Strange sweet mystery

As I was busy yesterday, drinking hot water and lemon for stomach cramps and musing on the psychogeography of Wales — more on that later — my cell phone rang.

A young soft voice with a hybrid accent. My long-lost sister J, calling me to say that our father had had a stroke in Hawaii and was in a coma. I was very calm, as if somehow I had known this was coming. Rush of warmth towards my sister. But when I mentioned our other sister, there was petulance and ill-concealed rage. The sibling rivalry I never understood between them. I was preoccupied and trying to take in the news and about my father and stay present to this unknown sister on the phone.

Gave her my contact details and said I would be leaving for the UK. We said goodbye.

And then nothing, no follow-up emails with messages or information as promised. A very old pattern this. Drop a bombshell and then vanish. My family communicatiing as if in spasmodic bursts of distress with no continuity, seemingly unable to sustain the intimacy sought.

When Una came back I was in shock and very white and dazed. That awful flatness and numbing. But staying with the absence of feeling, having a sleep, drinking hot sweet tea in a large mug. My old friend Hamilton came around to say goodbye and talked about his tours to France in 1973 with the sports team of an agricultural college, his efforts to integrate sports in an age of grand apartheid. Smiling at him, and letting his anecdotes and sharp loving glances flow over me.

Then Una’s supper of specially chined rack of lamb. I ate a little and went off to bed early. Blessed by a fitful sleep, the steadying breathwork carrying me through. My father is not expected to live.

Life on life’s terms.

And I got up to a clear cloudless morning and am packing, retracing my journeys into what a friend has called the ‘fog-enshrouded island of our ancestors’. Recalling Iain Sinclair’s magnificent ramblings on Landor’s Tower and the deep crazed ley lines of Wales. The stories I so loved as a child to do with the Children of Lir, the connection to those who came from the sea. The white lady and fountains and red deer of the Mabinogion. Spells and transformations and years of exile or disguise or penance.

Place and the spirit of place. It cannot be anticipated, it must be undergone. The initiation, the quest, the entering into the strange sweet mystery of life in a Welsh spring with the chestnuts in flower and the threat of snow still on the Black Mountain.

So I wonder if I will glimpse the Green Man. I wonder about the spell of envy and regret between sisters who remain forever in thrall to a parent’s favouritism. I think about rivers of shad and deep wells and ash trees and the histories of the suffering mineworkers, the ancient truth-teling folklore meeting a post-modern Britain at war. Entering my own community of hope in the meetings I shall attend, the book lovers I shall encounter, the friendships and the learning whatever it is that might be there to learn.

When I travel I think of myself as a flaneur, a stroller, somebody who ambles and notices and absorbs the magic of what is all around, the darker undercurrents and the literary pilgrimages, the memories and stories of those I meet, reading up as I go, writing myself into the shared human journey, trudging the road of happy destiny; and trying to pay attention so that the deeper things might not escape me. Connecting and dreaming, living in reality that is not of my making but in part created by my participation. Passion and intelligence brought to the process of greening intuition, if I can only stay receptive and willing to undergo what changes must be wrought in myself and others.

The green spring and the unknown country, the gift of a very remarkable year. Mourning and renewal, hope for my father so far away on a Pacific island, the letting go. There is nothing to be done and yet there is always hope for reunion.

Grateful living

Out in the garden my lemons are ripening on the tree, the old Eureka variety with their very yellow thick bumpy skins (great for zesting). Picked four ripe lemons and came inside with them, noting how they brightened an old handcarved wooden bowl on the scrubbed kitchen table.

A high wind for Pentecost and I could hear the choir practising Veni Spiritus Sanctus as I alked past the Catholic church high on the hill. Come, Holy Spirit, the image of flame and desire, new dissonant languages breaking loose in the market place, tongues of white flame hovering above the heads of the speakers. Babel, but with meaning and radiant with unseen power.

Waking this morning from a deep intriguing dream of art and poems written on canvas (a gift from Sallie?), I thought ‘dreams deeper than rock’ and could feel the adamant rock splitting open and water gushing like quicksilver. Turned over and fell back into sleep.

Said goodbye to the women of our liberation theology group, handing around plates of sliced banana loaf and trying to give a good reason for going ‘across the water’ and leaving the Mother of Abundance, sweet Africa, even briefly.

