Monthly Archives: December 2009

Year’s end under a Blue Moon

New Year’s Eve and I woke up and thought once again how grateful I am to be sober, watching the patterns of sunlight and leaf shadow on the walls.  A quiet supper with friends, sitting out in the garden under a blue-white moon talking over the decade just past and sharing plans for the year ahead. A decade that began for so many of us with the repeated images of passenger planes crashing into twin towers over and over again, the start of another world war.

For breakfast there were slices of ice-cold sweet watermelon and tumblers of apple juice. This evening we shall have some simply grilled chicken and green salad with cos lettuce and  wild rocket. The supper last night with my former art teacher was not a great success. She continues to resent me for withdrawing from her art classes, considering my departure a personal affront even though she recognises that our ways of painting are like chalk and cheese. All through the evening  she took little jabs at me and glared ominously over glasses of iced tea. I smiled back unhappily and said nothing. Restraint of tongue does pay off at times and the others present were  greteful to be spared any sharp exchanges. And it was the art teacher’s birthday and she was wearing a mauve chiffon top and her favourite diamond pendant. According to my calculations she must be at least 82, but she has stayed 78 for three years now. I hope she welcomes me back into her good graces in 2010 but I’m not holding my breath.

All night she had the music of the 1940s playing and reminisced about her youth, riding elephants in Ceylon and going to  bohemian parties aboard a houseboat on the Seine in Paris. My eyes filled with tears listening to her stories and the Big Band compositions  of  Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, George Gershwin, the later Nat King Cole and Count Basie. Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Some day he’ll come along/ the man I love…’  When I was a child, many of my parent’s older friends had been young in the early decades of the 20th century and talked about India under the British Raj or pioneer Kenya, vanishing living memories even then. The poverty of Europe after the First World War, watching Robert Scott’s expedition leave England for the South Pole in 1910, the Spanish influenza that devastated Kimberley in 1918 and killed 40-million people worldwide. Living memories passing into history textbooks.

The first decade of a new century, the decade in which I finally sobered up. And it is a relief, glancing back at the last 10 years and forward to a year of uncertainies, hopes and fears, that I only have to live for today. Stay in the present, in this here and now. And stay sober for another 24 hours.

Happy New Year to all of you.

The Things

Donald Hall

All things fall and are built again

Another blessedly sober Christmas passing and on to a sober New Year. There was a time when I would not have been able to imagine staying sober for either.There are moments of remembered grief and loss but they arise and pass within me. Reading  through bookmarked sites this morning I was inexpressibly touched by this, a reminder of  how many of us associate  Christmas with bereavement and need to go gently through the celebrations and hoopla.

It was the day after Christmas, 1993, that I got a phone call from my mother to let me know that Dad had died, unexpectedly, suddenly, quietly. It’s a memory that colors my holiday season every year, and it’s a strange thing — the grief and sadness never go away. One of the lies we always tell ourselves is that the pain will go away with time, that we’ll get over it, that time heals all wounds, and it’s not true. Every loss is forever raw, and we can feel it all again with just a thought or a reminder, like a Christmas phone call to the family. The older you get, the more of these moments of grief you accumulate, and they never leave you.

My garden is running wild to seed and looks madly overgrown and  jungly. A few weeks ago it looked enchanted and flowery and I retained that image  in preference to the sight of scrambling weeds and bleached fennel towering over my head and a runaway bush of poisonous Lantana that I will have to dig up in order to eradicate. My coriander has bolted, my Swiss chard leaves are mostly eaten up by some  insect predator, mint has set runners all through a bed of day lilies, the lemon grass is scraggly and brown. There are dragonflies with ancient glittering heads and veined wings hovering and  seeking cool in the kitchen. Tiny  pale green praying mantises that cling to towels and  window latches, swaying back and forth with clasped raptorial forelegs. Harbingers of autumn in the Cape.  The season is turning even as  the second full moon this month, a Blue Moon, ripens in the night skies. And our hottest months are still to come.

Our dragonflies here are mostly damsel flies, Malachites, Spreadwings, Threadtails and Stream-Damsels. But there are some true dragonflies, Hawkers and Emperors. I love watching them as I move around with my watering can. They remind me of the Yeats poem and the line: ‘Their ancient glittering eyes are gay’, meaning gay in the old-fashioned   sense of gaiety. Although who knows? They may be gendered in favour of sameness for all I know. The Masai Sprite, the Blacktailed Bluet, the Rock Hooktail? It all sounds very Lambda to me.

