No fear of the dark

Next door my neighbour Hester is herding her cats, calling ‘Pirrup, pirrup’ in a low sweet voice, clucking and whistling. She has six or seven cats and they rush to her each time she moves, miouwing and purring like  little engines. Cats rubbing against her ankles, cats watching her from the windowsill, cats preening themselves for her admiration, cats leaning down from tree branches to touch the top of her head with their paws. Every now and again one of her   beloved cats dies of a feline illness or is killed by traffic on the main road, and Hester sews a memorial quilt for her lost cat. All around the house there are cat-motif designs quilted  in felt and cotton and  old wools, reading ‘Beloved Goshka, 2000 — 2005′ and ‘Go in peace, Pitta Pat’,  ‘A Most Original and Superior Cat: Jemima Orphanpuss 1991 — 2002′ .  I have a beautiful  quilt she gave me  that I put on on my bed in winter with dozens of small black and yellow cats dancing around bonfires and catching mice.    

Before I joined AA I had never heard the expression ‘Organizing alcoholics is like herding cats’ and when I think of Hester, it doesn’t seem hard at all. Love is essential.

This weekend I have been rereading Amos Oz A Tale of Love & Darkness, sitting on the sofa with my legs tucked under me and a puppy or two nestled against me, reading a memoir of such depth and irony and nostalgia I feel as if I have knwon the author all my life. Like Oz in Israel after World War II, I grew up in a bare new pioneer country that was both idealistic and philistine, troubled by contradictions and political turbulence, questions of nationalism and identity and a future that might disappear. The adults I knew as a child had been shaped by the legacies of the 19th century and the triumphalism of the British Empire, the music of Beethoven and Mozart, the works of Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth. As small children we were brought up on  ‘great literature’ rather than children’s books and I remember puzzling over a passage in King Lear when I was about seven year’s old wondering just how sharp a serpent’s tooth might be and why an ungrateful child should  have a as nasty a bite. But at the same time we were made to  play rounders and hockey and get fresh air and exercise, were reminded that if we buried our heads in books we would go cross-eyed and round-shouldered and not be able to find a husband.

There was much talk about what would build character in children out in the colonies. I was sent to stay with my elderly Aunt Margaret during one of my mother’s worse drinking bouts. Aunt Margaret was my mother’s cousin and had been a matron in the East End of London during the Blitz. She walked like a large broody duck and  brooked no nonsense. I arrived on her isolated farm and found that  there was no electricity or running water. This  delighted me because I had lived like this on the forest reserves  up until a year or so before and it was an adventure. The farmhouse was a great shambles of a bungalow with  walls of quarried stone and mismatching bricks. There were  wide verandahs overhung with jade vines and purple bougainvillea, and bullnosed roofing in corrugated iron that rattled in a high wind. The older part of the bungalow was just a few wattle-and-daub rondavels linked by  mudwall passages with thatched roofing and exposed poles for a ceiling.

In order to build character Aunt Margaret would send me off each night after supper to my bedroom on the far side of the bungalow with  a little candle in a smoked glass holder stuck to  an enamel saucer. She would tell me to blow out the candle once I left the dining room and find my way through the maze of passageways, steps and rondavels by touch. This was her way of building my fledgling character and she promised me that if I persisted, I would overcome my fear of the dark. She had  been a young woman in the wartime  black-outs in London and had lived through bombing raids crouched in pitch-dark bomb shelters. This was the rainy season on the lowveld and I would be sent off to bed amidst thunderstroms and the din of torrential rain.

It was eerie and frightening to feel my way down those narrow passages and through dark musty rooms with the thatch rustling overhead and sheet lightning  breaking stark white through the windows, and I never quite found my way to bed confidently. But I did overcome my fear of the dark. And my childhood fears of spiders and snakes and ghosts. I began to think of my small nebulous uncertain self as a brave person. To this day when I see people suffering because they  are unable to sleep without a night light or scared of noises at night, ‘nervous of their own shadow’ as Aunt Margaret would have put it, I am glad for that tough instilling of self-sufficiency in a small child. I sometimes wonder if that  holiday spent with Aunt Margaret might not have helped me when it came to  getting sober. Even in those early days of going drinkless, it seemed to me that this sobriety thing might be possible if  I followed suggestions  and if I only persisted, taking one step at a time into the unknown.

