Oleanders and lemons

My neighbour’s oleanders are breaking into  masses of flower,  cerise, light pink and a heavy cream that is near-yellow. Because oleander bushes are so poisonous I don’t plant them in my garden but  the sight of them, the balled flowers and leathery spear-shaped leaves, the pools of black shadow below the bushes, makes me think of Greek islands, white walls and black rocks, indigo seas, griiled baby squid, feta cheese, Calamata olives,  sunburn and uncomfortable sex on hot afternoons.

A distraction from thinking about the veld fires raging all around us in the mountains, sweaty firefighters coming in to get medical attention by helicopter. The big dog  shivers with fright as the  yellow helicopters fly in low over the garden to land on the  fields across the road,  blades a  blur and engines roaring. Tractor haul water tanks up the road, there are fire engines on access roads, a fine blue haze hanging low on the mountains, plumes of innocuous-looking smoke.

Oh, and  oleanders remind me of Greek lemon trees growing in pockets of stony soil. I’m not awake yet this Monday morning, let’s have a poem by Jennifer Atkinson instead:

Lemon Tree

after Agnes Martin

Tilled snow

Plucked arpeggios

Of revery rungs

Laddered for zero

The inverse of music

Undelirious lines

Correggio’s

Unchecked hand

Minus the background

Noise of content

The aftereffect of citrus

Scent and the curious

Dryness left

On your hands

When you pare

The fruit opens

running through the middle of my head

The weekend of the killer tomatoes. There are jars and jars of tomato puree on shelves in the coolest darkest part of the kitchen. If I never see a tomato again, it will be too soon.

Last night we packed a  wicker basket with  cold roasted chicken, salad, ciabatta,  juices and  mineral water, then went off to a folk music concert in a large garden. Through the fronds of the old flamboyant tree above where the folk singer sat, we could see lines of scarlet fire running up and down the mountains and above that a swelling sickle belly of moon. It is too dangerous at night to send helicopters or firefighters into these mountains after nightfall, so  the fires raged unchecked all through the night. This morning the valley is smoky with shreds of ash  still falling.

A friend’s daughter sat with us and  as usual drank far far too much. Her mother was embarrassed and exasperated. I don’t get exasperated with drunken people because it took me nearly 30 years to stop drinking and nobody made the slightest difference once I was in the grip of  that  compulsion.

 

I’ve written here before that  the term ‘alcoholic’ is essentially a self-defining identity, that only the drinker can decide if she or he is alcoholic as opposed to  ‘just overdoing it now and again’ or drinking because  my husband doesn’t understand me’. Many of  my university friends drank far more than I did, ended up  in emergency casualty with  alcohol poisoning, drove cars into  garage walls while drunk, bungee-jumped into ravines while drunk, had black-outs and behaved extremely badly while drunk. And then they  sobered up, got a life and  assumed adult responsibilities, cut out the partying, drinking and wild antics. Others, like me, carried on quietly drinking to excess, and others still, who had  never touched alcohol  at university, began  to drink when they found themselves alone with  a child  all day or going through the turmoil of divorce, or just because at 5pm the vodka was there.

It is also true that alcoholism is an open secret and most of us can tell when someone’s drinking is out of control. We may need to name that destructive irrational behaviour  for our own sanity. All the same, unless that active alcoholic wants to get sober and wants it badly enough to ask for help or to make radical life changes, there is nothing to be done except to protect oneself and  step away. In my experience, severe  and chronic alcoholism is a messy business that takes no prisoners.

The wild fires in these mountains are known as runaway fires because they  race out of control within  an hour or two and will change direction according to  the prevailing wind or the presence of volatile brush or  timber, dead grasses,  dry leaves, haystacks. Even when the wind drops, the fires will go on burning on blackened and scorched earth for days.

Driving home in the smoky moonlit heat, the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen on the car radio:

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet

and a freight train running through the middle of my head

Only you can cool my desire

I’m on fire

Not entirely solitary

A friend  commented on a forum that he is ‘such a wuss’ about turbulence while flying. Well, who isn’t?

