Opening the door to the unexpected

 

The wind is blowing the garden to pieces. I run back and forth with a watering can chased by small dogs convinced that this is the best game yet invented.

Off early to the farmers’ market. As we crossed over the dam created on the old Riviersondereind Rivier (the River without End), there were white-capped waves and a gale-force wind. Pine and gum trees toppled across the mountain slopes. And when we pulled off the road to the old pine-clad farm stall,  the Bedouin tents had blown over in the night so the market was cancelled. There is nothing under our control in this life.

We drove to one of my favourite old hotels for coffee, the oldest coaching inn in South Africa. It was rundown and neglected, filled with tacky Indonesian furniture, and I had a lump in my throat remembering how lovely it had once been, the pretty light rooms with polished furniture, the sash windows and sprigged  cotton curtains. A coaching inn Jane Austen would have liked. Then we went off to a new restaurant set up high on a windy hill, long airy barn-like interiors with views  across the wheat fields and vineyards of the Overberg, and had a unexpectedly wonderful lunch of duckling with tangerines and lamb cutlets next to a deep golden slice of  dauphinoise potatoes. The place buzzing with families and visitors from Gauteng, a dozen or more languages ululating in the air. We bought still-warm ciabattas, bottles of grape juice and apple juice,  pots of planted basil and rainbow-stemmed Swiss chard. Then we took a long scenic drive to see crowds of blue cranes stalking about in newly harvested fields. Gorse a bright bitter yellow on the mountain slopes and electric-blue agapanthus lining the farm roads. But it was not a relaxing drive: reckless or drunken drivers speeding and overtaking us on corners  along the quiet country  roads, a new BMW convertible overturned in a ditch.

I love this sober life. There is nothing I can do about the unpredictable and the uncontrollable elements of my reality, they must be accepted. People do hurtful or tactless or tacky stuff. There are always last minute cancellations. There are always those  who do not realize that they are going to climb into a car and endanger another. That what they post online may strike a false note or wound another deeply. That we misunderstand one another constantly. We are always transgressing boundaries or coming into conflict, falling into short-lived intiomacies, risking betrayal, carelessness, relapse.

And of course the heat may wilt my basil plants, so green and tender.  But there are such wonderful surprises hidden away in each risky enterprise, each attempt at togetherness.  The pleasure on the young chef’s face when he came into the dining room and we all put down our knives and forks to applaud him. Exciting food, an spontaneous atmosphere of festivity. A father swinging his young daughter up onto his shoulder, a family rising to their feet to toasting the silver wedding anniversary of their parents. Hugs exchanged  at a table crowded with crew-cut  young men back from Helmand province.  Small children jumping into the murky waters of a farm dam watched over by an anxious water spaniel.  Lives well-lived for those of us who are lucky enough to have rejoined the world.  Live, love, la heim.

In sobriety, the world comes alive again, we join in that dance with the human community.

Humble perspective

 

This from the late Eric Hoffer, writing in The Art of the Notebook in 1954.

 ’The most important point is – and remains – not to take oneself seriously.  You pass your days as best you can, doing as little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read, scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of importance, and the sprouting of expectations.”

A place created out of lives

A quiet reflective morning. My deepest sympathy and love to Pam and her family.

Nanowrimo is going well! I wrote nearly 6 000 words before breakfast. Terrible stuff but so many words, all sound and fury signifying nothing.  My housemate saw me talking to myself in the kitchen. ‘I was born doing reference work in sin,’ I said to her in a moment of borrowed inspiration. ‘I hope that is a quotation and not a religious conversion,’ said housemate. Sarcasm!

News flashing around the world about the terrible shooting at Fort Hood. I had just put aside a New Yorker article on murder in America when I saw the news.  ‘The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany.’  Here in South Africa we have a soaring homicidal zeal not unrelated to our belief that everything can be solved with guns rather than due process of law or more effective policing or ending poverty. We know zilch really  about war-induced PTSD. Or why violence spins out of control.

