Telling the truth slant

Just as I was  about to go to bed last night, book and mug of Milo set aside, I recalled a sentence from the sci-fi author William Gibson.

‘The future is already here, but unevenly distributed.’

Immediately I went to my desk, opened a notebook and wrote 4 000 words of a new fiction. That will no doubt take 18 months or longer to percolate down into  publishability. But that sudden fierce impulse to write, and having the  story make and unmake itself under my pen, is the best part of the whole enterprise, a kind of  chilly ecstacy.

On the other hand, my word count the day before yesterday was  negative. Minus 480 words. I wrote them, read through them, couldn’t go on. A dead end. Read them again yesterday and  deleted them. Another false move on the chess board of characters and imperfectly free will, what they choose to do, what I choose for them to do, what  doesn’t  work out. The red knight, the black queen, the  awkward pawn. The chess board swept clean, the game over for now.

On various blogs, there is an ongoing debate and  questioning about what we blog, why and when. Issues to do with privacy and self-disclosure, what we  suppress,  what we write about instead of what we choose not to tell. How many taboos can be broken? With what consequences? How can we talk about honesty when so much is not revealed, hidden away in private  notebooks, not even broached in  emails or letters? For example — I don’t write about  local controversies because readers  who live here might deduce my real identity. I also don’t write about local controversies because it would take too much time to explain and contextualise them for overseas readers.

Is blogging a service to readers? I honestly don’t know. It may  encourage someone to realise  how relatively  sane and ordinary life can become in sobriety. Certain posts may shed some light on the nature of alcoholism  and recovery, or depression or living with PTSD. I hope so, and I  am  always  touched to think a  post has  helped or encouraged a reader. We all need to feel useful to others.

But I write because writing is just what I do. I’m not a great talker, not really someone for the phone or any kind of public speaking. I’m an erratic listener, sometimes better than at other times, well-meaning but often unskilled. I don’t gossip, even if I enjoy hearing about scandals and secrets as much as the next person. Privacy and  silence matters to me:  my life is shaped by discretion and protectiveness of those I  care for, those who trust me. What I am at core is a writer, that is how I express myself and  that is where the impulse to blog arises, not primarily altruistic but in hopes of joining a neighbourhood of fellow bloggers and writers, a conversation, in the hope of  discovering more about life and  sober living as I write.

And fiction is another kind of territory, more random and indirect, another kind of displaced telling and  hiding. If you are a close friend of mine, you may read my  innocuous little fictions and  find your fondness for a wrist tattoo or habit of saying, ‘And your point is?’ given to a completely unrecognisable character who has just  run away from her husband  with a bisexual gym instructor, or a retrenched librarian who  has moved into a haunted house to encounter a long-dead airman who smokes Camel cigarettes and sulks under the stairs. There is a character in a sci-fi novella who drinks wine but is not alcoholic: he originates in an old university friend who likes a glass of  unwooded chardonnay on the odd occasion. I give  some quirk of my personality to  characters from time to time — a liking for homemade ravioli or quoting Wittgenstein — but  my characters go on to bear and raise  children with  troubled dispositions, or develop allergies to cats, or to show an  callous and charming  facility for murder, and they are not me.

Emily Dickinson: ‘Tell the truth/but tell it slant.’

And to end on a controversial note: here is Damian Thompson in the Guardian arguing about  the rightness and wrongness of Alcoholics Anonymous. And looking again at what neurobiology might reveal to us about the mystery of addictive behaviours. Questions and opinions to make  us think, think, think on a sleepy Thursday morning.

If its disease model is wrong, why does it work so well? There’s no mystery. It takes drunks who want to stay sober and surrounds them with like-minded souls. The “programme” doesn’t manage disease: it creates an environment in which the temptation to drink ebbs away.

Crossing a wide and wild sea

The icy brilliant mornings of winter, storms past, villagers from the poorer communities chopping fallen branches for firewood, the garden a bed of  russet fallen leaves. The harvest is at an end and  the farmers are leaving to hunt in the Richtersveld and the  cold  beautiful desert of the Namib. Some of the hunters are  more enlightened and will cull  herds of  kudu or eland to ensure the  young buck will not starve in the  spring. The killing will be clean and professional, the venison  prepared for  families back home, more meat and offal salted or dried, no waste. Other hunting  expeditions will be  given over to drunkenness and  wounded animals left to die on the veld, a macho killing frenzy of  waste and cruelty.

