The ineffable lightness of blogging

When I am cut off from the cyber network of sober friends and allies, I invent blog posts as I garden or go for walks or have supper with friends. I imagine what might be happening in other’s lives as recorded on blogs I can’t access.  How did the marathon go? Is the new boat shipshape? How was the blind date? What happened next? Has the elephant galumphed out of the living room?

And then when I am back for a precious but brief space with ebbing memory and screen freezes, I cannot think of anything worth blogging about.

Monday morning is the weekly routine of soupmaking, creating stocks with roast chicken carcasses, chopping aromatics of carrot, onion, celery, simmering pots  filled with unlikely leftovers — cold brussels sprouts, grilled parsnips, Swiss chard from the garden — that amalgamate into delicious soups for evening suppers. Cooking is alchemy.

And fortunately I can dice and chop and stir in my sleep, because several of us sat up until nearly 2am last night watching the film Milk on television, so I am sleepless and switched-off this morning. I don’t function well on little sleep. Even when I was a student and living on red wine and black coffee and watching the dawn come up as we partied on, I didn’t exactly revel in that white-night insomnia. I would wander around jittery and fragile, barely coping until it was time to crawl into bed and catch up on sleep.

When I surface from the sleepwalking, I need to finish reading a friend’s manuscript, an urban steampunk fantasy. Steampunk is a genre that has to do with speculative fiction set in a Victorian world of new scientific discoveries that carry nostalgic echoes for those of us maroooned in the 21st century. Imagine Jules Verne or HG Wells teleported into a post-modern cyborgian space opera. My friend loves complicated technologies mixed up with Dr Watson in the drawing room. I can’t write that kind of stuff myself but I am doing my best to read it and make helpful comments. Her main character has a royal blue waistcoat and mutton chop whiskers, a scaly tail, laser-enhanced goggles and an aptitude for time travel, but is also in recovery from Satanic Ritual Abuse. I am in awe of that kind of imagination, but the dialogue is somewhat improbable. Right now Mutton Chops is designing a coal-powered flying boat intended for interplanetary travel and  all he can say is ‘E’gad, the soup has been salted to excess by the second parlour maid!‘ Which sounds like a bad Learn English As She Is No Longer Spoken textbook.

Sleep-deprived, sober and grateful. Like any steampunk optimist, I have a secret fantasy that my computer is quietly fixing itself (those busy little green men repairing short circuit boards and boosting artificial memory stores) and that I will not need to tackle the problem myself with a hammer, pliers and doorhinge oil. If self-repair is not the case, I may be offline for a while longer. Life on life’s terms…

Gratitude like a breath of fresh air

Breathing in. It is a battle to get online.

Staying connected with sober friends on the phone. Wonderful to hear the voice of somebody who knows all about the one-day-at-a-time thing.

 ”What you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled…the purpose is beyond the end you figured and is altered in fulfillment.”   — T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Find the time or make the time

Frazzled but sober, over-tired but sober, exasperated with my computer’s ongoing hassles but sober. The silver lining to any quotidian dark cloud.

A youngster with spots, shaving cuts and a large Adam’s apple has just knocked on the door and sold me a bottle of lavender water for scenting linen. His grandmother distills her own lavender essence from heads of flowering lavender and makes up bottles of aromatic water to supplement her pension. Her grandson is accompanied by a small Jack Russell that lifts its leg on the doorstep, sending my small girly dogs into a frenzy of excitement and outrage. I was just grateful for an excuse to stop writing for 10 minutes. Any distraction will do. My writing is going nowhere.

Read this strongly worded piece of tough love to get myself back to the grindstone, from veteran speculative fiction writer John Scalzi:

But if you want to be a writer, then be a writer, for god’s sake. It’s not that hard, and it doesn’t require that much effort on a day to day basis. Find the time or make the time. Sit down, shut up and put your words together. Work at it and keep working at it. And if you need inspiration, think of yourself on your deathbed saying “well, at least I watched a lot of TV.” If saying such a thing as your life ebbs away fills you with existential horror, well, then. I think you know what to do.

Into the cave of dreams

Dazzling weather, wild flowers and wild birds, everything fresh and renewed with the spring. But a friend is suffering a dangerous depression and I spent time with her, listening to that inner darkness and apartness that is so unreachable.

From Andrew Solomon’s moving tribute to a friend who killed himself:

Depression is a disease of loneliness, and the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison. Therapists can be perilously naïve about this. Marcello and all of us who loved Terry were locked out by the same privacy that kept him locked in. Privacy is a fashionable value in the twenty-first century, an overrated and often destructive one; it was Terry’s gravest misfortune. The unknowable in him, which I thought was just a kind of static, was actually his heart.