I have solved my alpaca-manure-meets-rolling-puppies problem. I am putting manure only on the flower beds at the front where puppies don’t go, and packing stinky manure into pots and tubs. It should be in the Promises. ‘You will no longer be defeated by shit logistics.’

 

The poet Louise Gluck:  “I feel quite passionately that the degree to which I have stayed alive as a writer owes much to the intensity with which I’ve immersed myself in the work of people making sounds I haven’t heard.”

 

Syd has kindly pointed out to me that calamari are squid, not octopi/octopuses. I love people who help me get it right. Sadly, the delicious tender baby squiddies known as calamari were tough as old boots despite my simmering them for hours and I am inclined to think they were neither squid nor octopi but some recycled rubber stockings worn by sex fetishists in the 1970s. Everything untrendy and unchic happened in the 1970s. Look at Gary Glitter.

Tomorrow I am going to a farmers’ market  to buy an organic ham for Christmas. Then I am going down to the coast to have fun with some noisy and recalcitrant AA friends. I intend to ask them about resentment and it will be fun listening to them disagree. Sometimes I wonder if there are really 1 200 Steps and nobody tells  the newcomer this for  at least a decade.

 

The poet Claudia Rankine: “I believe that where we are, how we are allowed to live, is determined by the politics of the land—the big politics and the little politics. And it varies depending on where you’re located. I’m very interested in the landscape in general as the site of living, of a place created out of lives, and those lives having a kind of politics and a kind of being that is consciously and unconsciously shaped. Decisions are made that allow us to do certain things, that give us certain freedoms and ‘unfreedoms.’”

How I look forward to a sober weekend full of roses and dolphins and farmers polishing white organic pumpkins.

Random thoughts that come and go

A neighbour has dropped off six sacks of alpaca manure for me, an early festive season gift. I am very grateful but  ambivalent. The garden will stink for a week and then flourish. The puppies will roll in manure and the house will stink morning, noon and night for at least six weeks. I need to find a solution and there is none. Alpacas are bred in the mountains near here. They are smaller than llamas and doe-eyed and perky with heads on curvy dinosaur necks. Their shit stinks to high heaven. It is full of luscious nitrogen that will help my faltering garden to bloom. I cannot face the idea of manure smeared on the carpets and sofa covers and  happy little dogs that reek of manure.

Moving on. Some of you asked in emails about the difference between anger and resentment. I may do a blog on that next week. My point yesterday was that if you are someone who has never been able to feel angry, you are not going to let yourself feel resentful either. All those volcanic and furious emotions are buried under layers of morally justified concrete. You go through the motions of forgiveness without acknowledging there is anything to be forgiven, without feeling the outrage and  anguish and  injustice of what has happened to you. And therefore you have no idea why forgiving you may be harder for others.  You may not know what the word ‘harm’ means.  One of the biggest acknowledged problems with church communities is what we call ’smothered conflict’ which is what happens when nice and ladylike and positive is the only way you feel able to present yourself.

I’m reading about sexual jealousy in Jane Austen.

‘Sexual jealousy is not normally what we think of as Jane Austen’s terrain. But her novels are full of jealousy’s tragic potential. If it weren’t for her intervention, her heroines would be forever losing men to more moneyed or vivacious rivals. In Persuasion she colludes with her heroine to the extent of throwing the other woman off a sea wall. Almost as murderous in its vengefulness as Tolstoy.’

Nanowrimo is not going well. I have a simple theory about how to get published. You write until your hand falls off and then you send  your priceless jewel of a novel to somebody who tells you to rewrite it from scratch. You write until your hand falls off and then you send it back to the same encouraging person who tells you to start yet again. You write until your hand falls off and then your first version is published and it sells badly and you make no money and every single reviewer tells you what you should have written, but that makes no difference because you are writing the next novel that needs to be rewritten from scratch and then your hand really  does fall off and you retire to become a one-book wonder. After your death you are discovered and  people who never knew you make  millions and the best-selling biography dwells on your horrible alcoholism with half a page at the end on how your recovered.

