Perception with heart

 

 

My housemate called to say her flight north has been delayed. She is reading a Patricia Cornwall detective novel and drinking caffe latte.

Back at home, I am slowly and generously composing a big soup for myself: in Italian, minestra is soup and minestrone is big soup. Minestrone is a miraculous answer to the problem of leftovers, but needs to be made on a very gentle, scarcely bubbling simmer for about three hours. It always tastes better the next day. Along with various echt-Jewish chicken soups, minestrone  is a wonderful comfort food. It freezes well, especially if you don’t add pasta or potatoes. I divide up freezer portions and then add pasta (penne or bowties or little gnocci–type shells) to the remaining minestrone in the pot.

Today my minestrone is composed of red onions, carrots, celery, parsley, courgettes, French beans, pak choi, butternut, broccoli, lentils, barley, cooked chicken, pancetta, ripe tomatoes, red peppers and some cooked borlotti beans , with penne rigate pasta added for the last hour. As is the way in life, it looks and tastes better than anything served up to the guests this weekend. I am going to eat it in a deep ceramic soup bowl with an old heavy soup  spoon while sitting at the kitchen table reading and looking out at the garden. I may or may not add garlic, anchovies, pine nuts, capers, origanum — this kind of minestrone is a bold  and rich soup that holds multitudes.  A friend of mine makes her best soups after Christmas, amazing broths of distilled turkey and goose and roast potatoes, right down to the brussel sprouts. On the whole I opt for simpler soups but it is satisfying to know that no left-overs need be wasted.

In those first few months when I was learning how to stay sober, I made myself big nourishing soups at least twice a week and they made me feel mothered.

What I shall read as I spoon up my minestrone is Tchekov, whose every story is about perception with heart. Every single character in a Tchekov narrative is trying to come to terms with time, the relentlessness of change, mortality. And failing. Lives that are grounded in failure. Located in the silliness of our lives, that we fuss with petty concerns while the inexorable presses up against us, unnoticed until it is too late. And the background is 19th-century Russia, the farway distances of the steppes, the pine forests and dachas by snowy rivers, the mud and the conversations of lonely passers-by, the shabby rooms and cooling samovars, yapping dogs, improbable fairgrounds, the winters silencing the conversations, blanketing the cities, the rivers freezing up like conversations that go nowhere. I have been reading the subtleties of Tchekov for nearly 36 years and I find something new and surprising each time I read one of the stories.

 

In the garden my daylilies are flowering all at once, bronze, scarlet, yellow, orange, butterscotch. It looks like the circus has come to town.

Staying alone

 

It is a dark rainy Monday morning — my housemate has just left for the airpoort and her flight to Upington from where she will travel to the Orange River. She was wildly excited. I was sick with fear but hid it fairly well. When I was younger I used to wish sometimes I could lock up all those I loved in a cosy safe room where nothing dangerous would ever happen to them. Such thoughts lie at the heart of my more controlling behaviours, the delusions of an older sister wanting to protect the little ones even while knowing it is impossible to keep anyone safe, let alone ourselves.

 

I’m not that alone of course — my neighbour is watering a large catalpa tree across the road and waving to me to come out and admire the clusters of creamy tulip-like blossoms. The most beautiful tree in summer. And there will be friends popping in, students for French lessons, neighbours coming and going, small dogs  to be fed and played with and scolded. But my housemate and myself are very close, family to one another, and I miss her already.

 

Last night I had supper with friends and talked to a farmer from the Strandveld. He told me that alcoholism is the biggest single cause of death amongst his workers apart from TB/Aids. He said almost casually that he gives an alcoholic farm labourer five years from the onset of binge drinking before he has convulsions or hangs himself or ‘the liver goes’. Five years.

Out on most of those farms there is no money for rehab, no interventions, no detoxing, no Antabuse, no hospitalisation, none of the medical help that prolongs life for alcoholics in the city or overseas. No AA meetings, no transport to get to meetings. But there are always bottles of cheap brandy, barrels of sour wine, 10-litre boxes of wine on sale when the workers have just been paid their pitiful wages. I realised listening to him what a scourge alcoholism muat have been in 1930s America before AA came along. The farmer said to me:  ’It is the most horrible thing — they start drinking like crazy and can’t stop until they drop dead.’ Which is the point many of us had to reach before we understood we were powerless to put down the glass of liquor that was poisoning us.