My greatest fear around turbulence on flights used to be the terror that they would stop serving liquor to passengers. I could face death but not enforced sobriety. And the more gin I drank, the more it looked as if the wing was falling off or the undercarriage dangling by one metal thread. To make matters worse, I was always seated next to the hijacker disguised as a clean-shaven soft-spoken businessman.

Paranoia, I have known it.

Another bright and windless day, another chapter written and edited. There is lasagna ready for the oven, blanched and peeled tomatoes ready for  bottling. The dogs sprawled at my feet as I work in the study, all gazing  at me in rapt dog love. Also known as the canine hope of another b-i-s-c-u-i-t.

Admittedly, there is no running water, but I have filled the bath with cold water so we will not die of thirst. Although the  neighbour who is coming around for lunch may not  like the idea of drinking a glass of bathwater with her lasagna.

The old solitude/loneliness conundrum. This same neighbour who is married and lives with a husband, two teenagers and a mother-in-law, pointed out crossly  that I have more of a social life than  she does. Which is true enough and many people who work from home welcome sociability  when the  day’s work is done. The singleton who wrote  Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, Eric Klingenberg, discusses  the paradoxes of  single living:

We need to make a distinction between living alone and being alone, or being isolated, or feeling lonely. These are all different things. In fact, people who live alone tend to spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors than people who are married. So one thing I learned is that living alone is not an entirely solitary experience. It’s generally a quite social one.

An intense desire to run away

Woke up feverish and headachey, some passing virus or recurrence of an old bout of malaria. Found a Kikkoman packet of dried miso soup in the back of the store cupboard and I shall mince some  new garlic and  snip spring onions, grate a little ginger. That combination of powdered red miso, dehydrated kelp and dried bonito flakes in boiling water is reviving, full of umami. Although thousands might not agree, since  miso is an acquired taste for us in the West. In order to give miso a chance, you have to use the best miso paste or powder available, the cheap miso mixes  have a spongy bitter aftertaste.

The best reading to accompany  miso soup is Haruki Murakami or Kenzaburo Oe, but if I  get those rhythms and strange masterful analogies into my head, the  piece I am writing will just gravitate towards imitation. Maybe I should just read  some more editorial on the American election primaries, which are zanier than any  sci fi novel could be. Our politics out here thrive on weirdness, so I don’t know why I should be surprised that politicians elsewhere take a walk on the wild side.

A friend who lives two streets away called to say she has a splitting hangover after celebrating  the sale of  her house. She isn’t an alcoholic as far as I know and that house has been on the market for  two years. I have no  problem with  people drinking  or  drinking to excess on the odd occasion: it is none of my business and I’m not puritanical about  those able to let rip once in a while.  Brightly suggested some miso soup to help clear her head.

The garden needs weeding, the  floor of the kitchen could do  with a mopping, there are blogs to read, dishes to wash, meals to plan. Dogs to walk. Emails to answer. Any activity except writing  has a certain  urgency. An article on writer’s procrastination from the funny and truthful AL Kennedy:

Robert Louis Stevenson once said that he didn’t like writing, he liked having written. And I think I know how he felt. The act of writing is delightful, once you’ve entered into the proceedings, it’s simply that – like many other intimate, involving and tiring activities – writing creates nervousness, fumbling and an intense desire to run away before it can really take a hold.

Post-miso feedback: the hungover friend called to say in a petulant dissatisfied tone that  she found the soup  fishy, horribly salty and disgusting. But she does feel better. Soup, glorious soup. Now I have no more excuses to keep me from the next chapter or  scene, unless the doorbell rings or a Person from Porlock wanders down the street.

Trouble shared, trouble halved

Overslept for once, woke up and  there was no time for meditation, no time for morning pages, no time for pottering around. I didn’t mind because I had awakened from that deep refreshing sleep I remember as a teenager, sprawled  out as the clock ticked on, face creased into the pillows, sheets kicked loose, just  lying there as if you could sleep for ever. And when I finally sat up and rubbed my eyes, it had been drizzling all night and the garden was soaked, no need to go out and  deal with bone-dry ground or tussocks of weeds.

The relief of change, a break in routine. We all need that from time to time.

