Wild winter storms

The wind and rain have torn the back garden apart and squalls persist, all in a mauve or yellow light like a bruised eye blinking. Nothing too destructive though, and my heart goes out to the people of Joplin.

When I go outdoors I am amazed to find the air saturated with sweetness from my rose-scented pelargonium, grown from a cutting found in the Swartberg mountains of the Klein Karoo, a small-leaved indigenous pelargonium that has the hidden power to make the wet storm-blasted garden smell like a Persian rose bower in  summer.

For supper last night I made a comforting leek and butternut squash risotto with Parmesan and a side dish of  cherry tomato salsa. My heart is vegetarian and I was happily dreaming up more vegetarian/vegan dishes with firm tofu and delectable steamed gem squashes and thinly sliced fennel and roasted garlic, oh bliss, when our farmer neighbour arrived with half a pig, just slaughtered and cut up, ordered in January. The housemate brightened up at once and began to rave about slow-braised pork belly and Dijon-mustard coated pork loin with cannelini beans.

Life on life’s terms, as they say. I got out Fergus Henderson’s classic piggy cookbook Nose to Tail.

Middle of nowhere

And it is a glorious winter, rainbows each afternoon arching between mountain peaks, coppery leaves falling, streams full and waterbirds around the farm ponds and dams.

Yesterday we went out for a drive after  the morning walk was curtailed by rain and found ourselves on a corrugated dirt road through banks of reeds, glimpses of heavy-bellied cows on spits of sand, white egrets and surprisingly green veld, tiny red gladioli coming up. Crunching acorns under the wheels as we drove through oaks lining some roads, ruined farmhouses from the 1940s, just a few tatters of leaves hanging in the poplars like yellow semaphores. Farm labourers’ cottages tucked away on the side of the kopje, so far from anywhere, threads of blue wmoke rising from chimneys and we wondered how they get to shops or clinics, but were cheered to see solar heating panels on the roofing of the cottages,  solid shutters and doors, as this indicates the farmers may  be good employers, have put in running water, ensure visits from the mobile clinics, decent  recreational activities. But so forlorn to live there at the back of the north wind, the long walks to the muddy fields and vineyards each day, the loneliness and silence. And nobody can eat the scenery.

Standing in a brusque chilly wind and wondering how many of the people living in those cottages are trying to stay sober all alone out here? The difficulties of isolation and boredom, wide empty skies, an empty landscape, no distractions or amusements or togetherness, just the wind blowing, the veld whitened with frost or baked with  sun. In so many places, character and lives are shaped by poverty rather than by choices or ‘lifestyles’. The history of this area is all about slavery, slaves from Mauritius, Reunion, Angola, Senegal brought here against their will and named after the month of the year they were sold: January, September, October. Reggie September, Adonis February, Dulcie September, Muriel October. Children taken away and sold, husbands and wives separated, the farmer’s son raping the young slave girls, that old bitter history that persist right to the present day. (How startled I was once to see the resemblance between the  servants and their owners on a Strandveld farm, the same features, the identical  eyes and similarly shaped ears, genetic consequences of droit de  seigneur.) And lives bent to the montonous back-breaking work, the utter dependence on their owners, the hardships of drought and failed crops. Constitutional liberties have changed very little for people out here, change has hardly touched their lives.

Driving back — to  go and speak to  anyone would be to risk charges of trespassing — the rain a torrent so we could not see the road ahead, just crawled down the mountain  by memory rather than sight, hoping we were alone on the road. The desire to reach out like pressure around my heart, the understanding of what ‘service’ must have been like in Depression America, amidst so much suffering and ignorance. But it is never to do with what  we might need, only to do with what we desperately want, what we are prepared to sacrifice, what involves going to any length.

 

What do we talk about?

Icy morning with brilliant sunshine and my emails are bouncing around the world, some bug in my computer system. Nothing to be done. An old friend has breezily arrived from the city and  suggested I try some of his agave nectar on sourdough toast along with a glass of  Totally Wild Aloe & Baobab Juice. Scary stuff, I might sprinkle some on my peaky plants.

