After rain, awakening

Yesterday I made my spicy bean stew for hungry guests who all sat around with mugs of tea and brandished large soup spoons, chatting and laughing while the small dogs screamed with rage to find themselves shut out of the kitchen and toddlers crawled under the kitchen table to play hide-and-seek between adults’ legs. The spicy black bean stew was a meatless version of feijoda, that rich but indigestible Brazilian kind of cassoulet filled with salted prok bely, cured pork, sides of green bacon and whole chorizo sausages, but meat now is too costly (the farmers will slaughter at the end of winter) and fortunately the beans and brown rice was substantial enough to be filling and everyone had several helpings.

Sobering up is not really about us. It gives us the opportunity to be useful to others which  may not have much to do with sitting around measuring spiritual progress or the lack of spiritual progress, but means that  somebody somewhere feels fed or helped or encouraged. I’ve never liked the distinction made between ‘doing’ and ‘being’ because we need both ways of engaging with reality. Thoughtless activity is as pointless as endless navel-gazing when there are still suffering alcoholics all around who need to hear our experience, strength and hope. Or just people who like a bowl of soup and  the conviviality that goes with  eating soup at the kitchen table.

From an artucle on  one of my favourite authors, Henning Mankell:

Because doing is what really matters. That’s why Mankell was on board the Sophia, part of the convoy of Gaza-bound aid boats stormed by Israeli commandos last May; nine activists were killed. But he prefers, he says, to call himself an intellectual, not an activist, because “an intellectual’s job is to take responsibility, and actions prove the word”. He’s quite prepared to go on a new flotilla: “You have to act, not just by writing, but by standing up and doing. For me, you cannot call yourself an intellectual if all you use your intellectual gifts for is to find excuses not to do anything. Which, sadly, is what I think a lot of intellectuals do

And then towards evening it rained and the small dogs  tore around the garden and dashed in black with mud. The bathroom ceiling leaked a little and gutters choked up woth summer leaves and overflowed down the walls. The winter rains out here don’t usually arrive until after Easter. I came into the bedroom to close windows and smelled the pungent rusty iron smell of wet plectranthus outside the bedrooms window.

The scent of  Africa here in the mountains has to be the smell of dust and grasses and wild herbs after rain, a pungent bitter smell you find nowhere else in the world. Nothing floral or aromatic, just this bitter pungent smell that roots me to the ground and reminds me of the windy plains of Kenya and dry riverbeds in Zimbabwe and swampy mangroves in Angola. It is so good to be alive and stand at an open window breathing in the smell of the earth after rain.

Veiled in mist

A pointillist morning with mist threaded through poplars in the valley, the fields glimpsed through a grainy veil. Veiled, seen through a glass darkly, which is a kind of metaphor for  all of life from our limited yearning perspectives. I’m making a large pot of black beans simmering with diced carrots, celery, red bell peppers, onion, garlic and chard, tasty and substantial because another another farming co-op has closed and there are hungry people invited for lunch. I’m lucky to live in a country where hunger is so often literal.

And this morning a visit from a battered woman with a nice sober husband who keeps hitting her even though he no longer drinks and is  very keen on quoting the Big Book to all and sundry. I’m with the writer Lundy Bancroft on this:

“An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice.”

Birds flying across fields in mist, angular black shadows on the retina. The leaves of the poplars are yellow and semapphore through the veil like children waving.

Setting seed in autumn

Beautiful Monday morning in autumn here, guineafowl running around the garden leaving tracks in the dew. Had a session yesterday evening with my writers’ group (some of whom actually write!) and we each wrote 500 words and then critted the writing (kindly but truthfully). Then ate bowls of lentil soup and talked about the Big Novel That Got Away.

The bronze fennel is running to seed, the fine grassy seeds are flying back and forth, the mousebirds carry away elderberries thick with tiny seeds. As if by chance I come in from the flyaway wind-blown garden and find this poem by Californian poet Peter Everwine:

Back from the Fields

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or a country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.

Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads,

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws,

old ones in beards, leapers

in silk leggings, the multiple

pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.

It’s been a good day.

 

Unable to find a credit for the guineafowl artist –

The slippery slope

A call from my newly sober friend living in the middle of a dusty plain. She tells me that  ‘this whole sobriety thing’ is going better. She climbed into her pick-up truck and drove 700km to consult a doctor who said  she was too anxious for his liking and gave her  three months’ supply of Ativan. She is two months sober and calm as a glacier, unruffled, content,  at peace with everything. In contrast I felt  very uncalm and agitated and murderous listening to this happy-ever-after story.