And  going through my notes, I see I have 4 700 words written on a new fiction, either a short story nearly finished or a healthy chunk of novella, or the opening pages of a novel. I’m hoping for a short story because my heroine here is a  young woman named Purefoy who keeps disappearing and coming back as someone else, scaring her  family and  friends. It feels like a horror story to me, although I don’t know that  many horror  writers would think it gory enough. I’m no good at gore and commercial genre typing can be a prison. The character Purefoy is also irksome in metamorphosis because she chews her  fingernails raw and takes a single bite out of  apples or hunks of cheese before throwing them away, so much waste. The project of writing fiction is an ongoing productive tension between conscious intention and the  unconscious  breaking in to subvert the plot.

In any case, I will finish this draft, rewrite it and in late February, after yet another reworking,  send it away to my beta reader and  let her  splodge red pen all over the pages, tell me what doesn’t work for her as a reader. I do the same for her and  we trust one another’s judgment. After that I will rewrite it again and send it back to her, do more corrections as suggested by her and rewrite once more, format it to specifications, send it off to an editor who likes my work. At that point it will either be rejected or shelved, or I shall sit down and rewrite it again following the editor’s critique, submit it for publication. There are no short-cuts when it comes to getting published, even if you have been through this process a dozen or three dozen times.

Not the easiest way to earn a living, but it is what I do.

Out on the local farms there are cases of multi-drug-resistant  tuberculosis and the farms are to be quarantined by government health authorities. Many of those  ill with TB are refugees and working illegally as farm labourers, so nobody  is going to  be happy about the quarantine. The housemate is collecting  sterile masks and gloves, sealed boxes of  medical equipment to deal with what may be a regional crisis. She is relieved that the outbreak isn’t the highly contagious Ebola virus.

Headlines in the local newspaper say that at a conservative estimate, 4.4-million people in South Africa have died of Aids, mostly children and the younger generation. By 2015,  six million will be living with HIV/Aids. Such a tragedy.

But on we go, mustering good will and  practical concern. And a neighbour has just arrived with several deep woven fruit baskets  filled with ripe scarlet tomatoes that  we ordered a month or so back. Fruit has ripened early  in the heat. Cracked, split and scarred, but magnificent in taste and  unsprayed. This weekend we shall make  tomato purees,  chutneys and pasta sauces, decanted into jars and bottled, lined up on the shelves high in the kitchen. A labour of love that saves us so much because I shall not have to buy canned tomatoes until early next summer.

Whenever I get stuck in a battle of wills with the nail-biting character Purefoy, I can take time out to  deal with tomato preparations in the kitchen. There are five-litre and 10-litre pots standing on the kitchen table, rows of  glass jars  waiting to be washed and boiled, rubber rings, tight-fitting lids. On Saturday there there will be five of us working side by side, shouting and laughing and scalding our knuckles; in turn we will go over and help others bottle their tomatoes, pickling onions or peaches.

Neighborliness, beta readers, good will and practical concern — it may not solve everything but  at least the troubles are shared.

It is what it is

Another Monday morning, another week unfolding. Got up at 5am, yawned through meditation, put on  some old pants and  weeded the front garden before watering, tugging up stubborn runners of grass and  digging out the  sly roots of  a wild sweet pea scrambler that strangles young plants if not checked. Then came indoors and wrote more fiction, scribbling away in a notebook as my tea went cold. Took the dog out into the back garden and threw a ball for him, combed my small dogs, chatted with the housemate over a muesli breakfast. A catalogue of what  need not be recorded, I suppose, the minutiae of  dailiness.

Outside, neighbours are walking  dogs, jogging and cycling before it gets any hotter.  Municipal workers brandishing scythes and  weed-eaters, trimming the verges of village streets.

Swallows doing figures of eight over the  rooftops, a falcon lazily circling in the distance.

This is of course an illusion, the peace and quiet of a small dorp or farming town, the clouds drifting overhead, the crates of ripe tomatoes stacked high in farmers’ pick-up trucks, the scything of  late summer grasses. Things are tough here. Many properties are listed for sale, businesses are closing down, farms going bankrupt as the  global depression  hits harder. It is an unspeakable relief not to wake up ill and sweating with  panic, dread, or  shame any longer, but the sober day holds its own  challenges,  uneasiness, the wrestling with  stubborn weeds and text that  needs to be rewritten or, worse, written differently, the  constant effort of selling work, of economising, paying for  essentials, cutting back, working harder.

