we had a lovely conversation while Pam’s six rescued dogs played at our feet. The sun went down over the glowing mountains — such a view! — and I looked at the  big stoep (porch) and imagined sitting out there at dawn or watching the moon come up. The oil lamp kept sputtering out because the wick had not been trimmed.  The house has low beam-crossed ceilings and a canary-yellow kitchen with no electrical light, and is a rabbit warren of small 19th-century rooms. It needs windows opened for fresh air and paint and sanded floors. Pam is a very untidy and eccentric woman  and I can see myself  ageing that way.  She had found a bottle of wine under a broom cupboard to offer us but the wine bottle was full of a decayed cough syrup. She doesn’t drink. We talked about the right way to bring up spirited and beautiful dogs and agreed on everything.

Nothing resolved, no resolution in sight. We will keep searching, keep hoping. But with acceptance comes hope.

To quote Syd: ‘If you look closely, there might be something right there in front of you that makes your heart sing.’

To try and distract myself I walked up to the local supermarket wich is really just a poorly stocked grocery store. And our inner mood colours the outer world. The leiwater streaming down the canals either side of the streets, thin but fast-flowing.  A cherry-red flowering gum, mountains in the distance towering and shadowed blue and dun, like grey velvet. But the heat made me feel dizzy and ill, lacking, insufficient.  Tripping, fainting, stumbling. Unemployed Xhosa men sitting on the edges of the pavement in the hot windless shade, sitting with sunken heads.. The pavements buckled and loose sand to slip on, the shop dingy and unswept floors.

I couldn’t remember what I needed, so I bought a small sack of brown basmati rice. Wrinkled limes, not worth the price. Tomato puree, split peas, lentils, a small butternut, some bread for the men sitting outside on the pavement. I buy as if I was still living alone. Looked on the noticeboard for rental accommodation, nothing.

Felt I was wandering around the aisles aimlessly, so paid at the till, holding out my green cloth bag, came out and the sun was like a blow. Crossed the street very carefully. I kept hoping I would not faint. Passed an old Toyota Cressida with black men inside shouting and swearing at one another. A large dog sprawled  listless in an alley behind a wire fence, no dish for water – I must take up a water bowl later.

The village looking rundown and grubby and dangerous. I felt dazed with heat, relieved to get home and lock the door behind me, pour myself iced water. That old feeling: I cannot cope, I cannot manage, nothing is going to nurture me, help me, I am barely surviving. The sweetish  stink of garbage in the streets, the deadening heat, the lack of breathing space.

But this is also my mood of crisis. I have lived in Africa all my life and it is more than a dung heap, the poverty is there but also the goodness, the humanity, the beauty. Taking my time and just going slowly. On Monday I shall go up to the library. See friends over the weekend. Try to keep writing. And outside the wind is rising, hot as steam,  but stirring the branches and leaves. Just to keep going until something strengthens within me.

My favourite quotation from the reclusive JD Salinger who lived before the Prozacification of America:

“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all,” Teddy said. “It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

Yesterday  Una and I went out for lunch  to Haute Cabriere restaurant built into the mountain above a Frenchified little village not too far away.  There are pinot noir grapes planted in the vineyards running up the slopes and the restaurant has been created from underground vaulted cellars flanked by wine barrels. We sat near a deep-set catchment window with shutters and a view down over the valley. It was very cool in the vaulted interiors and the terracotta tiles were pleasingly cool underfoot. A little dark and gloomy for  noon, and I remembered the lovely great bouquets of cream and white flowers they have in urns banded with brackets suspended all around the basement restaurant of Le Gavroche in London. Fresh flowers light up  a room.  I couldn’t eat very much so the food was wasted on me — roulades of salmon and prawn mousse, racks of pink lamb and baby carrots, timbales of aubergine and buffalo mozzarella. The last meal out for some time. Not expensive at all, surprisingly. The tourist season must be  over up in the mountains. On the way home we saw young falcons flying over the dam, golden-brown and glinting in the sun.

This evening we are having suppper with Pam S who is sympathetic and would like us as tenants, but has nothing to let at the moment. I don’t want too much village gossip about our search for  new accommodation so we only speak to  the more discreet villagers. We don’t want any sudden evictions. Went out this morning and collected a donation of tinned fish for  homeless people, unpacked cases of pilchards at the  offices of the social workers until I thought my arms would fall off.

