Life’s continuing ironies

Handsome woodpecker tapping on the trunk of the avocado tree. Not the Ground Woodpecker so common to this area, one of only three Ground Woodpecker varieties in the world, but the Goldentailed Woodpecker, Isibaqwebe, Campethera abingoni. A lover of woodlands from Tanzania to Angola, with a barbed tongue for finding insects and quite distinctive markings.

It was such a good, relaxing weekend — friends popping and out, plenty of hugs, sweet ripe strawberries and cream, books to read, walks down country lanes.

An acquaintance from a neighbouring village came around to borrow some books I have on the theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer and we sat outside talking about Bonhoeffer’s life and ideas. Woodpecker busy in an overhead tree. Buddleia, Deutzia and Polygala all in flower. The big dog ambled out and lay down on the grass, indulged himself in the sin of onanism as we were chatting.

Theological acquaintance (incredulous): What is that dog doing?
Mary (mildly): Stop it Satchi, be a good boy and go to sleep.
Dog: Self-love! May I recommend it?

The habits that shape us

Exhilarated to find that my vigorous and thorny rose Mermaid has come into bloom after the gardening service erroneously chopped it out seven years ago, sparing only a feeble shoot at one corner of the stump. It is a beauty with its ivory and pale yellow blooms, single-petalled and prolific, throwing out canes several metres long with hooked thorns.

Every now and again I hear from people who don’t believe their decades of drinking affected them other than making them drunk on numerous occasions. This makes no sense at all when we consider how habits shape us and the ways in which we come to think and how our minds are formed. Voluntary service influences how we interact with others; our eating habits are closely related to our levels of fitness; our reading changes the way we see the world and how we communicate; protecting an addiction leads to secretiveness, duplicity and the gradual manufacturing of an ‘as if’ personality, blunted and divided by the desire to drink and the fear of doing so.

So when I read yesterday that Vincent Tabak, the killer of Jo Yeates, spent a great deal of time before and distressingly after her death watching violent pornography, my feeling is that many of his interactions with women may have been blunted and twisted by fantasies of women being degraded or abused. Pornography as a behavioural addiction or fetish is another habit that impacts on personality. Julie Bindel looks at pornography and gender hatred in the Guardian:

There is no simple solution. Eliminating violent pornography will not prevent sexual violence and pornography does not, in and of itself, create men like Tabak. But the normalisation of sadistically violent imagery and the merging of pain, torture, degradation and sexual pleasure reinforces the view held by some men that women are subhuman playthings, and there to be abused.

Enough of that darkness — sometimes I read news reports (the criminality, greed, inhumanity) and feel a need to get out into the garden to breathe clean air and look at a rose with its golden stamens lifted to the sun.

Small domestic rituals

More friends for supper last night, overgrown pup behaved abominably. Boisterous and disobedient, showing off. Nevertheless we discussed recipes for broad beans past their best, the politics of food distribution in southern Africa and the latest volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters. In between cajoling the Abominable Beast to sit down and be good, and spooning up tarte tatin, shapeless and blackened with caramelised sugar at the edges, but yummy. I haven’t read the second volume of Beckett’s letters yet, but there are excellent reviews around and some moving extracts. He had a long and extremely difficult relationship with his Irish mother, but loved her deeply.

In 1948, from Dublin, where he was staying with his mother, Beckett writes this amazing comment on age and the second childhood: “The weather is fine, I walk along my old paths, I keep watching my mother’s eyes, never so blue, so stupefied, so heartrending, eyes of an endless childhood, that of old age. Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make. I think these are the first eyes that I have seen. I have no wish to see any others. I have all I need for loving and weeping. I know now what is going to close, and open inside me, but without seeing anything, there is no more seeing.”

Remembering my own long passionate involvement with Beckett’s work since I saw Waiting for Godot at the age of 17 prompted in part a post back to a sober friend on a mailing list:

Yes the morning routines are important for me — establishing certain routines to help me through the day began when I was working on a thesis in my early 30s and seeing a therapist about what I came to name as anxiety — some of us in recovery battle with depression, some with anxiety and some with both, or other issues — and in those years a formless anxiety, restlessness, despondent and immense dread seemed to take over my life at times. I couldn’t work alone, had to work on my own and hated what I produced.

I had experienced something like this years before when I was doing a dissertation in French studies on the work of Samuel Beckett (a magnificent writer the great Sam, but not cheerful) when I couldn’t bear to leave my apartment, was afraid of mirrors, empty streets and the sound of children crying, sat indoors paralysed and counting the hours until I could begin to drink at 5pm.

The therapist explained that some of this related to my war experiences and frightening childhood, that it would not go away easily because the body memories were traumatic and stuck in a loop to do with profound psychic helplessness and terror, this was how I would be for the rest of my adult life — she suggested I set up holding routines or small domestic rituals as anchors to keep me stable through the day so I went on on retreats and learned how to meditate, sit still and pay attention to the breath coming and going through my nostrils.

