Catching up with the world

‘Lest human voices wake us and we drown,‘ I thought to myself yesterday, answering the phone and talking with a friend in New York, reading emails, catching up with forums news and  bloggers’ posts (Mary Christine celebrated 27 years sober, which takes my breath away).  I know so many who find it impossible to get more than a few days together and the really  admirable thing about  27 years sober is  just that: 27 years without touching alcohol, achieved one day at a time.

Home again, missing the fires at night and thrill of heating an old boiler in order to bath (hot brackish water a luxury), falling asleep to the sound of the sea, walking through fynbos looking at francolins, guineafowl and outraged plovers guarding eggs. And I read Le Clezio and a book on Deep Green Resistance and an abundance of poetry, memorising a poem or more a day. The dog Satchi grew bigger and behaved very well on the whole, a sweet-narured, affectionate but stubborn puppy. The smaller dogs were impossibly excited and  noisy, but we all adjusted and compromised, the housemate and friends grilled plentiful sustainable fish on the coals, we talked politics late into the night and went down to the harbour, took out a boat to the island protectorate to watch penguins and seals, drove right into the wild and ungovernable valley named after the silver bearded spiders that weave webs between bushes, explored rocky beaches  and waded through forests of kelp at low tide. Scoured with salt and sunburned and blissfully tired.

The poet David Metzger:

Time unbends me
My fragments make no difference
They are children
Laughing against knowledge
Shadows grow large in the field
My window watches
Sunset swallow song
Stars arise
Page after page of my book
Writes thru time
Lights sewn together
My poem is bits & splinters
Darkness allows me.

*

Into dawn
The door opens.
Quail in pairs
Wobble out for seed
Scattered like stars
In random swirls around the green
Grace of bamboo
Moving supple in the wind.

The contrasts are staggering as always — the built-up resorts with massive holiday homes and guesthouses, boutique hotels, whale-watching boats that pursue and harass the Southern Right whales, sharkdiving boats: tourists dive down in cages and lumps of raw meat are thrown into the water to attract Great White sharks who go into a feeding frenzy. Motor launches, yachts, ski boats, buggies crashing around the dunes, boys with air rifles, tourists buying blackmarket supplies of rock lobster or abalone. Private security companies guarding homes and threatening locals who venture into affluent areas. New gates and fences going up everywhere, dunes torn apart for double garages, a skyline of satellite dishes, milkwood forests replaced with brick driveways and slabs of cement.

And then the poverty of the township, high unemployment, and scattered remnants of the older fishing communities that began here with the old whaling stations of the 18th and 19th centuries. The thin scarred women at the fish processing factories with faces hard as fists. People still cook in hearths and sleep on pillows stuffed with moulted penguin feathers, boiled to remove the stench. An elderly woman selling lice combs for those coming off the boats, yellowing lace doilies hung with musselcracker scales. Everyone afraid of the numbers of Great Whites coming into the bay, the overfishing and perlemoen (abalone) smuggling. The only viable industry is  crime, the poaching of seafood (crabs, mussels, sea urchins as well as penguin eggs) and the boom in drugs, locally made crystal meths or tik. All the police stationed at one village had been arrested and were on trial for drug dealing and poaching.

And my former art teacher suddenly very ill so that was a worry — her son flying out from America, while she sat up in her hospital bed and planned her funeral in detail, even writing the minister’s eulogy for herself. Feisty and lucid, hanging in there. Severe renal failure, congestive heart failure, her voice just a whisper on the phone, so hard to  hear that spirit quenched. But my neighbour T came through his open-heart surgery and  that was good news. We could turn off the cell phone and just walk by the sea, go to the old lighthouse on the peninsula and look out at the stormy seas. Even now, spars of mast and verdigrised cultlery wash up from shipwrecks along this coast.

Out of touch with the world for a short time, but walked into a cafe yesterday and saw headlines saying Amy Winehouse was dead. A brief painful shock to think of that intense voice and jazz/soul music talent gone. She made many successful singers (Madonna, Lady Gaga) driven by ambition rather than love of the music sound thin and plastic, inauthentic. But a waste, a journey cut short too soon. And she hasn’t been present to much around her for a while now, as Russell Brand noted:

 I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his speedboat, there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.

