The circus jacket

 

One of the early recovering alcoholics in AA was an artist named Ray C from New York who joined the fellowship in February 1938. He was asked to design the dust jacket for the first edition of the Big Book. He submitted various designs for consideration, including one that was blue and in an Art Deco style. The one chosen was red and yellow, with a little black, and a little white. The words Alcoholics Anonymous were printed across the top in large white script. It became known as the circus jacket because of its loud circus colors. The unused blue jacket is today in the Archives at the Stepping Stones Foundation

RayC’s story is told in the first editon of the Big Book, entitled The Artist’s Story. He quotes the New England transcendentalist and writer Thoreau to describe something of his own anguish and quest for sobriety and peace of mind. ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’

For Ray, the ‘neurotic drinking’  was a symptom of the desperation that had characterised much of his life.  A turning point came when after a meeting with another recovering alcoholic (probably Bill W), he met with 20 other men who had also ‘achieved a mental rebirth from alcoholism’. He detected an invisible source of power and influence at work in their lives and this  energy became for him a Higher Power in which he could have faith. The ‘flirting’ with religion was over.

“It is only when a man has tried everything else, when in utter desperation and terrific need he turns to something bigger than himself, that he gets a glimpse of the way out. It is then that contempt is replaced by hope, and hope by fulfillment.”

There is an postscript here that I discovered while browsing through the Akron archives. In 1974 Ray C starts one of the first AA meetings for homosexual and lesbian al coholics at St Margaret’s. The first Lambda meetings in Virginia begin shortly afterwards and in 1975 Lilian Fifield  publishes On My Way to Nowhere: Alienated, Isolated Drunk, a study of alcoholism in the gay community in Los Angeles. As I read that title tears came into my eyes: on my way to nowhere. The outsider status of so many artists, so many LGBT alcoholics cast adrift by their families, driven into ghettos, silenced by homophobia. And RayC was there at the outset, contributing his design skills for the lively assertive cover of the book that would reach  thousands of likeminded  suffering alcoholics right across America as the world teetered on the brink of global war.

One morning in 1938 Ray C met 20 recovering alcoholics who changed his life. This is what he said of this connection and I love to read it because when I walked into my first meeting I had the same feeling: here was my new family, men and woman who had the answer, who were living in the solution, who had moved beyond  discrimination and social roles. The energy crackled around them like high voltage current or lightning.

‘These men were like lamps supplied with current from a huge spiritual dynamo and controlled by the rheostat of their souls. They burned dim, bright, or brilliant, depending upon the degree and progress of their contact.’

Blissed out on mushrooms

 

I have a deep enamel bowl of shiitake and porcini mushrooms along with some just-picked large black mushrooms the size of a side plate. I usually make a classic Marcelle Hazan mushroom risotto, but this evening I am going to do a pasta dish with mushrooms and cream and penne.

You need:

• a large handful or two or more of fresh shiitake and porcini mushrooms
• 1 3/4 cups boiling-hot water
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 large garlic clove, minced fine 
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 lb dried penne, good quality
• one cup of single cream
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh chives
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 1 1/2 teaspoons finely grated fresh lemon zest
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

 

• Accompaniment: finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padua in a pinch

Wipe  fresh mushrooms clean with a paper towel. Don’t rinse mushrooms in water, ever. Heat 3 tablespoons unsalted butter in a heavy skillet over moderately high heat until foam subsides, then sauté fresh mushrooms with garlic, salt, and pepper, stirring occasionally, until  mushrooms are browned, 5 to 7 minutes.

Cook penne in a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling salted water until al dente, about 5 minutes. Drain pasta in a colander, then add it to mushrooms in skillet. Add cream and cook over moderately high heat, tossing and adding some pasta-cooking liquid if necessary to lightly coat, 1 minute. Add chives, parsley, lemon zest, and juice, then toss well. Serve immediately with cheese and pepper to taste.

You can add hot chilli flakes if you want to do so, but  it will taste creamy and earthy and delicious without. You could also use basil if that is in season. And you could skip the lemon juice if you just want unctuousness.

