Trudging

Tired and extremely anxious because my housemate had heart pain all night — she is off to the clinic for tests and may need to see a specialist.

Giving myself permission to take baby steps today, just getting  over one hurdle and experiencing one fear at a time. The concept of baby steps  feels manageable, just.

The sweet Great Dane is behaving like a large glossy thug and has chased the small dogs around the house, eaten a dish towel and chewed paint off  a table leg because he detects that my energy is too low to  quell his naughtiness. He growled at me while trying to hide under the chewed table with the chewed dish cloth in his mouth, wagging his tail to show he was not growling  in a hostile manner.

Various nursing colleagues, neighbours and friends have been around to sit in the kitchen and offer advice and drink coffee. I have found over many years that  there are people who want to help but balk at doing it, people who feel their boundaries are  threatened by the idea of helping because they have been used or taken advantage of  too often so that helping always feels like enabling, people for whom helping is synonymous with controlling,  people who are too inept to be of any practical help at all, people who only understand conditional notions of helping (what is in it for me?)  and those few who help unstintingly and know something about helping as empowerment. In the Third World, this last is what counts.

This is when I am grateful for routines, the same routines and  simple little structures I write about nearly every day. There is a garden to be watered, animals to be fed,  meals to be made, pages of writing that will not write themselves. I can’t indulge the luxury of procrastination or bills won’t get paid. Work, self-care and  household tasks keep anxiety at bay and give me a way to just carry on while waiting for news.

Trudging I suppose. Every road we take or choose involves a fair amount of trudging.

 

Domestic spaces

Into another week, into the gathering autumn. Getting up this morning, making a mug of tea to take back to bed, letting my  dogs out into the dewy garden and noting it was still dark at 6am. A few pages of the writer Thomas Merton, an old favourite to read during the season of Lent or at any other time. Then meditation, my lower back aching, Merton echoing inside me, the birds waking  out in the garden with tiny chippy cries, myself staying in the present, in the allness of here and now.

Sitting with a friend last night watching a rerun of The King’s Speech, Colin Firth so grim and troubled, her mentioning a mutual acquaintance and saying as a careless aside,’But she’s one of those recovering alcoholics, you know, they never come right, just find  other addictions or ways to act out.’ My friend’s face flushing when I reminded her I was also one of those. Who knows where recovery begins or ends? We none of us find much perfection in the short span of our lives and the woundedness does go on for so much longer than we thought it would…

One of those meatless weeks approaching and I might adapt this Moroccan Mint Roasted Vegetables recipe from 102 Cookbooks. We get all kinds of authentic North African spices here, but this recipe is simple and I have a garden bouncing with fresh spearmint so I might use that as well as the dried mint. Butternut instead of radishes, and skinny green beans, broccoli and  zucchini (we call them courgettes) added once the potato and cauliflower are doing well in the oven. Light enough for summer while signalling autumn.

Autumnal sadness at moments, delicate as heartbreak healing, but persistent. Turtle doves lingering in the olive trees.

Originally from Tehran, the poet Mimi Khalvati:

Ghazal: It’s Heartache

When you wake to jitters every day, it’s heartache.
Ignore it, explore it, either way it’s heartache.
 
Youth’s a map you can never refold,
from Yokohama to Hudson Bay, it’s heartache.
 
Follow the piper, lost on the road,
whistle the tune that led him astray: it’s heartache.
 
Stop at the roadside, name each flower,
the loveliness that will always stay: it’s heartache.
 
Why do nightingales sing in the dark?
Ask the radif, it will only say ‘it’s heartache’.
 
Let khalvati, ‘a quiet retreat’,
close my ghazal and heal as it may its heartache.

The body never lies

A white nerine flushed with pink in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill. The ‘March lilies’ have begun to flower, in a green  late summer that is somehow gaunt,  losing vitality as autumn creeps closer. My neighbour’s winter arthritis is twinging already.

Went off to watch  the 2010 film Black Swan at a friend’s house, taking along a medley of chopped carrots and cucumber and sugar snap peas, fresh, juicy and just right with a lightly dilled cream cheese dip. Why do raw veg lose their sparkle and  attraction  next to a bowl of salted caramel popcorn? The film was OTT theatrical, infuriating and marvellous. Like Red Shoes, that 1940s classic of revulsion, compulsion,  beauty, masochism and craziness.

