Amidst the vivid dawn of early winter

Grateful, always the consciousness of gratitude, to have been spared a living death.

Rain pounding against the house all night, the garden  untidy with broken branches and twigs in the morning. I sat up in a warm circle of lamplight reading Wittgenstein (‘to pray is to think about the meaning of life’) and thinking about him shutting himself away from the world in a small wooden hut in Norway so that he could think about the world and will and God (‘I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will; I am completely powerless’). How are we to live without doing harm? How can we exercise our will toward good rather than evil? What can we say about good and evil in human language?A mug of tea steaming beside me, dogs asleep on the rug, a moth fluttering against the black windowpane. Ludwig Wittgenstein who went to school with Hitler, who renounced a massive fortune in order to become a schoolteacher, who became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Who lost three brothers to suicide, who lived with the fear of going mad, who had successive breakdowns and suffered through two world wars. The mysterious happiness of Wittgenstein, who said on his deathbed ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.‘ The moth battering itself against the reflection of the lamp in the black windowpane..

Wittgenstein

To say time passes more quickly, or that time flows, is to imagine something flowing. We then extend the simile and talk about the direction of time. When people talk of the direction of time, precisely the analogy of a river is before them. Of course a river can change its direction of flow, but one has a feeling of giddiness when one talks of time being reversed. The reason is that the notion of flowing, of something, and of the direction of the flow is embodied in our language.

And to be immersed in this apparent flow is what constitutes our life: the sick dog now recovered and jumping for biscuits, edited work in neat piles on my desk, the mechanic from Namaqualand hammering and swearing  over a car engine in the garage. Neighbours bring over  toasted croissants for morning tea, the rain falls without pause, my friend Char turns up from her new home on the far side of the province. She is bitterly unhappy and wishes she had not sold her house or moved away. We make mistakes, we flounder, we lose our way, then test the shallows and strike out for the strong current that will carry us into deeper water. Swimming towards the unknown destination, finding our way home. The river flows on, time, unstoppable and inevitable.

And the rain it raineth every day

Rain falling in a cold mist, a good day to be indoors stirring a pot of split pea soup. This has been a difficult Easter weekend because one of my small dogs, the little foxy beast known as The Chub,  began vomiting on Saturday and spent most of the weekend at the vet. The sweet Chub lay on a sheepskin bed in a spacious cage with the vet attentive to her every need and charging us by the minute. She is home now — some kind of poisoning, no idea what she might have eaten. But her gums are red again, her eyes bright not sunken, she is no longer lethargic or staring. A great relief. Her little companion dog, her twin, was lost and bewildered without her and the house sunk in gloom. If you are an animal lover and lucky enough to share a home with beloved  animals, you will know the particular  agony, indecision and  misery that comes with a sick pet. The worst moment for me was when  the sick little dog crawled under a hedge to curl out of sight in a bed of ivy, the way animals seek a hiding place or cave or secret nest where they can die in peace.

And we had guests over for  Sunday lunch. The first winter rains began falling, slow rain like a misty drizzle all day and night. Lovely to sit in a bright, untidy but warm kitchen with dogs curled up on a rug in the corner as we chatted and laughed and forked up garlicky lamb and creamed parsnips. Because of my previous distress and a sleepless night, I felt thin as glass and as if my friends could look right down through me, through the green wave and watery depths down to the ocean bed of coral and white sand, fragments of ruined temples, drowned castles and shipwrecked dreams embedded down there  in forests of seaweed, darting silver fish slipping away faster than thoughts. For somebody who is usually defended and on guard, this was a strange but not uncomfortable  sensation.

Rain  still falling, brown leaves heaped in ditches, trees dripping, muddy roads, the mountains hidden by fog. I look at images of green English gardens  filled with white blossom and sigh a little.