In praise of difficult women

 

I’ve spent a rainy  spring weekend reading the new biography of Muriel Spark. Award-winning novelist, famous Catholic convert, reclusive celebrity — and an impossibly difficult woman. She fought with almost everyone who crossed her path. Gave her son to her mother to raise and then, when she could afford to parent him, bought a racehorse from the Queen instead and simply forgot about the surly adenoidal boy. Dumped lovers, publishers, spiritual advisors, housekeepers, bankers and agents on a regular basis. Fought with her biographer so that this first  study could only appear after her death.  ’She went throught people as through tissues of Kleenex,’ said her friend Ved Mehta.

 

I have a certain grudging admiration for difficult women. I may be one myself.

 

My friend Helena is very difficult. She repeatedly says things of herself that most of us believe should only be said of us, not by us. I had an email from her this morning.

‘I have always been a very honest person and humble too. My God has helped me become the person I am today. No matter what the cost, I have always said what I think. And what I think dear Mary, and I say this as a longstanding friend and academic colleague of unquestioned ability, is that you are not really a very good book editor. I hated your vague comments on my  paper and you seem unable to appreciate the subtlety and originality of what I was saying. My work is often misunderstood and I don’t care. I know how envious others are of me and very few have any idea what my integrity has cost me. ‘

Not something you want to find in the mailbox, especially as there was no criticism of the paper in question! I just didn’t praise it extravagantly enough. My friend Helena, a monster of egotism.

My friend Toinette. Who put up photographs of herself as slim and sylph-like next to photographs of her plump and spotty teenage daughter so that the daughter  (and any chance visitors)  might see how lovely her mother had looked  at her age. Reason for matricide.

My friend Noreen. Who has stayed 29 since 1983. And pretends that her old schoolfriends were in fact her teachers rather than her contemporaries.

Muriel Spark was a brilliant novelist — try to get your hands on a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or The Abbess of Crewe. Witty, satirical and gleeful. She wrote novels based on the Book of Job and a study of  one of my favourite theologians, John Henry Newman. She attended Mass every Sunday but left before the sermon because she said boredom was more painful than  guilt.

 

All morning Una has been typing a letter to a friend in Mpumalanga. She types with her two forefingers, very slowly and thumpingly. From time to time she asks me about spelling.

Una: How do you spell ‘insincerity’? And ‘beleaguered’? Or maybe ‘irreproachable’?

Mary:  Who are you writing about? What is going on? What has happened?

Una: Oh just something, nothing really

Una: How do you spell ‘unimpeachable’?

Mary: As in unimpeachable virtue? What are on earth are you trying to say?

Una: I am just showing off my excellent spelling, I don’t think the sentences make too much sense. My friend Bar thinks she spells better than me but she doesn’t have you to help her.

Mary: You have MS Wordcheck.

Una: But then I might sound very snobby and American.

The Emperor’s new clothes

 

Last night I was talking on the phone with an old friend from AA and as we talked I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

When I was six months sober I went on a business trip to another province and stayed there for a week, doing interviews and attending conferences. I have always loved going to new AA meetings in strange places, so I called up a friendly woman and arranged to go along to an evening meeting.

 

When this woman whom I shall call Judy picked me up at my hotel, she seemed a little nervous. She told me as we drove through darkened streets that this group of  recovering alcoholics was very special, that they were very loyal to one another, that they stood up for one another, that they did everything together and had great respect for the old-timers among them. I felt as if I was going to a gathering of saints with nicely polished haloes.  Holy huddles make me antsy, so I didn’t say very much.

The meeting took a while to s tart. The chairperson  welcomed us and told us how much he loved  having 28 years of sterling sobriety. He dropped his notes, then he lost his place in the Big Book. He  mumbled to himself. Nobody else said or did anything. The chairperson was blinking and swallowing hard, as if on the verge of tears. I couldn’t follow him when he did speak. Nothing made sense.

It dawned on me that he was very drunk. I glanced around me in a reflex movement of shock and dismay. Everyone else was staring hard at the floor.

Now I knew all about not interrupting anybody and  the rule about there being no cross-talk. But this situation was, well, intolerable.

So I spoke up.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. The chairperson was startled and peered at me owlishly in amazement.

‘Don’t you want to get sober?’ I asked. A kind of jolt electrified the room and for a moment I wished the floor would open up and swallow me.