Listening to the body

Blue skies, no wind. Fiercely hot Saturday afternoon. Went off to a meeting feeling very stressed and told people to stop texting on their cell phones and talking with their mouths full of ginger nut biscuits. A wave of massive anti-Mary feeling swept the room. Then apologised for my rudeness and was forgiven and everyone went back to mumbling through ginger nuts and texting shopping lists. Some you win, some you lose.

Full moon in Leo, a glorious sight. Last night I went to the bathroom at about 2am and found my small dog Chloe lying on her back on the kitchen floor and waving her paws and hindlegs in the moonlight. She is an off-white and caramel dog and looked just like a magical silver dog in a fairytale swimming in moonlight all by herself. The secret lives of animals enthralls me.

I was up at 2am because  my duckling with orange sauce did not agree with me. It was too rich and I felt bilious all night. For years I  believed that I had a cast-iron stomach and that my body could survive anything I did to it. Now that I am sober, my body has turned the tables on me. I get heartburn if I drink more than one cup of coffee in the mornings. The acidity in tomatoes disagrees with me. I can’t eat rich or fatty food and I am going to have to  cut down on dairy. It is as if my body wants me to keep giving up  things now that I have given up alcohol. More bad habits, more defects, more chocolate, more spicy breyanis!

‘Never mind,’ says my housemate. ‘It is nearly Lent and then you can give up  things and  do it with meaning.’ Very funny.

Every time I think about losing my home I feel bloodyminded and despondent. It will pass, but until it does I  am reading Thomas Merton and thinking long and deep thoughts on life on life’s terms, a phrase I have never cared for because I was somebody who  took a passive and avoidant attitude towards life and would retire to bed with the sherry bottle when the going got tough.

That realistic humility

The moon is nearly full and the garden at dawn is bright as a silver coin. I am thinking of you over in the northern hemisphere as the days lengthen and you are able to wake to light and anticipate longer evenings. This morning as I eat sweet papaya sliced with a squeeze of lemon and enquire about rentable accommodation here in the viallge I have been glancing at obituaries for the wonderful Howard Zinn and the elusive rebel adolescent author JD Salinger, both of whom died this week.

Salinger:  That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “F*** you” right under your nose.

And I do feel bloodyminded and despondent this morning but at least I am able to see those feelings as understandable, unhelpful and passing. This evening I must cook the duck that has been resting in the freezer for a few days and that is the kind of challenge that takes me out of myself. I shall do duck with an orange sauce if I can get oranges at this time of year. Otherwise it will be duck with honey and lemons. A green salad and roast potatoes in duck fat. If it looks promising I shall invite guests, if it looks as if it is going to be tough and greasy, Una and I will battle through it alone. I keep thinking of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.

“Our very first problem is to accept our present circumstances as they are, ourselves as we are, and the people about us as they are. This is to adopt a realistic humility without which no genuine advance can even begin.” — As Bill Sees It, p. 44

Facing loss

After-shock, I suppose you might call it. Looking around at my home and garden and realising  the extent of loss and going into shock and denial. There are times when I still wish I could feel numb and comfortable for a while, but that is not going to happen.

So I just carry on with work and talk to friends about my  sadness and dread and try to stay open and receptive to the vagaries of the future. It rained during the night and  the house is dark and cool, filled with the smell of wet leaves and damp earth. At night I have dreams about being homeless, the same disorieting kind of dream that I used to have in my 20s when I was staying in rented accommodation and trying to finish post-grad work. Back then I always thought  I might be rescued, that somebody would help me. But in reality my friends just share my feelings of sadness and helplessness and that is enough for me. There are not many choices and I  just have to make the best of a bad situation. What does help is to be free of those bitter vengeful feelings I had while drinking, that  inherent rage  arising from feelings of entitlement, ‘This can’t happen to me’.

Because anything can happen to anyone of us. A cancer diagnosis, a child overdosing, a bomb ripping apart a beloved city, a partner being unfaithful, a job loss, a sober partner drinking, a car accident, a devastating earthquake, the outbreak of war, a torn finger nail. And sometimes the only choice we have is how we choose to respond: with courage and hope, or with fear and avoidance.