Revived, refreshed, rested

Which is what one should feel like at the end of every holiday, but  that doesn’t always happen. This was a good break: hours of walking, driving along the coast, exploring, bird-watching, taking the dog along quiet dirt roads so he could practise walking to heel. Reflecting, musing, unwinding by a fire of kameldoring each night, getting up early to look at crazy red dawns across the bay.

Sea birds and fynbos-dwelling birds: terns, Cape cormorants, dikkops, francolins, guineafowl, plovers, sea gulls, fiscal shrikes, waders, wagtails, tiny yellow Cape canaries.

If I didn’t have so much unpacking to do, I might even write a blog about it. But that will have to wait. Do you have any idea how much havoc can be caused by a small bottle of balsamic vinegar breaking in a overpacked vehicle jounced along dusty untarred roads?

Play on the sea shore

Off to play at the seaside with my bucket and spade! The whales are streaming into the bay to lobtail and breach, there are dolphins in the surf, penguins on the rocky promontory and birds flying low across the estuary.

I’ll be back at the end of July, will miss you — take care all my sober friends and readers.

Packing for Africa

Sat under the avocado tree and sobbed with grief. All three dogs around to give me comfort. Very slobbery and affectionate in a noisy way, but dogs are not as good at comforting  humans as cats. I wish I had a cat around at times like these.

Then the door bell rang and there was an elderly lady wanting to talk about the arthritis in her jaw, painful, nothing much to be done and  she was stoic and admirable. Didn’t want to come in for tea. The new puppy got his head stuck  in the security gate and screamed blue murder. The old lady (89) hobbled away with her hands over her ears. Calmed the dog down and felt like a failure.

Made out a long list of things to take  on holiday. Mosquito repellents, anti-flea stuff,  anti-snakebite serums. Hurricane lamps and candles. Detective novels. Bedding for the dogs. Bedding for us. Smarter crisper bedding for guests. Cast-iron pots for cooking over coals. Storage containers for dog food. A mild dog shampoo in case  the dogs roll in dead whale on the beach or encounter a skunk. Cannisters of  Kenyan coffee and English breakfast tea. Armfuls of sweaters and beach wraps, detective novels, biographies, a paperback copy of Finnegans Wake. Fiction by Sarah Waters, Emma Donohue, Iain Sinclair, David Mitchell. Roberts Birds of Southern Africa. Jacqueline Yallop’s Magpies, Squirrels & Thieves: How Victorians Collected the World. Books to help identify sea shells and  sea weeds. An almanac of tides. Several cookbooks, including C Louis Leipoldt’s antique Cape Cookery which tells you how to turn wind-dried fish into  a dish called smoorvis with chillies, tomato and potatoes. Hiking boots. Blister cream for heels. Ugly but practical khaki hats. Waterproof windcheaters. Maps. Firewood. Extra pillows and an old mohair rug from Lesotho. Dried goods: pasta, brown rice, lentils, split peas, haricot beans, chillies, nuts, origanum, cardamom pods, black pepper, strips of mango and apricots. Sacks of  sweet potatoes and butternut. Madhur Jaffrey’s hefty World Vegetarian Cooking. More spices, a small bag of lemons. Navel oranges.

The housemate and I have agreed to travel lightly on this trip. She has made her own list which runs to three pages and includes torches, chocolate, Horlicks, dog biscuits, Dettol and half a sheep. This is what always happens, we pack for Africa, as if we were heading to Timbuktu with a zoo in tow – and without doubt we will arrive at the cottage on the estuary and discover we have forgotten toothpaste.

Door into the dark

The world flickers on and off with social media connections and I sometimes crave darkness. One of my overseas publishers is going through difficult  marital tensions and I have to listen to hours of misogynist rot from him. (He won’t read this. He doesn’t read anything unless it has to do with his  banking account.) I have been kind and  made allowances and listened with empathy, etc,  then told him to shut up and get over it. Get outdoors and enjoy what is left of his faraway summer.