The thing about sobriety is that there is no song and dance when things go topsy-turvy. We just keep putting one foot in front of another and doing the next right thing. And it could be worse.

My landlord has increased the rent to unaffordable terms. He is not open to communication. I feel extremely stressed and unsure what to do.  There may be a place we can rent some months from now. Una is equally anxious and suffering bad knee pain.

I keep going, just caring for the house and the dogs and getting my assignments in.The great thing about being sober is that although there is no reprieve from  anxiety and distress, the priorities remain, which are relationships. I know friends would help me if they could, but they are hard-pressed. And cups of honeybush tea are always a hot comforting drink. Most people in Africa and elsewhere in the world  survive without medication or counselling — that is a luxury for very few in this world and to be thrown back on our own resources and faith creates a naked kind of survival ethos.

It is a soft and cool morning, sunlight floating like soap bubbles and the valley all  green and lemony. Image from the Finnish photograoher Sirrka Liisa Konttinen.

Clustered berries on the physotegia and cotoneaster bushes are turning coppery orange and bright scarlet. Sighs of summer’s ending even though the day will be scorching hot.

Very dull and wretched week. A second day of PTSD, triggered possibly by a bad dream about the bush war or just by general stress over losing my home. Nothing very dramatic, I just feel slower and more stupid, forget the names for everyday objects, struggle with sentences, have this jittery film going in the back of my head. It will pass and I just stay quiet while it is going on. If people have had  combat-PTSD, they know all about this kind of thing, it they haven’t it makes no sense. It isn’t emotionally distressing after so many years, just disorienting.I lose weight which is not a bad thing after my gourmet Christmas meals, but can’t go out and walk in my usual routine.

What is comforting is pot after pot of Earl Grey tea and thin slices of dry toast. In the afternoons I try to sleep. No sign as yet of builders arriving, although that could happen any day now. There is dew on the grass at dawn and a fine mist across the fields, the first signs of autumn. I sit and correct proofs, can’t write much and the shape of sentences always looks wrong to me. The piercing barks of my small dogs are ear-splitting interruptions.

My editor in the UK tells me he thinks of me as a global writer, in that I can write for southern and East Africans abroad, for  the English, for Canadians, for the Antipodes. I wish my spelling would stop colliding  mid-Atlantic. The reality is that the countries in Africa in which I was born and grew up, no longer exist. Obliterated. Not unlike those  writing about Bosnia or the Ukraine. I don’t feel assimilated, I don’t feel tied to vanished identities, ruined town halls, desecrated churches,  graveyards overgrown as a wilderness. It is all very well being attached to London or the Rockies or the hills of Wales or  the state of Texas but that attachment  has a static unreal quality about it in a turbulent world and every day there are more people being displaced or sent into exile as refugees or watching their homes or places of worship blasted by  bo0mbs and mortar shells by impersonal drones. And those who have come to live in exile amongst oil wells and drive-by malls and well-endowed universities walk like ghosts who see only bone-dry wadis,  palm trees and open graves.

Aleksander Hemon:

Ellis Island immigrants, on the other hand, would come in, work hard, be exploited, make it or not make it but even those who made it would go back thirty to forty years later to the village of their origin and they would find that one or two people remembered them. So it was easy to sever connections, and in some ways it was natural: your life was here, your old life was there. But I know a large number of Bosnians in Chicago who send their kids to Bosnia over the summer—school’s over, they send them to Grandma. These kids are bilingual, bicultural. Displacement is not necessarily political. You can go back and forth. Transportation has become relatively cheap. Masses of people are moving around the world: immigrants, refugees, labor migrants. It’s an entirely different world.

So I sit watching an African ibis on my  grass and thinking about the Olympics in Canada and a friend in Dakar running out of TB vaccines and another friend who is a stockbroker on Wall Street and who wants to come back to the Karoo and have a baby — places belong to everyone and no-one. The world shrinks down to a walnut of tender wrinkled empathy that fits into my hand.

Now I must carry on revising sentences and ignore that  scrambled emotional interference in the background, drink cups of tea, read some French reviews of modern literarture in Arabic, think some more about what I will write again once my brain coalesces. And stay sober, that above all.

