Glimpsing the ghost in the machine

Deep down I am a superstitious kind of person, perhaps because I was told so often as a child not to step on the cracks in city pavements (a bear would come around the corner and eat me up if I stood on a crack) or not to pull faces because the wind might change and then my face would be stuck in a nasty expression for ever after.  Now I cross my fingers when approaching the computer because of ongoing computer blips, niggles and bugs since a well-meaning friend offered to upgrade software and install  some useful programs. Now it crashes and files corrupt, and I plead in vain with the ghost in the machine each morning.

The plus side of being offline for longer is that I have had a chance to do more reading, the ‘quiet alternative’ to online browsing. Alice Munro’s short stories, some Paul Auster, a reread of Bolano’s 2666, Juliet Mitchell on hysteria between siblings and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol which everyone in the village loves and hates and takes seriously. Freemasonry is big out here. Reading Dan Brown always reminds me why I hate gnosticism, that secretive elitism about the nature of knowledge, as if acquiring obscure knowledge is a shortcut to wisdom. It isn’t. There is no shortcut to the getting of experiential wisdom.

Each afternoon I have coffee with a woman from another village in a neighbouring valley who is trying to decide if she wants to get sober or not. In the mornings she likes the idea but by 3pm when she meets me, she is less sure. And her resolve falters towards 6pm and the magical drinking hour. As she points out, ‘If I don’t drink, what will I find to talk about with my husband? When we’ve both had a few drinks, everything seems funny and witty. Sober we bore one another.‘

So I doubt she will give sobriety more than a cursory glance for now, but listening to her is like watching the elephant in the living room trampling the furniture and it makes me happy I no longer have to play that mental game with myself. Her point is that there are no crises or dire consequences to the nightly drinking and only a slight headache in the morning. It doesn’t bother me that she may not feel ready to get sober, so I have another coffee and just nod. I drank with relative impunity for years, hanging out in non-relationships and not realising I was wasting years of my life. I never woke at dawn and stood looking at a brilliant sunrise. I never made breakfast for a loved one as an early morning surprise. I never bothered to go out and look at stars, Orion and the Milky Way and the shimmering galaxies of the Southern Cross. Never sat up late  writing and thriling to have the sentences pour out onto paper, the creative unfolding of a new fiction.

She asked me at one point, this soft-voiced woman with her green cat’s eyes and expressive manicured hands, why her family won’t just leave her in peace to drink. In time they will because they will realise that drinking means more to her than relationship. Before that they will get angry, even outraged,  because self-harm makes others angry. Drinking may not feel like self-harm, but it is obvious to others that the drinking is excessive and dangerous, that we leave ovens on inadvertently, pots boiling away on forgotten gas rings and doors unlocked before going to sleep, that we have one more last nightcap and a lit cigarette in bed, dozing off with the cigarette dangling, the glass on the edge of the bedside table. That elsewhere in the house there may be children crying unheard, the dog unfed in the kitchen, the cat shut out in the cold. Self-harm and neglect.

But we don’t stop until we stop.

The week starting out

Sober, grateful and computer-deprived, snatching time on a friend’s pc.

Large lumbering buses roar up and down the roads of the village bring mourning families in for Aids funerals. This is the sombre reality that begins each week. Continuing strikes and lock-outs and criminal violence. Small planes overhead spraying pesticides on orchards all around the village: elderly people have rashes on their arms and faces from the invisible toxins.

But this too: the flame of the coral trees, scarlet blooms on ironhard branches. The herbs in my raised bed are rushing up into bushy abundance and when I go out to water at dawn, the air is fragrant with wild jasmine, origanum, the new lavender. Each deep breath I take in the spring morning light is clouded with poisons but full of hope.

This beautiful broken world and the importance of just staying present to it.

The tender gravity of kindness

Computer still higgledy-piggledy, so there is only time for a great poem from Naomi Shihab Nye:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Fun with the unglum

Unable to work because of bug-ridden computer and defeatist software. Resting my eyes because of a recurring glaucoma problem, a rare glaucoma that has not affected me as badly as it might have. Sobriety helps establish perspective on health issues.

Invited Pete the Baptist minister to lunch at the weekend and he gave a little disapproving cough, then said he has been happily married for 47 years and has never been unfaithful to his wife. His wife has submitted perfectly to him as head of the household and he would never dishonour that. He does not pay pastoral house calls to unmarried women.

