Sunday fevers

Woke up at 3am shaking with fever and wondered if I have malaria on top on the bronchitis. Recurring malaria is one of the banes of my life out here. Got up and wandered around the house searching for a thermometer. Remembered eventually that I stood on and crushed the thermometer in a vague drunken mishap years ago. Had a cold bath and threw up, then went back to bed. Lay awake under sweat-soaked sheets thinking about  failure and lost opportunities and  various stressful factors multiplied by  a worry factor of 300 000 electrifying megabytes. The dogs began barking at the full moon in Virgo and I took them out into the garden where they dug up up a small plumbago bush. Then the sun began to come up and I fell asleep again.

Woke up feeling much better. Resumed fruitless correspondence with Yahoo customer care.  Coffee still tastes like something excreted by a lonely ocelot. Bathed both dogs, which was  World War III in slow motion. Lovely fluffy puppies who now want to go out and roll in  the dust under rosemary bushes and pick up sand fleas.

For lunch I am making some grilled lemony chicken with a big dish of steamed squash dusted with finely grated Parmesan and  crisp-fried sage leaves and  a little butter. I would put up a recipe for this  delectable squash dish, the ultimate autumn taste, but I have no idea of quantities. The Huibbard squash is the size of a small Volkswagen beetle in Day-glo orange.

When I was falling sick I was rude to my friend Char who can be annoying at times. Now she is snippy and hurt and keeps bringing me gifts from her garden — rocket, ripe plum tomatoes, plums, sweet poataoes — to show me how nobly she  can behave after receiving a deathly insult. I apologised at once after snapping at her, and  am reluctant to keep apologising. I might go out and pick her some Swiss chard and coriander and bay leaves. Somewhere Freud writes about the latent hostility concealed in the exchange of gifts. Maybe I should just apologise again, loudly and at length. In my next life I am coming back as a strong silent man who runs away and hides behind the garden shed at the  merest hint of conflict.

Autumn is nearly here. And life is wonderful. I keep recalling that visionary American farmer and poet and caring, truth-telling citizen, Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be — I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Invalid boredom with some gratitude

Very sad to discover that Scott W has decided to stop blogging — many of his posts in Attitude of Gratitude have inspired and encouraged me over the years. When I was able to access his blog, that is. There are perhaps eight or nine blogs that my ageing browser can’t access  — including Jilli Java, Gabrielle, Steve E, Chef Kar, Findon, Bill, Cat, Paula and several others. And many more where I can read but not leave comments.

Go well Scott, and I hope you come back some day.

A farmer’s market in the village today, buzzing with tractors, harvesting machinery, Afrikander and Nguni cattle, bad-tempered alpacas and farmers wanting to buy lethal pesticides by the gallon. Mention genetically modified maize or rapeseed around here and there is rapturous praise. If I go down there I will say ‘Damn Monsanto!’ and disgrace  myself, so I am staying in bed with my bronchial flu, but have sent a friend to search for an uncontaminated Hubbard squash.

Right now I’m reading a fascinating novel by Per Olof Enquist about the terrible effects of radium poisoning on Marie Curie and her assistant Blanche Wittman, once the Queen of Hysterics under Charcot at Salpetriere. Infuriating reading because I can’t tell what is fact and what is fiction. Wiki quotes the novel as if it is an encyclopedia. It is an enthralling narrative, makes me want to go and read up on Marie Curie’s  nearly being refused a second  Nobel Prize  because of her publicized adulterous affair and the public suspicion that she was Jewish, virulent anti-Semitism. AndI’d like to find out more about Blanche who  went on to work as Charcot’s assistant  and who was evidently  quite sane when not having hysterical episodes.

Glad to be sober but fed up with staring at the walls of my bedroom. Minor problems really.

Onward and upward, but slowly

Zapped by antibiotics, the bronchitius is receding. My appetite for life and  chicken soup has returned. My mind is growing back.  I no longer lust after a Moroccan couscoussier. My old tinny sieve with a scrap of muslin works just fine.

Apropos of nothing, except that I have been lying in bed reading Geoffrey’s Wall’s biography of the French writer Flaubert and thinking about moralizing discourses.

In 19th-century France, epilepsy was considered a ‘moral taint’ indicating family madness. To call somebody an epileptic fool indicated that the person was irrational, morally degenerate and probably had a childhood habit of masturbation. The treatment still involved bleeding with leeches.

