Momentous ordinary lives in sobriety

A breathless hot weekend and I tossed salads of bitter oranges and fennel, and ate ripe plums while chatting with friends and reading Ian Rankin’s gritty crime fiction Fleshmarket Close. A friend of mine is reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s foodie memoir Blood, Bones & Butter and calls me up to read extracts aloud. This is how Gabrielle found the space that would become award-winning restaurant Prune in New York:

And yet, even with the cockroaches crawling over bread baskets and sticky bottles of Pernod, I could see that the place had immense charm. There was an antique zinc bar with just four seats that had been salvaged from a bistro in France and shipped over. There were gorgeous antique mirrors everywhere, making the tiny space seem bigger than it was, and an old wooden banquette, and wrought- iron table bases. The floor, under all that sticky rat excreta, was laid with the exact same tiny hexagonal tiles that had been on the floor of a crêperie in Brittany where I had worked for a brief period in my early twenties. Even when gulping the comparatively fresh New York City air once back on the sidewalk, thinking I might have been poisoned in some way, I knew the space was exactly “me.” There were ten sturdy burners. Just two ovens. And fewer than thirty seats. I could cook by hand, from stove to table, never let a propane brûlée torch near a piece of food, and if it came down to it, I could just reach over the pass and deliver the food myself. I knew exactly what and how to cook in that kind of space, I knew exactly what kind of fork we should have, I knew right away how the menu should read and how it would look handwritten, and I knew immediately, even, what to call it.

Vision and courage where some of us might not have seen beyond the cockroaches and rat excreta. A friend of mine from university days, also a recovering alcoholic given that undeserved second chance, is opening a school for disabled children in Tanzania, undaunted by governmental bureaucracy, no electricity supply lines and regular flooding in the rainy season. Another friend is taking a deep breath and coming out gay at 66 years of age. Not exactly news to  many of us, but we all pretend to be astonished and delighted for him. What is astonishing is that he recovered from  45 years of addiction to tranquillizers and reclaimed what was left of a truly unlived and dormant existence.

And I have discovered a new favourite food blog: eat and dust by expat Scotswoman Pamela Timms in Old Delhi, featuring street food and British Indian cooking classics and  other yummy unexpected dishes. In formerly British East Africa and Zimbabwe I grew up surrounded by retired ex-India colonels and the relicts who talked about tiffin, ate kedgeree for breakfast and gave me copies of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories for my birthday. An anachronistic generation but the food lives on.

Sober living rocks. Ordinary or  adventurous lifestyles, the choice is ours, but the quality of a life lived without waste or shame makes all the difference.

Positive energies spanning the globe

Positive thoughts, wishes and hopes going out to Syd and his wife C. who is having heart surgery today. At times like these I wish the world could shrink down to a small neighbourhood so that I could make chicken soup and leave bunches of flowers on the doorstep or send a box of chocs to the hospital ward. But know you are both loved by all of us who read and respond to Syd’s blog.

For some reason I can’t link, but I’m sure you all know where to find Syd!

http://fine-anon.blogspot.com/

Autumn edging in slowly — mists low on the fields each morning and birds revelling in ripe cotoneaster and elder berries. Soon it will be cool enough for long morning walks before the sun is too high in the sky. At dawn this morning the temperature was 40 degrees Celsius or 115 degrees Fahrenheit, dark, humid and very hot.

Loved this poem by WS Merwin, written in tribute to the poet John Berryman who suffered with alcoholism and took his own life in 1974.

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

Another sober day in Paradise

In between bouts of rewriting  fiction and non-fiction, I have been processing crates of ripe tomatoes. The freezer is full of blamched runner beans, sweet corn and  carrots. There are shelves of tomato puree in sterilised Consol glass jars. If I never see another tomato as long as I live, it will be too soon.

In the bad old days I worked hard just to keep my head above water because getting drunk and getting over getting drunk took up so much time and energy. Now hard work has meaning and purpose. It might be tough on the back or the brain, but it doesn’t leave you clutching the rim of the toilet basin each morning or thinking that vodka-inspired incoherent scribbling in a noteboook is the stuff of genius.

For writers and would-be writers, a funny and shrewd breakdown of changes in publishing by Margaret Atwood:

Global killer

Most of the time I like to talk about recovery. That recovery is possible, the miracle of recovery, how we get better together, how our lives get better day by day.