But here is the author Jasper Fforde being encouraging to beginners:

‘I once wrote a novel in 22 days. 31 chapters, 62,000 words. I didn’t do much else—bit of sleeping, eating, bath or two—I just had three weeks to myself and a lot of ideas, an urge to write, a 486 DOS laptop and a quiet room. The book was terrible. 62,000 words and only twenty-seven in the right order. It was ultimately junked but here’s the important thing: It was one of the best 22 days I ever spent. A colossal waste of ink it was, a waste of time it was not. 
Because here’s the thing: Writing is not something you can do or you can’t. It’s not something that ‘other people do’ or ‘for smart people only’ or even ‘for people who finished school and went to University’. Nonsense. Anyone can do it. But no-one can do it straight off the bat. Like plastering, brain surgery or assembling truck engines, you have to do a bit of training—get your hands dirty—and make some mistakes. Those 22 days of mine were the start, and only the start, of my training. The next four weeks and 50,000 words will be the start of your training, too. ’

How grateful I am to be sober. This evening I am going to grill baby octopus (octopi?) called calamari and toss them with chilli and garlic and fresh parsley. There is summer rain falling on the garden and all the roses are in flower, white and pale gold and baby pink. My friend Char is going to stay in the village and not move  after all. My housemate is  going whitewater rafting on the Orange River at the age of 68 and has bought herself lycra leggings in bold orange, purple and black. She is a foolish and brave and wonderful woman. Life is full of surprises and many of those surprises are good things.

Invisible drunkard

 

From an unpublished novel by Aaron Bady of Zunguzungu:

 

‘No one knew that he started each day with a drink, or that he never stopped until falling asleep in front of the TV; he monitored his blood alcohol like a diabetic watched their insulin. Which is to say, even he no longer thought much about it. It was no longer interesting to him. It was just what he did. After years, he understood the range of breath and the danger of close conversation so well that no one ever smelled a thing on him, so well that he even forgot that he was lonely. He never stumbled, never slurred. And that particular openness of expression had become the face his co-workers knew, the person they identified him as when they greeted him in the morning or said good night to. Had they met him sober — not an impossibility, but it never happened — they would have known him, but would also have been bothered by some creeping subconscious fear, a sense that there was something just a little off. And while they would have gone home without being able to articulate what exactly it had been, what precisely had bothered them, they would have dreamed about it that night. But they would have forgotten it in the morning.

‘He was such a high functioning alcoholic, in fact, that when he was killed in a car crash, driving drunk, the accident wasn’t even his fault; the other car had swerved across the median when the driver bent over to change cds. And since no one checks the breath of a dead man, the eulogist stressed what a senseless  tragedy it had been, the hand of fate reaching down to pluck one of us, any of us, for reasons that would known to none of us.’

Swallowing anger

 

The newly sober woman friend I mentioned yesterday, whom I shall call Jacqui because she has dark hair  and reminds me of Andy Warhol’s images of Jacqueline Onassis, came around for supper.  Moussaka with a green salad. She had three mouthfuls of moussaka and two helpings of green salad and kept reaching for the wine glass that wasn’t there. I used to do that too.

‘The thing is,’ she explained to me, ‘I don’t have any resentments. I am just not an angry person.’

I used to think that way too. Getting strong or reprehensible emotions out of me was like trying to pry an oyster shell open with a plastic spoon. And while I was drinking I just kept swallowing anger, feeling no pain. Except that every now and again a simmering rage would bubble up and I would be horrified at myself.

Once I was at a church gathering with a moderately bad hangover. A very kindly balding theologian came over and told me  that as a Catholic he prayed every day for the souls of unborn children whose misguided mothers had resorted to abortion. I knew then and I know now that abortion is not a topic  for debate over coffee with strangers.  It is an explosive minefield. The theologian was either a social nitwit or one of those passive-aggressive types who likes to drive people crazy. But I wasn’t far off the crazymaking stuff myself.

I turned around to this kindly man in his dog collar and said: ‘Do you realise that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament?’

Simmering rage.

