Autumn colour

The computer whizkid is really a surfer and admitted happily that computers are not his thing. He says only time will tell if his tinkering around yesterday  fixed anything. He is off to dice with high rollers on his waxed surfboard  in the bay. He blew kisses to my dogs (renamed Dweeb and Cruncher) as he left and said he is going to ace something or other as he barrels, tubes, drops and guns his way to victory. No pearl diving, no faceplants, no getting scabbed. I should have known that a computer expert who called me ‘Dude’ or ‘Bra’  and thought my puppies were ‘awesome hot dogs’ might not have had my best interests at heart. While I was out yesterday, he ate all the peanut butter, four toasted paninis, a jar of honey, two cans of peaches and a slab of dark Lindt chocolate. Everything was rad and bitching but he was so effing over himself as regards my computer that he just bookmarked some surfer sites for himself and ‘kind of gave up, no time for bummers, Dude’.

So my computer  may need a new technician who will have to come from Cape Town and  will reveal him- or herself as  a secret cross-country runner or a sex addict or a thwarted novelist. Rather like waiters who are undiscovered actors or film stars waiting in the wings.

The antibiotics have kicked in and I am feeling better. Yesterday I went out for lunch and had butternut soup and freshly squeezed orange juice sitting on the verandah of a converted farmhouse looking out at our magnicent Cape Fold mountains in the wintery sunshine and feeling wiped out. My friends had oxtail in small cast-iron cooking pots and springbok carpaccio and piripiri chicken livers. The bread was homemade and very nutty.

 There were wagtails on the lawn and a fountain playing in one corner. Pin oaks turning red and golden at the edge of the garden, poplars with thinning  leaves. Near the parking lot, there was an enclosed pen with eight or nine mountain tortoises, kept there to amuse foreign visitors. I wish  locals wouldn’t  do this — most wildlife does not thrive in captivity and these tortoises seemed to have breathing difficulties, possibly a compromised immune system.

This Cape autumn is so lovely and I cherish every walk and drive through the countryside. I suppose some of this enhanced appreciation has to do with the lost years when I would realise a drunken summer had slipped by without my noticing it, that I was a year older and no wiser, that the pattern of dreary repetition had not changed. So much wasted time, but I doubt I could have sobered up a day earlier. It takes as long as it takes, before we hit rock bottom and stop digging.

Nothing stays the same

Long dark winter nights and dawn nowhere in sight at 5am. Woke with some kind of ear, throat, nose infection and a  neuralgia on the left side of my face. I am so unused to feeling unwell that I was taken aback to wake ill. Another of the benefits of sobriety I have begun to take for granted, the freedom from unwellness, abundant energy, well-being.

Computer still bugged with gremlins, computer boffin appeared and then disappeared, a travelling man with  no sense of rootedness or accountability. He mislays girlfriends and clients and seems to live in transition between rented rooms and friends’ couches. The kind of scruffy charm I might have warmed to when I was 19 years old, that hint of unwashed lassitude and dope-enhanced sleepiness.  He has left his woollen cap behind and a purloined pen  inscribed with the logo for British Airways. Unfortunately I have nobody else to fix this computer, so I am hoping he will materialise again later today. Still puzzled by the way he gave my dogs new names as he stood out in the back garden smoking.

‘Yo,’ he said. ”Cool dogs, man. Look at Thumper chasing Corkeye. Go Thumper!’

Dogs delighted with the attention and happy to hang out with him. My last PC service provider was a surfer who hated having to waste time earning a living fixing computers. He is now bronzing  his lazy but lithe body on beaches in Mozambique and sending postcards to former clients assuring them he hasn’t forgotten their troubles. This new fixer is a friend of Surfer Boy and equally disinterested in computers. No doubt he will confide in me that his real passion is for steel guitars or dervish dancing or growing feathery little marijuana plants.

Later today I am going over the mountain pass for lunch — a chance to see how the winter proteas are opening on the slopes and to look out for chacma baboons. Time to sit down with friends and share, listen, celebrate togetherness, eat yummy autumnal dishes. Well, that joie de vivre was more of a possibility before the facial neuralgia set in, but I can have  a thin herbal soup and listen.