My guests went back to the city all sunburned, their faces and arms swollen with welts from mosquitos (the bug repellents don’t repel our hardy mozzies), jumpy at the memory of large spiders in the bathroom, their ankles blistered by nettles. They kissed me goodbye and said they admired me for living in the peaceful countryside. I stood outside and waved fondly as they backed out of the drive and raced away, no doubt heaving great sighs of relief. The year I moved here, a friend from New York flew in a for a hasty visit and  was startled to find a wild boar gouging up the back garden. It had come into the garden to eat lettuces and at the time I had a rescued porcupine in the house smelling rather ripe and bristling quills so I had to keep thetwo wild creatures apart until someone from Nature Conservation arrived to return the porcupine to the wild. My friend from New York went back outside and stayed in her car smoking  and spraying herself with an Arpeges fragrance until both the tuskered little boar and the rank-smelling porcupine had  been removed. Then she told me she was booking herself into a local hotel  while I had the house fumigated.

I thought this very funny but could see that tough New Yorkers find Africa in the raw a little disconcerting  – when we were students in Cape Town, there was an oil spill off the coast from a derelict tanker and  we took home penguins covered  in oil and grime to clean them up  even as their razor-sharp bills sliced our forearms to ribbons. After a day or two, the house would be knee-deep in guano which horrified the landlady so much she would arrive and threaten to evict us while we shouted Animal Liberation slogans and bandaged one another’s arms. Such heady days of protest and penguin poo!

 

Let me see if I can reach 40 000 words on the last day of Nanowrimo. My friend and fellow blogger Annie K is within 5 000 words of the finish count. Way to go, Annie!

 

Image found here. Go have a look.

The best laid plans

 

Was it John Lennon who said life is what happens while you’re making other plans?

Anyhow, the supper did not come off as planned. My friend Char’s cat ran away after being chased by a wicked little Jack Russell. We all abandoned  any idea of supper and went out searching through the village, calling ‘Liefie, Liefie’ (which means Lovey, Lovey) even though the 12-year-old cat has never liked that name and prefers not to answer to it. He is the kind of white-nosed, black-eared and cold-eyed cat who should have been named after Julius Caesar or Caligula.

 

We searched in vain and Char was very upset. Came back home and predictably enough, there was the cat Claudius Nero waiting for us and in a temper because his water dish was empty. ‘Oh Liefie I am so happy to see you!’ said poor Char in a choked-up voice and the cat curled his fine line of lip at her. Then we had reheated and somewhat less inspiring food out in the garden, yawning and listening to the owls in the tree at the edge of the field.

‘Why bother to call yourself an alcoholic when you no longer drink?‘ asked my friend Monique ( not her real name).

Well, it is a challenge to speak with those who are not alcoholic and don’t claim to know any alcoholic except me. I have to think outside the shared AA discourse.

 

My friend Monique is a linguist at a local university and so I talked  to her experience. And I’ve been thinking through  this question of identity for a long time, discussing it on another mailing list, looking at what it means to take on a stigmatised identity resisted for so long. If you don’t like speculation, scroll on by. My friend Char fell asleep as Monique and I talked and the owls hooted in the darkness.

I told Monique that I don’t believe in the essentialism of an alcoholic identity. It is in some ways an empty construct — but no more so than gender. When I look closely, it is all mist and mirrors — and when I am not drinking it sometimes feels as if I have never drunk at all.

In early sobriety I found my cravings to be surprisingly empty at core, insubstantial, nothing there. Like the anguish I would go through in the dentist’s waiting room — no pain, nothing happening, just me sitting on a chair finding the waiting unbearable. Once I was in the dentist’s chair and having a tooth drilled or extracted, it was different, the relief of getting on with it, knowing it would be over soon. So I would notice the agitation, recurring desire for a drink, the desire not to give in and get drunk, the way the desire could be deflected or distracted, but would return. The encouragement of others who had done this before me was a beacon and bedrock. The slow ebbing of that desire to drink over weeks and months – a desire  consisting of nothing very much in itself, like wanting to feel happy or missing  out on animagined experience, a desire with no object.