Enduring a bout of PTSD, triggered by  nightmares. My tried-and-practised solution is to keep the house very quiet, drink  glasses of milk and  limit all interactions. If people have been through this, they will know how debilitating it can be, if not they won’t have any idea.A kind of residual war psychosis but that  explains nothing, A little like having  someone with a projector showing old reels of film, jittery and  out-of-sync, against the back wall of your mind. At moments you realise the jerky frightening images are your own life, at other moments they seem to  have nothing to do with you.

But I am sipping my milk and will lie down again in a while, try to rest. So long as I don’t have to cook or do any complicated work or hold a conversation I shall be fine. And it goes without saying that I won’t drink anything except milk and tap water.

I hope to be able to read and comment on other blog and  feel better tomorrow.

A new month. When I looked out of the window before dawn, the moonlight was shining onto the flat leaves of the ornamental ginger and poinsettia, casting hard black shadows below. The garden looked unearthly and strange,  another kind of world. The moon a blinding white, a staring white soup plate.  In the beautiful photographic and poetic blog  Beyond These Fields we Know, Kerrdelune  gives a list of the names for this enormous  cold moon at the end of January:

Big Cold Moon, Buckeyes Ripe Moon, Carnation Moon, Center Moon, Ceremonial Initiate Moon, Cold and Ice Moon, Cold Meal Moon, Cold Moon, Cooking Moon, Turning Moon, Earth Renewal Moon, First Moon, Frost in the Tepee Moon, Frozen Ground Moon, Great Moon, Great Spirit Moon, Greetings Maker Moon, Her Cold Moon, Hibiscus Moon, Holiday Moon, Ice Moon, Lakes Frozen Moon, Little Winter Moon, Long Moon, Man Moon, Midwinter Moon, Moon After Yule, Moon of Darkness, Moon of Flying Ants, Moon of Life at It’s Height, Moon of Much Cold, Moon of Strong Cold, Moon of the Bear, Moon of the Child, Moon of the Strong Cold, Moon of the Terrible, Moon of Whirling Snow, Moon When Animals Lose Their Fat, Moon When Limbs of Trees Are Broken by Snow, Moon When Snow Drifts into Tipis, Moon When the Snow Blows like Spirits in the Wind, Moon When the Sun Has Traveled South, Moon When the Old Fellow Spreads the Brush , Moon When Wolves Run Together, Ninene Moon, No Snow in Trails Moon, Old Moon, Pine Moon, Plum Blossom Moon, Quiet Moon, Rivros Moon, Rowan Moon, Severe Moon, Snow Blindness Moon, Snow Moon, Snow Thaws Moon, Snowdrop Moon, Snowy Path Moon, Strong Cold Moon, Sun Has Not Strength to Thaw Moon, Thumb Moon, Trail Squint Moon, Two Trails Moon, Weight Loss Moon, Whirling Wind Moon, White Waking Moon, Winter Moon, Winter’s Younger Brother Moon

My friend Char came over yesterday and we sat outside talking about books and travels and music. She feels she may have made a mistake buying a house across the mountains. I am filled with dread and uncertainty about my future here. So we talked about safer topics. The time is not right for  heart-to-heart stuff. She lies awake mulling over unhappy prospects and I lie awake  imagining the worst possible things that might happen, and in the meantime we carry on as usual.

Had a call last night from a friend in Dublin: ‘I have finally worked out why I have a problem with meditation,’ she said breezily. ‘I’ve read all these books and attended retreats and workshops and asked mediatation teachers for advice. The thing is, you see,  that I like the idea of meditation. It  makes people calmer and it  stillsl the  restless mind, that kind of thing. So I do like the idea of meditating. But I don’t do it. I read about it and talk about it and try it once in a while, but I can’t bring myself to do it often enough to make a difference. So it stays a lovely idea. That was my trouble with prayer too. I liked to sit down and ask for things and confide in God, but I hated the silence afterwards. So I just kept chatting away and not listening.’ 

My small dog known as The Chub has  become very nervous for no reason at all. I suspect it is a new game. She puts her tail between her legs and creeps behind the sofa and peeps out at me as if I am the Wicked Witch of the West. I have cuddled her and cajoled her in vain and now I am trying to ignore her. Her appetite for  doggie biscuits is undiminished. Much as I love playing nonsense  games with  my puppies, I have to write a long cogent article on why you can’t end poverty while  hanging on to the system that  creates poverty.

Living sober, rebuilding a life, just getting on with what  is at hand. And trusting that it will work out in the end.