Frederick Buechner: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Change, the flux of passing days, a changing society, new growth, autumn’s decay, new people moving into the village, others leaving — that impermanence, what is passing away or coming into being. Nothing remains the same. There is continuity and there is alteration. Children grow up, parents age and die, houses tumble down, the political and the personal vye for attention. Trees, rivers, landscapes all shift in the mind’s eye, memory itself fades. Time the imponderable and mysterious, so fleeting, so slow.

Making a pot of tea this morning, I feel slowed by pain, older and tired but glad at the same time to be here, willing to deal with whatever comes up  today, hoping to be of some use, hoping the writing will go well, looking forward to  meeting up with friends. This day is all I have, the only certainty, the only here and nowness in which I can  experience being sober and steadfast.

Rereading Samuel Beckett again and finding something new each time, more depth, more insight. A quote from Wendy Lesser for those of us for whom reading is as vital as breathing:

‘ There is a kind of rereading in which you go over and over a piece of writing (a paragraph, a page,a few stanzas) to try to figure out why it has the effect on you it does. This kind of rereading is obsessive and a bit tedious; it may be especially dull for the onlooker who does not share the obsession…it has in it something of Penelope’s nightly unweaving of her daily work as she waits for Ulysses uncertain return. She is trying to keep time still and at the same time move it forward. Something similar may be said of the obsessive reader.‘

Writing against the clock

Getting ready to go offline — the computer expert with his languid manner and nicotine-stained fingers will be here shortly to try and fix more glitches with my  old monitor. I am dashing off messages and copying workable text onto MS Word so I can carry on writing when the Internet goes down.

Last night the full moon in Scorpio was like a white blow-torch across the valley, the bright light kept waking me as it pierced through curtains and blinds. Now it is damp and  overcast, dark and sombre weather.

Met a sober AA woman for a cup of coffee — she was on her way to the small coastal resort of Hermanus, is allergic to dogs so she couldn’t come to my home.  We sat over lukewarm cups of instant coffee and almond biscotti. It was disconcerting because she has  five years of sobriety, but was so heavily medicated I could hardly follow what she was saying.  I don’t know if this is the only way she can cope. She said she feels as if she is frozen on one side of a plate-glass window,  but it is better than drinking. Sitting across from her I just nodded and felt that questions were pointless. After I waved goodbye to her, all the unasked questions came up in me like a tidal wave. Consciousness is painful for all of us at times but  without consciousness there can be no growth. To muddle through the day numbed and dazed and half-asleep is not  a good way to live. It reminds me of all those fairy tale heroines who lay immobilized in glass coffins or entombed in  palace beds hidden behind hedges waiting centuries to be awoken by a kiss from Prince Charming. What was it Flannery O’Connor said? — the life you save may be your own.

Grateful to be able to live sober and unmedicated — extending compassion to those who live in the twilight world of Big Pharma. Thinking about tolerance and  what that really involves from a discussion found here:

“Tolerance” is a feel-good buzzword in our society, but I fear people have forgotten what it means.  Many folks are proud of their “tolerance” for gays, working women, Tibetan monks in cute orange outfits, or blacks sitting at the front of the bus.  But what they really mean is that they consider such things to be completely appropriate parts of their society, and are not bothered by them in the slightest.  That, however, isn’t “tolerance.”

“Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you.  Things that make you go “ick”, or that conflict with strong intuitions on proper behavior.  Once upon a time, the idea of gay sex made most folks quite uncomfortable, and yet many of those folks still advocated tolerance for gay sex.  Their argument was not that gay sex isn’t icky, but that a broad society should be reluctant to ban apparently victimless activities merely because many find them icky.

Hungering for freedom

It is  a public holiday here in South Africa, Freedom Day, commemorating the first post-apartheid elections in 1994. The day when black people could vote for the first time ever in South African history. Freedom may be an elusive concept, but you know when it is not there, when you are unfree, trapped,  living without hope. Some of us create our own prisons, re-creating one locked room after another inside our own heads — others create prisons for those around us, in the belief that we are controlling them, ridding ourselves of them, keeping them safe. Chilling thoughts for an autumn morning.