The former art teacher has flu and  wants a bowl of my minestrone soup and I shall make that today,  take  a flask along to a planning  meeting for workshops on healing from sexual violence. I use what vegetables I have in the kitchen, so it may not be a  classic winter minestrone. Following minestrone  techniques, however,  I  cook my chopped vegetables in layers, adding them separately so the flavours do not muddle. There will be a  soffrito or mirepoix of sorts,chopped and diced leeks and red onion, minced garlic,  celery, fennel, green beans, field mushrooms,  and carrots which are softened in olive oil, then courgettes and a little Swiss chard cooked, a few baby turnips and parsnips added and cooked. Then  homemade tomato passata, not too much. I don’t need stock so I use spring water from the mountains. Simmer a while, put in some  lentils, not too much, then finely sliced cabbage or kale. Add cooked or canned  borlotti beans, some small pasta shapes,  fresh or frozen  peas and  grated Parmesan with  finely chopped parsley to garnish. Season to taste.

If an Italian purist is around, I call this a tomato and vegetable soup because I don’t add diced potato or  risotto rice or pancetta. The starches  and grains need to be in small quantities or the soup  will be  too heavy and  leave you wanting to lie down and snore for a week. Basta!

 

For those haunted by the past. I found this  letter and response on Rumpus an few days ago and  it moved me so. Families and the intergenerational  impact of alcoholism, brokenness, failure, the longing for  reconciliation and another kind of life.  The courage to keep trying. The compassion  of strangers.

I think the first thing is to recognize how much you have, in fact, moved past these experiences, even though you claim you haven’t. You would not be sober if you hadn’t moved past them. You wouldn’t have been such an astoundingly loving son to your mother if you hadn’t. You likely wouldn’t even have been capable of writing me a letter. While it’s true you’re haunted by your past, it’s truer that you’ve traveled spectacularly far away from it. You swam across a wide and wild sea and you made it all the way to the other side. That it feels different here on this shore than you thought it would does not negate the enormity of the distance you traversed and the strength it took you to do it.

a private cloud of unknowing

A storm brewing outdoors, clouds boiling up black after a  vivid sunrise and  a brief intermission of  blue skies and sunshine. The wind rising. Acorns and  the  prickly pods of  the liquid ambar tree crashing down onto the corrugated iron roof of the stoep. The dog expectant and  hopeful that the hot-water cylinder might explode again or the roof fall in. What else might go wrong?

No point in anticipating disaster.  The gardener Boetieman is cutting back  long tangled branches of the lilac-flowering Podreana ricasoleana  or Port St John’s creeper, a beauty but invasive. It grows at the mouth of the Mzimvubu River near Port St John’s in the Eastern Cape and   is closely related to another Podreana found growing near  the Zimbabwe Ruins and Nova Sofala on the Mozambique coast. It is believed they were brought there by slave traders and  originally from South America. Every plant has a story. On the wall behind the garage, the Orange Trumpet Vine is flinging down  branches of  orange and gold flowers. The Brillantaisia or central African giant salvia has over-powered  my small washing line. The garden is  streaming colour and  tropical splendour despite a dry cold winter. If the garden  was left to its own devices, it would be jungle in  less than a year.

Over a bowl of Kellogg’s cornflakes, I muse on a skilfully written article by Christopher Page, pondering the tensions and synthesis of  rational thinking with  the promptings of intuition, how thinking and feeling, doubting and believing might come together:

I know my belief has not come about primarily as a result of a rigorous reasoned process of intellectual investigation. And yet my faith is not irrational. I do not believe in spite of reason. The beliefs to which I adhere do not demand that I put my brain in some kind of conscious cold storage. To my mind, faith is no more reasonable or unreasonable than any other possible worldview to which I might commit. I cannot be convinced that only the atheist is truly reasonable, but reason is not the deciding factor in my journey of faith.

I come to faith along a road that is more intuitive than purely rational. My journey involves things half-felt, thoughts ill-formed, impressions and sensations only partially detected. I move forward in what the anonymous 14th century mystical writer called a “cloud of unknowing.”

 

Living close to the earth

Monday morning  arrived in an arctic blast of  wind. Put on a  pot of vegetable soup using left-over roast vegetables, grilled tomatoes and chopped parsley, a scant handful of lentils, plenty of  water, dashed out with the dog and an apple to crunch,  but we were driven back by the icy wind, I  came in with  ear ache and  watering eyes, the dog happy to get into the warm kitchen again, shouting for his biscuit.