I grew up into a ferment of sexual politics. The war between men and women. When I left home and moved to another country and went to university, I did voluntary work for two years for a Rape Crisis counselling centre. I thought it would help me work through things. I didn’t realise I was ‘restimulating’ traumatic memories for myself. I used to talk to a student counsellor every now and again and I would sit in front of him with an earnest  but pleasant look and say: ‘I may have a trust problem with men.’ What I couldn’t say was that I hated men. Every last man left standing.

I know now this sentiment isn’t uncommon in abused women. But it remains unsayable.

I stopped studying political science because I  worried about getting too rigid and strident. It infuriated me that the men in the seminar didn’t worry about dominating the  discussions or becoming rigid or strident, I felt very resentful of their indifference to what women thought of them. Instead I did a course in the cultural history of Western Europe and  wrote a term paper on fairy tales. A nice safe topic.

One night I was sitting up in the  university library with moths fluttering around  in lamplight, reading through commentaries on Perrault and Grimm. I kept thinking about all the wicked witches and heartless stepmothers. And then I thought about Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

Why would a man,  even in a fairy tale, fall in love with unconscious women, I wondered. Why would  a man want to kiss a woman who has been in a coma for a century? Why would a man want to make love to Snow White who is lying dead in a glass coffin with a piece of poisoned apple stuck  in her throat?

Why are the only good and lovable women in fairy tales sleeping or dead?

Simmering rage doesn’t just cool down by itself. I went to an academic drinks party in a department  with fifteen women lecturers where  the only  staff with tenure were  white men. Angry smiling women all around, gulping down nasty cheap wine. A balding professor ambled up to me and said, ‘Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress? You’re not the most feminine of women, you know.’

I smiled at him  pleasantly and said: ‘Well you’re not particularly masculine, so that makes us quits. Plus, you’re bald and I always associate balding with erectile dysfunction.’

He looked at me and I could see him thinking: ‘Ballbreaking dyke. I’ll get you.’

I left home when I was 17 and had already  started reading Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich. But it was not until I was 27 that I realised my father had battered my mother. I grew up thinking men  had a right to hit women. Women were hysterical and  childish and vicious and  deserved to be treated like children if they behaved like children. I also thought it was fine for adults to hit children, especially if they behaved like children.

When I was 27 and started thinking about  what had happened in my own  home, I wanted to kill someone. I wanted to see men who raped or hit women or raped children lined up against a wall and blown to pieces. These feelings frightened me so much that my drinking went awry for that year. I walked around like a time bomb with the fuse lit. Then the feelings drowned in alcohol, the anger turned inward and I sunk into another decade of depression.

Fast forward. When I was about eight months sober, I sat in on an anger management course for men run by my gentle friend Christopher. He was talking to a large and belligerent man who was protesting that he had never hit his wife. He had only punched walls and smashed mirrors and broken things.

“Well, you see ,’ said Christopher patiently and reasonably. ‘That is all you need do. Society does the rest. Women are terrorized and silenced and rendered powerless all the time  because they know what might happen to them. What would you feel like if your wife carried a gun around with her all the time and pointed it in your direction each time you tried to say something? Would she need to pull the trigger to keep you in your place?’

I sat and looked at my gentle friend Christopher and for the first time I knew there are men like him everywhere. Compassionate and aware men who know the score. And that  the anger calms down when  somebody is listening to women talk about pain and terror.

So what about the newly sober Jacqui who is not an angry person? I just say to her: ‘Give it time. If the feelings are there, they will come up when you are ready to deal with them.’

Blunted, muted, starved

 

From Nancy Connors’ review of Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr, a story of finally getting sober:

Karr drifted in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous. She wouldn’t pick a sponsor, made fun of the way attendees dressed and acted and adamantly refused to succumb to AA’s major requirement: giving oneself over to a higher power.

“For me,” she writes, “all color is leeched from the landscape. I’m blunted, muted, starved, yet stubbornly refusing the one suggestion everyone sober for very long makes: prayer. I recoil from any talk of spiritual crap, though I can’t fail to notice that the happier, less angry ex-drunks talk about such matters without any strapped-on, phony-sounding zeal.”

