Following the wrong god home

The wind came up and roared all night, hammering at windows and chipping roof tiles. I lay awake thinking about the roof  blowing off and how I was going to carry three dogs to safety and then  come back to piggyback the housemate up to the loft if there was flooding.

Whenever the wind  died down, I lay and thought about what my life would have been like if I had not  been mad or drunken or depressed or procrastinating or in love at moments of opportunity. Cheerful thoughts at 3am, tell me about it. How have I wasted my life, let me count the ways.  Gratitude? Bah, humbug.

Then I got up in a high wind, put on a Japanese kimono-style dressing gown  with no belt (because the dog ate the belt) and  had to  do an undignified dash out into the dark windy garden to try to pick up fallen avocados before the dog got hold of them. Avocado pulp is not good for dogs.

The dog, wearing a grim determined look, raced ahead of me and  ran off into the cistus bushes with a large Fuertes avocado and  I had to  stumble around in the scratchy bushes swearing at him and eventually wrenching the  slimy half-chewed avocado out of his mouth. I could hear the housemate laughing at me in the background.  As soon as I had taken  away the avocado, the dog wanted to be friends and  slobber all over my  face, head-butt my belly and  make lovey-dovey noises in my ear. Then (sigh) he became erotically attached to my foot because his testosterone levels are rising as  his teeny little soft testicles descend. Yelled and swore some more, and then  got back into the kitchen and  had a cup of tea and reconciled with the dog. Sat and cuddled my other two dogs who are jealous and  have taken to chewing paperback novels (Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, damn it) to get attention.

Whenever I have gone through a time when too many friends have died and especially in the wake of suicide, I have stumbled and quavered around with a cramping fear in my heart and stomach in case anyone else I love is thinking of killing themselves and is not telling me. This  tends to make communications a little stilted.

Friend: Hi Mary, I am having a rough week here…

Mary: Don’t do it, don’t do it, promise me you won’t do anything , well anything at all.

This poem says it all so much better.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

~William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes, no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Lively up yourselves

So there we had the electrician dismantling the stove. Because I thought he wouldn’t turn up for another few weeks I had begun boiling a large pot of volcanic polenta. Stirring polenta is what I do for relaxation on Mondays. The yellow depths of polenta were spitting and gurgling like Vesuvius. The electrician looked at it with  caution. I moved the pot onto the side of the sink and  then  went out to hush the dogs barking their heads off in the garden.

My over-grown Great Dane puppy got himself into the kitchen and helped loosen some wiring at the back of the ancient stove. The electrician is a family man and fond of a naughty dog, so he began to  arm-wrestle with the dog on the kitchen floor. After a few moments of friendly chaos, the electrician knocked the polenta onto the floor and the dog ate some, stood in some, sloshed some around. Then the electrician finished thermostating the stove and put it back together again. He arm-wrestled some more with the dog and put his back out. He had to  go and rest on the sofa and the dog lay down on the floor beside him and chewed up the sleeve of his cardigan. I cleaned up the kitchen. and my small dogs came in and barked blue murder at the stranger lying on the sofa. The electrician says  he may have to bill me for the  ruined cardigan.

Despite this I felt much more cheerful. After mopping up and  removing shreds of wool from the dog’s mouth, I  reheated the polenta left in the pot, made grilled polenta slices with bitter greens and a little harissa relish for lunch.

There is so much about life we can’t control, we might as well just  relax and enjoy the ride.

The voice of someone so damaged

The week rolling over, work on my desk, a large electrical technician dismantling the old stove so as to  put in a new oven thermostat, so  I don’t have to cook everything at furnace blast. Poor little dogs all yipping outside to come in and chew wires and sniff the intruder’s bum.