The Great Dane is chasing his tail round and round under the trees, not a care in the world.

The housemate  talks on the phone with a man suffering from  prostate cancer,  calmly discussing courses of treatments,  working out  petrol costs for travelling to specialists, the cost of a hospital bed if one might be available, the unpaid leave to be taken. Up the road there is a workshop on living with  diabetes, another workshop on ending violence against women and children, teaching anger management to men back from Libya, establshing yet another shelter for  women, a refuge that must be funded somehow.

On the far side of the  village, there is a golfing tournament. Smooth bright green lawns ribboning in an artificial meander amidst the dusty veld, luxuriously watered while  locals queue up to buy drinking water. A number of  the farmers’ sons are playing in the tournament and then leaving on a trip: they have organised an expedition to cull elephants in Botswana and  are loading  up their  Range Rovers with rifles, whisky, cooler boxes of  deli foods, and bundles of vine stumps for firewood. Tourists have booked to join them as observers and  are paying a small fortune flying out to  join this murderous safari. My stomach turns over with queasiness.

Neighborliness, natural beauty, poverty, cruelty and violence, so much from which I once fled. Now I  shall take off my grubby gardening clothes, sit in a hot bath and contemplate the abyss. Then  take a deep breath and start over, one deadline at a time, one protest at a time, one act of human kindness at a time. Letting my heart crack open like a ripe pomegranate, the white membrane stained red, the juiciness spilling out unaccounted for, profligate, abundant.

This given life

The former art teacher complaining that it takes so long to die. ‘I should have left by now,’ she says, almost wistfully except that her voice catches with fear. Sends  a message to me for more  beef consomme, more chicken consomme, possibly a  spoonful of French onion soup. I doubt she  will be able to  sip much of it, yet all the same, hope keeps  leaping in me with each return of her appetite.

Hot and humid weather persisting. The housemate has dizzy spells. I thought we had to attend an al fresco music concert and  picnic tonight (the new moon) in a friend’s farm garden but I had the date wrong. Instead we shall Frontline the dogs and I can make lamb stock that I turn into frozen cubes to be dropped into soups and casseroles a few cubes at a time. The trick with good stock is to get all the fat out, so the stock is light and clean. Needless to say I prefer to do this in winter, but I have some lamb’s bones from the butcher and the sooner  processed the better.

At least once a week I have a bad dream or nightmare about the incest. Nothing to be done about that. The cycle of dreams may stop, they may not. I don’t know what I’d do if the bright-eyed girl I was at 22 appeared out of nowhere and asked me when the healing would take place or be completed. I’d have to say ‘Maybe never,’ and that still makes me shiver. On brave mornings I  write down the dreams.

A woman called, shall we say Zettie, from a village over the mountains,  popped in to chat to me and have some tea. Kuier, as it is known in Afrikaans. She looks after her brother, aged 67, who is dying of alcoholism, needs a certain amount of alcohol each day just to ward off the DTs  or worse. Twice each week a group of AA members drives out and sits with him: they wash sheets and  help prepare meals to be frozen, sit and chat with her, help repair the gutters and electricals. He may not ever get sober but they certainly have more impetus to stay sober after witnessing his condition. Her children drive seven hours from the Eastern Cape once a month to  take care of him so she can get away for a day or two. In his more lucid moments, Zettie’s brother suffers terribly. Nobody is judgmental — it’s understood that  he may not be one of the lucky ones who get to stay sober, that he is  severely ill and the pancreas compromised. Before Zettie left, I ran to the freezer to get some miracle-working homemade chicken soup and will visit her next month. In any culture, learning to take care of our own is fundamental. And a privilege.

When I try to water my wilting  pelargoniums on the verandah, bad-tempered house sparrows  dive at me in fury. I have no idea why. It is the wrong time of year for  newborn fledglings and  they have no external threats I can detect. My favourite pelargonium has a scent like just-grated nutmeg.

