Summer’s last hurray

Buried in work, scarcely able to think about life out there beyond the writer’s desk. Planted some sprawling lilac-flowered rosemary, more sage, a broad-leaved fragrant thyme, herbs able to withstand the solid wall of heat we expect in February.

Watching the convulsions in Egypt from a distance, social uprisings met with ruthless suppression, protests that may only be understood or evaluated in retrospect. Chilled to think of museums burning, the loss of ancient beauties, the young lives at risk.

Ongoing concern here about Nelson Mandela’s health, impending sense of loss.

And summer in full glory, a last showing of roses and canna lilies, marguerites and salvias even as the grapes are  harvested in the vineyards. Flashes of cadmium yellow from Cape canaries darting  among the olive trees. Chorus of frogs each evening.

At night I dream of  holidays on the Wild Coast near Qunu where Nelson Mandela was born, the huts on the grassy conical hills, the  stormy oceans and fossil forests, the Nguni cattle  wandering on lonely beaches in sea mist. Magical places I have known.

Friends doing well in sobriety, reaching those little milestones that once seemed impossible: four m0nths, five months, six weeks, two years. Sobriety is charted in celebrations we never take for granted. Every day rescued from despair and oblivion counts for something.

Trust the story

This year seems to be taking flight  and weeks dash by. February will be the hottest and windiest month before we move into the mists and woodsmoke of autumn, but I feel I have been racing through January without pause and need to catch my breath.

There are ripe tomatoes ready to be made into puree, chillies to be dried, herbs to be scrunched into butter, onions to be plaited into strings. I am one-third of the way through a book on French concierge life and philosophy (The Elegant Hedgehog) and I can’t remember what I once knew about Husserl and phenomenology.  My revised chapter needs more revision. The housemate is on a steak burger spree and I toss salads under her nose in vain. She wants juicy double burgers on toasted buns with fried onions and slices of processed cheese. Wild mustard and mizuna leaves with a lick of green olive oil doesn’t appeal to her. On the other hand, a friend of mine about to head off to New York Fashion Week will not eat anything except my leafy salads.

A neighbour from down the road has come up with the solution to violence and found how to ensure world peace. His three-year-old grandson has taken to head-butting friends, relatives and the kitchen cupboards. Grandpa encourages him to shout: ‘Gi’ us a kiss!’ as he does so, and nobody minds the head-butting.

I am critiquing a friend’s manuscript and need to tell her to trust the story. If we go in deep enough, let the imagination play and explore as it will, and allow characters to act out of character, the story may begin to tell itself. And at the core of each of our lives there is a shining thread of pure story. It has taken me forever to learn this about my own life.

Nothing is wasted, everything has meaning if we know where to look, if we look with wide trusting eyes and leave a little space for hope to slip in.

Hint of autumn approaching

Windy and hot weekend, wrote and rewrote fiction non-fiction, reviews and grocery shopping lists. In the early mornings now there is a hint of autumn: the reddening berries on the pyracantha and cotoneaster bushes, plectranthus sending up white and lilac spires, a hint of woodsmoke drifting across the valley.

The nights are warm and clear. When friends come around we light a fire, carry out hurricane lamps into the garden. To live with firelight and candle flame is magic. When the coals are all that is left of the fire and the candles have guttered, we sit and look up at the stars and moon overhead. I have noticed how many of us in recovery discover a closeness to nature and a simplicity of lifestyle that we did not know or want to know before. Another unforeseen gift of the new life.

Sleep, interrupted

Hot summer nights illuminated by the full moon in Cancer. If it is Cancer. But the moon goes on ripening and glowing over the valley regardless of human definitions. Many farmers are staying up at night to keep watch this month because of the danger of veld fires. This morning it is hot and windy with a small leopard tortoise asleep on gravel under the salvia bushes. The dogs show no interest in it, to my relief.

Late night phone calls are amongst the most dreaded interruptions. A call last night at nearly midnight from an unsober friend, weepy and incoherent, enraged and  throwing a pity party. I gave up trying to understand what was wrong after the first five minutes, gently suggested she get some sleep and ring me in the morning. A drama involving life, the universe and everything else, I suppose. Many of us have been there — one of the more unappealing  dynamics of alcoholism is that exaggerated melodrama and misery lacking in focus. It’s all unfair, unbearable and getting worse by the minute.