Setting out clothes with some dismay because I only realise how shabby and unflattering my practical comfortable everyday wear is when I have to go in among strangers. Laughing a little at myself.

Nausea and stomach cramps, so had hot water and lemon, lay down under the duvet, listening to the strong wind. How thin the veil between worlds at this time of year, a thin gritty veil scarcely separating life and death — it is Mothers’ Day and I thought of my own alcoholic mother with great compassion, less torment than at this time last year.

When I got up again, there was sunlight and I could go out into the garden, pick mint and thyme for a herbal infusion. That happy peasant instinct I have always had to go outdoors and chew grasses or leaves when I feel ill. Respect for wilde als (the indigenous Artemisia), an African salvia, the bitter leaves of a small filigreed Jackman’s Blue rue. And the hot infusion was pleasant and eased my stomach.

A new neighbour coming up to ask about my trip and the possibility of a lift scheme in the future. The dog barking for attention, but he does not understand dogs, is not a country person, I could see that at a glance.

Going inside to play Vivaldi as I cleaned the kitchen and fed the dog. Noting that the garlic must be used up before I go, the coriander too. Una coming in to see how I am doing, a quick hug. Emailing a grieving friend and willing him to come through this with his spirit intact. Calling members of my AA group and listening to the litany of daily frustrations common to all of us and unique in how they impact on us in specific ways. Paying attention, lightly, but no distractions, just listening and responding. Being there right in the togetherness and letting self slip away like a passing whim.

Call from my sometime sponsor who is busy being a professional alcoholic-in-recovery working at a treatment centre and spouting pop-psychology, but still with that infectious giggle. She has no time now for AA meetings herself, she is too busy making sure her inhouse patients are confronted with their ‘massive denial’. Most of them, in my humble opinion, don’t want to get sober yet. Nooo, noooo, no. Their parents and employers are sending them to upmarket rehabs but they are involuntary patients, recalcitrant and defiant, so that massive denial is going to stay in place a while yet. Even if they get the ‘I-statements’ off pat.

Remembering my own denial that did not crack open until the day I was finally willing to look at myself hard and admit that my life was a mess. And that sorry excuse for a life was the only life I had.

Now the wind has dropped and most of my goodbyes are said. Clothes washed and ironed. Travel documents checked. Tomorrow evening we will have one last farewell meal, a small but delicious rack of lamb. I am planning peas with mint, roasted butternut with pinenuts. But not looking ahead, just grateful for the here and now, the garden so rich and colourful in autumn, the love of friends, the life that is still messy but in a different kind of way.

Gone fishing

Alcoholism the killer. When I opened my email inbox there was a gentle email from a mutual friend telling me you were dead. That you had drunk insanely for a month and finally had fallen into convulsions and died. Horrible and merciless death, typical of alcoholism.

You wrote at the beginning of your spring that everyone should go fishing. I went out into my back garden at about that time and saw a blue heron standing there, the prince of fishers, delicate and steely, like a blue and shadow-filled vision feathering its wings in the sunlight, and I thought of you.

In the one photograph I have of you, you are sitting in the lee of the boat and holding up a speckled trout with a gleaming white belly, wet and shining, beautiful in death. You look proud and vulnerable and enigmatic, your eyes hidden behind dark glasses, your blonde hair piled on your head, a white windcheater ruffled by the strong wind. A fine gold chain high on your neck. Large man-sized watch on your right wrist. You were a romantic woman, ironic, feminist, a sceptic, a fighter and an iconoclast to the last, but you were in love. The water behind you is rippled but calm.

We exchanged quotations from our favourite writers and made risque jokes online. We confided a little in emails and planned to meet. I wanted you to experience the wide spaces of the Kalahari, you wanted me to come over and walk dogs with you on your beaches. You were growing Mexican hydrangeas on your patio, rich and velvety colours. You adored spicy foods and sent me a recipe collection, laughing about your own lack of interest in cooking. I teased you about your fitness regime and passion for the misogynist Nietszche. You asked all about my wild African garden, avocados and tomatillos and the birds, and my sightings of sacred eland alongside the roads of the Overberg. We laughed across cyber space together and I thought of taking you up into the mountains with me to look at Khoi rock art and images of the sacred eland in brown and cream and berry-blue lines etched out thousands of years ago.