But there’s global picture that isn’t so positive. Scary stuff. From The Economist with a map:

THE world drank the equivalent of 6.1 litres of pure alcohol per person in 2005, according to a report from the World Health Organisation published on February 11th. The biggest boozers are mostly found in Europe and in the former Soviet states. Moldovans are the most bibulous, getting through 18.2 litres each, nearly 2 litres more than the Czechs in second place. Over 10 litres of a Moldovan’s annual intake is reckoned to be ‘unrecorded’ home-brewed liquor, making it particularly harmful to health. Such moonshine accounts for almost 30% of the world’s drinking. The WHO estimates that alcohol results in 2.5m deaths a year, more than AIDS or tuberculosis. In Russia and its former satellite states one in five male deaths is caused by drink.

Notes from here and there

As the weather cools, my mojo returns. I wrote 6 000 words last night. This morning it reads like  6000 words written by a sleepy person who can’t quite get to the point, but I shall edit then rewrite and slowly something marvellous may creep in.

Tremendous interview on ecology and interconnectedness with the poet WS Merwin in Guernica:

My generation grew up, or most of us thought we grew up… as freaks, because we grew up into a world where most of the writers and artists and the people who were interested in the arts weren’t interested in the birds and the bees at all. And those who are biologists and botanical and ornithological friends never read a book. We reached the age of maturity, whatever that is, assuming the world was like that. And suddenly you realize it wasn’t so, that there were quite a few contemporaries who felt the same way we did about everything being connected. I don’t think the other point of view makes any sense, except economically. If you want to say “increase” and “multiply” and “have dominion” and you’ve “got a right” to do this and all that, ok. But I think that’s suicide. Whatever you do to the world around you, you’re doing to yourself. I don’t mean that in any particular spiritual so-called way. I mean, actually. I mean if the guys in the Northwest who want to continue cutting down old-growth trees do it, the day will come when there aren’t any old-growth trees to cut down. And then what do they do? They say, Well, they have to do it because of their jobs. Well, there won’t be any jobs because there won’t be any trees to cut.

Went off to eat soberversary cake (well, dozens of tiny iced cupcakes) with a friend who is three years sober, a happy and relaxed evening. About 35 of us there from all over the mountain valleys and up from the coast. Three years ago, this was somebody who didn’t have a friend in the world and her family had cut off all contact. A miracle amidst so many miracles.

My lovely and savvy friend D has been attending New York Fashion Week  She sends me rapturous accounts of why she loves designer Marc Jacobs to death, his ’70s revival of soft lavender fedoras and high-waisted pants and peppy brogues, all swish and sultry atttitude. Designer Anna Sui did a take on the Russian ballet styles of Diaghilev, metallic brocades and woodblack geometrics. Lace, chiffon, the new metallics, Grecian fabric drops, dazzling Halston retro.

Reading her  shorthand on trend, I sit in my deeply aged denims and faded unchic sweater enjoying this glamour from a distance. I have always enjoyed design and once wrote fashion copy myself. D ate her chic micro greens with no hint of dressing at Kenmare near the Bowery, got a smile from Michael Douglas, shared a low-foam cappuccino with Anna Wintour on a club sofa in the Bowery Lobby, danced up a storm at the Rodarte after-party in the great glittering ballroom of the Jane Hotel, nibbled on an Atkins-friendly Thai Kobu beef salad at Indochine. Both D and Anne Hathaway had their hair done at Marie Robinson Salon and that was an oasis of calm off Fifth Avenue. Window boxes of white tulips, trees barely fuzzed with green, the city buzzing with pre-spring euphoria. Forever fabulous, absurd, extravagant New York.

Loss and gain

The housemate is feeling better as the heat lessens for a day or os. The dog had a choking fit. Dog feeling better but my nerves are shredded.

And I have beeen learning to Twitter, to tweet and retweet.

So I can now trim or clip urls and manage to sound incoherent in 140 characters or less. Following Maud Newton, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry who tell me each moving and thrilling event of the hour on the hour as they lead their utterly public and unbelievable lives. I must also set up a Tumblir account or Flickr around a teeny bit to get more platform for my presence. Put all my FB acquaintances on hold while I move on upward in social media nowness.