Someone I liked very much and who often posted to a mailing list I visit committed suicide and  I am so sad about that. I keep wishing she had posted  the day she felt the darkness gathering, had just posted and asked for support, had shared somthing of what was hard for her, and  we might have  said or done something, one of us might have made a difference. But  she simply stopped posting and  all of us have had experience of reaching out to those who don’t want to be found, so that was that –

Woke up worried and  unhappy, a sore throat, recalling that someone in the village  has colon cancer, fears of death and suffering and bleakness, I do tolerate these intense miserable moods, irrational as they are, better than I did four years ago or even  two years ago. That is another  great benefit of sobriety, the  widening of the embrace that holds more of any colour of emotion, more heaviness, or  joy, or  darkness.

But sadness stays with me. I keep thinking about a sentence I found  on a book blog, perceptive, but it jolted me. A skilled book reader writing about Raymond Carver and saying something that startled me because I have always known this without admitting it. The suspicion of  deep layers of damage  from alcoholism, a damage that can’t be defined or described, just the ways I have of missing things or distancing or  blundering, something  I recognised in Carver’s  short stories but  didn’t see or say to myself because I was stunned by his giftedness, the asurance of his writing, the moving dialogue.

Then this quote from the perceptive book  reader who does not care for short stories: ‘Only Raymond Carver, perhaps, does it for me with his short stories, and his is the voice of someone so damaged that I also find them deeply upsetting.’

That those who are not alcoholic can occasionally see or hear the flaw in those of us who have  recovered or  hope we have recovered. When I first came across Carver’s fiction I was drinking   very heavily in my  early 30s. The short stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Will You Please be Quiet, Please? shocked me into  the most unwelcome recognition. I couldn’t stay with Carver’s fiction and I couldn’t stay away. Couldn’t bear to read him because  that stunted, frightening, obscure, unpredictable world he described was my reality.

The bitterness, blaming and  dread of  the everyday. Ordinary exchanges or objects taking on  menace. What was me and what was the drinking? I was beginning to realise that the chaotic and fearful  ways of thinking didn’t end when I  woke the next day or when the hangover wore off, that I was internalising some of the craziness and  despondency of  drunkenness, that it had become part of me.

Impossible to write about this even now because it is too close, staring me in the face. How habituated drinking distorts our reality and sense of self over the years. We do recover, do heal, but for some of us, willing or not, it can take a very long time.

Dream a little dream for me

Woke up to find the street full of owls. How many of us get to write a sentence like that more than once in a lifetime?

There was owlish hooting and more back-and-forth hooting and loud hooting then muffled hooting, so I got up and went to peer out at the dark road. Owls in the catalpa tree, owls in oaks, owls on fences. A conference of owls. If you  stay sober, mysterious things happen. (Of course, if you stay drunk, mysterious things happen too, but that is because you can’t remember  much about anything, a debased order of mystery.)  The white stretches of  grass are stiff and pointy with dew, darkened with dog prints and bird tracks. The sun is eating up the dew. The owls have flown away.

When I can’t sleep (and I sleep like the proverbial log), I sit up in bed reading fiction, philosophy, collected letters, biographies, recipes, travel  books, theories about physics or  the Enlightenment or why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. Reading is elemental. As Helen Vendler argues  here:

Without reading, there can be no learning. The humanities are essentially a reading practice. It is no accident that we say we “read” music, or that we “read” visual import. The arts (music, art, literature, theater), because they offer themselves to be “read,” generate many of the humanities—musicology, art history, literary commentary, dramatic interpretation. Through language, spoken or written, we investigate, describe, and interpret the world. The arts are, in their own realm, silent with respect to language; amply showing forth their being, they are nonetheless not self-descriptive or self-interpreting. There can be no future for the humanities—and I include philosophy and history—if there are no human beings acquainted with reading in its emotionally deepest and intellectually most extensive forms. And learning depends on reading as a practice of immersion in thought and feeling. We know that our elementary-school students cannot read with ease and enjoyment, and the same defect unsurprisingly manifests itself at every level, even in college. Without a base in alert, intense, pleasurable reading, intellectual yearning flags. 

The former art teacher  has been taken by ambulance to the city, into a very expensive and  pretentious retirement home/frail care centre with fake Italianate villa surrounds and  lollipop topiary in courtyards, accountants leaning over the nurses’ shoulders, highways buzzing with traffic and sirens. She has lived in the quiet village for decades and spent her days  painting  farm cottages,  herons by the river and mountains  with snowy peaks.