My Internet  is crashing and I have no email access again but I keep trying to  post and sooner or later I will be lucky. When I’m not tinkering with the computer, I’m curled up on the sofa  in sunshine reading  the Swedish  crime novelist Henning Mankell who holds up a mirror to crime in order to show what is really happening in society. In this way he probes  what lies beneath the surface, raising all kinds of questions about justice and morality, how democracy works, how democracy can be undermined, human greed and  the long vengeful shadows cast by war.

The surgeon was thrilled by my housemate’s recovery from the knee replacement surgery. He scoffed at her complaints of  pain and stiffness, pointing out that she is able to walk without crutches and  is just impatient. Another eight months and she will be walking, hopping, skipping dancing. Such a relief to hear this! The housemate is now able to drive and has gone visiting, showing off her  new mobility. The freedom to move around, get exercise, walk up and down hills and stairs.

Each morning when I wake up I celebrate another kind of freedom. For so long I was in thrall to alcohol, enslaved by its power to change my inner reality. Each day revolved around nausea and illness from drinking too much the night before. My past was like a dark cupboard filled with unmentionable secrets and  bad memories. I was haunted by  all that had happened during the long dark love affair with drink. And I had to drink each day, there was no choice there. Only another drink could solve the problems caused by drink. So each day on waking I would wait until  the hangover receded and then begin drinking again, adding to the bad memories, the sense of waste, the vicious circle. I had a shame-bound existence that was unfree, choiceless, hopeless. And then finally I admitted that I was powerless and asked for help. And as if by magic, there was a key to unlock the door and I could take my first steps into a new life. Like many of us, I did not know what freedom was until I found myself completely  unfree and powerless. Now I wake up each morning tasting freedom like a refreshing mouthful of pure cold water.

Bridge back to life

Internet crashing from time to time, no email access, cell phone silent. Marooned — but connection may be restored by the end of the day.

No idea what happened to the fonts in yesterday’s post – I tried to fix them a few times and then gave up. Thank you for the feedback and support, it made all the difference.

My housemate has gone off to the surgeon for x-rays and a medical examination. She has been in pain since early yesterday morning and worries there may be a problem with the knee replacement. She doesn’t say or show much but I can tell she is despondent and dreading  the tests. I try to stay calm and not reactive, be there for her. Learning to sit with anxiety without overwhelm is part of sobriety’s learning curve.

Answering a question from someone newly sober and recalling what those early days felt like: ‘Quick question- at what point did those of you have been sober for a while find yourself comfortable in situations where other people were drinking?‘

Although I was desperate to stay sober, I found that in very early sobriety I was extremely reactive around alcohol in social situations.

I was acutely conscious of  others drinking around me and the sight of bottles of wine or liquor on the table was a visual magnet. If I felt awkward or out of place or stuck with argumentative people, I missed being able to drink as a buffer ‘to take the edge off’, to escape into drunkenness. 

What helped was going for for coffee or meals after AA meetings, where I sat in restaurants with relaxed sober people who didn’t notice  or care about who else might be drinking in the restaurant. I realised that in time I might also reach that calm indifference to alcohol. They had no problem telling the waiters to bring mineral water or glasses of lime & soda and checking with the chef that there was  no alcohol smuggled into the dessert.  From  friends like these I learned some common-sense basics I still follow today. As a rule I don’t go to functions or places where alcohol will be the only thing served and where I will find myself surrounded  by heavy drinkers. This means that I don’t go to pubs or wine-tasting events or sundowner beach parties. 

When I do go out I have a bottle of mineral water in my bag in case there is no alternative offered to alcohol, which is rare. I have a glass of water and something light to eat beforehand, so that I don’t feel hungry or thirsty while listening to speeches or waiting for a meal.

The reactivity to alcohol wore off fairly soon as I stayed sober and now I am scarcely aware if anyone else is drinking alcohol or not. Most people drink very little and all my friends know that I  don’t drink. In the beginning I would say that I was ‘allergic to alcohol’ or  on antibiotics, but now I just say that I don’t drink alcohol and ask for fruit juice or mineral water.

At its best, AA is a bridge back to normal and healthy socialising and over time I learned not just to relax and enjoy myself without needing to drink, but also that I could sit with feelings of boredom or discomfort when I found myself in difficult social gatherings. That is what most people do, just put up with the temporary discomfort because it is nothing to drink about.