I was a little taken aback, pointed out that I was not asking him out on a date or a pastoral house call, I just thought he might like to meet some people who live in the village and eat an interesting local dish (tripe). He wears a wedding ring, a handknitted green sweater and is pot-bellied and knock-kneed at 67 years old. Very obviously married and not what you might call irresistably enticing. Not somebody who would tempt me to slip into a transparent negligee and act flirtatious while I spooned up sexy mouthfuls of offal.

My housemate has been watching The Dog-Whisperer on television with the  neighbours and came home filled with dog-training zeal. She gave the lazy small dog on the sofa a firm but loving look, followed by a firm but loving command to get off the sofa. The dog gave her a firm but loving look in return and went back to sleep.

‘Pete the Baptist thinks I am trying to seduce him,’ I said to the housemate.

“Baptists are very optimistic people,’ said the housemate. ‘Don’t you remember the Hopping, Dancing, Screaming Preacher who came here about six years ago? He was a Baptist too. He used to run into the church and jump onto the piano, hopping up and down and pointing at the ceiling and scream, “Are you READY for Heaven?” like Little Richard but more high-pitched. The church was packed each time he gave a singing sermon and everyone did imitations of him hopping about like a jumping frog. Then he had a divine calling to minister to the heathens in Canada and went off there. In his place we got that gloomy Evangelical who would recite the book of Zechariah by heart and had a nervous breakdown.’

So the housemate and I got up and hopped around the living room screaming ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and the dogs joined us, barking in a frenzied manner. Not a glum lot, as the AA-approved literature puts it.

Waste not, want not

Since yesterday morning, I have been cleaning tripe. The fresh but gungy tripe in a large enamel bucket was given to me by a local farmer in return for a basket of avocados. Cleaning tripe is probably the most successful appetite suppressant known to humankind. I have a small wire brush I keep for scraping and scrubbing the honeycomb tripe fleece and I boil it, scrub some more and boil it again. The pong is indescribable, even with vinegar in the boiling water. When I told my housemate about the visit from the pink-faced Baptist minister still known as Pete (not Keith), she said:‘If he managed to sit here and talk about God in a house reeking of tripe, he must have more faith than you give him credit for. He must have felt he was being tried like Job. He may be a vegan unbeliever by now.’

Tomorrow I shall make a pounded relish of chillies with lime juice, chopped tomatoes and corinder, than serve the tripe and relish to friends and  my literacy group. Each year I go through this tripe or  related offal ordeal and worry about wasting good food, but the tripe eventually is the colour of pouring cream and tastes excellent, or at least harmless. Out here it is a delicacy and all the local restaurants and farms have offal feasts as cattle, sheep and goats are slaughtered at the end of winter. Some local cooks boil the tripe in milk with onions and others curry it with turmeric or simmer it in tomato sauce.

So perhaps Pete should come for Sunday lunch and he can hear all about my housemate’s theory that everyone everywhere gets to be saved (the Pelagian heresy of universal salvation) and meet some Buddhists and few people who are reliant on their ancestors and a militant atheist who thinks extinction is the best way to deal with humankind. And we can all eat my wonderful cooked tripe together.

Sobriety is not for the squeamish.

Computer glitches

The good thing about computer glitches is that I get a chance to read more books rather than browse soundbites. China Mieville, Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino, Antje Krog’s A Change of Tongue, And I can spend time out in the garden cutting back ivy and revelling in the smell of jasmine. Stood outside in the road talking to a neighbour last night and the air was heady with wild jasmine, spicy helichrysum (what we call the curry bush) and woodsmoke from cooking fires in the informal settlement. The full moon in Pisces was very bright, but we didn’t linger outdoors because some neighbours in the next street were held up a few nights back by men with knives. This is a dangerous part of the world and I’m reasonably vigilant, but like most of us here, I worry about something when it happens, not before.