To our amazement, she is ecstatic about this transplantation and has made new men friends, says she has always been a city girl at heart. She adores the ‘trumped-up luxury’ and  says she  will be quite content to spend her children’s inheritance on  her ‘bachelorette pad’. She says she intends to spend money like water and call pizza delivery twice a week and  hire and fire night nurses as she likes. She sent everyone a cell phone pic of herself in lipstick and a platinum blonde side-swept fringe, sitting in a wing-backed armchair next to a picture window and tearing up her latest will.  

‘Let them eat cake,’ she says, and the children laugh dutifully.

Funky but good

Last night it was clear and  almost warm, so I made a successful Asian chicken salad. Any recipe that involves the  funkiness of fish sauce as a dressing is  not always successful. Who wants to eat a dish that smells as if you stepped in something? But the taste is delicious if you hold your nose. I tossed together ramen noodles, fresh coriander, spring onions (scallions), minced shallots, garlic, freshly grated ginger, moist chicken breasts steamed in ginger and light soy, fresh chilli, minced lemon grass from the garden, ripe julienned mango, fish sauce, ground toasty cashew nuts, more fish sauce, squeezed lime juice, zested lime peel, grated palm sugar and about six or seven other lively and incongruous ingredients I can’t remember. Success!

Today  it is raining and bitterly cold. A good day for work if nothing else.

The housemate’s brother is ill with some nasty colon disorder. He is  about to have a colonoscopy and has been admitted to hospital. The housemate doesn’t get along  with her brother and they  only call on birthdays and at Christmas, but she got onto the phone right away. Her brother cried when he heard her voice and they talked as if they had never been apart for  a day. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ the housemate said afterwards. She doesn’t mind repeating cliches that are true.

I felt envious listening to this. I wish I had a family like that, I wish I could be family like that to my surviving siblings. In my family blood is thinner than anything except alcohol.

Over the weekend I was talking to  a long-sober friend who ‘saw the light’ in a prison cell after trying to sever her long-suffering husband’s head from his neck with a blunt bread knife. (ouch!) She said, a little scornfully, to me: ‘You sobered up without  any drama, you  just stopped drinking as I recall, long before anyone realised you even had a problem.’ Oneupmanship in recovery is reprehensible but it happens. My friend is fond of  purple paisley scarves, wobbly black eyeliner,  teetering red heels and still likes to throw the odd scene in public places. Nobody has ever been as wicked and desperate  a drinking woman as her.

The thing is, the damage in my case was all on the inside. I didn’t want to burn down the house or kill anyone else or dance on tables naked. I just sat behind closed doors trying to work out how to kill myself and do it properly because  the drinking was taking too long to do it.

And anyone who has  sat despondent and airless in front of an empty bottle at 9am on a summer morning feeling that this has to be  the last day, that it is impossible to go on any longer, knows  all about prison cells.

The narrow space of life

The beloved dogs are all sitting under a custard apple tree on a damp morning. Satchi looks like crumpled black velvet or  soft coal, yawning, his long pink tongue swallowing up the garden. His dog turds could fertilize the universe. The custard apple tree is fruiting and there will be heavy crocodile-skinned fruit in autumn, pale and sweetish-tart on the inside.

From an email that failed to deliver itself, my sad Internet misconnections:

An interesting question –  what frightens us enough to wake up and think ‘enough is enough’?

Those moments when we suddenly think ‘I can’t go on like this’ or ‘I’m going to die if I don’t stop’ are worth their weight in gold because they interrupt the  holding pattern of  feeling  some shame, feeling ill, wanting to drink, drinking, feeling ill, feeling some shame, wanting to drink, drinking again, etc.