Treading water

A difficult weekend. 

Some of my former colleagues in media wanted to sit down with me to catch up on news and involve me with  projects and features. They miss working with me and some haven’t seen me since 2007. It is so touching, even flattering in one way, but I am not that person any longer. None of them knew anything about my struggle with alcoholism  because I was a secret drinker and after I sobered up, they were supportive but baffled when I confided in a few of them.

The problem for me is that I have changed so much in the last three years, and since I left my former workplace. The old me would have loved to be involved with these projects, but I no longer want anything to do with media. My writing has changed, I have changed, the way in which I work has changed. That outward persona I developed to help me cope with the stress and rush of media doesn’t exist any more.

Yesterday I called the friends concerned and emailed  others — as they responded, I realised again how problematic that workplace had been and the pressure exerted on me to get involved there again. Not much has changed, as it happens. I kept thinking of the Eagles’ Hotel California:

‘You can check out any time/but you can never leave’

I am becoming or unlearning or  just floundering. Treading water is what I expect to do for  the first six or eight years  of sobriety. If not longer. I know I am not ready for certain kinds of relationship. I know I don’t want  the kind of relationship with which I made do for so many years. But beyond that I can’t go right now.

Last night I had a long and disturbing dream about walking around a house belonging to my managing director  and saw great Francis Bacon paintings up on the wall, eviscerated bleeding slabs, twisted dissolving torsos and agonised faces, bodies sliding apart, raw and blurred with movement. I stopped and looked hard at them, shocked but responding to the power of Bacon’s art, then realised  the MD could not see them at all. She had filled the house with chinoiserie and frippery, elaborate window dressings for  windows with dirty glass, family photographs in silver frames but she could not recognise  the images in the photographs, wingback chairs  too small for adults, garish colour schemes. There were curved staircases leading up to  landings with no rooms, going nowhere. Locked doors with skeleton keys that didn’t fit the tumbler locks. And everywhere ornamental  cages of moulting and dead birds, the smell of rotting corpses, feathers drifting down.

 

I woke up and thought to myself: Grotesque.

 

For the first time I began to re-experience and  feel the impact of those years working  in a company that verged on the bizarre much of the time. I began to understand the violence I had to do to myself in order to comply and perform in that kind of environment, the lack of freedom, the lack of ethics, the second-rate aesthetics and the coercion.

In most recovery movements we place  some emphasis or resolving past issues, making amends , reconnecting. This not wanting to reconnect was core, and unusual for me – in part because I don’t want blunted or careless people  coming into my life while I am sober and vulnerable. I don’t feel that reconnecting would resolve anything — but there is still some degree of emotional enmeshment  and that may be what threw me off-balance.

Disconcerting, but a good learning experience.

What sustains us

My housemate is a fresh-air fiend and a gale-force wind is tearing through the house, sweeping it clean for the weekend. It was Earth Day yesterday and I wrote a long email to the editor of our village newsletter all about the doability and desirability of organic gardening and recycling. It may not get published because  local farmers are so ecstatic about  new pesticides and Roundup and genetically modified rapeseed and maize. As the grass-scented wind roars through the house, out the back door and down the valley, I wonder how much genetically-modified  pollen or seed is being carried along by wind drift.

When I look out of the window I see harrier hawks and falcons soaring over the fields on air currents. But I can also see clumps of poisonous Lantana coming up again in ditches and invasive acacia seedlings swarming up  through mud and grass on the river banks, ready to choke the waterways. There is an ongoing and sadly unsuccessful battle here to preserve  indigenous fynbos vegetation from being overtaken by acacia from Australia. Our beautiful original forests of hardwood trees have been chopped down and replaced by water-guzzling eucalyptus and pine. Yet the picture is not all gloom and doom:  the dombeyas (African wild pears) planted in my road are thriving, the area abounds in wildlife, there is no light pollution or urban litter. Those of us who care about ecology and the landscape do what we can. It all counts, every last effort.