There are massive strikes by hospital workers, so most of our state hospitals are closed except for life-and-death emergencies. An elderly woman in the village has a suspected fractured hip, but will not be admitted to hospital for x-rays and sonar until Friday. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

A pink-faced Baptist minister new to the village came to visit. It still annoys me that people don’t understand that I work from home to earn a living. People find me at home and assume I am glad of company. The Baptist minister called Pete or something like Pete, is very enthusiastic about bringing God to the people. Unfortunately he does not like dogs and especially not my small muddy dogs who dashed indoors to jump into his lap and lick his plump pink cheeks. Apologetically I sent the dogs back outdoors, gave him a cup of strong Kenyan coffee and a rusk, was then obliged to listen to his masterplan for saving the world. When he finally left, he had put his muddy shoes outdoors and a glossy brown earwig had crawled into one of his shoes. I saved the innocent earwig before he could squash it and tucked it under a cistus bush. The minister blessed me, but in a bad-tempered way. He may not like living in a village this rural.

The happiness of restored sanity.

Sober women together

This has been a mixed week — attended a writers’ conference and hung out with other writers moaning together about publishers and draconian contracts and writers’ block, laughed a great deal and forgot about my ailing computer and stuck piece of writing. Then heard last night that a recovering alcoholic woman I have known on and off for two years died the other day. She had been drinking all alone, began vomiting blood and  was found dead by her landlord. Another reminder that alcoholism is a killer.

On a lighter note, Gail Caldwell has written a memoir of her friendship with Caroline Knapp, a tribute to the strength of sober women friends. I owe more to my women friends in recovery that I can say — we share at depth about our struggles and successes in life, listen hard, play hard, dare to disagree and help one another to keep trudging one day at a time.

Although there was nothing sexual about their friendship, it was in many crucial ways a love affair. Here were all the markers of a lifelong passion: their initial wariness of each other (they’d met at a party a few years earlier but had hardly hit it off); their shy, outdoor courtship (“Let’s take the long way home,” Knapp would say after a walk, so they could chat some more in the car); and finally Caldwell’s touchingly naked declaration, not far into the friendship, of “Oh no — I need you.” When Caldwell eventually manages to buy a house, it’s both amusing and somehow inevitable that Knapp rushes up and hoists her “like a sack of grain” over the threshold.

All the best qualities of the happiest and most resilient marriages are here. The in-jokes that no one else will get. The women’s willingness to take each other’s fears and neuroses seriously while at the same time gently demolishing them. The constant, fervent competition (“We named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the Inner Marine”) tempered with the kinder knowledge that “when it came to matters of the soul and the psyche, we each knew how to tend to the other.” And the fact that both women ultimately shared and feared the “empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction.”

But this was to be a romance without a happy ending. We learn right from the start that Knapp fell gravely ill with Stage IV lung cancer at 42, and that she had a sickeningly swift death. Maybe more startling, her dying doesn’t even form the book’s real dramatic climax. We’re still well short of the end when Caldwell grapples with “the suck and force of death,” sitting in Knapp’s cold and empty living room: “Here, in all its subcomfort temperatures and museumlike stillness, was Caroline, gone.”

Just another bozo on the bus

My computer is undergoing upgrades with varying degrees of success, so posting may be a little intermittent. Sitting with a steaming mug of coffee on an icy brilliant morning, feeling overworked, tired and preoccupied, glad to be sober. The jasmine is breaking into whiteness and an intensely sweet fragrance that makes me sneeze when I sit outdoors. All over the countryside there are toads hopping about with wild abandon because it is the amphibian mating season, honeymoon time for pond-dwellers

My increasingly eccentric and irrational landlord has invited me to his 80th birthday party. In one way I would like to go because I have a sneaking fondness for the old bastard and I believe birthdays are to be celebrated. But I know what will happen because I have seen him in too many social situations — he will have too much wine and exuberantly or belligerently want to discuss his plans for the subdividing of the property with me. And we all know that arguing with drunks is a waste of time. He isn’t alcohol-dependent, but he abuses alcohol on occasion.

Better to send a card and gift and stay away. He will be numbed out, euphoric and ready for a fight, whereas I will be sober, embarrassed and on edge. This kind of dynamic is why it is so often better for those of us in recovery to stay away from people, places and things closely associated with alcohol. The sober and the drunken are not able to communicate together with any depth or subtlety or integrity and the resulting disaster  might remind us why we used to need so to get drunk at family reunions or office parties, might make us long to be there again in the hall of distorting mirrors, roaring and loud-voiced drunks together saying things we don’t mean and will have forgotten by the next morning.