Years ago I saw a woman, quite old and dirty and dishevelled, drop a  two-litre jug of wine outside the bottle store in a grubby part of the city. The bottle broke, wine  spilled onto the pavement and she tried to scoop it up in her hands and drink some. Oblivious of watchers, indifferent. I remember thinking she was worse than me and wondering if I would ever go far enough down the road to be like that. It was curiosity but only just tinged with fear, not nearly enough fear to make me not go into the same bottle store that same afternoon, her being worse off and much further down the grey swampy road than me, although I might have done that same scooping if I had broken a wine bottle in my own kitchen with nobody watching. What happened when I was alone was not real, did not matter so long as nobody knew about it. That was how little I thought of myself as existing beyond the  drive to escape.

Reading a translation by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop of the poem Travelling in the Family by Carlos Drummond de Andrade:

There were distinct silences
deep within his silence.
There was my deaf grandfather
hearing the painted birds
on the ceiling of the church;
my own lack of friends;
and your lack of kisses;
there were our difficult lives
and a great separation
in the little space of the room.
The narrow space of life
crowds me up against you,
and in this ghostly embrace
it’s as if I were being burned
completely, with poignant love.
Only now do we know each other!
Eye-glasses, memories, portraits
flow in the river of blood.
Now the waters won’t let me
make out your distant face,
distant by seventy years…

Has Tripoli fallen yet? Drawing back the living room curtains so that I can see japonica and pelagoniums, a shrub with tiny lemony flowers. The poet Elizabeth Bishop, alcoholic, lesbian, shy, retiring, outspoken, a contradiction in herself,  prized ‘accuracy, spontaneity, mystery’ in art, and who would not be drawn to that as the world churns into deeper turmoil? The cold weather is sneaky but bracing.

Poignant love, I say to myself and go on writing at the old yellowwood desk, turning straw into gold or vice versa.

Feel free

Sat out in the just-about-there spring sunshine and read recipes for asparagus, artichokes and tiny broad beans with foaming hollandaise. Scary stuff, hollandaise. My  new dog lay on his back on the grass looking like an ugly shark. Great Danes have the sweetest natures of any dog I have known. The small dogs adore and  torment him because he is  still a clumsy puppy and they are  full-grown and  female.

My former art teacher  had a  lingering death-bed scene in which she forgave all her oldest friends and kissed her family members goodbye. Then she got better and  now is  about to go off to  a frail care centre. She is furious about this, has changed her will and  is busy fighting with her old friends and not speaking to her immediate family. I hope to be like her in those golden, mellow and  often hideous years. She gets on the phone to lawyers at 5am and  gets them out of bed so she can  shout at them. She refuses to look at catalogues of homes and  insists she interview care managers and matrons. Feisty, passionate and  eager to fight for myself and  quality of life.

There was a walk planned through the mountains, but my hayfever is too bad.

Last night I had a dream in which I was doing handstands against a wall  vivid with red, purple, yellow and green graffiti. Beautiful topsical turvical handstands.

For all of us freedom-loving upside-down eccentrics, here is Joe Gerstandt. Asking the unanswerable questions:

(1) Do you know who you are?

(2) Do you know what you’re here for?

(3) Do you know what your gift is?

‘Speak the truth even if your voice shakes’

 

A scattered tribe

It was so hot last night we sat out in the garden and watched the moon come up. The steamy warm breeze we call a Berg  wind was blowing, similar to the Santa Ana, or  a sirocco in Morocco. Every tiny mosquito, gnat, beetle buggy thing and insect that crawls on the earth and flies in the night or wriggles around and drops from trees, found my exposed tender skin and ate some of it. This morning I am covered in itchy bumps and red blotches. But the moon and balmy warmth was worth it.

A friend came over and said: ‘My new dog is driving me to drink.’

When some people say that, they mean they feel frazzled and they  want to go and find the  unopened gin bottle and  get out a tot measure and  shake loose a dozen  dinky ice cubes, and then forget about the whole idea because they  can’t find decent tonic in the house. When other people say that, they mean the dog is today’s excuse to  fetch the half-bottle of vodka cunningly tucked away behind the fabric softener and  pack of toilet rolls and then  have to dash to the bottle store to get  another bottle of voddies, a six-pack of beer and five litres of boxed wine for the evening. All the dog’s fault.

