It is the winter solstice in Africa, and there are hard scarlet and green knots of growth on the deutschia bushes. I have been sitting out in the dazzling sunshine of a cold garden watching Cape canaries flock around like large tame groups of escaped budgies, a bright silly yellow and vivacious chattiness. Reading Iain Sinclair, that mystical polymath and flaneur extraordinaire, writing about walking up and down the Thames. If I could walk beside the ocean or river each day I would be in heaven. Running water sings to me.
Slept very badly all night, pursued by memories of the past that is never quite past but always lying in wait for the unwary insomniac. Got up for mugs of Horlicks, followed into the kitchen by yawning and blinking puppies. Animals are the most loyal and touching companions. I thought about waking my housemate for a chat at 3am but decided against it. That magnificent and oblivious selfishness of my drinking days has gradually receded.
A tall grey cat with an Egyptian spookiness came and talked to me in a dream just before dawn, reminding me of a bleached and destroyed temple I had visited in other dreams, runic inscriptions on fallen masonry and doric scrolls in rose-pink terracotta. A limping archeologist trying to decipher ancient engraved scripts not intended for him — the cat reminded me that I had read them quite easily. Just as I was asking the cat if he ate the tiny mice that scrambled over the temple steps, I read something on a stone tablet that shocked me into wakefuness. Instructions on howe to stitch together the chambers of a ruptured heart.
Well, matters of the heart — but that is always invisible mending and takes an eternity of time.
My housemate needs an arthroscopy done on her swollen and troubled knee. She is very down about it. My bachelor neighbour has brought me a bowl of tree tomatoes (mine are not yet ripe) and the elongated spiky fruit of the Delicious Monster, looking like a dark green truncheon of pineapple. Next week I shall have to do something with a crate of ripe custard apples. Villagers cultivate the strangest fruits here.
It is bitterly cold and very still outdoors, only the wind blowing across the fields with a soft rushing noise, smelling of rain. The sunlight is green and gold and the mountains around the valley are mauve and brown. Tomorrow I am going to my oft-postponed art class and I will be trying to capture something of the colours and light that enrich this landscape. I walk around the garden naming the new growth to myself, trying to describe the red sheen on twigs.
If we drink to forget, we write to remember. We write towards the future, for the reader who may be our self or another, deciphering the instructions to mend a life from the inside.
Posted by louisey 