Lapis Lazuli

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done

Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or On shipboard,’
Camel-back; horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instmment.

Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

Feeling the fear

Dressing semi-respectably for a biomedical ethics workshop all afternoon. My style of dressing is very much ‘shabby chic’. My managing director once said to me in despair: ‘Your little black number dates back 12 years and is GREY. ‘ In my next life I am coming back as Anna Wintour of Vogue. Not that personality, just the dress sense.

My housemate is brave and phlegmatic about her knee replacement operation. I have the usual alcoholic terror of complete apocalytic annihilation. Feeling the fears for others comes with the territory. If I imagine and agonize over the worst possible scenario, she need not go through it — that kind of thinking?  Fortunately, in sobriety I am able to keep my mouth shut.

I am making a supper dish requested by the housemate. She wants  an old-fashioned green bean bredie, very simple, an Afrikaner farm stew.  I layer a cast-iron pot with braised onions, a little cubed lamb, more onions, potato, more green beans. And one or two cloves and a little garlic. I sneak in a little homemade chicken stock and black pepper. The green beans are organic and wonderful.

I have been revising various fiction pieces, written a few months ago. Some are good, most are not good enough.

I write a poem, then I place it in a drawer. There it stays for months before I visit it again. If I found that it resembled me then, I consider that I have not done much. If I felt as if someone else had written it, when it strikes me as an Other’s poetry, I tell myself, that I have accomplished something.

Mahmoud Darwich

Tomorrow I shall be having supper with my former art teacher, imperious and unforgiving. The breach between us needs to be healed. But it is not up to me and my amends may fall on deaf ears. Sigh.

To open your mind

Back to work — up early with a pot of steaming Earl Grey tea, pushing my brain to focus, concentrate, condense; think, think, think –

And then accompanied my housemate to an orthopaedic  specialist. Should that be orthopod? She will need a knee replacement in the next two months, so we are making plans. I do sometimes wonder if I shall ever learn to breathe  or pray my way through fear. I took along  my Christmas present to myself, a paperback copy of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall, the historical novel that won  the 2009 Booker Prize. Lulling myself with bloodthirsty power struggles in medieval England, and the central character of Thomas Cromwell who is tender and violent by turns, profoundly ambitious, tormented by his own shortcomings. For years i was disappointed by Mantel’s novels, felt they didn’t quite come off. And then she seemed to gather together her energies and pounce into her true grasp and range with Beyond Black, a novel that terrified me almost wordless. Reading good authors is the great soothing, demanding, consolation and distraction from life’s worries. As LitLove says in Tales from the Reading Room:

Reading is extremely good for you. It focuses the mind, hones concentration and improves memory, all in scientifically proven ways. It is also a way to open your mind to other cultures, other perspectives, other ways of life. Reading on screen, listening or watching television and/or films does not bring the same mental benefits as the slow, in depth, contemplative exercise of reading on the page. It also teaches problem solving and lowers stress. If you think it is important to do a sport or take exercise for the body, it’s equally essential to work out the brain, or else we risk becoming insular, forgetful, restless and opinionated.

Driving through the mountains was a pleasure despite the heat — bright yellow gorse alongside the road and eagles soaring over the valleys. Muddy farm dams and wild ducks splashing in reeds. When we got home, there was a grumpy vicar waiting to have tea with us. Uninvited, but men of the cloth do not think of calling ahead of time. He has worked out a carbon dating sytem for Genesis and completely refutes  evolution along with  the ‘emancipation’ of women. To my mortification, the small dogs waited until he was seated on the sofa and then took a flying leap into his lap, barking hysterically and upsetting his tea cup. I apologised for the dogs but offended him even more by refusing to join his eccentric brand of Anglicanism, smiling apologetically but thinking of the English mystic Evelyn Underhill.

There is no need to be peculiar in order to find God. The Magi were taught by the heavens to follow a star and it brought them, not to a paralyzing disclosure of the Transcendent, but to a little boy on his mother’s knee.

This Christmas has felt like being wrapped in a sober cocoon of friends and non-drinking acquaintances, hardly aware of the chaos and drunken antics elsewhere. Such a pleasure.