In those first months I did realise my physiological addiction is not pronounced, not  as it is for other alcoholics I have known:  I do not thirst for alcohol, salivating for a cold beer or the taste of hard liquor.  I did not shiver and cramp and suffer physical symptoms only relieved by alcohol, [not yet anyhow] – but the emotional yearning for oblivion, temporary reprieve from the flatness of sobriety or a longing for  even a brief moment’s euphoria seemed to ambush me at times — and that too  dissolved into a chimera when examined — no ‘real’ longing, no ambition to drink, no hope that drinking would unlock some door or help me cope — that dream of drunken inspiration lay in the past. I had pursued the dream of drunkenness as far as I could go.

And yet. It does seem to me sometimes looking back that I could not ever drink enough, that I would have liked to have consumed oceans, to have stayed drunk for a year and a day, the old dream of never waking from drunkenness, to always be intoxicated, transported, other than my sober self. And that  desire is nonsense when looked at more closely, a desire that made/makes no sense at all.  Monique looked at me as if I had confessed to being an axe murderer.

Because although I liked the taste of alcohol, it was the effect produced rather than the substance that held me in thrall. I would drink anything to get drunk, had few preferences. Alcohol could do something for me that nothing else could do. It promised something  of a transformation, it was not unlike falling madly in love with an invisible elusive soul mate. Alcohol was just the doorway to the land of bliss, that union with the Beloved, that unending ecstacy of union. If I could get drunk enough I could reach the state of nirvana, I could cease to exist, I could escape for ever, I could dissolve into that ocean, become one with the ocean, no longer separate, no longer apart.

I could never ever have enough alcohol. If you created a great wine cellar with caverns measureless to man running down through the earth to a sunless sea, that deep wine cellar with bottles of elixir reaching to the ceiling, endless unopened bottles, would be my  Xanadu, my pleasure dome.

InXanadu did Kublai Khan/a sacred pleasure dome decree/ where Alph the sacred river ran/through caverns measureless to man/down to a sunless sea.

And Coleridge was writing of opium, of intoxication, of drugged imaginings. The dream that always fails us.

I failed as a drunkard, I could never drink enough to satisfy that longing within. If I began again to follow that dream, the drunkard’s fantasy of myticism, of oneness, I would find myself again on that infernal quest yet again, drinking myself into  one sunless cavern after another, cursing to wake sober, cursing to find myself still alive and suffering, longing to drink and die, to cease to exist.

In the same way of thinking, to wake each morning now as a sober alcoholic, a non-drinker, seems absurd when I say the words to those who have never known the infernal quest — a sober alcoholic is a paradox or joke rather than an identity — it only makes sense when referred back to and contrasted with the memory of myself as a drunk, an alcoholic drinker. If that memory of stigma fades I would be somebody who may  or may not drink. Except that the memory is not mine alone — it is held and shared by friends and those who knew me back when… — and by others  including the bloggers and posters and other recovering alcoholics, sober former drunks who remind me why  not-drinking matters. And each time I see or hear or read about someone still drinking, struggling, floundering, divided, choiceless, I am reminded why I will not drink today.

 

WG Sebald:

‘What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, coincidences?  Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which is beyond our comprehension? ‘

And when I do look back at my own personal past I think of the poem by AR Ammons that begins ‘I have a life that did not become…’ Not just a sentiment of regret but a noticing of the gaps, ellipses, lacunae — an adult life that was drifting, unsatisfactory, troubled, secretive. And many aspects of the question ‘what happened?’ or ’what did you do with this one precious life?’ can only be answered by reference to alcoholism, that I drank instead of…

 

While I was drinking in order to have fun, in order to have  freedom from self-consciousness, in order to belong, in order to numb pain, in order to be less me, in order to become more of a person – my life slipped away and vanished. I woke up in a dark wood in the middle of my life to find I had never lived, I had only become a drinker, a person moreover who could not drink, who  could not  drink for fun or  bliss or forgetting. I was a drinker unable to drink, a drinker unable to stop herself drinking. I had an identity that made no sense drunk or sober. And  at the end of the day I could not live with myself as I was. I had to be relieved of that self, that spurious identity. The drinker had to surrender, give in, give up.