When saying sorry is not enough

 

Oh this time of year! I was reading a local newspaper this morning and sighing  to myself over a cup of coffee. I read newspaper reports on road rage and  armed robberies and suicides all year round and  as Christmas approaches I begin to fixate on them. The world becomes darker and more dangerous. old memories follow me about reminding me how bad it could get.

One of my early festive season memories, gothic as anything, is  of watching my mother get battered on Xmas Eve — my father hit her until she was staggering and then shoved her through a glass-plated  door. Both her arms and her face were badly cut. At the time I was furious with my mother because she was making so much noise and I registered at the age of six or seven that she was very drunk. I wanted to hit her too.

In the last couple of years looking back at my past, I can see that there was never a time when I didn’t have alcoholism as a central fact and trauma in my life. That was just how we lived. All masked behind  middle-class respectability for the neighbours and chaos behind closed doors.

I feel all raw and edgy just writing about this. It was ‘easier’ when I was drinking along with everyone else (more than everyone else? Surely not!) and trying to erase the past and make new bad memories and pretending that it didn’t matter. Or pretending that Advent meant something other than the awful feeling that a new-born child in an expensive beribboned and tinselly crib had been left  out in the rain and forgotten.

And I need to take a deep breath and go out into the garden and look at squirrels in the green oak tree. So much to be grateful for. Such a beautiful little blue and green planet.

A small cross man in the wilds of Nova Scotia is trying to fight with me about someone called Jack Trimpey. I don’t know anything about Jack Trimpey. I am not going to conduct World War III by email over Jack Trimpey. Get sober any way you want my darlings! Let us be grateful for miracles in any form whatsoever! Go out and admire a moose in the Nova Scotia wilds, buy a large frozen turkey, make plans to cut down an evergreen pine for the living room!

 

A newly sober friend called me to say she wants to get her Step 9 over by New Year. Lickety-split, all those apologies and grovelling and putting things right. She has 22 aggrieved parties on her list and asked if I thought that was too many. My original list included everyone I had ever met.

Step 9  -  Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Well, in my humble opinion, Steps 8  & 9 should be approached in close and attentive consultation with long-sober friends or a trusted sponsor in AA. For me Step 9 followed on from the process that had begun with Step 4  (well, Step 1 but you know what I mean) and I am very glad that the older woman in AA I spoke with told me not to rush anything.  I shall call her Agatha because she would hate the name. She is a remarkable woman. Very vivacious and bubbly with a spine of whippy steel and a snappy way with plain-speaking.

She gave me the definition of an amends that helped me understand how it differed from an apology:

An amends is more than an apology. It is a commitment to behave differently regardless of whether or not the amends is accepted.

An amends is to be made when you become conscious of behaviour that has caused harm. Agatha advised me that I needed to be able to look at the nature of that harm in a cool and collected manner, no impulsive dashing off to try and put things right. From her own experience, she said that it is important to be able to separate the making of an amends from the felt need for forgiveness or reconciliation. I should make the amends directly — face to face, not over the phone or by email unless I had no choice. I should not make amends in public because that would place the person under pressure to accept and would be no more than a self-aggrandising way of making myself look good. I should not badger the person to accept amends or remind them I had made amends and ask why the amends had not been accepted. The amends was for the harm done to them, it was not something that would be cathartic or liberating for me.

She also told me (and I found this very hard), that I should let go of expectations around that amends — the longing for restored relationship, to have things back as they might have been. The harm was done — and all I could do was to ensure that it would not continue.

And she told me that I should not be content with the way in which I had defined that ‘harm’: after stating the position as I saw it to the person concerned, I was to ask that person if he or she felt there was anything else. And then I should listen and make no attempt to argue or justify myself.

Arghh, Agatha! I recall how I sat and thought how helpful a pink gin would be right at that very moment. I don’t think I had ever admitted I was wrong unless magnanimously buoyed up with liquor.

I found the prospect very daunting even after I had made a realistic list of amendees – but my friend did tell me that after this I would not flinch from Step 10. The most important thing about Step 10, as opposed to Step 9, is the little word ‘promptly’. She assured me I would be less likely to put off making amends if I had done a thorough Step 9.