The eland, that great stately buck, was a guide and shamanic spirit for the Khoi who would come to them in trances and ensure the passage from life through the darker places into the other world, into the sunlight of the spirit.

May the sacred eland guide you on your journey, my beloved friend. Hamba kahle Miss Sallie.

Autumn leaves falling

Yesterday Una and I went down to the sprawling village of Somerset West in the Herlderberg Valley together, coming over Sir Lowry’s Pass and looking at the blue of the bay like turqouise, veined with dark waves.

Sorting out foreign currency exchange just as hideous as expected, watching money dwindle in global terms. Handing over precious and hard-earned rands and seeing a small handful of pounds sterling emerge in exchange. Swallowing hard.

But then we went to lunch together and ate sushi and I watched Una shout when the wasabi hit her palate. Such fun — we laughed and ordered one exquisite plate after another. Icy mineral water and fresh fresh salmon, tiny rolls of sticky rice entrapped in nori seaweed, side dishes of pink pickled ginger and pale green wasabi. I would have liked more adventurous sushi or sashimi, but for that we would have needed a more upmarket and chic restaurant. The big plus here was that the fish was fresh and trustworthy, the rolls well-prepared and everything had a tang. Hungry office-workers dashing in and out, tourists in rapture, families on holiday ordering large platters of sushi rolls to eat like snacks. Una very happy, dipping the mouthfuls in Kikkoman soy very solemnly, picking out eel, and salmon with avocado and caviar, shredded crab with spring onions, disappointed we couldn’t get chilli and garlic flash-fried scallops. Plenty of deep red tuna but too rich for me.

All the way home, driving past reddening pin oaks and white poplars and dark black-green Cape chestnut trees, barlinka vines like copper smoke in the vineyards, her tummy roared for more food. She said she wished she had opted for a hamburger. And when she got home she put thickly sliced ciabatta in the oven to toast and sliced ripe tomatoes and sweet red onion. along with goat’s cheese: a gourmet and a gourmand. I had green tea and felt virtuous. I have to get into a pair of denims by Tuesday.

And the autumn is fully present, the village copper and gold. I watch oak branches emerge across the field as leaves fall, mulch plants with layers of musky deep brown and red leaves which will rot in rain. The skies are mild and a pale blue streaked wth milky cloud. The first snow has yet to fall on the mountaintops.

It feels like an estrangement to leave this ripening season to go into a new spring. Fearful and taking a deep breath full of humus and humility and the damask scent of autumn roses, old and soft and tumbling like scattered scraps of dusty pink and gold silk.

Beauty is there — the peace and joy of some days — but to broaden life to embrace what is harder. That way I appreciate the calmer days more deeply. And all of this sober and gentle.

The Ordinary and Otherness

Yesterday I woke from a fierce wind that had roared through the village all night and found that the backyard was cluttered with broken branches and fallen avocados. This morning the yard is buttery with sunlight and mild as early summer. Inexplicable and sudden upheavals of climate — a warning in the newspaper that climate change may lead to the seas swamping parts of Cape Town, a port built up the slopes of Table Bay. There is no stability in the nature of our times and I read with increasing anger and frustration about the human death toll following Cyclone Nargis in Burma. A closed pariah state forced to appeal for help, but leaving it so late. With 41 000 people missing after the flooding of the Irrawaddy Delta and the smashing of Rangoon like a pack of cards.

Awake late at night, listening to a fierce wind or wild birds crying in the trees behind the house, I read and reread a friend’s very skilled translation of Roberto Bolano’s Murdering Whores and think about random and sweeping violence, that farcical chaotic nature of what cannot be foreseen, pre-empted or understood. What remains essentially absurd. And in the small hours of the night in a lamplit room with high ceilings, I read and reflect on this, not necessarily in search of comfort but for the sake of truth. What remains irreducible, absurd and tragic about our lives and death. To hold steady despite the knowledge of annihilation. I read like a disciplined study of acceptance, thinking of a Buddhist monk in his cell, a cenobite in his hidden and bare cave in the mountains. Taking care and examining each unwelcome response like a friend.

And another writer I have recently discovered comes to mind.