For years now I have read Joan Acocella’s columns on dance in the New Yorker and the one recurring theme in all ballet memoirs or profiles is pain and injury. Training in pointe work can damage the dancer’s feet since to dance en pointe is a technique that places the weight of the body onto the toes through the aid of wooden blocks and often occurs before physical readiness. The combination of   strength training, the strength needed for  such athletic work and the vulnerability, the  strain placed on the body from the  severe dieting, the  stress of lifts and jumping, the competitiveness — I think of all those little girls of my generation wanting to be ballerinas in pink and white tutus, the unreality of  those day dreams. Nerve compression injuries or sprained ankles, anyone?

So lovely to watch though. Svengalis and all.

Elusive fickle hope beckoning

Anyway, I had to write and deliver a conference paper, so off I went and stood up and gave the paper and answered questions.

It’s funny that I can sit down in the quiet of this study overflowing with dogs, books, rain spiders and geckos, and write bold, brave  stuff on paper, but so dread going out and standing up and reading my words and immediately hearing all the faults, mistakes and flawedness. But I got through it and answered questions in my schoolgirl French and so-so isiXhosa, then we all sat out in the autumn sunshine and talked about the death of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Homs, the tragedy and waste. Delegates from Lagos, Bogota, Maputo, Mumbai and Caracas all talked about what it feels like to live and work for change where they come from, all about making poetry and revolution and raising children and feeding the homeless and dealing with water shortages and  ending the violence. No matter where we come from  the commonality is stringer than the differences. We dream the same dreams, we suffer the same waking nightmares.

If you never read Marie Colvin’s reportage, you might want to read this American Journalism Review profile, to  underline  who she was  and the immensity of that loss.

So then I came home and my beloved dogs all ran to welcome  me because I am the heart and centre of their world, their special human.

A message left on my phone, bad news: somebody I met  for coffee last year when she was just seven weeks sober died this last weekend. She took her new sleeping meds and  got into bed with a bottle of vodka to wash them down and ease her into  the longed-for unconsciousness. She didn’t wake up.

The grief will smack me down later but for now I wish I could go back to that coffee break and  grip her by the shoulders, shake her and tell her to fight harder, get more help, stick closer to those of us who have  been there. But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. It is no good saying  we lose control of our lives in addiction, that we are powerless, that alcohol has taken over, unless there is a part of us that wants to live, that wants to believe it can get better, able to trust that fickle, improbable hope is waiting for us on the other side of the darkness.

Light frost  burning off the fields, the mountains hazy and purple. I must cook chicken necks for  dog suppers, do something interesting with oyster mushrooms and a big dish of baby spinach leaves picked at dawn. In the middle of the grooved pine  kitchen table there sits a large solid green cabbage, saying ‘Don’t boil me, for mercy’s sake.’

The wings of birds pointing

Found an old pair of capri pants in grey parachute silk and put them on after my bath this morning. The dog amazed and enraptured to see me in different clothes, fell over with surprise and lay on the floor wagging his tail and rolling his eyes at me. Great Danes are natural comics when they are not looking solemn or dignified.  It would seem I have a limited wardrobe.

Ash Wednesday, a hot sunny morning. There is no supply priest, so no Masses at the Catholic church up in the disadvantaged community. Like many other Third World countries, we are moving towards more secular understandings, joining the climate of neoglobal scepticism. Is there a sense of loss?  I wonder sometimes about the yearning that  persists, how to understand that unmet yearning for  something intangible, beyond, the numinous, otherness, the radiant and elusive. Words fail me. Reading the poet David Bottoms:

I am a believer in the power and the necessity of myth. I count myself a yearner after significance, as Robert Penn Warren called himself. I’ve experienced that personal yearning for meaning—call it the divine, if you like—and I take that yearning to be evidence of the possibility of the existence of its object. Why should I yearn for something that isn’t there? I believe pretty much what Huston Smith suggests in his book Why Religion Matters. This yearning for something greater, he says, is built into the human makeup and suggests the existence of its object—the way, say, the wings of birds point to the reality of air or the way sunflowers bend toward the light because light exists.

The ripened figs are falling from the trees, oak leaves browning towards autumn. No frost yet or morning mists, but a chill when I wake under a thin sheet at midnight, clambering out of dreams to find a quilt or  light blanket. Acorns falling onto  my neighbours’ corrugated iron roofing like  pebbles flung against a window, cracking the  night open.