Flaubert suffers from epilepsy as well as syphilis. He never mentions his epilepsy except to his closest friends and it is a source of shame, something he even regards as self-inflicted through his dissolute youth — he believes that his excesses can bring on attacks of petit mal — and his biographer says that Flaubert may have died of an epileptic fit, but the family insisted it was a fit of apoplexy. A shameful illness, something to be concealed and kept secret.

About his syphilis, Flaubert is extremely open and has no shame. His friends all have syphilis, they pass it on to their whores and mistresses and wives without any regrets or remorse. The ‘cures’ are dreadful and Flaubert stays away from Paris salons when the mercury blackens his lips, but complains of this to all and sundry. He talks about his ulcerated penis without any qualms  and expects  unmixed sympathy. It is a very common  affliction.  Although the syphilitic sores and boils and swollen joints, fevers, other symptoms recur again and again, he keeps believing he is cured of it or has contracted it anew. It is a nuisance but nothing more. Science has not yet shown the dangers of syphilis — when that is proven, it becomes fearful and morally reprehensible.

We still live with the unjustified moral stigma against epilepsy to this day.

Is it possible that ignorance lies at the heart of most moral panics or discourses? How can we talk about alcoholism without resorting to a moralizing discourse?

And there is nothing like reading  something  about the historical past to make me realise we do not know better  than those who lived in past centuries. We do not know more. We just know differently.

The AA of 2050 will reflect the society it draws on, the society it serves. No self-help movement exists in splendid static isolation. To the extent that AA is located in an insular,  paranoid, credulous , militarized, divided or aggressively secular society, those attitudes and tensions will characterize AA. There has always been struggle over inclusiveness, differing methodologies, moralities and interpretations of recovery in AA and the struggles will continue. The reality that alcoholism is a highly profitable and lucrative industry for  Big Pharma and  rehab or therapy  professionals is likely to continue and this  will continue to cause dissension and resentment, distrust etc.  So long as alcoholics remain a stigmatized community, scientific research on alcoholism will be partial, flawed or non-existent. AA is not monolithic and  has developed in very different ways  in different global locations. There will always be those who want to reform AA  or restore AA back to some historical ideal; and there will always be those who will ‘take what they need and leave the rest.’ And alcoholism may remain cunning, baffling and powerful for many years to come.

The rain has stopped and we are headed for another heatwave this weekend. I  am making punnets of ice cubes in the freezer so that I can put ice cubes in my dogs’ drinking water and ice cubes in my tepid bathwater and  lavish ice cubes on my homemade ginger beer. Guests can demand ice cubes in abundance. There is  some kind of farmers’ market this weekend — not the kind with trendy organic vegetables and designer muffins or sourdough breads. This market will have stalls with cattle and tractors and farm machinery and greasy hot dogs with beer on sale, a few trucks piled high with cabbages or maize cobs or large white pumpkins. I am hoping there might be large orange  Hubbard squashes or some early apples.

Under the weather

When I am unwell, I sleep like Rip van Winkle. Centuries pass and I wake up all foggy and wondering if I missed anything important.

The housemate is feeling better, full of beans and pink-cheeked, charging around doing good works. While I have bronchitis and lie in bed reading all about the French writer Flaubert who suffered from boils, syphilis, cold sores, apoplectic fits and petit mal epilepsy. He didn’t have access to broad-spectrum antibiotics and an attack of influenza in 1870 kept him in bed for three months. I expect to be better by tomorrow.

I am grateful to be sober, but the important  point about gratitude is not that we feel it but how we express it.  I miss being able to be of service in so many ways.

All I want in my life is an authentic Moroccan couscousier. A sieve-like pot suspended over another pot of boiling water to produce perfect delicately flavoured couscous. I recall feeling this way about the Vietnamese bamboo steamers which I rarely use, and a curved chopping blade or mandolin that makes me nervous.

We were offered a new place to stay but had to decline because it is too expensive and I am reluctant to move until Una has recovered from her knee replacement.

The ghost of the local farmer killed in a car accident the other day has been seen by several villagers. In life he was a sturdy red-faced man who swore heartily and liked steak and potatoes, rugby and plump heifer calves. Now he is floating through farmhouse walls, appearing on staircases in a dim blue light and sending odd messages to the living. ‘Tell my wife to get herself a leather coat for the autumn,’ says the ghost. ‘Things are very different here and move more slowly.’ As is the custom in country places, older villagers go out to tell the bees that someone has died. This is an old German or Dutch folk tradition brought to the Cape Colony in the late 1600s. Our fierce gold and black African bees are proprietary about the living and the dead.