Daniil Kharms, born in Russia in 1905. He chose his surname in later life, a Cyrillac translation of ‘Holmes’ from ‘Sherlock Homes’ but his motive remains obscure. As does so much about a writer who dated his poems with astrological symbols and resisted the obvious or accepted notion of meaning wherever possible.

He knew about the ordinary, but the ordinary as human suffering, the way most people in the world know it. Daniil Kharms’ diaries from the 1930s describe bouts of hunger, paranoia and helplessness as well as desperate prayers for salvation. A line in his Blue Notebook from 1937 reads: ‘We’ve died on the fields of the everyday’ – the critic Tony Wood points out that this is an echo of Mayakovsky’s suicide note of 1930: ‘The boat of love ran aground on the everyday’.

Wood comments: ‘Though they distort and transform it often in hilarious ways, Kharms’s prose fragments convey a great deal about the everyday reality of 1930s Russia: queuing for food, overweening bureaucracy, a pervasive sense of vulnerability; violence erupting constantly and inexplicably. ‘

In August 1941, Kharms was rounded up by the Russian authorities yet again and faced Soviet imprisonment once again. He feigned mental illness to avoid a sentence of hard labour, but died in a prison hospital in 1942, during the siege of Leningrad. After his ‘rehabilitation’ as an approved writer in the 1960s, some of his unpublished work began to trickle out, much of it in samizdat, but it was only in the 1980s that Russians started to rediscover Kharms. His work is only now coming to be more widely known in the English-speaking world. It is harsh and comic and startling, with something unbearably poignant at the core. What else is there beyond a reality so profoundly unlivable? This would seem to be one of the unanswerable questions Kharms poses in his writings.

He may not have transformed his reality but he illuminates it — the strange and terrible nature of violence itself and the hope of a redeeming Otherness that yet remains always elusive. In a diary entry from 1939, Kharms wrote that ‘only miracle interests me, as a break in the physical structure of the world.’ A miracle he did not find but sought to the end of his life. Courage blazing out on every page.

So intriguing, the harder questions pondered in sober living. Art not as consolation but as a challenge, the invitation to live more deeply, to embrace what has been avoided for so long.

Hanging in there

Windy and when I woke and heard the wind rattling the sash, I realised I had been dreaming about wild palms. Fronds lifting, a crazy pounding surf in the background, the headland black against the light. I was calling to others with me, trying to help them. But I don’t recall details.

No more details from Zimbabwe. Intimidation, threats, shootings, rumours of torture and more detentions. Burning landrovers, razed huts, family members unclear on any news. Hospitals that have become military installations, no information given out. School teachers fleeing the border areas into the green hills. Praying for their safety. Checking websites, hoping for emails or sms messages.

Got up in the windy darkness and made a cup of chai, spicy and refreshing to begin the day. My dog ill and very lethargic. Sipping chai and stroking the dog’s head, breathing in and out slowly. Reminding myself: a poster on one of my favourite sites wrote the other day that when we are newly sober drinking seems the solution to every problem. That is because other resources and skills have not yet developed. It takes time and I simply have to stay in place. Hang in there. Violence has been part of my reality for so long and there has been so much loss in the last decade. The impact of it is like being slammed into a concrete wall over and over again without reprieve.

But this is what it is. If I hang in there, the light will come again, there will be more of a breathing space. I don’t want to dull my senses or resort to the old solutions any longer but I do not have strong coping skills. I talk to others and draw strength from their calm or gentleness.

Seasons changing, turning over — in Europe it is Beltane, here it is Samhain. The time of the Ascension. The Feast of Yams in West Africa. Autumn’s harvest. Spring’s renewal. When the sense of dread and grief gets too much for me I recall what it was like to inhabit a beleaguered South Africa in the 1980s, in the locked heart of the apartheid state. If we could survive that, we can come through this.

My sister in New Zealand has a bleeding ulcer and dreams of Nyanga every night, the waterfalls and tree ferns and river gorges overlooked by the eagles of the Eastern Highlands like totems for her. She writes to me that her life in exile from Africa is only a half-life. But there is no place for her in the homeland under tyranny. Other expatriates tell her it will not be long now and there will be some kind of resolution there. Hang in there.