Met with some sober friends and we talked about rigidity, the tendency to see everything in black-and-white. I was like that as an active alcoholic, almost pathologically defended because I felt I had so much to lose if I wasn’t right. To be wrong was unthinkable. It was a control issue for me — the world was a scary and threatening place in which I felt helpless and misunderstood. I thought this heightened vulnerability and inflexible way of viewing reality was to do with my innate personality, that I was just an extreme either/or personality, a natural-born victim.

Not so. When I surrendered and stopped thinking I could outwit the part of myself determined to drink at all costs, when I accepted that alcoholism was the winner in every drinking competition I staged, when I admitted my life was unmanageable because I could not control the drinking – something inside me let go. And little by little since then I have come to realise that there is nothing to defend.

And it is a great relief to be just another common-or-garden alcoholic, just another bozo on the bus. Rather than an exceptional and misunderstood drunk with a dazzling future ahead of her and a unmentionable past shrouded in secrecy, and no awareness of the present moment, the here and now.

We have come too far together

Bright green leaves visible on the oak tree across the field. Our oaks here were brought out to Africa from Europe by the Dutch settler Simon van der Stel three centuries ago and flourish all over the Cape. The wood is not good enough for furniture or flooring because our winters are too mild and the oak does not harden. Often the trees die of stress in a hot drought-stricken summer.

There is nothing like the green of spring.

Which statement calls for a poem. Currently frazzled with work and housekeeping and budgeting and a bout of sleeplessness, but I want to celebrate spring in some way.

Love, despair, the sudden edible bright green everywhere, snails mating on a high garden walls (gleaming silver figures-of-eight).

The Silver Lily

by Louise Glück

The nights have grown cool again, like the nights

of early spring, and quiet again. Will

speech disturb you? We’re

alone now; we have no reason for silence.

 

Can you see, over the garden—the full moon rises.

I won’t see the next full moon.

 

In spring, when the moon rose, it meant

time was endless. Snowdrops

opened and closed, the clustered

seeds of the maples fell in pale drifts.

White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree.

And in the crook, where the tree divides,

leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight

soft greenish-silver.

 

We have come too far together toward the end now

to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain

I know what the end means. And you, who’ve been with a man—

 

after the first cries,

doesn’t joy, like fear, make no sound?

Another sober Monday

When it is hot, the garden smells of the wild curry bush, pungent and  spicy. I love the smell but many local people hate it because they want sweet flowery spring fragrances.

When I am not walking in the veld looking at pink and black proteas like feathery wild crowns, I am reading China Mieville, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and, by way of light relief,  a Donna Gillespie novel about a woman seer living in deep Germanic forests at the time of the Roman occupation, yet another historical niovel deeply indebted to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. I love reading about people deeply and romantically and irrationally embedded in nature, talking with trees and being warned by eagles and staring at the moon for messages. My secular 21st-century mind shuts down and I become primitive and atavistic and like a child in thrall to fairy tales. All the fault of Grimm and Perrault, whose fairy tales were my childhood reading along with tales from classical Rome and Greece.

And listening to Glenn Gould playing The Goldberg Variations, sublime music from the craziest and yet most lucid pianist of our times. The genius of Gould, crouched on the uncomfortable low chair his father made for him as a child, mumbling and humming and singing the notes to himself, transported, gesturing. If you have never seen ecstacy in creation before, this is it. Bach wrote these variations as a kind of lullaby to help him sleep, but Gould turns them into a vital and energising wake-up call.

Maurice Blanchot translated by the pithy short story writer Lydia Davis:

I have wandered: I have gone from place to place. I have stayed in one place, lived in a single room. I have been poor, then richer, then poorer than many people. As a child I had great passions, and everything I wanted was given to me. My childhood has disappeared, my youth his behind me. It doesn’t matter. I am happy about what has been. I am pleased by what is, and what is to come suits me well enough.

Is my life better than other peoples lives? Perhaps. I have a roof over my head and many do not. I do not have leprosy, I am not blind, I see the world—what extraordinary happiness! I see this day, and outside it there is nothing. Who could take that away from me? And when this day fades, I will fade along with it—a thought, a certainty, that enraptures me.

I have loved people. I have lost them. I went mad when that blow struck me, because it is hell. But there was no witness to my madness, my frenzy was not evident: only my innermost being was mad. Sometimes I became enraged. People would say to me, Why are you so calm? But I was scorched from head to foot; at night I would run through the streets and howl; during the day I would work calmly….