One of my neighbours, a close friend, needs to have an operation to replace a leaky heart valve. I am sick with dread but act cheerful and optimistic. This is what is needed here and now.

My dearest friend is dying very slowly and I can’t think about anything else, walking around gnawing my knuckles and  weeping. While revising  work estimates for the maritally troubled publisher and fact-checking and  proofreading my own work (it looks perfect to me, not a good thing) and teaching the new pup to walk nicely on a lead and  sorting out complicated feeding arrangements for three dogs and making thin but nourishing soups for my friend and cooking for weekend guests, tidying the spare room, sorting laundry, peeling green cooking apples for a pie.

And the garden smells like vanilla from massed bushes of lilac heliotrope blooming in the middle of winter.  I’m reading Seamus Heaney and wondering how it is that  distressing and insoluble crises,  dark nights of the soul and grief all somehow put fine steel into the backbone. The hard and valuable work of getting on with life.

The Forge
by Seamus Heaney

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

The sun in winter

Heatwave in the middle of winter. So hot outside that the dogs lie panting on the grass.

Scraps of notes from daily life, jottings noted between great gulps of work. How the moon fills the house at night, that bleak lunar radiance. A friend dying of cancer, smiling but not able to eat or swallow.  Helplessness. The new puppy tumbling over his own paws, running to me with his tail wagging. Wondering if this heat will last, wondering about what to take on holiday, Daydreaming about finishing short stories sitting on the beach inspired by ozone and the sight of whales sporting out in the  indigo bay. Reading Deborah Eisenberg:

“But maybe that’s what life is always like. All the time, for everyone. Maybe any moment you could say, this is normal; it’s just what’s happening. And you could equally well say, this is the strangest thing that ever could be. Probably so – it’ll just depend on where you start the story.” 

The sweet pup has chewed up a small grey-blue rug from Egypt and spat bits of carpet weave all over the living room. Why wasn’t I paying attention? I was making a lamb korma in the kitchen and talking to myself like a celebrity TV chef. How I loved that rug! But there is no use paying attention to décor or design with a houseful of dogs. Because I have my eccentric moments I’d love to live in the French author Pierre Loti’s house, the man admired by Henry James because he was ‘one of the precious few not afraid of being ridiculous’:

On an unremarkable street in the unremarkable town, the Loti house museum — two attached bourgeois houses, really — is an alternate world where wildly divergent cultures and epochs are thrown together. Loti was an eccentric of his era, and would be considered eccentric even today. He collected sperm whale teeth, Senegalese bracelets, Egyptian cat mummies, Japanese mobiles, and even bought the house next door for his overflow of objects. He posed nude except for a small genital covering to disprove rumors that his sculptured, small-waisted body was corseted. His house is the gateway to this world, with rooms that unfold as if each were a layer of his personality.

 The austere, velvet-lined Red Room is an expression of conventional, 19th-century middle-class life, sparsely decorated with family portraits, a piano and an oversize Bible that bear witness to the activities of Loti’s Protestant upbringing. The vast Renaissance Room is a surrealist fantasy of the Renaissance: 17th-century Flemish tapestries, Venetian glass, Asian and Indian statuettes, a Neo-Gothic fireplace that Loti designed himself and his own invented coat of arms (which combines the grape vine motif of his wife’s family emblem with the head-gear of a deep-sea diver.)

And here we go again on the divergence between science and religious or psychological or moralistic traditions, the shift towards more open-ended research, more efforts to understand the conundrum. The New York Times reports on medical residency accreditation in addiction:

The rethinking of addiction as a medical disease rather than a strictly psychological one began about 15 years ago, when researchers discovered through high-resonance imaging that drug addiction resulted in actual physical changes to the brain.

 Central to the understanding of addiction as a physical ailment is the belief that treatment must be continuing in order to avoid relapse. Just as no one expects a diabetes patient to be cured after six weeks of diet and insulin management, Dr. Alford said, it is unrealistic to expect most drug addicts to be cured after 28 days in a detoxification facility.