I do wonder about the connection between severe depression and alcoholism and no doubt I shall go on wondering because there no hard and fast answers.  My friend has spent years in therapy, years in recovery, is a deeply religious person and yet she feels almost powerless against the depressions that darken as she ages. As Andrew Solomon points out in the same tribute:

Terry had an illness that was distinct from but contiguous with his personality. He had been brave enough to start treatment, to seek insight, but insight had not redeemed him, as insight often doesn’t. It is heartbreaking to give words to your pain only to find that pain unaffected by articulation. It is a betrayal—the betrayal inherent in art’s and philosophy’s clear descriptions of what they cannot improve. For Terry, art historian and philosopher, that familiar betrayal became a disease state. Psychoanalysis can look to early experience and trauma; social theory can pin things on an emotional style, or on homophobia. Behaviorists can blame the way he processed his experiences, or the stories he told to himself. Neurobiologists could comment on the rate at which serotonin was taken up in his brain. All we can say for sure is that the clues Terry gave of being depressed looked smaller to all of us around him than the depression they marked turned out to be.

In other news, the computer problems persist. Everyone in the village went to a local tractor show because tractors are for farmers what Michelangelo is for artists. Affluent but somewhat clueless foreigners on holiday visit the isolated village in spring and buy pretty thatched homesteads with cottage gardens in a fit of spring madness, then discover they have bought a village rather than a house, and a stubborn less-than-welcoming village at that. My neighbours bring around baskets of newly grown Jerusalem artichokes, delicious, but inclined to make one fart. The lavender bushes with their new purple spires are as high as my waist.

Each morning I have a head full of dreams: like Orpheus I glance back and try to recapture some of them in a handy notebook before they slide away into darkness in the cave of dreams. Metaphors of the sea, of swimming or drowning, coming ashore on deserted islands, fording rivers, climbing into tall trees for a better view of the wild landscape and grey-blue ocean. The mantra for life, in a way, might be ‘It’s all metaphor, it’s all real’. How we begin to tell the dancer from the dance.

Life in the bright moments

Cold bright spring morning. House martins feathering their nests on the stoep, parents feeding the openmouthed babies, a source of keen pleasure as I watch from a distance. Small wagtails and mossies coming into the kitchen, oblivious of the dogs. Listening to new bird cries at dawn, but too sleepy to remember them.

Working for long stretches on a piece of fiction for a Canadian writing collective, the unhappy effort of six hours writing in order to produce a few decent sentences. To develop a critical awareness of what makes for good writing is crucial for both readers and writers, a quality of intelligence quite distinct from judgmentalism. From Whatever Happened to Reading Properly? by  Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBlog:

In a world that moved from being viewed by the vast majority through a sacramental lens, to one where earthly powers had ever more secular explanations, the problem of authority became a problem for art and artists. Why and in what way did the artist have authority to speak? And how could that question inform the art that the artist produced, so that their work did not exhibit the bad faith of pretending that question away? This leads to our second theme: the disenchantment of the world. Do artists seek to re-enchant the world (and who/what gives them authority to do so) or to respond to its disenchantment? Either way, it’s a serious job, even when you’re laughing as you do it, like Sterne or Spark. For readers who seek through their reading to reach into existenital questions of their own, it is a vital activity.

And when it comes to weekend reading online, I was moved by the Scandinavian writer Henning Mankell’s tribute to Mozambique, a country –described by Mia Couto as ‘a verandah that overlooks the Indian Ocean’ – I know as well as the back of my hand:

And, after decades of war, the animals are returning. Wildlife preserves that have been empty because of illegal hunting or simply because the animals fled, are beginning to fill up with elephants, zebra and other animals again. The Gorongosa national park (exploregorongosa.com) in the north has hundreds of species and offers safaris; at the Great Limpopo transfrontier park (dolimpopo.com), on the border with the Kruger in the south, tourists enjoy 4×4 eco-trails, canoeing trips and hikes, encountering leopard, snakes, crocodiles, rhinos, giraffes and more.

But it’s the people that are most important. The wonderful Mozambican people have endured tremendous misery without losing their dignity and their positive outlook on life. Moreover, they have not lost their will to progress and develop. Mozambique is a country where the people never surrendered.

Through a glass darkly

The pleasures of reading, as Syd has noted. Right now, while my emails back up on my addled virusy  computer, I am deep in Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo, a novel featuring a tattoo artist and flooded with watery recollections of Morecambe and Coney Island, the seas that inspire dreams or nightmares in those who sail on them or just sit watching waves break in on the rocky shores; the Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s Secret Scriptures on an elderly woman who has been shut away in an Irish mental asylum for most of her life; William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms, set in contemporary London and dealing with the global pharmaceutics industry. None of them new books, but I appreciate books more once the reviews and acclaim have died down. 