A friend of mine who doesn’t drink sits aghast through the TV docu-drama Celebrity Rehab each week as the less-than-glamorous down-and-outers wail about their terrible childhoods and the traumas that ‘made’ them drink. What makes most of us drink ourselves into an early grave is alcoholism, nothing more, nothing less. I have sat in groups with incest survivors and the war wounded: many recently traumatised women, men or youngsters turn to alcohol and drugs for relief. But not everyone carries on drinking or drugging for the next two or three decades.  Not everyone with PTSD  carries on drinking despite painful and repeated evidence that drinking doesn’t help. That irrational spiral of addiction and denial remains a mystery — why some and not others? The question may not be ‘why me?’ or ‘how did this begin?’ but ‘how  can I stop when I can’t seem to stop?’ A moment of genuine surrender.

And it was a heartfelt relief to me when the dramas and self-centredness receded in recovery. Whatever had been awful, indescribable and terrifying  went back to being just another hiccup or stumble in  an ordinary day. No need to wake up near-strangers late at night and let out my barbaric yawp, as Whitman called it.

Up in the Karoo Highlands the French fugitives nicknamed the ‘Doomsday couple’ were shot dead by police after an extensive manhunt. Their cult has disavowed them as it goes on preparing for the end of the world in 2012, along with George Lucas and various other Hollywood pundits. I’d rather carry on one day at a time and worry about apocalypse if and when it does arrive.

Our poor falling-down selves

Went out last night and sat with a young schoolteacher dying of cholera. Only 33. All through the night I woke in tears. Blazing heat this morning, no shadows, no shelter.

And there are two French members of an American cult on the run in the Karoo Hoogland after shooting two policemen, one of whom died on the scene,, so  everyone in country areas is on alert. The couple who have gone on the run were staying on a remote farm and belonged to the Ramantha School of Enlightenment cult started near Washington by an American called Judy Knight who claims that Ramtha, a 35 000-year-old disembodied entity from an ancient civilisation, channels through her. The Ramtha movement belives the world will end in 2012. The runaway couple are in possession of a .22 hunting rifle, a 9mm pistol, a semi-automatic rifle, two revolvers (a 765 Magnum and a .38 Special) and a pump action shotgun. Violence and apocalyptic are natural companions.

The craziness of violence and the craziness of alcoholism are kin. Sanity is such a quiet and patient quality. Grace resides in the ordinary, the everyday, the small heroic routines carried on for a lifetime. Thinking of a poem by Joy Harjo:

The world begins at a kitchen table.

No matter what,

we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table.
So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe
at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what
it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms
around our children. They laugh with us at our poor
falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back
together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella
in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place
to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate
the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared
our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow.
We pray of suffering and remorse.
We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table,
while we are laughing and crying,
eating of the last sweet bite.

Imagine this

Writing workshop this weekend, stimulating, tiring, infuriating, everything a writing workshop should be. Clash of the titans, those enormous writerly egos. And I realised yet again that imagination can’t be taught. We catch fire as kingfishers draw flame (Gerard Manley Hopkins), but imagination needs a nurtured inner life and leap after leap of faith.

Years ago I read a short story by Carol Bly, the title escapes me. In the story two scenarios are presented. A small girl  comes home and announces at supper that a family of bears have moved in next door.

Scenario 1: the father scoffs at her and says that just isn’t possible, she needs to grow up.

Scenario 2: the father asks about the bears. ‘How many bears? Do you know their names? What are they wearing?’ The small girl is delighted and the bears become more real.

If you can dream it, it might happen. And the imagination is like love: playful, generous, dangerous and transformative.

Tomatoes ripening faster than we can eat them. Tiny pinky-brown scorpions  sleeping on the brick paths across the back garden, so we dare not walk around barefoot. I am making stuffed tomatoes with finely chopped red onion, garlic, parley and ciabatta breadcrumbs for supper with  good cheese and olives on a platter, a sharp entrancing salad of wild rocket and mizuna.

My lovely friend D calls and tells me she has tracked down an elderly artist, a famous portrait painter now in his 80s, and persuaded him to teach her life studies. She says in a hushed voice that the artist has the virile strength of line you would find in a young man. She is mad with love and draws all night until dawn. The downward sweep of the collar bone, the ridge of muscle on the upper abdomen, the swell of fat on taut buttocks. Imagination is so often suffused with passion and  the irrational. She is longing to have her heart broken.