Amusing but ironic quote from The Cosmology of Reya:

I love watching films from the early 1960′s. When someone is ill or faints, a caring person will inevitably pour brandy down their throats. When they wake up, someone will hand them a cigarette. People in 1960′s movies smoked cigarettes while in the hospital. Wow. Hmmm … unclear on the concept, eh? When a film character is experiencing grief or sadness, inevitably a caring someone will say, “Stop crying. Here. Have a martini and a cigarette.” Wow.

We all remember those days, don’t we? When I was  very newly sober, I would lie awake and worry about what would happen if I was hit by a bus and knocked unconscious and came around to find a Good Samaritan pouring neat brandy down my throat. Would I be  able to seal my lips tight and grit my teeth together in the nick of time or would I gulp down the brandy and immediately  fall back into hopeless alcoholism? It hasn’t happened yet and those kinds of scenarios don’t really bother me much any longer.

For many years I lived in the city and I would walk to work  along streets where I could look at lime trees or peach trees in flower or  the changing colours of the fiddlewood. There was a family-run Italian restaurant with  olive trees in terracotta pots paired at the entrance, and I would greet the shining silver  trees like old friends each Monday.  Over months I would befriend city pigeons and starlings that darted from windowsill to parapet to pavement. On the balcony of my apartment I grew herbs and  pots of lavender. Because  I was drinking like a fish most of the time, I would forget to water growing things and would  kill  off my plants in summer. The remorse would send me off on renewed bouts of drinking, muttering to myself ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’. Guilt and alcoholism go hand in glove, perfect co-conspirators. Still penitent, I would  bring home new pots of basil and rosemary, over-water them and  they would drown. But there were hedges of myrtle and  scented pink frangipanii trees  in my road and I couldn’t harm those. As the years passed,  I hungered for nature and a garden more and more.

Now I live out in the country with a slightly unmanageable and overgrown but madly organic garden, with mountains and rivers and open veld stretching away through the valley and beyond. And because I am sober, I can do more than just  be a spectator to my own life and the beauty all around me: I can participate, help sustain and protect  the fragile ecology I call home.

Bubbling up like a fountain

The publisher in Montreal is suddenly delighted with everything I send him. For a few days I have been basking in this sudden unusual  approval,  feeling that I am getting better as a professional writer and the writing has taken on a happy confident  glow. Now I hear from him that he is in love. It is spring and he is reading the love poetry of  Neruda and Leonard Cohen. He l;istens to corny pop songs in the bath and  admits his critical faculties have deserted him. He stops in the street to smell the flowers and  doesn’t mind sneezing from flurries of pollen. He is going to lose weight and join a gym, climb the odd peak in the Himalayas. Sent off a bunch of sweetheart roses to his ex-wife instead of a lawyer’s letter. He  may try his hand at a spot of  writing himself. He wants everyone to be as happy as he is. Sadly, he is not so much in love that he feels like paying more money to his wonderful writers.  But  right now he assures me that I am brilliant and dazzling and bubbling up like a fountain of creativity. Long may his love affair last!

Well, the time is not right to talk about  violence, it would seem. I did try to put my arguments as clearly as possible and  did not mean to tread on toes. But I was talking about patterns of sexualized intimate violence in the context of a rape culture. And if there is not a deep understanding of patriarchy or sexism and the  kinds of specific and prevalent violence arising from those social forces, then anything said will sound unfair, biased or excluding. Thanks to those who did email me and do understand.

An encouraging note on writing process from the always-inspiring Laila Lalami:

When I give readings, one of the most common questions I get asked is to describe my writing process. I always hesitate to talk about it, because it seems so idiosyncratic and hence useless to anyone else but me. For instance, I always begin my writing day by listening to Rachmaninoff. Why Rachmaninoff? I have no idea. But listening to the same piece every day helps me start my routine. And routine is paramount for me, because I can’t afford to wait for my muse to show up. She’s kind of unreliable. I’m also pretty fastidious about my note-taking, so in addition to two writing notebooks (one for fiction, one for nonfiction), I also keep a logbook to keep track of what I’m writing and what I’m reading. Right now, I’m working on my new novel, so my current draft, my research, and all my associated notes are stored together. That way, I can find what I need when I need it. It’s early in the process, so I am only on my first box for this novel and it is not even full yet. But, you know, one page at a time…