When I was 16 I was  walking down a street in what is now Harare but was then the colonial city of Salisbury, with wide avenues and uniformed policemen and lovely old jacaranda and flamboyant trees shading the pavements. A bomb went off in a large general store behind me and I was thrown across the pavement. For a few moments I couldn’t understand what had happened, then I realised I had been cut by flying glass. The ground was shaking and there were clouds of dust everywhere. My arms and legs were bleeding. My initial reaction was rage, then terror. It felt as if my world had ended. Then I saw a woman trying to revive a small child  some distance away and I crawled over to help her and  life began to take on shape and meaning again. Our only purpose in life is shared purpose, the meaning we create together from love and understanding of a greater meaning somewhere just beyond our human reach, something that outlives us and endures through human history. As an elderly Catholic priest once said to me: ‘The Bible would mean nothing if there was nobody there to live it.‘

“Life will take on new meaning. To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends – this is an experience you must not miss. We know you will not want to miss it. Frequent contact with newcomers and with each other is the bright spot of our lives.” — Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 89

That alcoholic sneer of self-hatred

John Symons on the alcoholic writer Paul Scott (who wrote The Raj Quartet):

He went to bed with whisky or vodka, lighted up the first of his sixty daily cigarettes on waking, settled at the typewriter with a glass of vodka beside him, ate dinner off a tray. His daughter Sally said he looked at his wife as if she were a bad smell under his nose, to which Spurling adds (necessarily basing herself on Penny) that his face was ‘set in a perpetual sneer, the sneer of self-hatred that had come to include her too’. He was dismayed and horrified when she left him, and wrote to say so. His letter to her is more coherent but less expressive than Tusker’s apology to Lucy, written just before his death. Scott wrote to his wife: ‘I am contrite, but could not tell you to your face. I’m a mess.’

As the heart grows older

	Thanks for the messages of support and suggestions. We don’t have the same tenant’s rights or protections you have overseas. My landlord can find someone else to rent  tomorrow and I  will battle to find anywhere here to live with decent security. He is able to evict me on one month’s notice or raise the rent as much as he likes. I entered into an informal arrangement to buy this house some years back — because I wasn’t a South African citizen, I couldn’t get a bank loan. He reneged on our verbal agreement. There is nothing to be done  — it has to be accepted. I am just taking it day by day. The surveyor came around and measured up the back area.  Drinking will resolve nothing and there is no desire to drink,  but I expect a great deal of heartache in the months to come. A learning curve. My housemate is very upset and feels helpless — she has to deal with a knee replacement op in March and  I want us to stay here until she is better. Then we might see if there is anywhere we can find — no, there won’t be a garden, but somewhere safe with a fenced area for the dogs. It is strange but something I have noticed before — my heart literally hurts in my chest as I go around watering plants and  do household chores. And yet as I move around, I do know in my  core that I created a rewilding haven for a few years, was able to spare a few creatures and plant trees, create thickets for birds to nest, a sanctuary, a fruitful wilderness. That may be all any of us are able to do in this brief life, in this brutal nature-hating culture. The lines from  a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins come back to me  in this hard time: Spring and Fall:                 to a Young Child    Margaret, are you grieving    Over Goldengrove unleaving?    Leaves, like the things of man, you    With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?    Ah! as the heart grows older    It will come to such sights colder    By and by, nor spare a sigh    Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;    And yet you will weep and know why.    Now no matter, child, the name:    Sorrow’s springs are the same.    Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed    What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:    It is the blight man was born for,    It is Margaret you mourn for.

Just another guy who can’t handle booze

Every now and again on a Monday morning I seem to lose the urge to earn a living. Even though I am  bright-eyed and sober and unreservedly grateful to be this way, I  just can’t seem to put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. So I have been zapping to spam all the homophobic vitriol I received  for my comments  section yesterday. What is it about the culture of nastiness on the Internet? Recover your humanity please, people. There is a living breathing human being seated here on the receiving end, and being ‘sicker than others’ is no excuse for ignorance or bigotry.

A reminder from my friend Annie K. The sober alcoholic known only as BillW died 25 January, 1971 of pneumonia complicated by emphysema. His own obituary? ‘Just another guy named Bill who can’t handle booze.’ I was particularly struck by his  explanation of the principle of  anonymity in Alcoholics Anonymous:

“Anonymity isn’t just something to save us from alcoholic shame and stigma; its deeper  purpose is to keep those fool egos of ours from running hog wild after money and fame at A.A.’s expense.”

When I was 16 years old, hormonally deranged and keeping a long-winded and savge diary, I  came across a copy of the Diaries of Franz Kafka in Kingston’s bookshop, right next to the Confessions of Augustine and the Diary of a Mad Housewife. I bought Kafka with pocketmoney I was saving to buy  alluring green eye shadow and took the  mention of his ‘pathologiocal sensitivity’ to be a compliemnt because I  felt I was exceptionally star-crossed, gifted, irresistible,  pathological and sensitive myself. Look at me sideways, would you? I shall leave you stunned and speechless by lowering my sea-green eyelids and batting my spiky indigo-mascaraed  lashes.