I also began doing stretching and balancing exercises, later t’ai chi, and these daily practices for me became self-soothing techniques that have helped me in sobriety. I still wake up at times feeling terribly anxious and unable to face the day ahead, unable to write, certain something terrible and devastating is about to happen (I used to think this was just the aftermath of drinking but it is part of the same old deep-seated anxiety, perhaps one of the reasons I self-medicated with alcohol).

So I get up and meditate, sometimes read a little, drink tea rather than coffee and do my t’ai chi, water the garden, feed my dogs, always have breakfast even if I am not hungry and then sit down and write morning pages, no fewer than three handwritten pages so that I get into the rhythm of writing that will carry me through the day.

The daily routines, as simple as running a bath or making green tea in my old white teapot, routines to hold the mind in place.

Beckett: “In the place where I have always found myself, where I will always find myself, turning round and round, falling over, getting up again, it is no longer wholly dark nor wholly silent.”

No-one is going to drop a meaningful life into your lap

Woken at 5am by the Great Dane barking at his reflection in the living room window. True, I sometimes feel like barking at my reflection in the mirror on a bad hair day but this loud deepish barking may mean my puppy is becoming a watchdog (territorial instincts kicking in), or that he just likes talking to himself when alone. He is immensely sociable, overjoyed to see me stumbling out of the bedroom and reprimanding him rudely.

Reading news websites as I had my second cup of morning tea, I read that our South African advertising standards authority has withdrawn a television advertisement depicting angels falling to earth smitten by the fragrance of a man’s deodorant, because this might offend Christians.

The advert for Axe deodorant depicts winged, attractive women crashing to earth in what appears to be an Italian town, and then being drawn towards and sniffing a young man who has used the deodorant. The text at the end of the ad reads: “Even angels will fall”.

Sandwiched in between our daily listings of rapes, murders and political corruption, this news has a wacky kind of naivety about it. Censorship here has always had a zanier-than-thou feel. Serious blasphemy and denigration of others’ beliefs, together with blatant sexism, unsubtle homophobia and various other forms of discrimination, doesn’t bother the advertising standards authority at all.

A friend at supper last night said she has given up the search for meaning in her life and is content to just live with the unknowability of it all. No, no, no, I said, we need meaning (this while washing a large cast-iron pot and reaching for a towel with wet hands, gesturing towards the universe as I did so). We create meaning and purpose in some ways — our relationship choices, our work endeavours, our determination to get sober and reclaim our lives. And then there are the elusive meaningful insights that come to us as gifts and miracles, the numinous and unexpected, a shaft of light into the darkness. Luckily for me, Jessa Crispin puts it much better in a shrewd article on Alice James among other topics:

…what Wolf sums up as, “What gives meaning to our lives gives us reasons to live, even when we do not care much, for our own sakes, whether we live or die.” And now that is the meaning her life carries: how meaninglessness is so easy to fall into, and how no one is going to drop a meaningful life into your lap. You fight for it over and over again.

More five-finger exercises

Woke early, yawned through an unthinking 45 minutes of meditation and sat down in the study just as the sun was thinking about getting up, brutally eliminated three chapters and began again on the straggly library story. I now have a single paragraph I like, but not much more than that. Went out to water the garden and grappled with the Big Dog for possession of the watering can, admired a tumbling Cecile Brunner rose in the hedge. Came inside and ate some muesli, wrote another paragraph and erased it. Should my character Loup voluntarily enter the looney bin or will the clinic director lure her in on false pretences? Why did her mother disappear in autumn 1977? Who is the young gay man stealing books in the library?

Some days are all about writing sentences and crossing out sentences.

Caught up on the news, chatted to the housemate, had some more tea, played with dogs, wrote emails, sat down at my desk and thought hard about the story. Wrote three lines and crossed them out. Gave up and began editing a chapter on political economy and funding crises in the Third World.

Fortunately I then came across a review written by some poor sod trying to make sense of Roberto Bolano’s just published Antwerp with an opening sentence that reads:

“In Antwerp a man was killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs.”

Which sets the stage for absurdity, senseless violence, resistance, fantastical outcomes as shown via our fumbling efforts to make sense of our separate and random destinies, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered in this by literature and art. It is now eight years since Roberto Bolano died of liver disease at the age of 50 and there has been a steady flow of translations and posthumous publications that either baffle or enlighten readers. Initially there was considerable hype, romantic or disturbing rumours and the curse of media fame, but now the hype has died down and the works remain, difficult and rewarding for readers willing to persist. Last year I fell into the digressive darkness of Bolano’s neverending novel 2666 and only fought my way to the surface after six weeks, wishing I could live in Bolano for ever and wrestle with strange coloured fish in the subterranean depths but emerging without so much as a handful of glittering scales to show for all that immersion.