 

A glow of friendship

This festive season I have so enjoyed reading about the celebrations and meals and family reunions of the recovery blogging community. I felt like an honoured  guest  in the homes of my online friends, admiring the decorations and  looking at the dogs and cats and hearing  stories about family members and  how the day was spent. Over and over again recovery bloggers bear witness to the same amazing truth: there is life after alcoholism. A few years ago, that would have seemed utterly impossible to me. I needed to drink in order to keep going, or so I thought.

Saddened to wake up this morning and read that the  South African poet and anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus is dead at 85. I heard him speak at the University of the Western Cape, a strong-voiced old man with a flowing white beard and  passionate opinions about freedom and justice, a rabble-rouser to the end. He will be deeply mourned.

There will come a time
There will come a time we believe
When the shape of the planet
and the divisions of the land
Will be less important;
We will be caught in a glow of friendship
a red star of hope
will illuminate our lives
A star of hope
A star of joy
A star of freedom

Here in the village it is a quiet and  peaceful Sunday. Friends are coming for lunch, a very simple meal but not left-overs.  Either grilled lamb and salads, or lasagna. I have been sitting out in the garden reading and reflecting on the Franciscan writer Richard Rohr while my lively dogs chase lizards across the sandy places under the olive trees.

The word “prayer” has often been trivialized by making it into a way of getting what you want. But… I use “prayer” as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope and love within yourself. It is not a technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy, or a requirement for entry into heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven now.

Two weeks ago, a woman alcoholic  who is on a mailing list I follow and who had written to me  many times, was sentenced to a number of years in prison for yet another drunken driving offence. It was a very severe sentence for an alcoholic woman in her early 60s and I was shaken. Confinement and the shadow of constant surveillance affects personality in a harsh and negative way. Since I sobered up and  have come to hear the lifestories of many others like me, I realise how  many alcoholics run out of time before we are ready to stop, how the habit of excessive drinking can suddenly spiral into tragedy and crime. Please keep my friend in your thoughts and prayers.

Any minute might bring a new discovery

The day after Christmas is known here as Boxing Day or St Stephen’s Day. I have been browsing through images of mothers and babies (one of those Advent themes that  come to me belatedly) while eating too much panettone. This has been a lovely festive time and I am now adept at roasting dozens of smallish chickens to perfection. How odd to think of myself as useful! And I have found the most delightful images of a gingerbread cake made to resemble a Seattle townhouse.

The daughter of neighbours came over to eat crab cakes and complain about her mother last night, weeping into her apple juice. She has managed to break up with her boyfriend, lose her flat mate and her accountancy job in the last week. She is aghast at herself and blames her outbursts on Christmas blues. I am reminded of a telling statement from JG Farrell:

 “I’m now fully conscious of this curious anarchy inside me that requires me to smash to pieces any promising relationship. Have you ever had a subconscious drive to start a row which will wreck everything so that one’s emotional landscape in turn becomes barren and tidy once more? I have it all the time.”

The flow of visitors has eased off and the fridge is full of leftovers. My housemate is resting a swollen knee, lying on the sofa with the dogs for company. The house is cool and dark with blinds drawn against the heat, the garden a haze of golden light and scents and colour. I have been reflecting on the  life of the Canadian poet Margaret Avision who died recently:

Avison was also well known as a Christian poet, and her conversion at 45, after having drifted away from the faith, is a central point in her story. Anyone who has seriously considered what it means to be a Christian has undoubtedly felt some fear – fear of losing themselves, of having to surrender everything. That was a real fear for Avison too. On the verge of saying yes to faith, she addressed Jesus: “I’ll believe, but oh, don’t take the poetry.” Yet, in the end, she gave in, throwing her Bible across the room with the exclamation, “Okay, take the poetry too!”

The consequence was, as she put it, “a new design” coming into her life, a reorienting of the familiar. She found that her senses were enlivened, poems came thick and fast, and “any minute might bring a new discovery.”

Her experience speaks to another fear some Christians have: the feeling that the only safe art for Christian consumption is art by other Christians. Avison found, on the contrary, that her subject matter was enlarged, not constrained, by her coming to faith. “If God is anywhere, if He is present,” she told an interviewer, “you can study anything.”

‘Any minute might bring a new discovery.’ The difference between holding expectations and living in expectancy.