Good Friday in the mountains

Ah yes, thank you all again for the supportive comments and emails. For those who want to know more, just Google ‘crime in South Africa’ and you get more frightening statistics and all kinds of scary sociological explanations. Better to eat buttered hot cross buns or simnel cake and enjoy the spring weather over there.

Here the Meyer and Eureka lemons and small tasty guavas are still ripening on trees in the garden and I am planning out a new planting design for my herb garden. I want to put in Swiss chard, flat-leaf parsley and leafy sorrel along with small bushes of winter savoury. A friend of my housemate  has just heard that a lump in her breast is malignant and  will have a double mastectomy later this year. She said on the phone that ‘the veils are thinning’, a strange phrase from someone who grew up in a Calvinist Afrikaner church. Liminal situations are painful and frightening but often we wake up and welcome change.

Good Friday — there are church bells tolling in the village, but no priests for the Catholic church here so  only a communion service on Sunday. The congregation of the  Dutch Reformed Church, the Nederuitse Gereformeerde Kerk that once dominated this valley, is dwindling away and the young people join Pentecostal sects or look to Buddhism or militant atheism for answers or a way of living. More changes to be accepted if not welcomed.

I have been reading the gifted Pulitzer prize-winner Jennifer Egan and marvelling at a quality of transparency and her own  fondness for writing badly in order to develop the habit of daily writing.

Egan:

Writing badly gets you to all the good stuff. We’re all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can’t write well if you’re not willing to write badly. That’s why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange. That’s so critical, and the only way to do that is sometimes to just write badly. It’s like daily physical labor, like exercise.

I used to want to lay claim to a certain transparency in blogging because that is what I valued so in private diaries. But it is not possible to write about  the people or conflicts or significant moments in my own life without betrayals and exposure of identity. I’ve also come to realise that on the Internet nothing ever goes away. So blog readers are left with the impression I spend my days looking at cloud formations or dreaming up  recipes for sundried tomatoes and stuffed vine leaves. I wish. As I browse other blogs and  find startling revelations or  disclosures, I sometimes feel as if I am a voyeur and that in turns reminds me of something else.

Years ago when I was on a retreat at an old Dominican convent built in 1900, with secluded chapels filled with stained-glass light, pillared and arched cloister walks and gardens full of white roses and pink-faced marguerites, I went into the church one afternoon and decided to sit upstairs overlooking the altar. I had no luck meditating but sat on peacefully thinking about supper and watching the light fall on the bare stone altar. I was perhaps 24 or 25 years old with longish red hair and passably pretty, a Catholic convert full of  ideals and theological quandaries, attached to small gold crucifixes and a rosary of red Irish gold. As I sat there, someone came into the church and I could hear the person kneel in a pew below me, unseen. Then a woman’s voice spoke out, someone who thought she was alone. I did not know what to do and after a few moments it was impossible for me to get up and leave, already I had heard too much.

Looking back I understand  that being so young and inexperienced, more afraid of embarrassment than intrusion,  was what created the dilemma — the person I am now would jump up, cough loudly and leave at once when I heard that tone in a stranger’s voice. An elderly woman talking to God aloud, arguing and pleading. But back then I sat frozen and forced to overhear the secrets of a woman’s heart. She talked about her disappointments and anger at a superior and the ongoing pain of an old long-abandoned love affair, about sharp piercing headaches each evening and a sense of waste, crippling loneliness, the fear she had made a mistake in joining this religious order, the shrinking of her life, the dullness of daily admin work and time flying past, a barren and embittered old age ahead. Then she went quiet and I hoped she might leave. But after a while I realised she was listening to the God she had spoken with. She  spoke again, tearful and still in pain, and then she said an Our Father and got up, went out of the church. I sat on for a little while, then went out as well, praying that I might never meet her and that she might never realise she had been overheard. I had not realised that  anyone spoke to God that way, as if God was real.  The emotion that stayed with me for a long time was envy.

Random thoughts that defy category

The great sober pleasure of waking each morning in time to watch the dawn. The full moon only beginning to fade as the sun comes up on the far horizon. White clouds billowing up from the north like steam in a dark sky.