This week, David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 years old on 21 February. That makes me feel inexpressibly sad, as well as cheated of more books, more of his giftedness and presence in the world. His The Depressed Person in all its  unrelieved embarrassing intensity has been described as a rare accurate  account of severe depression from the inside. The self-hatred, the crushing loneliness, the desperation of needing others while remaining unable to communicate or gain comfort from contact. Often in recovery circles, people suggest blithely to newcomers that they should phone someone and tell them how tough it is. Not a bad idea for many of us, but in severe depression this  becomes a near-impossible ordeal.

The depressed person confessed that when whatever supportive friend she was sharing with finally confessed that she (i.e., the friend) was dreadfully sorry but there was no helping it she absolutely had to get off the telephone, and had verbally detached the depressed person’s needy fingers from her pantcuff and returned to the demands of her full, vibrant long-distance life, the depressed person always sat there listening to the empty apian drone of the dial tone feeling even more isolated and inadequate and unempathized-with than she had before she’d called.

In the garden the Great Dane is eating fallen figs, an ominous sight. He is fond of fruit and known as the Peach Thief because of his cunning theft of ripe peaches from a dish placed supposedly out of reach. But even though he has a cast-iron stomach, I don’t want him eating ripe figs, so I must go and  rake them up, squelch them into  jute sacks for  compost. Outraged small birds, white-eyes and wagtails, screaming at the dog from  upper branches of the old Genoa White fig tree.

Thirsting for something

Ah yes, families. The fertile ground of  our growing years, the claustrophobia, the wisdom, the unexpressed love, the best intentions, the accretion of lies and  small crimes, the clinging and the wrenching away. In my short fiction,  the sisters have begun to talk to one another. The house, though, is falling down all around them, a dark airless box of a house shredding and dismantling itself, collapsing in on itself like a black star. Love gone sour, perhaps.

The dead parents are memory’s puppets. When I was very young I  would daydream I was an orphan waiting to be adopted. Or a changeling waiting to be found. Somewhere out there was another family, another destiny. Now I am in reality an orphan and the ghosts of my father and mother follow me from room to room in the derelict house, talking of incidents and family outings of which I have no recollection. They remember it all so differently, as do my sisters and brother.

Memory is always tricky and insubstantial, as is the way we read the present, what we choose to recall, what we consign to forgetfulness. How we simplify, edit, revise our own histories.

 

Outside in the  branching tipuana tree there is a gymnogene or African harrier hawk perched between two thick branches. Such a terrifying wingspan. In the Sahara  this hawk eats the fruit of the oil palm and catches  small rodents. Here it eats wild figs and hunts for  smaller birds and rodents. Gymnogenes nest in trees on the mountain slopes and come down to the village for water and to hunt.

 

The first time I saw the Sahara desert from a plane window I was six years old and  it seemed to me that  most of the world was desert. A rippling world of red sand dunes below me. Somewhere in amongst the dunes would be an oasis with  wells of  cold water, but I could not see any  palms or shady places, just the red sands stretching to the horizon. No roads, no signposts. Travellers would  have to find their way by the stars at night and measure time by the  sun passing overhead. Looking out of the window I began to tell myself a story of the traveller who finds an oasis after days of walking  in no particular direction. He leads his camels to the well, but the well is empty. No water. Is a miracle possible? At dusk the dew falls and he collects a cupful of dew, then another cupful. Tomorrow he will lead his camels out into the desert again.

 

Thirst. The story of my life.

What might have been / what could not be unwritten

Listening to Debussy’s Nocturnes, background music filled with the movement of clouds and sea sirens calling and  a festival of aerial light, while I write about a derelict house filled with clocks, a crumbling staircase, moonlight coming in through unshuttered windows. In the kitchen downstairs an elderly woman is reading through old letters, burning them one by one as she finishes reading. They are not her letters to burn, they are love letters written to her sister who lies sleeping in a loft bedroom.

Sibling jealousy, such a rich theme.

When I was about 13 years old and in  high school, new to formal  schooling  after years of living out on a forest reserve where education was erratic  correspondence schooling and School on the Air, I won an international  writing competition and had to go up on the  hall stage and stand next to the headmistress while she told everyone I had  done the school proud. I cringed and  looked down at my laced-up shoes as she spoke, hating the feeling of being stared at.