And to a large extent that has been the case. How indebted I am to the wisdom of those who have walked the road before me in AA.

Bright morning, blue funk

 

Early Monday morning and I am still surfacing out of the weekend’s blue funk, that sudden crumpling and freefall. I understand it well enough and it is nothing to drink over. The shadows of the past, recurring fears and uncertainties.

Artist James Rosenquist in Painting Below Zero:   “When things become peculiar, frustrating and strange, I think it’s a good time to start painting.”

And I am starting a long story for Nanowrimo. The less I feel like writing, the more important it is to keep up the discipline. So I labour through the rewriting and misery of editing my own work on a commissioned project and then get down to a  pressed two hours of storymaking. When it goes well, it feels like great sex or forkfuls of  linguine with clams. When it goes badly, it goes badly.

The literary controversy of the moment is the publication of the late Raymond Carver’s unedited stories, his original versions. Editor Gordon Lish did more than edit  and restructure Carver’s stories for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, he retitled, repaginated and rewrote substantial sections of the texts submitted by Carver. Lish altered no fewer than 10 of the endings to Carver’s stories for his first collection.

One aspect that interests me here has to do with the relationship between an editor and an alcoholic writer. I first read one of Carver’s original versions in the New York Review of Books and I could see why Lish had done what he had done. When we are drinking we feel inspired and ‘lit up’ and highly creative. But the drunken end product, the writing itself, is often grandiose, illogical and tedious to read. This is because alcoholism has a stunted and deadening quality on all communication. That monotone  flatness persists into early sobriety. When I used to have to read through reams of what we called ‘cocaine prose’ sent in by would-be travel writers, the prose was excitable, fact-free and cluttered with superlatives and adjectives. It was always unpublishable. When I read copy sent in by active alcoholics, the giveaway was the lack of any sustained vitality or power in the writing. It would go flat at some point, like a fizzy cool drink that has been left out on the kitchen table overnight. Stale.

Gordon Lish knew Raymond Carver to be an unreliable and impoverished alcoholic when they first began working together. My feeling is that he excluded  Carver from consultation and overrode Carver’s objections because  of that alcoholism, the reluctance of a professional editor to work with a rambling, insecure and at times incoherent alcoholic. And it is Lish who created much of  the minimal deadpan tone and menace of those early stories, who gave Carver his style. The ghostwriter who gave the emerging author his true voice. A very strange story indeed –

This afternoon when it cools down, I am going to scythe armfuls of lavender for the house. I dry bunches to hang in the kitchen and bathroom, the long blue-mauve wands of Lavendula augustifolia, French lavender as it is known to distinguish it from Spanish lavender, the fat dark purple heads of Lavendula dentata. I use dried lavender, snipped fine, to stuff pillows. For weeks the house will be filled with the dry fragrance of lavender. My friends shall have the doubtful pleasure of resting their curly heads on prickly gingham pillow of lavender, inexpertly hemmed.

Lavender’s blue dilly dilly

Lavender’s green

When you are king dilly dilly

I shall be queen

Sunday with friends

 

Enough of the Halloween blues! Got up early this morning and went for a brisk walk through vineyards and up the mountainside. Exercise is one of the best ways to get yourself out of yourself, if you know what I mean. There’s something about sweating and huffing and puffing and aching calves that gets rid of self-pity.

Why didn’t I discover this years ago? Because I was drinking and woke up hungover and unable to do anything more strenuous than crawl through to the bathroom and rest my head on the cool rim of  the porcelain toilet bowl. Charming.

Today I am making lamb korma kebabs for lunch, to be grilled over charcoal.  I hope they taste good, I haven’t done this before. In the back of my mind I am thinking Middle Eastern and North Africa and sizzling meat over white-hot coals, flat breads and pitas, belly-dancers and camels and rugs thrown down on the grass and jugs of iced tea and mint, rapturous witty friends, delicious kebabs, well-behaved dogs. The reality may be a little different.

Gratitude. To be here now, to have another long day filled with opportunity, to be with those I love.