One page at a time, one day at a time. Sometimes I am amazed at how much can be achieved and completed or begun within the space of 24 hours while sober, clear-headed, aware, grateful, focused. Sometimes I am equally amazed that 24 hours has flown past and  it feels as if I have scarcely managed to get myself up, fed, washed and dressed, never mind putting pen to paper. So much lively village gossip! Such fascinating things written by other people on the Internet, so effortlessly! Such fun dogs wanting to play out in the garden and be walked or bathed! And then there are phone calls from lovely friends and a quick visit to the library. So many new books written by other people and so much more interesting than my own writing! Time out for lunch, salads and soups and cups of green tea and  another quick raid on the chocolate supplies. Just as I sit down to work, I recall that I should really write an encouraging email to somebody who has been sober six months. She is also putting off writing and we fire emails back and forth, full of wittyanecdotes and  gratitude lists. Then it is time to attend a workshop on literacy training — and like all committees we meander and eat sticky buns and drink  tea afterwards and argue or agree  or sulk, and when I get back it is time to have supper and chat with the housemate who has had a busy and productive day and wants to share at length. Then I am back at the keyboard and yawning. Empty-headed. Time for a hot bath and bedtime with a little reflection on the day, a little discernment, Steps 10 and 11 and  – no, too late, I’m asleep…

Getting to the point

It is freezing cold. I am slouching around in sheepskin slippers and making a Tuscan bean soup. As the deciduous trees thin of leaves, the garden pulsates with light in unexpected places.

Had a call that drove me slightly crazy for a short while. Alcoholism is maddening in all its manifestations and hard to be around, I should know. This call was from an unsober friend who keeps adding up all the days and weeks she didn’t drink over the last decade and it is the most pointless and confusing exercise imaginable. She has worked out that she has 14 months intermittently sober over 10 years of drinking and she adds that onto the three months she had last year and the two months she will have reached in six weeks time if she doesn’t drink before then, not counting last weekend’s little hiccup or the three day-relapse over Easter. She lives in a fictitious muddle. If we are not talking continuous sobriety one day at a time, it doesn’t count. Mind-fucking games come with  active alcoholism and  are part of the insanity.

While I’m thinking about it and after reading Garnet‘s and Cheryl‘s posts – the one recurring theme of my adult life has been the struggle in resisting abusive relationships and working to empower women caught in cycles of abuse and placatory behaviour and recidivist violence. I have written about this before, the long journey of coming to understand and work through the latent and overt violence in my family when I was a child. But the prevalence of such behaviour  means that it was and is everywhere. Sitting in a classroom listening to a geography teacher with eye make-up failing to conceal a black eye and bruised cheeks . Hearing my mother’s sisters talking about how they would hide in the garage  while their husbands smashed up the living-room furniture.  A friend at university who watched  an enraged husband kick her dog unconscious.  And I have sisters who have run out of their homes late at night  in fear of their lives. Have known battered women who take it out on small defenceless children.  

In one way this problem has nothing to do with alcoholism, although alcoholism may exacerbate the problem. It has to do with a person who believes he or she has the right to bully or intimidate or strike family members or the elderly or gay men or lesbians or disabled teenagers or anyone perceived as weaker. That he or she can destroy property, victimize friends or hurt domestic animals, force someone to have sex or hand over money or force them to pretend that it didn’t happen, that they will be safe until the next time.  The erroneous belief that he or she can stop this abusive behaviour at any time because it isn’t  that serious.  I say ‘he or she’ but this is also about gender inequality and sexism and a culture that  produces  an unacceptable amount of male rage and aggressive pathology directed towards women and children.

It is all very well asking why certain men harrass, beat or rape  women or prey on children. But talking about anger management doesn’t explain very much. We also need to ask why men are sexually aroused by pornography that promotes violence against women and degrades or dehumanizes women’s bodies and sexuality. Why men see nothing wrong with paying for sex rather than entering into relationship and working towards consensual sex. And why abuse against women and children is seen as a private domestic problem when  there are households on every street of our cities, north and south,  in which frightened women are cowering and children are being traumatised. When so many women are stalked down and killed by men they once loved but fled from. The ones who didn’t get away.

