Avocados with everything

 

 

This header is, unusually for me, quite literal. We have a glut of avocados and I have made guacamole, avocado starters with prawns, avocado dip with Roquefort, avocado halves with lime juice and black pepper, avocado and cream cheese sandwiches, avocado segments with spring onions, avocados with rocket pesto. And about 50 other stranger than strange concoctions. But can anyone really have too much ripe creamy perfect avocado?

My writing project is crawling along at a snail’s pace and  driving me crazy. I keep reminding myself what Thomas Mann said: ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’. And if I don’t get this project completed by the time we go on holiday next week I shall have to take it along. Sit and sweat over my dreadful sentences and fact-clotted paragraphs  instead of wandering around admiring wild flowers.

This morning I got up early and sat rewriting and rewriting  for an hour — but as the sun came up, quick as a  thunderclap, the way it does in Africa, I saw troupes of francolin and guineafowl running about on the fields near the cottage and went  out to look at them. No babies yet but so lovely to see wild birds unafraid of humans. They were very curious and came as near to me as they dared. Heavenly, and the turgid writing just had to wait.

Today I am making a vegetable soup for elderly people with tuberculosis who come along to the clinic and have to wait all day in the cold and wind. They need hot food and I have been delegated. Needless to say I want to make an unbelievably good peppery watercress soup because I have a bucket of fresh watercress, but rib-sticking food is called for so I am doing an old-fashioned Scottish Cock-a-Leekie soup witha whole chicken, a chopped marrow bone, carrot, onion and plenty of barley as well as soaked prunes. Not everyone likes prunes in soup but these are not obvious and will help the digestive juices flow, she said indelicately. It is a classic Scottish Burn’s Nicht soup and I will never mess with the recipe.  In the bad old days I threw in some whisky but in truth most dishes that taste good with liquor really taste better without it. 

 

And then I have to help organise the local farmers’ market tomorrow and write leaflets and rinse armfuls of bok choy. I love doing this, it is only in sobriety I realised that I could have spent my adult life  quite happily peeling vegetables and stirring the stock pot in a country restaurant.

But instead I am a writer because I  cannot not write and so  at some point I shall have to stop making soup and reading/writing blogs and  talking food politics with stall holders and painting a water colour of a graceful green and white leek suspended above scrubbed oaken table with a crumpled checked yellow napkin and a chameleon in a crisp white wig. And go back to working out what is wrong with the last 30 pages of my text.

deeper in the drifting dark

If only it would rain. The garden is bleached like a dusty bone. The nights are cold but by noon the sun is high in the blue skies and harsh, a burning disk cut from sheet metal. Winds blow from the north and rattle bare branches, raise dust storms under the olive trees. It will be a dry spring if there rains do not fall again soon. Wild flowers are out on the mountain slopes and on the plains, brilliant and fragile, withering after only a day.

I wake each morning from dreams of my father dying and cannot recall details. Dreams are the counter-intuitive language of the hidden self. I am not yet ready to look into that depth of feeling, decipher the impulses and taboos.  Dreams are for the dreamer alone but the dreamer hesitates and misreads the messages, turns away in fear or bewilderment, gives up on those coded inages so strange and glowing with significance.

So much about recovery too is counter-intuitive, dynamics of paradox and ambiguity. We embrace powerlessness and locate another greater source of power. We give up old notions of power and self-sufficiency in order to reconnect with our forgotten selves and those who have become strangers. We learn to say no to the desires that once seemed so fierce, beautiful and life-giving, just as alcohol once seemed a solution perfect for us. We unlearn our own histories and read a darker narrative, learn an autobiography written against the self we once were. We gain something we had not know existed. It all sounds like a code, cryptic and inaccessible. But it is simple and clear as  the words on this page. We have known it all along, we recognise what is there as our deepest dream, that long-suppressed wish and hope of childhood. Goodness is everywhere, like honey spilling out of the comb onto our fingers, a glass of cold water that satisfies a raging thirst.