An Emperor  who cares more about clothes than military pursuits or entertainment hires two swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes cut from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or unfit for his position. The Emperor cannot see the (non-existent) cloth, but pretends that he can, for fear of appearing stupid; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime. The Emperor then goes on a procession through the capital showing off his new “clothes”. During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, “But he has nothing on!” The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth.

 

The chairperson began to hiccup. Then he said in a loud voice, ‘Why won’t anyone believe me?’ He got up and stumbled out of the room. A visibly shaken  man at the back came forward and continued the meeting as if nothing had happened. There was almost no sharing. I think the meeting closed after 15 minutes.

While I was helping to dry dishes afterwards, the woman who had given me a lift came up. She was flustered and angry with me.

‘He deserves respect,’ she said. ‘Such a good man who has helped so many people. To be humiliated like that, shown up in front of everybody. We don’t interrupt one another in AA. Never.’

“I’m sorry,’ I said and I was. ‘It must have been terrible for all of you to see him fall to pieces like that. How heartbreaking.’

‘It was terrible,’ she said and her eyes filled with tears. ‘He came to our home for supper just after Easter and my husband said — but I couldn’t believe it. And then he was fine for a while, on so many committees, so unselfish. Then he had a fall down some stairs and we went to see him in the hospital and he insisted it wasn’t  that problem, you know. And then he made these funny phone calls, accusing people of things – but he kept coming to meetings and we all loved him so much, we didn’t know what to do.’

Years ago a very wise Catholic priest told me that rules are made to be broken. He didn’t mean that rules aren’t necessary or binding for most of the time. He just said that there are exceptions to every rule. He was talking about civil disobedience and defiance of the unjust laws promulgating apartheid. The generally accepted rules in AA against cross-talk or interrupting others, personal confrontation, are there for a reason — but sometimes confronting denial may be the only way forward if the entire home group is not to become embroiled in the pretence.

I don’t know what I would do now. I might handle an issue like that more sensitively, might wait until after the meeting, might speak to others first. But I would still want to say something. It makes no sense for us to speak of ‘rigorous honesty’ if we are collaborating in a cover-up. And alcoholism is an open secret; only the alcoholic believes his or her own lies.

The quickie version of Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon

 

Because sometimes we need a meal with both style and substance. I serve this up with perfectly cooked rice and a lively green salad. In winter I sometimes do mashed potatoes or buttered noodles.

This will take about 3 hours but longer doesn’t hurt.

Ingredients 

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive  oil

3 ounces small brown onions or shallots, chopped

3 1/2 ounces thick-cut bacon, diced

1 1/2 pounds stewing beef, cut into 1 1/2 -inch pieces, patted dry

Scant 1/4 cup flour

1 1/4 cups any type of stock, hot

1 1/4 cups red wine, but you can use a richer beef stock or a little soy sauce in hot water. If you are unable to drink wine tra-la, then either boil the  pot hard for a few minutes to  make sure the wine evaporates during cooking and use only one cup, or go without. It will be delicious but not  traditional. Don’t use grape juice or anything fruity instead of wine. And if you have a French guest for supper, don’t call this Boeuf Bouguignon or the outraged French guest will send around a Michelin inspector to eliminate you. The ghost of Julia Child will rise up in the night and chain smoke  cigarettes in your kitchen as she mutters about how ethanol volatiles burn off in cooked food.

1 bouquet garni (1 bay leaf, 3 sprigs fresh thyme and 3 sprigs parsley, tied together)

Black pepper

3 1/2 ounces portobello mushrooms, diced

Salt.

 

 Directions

1. In a heavy pan (I have a large orange Le Creuset) over medium heat, heat olive oil. Add onions and bacon and cook, stirring, until browned. Remove them and set aside; leave fat in pan.

2. Add beef and brown on all sides (work in two batches to avoid crowding).

3. Sprinkle browned beef with flour, stir until browned and add stock. Stir, scraping bottom of pan, then add reserved bacon and onions, the wine if used and bouquet garni. Season with pepper.

4. Simmer very gently for 2 hours.

5. Add mushrooms and cook 30 minutes more. Season with salt and serve. Or, even better, reheat and serve the next day.

This will serve four hungry people but can be stretched to six. I hardly ever use wine in cooking any longer but here it adds a deep rich layer of flavour. If you  are getting  into a tizz about the idea of alcohol lingering on in a pot of stew, then make a French omelette with chives or roast a chicken instead and  avoid any  wine dilemmas. If the mere smell of alcohol is going to send you dashing for the mouthwash or vanilla extract, just keep it simple.