After a pot of tea and desultory meditation, I sit in the bath and note how the skin on the back of my hands is ageing. But if I squint at the hands through half-closed eyes in the steamy vapours, they look as they did when I was 33. In my private enclosed mind I seem to stay forever 33, although I don’t mind ageing at all so long as the process isn’t accompanied by pain or disfigurement. Thinking of my friend PS who came around yesterday and held herself bolt upright, moved about tentatively and with great care not to jar her painful back. Her face as open and cheerful as ever, but in the last year she has develioped a nervous habit of blinking, as if she had become short-sighted or sensitive to light. Sometimes I wonder if she comes to visit me as a pretext for spending time with my dogs who greet her with much affection and compete to get onto her lap as I bring in the tea things. She has a pack of large rescued dogs herself and has bought a trailer so she can drive through the countryside with dogs barking madly behind her old rust-experiment of a car.

The night before last, we had intruders in the back garden again, stealing the avocados and trying the padlocks on the garage. Disturbed by the dogs barking and lights going on inside the house, so they left and ran off down the road. No point in calling the police unless they smash windows or try to get in. Lou asked in comments yesterday if I ever feel in any danger. Well, Lou, the danger is constant. But it is not the kind of lurking violence where fears could be soothed by  buying a gun or buying more padlocks. This is one of the most violent countries in the world and the assaults and rape and murders are  too numerous to mention. I can’t think of anyone  living here who has not been attacked or has not lost family members. If I shot an intruder dead, his brothers or fellow gang  members would begin a vendetta to kill everyone in the household. And if I shot somebody dead, the knowledge that there was a gun in the house would lead to increased burglaries because everyone here wants a gun. The price of a weapon is less than the cost of a bicycle and every now and again I wake  to the noise of automatic gunfire from AK47s. Out here we understand a great deal about  escalating spirals of violence and why guns are not a solution at all, not even a short-term answer. The police don’t respond to calls late at night and there are no ambulance services out here. There isn’t much to steal, so hopefully the burglaries will ease off when the bad weather sets in. And like everyone else out here, I have lived with  danger for many years, have faced and dealt with my fears and anger as  far as is humanly possible. Those who suffer the worst  and most relentless violence are young black women in the informal settlements and the battered women’s shelter here is always full to overflowing with a long waiting list.

We live with danger. International drug cartels  create havoc in poorer communities, youngsters recruited for  mercenary work in Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya come back  hooked on war games and the power of violence, refugees stream into a climate of xenophobia. We live with plagues: Aids, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria,  the threat of Ebola virus, wild variant influenzas, cholera, typhoid and brutal sudden deatb is everyday, nothing out of the ordinary. I don’t write much about this side of my life because many of my readers live in relatively affluent and protected places in the First World and  assume I too could live there. Posts about fear and violence sometimes trigger off a naive paranoia or compensatory religiosity in readers. People write and assure me  that they too could die at any moment or that the violence out here has nothing to do with neo-globalism or a history of colonialism, that it is just human nature and the same everywhere. But it is not.

Another definition of the word ‘sober’ has to do with seriousness, gravity, looking at life with a clear and unsparing eye. Sober, we see reality as it is and that reality carries with it the inevitability of our own death. One of the many reasons I had for sobering up was that I should not come to die before I had lived. And I did not want to live a life given over to fear and hatred or pettiness.

A quotation from the blogger Jean Morris:

Acceptance doesn’t mean having no problem with violence, pain, cruelty or injustice, not doing anything to oppose or alleviate them. It means accepting that they’re already here, right now, in this moment, and there’s nothing we can do to change that; that denial achieves nothing, so we’d better practice facing up to what is and doing the best we can with it. Facing up: the hardest lesson, especially if you’re, like me, a classic example of what psychologists would call an ‘avoidant’ personality (my very earliest memories are of shutting down, pretending: I’m not here, this isn’t happening).