 

And as I work and watch for rain clouds, I read the poet Stanley Plumly on death and life and everything in-between. Poetry  has the same slant of meaning as do dreams, the same hidden and wonderful syntax.

 

Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me

 

by Stanley Plumly

We lie in that other darkness, ourselves.

There is less that the width of my left hand

between us. I can barely breathe,

but the light breathes easily,

wind on water across our two still bodies.

I cannot even turn to see him.

I would not touch him. Now would I lift

my arm into the crescent of a moon.

(There is no star in the sky of this room,

only the light fashioning fish along the walls.

They swim and swallow one another.)

I dream we lie under water,

caught in our own sure drift.

A window, white shadow, trembles over us.

Light breaks into a moving circle.

He would not speak and I would not touch him.

It is an ocean under here.

Whatever two we were, we become

one falling body, one breath. Night lies down

at the sleeping center—no fish, no shadow,

no single, turning light. And I would not touch him

who lies deeper in the drifting dark than life.

You say tomato and I say tomato

 

Came back from my workshop filled with optimism and admiration for a group of very brave people willing to share about trauma and healing and solidarity.

Called my housemate and said happily: ‘I am going to make edamame beans for supper with mint and baby garlic! And some pan-glazed tofu with fennel and roasted red peppers. Or edamame beans with broccoli and Swiss chard timbales.’

“Oh help,’ said Una. ‘Couldn’t we just have steak burgers for a change? With fried chips and bottled ketchup?’

I have a small but not insignificant edamame fetish. No, I don’t think it has anything to do with incipent alcoholism or defects of character. Edamame beans are nutty and delicious and anyone would be glad to see them tender and green and nestled with  a dab of butter and lemon juice on a handthrown ceramic plate of original organic riverbank clay. My housemate who has no alcoholic traits whatsoever, has a red meat fetish. She likes meat and potatoes and bread and something green as an afterthought served up on a large white china platter of mass-produced origin. ‘Green’ for her  means any vegetable including tomatoes. The summer I obsessed about pomegranates in all my al fresco salads she nearly reached breaking point, but staved off her frustrations by eating takeaway fried chicken with no extras.

 

Yesterday she asked me nervously: ‘When you grow out of edamame beans what do you think will be your one & only irresistible ingredient this summer?’

“Well, I’d like to see more saffron in everything,’ I replied in dead seriousness. ‘Saffron gilds the ordinary risotto like liquid gold. I must find some veal marrow and make a classic Milanese risotto with saffron. But saffron is expensive. I am thinking about a strong Vietnamese mint with black stems that numbs the tip of the tongue for up to three hours. Or smoked aubergines to add a certain piquancy to casseroles and Mediterranean dishes. And then there are mustard greens. And a herbes fine vinaigrette from a French medieval recipe to go with vine-ripened tomatoes: the perfect signature dish for country living.’

‘Right,’ said Una. ‘Another four months of different ways with radicchio or wild spelt or home-fermented yoghurts. I think I might just fry myself some bacon and eggs while I get used to the idea.’

 

Difference is the spice of life, diversity makes for interest and tolerance. When I go out to a restaurant, I like to order something I have never eaten before and I can usually talk myself into liking it. Una likes to order the same thing each time, done the same way and cooks from her mother’s 1948 cookbook. I like novelty, she likes comfort eating. We are truly Tweedledum and Tweedledee in culinary terms.

TomAto, tomaato, potAto, potaato, let’s call the whole thing off.

The practice of meaningful living

This morning I shall be helping to facilitate a workshop held in the local library on what might be called ‘positive psychology’. For many therapists it is a source of concern that studies on psychology have focused so intensively on emotional illness rather than enhancing and supporting wellness. There is a shift from  just helping those struggling with mood disorders etc to survive, and looking instead at what constitutes authentic contentment, following the work of Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, Martin Seligman and others.