Happy to lie in the grass and listen

 

Which is a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem Birdcall, and yes, I do know my blog post titles are  often beside the point and obscure. Phrases come into my head like  a few bars of a song and stick there for the day. I write them down as a form of exorcism.

 

Last night I invited my unsober friend Karin around for supper: roast chicken with black olives and oranges, a little Moroccan in style and a favourite dish of hers. Yum, yum! She accepted the invitation eagerly but then  didn’t turn up. This happens quite often, so I ate most of the chicken myself and threw olive pips into the garden.

 

This morning she called, excessively and insincerely penitent.

 ’I drank too much and passed out,’ she said. ‘Our friendship is ruined. It is all my fault, everything is my fault. I can’t forgive myself. I always do this kind of thing and drive others away and waste their time. I’m no good for anyone, nothing I do ever works out. I might as well not be alive.’

‘Enough already,’ I said. Self-abasement masks huge self-regard.

And if she ever sobers up, she will realise she couldn’t help it. One glass of wine and the world looks different, the priorities shift, another glass of wine and there is a drifting and sublime forgetfulness, Fleetwood Mac playing, a daydream underway, glass three and  intimations of mortality. Roast chicken  is too prosaic, there is only the lovely drunken tumbling into disgrace –

 

Drinking my life away did not feel like insanity, that was the thing. It felt urgent and compelling and as if nothing else mattered. Only in the cold light of a year’s sobriety did I realise quite how insane it had all been. The years sliding away in a blur of incoherence and all the alarming accidents and missed connections and betrayals and  disappointments and failures and postponed opportunities were bound up with those innocuous little glasses of wine each afternoon or evening.  Insanity, a craziness that had crept into my life unnoticed while I was just taking the edge off  my unhappier hours.

This weekend I have nothing much planned other than attending a ’fun evening ‘ village concert, which  has an ominous sound to it. Small rural towns  love amateur theatrics and  no doubt the farmers will dress up as ladies of the night and  the dominee will come onto the stage in a grotesque blonde wig and there will be tacky double entendres and much slapstick and raucous laughter from the actors if not the audience. And a finger supper prepared by the church ladies with scary little canapes made up out of old cans of asparagus tips or smoked mussels with scraps of processed cheese  and grey hardboiled eggs. Instant botulism.

“Poor you,’ said Charlotte. ‘At least I can  anaesthetise myself with  some red wine.’

Wine the great lubricant, dulling the senses, easing the pain. Um, well, no not really. There was always a point at which  the alcohol consumed made those  social ordeals more excruciating and the loneliness more unbearable, at which  moment more wine was desperately needed and inevitably  there would be no more wine, and an escalation in that awful sensation of misery and panic and the need to get some more  alcohol somewhere, having to ransack the  kitchen or  pantry and  implore the hosts and steal from dregs in other people’s glasses amidst the ensuing  muddle and embarrassment. Insanity. No, I think I can face  a village concert unanaesthetised without any temptations.

And the next morning  we have fine weather predicted and I can lie on a large tartan rug out in the garden, reading poetry by Mary Oliver or Elizabeth Bishop and listening to birds singing and watching my puppies playing on the grass and eating more olives. Breathing, eating and drinking gratitude.

Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

Transparent as a pane of glass

goggles and a hefty oxygen tank, and  swam over a wonderful glowing ridge of fiery coral only to see a great black car submerged and a drowned woman with her face pressed against the window  glass. I was so shocked I began to gulp water and had to flounder up to the surface. When I looked back down into the water I could see the glowing coral and white sands but not the submerged vehicle.

I wonder how many other woman of my generation had similar images  come into their conscious or unconscious thoughts yesterday. It isn’t really about whether Ted Kennedy paid his dues to society or spent a few final hours at the grave of Mary Jo Kopechne as a belated tribute or whether he suffered torment and guilt through 40 years. None of us know and like Syd I believe in forgiveness and redemption.