My old friend is a militant atheist (used to be a militant Marxist and before that a militant vegan) and  while enjoying my hospitality and  a warm welcome, told me that anyone who believes in religion is weak-minded, immature and stupid. I snappily retorted that he lacks imagination, is a literary philistine and profoundly irrational in his own way. Metaphor is as alien to him as repetitive number-crunching is to me. We have had this kind of repartee for decades, so no hard feelings. He admitted that he was frightened witless at an early age by a large fierce Sunday school teacher in a polka dot dress.

Then he explained time, memory and perception to me, quoting a New Yorker article by David Eagleman that I had read quite adequately all by myself. Fond as I am of my agave nectar-gobbling friend, I have little time for Men Who Explain Things To Women. There is a warped gender bias here, although I have met those who explain anything to anyone because They Alone Are Right. But conversations between men and women often stumble at this hurdle. Rebecca Solnit says it better than I could:

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me.

It is too dark to walk in the mornings now, pitch-dark and the hill slopes slippery with mud, so the housemate and I walk in the late afternoon, watching coppery and yellow leaves tumbling down from the trees, stopping to chat with neighbours and other walkers. Enjoyable but not much exercise. The empty plot where woody protea bushes flourished is now a vegetable garden with maize and runner beans . Someone at the end of a road near the stream has a young female ostrich guarding his property and she  waits dolefully at the gate for  passersby to cluck at her. Why do we talk to an ostrich the way we would talk to a domestic hen? I don’t know, but I cluck merrily in greeting and the ostrich drums away in her throat, a sound that would be ominous if not for the high diamond-mesh gate.

Adventures in sobriety: miscommunication, basking in the warmth of old affection, the  harsh beauty of winter, the long-lashed glance of the ostrich.

A small world

Pause in the rain, so I went out quickly to buy some groceries. The local ‘supermarket’ is really just a trading store with luxuries for the more affluent and packs of sugar, Imani soy mince, maize meal in bulk and canned chakalaka for the majority. I found  my grains and pulses, a small packet of jasmine rice on discount. All around me farm workers smoking handrolled cigarettes and wearing old clothes smelling of woodsmoke (no electricty, no running water). Very good-humoured if noisy atmosphere (rural Xhosa people bellow over your shoulder as if calling to one another on distant hilltops) and the manager came past and laughed when he saw a little boy tearing open a packet of toffees, saying he could have it for free. It is a tough time financially here: clothing shops go bust, there are no farm machinery outlets, the farming co-op is battling. Yet there are new shops opening  to sell hi-def TVs and cell phones.  Drug dealers are having boom times and  gun-running is profitable as ever. Small villages, or platteland dorps as we would say, hang in through bad and good times, years of drought, years of civil unrest, years of better crop prices and fattening cattle. There are potholes in the roads and more farms on sale, but also cheap drumhead cabbages and pumpkins  stacked high at the roadside, mud-stained sheep grazing peacefully in fields and  the aloes about to throw up their red spires on the kopjes.

An elderly friend came up to me and complained that a local handyman has wrecked her plumbing and now she is having to pay for him to have some kind of treatment for his alcoholism.  The treatment involves a hypnotist who claims to have been a hit in Florida and  payment in US dollars, but my elderly friend is taken with hypnotism and  there is not much I can say about that. I doubt the handyman wants to get sober and there are plenty of kind-hearted clients who will help him perpetuate his  habit. Taking money off foolish elderly women is a pastime the world over. ‘He’s a bad lot and hopeless at fixing anything,’ said my friend cheerfully, ‘but this hypnotist has the cutest accent and does Elvis impersonations too. He grew up in Brakpan and  has travelled the world, met President Obama last year when the president came down to surf in Miami.’

”The world is a small place,’ I said vaguely. Barack the surfer dude, who would’ve guessed?

Letting go again and again

Heavy rains, Internet contact coming and going. I work on with pen and paper if I can’t input online, writing and rewriting, editing as I  get access to MS Word. In the midst of a thunderstorm we discovered  that a new full cylinder of gas had been stolen, which means  moving the gas cylinders elsewhere and  keeping them in a bolted cage thingy. How this depresses me. A life bounded by security gates, padlocks, barred grilles and burglar alarms, plus that constant alertness that breeds paranoia.