When I sobered up, I moved, as so many others have done, from a state of extreme and anguished desperation to a profound experience of gratitude. That shift in attitude and orientation helped me change my life around. My solitary existence became a life of engagement as I became involved with others in recovery, connected with my community, established new and healthier work practices and discovered creative activities that were both play and work-related. My life took on meaning and purpose because it was based in service and giving something back, asking for and receiving help, understanding reciprocity.  Since then I have discovered that ‘spirituality’ is not  an individualistic wish-fulfilment exercise in a void but a reorientation that flows out of concrete engagement and  with others and ‘neighbourliness’. Spirituality is not some imagined compensation in a vacuum, it is what deveops in relationship.

And this too: the choice to focus on those who play a positive role in our lives rather than those who undermine or backbite or flatter.  All communities and organisations are human and flawed. Troubled people act out and behave in inauthentic and inappropriate ways. Controlling behaviour often signifies anxiety rather than tyrannical tendencies. Learning to speak up and say no is easier for some than for others. Those who are stuck in attention-getting behaviour can dominate groups and get all the attention (albeit negative) they are seeking. But  much of the time, there are solid trustworthy friends and members whose contributions we overlook. If we don’t develop the skills of discernment we should not be surprised if we find ourselves disillusioned or disappointed: we are placing trust in those who are not ready to assume responsibility, we are taking  fools at face value, we are placing our lives in careless hands.

 

So we shall all gather together today out of the cold bright wind and look at ways to strengthen and build community, ways to interact meaningfully and selflessly,  look at what is involved in leading a balanced life.  And how to keep the focus on solutions and togetherness rather than scapegoating or  us/them thinking. To move beyond blaming.

What keeps us company

 

A friend in Los Angeles who is a rigorous Kleinian analyst, sent me an email in which she said: ‘The way to overcome grief is mourning.’

What is frozen within resists thawing. Time and patience, as in most long-term processes. The waterfall a glacier tumbling through blue air.

 

I add a smidgeon of cumin surreptitiously to the pot of split pea and carrot soup I am making for my elderly art teacher. She does not know cumin and would probably not care  for it, but it grounds the soup in that fragrant earthy cumin way. The trick is to add the spice so subtly that only a cumin-lover can taste it.

 

As I taste and refrain from adding more, I read an article about the artist Dash Snow who died of an overdose of heroin in New York on 13 July. When I was in New York, sober and filled with zest and trepidation two years or so ago, I saw some of  his photographed graffiti and installations at a friend’s loft in Soho. An amazing sensibility, edgy and provocative.

Dash Snow died alone at the Lafayette House in the East Village, alone except for the following in his room with the antique marble hearth: an empty can of Amstel, an empty can of Heineken, an empty bottle of Bacardi rum, three used syringes and three glassine envelopes emptied of heroin. The substances that keep us company in that deadly aloneness. He was not quite 28 years old, the Kurt Cobain of the art world.

 

“He could go a month clean,’ his ex-wife recalled. ‘But if he had one glass of wine it would become a bottle, then coke, then heroin. There was not a slow build-up. It was like a beast building up.’

 

The beast in the jungle, the shadow crouching in the corner of the hotel room. I sit and look at  images of his work. I think of what might have been. What it means to have Charles Saatchi paying five figures for your collages when you are 25. To have it all and to know that all is floating on addiction.

We have only today, the reprieve, the deadly virus dormant or in what looks like but may not be remission. A virus, like addiction or alcoholism, has no morals. We are tightrope artists, trusting in the fragile community of recovery, the hope that keeps us balancing on the tightrope above the freefall.