But  there is an aspect of  that unresolved Chappaquiddick incident  that will stay with us as long as we care about what happens to vulnerable young women in dangerous situations, so long as we continue to fight against rape and sexual violence and place equal value on the lives of unknown women as much as those of powerful charismatic men.

What really happened that night and  why did nobody tell the truth? I think of the decades of tight-lipped silence from the Boiler Room Girls, those other young single women who happily went off to an overnight party with a group of married men on a remote island. The silence  from the men present that night. The silence of  the outraged Kopechne family. The silence from politicians. The unanswered questions.

I first read up on this case when I was in my 30s and looking at issues around legal reporting. The inconsistencies and contradictions of the news reports bothered me so much I could not believe what I was reading. Why would a young woman who may or may not have been drunk climb into a car heading back to her hotel on the mainland without taking her purse or the key to her hotel room? Why were there bloodstains on her blouse? Why was her underwear missing? Why was another woman’s handbag found in that car?  Why did the deputy-sheriff report seeing the Oldsmobile two or three hours later than the times given by others?

Why was this terrible accident not reported to the police for nine hours although three people knew that young woman was trapped in an overturned car underwater?

When we stand up in a court of law and swear to tell ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’, it is because the truth has a liberating and healing power we all recognise and need. The fullness of truth may be terrible to hear and have  unpleasant consequences, but knowing the truth brings closure and  enables us to move on. We learn from the revealed truth: legislation can be amended, justice served,  reconciliation reached.

We are able to look back at tragedy as through a transparent pane of glass and  feel we know what really happened and hope it never happens again. The truth revealed puts an end to conspiracy theories and skeletons in the attic and rumourmongering. It is akin to that tremendous moment when we speak up at a meeting and say “My name is Mary and I am an alcoholic.’ We acknowledge that we need help, there is something badly wrong and we want to recover. We tell the truth against ourselves and put an end to the muddle and lies and cover-ups.

Forty years ago a young woman who mixed in volatile and hedonistic political circles was left to die in an overturned car at the  bottom of a tidal pond. She may have stayed alive in an airpocket for as long as three or four hours. While those who knew she was trapped in a watery grave were primarily concerned about alibis and reputations and the question of the US presidency.  This  is an incident that should never be brushed aside or forgotten and even as the efforts and acheievements of a great senator are applauded, women all over the world will think of  28-year Mary Jo Kopechne and wonder if something like that could happen today.

Thinking too of feminist poets like Adrienne Rich who charted that long journey each of us as women undertake towards autonomy and full moral agency.

Diving Into The Wreck

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

We can learn something new anytime we choose

 

Just thinking aloud here on a blank-faced kindly screen after having coffee and conversation with a neighbour. She was talking about family problems. The patterns of family interaction that stay intact across generations and different places and time zones. Some patterns that are rich and sustaining and nurturing. Others that drive family members crazy and block communication, blur boundaries, hamper growth. Most families have both kinds of patterning at work across any number of  lifetimes.

 

Years ago I decided to study a course module in family systems therapy. I didn’t think it would help me understand my own family better. What interested me was behavioural systems at work in families, systems of homeostasis and loops and closed circles and blocked feedback. Why  things don’t change, what stops solutions from being put into action.

The thinker and teacher on whom I focused was the American family systems theorist Virginia Satir. Her life story interested me just as much as her work.

Satir was born into a family of German immigrants in Wisconsin. When she was five years old, she developed acute appendicitis. Her mother was a devout Christian Scientist and refused to allow surgeons to operate on the little girl. Eventually Virginia Satir’s father stepped in and overruled  the mother, but by then the appendix had ruptured and surgeons  battled to save the child’s life. She remained in hospital for months.

Later that year, little Virginia Satir decided that when she grew up, she would become a ‘child’s detective of parents’, because she had realised that more goes on in families than meets the eye. Her detective work and support of children’s rights changed the way  professionals view families and Satir as a psychoanalytic detective was  brilliant at exploring the unsaid in family histories and styles of communication.

Her greatest insight was quite simple: that the presenting problem is not the real problem. Each week, thousands of troubled people walk into the offices or consulting rooms of doctors, specialists, therapists. Satir realised that the presenting issue, the given reason for the visit, was rarely the difficulty. How people coped with the presenting problem was the core difficulty.