Written in stone, written in sand

And finally late yesterday, the storm broke, sizzling and crackling across the valley,black and silver  gouts of rain, that unmistakeable smell of the red dust and curry bushes, bone-dry foliage, bleached grasses  smacked alive by a sudden downpour. Lightning and  very loud thunder, the dogs all raced from room to room barking wildly and then  clustered around me on the sofa. Afterwards, the air was cooler but the humidity worse.

John Burnside has won the TS Eliot prize for poetry and has an eloquent  piece on  what poetry means to some of us:

There are poems that have, literally, changed my life, because they have changed the way I looked at and listened to the world; there are poems that, on repeated reading, have gradually revealed to me areas of my own experience that, for reasons both personal and societal, I had lost sight of; and there are poems that I have read over and over again, knowing they contained some secret knowledge that I had yet to discover, but refused to give up on. So, at the most basic level, poetry is important because it makes us think, it opens us up to wonder and the sometimes astonishing possibilities of language. It is, in its subtle yet powerful way, a discipline for re-engaging with a world we take too much for granted.

After the storm had subsided, standing at the back door and  looking out into the dripping darkness, the air  quivering with gnats, the cicadas starting up again, I had a moment of irrational sadness that had to do with other houses I have lived in, other lovers, other gardens. The times I have gone out to call for a cat in the rainy garden, trains running past and throwing light onto the wet road, the times I picked up broken branches from an oleander bush and paused to listen for someone’s return, footsteps coming up the gravel drive, the  evening I went out barefoot in rain-soaked grass and trod on a garden hose in the dark, that  sudden terror of thinking I had  trod on a snake. The mind can kill us with illusions — that night I  came near to fainting, my heart beating unbearably fast, a bitter taste in my mouth, gulping for  breath with my foot motionless on that smooth round hosepipe.The mind in error, the conviction misplaced.

How often have I lain awake tormented by  fears that did not materialise,  things I believed with all my heart and which would turn out to be wrong?

Out here, a farmer told me once  about a  fruit packer who nearly died after locking himself into a cold room near the packing sheds, waited there shivering and convinced he would freeze to death. When  the farmer was able to  prise open the door, he  wrapped the  chilled and  shivering  worker in blankets, all the while explaining to him that the  cold room was not in fact refrigerated, the electricity was turned off. The room had been at  a normal temperature, no colder than the  summer evening all around in the orchards. But the trapped man’s mind had  told him otherwise and his body temperature had plummeted.

This too is  part of the inner struggle against addiction, that conviction that a substance is utterly necessary, that we cannot live without it. A conviction that persists long after the cravings have stopped, long after the active addiction has ebbed away. The mind returning to  a cherished and essential illusion:  this is essential, this is who I am, this is inevitability, written in stone. Accompanied and contradicted by another favourite illusion: this time it will be different, this time it will work, this time it will come out right.

White nights

Woken from sleep by the intense itching of a mosquito bite on the instep of my foot. Agony in a minor key, unable to stop myself from reaching down and scratching. The tiny high whine of the mosquito hovering above me in the darkness.

Went through to the bathroom and  searched for the old standby cure of my childhood, Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia in a dark blue glass bottle. My mother told us to  dab it on mosquito bites, sunburn, pimples, cuts and scrapes. I was told to swallow a chalky mouthful once a week to help my skin stay unblemished because otherwise I would not attract a husband. To keep ‘regular’, all of us children were dosed with cod liver oil masked by molasses each Saturday morning. The large tarnished tablespoon used for measuring out  doses  and the way the taste lingered stays with me. If we had a temperature, there would be brandy to break the fever and then a teaspoon of Marmite to build us up. My mother had no faith in disprin or doctors.

And now I have no Milk of Magnesia, no cod liver oil, no brandy or jar of Marmite on the bathroom shelf, no brass-bound medicine chest  at the back of a capacious pantry.