Anyhow, I loved Kafka and imitated his statacco  manner of third-person entries for years. I went on to read him over and over again and search out biographies to find out more about  who he was,what shaped him and that bleak but  truth-telling vision of  our human condition. Now I read that Kafka’s last friend, Alice Herz-Sommer, has died at the age of 106.

“Kafka was a slightly strange man. He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly,” she says, and then grows silent. “And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him.”

And this morning my landlord told me he plans to subdivide and build a second garage that will fill the space now occupied by my garden. I feel heartsick but I have always known this might happen. Human greed. I think of my birds and trees and my heart turns to stone.

Weekend entertaining

My feeling is that if you do not have idiosyncratic, witty and lovable sober friends in AA, your life is hardly worth living. Such a good time — making memories — arguing with ferocity and instant forgiveness – eating  spicy seafood chowders and gulping iced water, hugs and  promises to meet again on parting. I have always been drawn to difficult personalities of  immense integrity who are passionate and greedy about good food. They abound in AA, my good fortune. To understand all is to forgive all.

And my neighbours came over in the evening and we sat out under a brilliant bisected moon and a sky shimmering with old stars. Talking about our memories of a country that no longer exists. Of course I had nightmares and insomnia to follow, but the pain is part of what makes  my life now so worthwhile. When Hester, as I shall call her, talked about going up from Maputo to that once-prosperous little farming town across the border and seeing the empty looted shops, roofless houses, hacked-down trees, grass growing up through cracks in the pavement, the destitution and mass starvation I went white with  sorrow. Afterwards I could not sleep, lay in the old  agony for hours. A raw visceral anguish that will be with me until I die, that loosens my ties to life. But it is  something that has shown me the underbelly of  that love of place and  kin, deepened my empathy with the homeless and exiles everywhere.

The lovers arrived today and  that was also fun –  Patsy and Renetta, shall we say?  Not their real names. Contrary to my expectations, they ate and ate. If music be the food of love, play on. Plump and uxoriously happy women munching on grilled spicy  chicken drumsticks and murmuring over cucumber raita and  various salsas.The dogs spontaneously danced in the kitchen on their hind legs and  came running up for  pats and compliments. Bowls of ripe peaches and  golden plums, plushy apricot-red persimmons.  They left with great reluctance, wanting to move to the countryside right away.

How strange to think once I could not wait for people to leave or go out into the garden so that I could  go quietly into a darkened room and pour myself a glass of anaesthetising  vodka or gin. That inner self who only cared about  seizing an opportunity to drink, to dull my  edgy feelings, to escape into a world where nobody contradicted me, nobody disagreed with me,  I did not have to care for anyone The Miller’s Song: I care for nobody, no, not I/And nobody cares for me. A world in which I was forever right and forever alone. How chilling, how unnatural. My sober reality largely coincides with the sober reality of others. A new world.

Bound ever closer together

 

All across these mountain valleys, apples ripening on the  trees. The more common varieties grown for export include Pink Lady, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Honeycrisp and Braestar. But there are also  varieties  that date back to Edwardian  times, Beauty of Bath and a close relative of the famous Worcester Pearmain found in Herefordshire. In all honesty I don’t think our apples grown in a the warmer climate  can compare with the crisp sweet crunch of English apples but I do enjoy our late autumn apples, the slight wrinkle and  fragrance. Peaches  and yellow plums are coming in, together with persimmons and custard apples.

Driving to the farmers’ market this morning, an amazing sight. The leader of a troupe of Chacma baboons jumped onto a slow truck heavily laden with apples,  climbed into the back of the truck and began throwing apples to the other baboons at the road’s edge — all this on the Nuweberg in Viljoen’s Pass with the Hottentots-Holland reserve all around, the proteas and wild grasses and grey santolina.

A bowler’s over-arm swing, the  thick-set baboon chucking out red apples onto the road, apples rolling downhill with young baboons  giving chase. I have heard local farmers talk about the baboons stealing fruit from the trucks climbing the four mountain passes that surround our valley but thought the stories apocryphal. There were more baboons playing under the flowering gums on the mountain pass, around 1 500 metres high, and we saw grey rhebok near the small dam.