So often writing feels as if we are in pursuit of futility — plots are just trapdoors into nowhere, characters remain cardboard, motives wear thin. We can’t write and we can’t not write. Then, in a moment, an instant, it all changes and elements click into place, exciting possibilities appear, characters step forward and begin to speak or act in ways we could not have foreseen. The story tells itself.

Not unlike the way we stay sober day and after day, muddling along, trying and failing to make sense of our lives, stumbling and wavering but not falling into relapse, holding up torches for others and hoping we are pointing them in the right direction, holding hands in the dark, grasping after elusive meanings and consolations, the trudging that often makes more sense in retrospect and yet occasionally gives up a view from the top of a steep hill, the landscape radiant with yearning, splendid, spread out below and beyond — so on we go, just bumbling and searching, lonely at times, misunderstood and misunderstanding, misguided in our loving and clutching at resentments, missing the sign posts, reading the map from south to north and upside down. If we don’t get there, wherever there may be, we have still experienced the journey.

Wit of the staircase

Except for the dinner party, it was a good weekend. Various friends called me to say what they wished they had said at the dinner party. I lay back in the bath on Sunday morning and came up with some choice l’esprit d’escalier (wit of the staircase) replies myself. Restraint of pen, tongue or keyboard is not always the most satisfying way to go and in retrospect we compose retorts of profundity and brilliance, a complete waste of time of course. It bothers me a little that if a certain ex-lover I knew when I was 27 should ever bump into me in the street, he may be astounded to hear me come out with a 3 000-word Nobel prizewinning analysis of why our relationship failed and exactly what he did wrong and what I did right.

The term l’esprit de l’escalier or thinking of the right comeback too late, comes from French philosopher Denis Diderot. During a dinner at the home of statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to Diderot which left him speechless at the time, because, he explains, “l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier” (“a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he reaches] the bottom of the stairs”).

And on the other hand I was reading the fiery Chris Hedges on OccupyUSA who comes out with what he wants to say without hesitation:

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

“America,” Langston Hughes wrote, “never was America to me.”

Gardening means backache. I spent yesterday afternoon happily weeding, mulching and bellowing at dogs who wanted to dig alongside me. My plectranthus bushes and groundcovers are putting out new leaves, green and purple-veined or light green edged in cream. Later today I am meeting with a young Xhosa writer and we will work together on a translation of some of his stories. My favourite is a detailed account of how to recognise your own Nguni cow in the dark. Useful knowledge for rural Africa but involving the ancestors who as everyone knows are tricky customers, nursing old family grudges and determined that their great-grandchildren should become traditional psychic healers or sangomas rather than IT specialists.

Slipped under our front door, a wedding invitation. The daughter of a local farmer is marrying a man she met a fortnight ago. Nobody is wildly thrilled about this hasty marriage, but the invitation promises in bold silver capitals that there will be kareoke singing at the reception after-party. No speeches or long tediously obscene jokes, just tipsy bridesmaids channeling Celine Dion. My blood runs cold.

The deal is this

Long and anguished monologue at a dinner party from a depressed businessman from the city who thinks his wife is taking too many sleeping pills, anxiolytics, tranquillizers, seratonin-enhancers. He isn’t taking any medication on principle and prides himself on toughing out his gloomy moods. He used to worry that his wife ate too much and insisted she go to Weight Watchers. Then he thought she drank too much, locked away the liquor and complained to the family doctor and minister, tried to shame her into not drinking. After that he worried in case she was having a affair with the family doctor and insisted they find a new GP. Now he thinks the new GP is giving her far too many pills. He wants to send her to a psychiatrist (his golfing buddy) and have her meds reduced and her problems sorted out. He himself has no problems, as far as he knows.

None of us at the dinner party said anything. What could we say? One guest murmured something about wanting to offer the problem wife a lifelong holiday from her controlling husband, but nobody dared laugh.

Windy and cold weekend weather, tried to write some fiction and the library story dried up like a stony riverbed. Is resurrection possible? Some stories just shrivel up and there is nothing to be done. Tried to edit another chapter of non-fiction writing and then gave up and lay on the sofa reading The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht, a magnificent and strange narrative. Dogs snoring all around, a pot of tea at hand.

I don’t know if I dislike editing myself more than I dislike being edited. Here’s the much-missed David Foster Wallace ordering Harper’s NOT to edit his copy:

The deal is this. You’re welcome to this for READINGS if you wish. What I’d ask is that you (or Ms. Rosenbush, whom I respect but fear) not copyedit this like a freshman essay. Idiosyncracies of ital, punctuation, and syntax (“stuff,” “lightbulb” as one word, “i.e.”/”e.g.” without commas after, the colon 4 words after ellipses at the end, etc.) need to be stetted. (A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more; for you, the big reason is that I’m not especially psyched to have this run at all, much less to take a blue-skyed 75-degree afternoon futzing with it to bring it into line with your specs, and you should feel obliged and borderline guilty, and I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.)