Sigh. I know from personal experience that if you go to  your kind well-meaning family doctor and tell him you stayed up all night playing the Grateful Dead and smoked several cartons of cigarettes and called up  two ex-lovers to find out what actually went wrong  back in 1992 and fried yourself  steak and eggs at 4am and set the kitchen on fire and then climbed onto the roof of your house to watch the dawn and fell off, your doctor is going to wonder if mood-altering substances are involved. So we don’t tell the GP what we do when drunk and disorderly. We say ‘I don’t know what is happening, I keep getting panic attacks’. Or ‘I can’t sleep and I keep throwing up from nerves.’ Or ‘I’m so depressed for no reason.’

No medical practitioner or psychiatrist or therapist will find it easy to diagnose what is wrong with  someone  embroiled in active alcoholism because the alcoholism masks  whatever else might be going on. That is why friends in AA remind newcomers to get  sober for a while before  trying medications of any kind. If, after two years sober, you still can’t walk into a supermarket without  hyperventilating or lie in bed weeping all day, there may be something  that has a clinical name and  needs attention. But for many of us, all kinds of troubling behaviours and insane symptoms clear up when we get sober.

So if we  find ourselves taking little white or blue pills to  help  with the pangs of early sobriety, the chances are that we are not getting better, we are switching addictions. Yes, I know my friend pillowed, cushioned, floating on Ativan isn’t listening to me, but somebody out there might  benefit from this. I have no general opinions of mood disorders or  mood-altering medications administered in a responsible or monitored situation. But sometimes a small bottle of happy pills is just the slippery slope back to  addiction hell.

Summer thunderstorm

Woke before dawn to a thunderstorm crashing through the mountains, sheet lightning and a torrential downpour just before dawn. Joy, because we are facing water restrictions and the garden is dry as a bone.

Made coffee and sat watching streaming news updates on the bombing of Libya. My continent, more violence, more tragedy, more casualties. Possibly an end to tyranny, but at a price. Scenes of desolation in Japan, broken toys in  a field of grey mud, restraint and dignity despite  the overwhelming grief..

A local farmer called and asked if I want  crates of drumhead cabbages at  a discount. I quailed at the prospect of salting and pickling jars full of cabbage, but we may be in for a tough winter and I need to plan ahead. Out here many people are poor and hungry and although produce is plentiful at times, there are months of getting by on lentils and brown rice with a little bacon. The plus factor is that out here the Xhosa  people live  well into their 90s unless they are stricken with TB or Aids. No heart disease, no food allergies, no proliferating cancers, no obesity or diabetes, no urban pollution or stress. A simple diet and hard exercise beats Western uxoriousness hands down.

The plectranthus is in flower, lilac and mauve spires everywhere. Black elderberries tumbling down from neighbouring trees, rosehips and the olive trees thickening with  glossy green olives that will blacken and ripen by the end of May. A friend has had a miscarriage and stays indoors weeping and looking at hand-knitted booties. Another friend with family in Italy is starting a local garden nursery to be filled  with herbs and  fruit trees and old roses that grew on Corsica when Napoleon was a boy.  Life in all its heartbreak and abundance.

The gift of time

From a profile of the great Swedish writer Per Olof Enquist who is now 76 and looks back on the years of writing  since he got sober at 56. It’s never too late –

The last 20 years have been a fantastic time. I’ve written a lot of books,” he says.

Born in 1934 in Hjoggboele in Sweden’s far-north, Enquist published his first novel, Kristalloegat (The Crystal Eye), in 1961.

It was his writing, he says, that finally pulled him out of the relentless “black hole” into which he had plunged for his first 56 years.

“I think I wanted to be a writer all my life and I didn’t give up,” he says, conceding however that much of the time “it wasn’t so easy to survive.”

In his large Stockholm apartment, bookshelves cover an entire wall, packed to bursting with poetry, plays, novels and fairytales, all by his own hand, in the original Swedish versions as well as the English, French, German, Russian and other translations.

“It’s my egocentric bookshelf,” he laughs.

“Every time I feel depressed that I’m not doing anything, I look at this bookshelf and say to myself ‘well, that is seven metres (yards) and I have done a little bit, so I can die’.”

Page after page is filled with observations about history — both his own and Sweden’s — that repeatedly pick off scabs and reopen wounds since “I think people would be bored to death if you write a novel that everything is perfect in Sweden.”

Enquist came close to death several times during his alcoholic years. After trying twice in vain to kick the habit, he managed on the third try after convincing his caregivers to let him use his computer and discovering to his delight that “I was still a writer.”

“The most terrible thing about being a writer is not to write but to not write… I hadn’t written almost anything for 13 years,” he says.

“I think that in writing Captain Nemo’s Library I realised that I wasn’t totally brainwashed,” he says, insisting that working on the 1991 novel “saved my life”.