And I need to get more epigrammatic. Sell myself to the world in 140 characters, be pithy and witty and concise. Not doable. Sandmonkey on Twitter keeping me tweeted on Egypt and somebody else has just tweeted about Libya. According to another cryptic tweet, I am about to be published in an e-book anthology unless the e-poublisher comes to his senses and decides to earn a decent living.

No time to drink. No desire to drink. Social media has eaten my soul. So far I have 300 followers, none of whom are showing any interest in getting to know me as a valuable network connection online. They are all following other Twitterers whom I am following because they follow someone who is probably not worth following. Is there life after Twitter or are we doomed to sit gossiping about celebs in Etherland forever?

In my next life I want to become a round-the-world lone sailor. Reid Stowe sailed around the world for three years and came back to find nobody understood what he had been through.

Moitessier would understand. Moitessier, a great inspiration to Reid as a young man, was competing in a race around the world called the Golden Globe in 1968, and he was well in the lead when he decided to change course and simply keep sailing. He explained this in a note, which he flung by slingshot onto the deck of a passing ship, that read in part: “I am continuing non-stop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.” He later wrote that, looking back on his decision, he only regretted the inclusion in the note of the word “perhaps.”

And even alcoholic losers do get remembered from time to time. The English writer and alcoholic Patrick Hamilton has had a blue Heritage plaque put up to him in Chiswick. Hamilton might have been a truly great  writer if he had sobered up and given himself a little longer to write. Always that sense of waste and loss I feel when thinking about creative minds ruined by alcoholism.

He was the laureate of the shabby centre of London, the out-of-the-way corners of Fitzrovia or Earls Court where dipsomaniacs fritter their lives away, trying to pick up barmaids or whores, and failing as miserably in that enterprise as they do in everything else.

Be my Valentine

How sweet to find Valentines in email poems and to be planning a Valentine’s Day for lovers and friends and anyone-else-at-a-loose-end supper with iced cucumber soup and spicy butternut pilaff, ripe plums with ice cream for dessert! The plums are magnificent this year.

We’ll eat late because the heat is terrible and my housemate has had several angina attacks and suffered with heat exhaustion all weekend. Elderly villagers are ill with heat stroke and  there are babies suffering with dehydration. My neighbour’niece in shock because she had a frightening car accident the other evening. No counselling out here so she will have to travel for hours to see someone who might help her. This is a brutal country. Another accident, an unknown Xhosa man, a job seeker who had been walking through the mountains all day from farm to farm, was run down and killed  by a reckless driver, and I think of his family waiting for him to return and  not knowing he is dead. The desperation of the poor is  so extreme, even while emails of jubilation and hopefulness  arrive from Egypt.

One of my publishers suggested  I learn to Twitter and I have been following tweets from all kinds of people.  If I want to say anything of significance in  140 words, I will need to become more epigrammatic.  Sigh.

Away from socila media, I’m rereading  the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro in awe and admiration, that willingness to look hard at the unlikeable aspects of the young woman Munro herself was once. In sobriety the drinking is no longer an excuse for what we find lurking in our own motivations and ambivalence. The more courageously and truthfully we face ourselves, the less power the old demons hold over us.

And fortunately there is always love: transient, troubling, unrequited, unbalanced, impossible. What would we do without it?

Early Valentine poem

Couldn’t resist this, from Blake Morrisson:

Against Dieting

Please, darling, no more diets.
I’ve read the books on why it’s
good for one’s esteem.
I’ve watched you jogging lanes and pounding treadmills.
I’ve even shed some kilos of my own.
But enough. What are love handles
between friends? For half a stone
it isn’t worth the sweat.
I’ve had it up to here with crispbread.
I doubt the premise, too.
Try to see it from my point of view.
I want not less but more of you.

Learning curve

The cherimoya trees are in flower, starry as white orchids in sunlight. I can’t find images of them anywhere. Heat and humidity continuing: by early evening we are exhausted and just lie on sofas drinking lime and soda. The dogs drink litres of water.