Talking about Big Pharma, one of our local doctors has just come back from a sojourn in New England and spoke to us at supper the other night about his unease with the over-medicating practices he found there. He spent most of his day refilling or authorising prescriptions for mood stabilisers, anxiolytics and sleeping pills. Many of his patients have been on meds for decades and he has no idea how they would function if they were to stop taking them. He says that all he could do was ‘tweak’ or ‘adjust’ because the patients would not consider trying to live unmedicated lives. ‘More than 80% of my patients were supposed to be bipolar,’ he said. ‘That is an astonishingly high – even implausibly high –psychiatric population for such an affluent, comfortable society, no undue stresses or war-related traumas, nothing like the hardship and turbulence of Africa — but this was how they choose to live, based on a psychiatric diagnosis made 30 years ago when they were teenagers.’ He noted sadly the bluntedness and loss of subtle emotional ranges, the lack of acuity, the mind’s sharpness lost. Listening to him we all shivered, as if looking into a numbed and chemically manipulated future.

I have often thought that my alcoholism began as self-medication when I was an ignorant and impoverished student trying to suppress old traumas and avoid dealing with newer realities that frightened or angered me. Instead of learning coping skills, I drank. Over the years I would notice from time to time that my emotional responses were duller and more flattened or ‘unfeeling’ as time went by, but I didn’t connect that to the progressive effect of excessive alcohol use. Only when I sobered up and embarked on the rollercoaster of unmedicated feelings did I realise what I had been doing to myself. The shock of ‘feeling’ things without any chemical buffer was raw and painful, but I did not trust myself with medications. And  my therapist was clear that I was not clinically depressed or suffering mood disorders, was sceptical about the worth of meds for long-term war-related PTSD. So I learned to sit with the feelings and I am very glad I did. I do know many recovering alcoholics rely on mood-altering medications in order to cope — that is their choice and I have no quarrel with that. All the same, I acknowledge a certain queasiness about who profits from pathologising and medicating the global masses and the personal price to be paid for that dependence. A woman friend of mine mentioned the other day that she has spent 14 years behind a glass wall — that distancing effect of certain meds — and has almost forgotten the immediacy of sensation and ‘what it feels like to experience the heart jumping for joy’. Such an unquantifiable loss.

Turning aside to the miracle

Computer duplicating corrupted files and I will be offline for another day or two. There is a new book out from philosopher Simon Critchley entitled How to Stop Living and Start Worrying and that fits my mood quite aptly. A dear friend has relapsed and sends me long drunken political rants I can’t bear to read. Why do we think we can change the world when we are drunk and at our most inept? Don’t answer that.

On the other hand, a sober life is a thing of beauty. The moon is almost full and brighter than a searchlight in the evenings. The wild roses are just opening in apricot, pink, cream,  as spring races past. Another dear friend is celebrating 35 years sober, year after year of solid unstinting service to AA in gratitude for having his sanity and life saved at the end of the 1970s.

I am fishing tiny new-born spiders out of pools of water and kitchen sinks and buckets. Little pearly orb spiders with no instinct for self-preservation. Since childhood I have loved insects and creepy-crawlies, the tiny darting creatures all around us. Some lines from JM Coetzee:

“He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything, as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust”

As I get older, it seems to me I cannot tread lightly enough on the earth, each new simplicity is a source of happiness. Later today we will go around to wish my eccentric neighbour a happy birthday. We can’t go until late in the afternoon because this gnomic 77-year-old has only one pair of trousers which he will wash, dry and iron, so we mustn’t catch him when he is all knobbly knees and blue-veined calves. What do you give to someone who wants nothing? So I shall take along some blueberries and ice cream.

Sun coming through the rainclouds at last, shafts of luminous golden sunlight – reminding me of a favourite poem from the crusty but visionary Welsh poet RS Thomas:

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

No shortcuts

How do we learn to live a satisfactory life without alcohol? I ask myself while reflecting on the sublime airy pillows of gnocci I made last night, delicate mouthfuls sauced with crispy sage leaves and brown butter. The glooomy neighbour beaming and joyful, transported by good food and the warmth around the kitchen table. Sticking like glue to those in recovery is the only answer that makes sense to me.

We learn from those who live life fully, brokenly, richly and with human ineptitude  in recovery. No short cuts.

More murders and assaults. Poachers funded and armed  by Chinese Triads along the coast exporting and carelessly destroying stocks of abalone (perlemoen locally) and rock lobster (Jasus lalandii). Decimating rare fish like our gorgeous Red Roman. So I spend mornings writing letters and circulating petitions. Probably pointless.

Rough winds shaking the darling buds, as Shakespeare wrote of May and HE  Bates fictionalised. This is a rough spring and I see the petals and buds shaken loose from bushes and trees. A process we all endure.