When I did look  into the sea of faces below me, I saw only my younger sister looking at me in utter misery and hostility. If I was to be the writer in the family, she could not go on writing. She was inconsolable and  despondent afterwards, tore up her diaries and  poems. That day I felt I had robbed her of her future. Of course, all this was irrational and typical of the thwarted relations and rivalry between siblings, a pattern between us of stifled competition and  envy, merged identities,  a contrived mirroring in which one would remain the reflection and only able to mimic the other. I assured my sister she could do whatever she liked, she could write her books and I would write mine. And yet my sister never wrote again, and a twinge of that old irrational guilt stirred in  me on reading  Colm Toibin’s how I killed my mother in the Guardian this weekend:

It mattered to her that she could have, or might have, been a writer, and perhaps it mattered to me more than I fully understood. She watched my books appear with considerable interest, and wrote me an oddly formal letter about the style of each one, but she was, I knew, also uneasy about my novels. She found them too slow and sad and oddly personal. She was careful not to say too much about this, except once when she felt that I had described her and things which had happened to her too obviously and too openly. That time she said that she might indeed soon write her own book. She made a book sound like a weapon. Perhaps a book is a weapon; perhaps an unwritten book is an even more powerful weapon than one which has been published. It has a way of filling the air with its menace or its promise, the sweet art of what might have been.

Families, families. How we help and hinder and harm one another. Who gets to have the last word on  that deep toxic or lifegiving compost that was our family life in childhood?

***

The housemate will be working in a hospice for  the disadvantaged over Easter, away most of the time, and I wish we did not have to work through weekends and religious holidays. It can’t be helped. Many people out here hold down  two or three jobs well into their 70s and 80s since retirement and pensions out here are scant options and not because people are feckless, or fail to plan ahead or save. Governments and banks are going bankrupt, money and national debt has been mismanaged, there is not enough  work available to generate wealth. Each time I see  images of Greece, the bewildered faces showing the terror of savings gone, the increasingly harsh austerity measures, the  despair and outrage, I quail at the future. On we go all the same, doing what we can.

And on a lighter note,  this  gave me such pleasure, a mountain hiker who kept Moleskine journals as he walked the Pacific Crest Trail and came home with 850 pages of journalled memories. Years ago I hiked around East Africa, Zambia and Botswana and didn’t write anything down because I was afraid it might be confiscated by border authorities or at road blocks set up by Zambian soldiers. I should have taken the risk. These journals are a wonderful resource and aide-memoire.

The blues by starlight

So we all sat out under leopard trees ( the achingly beautiful Caesalpinia ferrea with its tall slender trunk dappled like the hide of a leopard) and the skies over our bowl of a valley filled up with stars and the milky light of late summer. The musical genius with the six-string guitar was not in a mood to perform so he sat under a climbing aloe at the far end of the garden, alone and palely loitering, while a white jazz singer from Atlanta, Georgia sang  to us.

It wasn’t a bad performance, but we have  mind-blowingly good jazz out here in Africa (well, we would, wouldn’t we?) so  the audience was a little underwhelmed. Think Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Letta Mbulu, Sibongile Khumalo. Then a couple of youngsters jumped up and began riffing and the music got a whole lot better.

Like jazz everywhere, South African jazz comes out of the broken places. Heartbreak, poverty, violence, bereavement. The mining compounds, the prison cells, the shebeens and  experience of being homeless on the streets, the years of apartheid.

Nothing beats jazz under African skies on a summer evening.

Seriously. If you’re new to sobriety and can’t imagine how you could ever dance or sing sober, buy yourself a ticket to the next Cape Town International Jazz Festival and get over here and start  living it up. We were given hips for moving, fingers for snapping, a heart for soul. Here’s the laidback Sipho Gumede, from his album Blues for My Mother, playing When Days are Dark, Friends are Few.

Weekend round-up

The new improved dog is so angelic we wonder if he has been swopped for a changeling. Very disconcerting. The dog trainer I shall call Dimple came around  primed with the  smarmy successful Cesar Milan’s techniques and fell in love with  the dog.  The housemate was taught to Tsshhipsst! and stand upright looking away from the dog. The dog  loved his obedience class. By late that evening we were both worn out by the dog’s eagerness to obey our every wish and command, sitting and  wagging his tail expectantly.

Dimple said that she will come around and  spend some quality time with the dog because she needs to get away from her hooligan grandchildren who  will not respond to dog-training techniques and run wild in a lovable way. She admitted that her own dogs are not that well-trained and our Great Dane is very happy, well-adjusted and relaxed. I sort of hoped the dog would chew her handbag a little or  destroy a throw pillow in  his naughty way, but the dog just lay down when asked and watched Dimple with attentive and submissive goodness. Most unexpected. We must have done something right.