This came as a lightning bolt to me when I was studying her work. I sat in lectures and seminars each day with my  horrible secret eating me up from within. I was alcoholic. But alcoholism was not the major difficulty in my life. The problem was that I resisted getting help in solving my problem. Secrecy and lies and despair, the conviction of being incurable, were much worse problems than  the fact that I was drinking too much. I knew others had had my problem before me. I knew many alcoholics had sobered up. Why should I not become one of them?

Because coping with my problem meant changing my life. It meant trusting strangers. If I told anyone about my problem, I would need to stop drinking. And I did not think that was possible. For one thing, I didn’t want to stop drinking. But I hated the fact that I drank so irresponsibly. I wanted to want to stop. I was convinced nobody would understand this convoluted crazy thinking.  I didn’t understand it myself. Round and round on the toy railway went the little train, unable to stop chugging along or leave the track. I could not stop drinking on my own. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t trust others to help me without taking advantage of my vulnerability.  Round and round the  cage ran the lab rat, round and round the track went the toy train.

Deep inside my mind and heart were all the wrongheaded lessons I had picked up as the daughter of an alcoholic. ‘You made your bed, now you must lie on it.’ My mother said that all the time. ‘Never apologise, never explain.’ That was my father. If I were to look back through a telescope into my own genealogy I would probably hear those phrases echoed by my Scottish grandmother or English legal-beagle great-grandfather. My parents distrusted outsiders. They despised do-gooders. They were suspicious of doctors. They  liked the idea of a stiff upper lip and  moral backbone.

Some of her greatest work  was done by Satir late in life when she began writing down her observations and understanding of ‘forgiving parents’. She believed it bis never too late to reconstruct the family and for parents and children, estranged siblings, step-parents etc to become friends. To assume new roles, to get to know one another as adults, compassionate and accepting and tolerant. The five-year-old child nearly murdered by a bigoted mother had come to see the frightened child within each parent. She was able to look at parents with new eyes.

As Satir herself said on numerous occasions: ‘We can learn something new anytime we choose.‘

The archipelagoes of waking dream

 

When I was in my 20s I came across  a copy of Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, one of the strangest and most wonderful not-quite-science-fiction novels ever written and I sometimes feel as if I have never stopped reading it. A deluded narrator in an unreliable universe undertakes a journey to the Dream Archipelago. I put the book down one grey winter’s morning in perhaps 1987 and  began my own journey to a place I knew beyond doubt existed for me: the dream archipelago of my own imaginary future.

At the time I was living under the dictates of the second State of Emergency and feeling trapped in a beleaguered country at war with itself, closed to the world outside those patrolled borders, an international pariah, a place of secrets and  hidden terror. I was trying to complete a thesis  in which I had lost faith. Living alone, I was drinking too much and living in the past. The only relationship I wanted was one that had ended two years before. I was afraid of the present, which seemed unmanageable and messy and lonely. The future of my imagination had a bright unknowable dazzle.

So in my dreams I began  searching for the white islands and gleaming cities of the Dream Archipelago. At night I would place a last glass of wine on the bedside table, crawl under a grubby duvet without bothering to undress and go away into a place I had never known in my ‘real’ life.

The islands were grey and  misty and beautiful. There were friendly sailors at the harbour  who pointed out directions, and a ferry that left each Thursday at noon for the nearest port of the western archipelago. I often sat beside the same woman with a basket of dried goods and a small overnight bag. We would talk about the bad weather on the mainland and all the underground cellars  being built in back gardens for security reasons. When the ferry docked on the outer rim of the archipelago I would see my friend waving from the jetty but I could not go ashore in the west of the islands, I had to get permission from senior officials at the Archon further into the cluster of islands. So I would wave to my friend and then stay aboard  waiting for another passenger boat heading  further into the archipelago. Often it did not arrive and I would have to go back to the mainland disappointed.  