To all my distressed poetry-writing friends who emailed so endearingly: if you cannot understand iambic pentameter or terza rima, it is hard to write lines that move with the breath. The reason it is hard to get poetry published is because poetry is very hard to write. Read Anne Carson, read Geoffrey Hill, read Elizabeth Bishop, take a few years off for silence and receptivity. Craft matters and if you don’t know what craft might be, you need to read some more. No shortcuts. And the bottom line is that if you have nothing to say, you can’t write anything worth reading.

Creative writing is about craft and commitment. In the same way, we say that it is necessary to go to any lengths to stay sober: if you’re not willing to go to many lengths, you are unlikely to get sober. I hung onto my old fantasies of self and consoling habits as long as I could. Surrender is surrrender.

Karel Schoeman

When something becomes irrevocable, you have to recognize the fact and accept it. It doesn’t help to kick and struggle, all your tears and your prayers won’t help. You must go on with your life, as well or as badly as you can. It’s life that’s unyielding, implacable, not me. The old world has disappeared and it will never, in all eternity, come back, even if we give our lives to try to regain it. We must learn to live in the new world.

A small warning

Breezy and golden Monday morning, the fields bright with wild flowers and big pink flat-faced roses running along the fences. We’re having a crime wave out here in this part of the countryside so my anxiety is higher than usual — stabblings of elderly pensioners, gunshot fire at night, carjackings and assaults. Nothing to drink over, but not an easy time. 

I read Mary Christine’s thought-provoking post on recovery blogging after five years and agreed with many of her comments as well as her questions. There are no easy answers. Those of us who do blog are the first generation of recovery bloggers and that is a certain kind of responsibility, but there are no guidelines as yet. I read around widely on blogs that identify as sobriety-focused, AA, Al-Anon, recovery etc. The silliness does depress me at times, along with the dire poetry and mutual admiration societies. It bothers me when people have no sense of privacy, let alone any appreciation for anonymity. Each time I see happy family snapshots, I am aware that Google search engines are trawling the web to capture and store those images, post them on generic image-bank sites. No privacy, no anonymity. A while back, a blogger who was bad-mouthing her employers and job-hunting said something that puzzled me a little. Because it was a lazy Siunday morning, I ran a quick advanced file search with only two identifying details and within four minutes I had unearthed the name of her workplace, her son’s academic institution and residence, her online banking account number and home address, her Facebook identity and online  CV. That horrified me. Because any employer could have done the same.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly and knows my part of Africa well, could quickly guess my hometown and possibly go on to identufy myself and the person with whom  I share a house. Our AA meetings are here are far and few between but they are also small and I don’t talk about them in case local readers are able to deduce identities of certain colourful characters. In my real offline existence I never talk about any of my sober and unsober friends, am very low-key and discreet. When I write about them online I change all the details, but I mention their situations and dilemmas because it may help someone going through something similar. I try to speak about those I encounter with respect and tenderness. It bothers me a great deal when Al-Anon bloggers disclose a great deal about the still-suffering alcoholic in their lives because for me this is a transgression of another’s privacy and, secondly, because of the hostile and often ignorant assumptions about the nature of alcoholism. I hate listening to others demonise, pathologise or depersonalise the alcoholic or addict in their lives, don’t believe it helps the Al-Anon member or anyone reading. I have learned agreat deal from those who have a mature and informed understanding of Al-Anon and take those understandings into my own life and dealings with the families and friends of active alcoholics. We don’t have Al-Anon out here where I live, we don’t have NA and we don’t have rehab centres or even detox facilities at the state hospital two hours away. We have one another and we muddle along together.

Other details of my daily life are a way of showing how one sober woman in recovery lives one very ordinary life, my interests, my struggles, my mistakes, my slow recovery from a devastating illness. Because I work from home and lead a very quiet and often lonely existence, I don’t have that much to write about. So I mention my garden, recipes I  am cooking, what I see on walks in the mountains,  books that I am reading (I have no television) and ideas about society or psychology, insights that come to me, quotations that move me. I stay in touch with the wider world via online forums and mailing lists and the great mysterious unfolding  possibilities of the Internet. None of this is wildly exciting but it is the life I have chosen and love. When I sobered up, life began anew for me, the creativity came back, the healing started, the service opportunities grounded me in a more worthwhile life.

Thank you for reading and take care, please safeguard your personal details and those of family members with more care. Sadly, in blogland it is safest to assume that you are being read by those you would least like to be read by, tracked by strangers who do not have your best interests at heart. Don’t say anything about another person you would not say to that person’s face..

A savage and beautiful country

For the weekend, a poem from Diane Ackermann:

The Great Affair

The great affair, the love affair with life,
is to live as variously as possible,
to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred,
climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.

Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding,
and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours,
life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

 

Image from Virgilio Ferreira, found here.