Learning, through Buddhist practice, that bad feelings aren’t going to kill me, they only feel as if they are, that the only way out is through them, has been a deeper lesson than I’ve culled from any intellectual learning or from psychotherapy, a slow lesson, and one I’ve only learned… oh, perhaps one percent of. But still, astonishingly deep. For one reason and another, I haven’t done much formal sitting meditation or hung out much with Buddhists recently. But the lesson, this deep change in one percent of me, feels irreversible.

Week before Easter

For some unknown reason my decision to spend Easter away from work and my desk means that I think I must complete and perfect every single task still piled up on that desk. And find time to degunk my keyboard which is blobbed up with dog hairs and coffee drips.

Outside in the garden, lemony, copper and umber leaves are spiralling down from trees and I woke up to the distant plaintive sound of plovers calling in the mist. Autumn’s beauty and melancholy. I stood out under the trees drinking my coffee and thinking about how brief our lives are and how so much of daily life goes unrecorded, unappreciated and unnoticed. Then I went back indoors for a hot bath, found myself sharing the steamy suds with a half-eaten, disintegrating spider and briefly lost all sense of the melancholy loveliness of life.

So good to be reading Lou again at Subdural Flow II. I used to know the significance of that medical title but no longer remember it. Never mind, Lou always makes sense to me.

In readiness for Easter, I have hot cross buns in the kitchen to be eaten with ceremony on Good Friday. I don’t eat hot cross buns at any other time of the year. These buns are an English tradition dating back to medieval times when the Lenten fast was slightly broken on  Good Friday  to eat sweet yeasty fruity buns marked with the sign of the cross. The symbolism for Holy Week and Easter is liturgically and  spiritually rich and I sometimes wish I could enter into it with more depth of feeling and belief.

And outside the autumn leaves keep falling from the oaks, catalpas and liquidambars while the sun burns through the mist and sets the wet fields shining. A sight worth looking at.

Daily snapshots

 

A sober friend of mine has just celebrated seven years of continuous sobriety and emailed me to say she is baking peanut butter, marmelade and raw bran muffins for her home group. ‘They will love it,’ she writes excitedly. ‘The muffins are  not too sweet and quite chewy.’ I bet.

Country life! Oaks here all turning red, power surges during thunderstorms battering the motherboards of computers, and the local municipality has painted wobbly white middle lines along the village streets. Large numbers of guineafowl roosting on the roof of the church hall and everyone is discussing recipes for roast guineafowl wrapped in bacon. Life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Catching up on news: we attended a birthday supper for  one of my neighbours, only slightly hampered by the presence of  their eight cats. I had forgotten quite how subtly dominating cats can be when they want things to go their way. Cats purring and leaping from lap to lap, favouring those who don’t like cats. Gorgeous stripy and calico beasts, and I would love to get a cat again, but the garden is full of baby birds. A lively evening of village gossip, sports talk and earnest discussion on whether it is safe to eat large wedges of wild mushroom found growing in local pine forests. All of this punctuated with cat antics.

Yesterday a sadder occasion, a visit from a friend whose husband has a degenerative brain condition and has turned into a trembling shuffling old man in a matter of months, mumbling and  delusional. A proud and private woman who has never  asked for help, not knowing how to say to even her oldest friends that she cannot cope. A humbling time.

Then a quick hair trim from the scatty hair cutter up the road (I really can’t call her a hair stylist), who is going off camping in the mountains with her new boyfriend. She has never been camping before but is having her fingernails done for the trip and plans to wear peep-toe sandals and cropped floral pants that make her look cuter than Gwyneth Paltrow. I suggested she take along a big hat and blister ointment. She tossed her over-moussed little head at me and said all she needs is Tease for Two Vanilla Craving Kissable Whipped Body Cream and a scarlet thong or two. She may be right but I’d still pack the snakebite anti-venom kit. The mountains out here have their meaner moments.