So good to get daily emails from newcomers frightened into sobriety by festive excesses. There is no wrong way to get sober. Dream up a better life (wouldn’t any life be better than the wasted years?) and begin again, today, this very minute.

Parallel lives

Got up while it was still cool outdoors and began filling pots with compost and soil. The great challenge of the coming decade (aside from staying sober which goes without saying, ahem!) will be gardening with backache. I have found that it is wise to move more carefully and deliberately because a sedentary career in front of a computer —  as well as years slumped on couches with a good book – have resulted in a twingey back. Each morning I do back exercises watched by fascinated small dogs and keep stomach muscles as taut as reasonably possible to take strain off the back, but gardening means bending over pots or weeding or reaching into low-growing bushes with secateurs and that has become an unhappy experience.

The cherry-red coral gums are now flowering alongside the roads, as is  the Bauhinia galpinii, called the ‘red orchid tree’ by international growers. We know this as Pride of De Kaap or Vlam van die Vlakte, a scrambling untidy shrub that behaves like a creeper let out of school, running wild through more sedate bushes and trees. It originates in the De Kaap valley of Mpumalanga, but  is found all over South Africa. The five-petalled flowers have a delectably vivid colour somewhere between a bright red and a lively orange. Linnaeus the great botanist named the Bauhinia first in 1753. He looked at the twin leaves split like paired butterflies and these reminded him of  his friends Johan and Kaspar Bauhin, herbalists and plant lovers who were identical twins. When the light fades, the leaves of the Bauhinia close as if a woman was snapping shut a little fan.

If there was such a thing as a parallel life, I would blissfully spend it studying botany. Or geology or  microbiology. One of the sadder little side effects of alcoholism is that  we forget how endlessly enthralling and glorious the natural world all around us  really is. And how threatened, but that is another story.

One of the themes of my own writing and one I search out in other writers is diaspora, the experiences of exile, loss, repatriation, emigration, homecoming or homelessness. The movement of refugees across borders, the struggle to begin again in a new country, the regrets and nostalgia for what was left behind. There is a new collection of short stories, Binocular Vision, out from Edith Pearlman and reviewed in the New York Times. How history repeats itself:

The lovely “Purim Night” describes a 1947 celebration at a displaced persons camp in Germany. The residents are mostly Jews, awaiting admission to other countries. The war is over, but shortages still abound, and there are no supplies with which to celebrate the holiday. “As for the meal preceding the party, it would consist of the usual dreck: watery spinach soup, potatoes and black bread. Eisenhower had decreed that the displaced persons camps be awarded 2,000 calories per person per day; decent of him, but the general couldn’t keep count of newcomers, they came in so fast.” Nevertheless, the refugees are fueled by hope: everyone has survived, everyone is dreaming of new homes in Israel, America, England, and invention thrives. The holiday is celebrated by wildly creative means.

Drawn out of my breast like a rib

Working flat out, no time for play this week. Write, rewrite, revise, cut, edit, write, rewrite, revise. Tear it up and start again.

So instead of a post, a poem from Zbigniew Herbert

I Would Like to Describe

I would like to describe the simplest emotion
joy or sadness
but not as others do
reaching for shafts of rain or sun
I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star
for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain
I would like to describe courage
without dragging behind me a dusty lion
and also anxiety
without shaking a glass full of water
to put it another way
I would give all metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin
but apparently this is not possible
and just to say — I love
I run around like mad
picking up handfuls of birds
and my tenderness
which after all is not made of water
asks the water for a face
and anger
different from fire
borrows from it
a loquacious tongue
so is blurred
so is blurred
in me
what white-haired gentlemen
separated once and for all
and said
this is the subject
and this is the object
we fall asleep
with one hand under our head
and with the other in a mound of planets
our feet abandon us
and taste the earth
with their tiny roots
which next morning
we tear out painfully

Time and the river

Publisher loved the chapters I sent through but wants a whole new section. And on reading through the  manuscript I see all kinds of adverbs and spliced commas, so that means a few days editing. Work, work, work.

A sudden power blackout this morning and now my screen  lights up with ominous messages telling me all my cookies have vanished. I miss the days when I sat with a pen and a noteboook, with spare pens  and a new unopened notebook  in a nearby drawer.