Letting go. What will be will be, and I go on from hour to hour, day to day. A friend in Australia is sober seven months, another friend has 22 years. Time reclaimed from the chaos of alcoholism. This is what matters: the gratitude, the  reclaiming, the work and relatedness, the rain soaking the garden. Leeks pulled up clotted with good black earth.

Let the good times roll

Friends around for supper last night and the housemate made her special offal with trotters, honeycomb tripe and all kinds of unmentionables. The Afrikaans afval (offal) is traditionally made with curry and I mix up the spce paste with coriander, turmeric and some tamarind. I prefer my tripe done with tomatoes, Trippa alla romano, but everyone who sat eating last night was in ecstacy. For the friend who didn’t eat  offal I made a mushroom risotto with homemade lamb stock. And a watercress salad.

Our neighbours talked matter-of-factly, almost cheerfully anbout the third time their son Graham (name changed) was held up at gunpoint. He went around to a client’s house to fix the plumbing at  about 11 am on a sunny morning, let himself into the house with borrowed keys. Inside, he was pinned down by five men with guns, his cell phone taken away. One man with a northern Sotho acent said to him: ‘Don’t look at us. Whatever you do, don’t turn your head.’ Graham lay face down with his head averted and listened to the gang ransack cabinets and  stockpile guns and jewellery. He lay watching  the wall, keeping absolutely still. One man came over to him and said in a calm, friendly voice: ‘You are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘ He lay there as they left the house, and went on lying there as a car started up and moved away. He tried to move but couldn’t; he was frozen with fear and shock. At last he got up and went next door to find a phone, stumbled over the body of the owner lying in a pool of blood on the floor, shot twice in the head. He called the police and sat with the body until they came. And then he went off to his next job. Luck, chance, destiny.

We live in a country that is hard to understand, and we live with a level of danger that leaves us numbed and blunted. But it was wonderful to come outside afterwards and look up at the clouds blowing away from the stars, stand there laughing and saying goodbye. To live life to the full, regardless.

Where narrative saves lives

From an article in The Rumpus on drunkalogue memoirs:

It occurs daily – hourly in some places: people packed into church basements, listening to strangers telling their stories, mindful of a collective purpose and the rigid rules of the drunk’s narrative, outlined on page 58 of the big blue Alcoholics Anonymous book kept hidden in millions of nightstands, purses, and under passenger seats: “Our stories disclose in a general way what we were like, what happened, and what we are like now.” Each speaker rigorously fills his or her past into this outline, a recovery Mad Lib where the adjectives and pronouns may be different, but the stories are essentially and purposefully the same. It is the master narrative of recovery – the only means by which many believe they can be freed from their addiction. To an outsider, it may seem mundane, exhaustingly familiar, even pointless, the same story over and over and over again. But for those that frequent these rooms, who understand the protocol, who already have their dollar bill in hand well before the donation basket is passed, these stories are a matter of life or death. A necessity. These people are plagued by a disease that includes among its many symptoms a dangerously short memory that too easily allows the sufferer to slip back into their certain insanity of doing things over and over again, always expecting different results – an imagined future that never comes. It is a disease for which there is no immediate cure. For now, storytelling is their surest bet to a life of sobriety – a life of promise and potential, a life they never thought they’d be able to have when they were still staring down bottles that consumed them just as much as they consumed the various proofs inside. These stories – their form – serve a very specific function. In this world, narrative actually saves lives.

What was I thinking?

Keeping fingers tightly crossed that the Internet stays up long enough for me to post. Got up early and stood at the window in a voluminous fleecy blue tracksuit watching the sun come up like a coppery furnace in a sky barred with blue and gold. Wild herons flying up into the blazing light. The world is full of magic if we stay present to it all.

Now I must go and wash dishes and struggle with sentences that keel over like dead soldiers when I put them down on the page. My memory has been sucked down a deep hole somewhere and I have nothing to say. It will pass.

Dullheaded after flu so I liked this from Libba Bray:

One of the things that continues to surprise me about the writing life is how bloody impossible it can seem at times. I always feel that somehow I should have figured out how this whole thing works, but I swear that every single book is like learning how to write all over again. It’s learning not to break and run when you start dredging up those ghosts of the subconscious, those deep-down scary things that we do our best in our everyday lives to ignore. I’ve written five books now, and I know this is part of the process, and yet I am always surprised, dismayed, and panicked to find myself in this spot. I’m telling you this happens EVERY SINGLE FRIGGIN’ TIME.