It is still raining and very damp, pools of green water shining  like grassy mirrors. The hadedas or ibises and blue cranes love this kind of weather, they go fishing in the water-logged fields across the road. In the distance I can hear thunder and lightning in the mountains, the air smells rankly of sulphur tinged with salt, sea breezes blowing inland. The landscape awash with rainwater, horizons all misty and grey, trees and fields blurry and soft under cumulus cloud formations.

My computer is  acting up and the Internet keeps crashing. No Yahoo access and my browser is eight years out of date. Time for Rip van Winkle to go back to sleep.

Notes from a sickbed

This morning it is ferociously hot and damp, steam rising from the tarmac and the fields, the sun burning off mist. I have a bad chest infection and my housemate has bronchitis. She saw the doctor yesterday and he gave her handfuls of over-priced medications that will hopefully  make her better  within the course of today. She has gone off to see a settlement of people ill with suspected  cholera, which  makes me furious and  helpless because I can’t force her to stay in bed. In this house we have an informal rule that only one person can be sick at a time because the household needs to keep running. Fortunately, the dogs are both lively and curious, need no extra attention.

My Yahoo email has corrupted and I can’t access  it. This is extremely worrying and  I lay awake all night planning to bring down the evil Yahoo empire somehow, but it is probably something stupid I did. All of you who email me regularly, please email me at mla50@mail.com. I will delete this  address after 24 hours and hopefully will have my regular  email  up and working again.

The washer on the hot tap has perished and I have to crawl out of my sickbed and deal with a plumber if and when he deigns to arrive. In the meantime boiling hot water is splashing away down the plughole. I knew I should have married a man who would have done something manly about  the plumbing. Or learnt how to do something womanly and effective myself.

Upsetting news. A local farmer has been killed in a stupid car accident, his own fault for  overtaking on the blind corner of  a mountain pass and having a head-on collision with a pentechnicon. His wife and  young children are distraught. He was a kind but impatient man who liked to drive very fast in his  new convertible.

As I lie in bed and drink lemon juice with honey in hot water, I am reading Geoffrey Wall’s biography of Flaubert. It is beautiufully written. The problem is that  nothing much happens in a writer’s life because  writers spend their days  staring at  empty  pages and rewriting  sentences over and over again. Sometimes I wish I had run away to join a circus and led an adventurous life, even though I have no sense of balance and would have ended up as an alcoholic clown or mucking out the elephants’ stalls.

Grateful to be sober and blamelessly ill.

Of love & enmity

After the Movie

by Marie Howe

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.

He says that he believes a person can love someone

and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.

Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”

think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.

Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.

Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the

     murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.

Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice

repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say

     to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at

     someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to

     live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.

I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from

the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.

But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are

     a nun.”

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things

     of me even if he’s not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.

Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

It’s living that counts

The morning began in tears reading  one of my favourite bloggers, Everybody Needs Therapy,  paying a loving tribute to her father who died last week.

She says of this wonderful man what each one of us would like to have said at our funeral:

He would teach that it’s what’s inside that counts, not what you have. It’s not acquiring things, it’s living that counts, living fully. This in the heart of of the suburbs, a very material world.

The abundance of life. In some ways I know my life out here in the mountains isn’t very exciting and it does get lonely. I miss the  ups and downs and collegiality of the workplace,  the  pleasures of having meetings every evening to attend, miss going to films and being able to sit in a city coffee  shop  watching people come and go, the lively  markets and street theatre,  art galleries all around, having friends staying  within walking distance. But being out here and having time to write and time to reconnect with nature is the kind of luxury money can’t buy. My sober life feels filled to the brim and spilling over.

And more and more as time goes by I appreciate  how much insight I was given in my own years of therapy. although I was not able to integrate any insights or put much into practice until I sobered up, the understandings were waiting there in memory storage. The  analysis I received all those years ago was  very different to  what often happens now, to go by this  somewhat terrifying article in the New Yorker, but  through the skilled listening of  an empathetic  analyst (whom I thought of as The Enemy for  nearly two years) it became possible for me to listen to  myself and to find a voice, a way of talking about  my own past.