From an email to a friend, thinking about time and  the ability to face a future without drinking:

Sometimes I say to myself that I am never going to drink again and it seems entirely logical. Why would I? Other times I feel as if I am promising myself I will climb Mount Everest before I die, completely unrealistic and undoable. That ambivalence is core to my alcoholism and will probably always be there. I don’t intend to drink today, but I may drink tomorrow. I intend to stay sober for the rest of my life, but I may drink next week. I  want to be sober  next week on Friday so that I can go to a friend’s house for  her birthday. Behind me I have xxx sober days, a new kind of past. Slippery sliding time that drags so and then races past us in an invisible wind.

There is a problem with time and what time implies. I’ve been working on a novel that begins in the 1980s and moves into the 1990s. I realised last night that I recall the 1980s much  better than the 1990s and that threw me off-balance for a while because I don’t understand why some  periods of the remembered past come up with telescopic clarity and others in a haze. Nothing to do with alcoholism although both decades have their foggy moments. My later drinking was in fact lighter than in the 1980s which was a hectic time — and the drinking again went seriously awry in the 2000s. Nothing to do with emotional crises or being happier or sadder. Just a trick of memory. Time remembered imperfectly.

Because time and memory keep shifting, time is unstable and prone to all kinds of revisions. And that too is how I feel about the future. Sometimes it is a blank slate full of possibilities and at other times it feels like an obstacle course of looming bereavements and losses and terrors to come. And sometimes the future is brief and vanishing. Initially staying in the present day helped a great deal with ‘managing’ the alcoholism, I simply focused on staying in the day and staying sober for 24 hours at a time, not looking ahead or trying to second guess the future . In a crisis I would still do that and meditating each day  keeps my awareness very here and now at certainpoints during the day.  There may be a slightly Buddhist  dimension to this although writers on Buddhism  talk about moving beyond simplistic understandings of time, illusion etc.

But memory has  a slippery inconstant quality — the unlived aspects within me keep coming up with the past in tow, and there are hopes and plans for the future which seem more realisable now in sobriety than they did five or 10 years ago. I also sometimes think that because I don’t have children or grandchildren, I am less conscious of ageing. There are fewer reminders or contrasts of relative age and youthfulness.

But the life ahead can stretch out interminably when I imagine it as a long-drawn out battle with alcoholism even if I remain on the winning side. Each festive season and January I keep saying to myself: ‘another year without drinking’ as if I have run a marathon. But much of the time there is little awareness of conscious struggle and fewer cravings. So that part of not-drinking is easy. Something else down there is not easy or getting easier. That is life, my own nature, my deeper struggles.

Right now there are trays of ripe clingstone peaches  on the kitchen table, hinting at autumn speeding towards us. The pages of the novel thicken with each day’s writing. I work on critiques of friends’ manuscripts, reading them with the care I want readers to lavish on my manuscript. The garden frizzles in the heat, but at night the garden is warm and balmy with starlight like  phosphorescence.

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the open arms of the sea, Roy Orbison’s voice:

Towards understanding

Spent the weekend revising text for a publisher’s deadline. Now waiting to hear if the revisions worked, bracing  myself for another rewrite. Ugh, ugh, ugh. But as I learned many years ago, if you can’t take criticiosm gracefully and act on it, the writing life is not for you. It isn’t up to agents or publishers to tell you what is wrong and how to fix it. But if it doesn’t work for them, something needs careful attention.

Appalled by the shootings in Arizona and thinking about hate speech, violence, paranoia, militant dysphoria, militarized societies, invisible foreign wars and untreated emotional illness or anomie. No easy answers. How can we make a difference to the societies in which we live?

The accidents of our lives bruise us into dirty individuality. —Gregory McGuire

As if overnight, the garden has bleached and dried out like  brittle straw: fennel crisping, grass gone to seed, bushes overgrown and browning. A young drug addict in recovery is coming along to help me cut back the bushes, creepers and young trees on Thursday. He has a desperate look in his eyes, but I am not sure that it is desperation for sobriety. We shall see. As I get older, the lives of others become simultaneously more transparent and more mysterious, like one of the artist Joseph Cornell’s light boxes.

Found a poem by Mary Oliver that brightened my morning:

MESSENGER

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.