Another sober day full of opportunity

A sober, peaceful and Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

Last night we had friends over for paella and sat around a fire under the stars — the clouds blew away and the Southern Cross galaxy looked magnificent, with a thickening white crescent of moon. I was woken before dawn by processions of African Zionist church members drumming and chanting up on the hill, and in a short while I am going off to roast chickens for 200 elderly and homeless people. Something that would have seemed impossibly daunting before I got sober but I now have a Foolproof Plan involving relays of ovens and hot pans and timing!

My housemate had a great evening along eating paella and laughing, telling stories,  with the rest of us and then spent much of the night sitting up with angina pain, which makes me feel helpless and sick with fear. But I have learned in this last year that  it doesn’t help to focus on the fears and setbacks which are inevitable — I try to set them in the context of life’s inevitable ups and downs.

Reading through various websites this morning I was startled to discover that one of my favourite poets, Don Paterson,  once wanted to become a preacher — short but very funny piece in the Guardian:

I was a small, fat boy in a kilt with, as I saw it, limited career options. Something in show business seemed about right. Half-human, half-traybake I may have been, but I was still keen to impress. My opportunities were few and my models fewer, but I had Sunday school, and my grandfather. He was a minister in the United Free Church of Scotland. Standing up and telling everyone how to behave seemed like a grand job. And – how cool is this – they had to call you Reverend. So I taught myself to recite the names of all the books of the Bible. The old dears who read us boring stories in the windy North Halls found this trick devastatingly precocious and declared me a shoo-in for the ministry.

Figuring that the speed of my delivery would be directly proportional to its impact, I got faster and faster, and trained with a stopwatch. I could see myself as the dog-collared focus of a vast, rapt stadium, where I’d rattle the books off so fast the big ladies would swoon at the miracle of it.

Alas, this turned out to be much less impressive than I’d hoped, especially to women, though it took me several years to accept the fact. I should say that, blissfully, God figured nowhere in this, even as an afterthought.

When I get back home there will be rock lobster grilled over coals and  one or two friends around to sit and enjoy a late festive meal. I have invited my unsober friend K over because she will be all alone but I don’t know if she can be lured  away from the gin and that lubricious wallowing in self-pity we all love to indulge in while drunk on significant holidays. ‘Cry me a river’ was once my leitmotif  on occasions like Christmas. Now I have a theme of Jingle Bells sung by cats  recurring in the back of my mind.

If you need to take a few minutes to relax and unwind, refocus, this is a lovely Silent Night meditation.

And if you want to get sober today, there are many of us all over the world wide web and from many different continents and countries who are here for you.

A story told to make sense of things

Rain fell during the night and the garden is cool and wet. I have been wandering around cutting armfuls of roses and hydrangeas and worrying about a sober friend who is not answering her phone or replying to emails. My housemate has to see a specialist about her worsening knee pain. My neighbour’s cancer may have returned. Another neighbour is walking his two small Pekinese puppies and cooing at  them like a lovesick turtledove. Hungry people keep coming to the door and I make hefty sandwiches with farm butter and jam or Marmite. It wrenches at me to see hungry people in a time of plenty.

Jack Kornfield: ‘The trouble is, you think you have time.’

Each sober  Christmas feels like a miracle to me. Life is rich, complicated,  abundant and full of heartache as well as joy. And that learning curve never lets up. Somebody emailed me yesterday and asked me what I had learned from online participation in recovery forums, service work and blogging. I wrote back, predictably enough: ‘Nothing, and I mean nothing, pays off like restraint of tongue and pen.’  That short-lived cathartic or malicious satisfaction of complaining about or maligning another, whining about  petty miseries, pointing out somebody’s faults — that is nothing compared to the gentle and steady discipline of keeping my mouth shut and my judgmental opinions on the back burner.

The sun has come out and the wet fields are shining like a green lake. I can’t find a paella recipe that isn’t dominated by pungent chorizo sausage. Tonight there will be perhaps eight of us — or nine, or eleven — sitting around a fire under the stars. Nobody drinks, and I am the only person who  has ever had a drink problem. That there are so many sober people out there still leaves me gobsmacked. I always assumed  people only stopped drinking  if they had no choice or were at death’s door, and that all families were selfish dysfunctional nightmares.  But all over the place there are happy  well-adjusted families,  teetotal men and women stirring  puddings and baking  pies, loving and sane parents taking children out to look at fairytale lights, children  excited and hopeful that this Christmas will be just as wonderful as the last, and the one before that. Making good memories counts for so much.