‘So that a phoenix might arise from the ashes?‘ asked Moniqque.

Cooking for friends

 

If the heat ever breaks I am going to unpuddle off the sofa, take the ice cubes from between my parched lips and make a fennel and orange amuse-bouche, bechamel my way through a roast vegetable lasagna, do something ravishing with pancetta and walnut oil, toss pak choi in a hot pan. Or just hand the guests a tomato and head of baby gem lettuce each and let them make themselves a simple salad.

The guests are not pining for the city lights. They are comatose and weak from heat fatigue. No fun at all, and the small dogs are  hugely disappointed. Before I was overcome with heat fatigue myself, I washed the puppies one at atime in a cool bath. I found three fleas or some fragmented black pepper grindings, who knows which? The dogs are fluffy and angelic, squeaky clean. So am I. Drenched in dog shampoo, soaked to the skin, smelling  of wet dog and toasted almonds — I am currently  obsessed with green beans done the French way with almonds and a scrap of garlic.

Does this happen to everyone? The grand obsession with alcohol departs and  the addled mind fills up with all kinds of other preoccupations. I lie awake rewriting the Copenhagen treaty and making the world safe for rare species of anemone. I lie awake and invent new ways of coddling eggs and slicing French beans at a Gallic angle. I lie awake and matchmake for unmarriageable lesbian friends who  prefer horses or dogs to their own species. I advise the God of my understanding on how to fix an exploding red giant  supernova in another galaxy. Or something along those lines. My novel turns gargantuan with untested theories about hybridized apple trees and ghostwritten presidential speeches and created bubble cities on the ocean bed. The other night, with a white moon waxing fullish in Aquarius, I devised a new kind of oily yellow gremolata to accompany pork belly and a spinach-green couscous. In the old days I just thought about drinking — how bad it was for me, how much I liked it, how necessary itwas — and gloomed over ex-lovers and my depleted bank balance. Now I am sober and an existential menace rivalling the Creator of Worlds.

 

For supper  (we shall sit out in the garden under the stars at a small table lit by hurricane lamps, with hungry mosquitos needling our bare legs)  we shall have grilled rosemary chicken and a big bowl of slim green beans with toasted almonds.  Baked potatoes with salt-free butter. A big dish of salad with plum tomatoes, olives, capers and  lettuce leaves roughly torn. Then the guests can stagger off to bed and lie awake listening to the owl while I rewrite War & Peace.

Turtledoves and cicadas

 

Hot sultry weather unstirred by wind. Guests slumped around on sofas and in big armchairs,  dazed by the quiet and with puppies licking their faces. Tall jugs of icy homemade lemonade and gingerbeer, a glut of summer peaches. The garden humming and cooing with cicadas and turtledoves. As in the sensuous and symbolic Song of Solomon:

The flowers appear on the earth;

The time of the singing of birds is come,

And the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land

Insanity would be drinking alcohol in this kind of heat, dehydrating the body, whacking the blood sugar levels, adding to the exhaustion. I lie on the pillowed sofa and read detective novels while sliced strawberries sweeten in the fridge and bowls of yoghurt flavoured with mint and honey chill. All around the house there are tall glass vases of hydrangeas and agapanthus, blue on blue. Sobriety makes sense. The guests  tell me they are keen on good wines. by which they mean a glass or two of flinty sauvignon blanc with the grilled chicken or fish steamed with ginger and lemongrass. Most people don’t know what serious drinking involves, the dedication and persistence of downing several litres and then some. Wiping out the evening, the night, the next day, a lifetime.

There is a new book by Karen Armstrong on the bedside table, rebuting in part the New Atheists. I’m musing on faith, the impossibility, the necessity. How it all becomes simple when we are singlehearted in our quest.

“Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage.”

Cigarettes, whisky and wild wild women

 

Anne Sexton — American poet, alcoholic, suicide.

Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was—
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.

How we choose to think

Another glorious and blue-eyed morning on the far side of the universe in the Dark Continent. This morning I woke early and  threw open my curtains, then sat down on a zendo cushion chewed around the rim by unmindful puppies and meditated for 45 minutes. After that I had some wild Kenyan coffee and a cup of green tea to calm down the thrill of the wild coffee. Then I tidied the spare room because we have city guests coming to stay. In my next life I am coming back sober from the get-go and houseproud. I found pruning shears under the bed, an extra copy of As Bill Sees It, lonely unmatched socks in twirly patterns and the lid of a pale green Le Creuset pot I lost four years ago. And after that I sat down on the swept floor of the spare room and meditated again because my head was in a bad Hating-the-Inner-Slob mood.