Another glorious day, breezy and  cloudless. This evening we are going to another  outdoor concert at the home of musically inclined friends. We shall be listening to  the son of a local villager, a self-described musical genius,  play his own compositions on six-string classical guitar, which will be either amazing or a few hours of sober unrelieved agony.

The housemate has gone off to a community hall to make lunch for 600 small children living with Aids or TB. We sat and worked out the quantities for three  huge steam trays of  pasta and mince bake along with a kind of luscious custard pie that is very popular. Kids out here are not faddish eaters, mostly because they are hungry. I sent along a big bowl of my  spiced peaches to be chopped up fine for the custard pie.

Because it is on my mind, I am reposting a comment I left on a new and favourite recovery blog. It isn’t about blaming, but understanding the dynamics that influence our obliviousness and denial as alcoholics.

Mrs D wrote: ‘Candy then told me about a friend of hers whose husband’s drinking is causing immense grief.  He’s boozing heavily, hiding it, lying about it.  She’s trying to talk to him about it, and has threatened to leave and take the kids with her, but he’s aggressive and in denial, and he says she’s uptight and won’t let him be himself.  He doesn’t seem to feel any guilt or think of himself as having a problem.  I don’t get that!  Is he lying to her or is he lying to himself?  This is an attitude that I just cannot relate to.’

 

My response, an insight that has helped me understand why I didn’t realise how  problematic my drinking was in my 20s:
You know, the husband may be in denial or blunted but he may also be someone like me who grew up in an alcoholic family.

My earliest memories are of my mother with a glass in her hand. Tiptoeing around the house in the morning because my mother was not well and needed to sleep. My mother at parties. My mother laughing too loud or crying, stumbling or falling. My mother making a fuss of us for no reason or ignoring us.

Alcoholic drinking was normality at home. Drinking was what made adults happy. Drinking caused fights. Drinking was for nights and weekends and holidays. To this day when I am around heavy drinkers, it feels familiar. I had no idea until I left home that not all children grow up with the roller-coaster of parental drinking.

What children internalise from an alcoholic parent is that habitual and chaotic drinking is a way of life. Unlearning that may take decades, and like your friend’s husband, I didn’t really understand what was wrong with it until my own drinking had gone far beyond acceptable. Even then, I kept thinking most people drank this way.

Unfathomable complexities

Flies in the ointment, an older generation would have said. Small things that are driving me a little crazy:

The housemate has decided that the Great Dane regards her as his Best Friend and not an Authority Figure so she has asked a dog trainer to come around and work with her and the dog. I am not invited to  this training exercise. The dog listens to me (well, more often than not) so I don’t need to  be involved with this dog training. Sigh. Trepidation fills me, but for now I will  just  sit obediently in the corner and wag my tail.

All the dog trainers I have known are control freaks and  channel Cesar Milan the Dog Whisperer. Will the housemate walk around going Tsshhpt! and hissing at the dog in a calm assertive manner?  Sigh.

My emails are bouncing around  the cyber universe and coming back to me as unsendable.

The ancient and resurrected washing machine went kerlunk, kerlunk twice and then fell silent and immovable yet again.

On the other hand, the new dark blue slip covers for the sofas look as if the living room is respectable and almost chic. Black dog hairs just vanish into the indigo denim background.

My latest fiction is Weird in a good way (as opposed to just weird and unlikely to appeal to any  serious publisher), a kind of offbeat, dark and unlikely fantasy. And I found inspiration in an article by Matthew Cheney on the kind of fiction I myself like to read and hope to write:

More and more, I find myself attracted to innovative writing that isn’t afraid to leave great gaps within itself, that doesn’t try to stick the world onto a postage stamp, but rather puts a postage stamp in the middle of the world’s unfathomable complexities.

Just looking at the word ‘postage stamp’ gives me a pang of nostalgia for the days when I could wet a stamp and stick it on an  envelope and it would wing its way around the world without  Yahoo kicking it back to me within two minutes.

Unfathomable complexities. The dog is off on a new learning curve. The sun is shining and the front garden has been weeded and watered. There are now more  flowering bushes than weeds. The part-time gardener is cutting back the Purple Medusa of a bougainvillea in between spates of arguing with his ex-wife on his cell phone.

One small craziness after another, but on we go, pausing to sniff the flowers and brush dog hairs off the sofa, practising fictionary dialogue in the kitchen while  rolling out homemade pasta. More kerlunk, kerlunk? Light and airy pasta is another miracle that doesn’t  happen on demand. But it’s there waiting to happen, like so much else in our  unfathomable lives…