“Such is the paradox of AA regeneration; strength arising out of complete defeat and weakness, the loss of one’s old life as a condition for finding a new one.” – As Bill Sees It, p. 49

Next door my neighbour Hester is herding her cats, calling ‘Pirrup, pirrup’ in a low sweet voice, clucking and whistling. She has six or seven cats and they rush to her each time she moves, miouwing and purring like  little engines. Cats rubbing against her ankles, cats watching her from the windowsill, cats preening themselves for her admiration, cats leaning down from tree branches to touch the top of her head with their paws. Every now and again one of her   beloved cats dies of a feline illness or is killed by traffic on the main road, and Hester sews a memorial quilt for her lost cat. All around the house there are cat-motif designs quilted  in felt and cotton and  old wools, reading ‘Beloved Goshka, 2000 — 2005′ and ‘Go in peace, Pitta Pat’,  ‘A Most Original and Superior Cat: Jemima Orphanpuss 1991 — 2002′ .  I have a beautiful  quilt she gave me  that I put on on my bed in winter with dozens of small black and yellow cats dancing around bonfires and catching mice.    

Before I joined AA I had never heard the expression ‘Organizing alcoholics is like herding cats’ and when I think of Hester, it doesn’t seem hard at all. Love is essential.

This weekend I have been rereading Amos Oz A Tale of Love & Darkness, sitting on the sofa with my legs tucked under me and a puppy or two nestled against me, reading a memoir of such depth and irony and nostalgia I feel as if I have knwon the author all my life. Like Oz in Israel after World War II, I grew up in a bare new pioneer country that was both idealistic and philistine, troubled by contradictions and political turbulence, questions of nationalism and identity and a future that might disappear. The adults I knew as a child had been shaped by the legacies of the 19th century and the triumphalism of the British Empire, the music of Beethoven and Mozart, the works of Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth. As small children we were brought up on  ‘great literature’ rather than children’s books and I remember puzzling over a passage in King Lear when I was about seven year’s old wondering just how sharp a serpent’s tooth might be and why an ungrateful child should  have a as nasty a bite. But at the same time we were made to  play rounders and hockey and get fresh air and exercise, were reminded that if we buried our heads in books we would go cross-eyed and round-shouldered and not be able to find a husband.

There was much talk about what would build character in children out in the colonies. I was sent to stay with my elderly Aunt Margaret during one of my mother’s worse drinking bouts. Aunt Margaret was my mother’s cousin and had been a matron in the East End of London during the Blitz. She walked like a large broody duck and  brooked no nonsense. I arrived on her isolated farm and found that  there was no electricity or running water. This  delighted me because I had lived like this on the forest reserves  up until a year or so before and it was an adventure. The farmhouse was a great shambles of a bungalow with  walls of quarried stone and mismatching bricks. There were  wide verandahs overhung with jade vines and purple bougainvillea, and bullnosed roofing in corrugated iron that rattled in a high wind. The older part of the bungalow was just a few wattle-and-daub rondavels linked by  mudwall passages with thatched roofing and exposed poles for a ceiling.

In order to build character Aunt Margaret would send me off each night after supper to my bedroom on the far side of the bungalow with  a little candle in a smoked glass holder stuck to  an enamel saucer. She would tell me to blow out the candle once I left the dining room and find my way through the maze of passageways, steps and rondavels by touch. This was her way of building my fledgling character and she promised me that if I persisted, I would overcome my fear of the dark. She had  been a young woman in the wartime  black-outs in London and had lived through bombing raids crouched in pitch-dark bomb shelters. This was the rainy season on the lowveld and I would be sent off to bed amidst thunderstroms and the din of torrential rain.

It was eerie and frightening to feel my way down those narrow passages and through dark musty rooms with the thatch rustling overhead and sheet lightning  breaking stark white through the windows, and I never quite found my way to bed confidently. But I did overcome my fear of the dark. And my childhood fears of spiders and snakes and ghosts. I began to think of my small nebulous uncertain self as a brave person. To this day when I see people suffering because they  are unable to sleep without a night light or scared of noises at night, ‘nervous of their own shadow’ as Aunt Margaret would have put it, I am glad for that tough instilling of self-sufficiency in a small child. I sometimes wonder if that  holiday spent with Aunt Margaret might not have helped me when it came to  getting sober. Even in those early days of going drinkless, it seemed to me that this sobriety thing might be possible if  I followed suggestions  and if I only persisted, taking one step at a time into the unknown.