For the first few months it was sunny and the seas calm — we saw dolphins once or twice, swimmers on broad white beaches circling the bays. But then the summer passed and I would  watch snow falling on the rocky promontories and fir pines of islands as we passed. The sea was dark and choppy. Gunboats passed us, heading out to sea. The woman who had sat beside me no longer  caught the ferry and I often found myself alone in the cabin or  standing on the decks. Permission to visit my friend arrived in a bulky envelope from the Archon. Reading through the documents I found I had been given me a new name and  identity details for the purpose of travel and warned me that travel  to the north was not advised because war had broken out  in the archipelago. I had a phone call one afternoon and a woman’s voice  told me I might have to stay on the islands if I was caught in  the shipping blockade while visiting. My lifespan on the island would be much shorter than  on the mainland but I would be able to move around freely in the Inner  Islands and would be mentored for a new career. This made me  feel exhilarated for days.

For much of that year I lived in  my ongoing daydream. It seemed more real to me than anything of my waking reality. Then one evening I went out for supper with a friend who was also writing up his thesis. Emboldened and made careless by too much red wine, I began to tell him all about my wonderful  dreamlife, a spool of magical narrative I was thinking of turning into a novel. My friend listened for a while and then interrupted me.

‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘I find this very disturbing. You sound as if you are having some kind of nervous breakdown. We can’t turn our backs on reality like this, Nita. You sound unanchored and a little delusional. Let me make an appointment with student health up on campus and get you some counselling. The stress of the thesis must be getting to you.’

I began to tremble and weep then and agreed with him. I did feel disoriented and in need of help. And so I stopped dreaming about the  wonderful future in the archipelago, deliberately paid no attention to that siren call. I resumed  my unhappy life and for a while I drank much less and made an effort to get out and  be with others. It bothered me  extremely that my friend had called me by my dream name, the name  I had been given to travel to the west islands of the archipelago. Madness seemed  to be hovering  nearby.

 

Literature opens us to possibilities and to ways of escape into selves and quests we dare not undertake in our daily existence. It was a false beginning, an adventure in unreality. Years later when I read Iain Sinclair, JG Ballard and more of Christopher Priest, I felt the spell of that dreaming life come over me again. But this time I could recognise the dangers and step back. And I could see  the role played by alcohol, by extreme isolation, by fasting, lack of self-care. Talking with woman friends, I find that as young women many of my friends went through something similar — rituals and initiations more imagined than real, daydreams enhanced by dope or appetite suppressants or sleep deprivation. Travels in the the underworld, the futures denied to us in this reality. The Dream Archipelago will have to wait.

Brief recognition

 

A bright Monday morning with a cold wind blowing. Hard at work, writing and rewriting and rewriting. Some of you know what this feels like. The  old yellowwood table at which I write is lonelier than any desert.

Odd and troubling distraction. My much-loved  bipolar friend sent me a grainy old photograph of Edwardian erotica that she found in her grandfather’s mouldy suitcases. I don’t know what it signified to her.

It is not erotica, it is  pornography. Erotica is how art celebrates sexuality in a context of beauty or aspiration. Pornography is just masturbation material. A youngish woman spreadeagled on a bed with a lascivious smile and no expression in her eyes. There is a chamberpot  half-concealed under a brocade curtain probably thick with dust. A cradle in the corner of the room. (Single mother?) A battered heavy umbrella  near the door, an old coat hanging on a hook.  There is a bruise on the underside of the woman’s arm and her belly is concave, probably from hunger. Inked inscriptions in white inform me that this photograph was taken in 1914 in Nieuwpoort, Belgium.

 

I looked that up. Nieuwpoort is a fishing village in Belgium where the German invasion was brought to a halt in  1914 because of floods. The German invasion was halted  for a while. The town of Nieuwpoort was completely destroyed in the fighting, wiped out, erased. This is where the Battle of Ypres took place.  Pillage, rape, looting, destruction.

How is it possible to look at a photograph of a naked woman and not see that bruise, not see that small cradle, not see her humanity and pathos, the desperation,  the tragedy unfolding? She has a wedge of dark hair on her vagina, thick eyebrows, a mouth crowded with crooked teeth, a mole on her left breast, a harelip. Woman as receptacle, woman as spittoon.

When I look at an image like this I realise again how much of my own humanity I lost during those long oblivious years of alcoholism. And I think of  frightened soldiers and taunted young men trying to prove themselves and the bluntedness that comes to bored and  drunken men everywhere. But mostly I think of that woman and the bruise on her arm.

Obviously I can’t post this  old photograph online because I will  have my blog restricted or attract porn-watchers. So absurd, so pathetic.