Nonetheless, he feels that he lost all the years, especially the three he spent living in Paris, when he was constantly drunk.

“I was sitting in a beautiful apartment on Champs-Elysees and couldn’t write… I remember the beautiful view from the balcony. Paris was beautiful to look at, but I couldn’t use Paris,” he says.

While his words are laced with regret, there is no trace of self-pity or denial.

He says he simply looks back in order to better move forward, as he does in the new autobiography written in the third person “out of honesty” so he can say anything.

Four years of gratitude

The day I got sober I did not know it was St Patrick’s Day. And I was not feeling grateful. that day I was frightened and angry and  certifiably insane. In all probability, I was in withdrawal and didn’t know that either. Not a particularly  severe withdrawal, I hadn’t drunk that much, but  my memory of recent weeks was blurry and  confused, filled with shouting matches, sleeplessness and constant efforts to get drunk and stay drunk, longing to die. I was suicidal, desperate, and at the end of my long love affair with alcohol.

That I was able to stay sober and begin finding my way out of the labyrinth is because of many other factors, some of which I probably don’t understand as yet. I do know I owe a great deal to other sober alcoholics in AA who helped and encouraged and befriended me in that first bewildering year of freedom, those who responded to me online and helped me do online service from a remote corner of the world, all of you who take the time to read this blog and comment.

There is no freedom that means more to me today than the freedom from the urge to drink myself senseless. All other freedoms and responsibilities in my life stem from that freedom, the freedom of  choosing not to drink one day at a time.

And I could not have done that without your support. Thank you very much for helping me get here.

Reaching out

Thinking of those in the devastated coastal cities of Japan as well as the city of Tokyo facing rolling mass blackouts. Not easy to get to an AA meeting in unlit streets or damaged buildings, so online contact may be  an alternative for some.

I’m posting this message sent out from JanBB, the chairperson of Online Intergroup Alcoholics Anonymous (OIAA) earlier today. If any of you are able to send it to friends in recovery in Japan please do so.

Hello AA Japan,

The Online Intergroup sends its support and concern for your safety and
continued wellbeing. We hope all of you have come through this recent
catastrophic earthquake as well as subsequent aftershocks, with lives and
sobriety intact.

It may diffcult for many of you to travel to meetings or your buildings may not
be habitable for meetings. OIAA can help.  We have a directory of online AA
meetings available for your use, that are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 
Our meetings do not close.  We urge all of you to please make use of our AA
meetings online directory, as you are all so welcome to join us:
http://www.aa-intergroup.org/directory.php

We also have a Japanese language member group:
http://www.aa-intergroup.org/languages/index_jp.html

Please come join us, as we want to hear your experience, strength, and hope and
share with you how we have recovered through Alcoholics Anonymous as well as
offering our friendship and support. We are always here for you and desire to be
of service in any way we can.
Please pass it on.

Like everyone else…

Like everyone else, I’m thinking about those suffering, bereaved or stranded in Japan. Wishing there was something practical I could do to help.

Sat up  last night reading a PD James detective fiction. No spoilers, but in the novel there is an alcoholic priest who has overcome his affliction by living on a lonely island where he can’t get  his hands on the demon drink. The Splendid Isolation  fallacy, you might call it. He is ‘coerced’ into drinking by a bad character and then has a relapse. A kind woman and helpers  nurse him back to health and he stays locked up in a house with them, then returns to the island. Lo and behold, he feels strong enough after several months of abstinence to consider venturing back to the mainland, secure in the belief he will not drink because the solitude and time spent not drinking have cured him.

Sigh. I often thought about joining a strict contemplative order in my early 30s, locking myself away from the world. I didn’t see myself becoming a saint (that was not appealing at all) but I thought I might be able to stay sober if I kept away from lovers and temptations and the outside world.  And I reasoned that the desire to drink would ebb away by itself, so that eventually I would wake up one morning and  find myself cured. Like  the character in the PD James novel, I was wrong on several counts. Abstinence does not  remove the underlying alcoholism. Temptation pops up in the most unlikely places. Alcoholism does not cure itself. And I would not have been able to get or stay sober on my own, surrounded by well-meaning non-alcoholics or safeguarded by distance from liquor.