Japonica in blossom

 

The fields across from the house were white with frost when I got up this morning. Cloudless skies and blossom appearing on the bare branches of the  African coral tree and the japonica as well as my magnolia.  In the northern hemisphere, friends are celebrating the old Celtic festival of Lughnasadh or Lammas to signal the autumn approaching; here we have  the Celtic equivalent of Imbolc, the  first hint of spring. I went out in an old slubbed grey track suit and cut branches of flowering japonica  and arranged them in  tall glass cylinders to be placed on window sills. That clear cherry-red blossom brightening the rooms.

 

The fears have abated, like resentments, fading away for lack of attention. I slept well and  both of us, my housemate and myself, have been out in the garden walking around, reclaiming space, playing with the little dogs and picking  sprigs of rosemary and origanum that we  can use to season the grilled lamb. A friend’s disabled daughter is coming around for tea and  there are homebaked pecan crunchies and satiny iced cupcakes with pink candles.

 

A new AA friend emails me and asks: ‘Have I sobered up too late?‘ She is in her early 50s and shocked to wake like Sleeping Beauty in the cobwebbed palace behind tall hedges, opening her eyes to discover a century has passed, a lifetime spent in oblivion.

 

It is never too late to begin living; to enter into the flow of that stream of gratitude and wonder, to accept pain and grief as the price for transformation, to risk becoming whole. As Berthold Brecht wrote: We can begin again with our last breath.

Dream of the burning child

 

This morning Rachel (pronounced Raakal) came around to help me clean windows. As a rule I don’t like to hire domestic workers in South Africa because it is a form of wage slavery and well, there is a long history of slavery and dependence and exploitation here. Complicated.

But I cannot do the windows alone, I am not able to reach up high enough and so Rachel arrived and we had coffee and breakfast together and then set out step-ladders and buckets and squeegee things. Rachel had heard all about the burglary and she went around checking the locked doors and closing windows. A gesture of concern I thought, and just carried on wetting the glass.

 

But then Rachel went out to the garden shed and unlocked that door and brought in the axe and a small blunt panga for pruning bushes and hid them behind the wardrobe and I felt a breathless  terror creep over me as I watched her,  saying nothing.

‘These men will rape you and then kill you just like that,’ sa id Rachel, her face wrinkled with anxiety. ‘You must never open the door when you are alone. I know these kind of men. They will kill anything.’

 

I could feel myself going white and feeling giddy from terror as I thought about that axe, so I made some tea and sat down for a while.

 

It occurred to me that i was feeling  not my own fear but Rachel’s terror, the trauma of Rachel’s life in a dangerous township with gangsters and mob rule and violence against women. I wanted to talk to her but I did not want to make her more afraid. It is possible that she could only let herself feel her fear for me, not her own terror. We sat and drank tea and we talked about mending pots and baking bread and the snow falling on the mountains despite the bright sunlight. And then we finished the windows.

 When I first began reading and studying psychoanalysis years ago while having therapy (such a painful luxury!) one of the hardest things to accept was the role of the Unconscious in  my own psychic processes. It repelled me to think that I was moved or motivated by impulses foreign to the waking self, instinctive drives of which I knew nothing. Almost as hard to accept as the recognition  that I was somehow living fixated and in an obsessional state, trapped in a mystery called alcoholism.

But I am able to glimpse the Unconscious at work from time to time, and over the years I have gone back again and again to the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis, studying from a distance the mechanisms of displacement and exaggerated defences at work. The Self I would rather not know with her unseen compulsions and projections and driven by terror, abnegation, sadistic death drives. We are none of us  what we seem to be.

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud recounts the dream of an exhausted father whose young son has just died. The father falls asleep and dreams that his son is standing beside his bed in flames, whispering ‘Father, can’t you see I am burning?‘ The father wakes to find that a candle has fallen over and set fire to his son’s shroud; he has been awoken by the smell of smoke. But within that dream is the trauma of loss and self-reproach that he was unable to save his son from death, the irony that the son ‘saves’ him by coming to him in a dream. The reproach of the son wakes the father because the sight of his child burning is too unbearable for the father to go on dreaming despite his exhaustion. And here too is the symbiotic, the mystery of intense identification with another, the sharing of terror and urgency.