One particular insight, a great help in meetings,  but one that still makes me both uncomfortable and grateful,  is this:

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves.” – Carl Jung

Conflict is a growth point, one of my psychology lecturers would say and I would  absentmindedly write this down. Yes, it is  a growth point but  one of the more painful kinds of growth. Letting go of old enmities and grudges felt like a small death when I was doing the Steps for the first time. Then came the relief and freedom and  sense of moving on, inner spaciousness and expansion, a lightness within. But  my need to create ’enemies’ to hold my unperceived self-hatred was  very strong in me: I had what the Irish call a ‘bitter memory’.

Which brings us back to forgiveness, something I now think of as pivotal to my life, along with  a new flexibility in  admitting when I am wrong, have made a mistake, misjudged another, spoken thoughtlessly, acted without forethought, done harm to another.

Step 10. This Step has been a way of finding flexibility and learning to move beyond rigid defensiveness. When I was drinking, the need to protect myself from any criticism was uppermost because I was preoccupied with protecting the alcoholism and often felt that to admit I was wrong was to leave myself vulnerable to attack.

Sobriety has been a sharp learning curve. Many of my old ways of thinking and acting needed to change. Early on, friends suggested that this Step is not primarily about ‘apologies’ but rather about becoming open to ongoing self-correcting behaviour. I simply need to admit I have made a mistake and adjust my thinking and behaviour in accordance with this understanding. I have found too that to act promptly to rectify matters prevents the build-up of resentment or grievances. To be able to tell the truth against oneself, fearlessly and spontaneously, is a sign of maturity and a touchstone of the authentic. I would love to get there some day.

Step 10 – Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it

The smartness of cats

The pretty calico cat named Evil Moriarty  has all of us suckered. He teased the dogs all morning and then went home for his lunch and now  we are waiting for him to come back. My dogs have not moved from the window watching for his return. The house is dull without a wicked cat taunting us and waving his tail back and forth in an insolent way. Why do we come to need our enemies as much as our friends?

Once a school classmate who had plagiarized one of my essays and who I hated with an undying hatred suddenly sidled up to me after  a hocket match and apologised, asked nicely if we could be friends. I was so disappointed I could have wept. I wanted a foe worthy of my mettle, a rival, an imagined enemy who would spur me on to acts of brilliant revenge. Now we gave one another sickly smiles and I  knew with a sinking heart I would never get to dance on her grave. The same feeling when I completed  Step 9 and  found myself alone in the world without my cherished enemies.

Fortunately there is always Evil Moriarty whose owner probably calls him Bootsie. From Dr Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat:

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.

We looked! Then we saw him
Step in on the mat!
We looked! And we saw him!
The Cat in the Hat!

You seek your own idea

My housemate has a bad chest infection in this terrific heat and humidity. I nag at her to see the doctor, stay in bed, take antibiotics, slow down. She is a trained nurse and ignores me.

I had another  complex, beautiful but frightening dream about my dead father. Bereavement works like a musical sonata, full of surprises and recurring  themes and lots of pain.

A while back, Lou posted a magnificent essay by film critic  Roger Ebert in which he spoke about his recovery from alcoholism and membership of AA. I wondered at him breaking anonymity — but a recent article in Esquire revealed he knew he could not ever drink again, was as good as dead. He had had his jaw removed  as part of cancer treatment. An elderly Catholic nun I knew once told me: ‘Judgment precludes understanding,’ and she was right.

A small pretty calico cat is teasing my dogs by jumping onto the window sill and making throaty miouwing noises to wake the dogs. Both dogs are enraged and cannot  think of anything beyond barking at or chasing this interloper. They are incapable of detachment. I am also caught up in this drama and  planning ways of discouraging the cat in a loving manner. The house is bedlam.

My neighbour is fasting for Lent and leans over the garden wall with an ecstatic look in her  eyes to quote from the French theologian Jean de Caussade. I wish she would have a slice of toast and honey.

You seek for God, beloved soul, and he is everywhere, everything speaks of him, everything offers him to you, he walks beside you, he surrounds you and is within you. He lives with you and yet you try to find him. You seek your own idea of God, although you have him in his reality. You seek perfection and you meet it in all that happens to you. All you suffer, all you do, all your inclinations are mysteries under which God gives himself to you while you are vainly straining after high-flown fancies.

To refuse to be a victim

The Irish writer John McGahern who died in 2006:

‘I never felt a victim. To be a victim is a failure of intelligence. One becomes responsible for one’s own life, however difficult that life may be. ‘No matter what happens to you, no matter how depressing the material, if it becomes depressing to write, or indeed, to read, it’s no good. I firmly believe that unless the thing is understood it’s useless, and that the understanding of it is a kind of joy. It’s liberating.’