Eye of the beholder

Thanks for all the supportive comments and emails. The crooked mechanic turned out to  be from Namaqualand where they do go around telling each other how big and tall and strong and brave and truthful they are, presumably to compensate for  feelings of regional inferiority. The car is fixed (hopefully) and the Namaqua mechanic is going to teach me how to make a cunning autumnal jam with prickly pears, transparent and glowing like amber. He says he is a world-champion at making prickly-pear jam.

Namaqualand is big sky country, an arid area extending across Namibia and South Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the small town of Pofadder (Puffadder) in the east and right away to the north of the Great Orange River. If you lived in a small dusty town called Puffadder  in the midst of empty plains, you too might  need to tell everyone how great and marvellous and world-famous you are. Many Namaqualanders work on decaying and unprofitable diamond and copper mines and  have to leave home and travel far to find decent jobs. But they bring the glories of dusty obscure Namaqualand with them. In spring, Namaqualand becomes a wonderland of wild flowers and thousands  travel there to look at the veld blooming as far as the eye can see. I have visited Namaqualand in spring several times and it is breathtaking.

But for most of the year it is hot and dry and absolutely nothing is going on there. The Namaqualand mechanic told me several time that this empty desolate landscape is the finest in the world. “Ons lewe lekker. Dit is vir ons heeltemal goed genoeg,” he assured me. We live very well. There is always enough to eat.

Simplicity, essential for a grateful life anywhere.

The nature of a passing funk

Fiercely  hot again, long panels of sunlight falling on my desk in the study and  so I input text while squinting into the dazzle. A cheerful bearded mechanic has arrived to work on the housemate’s car and they  are discussing spare parts in the garage. The mechanic has a broken-down rusting pick-up truck that looks as if it belongs to an alcoholic-in-training. He has told us three times how honest he is and how he loves helping people out of tight situations. The housemate and my undiscriminating dogs adore him. I think he is a crook.

Oh look! The housemate has invited him for lunch! Now he gets to eat us out of house and home before he robs us blind. I need to do some work on my attitude.

Because I have been going through a kind of funk all week.  Not sure at all that I’m through it, but still. I agreed to write a long review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, his last unfinished novel at the time of his suicide. While waiting for a copy of the book I began to prepare by reading accounts of DFW’s excruciating and severe depressions, as well as looking at the bleak poet JH Prynne on  language failing us all in the end and rereading Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle. Cheerful bedtime reading, bleak stuff, not perhaps the wisest course of action right now.

Then I received a long and frightening email from a woman I knew at school  who is now mentally ill and  near-destitute, about to become homeless. I was terribly upset by the email and there is nothing I can do, I don’t have money to lend her and she can’t hold down a job. State asylums are overcrowded and dangerous, there are no safety nets and she has  no family, no resources.  I’m used to telling people they can get sober even though I know sometimes that is only part of the story, but here I have nothing to offer. She can’t stay here because there is no room and we can’t afford to support her. And what has happened to her could so easily be my story.

Like all funks, this one has its more irrational aspects and  a lurking despondency. To counter that closed-in feeling, I  have been working outdoors in the sunshine, collecting wildflower and groundcover seeds  to scatter across torn-up land on a hillside beyond the village. The farmer was going to plant a vineyard, sent in bulldozers and  destroyed the fynbos, then changed his mind. The fynbos (indigenous vegetation) may grow back but invasive acacia seedlings are likely to get in first. So I seed and put down seedlings from a mix of fynbos, renosterveld and succulent Karoo biomes with the help of several eco enthusiasts who unfortunately believe that environmental crises can be solved environmentally.  Sigh.