Love that last line.

Deep vegetable love abiding

Stopped to talk with an elderly farmer who arrived in the village in the 1930s and found no fewer than five Batavian teak watermills flourishing here. In those days, there were small-holdings, not cottages, and each kitchen garden had several fig trees, hedges of quince and pomegranate, the ubiquitous rough-skinned lemon, orchards of pecan and almond trees, trained apricot trees and groves of apple trees. Villagers grew tilled plots of sweet potato and enclosed gardens of medicinal herbs, the lovely kankerbos (cancer bush) and buchu, aloes and bulbinellas. Then as now, it was a secretive, self-sufficient farming community where people often kept to themselves and murmured their secrets only to the beehives at the far end of pastures.

Early summer produce is bountiful right now, with tables and stalls under trees. New bulb fennel, the late broad beans, courgettes (zucchini), young butternut, small red cabbages, bunches of sorrel, shiny purple eggplants, French beans, okra and ripening Fuertes avocados. Glass jars of homemade yoghurt and feta cheese. Distilled lavender water in rinsed wine bottles.

I confide to the housemate that I am madly in love with a recipe alchemist called Yotem Ottolenghi who is creating the most enticing and irresistible new vegetarian dishes based on Middle East flavours and seasonal produce. (Hat tip to my much-loved friend Jan for alerting me to Ottolenghi’s recipes.) The housemate commiserates with my smitten, greedy vegetable infatuation and reaffirms that she remains a carnivore. We both try to ignore the Great Dane having innocent and enthusiastic sex with a bookcase. The housemate is not desperate to eat pearl barley risotto spiked with spring onions and sorrel pesto, but says she is open to the faint possibility it may be edible.

And the fencing contractor has promised to come around on Monday evening and think about finishing the fencing job. He no longer builds fences and seems to have forgotten all he ever knew about fences. It is possible to embarrass and ex-fencing contractor into completing a fencing assignment? I may attempt to bribe him with a stuffed aubergine snack –

What it was like

Writer Will Self on living with a rare blood disease and looking back on the years of addiction:

What matter, the facts are these: for a decade or so I stuck needles in my arms, my hands, my feet and on one particularly weird occasion my penis. I schlepped across town in all weathers to buy needles and syringes from late-night chemists at Marble Arch and on Willesden Lane – because these were the only outlets in London that sold them over the counter, no questions asked. For a junky who was bad at shooting up I was peculiarly fastidious. I knew all about the risks – from septicaemia to “dirty hits” (when bacteria are injected along with drugs), and viruses such as hepatitis B – initially – then latterly hep’ C and HIV. I took precautions to guard against these maladies, such as using sterile needles wherever possible, and if I couldn’t, cleaning the old “works” with bleach in solution. Most fortuitously I hardly ever shared needles – indeed, I can only remember doing this on two or perhaps three occasions, but it’s significant that one of these involved the flea’s progress of the syringe. “It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee / and in this flea our two bloods mingled be …” – between two fellow-addicts, both of whom subsequently turned out to have hepatitis C – then on to me.

Go go go Nanowrimo!

Stayed up working on my book review until 3am and then jotted down a few notes for the fiction currently floundering and milling about. Now it is 11 am and I am making myself a refreshing Lebanese chicken, mint and lemony soup called Shourbet Djaaj Bruz. A Lebanese friend showed me how to make this years ago — left-over chicken, chiffonaded mint leaves, the juice of half a lemon, a minced garlic clove, a grind of black peppercorns, a stick of cinnamon, a handful of rice, several cupfuls of filtered water. Bring to the boil, simmer and serve up when the rice is tender, adjust for how much lemon juice you like. Light and healthy comfort food that used to get me through the cruellest hangovers.

Speaking of light and delicious food, a friend sent me a link to some inspiring recipes from the UK chef Yotam Ottolenghi and I am smitten with his take on new vegetarian cooking (and Middle Eastern dishes, Asian dishes, North African dishes etc etc). Note to unrealistic and irrational self: I need to fall in love with a chef this summer and sensually enlarge my cooking repertoire if not my girth. In recovery we owe it to ourselves to nurture and take care of our detoxed bodies. And I do know it is not that simple.

Unable to look at the flood of ghoulish and grotesque Internet images of a dying tyrant.

Nanowrimo time again, National Novel Writing Month in November, that frenzy of communal writing for 30 days. I participate because I like the company, enjoy beta-reading and commenting, like the break from each day’s solitary stint. Many of us just carry on with our usual work-in-progress and hope to get a little further with the next chapter. Let me know if you’re in there and wanting writing buddies for the month.