There has been much debate on the Internet around the New York Times report on a crime in which an eleven-year-old girl was raped by 18 men. In the Rumpus I found this very pertinent essay by Roxane Gay on the language of sexual violence:

We live in a culture that is very permissive where rape is concerned. While there are certainly many people who understand rape and the damage of rape, we also live in a time that necessitates the phrase “rape culture.” This phrase denotes a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence toward women is acceptable and often inevitable. As Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver ask in their book Rape and Representation, “How is it that in spite (or perhaps because) of their erasure, rape and sexual violence have been so ingrained and so rationalized through their representations as to appear ‘natural’ and inevitable, to women as men?”  It is such an important question, trying to understand how we have come to this. We have also, perhaps, become immune to the horror of rape because we see it so often and discuss it so often, many times without acknowledging or considering the gravity of rape and its effects. We jokingly say things like, “I just took a rape shower,” or “My boss totally just raped me over my request for a raise.” We have appropriated the language of rape for all manner of violations, great and small. It is not a stretch to imagine why James McKinley Jr. is more concerned about the eighteen men than one girl.

For those of us who have been there

Veld fires raging north and south of the village but today it is rainy and overcast, a great relief.

A sad day and plenty to think about — I had news that somebody I met in meetings a year or two ago died after a terrible, chaotic relapse. The person who phoned to give me the news is not a recovering alcoholic and you would think  we were talking about two different people. Alcoholism is so misunderstood and it takes a long time — a lifetime even — for those not afflicted to understand  how addictive illness robs someone of choice, lucidity, humanity. I know that sometimes alcoholism is compared to diabetes or cancer, but for me the closest analogy is a debilitating and inexorable insanity.

This may well fall on deaf ears and yet I feel compelled to set it down yet again. There is no point in reasoning or pleading or bargaining with or threatening an active alcoholic. You might as well be arguing with someone in deep dementia or someone who has fallen unconscious. The alcoholic can’t hear you because the need to protect the addiction is all that matters. That is the nature of the illness or insanity. Active alcoholics may be well-dressed or penitent or university-educated and seem outwardly  ‘normal’ charming lovable people but to think that way is to miss the point. Alcoholism has made them increasingly delusional and they are held fast in the grip of an overwhelming compulsion. The damage is on the inside and  that emotional chaos is fundamentally irrational.

Each time I go into the village, I walk past  groups of young children with foetal alcohol syndrome. Sometimes their mothers are still alive and begging for money or liquor outside bottle stores or getting the children to beg or steal for them. These are not wicked, irresponsible, selfish or evil mothers. They are alcoholics and what they have done fills them with terrible anguish and perplexity. To harm their children was the last thing they meant to do. But that is what happened and will happen again if they don’t die before falling pregnant again. When desperate they will sleep with men in order to get the money to buy alcohol. They may sell their daughters in order to get the money to buy alcohol. If you don’t understand alcoholism, this is deplorable and inexplicable.

The simplest and most frequent criminal activity amongst active alcoholics is driving drunk. During rare lucid moments of  not being drunk, most active alcoholics will admit that if they begin to drink they lose all sense of  why they should not drive. The compulsion to drink though is far stronger and more cogent than the concern about driving while drunk. The active alcoholic doesn’t want to drive drunk. They just want to get drunk. What happens after that is, well, another kind of problem.They may remain vaguely aware that they could  hit and kill somebody while driving, but that  matters far less than getting to the pub or  the bottle store to replenish supplies or keep on drinking.  And the drunk driver feels fine and competent.

One of the more tragic stories of an active alcoholic in denial is that of Audrey Kishline of Moderation Management. This horrible and irrational story sends those who don’t understand alcoholics into a moralizing frenzy. Audrey Kishline began Moderation Managment because she knew she had a problem with alcohol, but wanted to learn to drink normally and moderately. She has always insisted she is not an alcoholic. The ideal in Moderation Management was for women to drink  nine drinks a week and men 14. Moderation Management was a successful self-help group and Audrey got a book contract.

Then on March 25, 2000, Audrey Kishline and her bottle of vodka got into a pick-up truck and went for a drive. She hit and killed  a man and his 12-year-old daughter. Audrey’s blood alcohol level was more than three times the legal limit. She recalls nothing of the crash.

So Audrey was sent off to prison for four years. The woman who had lost her husband and daughter, Sheryl Maloy Davis, began visiting Audrey and forgave her. Audrey felt she had been given a second chance. Once out of prison, Audrey began drinking again and left her family. She went to see Sheryl and the two women wrote a book together about their journey to forgiveness and friendship. Audrey has now found a job at a dry cleaners and walks to work and back home. She still believes that many people with drink problems are able to learn moderately controlled drinking, but says she doesn’t know  what happens after  people cross a certain line into uncontrollable drinking. She admits that she is still drinking, but says she will never drive again.

Would you believe her?

If you are not alcoholic or have no understanding of alcoholism, all kinds of moral questions and abhorrences come to mind. No sane person would do what Audrey Kishline has done and continues to do. And that is the point.

Step 2: We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.