It breaks my heart to go away and leave my dog when he is ill with cancer and needs me with him. But it has to be done. Una will care for him and the vet will ensure he does not suffer. But the abandonment sticks in my gullet …

Just to stay in the present and deal with the moment as it needs to be lived through. A hard wind blowing, the copper storm of leaves whirling up in the street outside. Such beauty in this autumn, always the most poignant of seasons. Mellow and graceful dying. Death that is also transformation. So I sit tight and hope for inner renewal and political change, for freedom like a wind across the country to the north of us.

The nurturing source

More violent and distressing news yesterday evening about a cousin, an IT specilist from Penhalonga, arrested, beaten up and tortured. Later released, no charges, with severe kidney bruising. Others around Mutare and Odzi beaten up, clubbed and locked in overcrowded cells without water in the heat, for hours. The opposition has beaten Mugabe’s Zanu-PF but there needs to be a run-off, accompanied by increased intimidation.

Living in southern Africa. The quiet stony hills and mountain ranges, the flood plains and lowveld and savannah, the grasslands, thorn trees and deltas, and rainforest. Human settlements, the scourge of terror and fear like a current leaping across the bushveld.

I could not sleep and lay awake last night with Thomas Bernhard, thinking about Amstetten that was once a women’s concentration camp under National Socialism. Frantz Fritzl’s boarding house scarcely a 90 minute drive from the house where Adolf Hitler grew up. Coincidence.

Natalie Kampusch, held in an Austrian cellar for 10 years, says under National Socialism, there was no respect for women. Naming a connection. I read Thomas Bernhard and think about how we drug ourselves with social pleasantries and pieties and the refusl to look, the stunted apathetic neighbourliness and nul curiosity. An Austrian woman lawyer went crazy and shut up her children in a dark cellar for seven years.

Life on life’s terms.

Turtle doves loud when I woke, the neighbour’ border collies brking for their work. I have been dreaming up the life of a young woman, an ex-dancer who met a man outside his gate in a narrow drk street where he knelt before the gravestone of one of his children. Her women firnds believed she had beeb abducted like Presephone, but there was nothing they could do. A slideshow of her marriages, two marraiges with joys and homemaking, the deaths of children, a slow extingushing of self. A women hurrying past each day on a dark street, her hair caught up, face averted, living out the choices and embracing regret like a friend.

A vision needed, a glimpse of the sacred eland, women circle-dancing in a meadow, a single blue gential flowing near a flinty half-hidden rock. Possibilities and the impossibility of chooosing.

Practically, a wheelchair-bound friend is not well and I am busy making her Elizabeth David’s chicken soup, delicious and wholesome. Cutting up celery, grating sweet carrots, slicing leeks, picking a bay leaf or two. Decanting stock. Putting in chicken thighs and a glass of dry white wine. Letting it all simmer together — then I shall add potato. Weak sunlight like pale lemons tumbled into the kitchen. The dog following me around. The fragrance of chicken soup filling the house. Practical love matters.

Listening hard

Walking around a neighbour’s garden and peering at the ground to try and spot fallen pecan nuts amongst the curling brown and blackening leaves. The skies dark, the wind giving us ear ache. A small handful for our trouble.

Coming back home and choosing not to think again about the politics of incest, the minotaur in the labyrinth. Just staying in the day, the dog’s welcoming bark, messages from friends left on my cell phone.

Alone in the house and treating myself to a recording of Glenn Gould’s The Well-Tempered Clavier from Bach.

Gould was a genius. Eccentric, but the music is flawless. He hated live performance which he compared to vaudeville. While playing the piano he hummed continuously, swayed and clutched at the air. The temperature of the recording studio had to be extremely warm and the piano raised on wooden blocks. He himself sat on an old chair his father had made for him, no higher than 14 inches above the floor, a small rug beneath his feet.

He disliked being touched and wore gloves to shake hands. He was fond of solitude. Like Arnold Schoenberg, Glenn Gould was enthralled by theories of reincarnation and mystic numerology. He believed that he would be reincarnated two years after his death as Sam Caldwell, a media theorist and contrapuntal poet. Nobody seems quite sure if he was joking.

Yehudi Menuhin said of Glenn Gould: ‘No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly.’

Listening to Gould play Bach or Beethoven is to become the composer for a brief glorious moment, to participate in Bach’s vision, to hear what he heard with an inner ear. Gould knew how to listen. He knew how to share his gift, that utter awareness.