 

As the unforgettable and unforgotten David Foster Wallace puts it:

‘As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.’

City guests  sometimes known as friends turn up frazzled from the traffic on the highways. They sit in the garden and smell the musk roses and listen to birds. They wonder aloud why they don’t live out in the country, why everyone does not live this way. They have long baths in soft unpolluted country water and cups of tea and sticky buns. Then they say shyly that they want to pop across to the chemist for something. The lone star chemist closes at noon most days. The guests get restless. They want to go out and drink espresso at fabulous buzzy little cafes and nibble on sushi and look at glamorous celebs mingling  and thronging in shopping malls. They cannot believe I live without television or video. They don’t want to listen to sublime Bach on the old grungy player. I let them do Internet shopping online. They  want to do exciting clubby things when it gets dark and everyone in the village goes to sleep. The country air makes them yawn. They go to bed and the owl keeps them awake  in the small hours. They get up and jog around misty vineyards but miss the traffic noise and grey fumes. The quiet becomes a little sinister. They miss the crowds and the delis and the ambulance sirens. There are large spiders lurking under the eaves and fruit bats that swoop through the garden at twilight. Cobras under the plumbago bushes at the back of the garden.  And yet despite the dangers, nothing much happens. They find their own thoughts boring. Nothing to buy, nobody to fight with, nothing to do. The old mirror  in the bathroom makes them look fat. They make implausible excuses and dash back to the city with relief at the crack of dawn on Sunday.

 

It is of course a retake on Beatrix Potter’s story of Johnny Town Mouse and Timmy Willie the little country mouse. (I once had a wonky tricycle I called Timmy Willie because it preferred ditches to the road.)

TIMMY WILLIE received him with open arms. “You have come at the best of all the year, we will have herb pudding and sit in the sun.”
“H’m'm! it is a little damp,” said Johnny Town-mouse, who was carrying his tail under his arm, out of the mud.

“WHAT is that fearful noise?” he started violently.
“That?” said Timmy Willie, “that is only a cow; I will beg a little milk, they are quite harmless, unless they happen to lie down upon you. How are all our friends?”

A day for thankfulness

 

Wishing all my American friends a sober and peaceful Thanksgiving. Enjoy family togetherness and food cooked with love and make space for the lonely stranger or orphan at the feast. And when the beloved family members tread on toes and push the same-old-same-old buttons, breathe in deeply and surrender it all, let it go, take another slice of honied pumpkin pie  –

 

My Nanowrimo novel-in-the-making has reached the sum total of 32 000 words and I am about to give up. I may have a short story there, buried in the digressions and Maryness and good intentions paving the road to hell or writer’s block.

 

Intriguing review of a new tell-all non-fiction book on alcoholic film actors, Robert Sellers’ Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed. An element of riotous drunkalogue perhaps:

Peter O’Toole:  “I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one’s local in Paris and woke up in Corsica.”

But the reality is a much sadder and more predictable story.  Alcoholism had the last word.

Anyone horrified by the reckless abandon of “Hellraisers” should know what its ultimate effect turns out to be. This fun-loving celebration of drunkenness proves to be an even more sobering cautionary tale than some of the most serious addiction and recovery memoirs. And the fact that none could entirely stop drinking, even when it became a life-or-death medical necessity, makes it that much sadder. Funny as it is, the book’s boisterous beginning gives way to grimly premature states of illness and dotage, with Mr. Harris as the member of the foursome most aware of his behavior’s high price. “I didn’t even have the joy of remembering my own exploits,” he said, after realizing that alcohol had wiped out much of his memory.

Today I am making  huge sagging peppermint ice-cream cakes for a Christmas party given from small children from disadvantaged communities. Outside, a heat wave is building like a solid wall of fire.  Given the rate that the ice cream melts, this is going to be a very messy and sticky party, but such fun! I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

 

And a dear friend who is usually cynical and fond of throwing cold water on my  enthusiasms and faith in humankind has just sent me an email in which he surprisingly says: Let’s remember the thanks in Thanksgiving. How touching and unexpected.