But for Freud this is a displacement: what he hears in the patient’s dream is not the father’s anguish or the visitation of the dead child as a reproach, but the great Judaic story of Abraham who is ready to sacrifice his son Isaac to placate the vengeful and demmanding Father God, Yahweh. Abraham takes his beloved son Isaac up onto the mountain and binds his son to an altar, planning to kill him ritually and  burn him as an offering. The son Isaac has no choice but to accept death at the hands of his father. The sacrifice is interrrupted: Abraham  and Isaac experience  the mercy of the hitherto unknown loving G-d who intervenes and spares the child. And for Freud as a secular Jew living in modern Christian Vienna, there is another symbolic pointer here: the God who allows his only beloved Son to die nailed to a cross in order to redeem humanity. Another kind of sacrifice, another  displacement.

When we are faced with crisis or trauma, we find ourselves pinioned between what must be accepted and what may pass. There is the opportunity to encounter and contain the shadow of terror or annihilation. But there may also be  a chance to bear witness to the trauma of another, to hear and hold what is intolerable for the other. As in the fellowship, there is a space for profound empathy despite difference.

This is not my usual way of blogging and I apologise to those who find it obscure or troubling. Working through any kind of violation is not easy and to have had intruders in my home has brought up old memories and fears.  It strikes me that the double-edged gift of clarity given to us in sober living often means that we cannot but see the skull beneath the skin.

A failed intervention

 

So the stalwart locksmith I shall call Rudi came to change the locks. The watchdogs wagged their fluffy plumes of tails at him and squeaked a little. They only really bark at me these days, when their supper is late.

Rudi had some coffee. He changed the locks and had some more coffee. He had a toasted chicken mayonnaise sandwich.

 

And in between the coffee and the sandwich and the lock-changing, he told me the story of how he and his wife tried to tell his daughter she has a drinking problem and needs to get some help. A police sergeant also turned up to get finger prints and had some coffee and told us how his brother-in-law went for help, but only after the entire family had given up on him. Rudi wasn’t as encouraged by this as he might have been.

I talked a little about my brother being actively alcoholic. But my brother is on the other side of the world, sitting on a beach under palm trees staring at a coral atoll and I don’t know much about his life or how bad it is. So it doesn’t hurt me all the time like a punching in the solar plexus that never lets up.

 

Rudi is hurting. His daughter was arrested for driving drunk and being drunk and disorderly in a public place. His daughter is a primary school teacher and her name is, let us say,  Sonja. Sonja is engaged to a lovely sweet-faced man who broke off the engagement last week when he found that his fiancee had been sleeping around. Well, drunkeness affects us that way, sadly. We lose our finer discrimination along with our moral good sense and our ability to keep sitting upright on a bar stool.

Sigh. Anyhow, Rudi bailed his daughter out of a holding cell and brought her home. Then he and his wife  and Sonja’s two brothers all gathered round the pale and defiant Sonja and wept. They tried to use ‘I’ statements and told her again and again how much they love her and just want to be there for her. Sonja cried too and said she would try harder. One of the brothers brought in the family Bible and Sonja promised on the Bible she would never drink again. Everyone cried some more and they all hugged each other.

 

Then when everyone left her alone, Sonja sneaked out of a side door and walked to the nearest bottle store and got very drunk and then  evicted from her flat. And she has been drinking  since. The intervention failed. Rudi blames himself, his wife blames herself, the brothers blame the sweet-faced man who doesn’t want to marry a promiscuous alcoholic.

I gave Rudi a pamphlet on Alanon and I talked about how AA works and I shared something of my story. But there are no guarantees — and he wants solid ground under his feet. He wants his good daughter back. He wants his family united again. He wants to believe in God and that God is going to save his daughter. He doesn’t want quicksands.