Terry Glavin:

The world is a palimpsest, and as soon as a story is told to make sense of things, it is a rare thing for it to vanish out of the world entirely. Once you hear these stories, you will never see the river we know in quite the same way, nor the cosmopolis that has grown up along its banks, and those stories will echo in everything you hear for as long as you may live….

Why I was never a snob drunk

Inky-black and very welcome rain clouds are rolling in from the north and we might get some cooler weather. My young lettuces have been suffering in the heat so I am very glad to see these heavy dark clouds. I hope we get a solid downpour and the garden is soaked. Everything needs to cool down.

In between looking at recipes for tempuraed prawns and reading sober bloggers, I have been skimming through a review of the philosopher Roger Scruton’s latest book, entitled I Drink, Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine which is all about appreciating fine wines and sharing civilised bonhomie over small quantities of sauvignon blanc in glasses of  Riedel crystal.

In other words the kind of drinking I never did, and which is as mysterious to me as nuclear physics. Naturally I liked the  idea of wine-tasting clubs and collecting vintage wines and sipping single malt whiskies while discursing knowledgeably on why unwooded chardonnay  is best to accompany poached salmon. The problem was, sigh, that I would drink anything that made me drunk and as much of it as possible. When I finished one bottle I would move on to another or switch drinks or drink from the dregs of others’ glasses or a hidden flask in my handbag or go out in search of rot gut cheap hardtack. A case of wine made more sense to me than a glass or single bottle, but even a case was not enough. I doubt even a wine cellar would have been enough. Or an entire distillery.

Every once in a while I meet what you might call ‘snob drunks’ in recovery who only ever  drank good champagne – and never fell off bar stools or slept with strangers while  in a black-out or undressed in public or drank vodka in shampoo bottles.  But I get a kind of sardonic, knowing instinct about them and their ladylike stories of how they talked a little too loudly and realised they were mildly embarrassing  when tipsy on Dom Perignon. A drunk is a drunk. If you gathered together a dozen active alcoholics from different walks of life and locked them up  in a room with a well-stocked bar, they would all sound very much alike after consuming a bottle or so of vodka each. Some of us get belligerent, some of us get weepy, some more unco-ordinated than others,  but we would all be scheming about getting our share of liquor when the bar supplies began running out. We’d all be talking nonsense and behaving badly and passing out and puking on one another’s shoes. And hiding our private supply of booze under our chairs while we bragged about our doctorates or years in therapy or  talked in plummy voices about family genealogy. Or philosophy and how to tell a decent cabernet sauvignon from plonk.

I hope Roger Scruton doesn’t end up with alcoholics at his dinner parties or his appreciation of wine might be  tempered with cautious  realism.

His dinner parties sound a real gas: “A good wine should always be accompanied by a good topic”; he prescribes, for example, “whether the Tristan chord is a half-diminished seventh or whether there could be a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture.” Everybody back to Rog’s, then…

That pedagogical side comes out strongly in the book’s second part, which gets to grips with the philosophical implications of oenophilia. This is less enjoyable, though one may still sift bracing minerals of good sense from the slightly dry lecturing: he is good on wine as the expression of a place and community, on the nuances of intoxication and on the social beneficence of buying rounds. He is insistent, though not entirely convincing, about wine as an agency of moral enhancement: “Wine respects our illusions and even amplifies the more benign among them. But it does not provide an escape route from reality.”

If wine hadn’t provided an escape from reality, I wouldn’t have bothered with several litres at a time, would I?

The mood in the village is very festive. Everyone is listening to Susan Boyle, Rock Against the Machine or Yvonne Chaka- Chaka. This morning I ate a handful of cashew nuts, a small mince pie and a slice of blue Roquefort cheese for breakfast. People are stringing old-fashioned coloured lights from their rooftops and  the branches of camphor trees. My housemate sings Once In Royal David’s City,  the same verse over and over again, as she fries herself eggs and bacon for breakfast. We lie sprawled  on sofas with small dogs  on our stomachs, groaning gently and passing back and forth a bowl of pistachio cookies. Sober hedonism.

Once the rain stops I am going to admire labrador puppies on a nearby farm. There is nothing like a small golden labrador puppy with toast-and-milk breath, silky ears and floppy paws, pink-tongued yawns and wet-nosed snuffles to make everyone all soft and gooey inside and  overflowing with gratitude. Life is good.