“It’s not surprising to us now that when you stop the treatment, people relapse,” Dr. Alford said. “It doesn’t mean that the treatment doesn’t work, it just means that you need to continue treatment.” Those physical changes in the brain could also explain why some smokers will still crave a cigarette 30 years after quitting, Dr. Alford said.

Sunday morning thoughts

Standing in the kitchen peeling  small turnips, carrots, parsnips and potatoes for  a dish of roast vegetables to accompany grilled lamb with rosemary. Taking deep breaths to keep anxiety down. My former art teacher, the wonderful termagant, had a bad fall and  is on her way to hospital, admitting she cannot live on her own any longer. Prepared to give up her  independence. Not easy. The housemate had a severe angina attack, is pale and subdued. I should bully her to get to a doctor who will check for heart damage but like most nurses, she dislikes doctors and hospitals, just wants to  sit in the garden laughing and playing with the dogs. Letting go for the umpteenth time.

Reviewed at the Guardian, a new book out by John Bradshaw on  dogs and what we humans have done to dogs. I love reading anything that sheds light on the mystrious relationship between dogs and  ourselves. My new Bismarck Great Dane is the sweetest, most wilful dog and growing like a beanstalk.

His account of the evolution of dogs is fascinating. Surveying the latest research, he concludes that the dog’s epic journey towards domestication probably started around 20,000 years ago. Dogs have become almost a separate species from wolves, and their evolution continues to confound biologists. What Bradshaw is keen to stress, though, is the unique evolutionary pact between humans and dogs: we have programmed into them a deep need for relationships with humans, which we must treat with respect.

This material underpins Bradshaw’s most compelling chapters, which explore the emotional lives of dogs. The revelation here for many dog owners might perhaps be that dogs’ emotional repertoires are much more limited than we generally think. Research confirms that most dog owners are convinced their dogs can feel and display complex emotions – particularly guilt. In fact, there is almost no evidence for this; dogs simply do not have the self-awareness for such emotions. But in persisting with the notion that dogs have this advanced understanding of their actions – and our expectations – we end up punishing them in ways they cannot understand. Dogs are specialists in love, fear and joy. But we must stop assuming their knowledge of emotions beyond their grasp.

The dog — my specialist in love, fear and joy – went off to meet his new vet on Friday and we were assured he is a beauty, in good condition, a rib cage still mostly cartilage, ready for more food and a new bigger stainless steel  supper dish. He will go back to the vet in a month’s time — more shots, more check-ups, more vet’s bills. He likes these outings, sits up in the front seat in a calm dignified manner. Another human projection of course, the dog as statesman at nine weeks.

And guilt like shame is a human emotion, there is no shaming behaviour in the wild.

Hanging in there a little longer

A small brown bird with a yellow beak, a frequent visitor to the garden, has begun imitating the sound of the clicker. This has resulted in great confusion for the new puppy and for me. The housemate thinks this hilariously funny. The same clever little bird can also imitate the sound of a cellphone and the shrill of a car alarm.

This week I have been thinking about the language of the heart and that softening which comes from letting go of the need to control oneself and others in a harsh, compulsive manner. This is something I first began learning about in therapy.

These days most psychotherapists have learned to redirect their attention from gathering information about the client to attending to the client’s actual experiencing in the living moment. The idea was that my therapist and myself were going on a journey together and would try to explore issues and difficulties together with as little defensiveness as possible. To imagine myself being heard rather than judged was a great leap of faith for me.

In our sessions together this meant that I would  mention something that made me feel bad. Unhappy. Uncomfortable. Angry.

The therapist would then say:  ”So let’s just sit here with that feeling of discomfort, and see what comes up.”

Then we would sit there in silence, and eventually I would say something else. She would say, “So how does it feel to say that?”

After a while, stumbling and reluctant,  I would say, “Well, it feels really horrible.”

She would say, “So, can you tell me what feels horrible about it?”

And so on. Trying and failing and trying again. Saying the hard stuff and staying with the feelings that came up. Not covering up, not pretending, not  denying how horrible it felt for me right then and there. It was really about myself and her finding just a way to explore what I was feeling. Her job was to stay out of the way and provide a space for me to explore the feelings.