Whta my friend meant is that she has recently adopted her first dog, a mild-mannered  basset. She thought a dog would be fun and  a pleasure to have around.

‘He chews things,’ she said. ‘He acts if he is housetrained and then pisses in the hall just after I finish vacuuming the carpet. He barks for no reason at all. I don’t know that I am a dog-person.’

I averted my eyes from my own sweet dogs digging holes under a row of  lavender bushes, slapped a mosquito probing my forehead and sympathised. We all have those days now and again.

And I notice that I can’t write the word ‘insect’ without writing ‘incest’ (just did it again) which makes me wonder if some things ever go away or if they just hang around bothering the Unconscious and  keeping me awake in the small hours.

‘Did you have another bad dream about your father?’ the housemate asked the other morning. ‘I could hear you crying in your sleep.’

Recurring dreams are  a tough one, the more so when the dreams have to do with the reality we would do anything to forget.

But sometimes it works to remind myself ‘That was then, this is now’ and write down the  dream yet again to rob it of its sinister power, then make toast with  slightly bitter marmalade and admire my  large puppy chewing a rubber bone on the grass and looking sublimely happy and contented. Reminding myself that  my life is made up  of many layers, with the sediment of childhood trauma far far down, almost buried and forgettable. And then I go off to read Stanley Kunitz and  write fiction.

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face,

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Forever young

Conscious living — maddening, painful, frustrating, demanding. And always preferable to the alternative.

The Great  Dane puppy discovered an unattended chocolate digestive biscuit on a small plate on a low table, left by a guests. He immediately realized that unhealthy human food beats healthy nutritious dog  food hands down. He has been sitting for an hour or longer in front of the low table waiting for more manna from human heaven.

 I have a certain bounce-back resilience that  bounces back about 95 % of the time. I’m lucky that way. In the bath this morning I  started to sing a few bars of Dylan’s Forever Young, the only lines I know.

 May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young

 The sourdough is bubbling away under its warm folded rug like a murky cauldron.

 My hay fever is worse than ever and may not be caused by natural pollen but by crop spraying, loads of carcinogenic chemicals dumped onto fields and vineyards across the valley.

 Never mind! The Magnolia stellata is out in the next street and resembles a galaxy of white scented stars. The mauve  wisteria is  just opening and in a week we shall have indigenous jasmine perfuming the evenings. My lovely orb spiders have had babies, snails are mating on vertical surfaces and  there is a group of  children playing soccer together on the  playing field I can see from the  study window. Black and white, rich and poor, boys and girls, barefoot and in expensive trainers, running and shouting and  having fun. The future belongs to them.

Random, quixotic

When the going gets stressful, the stressful  get resourceful and  a little off-kilter. I am trying to revive a sourdough starter from the bottom of the fridge. If it works I shall have a semi-rye sourdough bread in three days time. If not, I shall have a fizzy mess of wild yeasts and will have wasted a kilo or more of  expensive stoneground flour.

Pollens whirl around in the  chilly wind and many people in the village have hayfever. I can hear my neighbour sneezing as she hangs out washing.  Why is she hanging out her washing so late in the day? I must go and  peer over the fence. Nosiness is  how human societies come to be glued together in curiosity and  concern.

My Internet has slowed to snail speed. And I have to write about speculative finance and  commodity fetishism and all kinds of odd subjects. Is there life after Google?

Last night I had a dream about a man I lived with when I was 19. In the dream we were together in a guesthouse with more bathrooms than bedrooms and  the guests wandered in and out of rooms wrapped in towels, searching for  somewhere to  lie down. I had a dog that was small and wicked, running away when he was called, a little red ferret of a dog. The man I loved was young again, 23,  smiling and pleased to see me, but his eyes were firmly shut, so I had no idea if he knew who I was. When I woke up I wished I could speak dream. There is a mysterious dream language that is so intensely personal and indecipherable.