And I look across the water

 

The cicadas are going crazy in the sycamore trees as well as in the oaks and honey locusts and catalpas. This is the sound of high summer, the remarkable acoustic talents of the cicada with its wide-set large eyes and veined transparent wings. Male cicadas have loud noisy timbals on the sides of their abdomens and they collapse their abdominal muscles and membranes to turn their bodies into resonance chambers. At the same time they wiggle back and forth on the tree they are perched on, a kind of high-spirited drumming dance at the hottest time of the day because cicadas love dry heat. They sing different songs: a distress call if one of them is attacked; a number of different mating songs to attract different kinds of mates; and a courtship song to welcome the female who arrives to join the lonely jiver. In Aesop’s Fables the nonchalant cicada sings all summer long while the diligent ant stores food. Unfortunately the cicada can live up to 17 years while the ant, well, doesn’t.

To know what a the sensuous buzz of a cicada sounds like, put a brown paper bag over your head and hum along to Amy Winehouse singing Valerie while thumping your midriff with a soft fist and thinking pleasurably dirty thoughts. The kind of exercise you can only do sober and at home alone —  don’t try this in public, people.

There are too many lonely people in this village. Last night we had somebody over for supper because she lives alone and goes up to the library  each day just to see human faces and quarrel with the librarians. The spectrum of schizo-affective disorders is vast, and vastly misunderstood. Shelley, as I shall call her, ate her roast chicken with a spoon and talked only to the dogs. They empathised more attentively and affectionately than any human could ever manage. It was a wonderful evening and I was reminded that when our hearts break a little they open wide to other understandings of gift.

 

I’m still thinking about memory, echoing the one and only Proust:

“When from a long distant past nothing persists, after the people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, still alone, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long, long time like souls, ready to remind us, waiting, hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest, and bear unfaltering in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence the vast structure of recollection.”

The agapanthus are flowering all around the Cape and in every village garden. Agapanthus from agape, the Greek word for a pure and selfless love, a tall-stemmed flower with a cluster of electric blue or sparkling white flowers. I catch my breath each time I see them. If heaven is not a garden I shall come back to earth and just listen to cicadas for an indolent eternity. How good it is to be sober.

 

How many tears in a bottle of gin?

 

A friend has given me a large jar of vanilla-scented bath gel. I took a luxurious long bath, all sudsy and spiritually enlightened, and when I got out and wafted into the living room my puppies sniffed at me suspiciously and my housemate said: ‘You smell like Aunt Betty’s Original Sponge Cake mix. If you go out shopping smelling like that, an unrecovered diabetic will come along and take a bite out of your tittie.’ Charming.

How many cabs in New York City, how many angels on a pin?
How many notes in a saxophone, how many tears in a bottle of gin?
How many times did you call my name, knock at the door but you couldn’t get in?
- Paul Kelly Careless

Mary Christine’s post on the year 1977 has led me to reflect on obliviousness. The way life slides out of sight while we are drinking. Thinking back almost three decades, I remember going to speak with somebody I had spent time with over the weekend and asking him if he recalled anything I might have said or done in the course of about 15 hours I could not remember. He was scornful and uninterested in talking to me. ‘You just don’t want to admit to yourself that you are a heartless vicious bitch,’ he said. ‘You’re just looking for ways to excuse your behaviour.’

It was beyond mortifying and if I think back, I would still give a great deal to be able to find out what happened and make amends for that behaviour. Hopefully he has learned something about alcoholism as an illness somewhere along the line. It was my eighth or ninth alcoholic blackout and I was terrified. I had frequent nightmares about killing someone in a blackout and being put on trial where nobody would tell me what I had done. Secretly I wondered if I might be a multiple personality (we didn’t call it dissociation back then), a Jekyll and Hyde monster.

One of the most brilliant insights  uncovered by BillW and his companions was the realisation that only one alcoholic can understand another, can speak truth into another’s addled mind. Two drunks together while drinking are hopeless — slurring and colluding in denial and swearing eternal love to one another as they gulp down another drink at the bar counter. But any recovering alcoholic knows from within how it feels and how hard it is to admit the truth of our powerlessness over alcohol. And as recovering alcoholics we have immense compassion for one another as we learn how to stay sober one day at a time for the rest of our lives.