Eventually I soothed the itchy bite with a dab of sticky pink Germolene, went back to bed and lay in the dark just  following my mind into the  solid block of sensation as I do each day in  sitting practice,  noticing how the itching sensation would become unbearable, increase in ferocity and then  lighten, diffuse. The tickling of a fly on my forearm, the eyelash pricking a corner of the  lid, the desire to yawn — all worth close attention in sitting practice. There is nothing that doesn’t matter. After a  while, my hands rigid at my sides,the itch would  ease for a few seconds, soften and  just ebb away. Then I found myself thinking of something else entirely and  when I brought my attention back to the itching it was hardly there. That daily effort of meditation slowly turning into a tool for coping with physical aches and pains, the understanding of how my own skittish mind works, what it shies from and what  helps me hold steady.

Woken again by the voice of a character in a story  that lies unfinished on my desk. I turned over and closed my eyes, but his voice kept talking, demanding a response.  Got up, made tea and sat down at my desk, began writing. The uses of insomnia, the way a plot snaggle or a discontented  character will not leave  the writer alone. How I resist endings, my dread of closure. And  all narrative has an unfinished quality for me, I want to come to the last page and find another book within the book waiting for me, want to write the last line, pause and then  go on with  what has not yet been told, the story behind the story.

From Lars Iyer of Spurious:

‘Were it not for those terrible nights of insomnia I would not write’. Kafka suffers from the day, his job, his family; he writes to discover that peculiar absence which unbinds time from itself, that disarticulation which breaks him from the chance of even beginning to write words on the page. Writing is a pseudo-task, the simulacrum of a project: you can’t complete what does not even allow you to begin and you can’t begin a task which seems to require that you relinquish the very possibility of setting out.

How to understand the strange drama of writing, this demand which sends you on a great detour before you ever write a line? Kafka’s letters, notebooks and diaries allow him to mark time with respect to the absence of time, to find himself just as he begins to lose himself; they save him, but what can we expect from them but despair? As soon as he writes, he is lost. And when he writes about losing loss, when he writes about writing, his loss is redoubled.

Sweated raw in the furnace

Furnace season: runaway veld fires, the house thickening with flies, herbs  scorched brown. The heat wave may not break until the weekend and schools close early, work on farms has slowed to a crawl. We fill bird baths and leave out saucers of water for the cobras at the far end of the back garden. The dogs  lie panting under tables and stretch out against cooler old walls in the living room.

Trickles of sweat down my back, itchy under-arms, chafed thighs. There are ice cubes dissolving in the dogs’ drinking bowls, jugs of  iced tea and ginger beer in the fridge, bottles of  refrigerated water lining the shelves. I go out and give cups of cold water and  slices of bread and jam to unemployed people searching for work and walking  from farm to farm in this deadly heat. Several elderly villagers have been hospitalised with heat stroke or dehydration.

Despite the heat or to counter the heat by sweating more, I make spicy African peanut soup the way it was taught to me  by a bad-tempered shopkeeper in Mtito Andei in Kenya. The school bus had broken down and we were stuck between Nairobi and Tsavo or Voi,  a crowd of bored teenagers standing around annoying the shopkeeper who  at last made us something to eat in the hope we would go out and lie under thorn trees in the shade and sleep. He talked, as he was cooking, to the other students, who understood his Swahili. I  couldn’t follow and just watched.

Down here I can’t get the  large good roasted peanuts of East Africa, so I use a  spoonful or two of crunchy peanut  butter. A handful of methi or fresh fenugreek, some coriander leaves,  diced carrots, potatoes, onions, some wild spinach or moroq, some  black or red maize (corn) scraped off young cobs. Piripiri (birdseye) chillies to taste, ground black pepper, peeled and  diced ripe tomatoes. Plenty of tomato. Peanut butter stirred in at the end, sometimes a little sour cream or  a garnish of  coriander leaves. No measurements, I just  follow my instincts because it is one of those soups that can’t go wrong so long as you  go easy on the chillies.

Standing half-naked at the gas hob, apron crumpling at the corners,  a bandanna tied around my head, sweat dripping, the kitchen smelling good. Remembering the monsoon  seasons of East Africa, trade winds blowing across from the Horn of Africa and how the monsoon would break, the kitchen garden  turned into a seething  red pond,  the banana palms  torn apart, the verandahs sluiced with rain. The relief of it, that heat broken by rain and wind like a whiplash, the violence needed to crack through that humidity.

And here too, the rain will fall in the mountains, the drought will break.