We can’t explain patterns of social behaviour only in terms of individual motives and personalities. To say that men are taught bto act dominant and masculine while women are taught to act submissive and feminine is not adequate to explain the prevalence of abuse directed at women in the workplace, in the home, in churches.   We need to look at misogyny again, that hostile contempt for femaleness, along with  the contempt directed at men who are perceived as vulnerable and ‘weak’. The way in which men are encouraged by media and peers to feel entitled to act out aggression or demand sex or expect compliance from wives and children. That wives are property and belong to the man who pays for them, who married them, who owns them. That aggression can serve as a substitute for communication.

 And we need  to look at the lifelong and unrelenting  fear  women feel if they have to walk through streets alone at night, if their cars break down on a lonely highway, if a strange man knocks at the door, if they  are trying to outwit an abusive man on a daily basis and unable to protect their children from him. If a mother looks at the soft-spoken but arrogant man her daughter has brought home as a  new boyfriend and suspects her daughter is about to re-enact the nightmare  they both endured years before. Because it is also intergenerational and the patterns keep repeating.  

I do know there are many men who don’t feel this way and relate to women with respect and  seek equality in relationship. But I also know too many women who believe that because we have degrees or financial independence and years of sobriety and discernment, that we will not be lured into a relationship with a man who is capable of abuse. The reality is that  we don’t see it coming.

Sober on Tuesday

A sad beginning to the day, hearing that Thailand Chani, long-time sober blogger and  an eclectic outspoken free spirit, died of a suspected heart attack in her sleep almost a month ago. Tribute from her friend Susan here. Many of us  who know Chani from  mailing lists and her blog were waiting for her to post again after she moved home, and  many more of us hoped to meet with her one day.  Hamba kahle Chani, as we say out here in Africa, go well and be at peace.

Flights from South Africa to Kenya or Europe again delayed while clouds of fine volanic ash continue to drift south from  an Icelandic volcano. As is the case worldwide, thousands of passengers are queueing for  the first flight that may depart this week, but preference will be given to those stranded  the longest and those with domestic emergencies. Our small modern world has  become impassible, and the geographical distances again seem very great. In the early 19th century, passengers from Southampton or Rotterdam faced a six-month-long sea journey by sailing ship in order to reach Algoa Bay or  the port of Cape Town, rounding the notorious Cape of Storms. The Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes described in 1572 a fearful brooding spirit of the Cape named Adamastor, luring sailors to their deaths. And of course, we have the ghostly wandering ship, The Flying Dutchman,  glimpsed during tempests off the Cape of Good Hope and famously  seen by King George V of England as a young man aboard a British naval vessel. Travel has always been perilous and difficult — sometimes we forget how perilous.

And  the skies overhead are the bright blue of winter in the southern hemisphere. In between bouts of writing and revising and editing, I am immersed in my new copy of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, about which more later, once I have finished the book. Wearing woollen fingerless mittens as I sit at the keyboard because the temperatures are dropping. We may have snow before the end of the week.

Nice conundrum from James Baldwin:

‘Confrontation doesn’t always bring a solution to the problem, but until you confront the problem, there will be no solution.’

Had a baffling  email from someone out in the American heartland, teling me he has decided that he will not go to a meeting  until he has sobered up, for fear of making a fool of himself. Oh, I do understand that feeling! We make such fools of ourselves while we are drinking. But, but, but. He admits he can’t stay sober on his own. He lives in a lonely shack in the middle of nowhere, but has a hick town with  a used car lot and daily AA meetings just over the hill. So my lonely alcoholic out in the badlands will one day stride into that meeting sober and upright and ask for the help he  no longer needs. He wants to be able to say: I did it on my own. Then he will be able to stride out again and prove to himself that he can go on doing it all by himself.  Right now  he can’t stop drinking though, so he dare not go to that meeting. What is wrong with this story?

Out here amidst the lonely hick towns of my part of the world, I do know men and women who got sober  all by themselves. Not the easiest way to do it, but they did it. But for many of us, the reason why we ask for help is simply because we can’t  do it alone. We lose each and every battle within the divided self. In my own psyche I have an inner hick town with a subdued, mousey little teetotaller who has to compete with  a nice big  shiny bottle store and  the friendly pub next door. If I didn’t have other sober alcoholics around, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Loneliness is a killer.