There is a young ostrich that watches us from further down the hillside. Presumably the farmer keeps the ostrich as a watchdog (quite common here) because she stays quite close to us and  doesn’t startle at all. I am wary of her since wild animals in captivity develop  ambivalent and unnatural interactions with humans as a source of food and  we don’t eat anywhere around her or make sudden movements. Ostriches are extremely curious — those long-lashed beautiful eyes — and she mimics our movements when we begin digging. When we leave, she runs around the kopje like the wind, amazing speed and agility.

More stringent water restrictions implemented out here in the Overberg as the drought continues. The usual rubbish aimed at guilt-tripping individual householders while leaving the water-guzzling  luxury golfing estates unbothered. Wrote a letter to the local newspaper about the irony of having water tankers from Cape Town needed to provide drinking water for  thirsty people in the informal settlement while a few kilometers away hectares of nicely mowed golf courses have water sprinklers running for hours every day. It won’t get published but it will be there on file for journalists to read. And it was cathartic to write. Squinting into the dazzle, hoping the attitude brightens a little.

How we construct meaning from experience

Cold and windy weather, gusts of rain all morning. Winter nearly here. I have a recurring craving for hot ginger tea, which is not tea at all, just  fresh ginger grated fine  and spooned into a flask with a teaspoon of honey and  boiling water. Such a restorative.

I agreed to write a review of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published novel The Pale King and in preparation have been making myself read accounts of David’s severe (excruciating) depression leading to his suicide at the age of 46 in 2008. While reading and flinching at the darker details, the loss, the waste, I found this on the experience of early recovery touched on in his novel Infinite Jest (David struggled with alcohol and drug abuse at various times).

Here is the fictional character Don Gately, eight months into AA:

They somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There’s serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time …
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you’ve been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you’ll begin to start to ‘Get in Touch’ with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You’ll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anaesthetic. ‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

I love the work done by David Foster Wallace and  number myself among those who think of him as one of America’s most morally passionate writers, someone who can reach into your chest and squeeze your heart until the stone yields blood. Not an easy writer-philosopher, and much of his work eludes me, I suspect I will have to reread him many more times nbefore I get the fuller meanings. But I’m prepared for the long haul.

I began to read David Foster Wallace in earnest after finding his 2005 commencement address to students at Kenyon College online and reading his definition of true freedom as something that “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

That ‘totally hosed’ is the clincher. Another reminder to myself at that time to ‘Think, Think, Think’. A little slogan that showed up  the non-thinking cluelessness of my life before sobriety. And a reminder too that the pain is worth it. To quote the man again on writing meaningful fiction because I can’t resist it:

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies cpr to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

Windy and bright

Had a fun weekend with picnics and left-behind can openers plus mislaid pewter forks, walks by rivers, bird watching, marvellous meandering conversations at twilight. This morning I woke up to a lost Egyptian goose honking on the roof. Went out and gave him directions to the dam about half a mile away. Off he flew in the direction suggested, a beauty and like me a believer in Dr Doolittle talking to animals as interspecies communication. I’ve spoken to animals all my life, to chameleons and frogs and ostriches and tortoiseshell cats. And to herbs and gnarly wise trees. Sometimes they talk back.

My sink is filled with just-picked snappy green beans. I am making a lunch of stirfried green beans, chopped shallots, slivered garlic and silken tofu seasoned with sesame oil, light soy, a scrap of red chilli  and lemon juice, and I’m hoping a friend will join me and not mind tofu. She can make herself toast and baked beans from a can if she is not a tofu person. Somewhere at the back of the fridge, the big thwumping-growling-groaning fridge due for retirement, I have a sealed jar of fermented bean curd (doufu ru) that I adore but which smells like a long-dead goat with halitosis (ammonia with a  kick) for those who have not acquired that taste. The housemate lives under the happy illusion that the smell is a slightly over-ripened blue Roquefort cheese and thinks no more about it.

The bright north-easterly wind is blowing  yellow leaves like old patches of velvet off the catalpa trees. This morning I read a post from a long-sober friend who said she has a contented life with the usual unresolved problems. I like that. Fly south, my lovely wild goose.