 

It is a terrible and frightening time. And there are no keys that fit the broken locks.  There is no master key. There is no possibility of locking up an alcoholic out of harm’s way. There is no return to innocence. And no unlearning  these hard truths. I said goodbye to Rudi and promised I would pray for his daughter. I know that she can get sober. She has to want to get sober though, and that is often a long and tortuous road of losses and heartbreak.

I am so glad I did not have loving and close parents whose hearts I could break.

Whatever comes our way

 

Had another burglary last night — and the intruder even came into the kitchen while we were in the house and snatched Una’s wallet. As well as raiding the garage. So we have to replace locks, bank cards and tighten up even more on security. Hungry people in the bitter cold — but also a  drug problem  in all likelihood, and I hate to feel somebody is watching the house. Two dogs who didn’t stir or even pick up the scent of a stranger.

But this is life in South Africa and the main thing is that nobody was hurt. The police came around, drank coffee and ate rusks, not very helpful. They admired the curtains.

And we are going away on holiday next month which means leaving the house unattended. Neither of us wants to come back to smashed windows and  empty rooms. Our neighbours are vigilant but they can’t hear noises from that distance. Although we don’t have much to steal, I don’t want to lose stoves or fridges. Damn, damn, damn. Now I have no money for my art classes and we have to replace stolen property.

But it is a lovely quiet morning with soft rain falling on the garden, much needed. There are baby squirrels darting up and down the road between oak trees. Stalwart Rudi has been around to replace locks and padlocks. Neighbours too, with hugs and sympathy.

Taking a deep breath and carrying on. I don’t have the crippling fears and phobias of my drinking years which would have made a shock like this intolerable. And I have lived through so much worse, thinking of the man who held a gun to my head in downtown Johannesburg. How I froze with terror, thinking ‘This is it’ and preparing myself to die, finding a place within me that was ready to face death. Which may have been a readiness amidst trauma that led me to sober up for good.

I accept what comes my way. I may not like it and I resist the injustice of it but I live in a violent impoverished country and if I am to die I accept that is what will happen. When I was over in Wales, the whining and complaining of those who  to my eyes had so much — a subsidised and pampered life with social safety nets and shelter and freedom from crime — depressed me until I realised that they lived passive and demoralised existences of anomie, not knowing neighbours, not feeling needed or useful.  Fearing themselves to be parasites on the welfare state, redundant, helpless. And not all the double-glazed windows and motorised wheelchairs and plushy pension schemes can compensate for  not belonging, having no community, a lack of hope. Where there is no vision the people perish. Because we all come to nemesis sooner or later, the stone wall, the terminal ward, the necessity of divorce, the hard understanding that the life we save may be our own.

Hands across the oceans

 

Reading around the blogging community, I am aware of pain and crisis and my heart goes out to those of you hurting or struggling. Each day I take some time to read through bloggers new and old, and getting to know each of you is a joy to me, an inspiration, a help in my own sober life. I peer at snapshots of babies and kittens and horses and painted roses. I wait for details of the housewarming, I look forward to seeing a new artwork, I  am thrilled to hear about promotions at work, I grin at the jokes. Each anniversary is special. I love the courage and humility and tenacity of those on the comeback trail from a relapse.

My heart aches when the weekend away was painful and disappointing. I read between the lines for heartache and the fear of betrayal, the economic insecurity, the grief over a miscarriage or a parent dying. I say prayers and think about those of you, those of us, facing health issues, job losses, separations. Those waiting for a beloved child to come out of prison. Those searching for a dog who cannot be found, hoping for a call from an alcoholic spouse who has run away, frightened to go through a job interview.

 

I hope that someday we will be able to get together and meet face to face, sit around a fire under the stars and laugh and tell more of what does not appear in blogs, the full uncensored story of our rich and messy and wonderful lives. Even the most heartbreaking story of a sober alcoholic is a story that conveys experience, strength and hope.

And we are trudging that road of destiny together, not alone.