It was very hot at the market and we had to hurry because I was going down to the coast – on impulse I bought a large white freshly killed duck , then the yellowtail and  a lovely geelbek (fish from the Atlantic) on ice  for this evening’s fish grill. A vivacious conversation with a Madagascan French baker selling baguettes and ciabatta, health bread with rye and sunflower seeds. He talked about the  volcanic eruption on Martinique in 1902 and the chaos it caused there, thinking about Haiti’s earthquake. All the islands off Africa in the Indian Ocean are French-speaking and have histories blighted by slavery and  funded dictatorships. He had met Aristide, the former president of Haiti who now lives in exile in South Africa, a Salesian priest become liberation theologian, another  exile who loves good French bread and longs to be back on his suffering island.

And I was thinking too, as I saw the people waiting for the beer tent to open at the market, how simple it is to break that dependency – and yet  it is  so much harder than we anticipate. The heat terrific, hard blinding  light on white tents and  shade umbrellas, looking with sympathy at those who will be pale, sweating  and incapable by noon. I carry a bottle of  water in my  raffia bag, never let myself get thirsty or  too hungry or  dazed by the heat. A wide-brimmed hat, thin cotton top, free of any compulsion to let the day slip into  a haze of drunken melancholy.

Along with coping strategies, I learned self-soothing behaviours in early sobriety and  they hold me steady. I’m not talking about maladaptive habits: self-harming mutilation or  binge eating and vomiting, numbing out with porn or overspending on  consumerism, process addictions that are just substitutes for  the bottle. I’m talking about  taking care of the uncertain or flustered self who wants a glass of cold water, a cup of hot sweet tea, a friendly voice on the phone, a long scented bath, a walk in the cool of the day, practice in breathing. To keep a journal, to paint landscapes, to make summer soups and tend herbs and  sit laughing with  sober friends in a shady  restaurant overlooking a lazy green ocean. I’m heading out to have lunch with some sober AA friends down at the coast. Such idiosyncratic  generous crazy wonderful people., my own kind. I shall come home dizzy with laughter and affection. A cameraderie I have never known before.

“How much better it would have been had I felt gratitude rather than self-satisfaction — gratitude that I had once suffered the pains of alcoholism, gratitude that a miracle of recovery had been worked upon me from above, gratitude for the privilege of serving my fellow alcoholics, and gratitude for those fraternal ties which bound me ever closer to them in a comradeship such as few societies of men have ever known.”

– As Bill Sees It, p. 133

A lifelong plan for recovery

This morning I am making a pot of chicken and vegetable soup for my convalescing neighbour. I learned to make  wonderful motherly Jewish chicken soup from Claudia Rodin’s  book on Jewish cookery. The trick is plenty of chopped  fresh parsley.  Chicken soup is something I make perhaps once a month and I have  several variations, but  all of them from Claudia Rodin. Simon Schama has pointed out that: “Claudia Roden is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker. She is, rather, memorialist, historian, ethnographer, anthropologist, essayist, poet …”

Two of Una’s friends, a lesbian couple madly in love, are coming for Sunday lunch. Lovers make me gloomy because I am not in love myself and  new lovers eat very little. They will  gaze into one another’s eyes and make  private jokes and toy with the roast lamb, tell us that they can fit into one another’s  clothes, exhibit their twinned tattoos, entwine their feet under the table, go on and on about   being synchronized in multi-orgasmic bliss while the rest of us take second helpings of  ciabatta and talk about the weather . So I shall  give them a light green couscous and some grilled chicken and save the lamb for the loveless and hungry. Una is a romantic and wants to  create  a magnificent chocolate souffle with crimson rose petals scattered on top. I tell her that women who are in thrall to lust do not eat. She pauses to consider thisand says they have not  yet adopted a dog. That  might mean they are not committed to any notion of lasting love because the parenting of dogs is  a consolidating couple activity.

I lie in the bath and think about Step 6 and my obdurate hanging onto unhelpful attitudes and habits. There is another  quotation stuck up on the tiled wall,  with the ink running. I should probably stick up definitions of the word ‘progress’ because sometimes I feel I am stumbling backwards.

“AA is not a plan for recovery that can be finished and done with. It is a way of life, and the challenge contained in its principles is great enough to keep any human being striving for as long as he lives. We do not, cannot, outgrow this plan.” – Alcoholics Anonymous (3rd ed.), p. 311