Dark yellow chrysanthemums

The sky is taking on the deep clarified blue of winter. The air smells of burnt ornges and chrysanthemums. I get up and walk in the dawn light, watching the sun come up over mountains in the distance and burn mist off the floor of the valley.

A friend in the UK is sending me a copy of the just-released first volume of the Letters of Samuel Beckett, whose work means a great deal to me. I can’t afford to buy imported books with our currency exchange and have to order them through the library which takes two years. Now I shall be able to read this wonderful book before June and I feel ecstatic.

 

I first bought paperback copies of Beckett’s  Murphy and Malone from Kingston’s Corner Bookshop in a small town  now called Mutare, in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. I would save up pocket money and money I made reading to a blind WWII fighter pilot  who wore his cleaned and pressed uniform for the occasion and we sat under flamboyant trees outside his retirement home while I read chaters of Arthur Bryant and Gibbons in my hesitant teenage voice with its hybrid colonial accent. Then I would have enough money to go and buy modern fiction and read it voraciously. Only in my 20s was I introduced to Waiting for Godot and Endgame — sitting there in the darkness of the university theatre with goosebumps and hearing again that distinctive phrasing and bracing bitterness, the unfathomable  puzzle and tragedy of human life explored. That polyglot mind, the mastery of so many languages, the love of art and painting, the homelessness, the poverty, the depression — wth greatness blazing through it all the way my neighbour’s chrysanthemums blaze like gold in the dark autumn morning. Here is a quotation from the Letters so that you can see what I mean:

 

‘It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused . . . . Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as, for example, the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? An answer is requested’

And yesterday a local woman came to see me and talk about her problem with alcohol. I was enthralled, immediately thinking this might be a way to start a meeting of two sober women, two companions trudging the road of happy destiny etc. She sat and talked about the familiar scenarios — the embarrassments, the fears of passing out at dinner parties, the nights spent with the wrong kind of man and the screaming at her husband and children, blaming the marriage, wanting her youth back, only vaguely dotting the connections between the regrets and blaming and the daily drinking. We agreed to meet again at the weekend and I gave her some pamphlets — she is not a reader.

 

Then, early yesterday evening, she called me from a hotel somewhere near the city and was weeping but defiant. She has been planning to follow another man to Johannesburg or Sydney, cannot stop drinking, does not want to stop drinking. She meant what she said at the time but ‘the drink was too strong for her’. The new man drinks too and she must keep him company, he cannot be left to drink alone. So she is leaving — cannot think about the children, they are better off wthout her, she feels she is making a mistake but will do it anyway. The old alcoholic story recited like a nonsense nursery rhyme. I was there once myself, the bad faith, the lies, the selfishness and lousy decisions. So I wished her well.  Nothing else to say.

 

The dizzying huge black pauses in Beethoven.