A friend of mine who is a journalist in Zimbabwe has been receiving death threats  and my heart trembles for her. I came across a frightening and very moving articles on what jouranlists face in dangerous places written by investigative reporter Lydia Cacho:

For every time our body rebels and says “not again!” to another 15-hour flight, eating badly, sleeping worse, in order to repeat the story told a thousand times over, a little inner voice replies: “You are alive, you have to do it.” When others insist that we are heroes or heroines, we are genuinely reluctant to believe them. I’ve never known of a single colleague who has been tortured, or who lives with the threat of death and persecution for their work, in such a confused state of mind that they believe that working in the defence of individual and collective freedoms is an act of heroism. We know full well that it is nothing more than an exercise in survival and shared dignity. We also understand, for we are constantly reminded of it, that the world demands its heroes to be examples who defend human rights with their voices, their words and their culture – those rights that prompt us to demand access to water, food, land, justice and, ultimately, the right to lead a happy life, free of violence. So it is we can proceed anew to the forum of the survivors: like optimistic chroniclers, we document the tragedy and nourish the possibility that all this will disappear if we persevere together in making it so.

Overheard on a sobriety forum, a great quote: “If you are a heavy drinker and you quit drinking, problem solved. If you are an alcoholic and you quit drinking, your problems are just beginning!”

I remember the first time I realised that I had only one solution (get drunk) for anything that went wrong and that most people had worked out many different responses and solutions. One of those alarming light-bulb moments — putting down the bottle meant picking up a new way of living. A major learning curve. The good news is that I wouldn’t have to do this alone.

What brings you joy

Terrific humidity after the storm. We had hailstones bouncing off the corrugated iron roof of the stoep, a brand-new auditory challenge for the dogs. At some point after midnight, the temperature finally began to drop and a wind came up from the north, mercifully cool and dry. I grew up in tropical Africa with regular monsoon rains, but never got used to walking around in a state of dissolve.

Received some emails from readers here about the trials and joys of the writing life. The key for me is sobriety. Even for those who are not alcoholic, anything written drunk would be better written sober. Every now and again I hear versions of the Hemingway myth, that drinking enhances the creative genius. If you really believe that, then go away and read a biography or two and the agonies described in the letters. Hemingway loved to write drunk in the afternoon and evening, but dragged himself out of bed in the morning and rewrote sober. He admitted that his drunken drafts were rubbish. An addled mind cannot structure paragraphs or think out character development.

For the long sober haul, however, there are some guidelines. I wish I knew the source of this, the line about joy makes so much sense:

1. Support is Essential
We all need support. Just knowing that there’s somebody there who supports and encourages your creativity is a massive gift. Who are the supporters and warmers of your creativity and who are those who freeze or discourage it? Which parts of yourself are supportive to your creative self, and which parts are destructive to it? How can you best support yourself – and enlist support – to write regularly and wholeheartedly?

2. Baby Steps
Think too big at the beginning and you will get overwhelmed. Break up your writing journey into small, manageable steps, and, if it’s helpful, find a way of marking each forward step. A writing friend made a schedule of the editing she needed to do, chapter by chapter, stuck it on the wall and ticked each off as she completed it. She’s now finished the novel. David Whyte (author of Crossing The Unknown Sea) decided to take one small action a day towards his ambition of becoming a full-time poet. Within three months he was standing in front of an audience, an event brought about by one of his actions.

3. Be Specific
Forget what may or may not happen at the end of the process of writing your novel. Forget the state of publishing, the statistics of the slushpile. Forget too – at least for the moment – the vision of winning the Booker. It’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by the big unknowns, in life and in art. Fear thrives in the intangible, the virtual and the grandiose. Creativity thrives in the specific and the physical: in the action of sitting down to write those 500 words, or printing out your manuscript to send to one agent. What’s the next, small, specific task you can do right now? Each specific achievement embeds the concept of ‘can’ into your soul.

4. Be joyful
Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget joy. We get so wrapped up in the competition, the ambition, the achievement, that we lose sight of the sheer pleasure of being a wordsmith, of tinkering about with ideas, of playing. If you can discover what, in your life, brings you joy and simply do more of that thing, you are on the path towards fulfilment. If I keep noticing where the vitality in my life is and fish from that pool, joy follows. Joy’s a subjective business. Honour yours.

5. It’s Only Marketing
When my life coach said this, I was taken aback. Suddenly, everything fell into place. As writers, our business is to write. Everything else is marketing. Marketing includes anything that connects you and your work with the outside world, whether it’s blogging, researching agents, entering competitions, submitting to agents or publishers, or self-publishing. Necessary work, but just marketing. Nothing personal about it.

6. Two Steps Forward…
…and at least one step back. That’s the process.