Usually, I get a sense that this is about to happen because I become agitated and completely avoidant. I will whimper and pace the way dogs do before a bad storm. There will be a few days, maybe a week or two, sometimes even a month, in which the writing feels terribly stilted. False. Awful. The equivalent of small talk at a party where you don’t know anybody and you can’t leave yet because somebody else is driving, and so you just have to keep standing in the corner holding on to your sweating seltzer glass saying, “Really? How interesting. I did not know that about elephants.”

I hate this part. Hate it. These are the days when I come home with the comic book dark cloud scribbles over my head, and when my husband asks me how the writing’s going, I sigh and press my head against my palms and moan, “Terrible. I can’t figure this thing out. I don’t know anything about writing books. You have to tell them I don’t know how to write books. The last five books were a fluke, and now it’s over. Over, I tell you. I’m so sorry. I tried. I have to go watch The Simpsons now.”

If this part of the writing process were an iPod track list it would look like this:

Track #1: I Suck
Track #2: I’m Not Smart Enough to Write This Book
Track #3 No, This Is Different
Track #4: Maybe I Could Become a Firefighter/Gravedigger/Finger Puppeteer
Track #5: I Suck, Parts IV-VIII
Track #6: Why Can’t I Write Like (Fill in Blank)?
Track #7: This Doesn’t Happen To (Fill in Blank)
Track #8: Will You Help Me Fake My Death/It’s the Only Way/My Life in a Storage Unit Medley
Track #9: I Suck (Extended Dance Remix)
Track #10: What Was I Thinking?
Track #11: This Is Hopeless! (DJ Flail ‘N’ Whine Mix)
Track #12: So Overwhelmed I’m Underwater
Bonus Track: Also, I Hate My Hair

Incandescent light

The winter sun like a black glare. I have been writing to a friend in the UK and commented that I went out into the back garden to pick a bay leaf and realised our sun in early winter is as strong as the June sun in Britain. Lemons  yellowing on the trees, filling up and rounding out. Ripe avocados dropping onto the grass – each morning I spoon up a creamy avocado with a little lemon juice and some black pepper. My neighbour eats his avocados with  sugar and  cream.

Sleeping much of the day, unable to work but reading: the novels of Margarita Krapanou, the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Mayle’s semi-fictions about Provence, so light-hearted and incurious. If you peered into my soul you would only find a steaming dark lake of Ceylon tea, with and without milk, lemon, sugar. But as I lie in bed and  sneeze or splutter, I long to be up and about, catching up on work, rolling out phyllo dough, dicing tomatoes, chatting to friends, watering the garden, walking dogs. And the schleffera are in bloom, incandescent burgundy, purple and  stormy blues or violets.

Back when I have more to say and an active brain –

Mist dropping slow

Hardly a glimpse of the full moon because of low-lying mists  in the valley, grey evenings and mornings white as a wet sheet.

Making myself a pot of tea in the kitchen, the garden blank-faced with mist, but on the kitchen table there are wands of  flame-coloured gladioli, a neighbour’s gift. A dear elderly man who went out into his garden and cut an armful of his  plants for me, handing them to me at the front door with a shy uncomfortable smile.  Rare Zimbabwean gladioli, small vivid blooms, nothing like the monstrous hybrids sold by florists. Those light wands of scarlet mixed with hot orange that grow wild in the Zimbabwean grasslands, bringing back lthe lovely memories of my homeland. The kitchen glowing like a fire, lit by flowers.

Remembering how I made myself get up out of bed this morning at 5am and sit cross-legged in meditation, dull-headed and knotted up inside after a sleepless night of worries and unhappiness. Byproduct of flu, I suppose. And just sitting with a conscious mind, breathing in and out with silent deliberation, letting the dust settle, sitting out the hour with patience and focus despite  niggling misery. It worked and I make a note that this is what to do, to keep up the daily disciplines and especially so when ill or vulnerable. A promise I made myself in early sobriety, to live differently, live as if my own life mattered. And this has stood me in good stead, to pay attention and stay with the beauty as well as the grief or pain.