Once in a while she would provide some guidance when I was blocked, but normally she would just let me explore what I was feeling, and would always encourage me to “Hang in there with that feeling for as long as you can, to see what it tells you.”

And little by little (painfully slow, painfully hard work) I began listening to myself beyond the  criticising and hating and self-loathing, without dismissing,  trying to justify or excuse or  prop myself up.  Because of that I found after a while  that I could hear people differently, without blame or praise or fault-finding. I could just listen and  hear what it was like to for them, how it felt to be them.

Kindness doesn’t happen overnight. Compassion can’t flower in an arid desert. There has to be groundwork and deep attending to what happens in any human life,  what is being said and left unsaid, the richness and beauty and anguish of another’s life. And the freedom to pay attention to our own suppressed voices within, the longings, the dread, the  dreams.

 

Elusive pursuits

Sun out and turning the grass and spears of new watsonia, chismanthus, crocosmia a strange charteuse. Greener than any known green. My herbs have drowned. After 10 minutes of clicking my way around the kitchen with the new clicker and the Great Dane pup, he thinks his name is ‘Good boy!’ A faraway friend who has been sober for five years  tells me she thinks she can now drink safely and sociably. Good luck to her.

After muesli I sit outdoors and think about friends going through hard times, family crises, health scares. About an ominous dream I had last night that brought obscure fears to the surface, the kind of dream I might appreciate in retrospect. What shadows lurk just out of sight.

And then I think about coping bahaviours, recalling an astute comment on a sobriety forum. What happens when we stop drinking but go on using the same coping behaviours, stuffing down feelings, turning to daydreams and giving up on reality, procrastinating, living through others, living onscreen rather than with others. Starving ourselves, over-eating, driving ourselves in gym or the workplace, disciplining the body but not the mind, chasing after love in  the wrong places, wanting to control everyone around us at any cost. Shaming others as we have been shamed, reminding them we have never done this or that, pointing out faults and  failures, overlooking our own self-aggrandising manner. It’s called being human.

And then there’s wishing thinking and there’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Peace of mind. Contentment. Reading this from Amy’s Humble Musings:

We’re all reaching, trying to tweak that thing that if we could “just get right” will magically make our lives perfect, or at least….happy. When it’s late and quiet and dark, sometimes we are just thinking about how to hold our marriage together. I think about the perfect formula for happiness all the time, though I’m too theologically snooty to call it that. If I could just lose weight, if I could just control my temper, if I could just remember what I wore yesterday but forget about that thing someone said last month, if I could just be open and vulnerable to the people I love — then everything would be okay. Wouldn’t it?

A slower life

The morning after the weekend, dogs sleepy and joyful, a new bird calling in the garden: a liquid urgent call I try to memorize. Searches for mislaid socks, the phone rings incessantly, talk of power cuts, no hot water for a day or two. Laughter, and running out into the garden to fetch in some washing before the rain starts again. Bundles of tea towels and aprons that smell of the wind and  wild grasses. Ordinariness in the light of sobriety.

Changeable weather, clouds frayed grey and silver and  darkening like a bruise in cumulus, the temperatures dropping. What is that bird calling in the olive trees? And nothing to say really, empty-headed and yawning at my keyboard, a poem  spilling out from memory:

The Weather
John Newlove
1938 – 2003
From: Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992

I’d like to live a slower life.
The weather gets in my words
and I want them dry. Line after line
writes itself on my face, not a grace
of age but wrinkled humour. I laugh
more than I should or more
than anyone should. This is good.

But guess again. Everyone leans, each
on each other. This is a life
without an image. But only
because nothing does much more
than just resemble. Do the shamans
do what they say they do, dancing?
This is epistemology.

This is guesswork, this is love,
this is giving up gorgeousness to please you,
you beautiful dead to be. God bless
the weather and the words. Any words. Any weather.
And where or whom. I’d never taken count before.
I wish I had. And then
I did. And here
the weather wrote again.