Outraged friends or acquaintances were not being deliberately cruel in withholding information from me – they had distanced in order to protect themselves and owed me nothing. They didn’t understand alcoholism, had no need to understand it because they stopped drinking when they knew they had had enough.

I had no plans to join Black Sabbath. I went out with Geezer and Tony and we got drunk, and I found out the next day that I had agreed to join the band.
- Bill Ward

 

Obliviousness.

 

When I was 15 and at school in what is now Zimbabwe, we were studying James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Our teacher Mrs Maddox was called out of the classroom to take a phone call. It was a hot afternoon and I sat and looked at msasa trees in the grounds below the school, daydreaming and waiting for the lesson to end. Mrs Maddox came back and was flustered, unable to find her place in the book we had been studying. ‘It was page 43, halfway down on the lefhand page,’ I said without a copy of the book in front of me. I had an eidetic memory, that captured pages as a camera might. I had read the novel the previous year and as Mrs Maddox read passages out aloud I would see the pages turning, the headers and paragraphs. I had a very unusual memory that I took for granted.

 

In the drinking years my memory took on what a lover once called ‘the bitter memory of history’. I nursed grudges and cherished grievances. I could not be dissuaded from the detail my memory provided, I sulked and brooded over wrongs and insults. My version was always the right one. I had not idea that this kind of exact and hostile recall might impede forgiveness, because I thought of myself as somebody who neither forgot nor forgave.

At the same time, my memory often gave me pause: I would realise that the remembered facts contradicted the mood I felt in. I was also very aware that I edited facts and remembered selectively, that over time I revised and altered my memories, subjectively and at a certain cost to the truth. My memory was unrelaible, could not be trusted.

Only in my 40s did I begin to understand the connection between memory and attention. It was bothering me more and more that I knew so little of my friends’ lives, that I had gaps, lacunae, ellipses in my memory, long periods of forgetfulness like blank pages in a book. I wasn’t paying attention because my alcoholism excluded awareness of daily realities. I tried not to think about many things. I lived in a blurry dreamlike world of drunkeness — what I thought of as my ‘lost summers’, endless hot afternoons drinking alone and listening to music, nights sitting out on a balcony looking down at the river and drinking. I could not recall if anyone had been with me. I could not  recall what had made me weep.

In those years, I finished theses, wrote essays, chapters, conference papers on days of nominal sobriety when I was hungover and desperate to complete projects, forcing myself to read and reread, hand in assigments and publishing articles that I would later look at with no recollection of having written them. I was running on empty, driving myself with only a limited talent to help me keep the facade intact, the sham of being an academic or writer. Unsurprisingly, the writing suffered. My mind was cutting itself to pieces.  In my late 30s I found I could edit well enough — and editing was easier than creative writing. So I called myself an editor and a whole part of myself, that shining golden ball of  hopefulness, rolled away out of sight, sliding into darkness. I found softer, easier ways to keep going because I no longer had the energy or persistence to keep trying. I had forgotten what it felt like to be me.

Alcoholism is a search for a common language, or at least, it is a compensation for a language that has been lost.
- Octavio Paz

And when I began going into meetings and listening to the life stories of others like me, I began again to remember. This is what it felt like. This is what happened. This is what was lost. Women who scarely remember the faces of children taken from them as babies. Men who live with the knowledge of their own criminal wrongdoing but not the memory. Those who know they are no longer welcome at family Thanksgiving but have no idea why. The terror of waking in the morning to a body that is bruised or bleeding and there is no way to find out what was done during that night of blackout. Waking in prison or hospital and recalling only the day before. That happy-go-lucky impulse to have a beer on the beach before heading home. To stop at a neighbourhood bar for  a glass of wine and some conversation. To pick up a drink on a Saturday afternoon, meaning no harm. And then to walk that inner circle of hell reserved for alcoholics.

Remembering what it was like: the collective memory of sober alcoholics together reminding one another what it was like, holding open the door of memory for one another. And how the story of forgetting and  loss became one of redemption, restoration, recovery. What happened; what we are like now.