Yerterday was a mixed time of troubles and  happiness, Pentecost Sunday blazing with  sun like a bouquet of flames,  flickering golden light on the mountains. But we woke to find the side gate padlock smashed and  footprints all around the back garden. Intruders and  although we have been burgled — invaded — so often, I never get used to the violation, the sense of outrage. A neighbour up the road was burgled and the police are looking for  three young men, armed. Armed. Well, not a good start to the day. It is all very well saying we have dogs to protect us, but I do not want my dogs hurt.

But a friend came to  put another padlock on the larger gate and  secure the  gate to the  side of the house. We had planned a brunch with friends on an old farm in a nearby valley but could not leave the house unsecured, so stayed home, waited for  Fr P, the housemate’s new best friend, and grilled deboned leg of lamb,  made Greek schwarmas or gyros in  pita bread with  diced tomatoes, onions, cucumber and yoghurt, roasted winter vegetables and the housemate outdid herself with a treacle pudding. Fr P known simply as P arrived and  settled under the trees in the winter sunshine with a detective novel and the giant dog at his feet ( a dog lover, to our relief). Other friends  turned up and offered to help finish the treacle toffee pudding. We talked about murder mysteries and  dog breeds and P told us all about  travelling around the small hill towns of Italy and how the Italians,  divide up young roasted partridges with their bare hands, the crusty bruschettas and ‘humanitas‘ of life there. The housemate is on fire for the Olympics and Wimbledon next month,  so some of us talked about sport and the dogs all lay around snoring as the  mild  sunny afternoon wore on. I showed P the  ribbon bushes (Hypoestes aristata)  flowering purple at the back of the garden and he  gave me his grandmother’s recipe for  the ultimate minestrone soup. When he left he said it had been a ‘heavenly’ day and that he will come again soon. He will need to come again soon because he has borrowed an armful of novels and  an Elizabeth David cookbook. It was a good day. Everybody needs time off from roles, whether they are writers, nurses or priests and  that easy-going conviviality did us all good.

What brings us alive

‘What are you making  for  Sunday lunch?’ asked the housemate. ‘Is there anything you need from the shops over the mountain?’

Mary, happily. ‘Jubilee Coronation Chicken with curry and mayonnaise! This was served up in 1953 by Rosemary Hume and Constance Spry for the brand-new Queen Elizabeth II. I am going to give the chicken an Asian twist, lighten up on the mayo and slice in a little mango, toss some watercress, and then we too can join in all the waving of Union Jacks and  Prince Philip mugs and Royal hoopla. The last Diamond Jubilee Monarch, Queen Victoria, has all her diaries online and  she reads just  like a chatty blogger. I’m enthralled with royalty. ‘

Housemate: ‘Did I ever tell you that  my uncle was the mayor of S— and  entertained the Royal family on their tour of South Africa in 1947? He said both Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret played footsie with him under the  supper table.’

Mary: ‘Wasn’t this your uncle the gambler and philanderer from  Putsonderwater? He also said that he was descended from three American presidents.’

Housemate:’But the family says Frikkie was very handsome when he was young, except for the jug ears. He told jokes about flying pigs and bulls’ testicles and  could strum a banjo like Tommy Dorsey. He gave Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy new words all about a  cattle farmer on his wedding night. Back then he was known as a ladies’ man. Nowadays he’d be known as a sexist pest.’

Would the uncle from Putsonderwater have been less of a liability than  outspoken Prince Philip? We shall never know.

Our friends Anthony and  Trix (made-up names) are moving away to Zambia because A has a new job to do with the  financing and building of a  bushveld hospital. This sounds like a very bad idea because Trix has  lupus and needs frequent medical care and urban comforts, but she is wildly excited and planning to take up wildlife photography. We are invited to go up there and spend Christmas sitting under thorn trees eating free-range  African chickens that I know from experience are tough as old boots since they outrun wild dogs and  lynxes and have more lives than a cat. I  will miss my friends. At this time of life, each loss or separation feels like deprivation, a connection and  intimacy that can’t be replaced. David Whyte’s poetry echoing in me:

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

On, then, into the adventure and ups and downs of life, pushing out the boat into that chilly exhilarating current and hoping for the best. The Catholic priest who is the housemate’s new best friend may be coming over for lunch on Pentecost Sunday and  perhaps roast lamb  might  be more appealing than a weird  retro chicken mayo dish. Taking myself to the back of the garden in cold sunlight to sit drafting fiction in a notebook, dogs sprawled on the grass around me, the sparrows and  wagtails loud in trees overhead. Reflecting on vulnerability,  illness and healing, what helps us through that dark night — reading Jennifer Nix on coming through the  ordeal,  facing what has to be faced:

All the while, I obsessed over whether I deserved someone else’s kidney. As my husband, family, and friends stepped forward to be tested as potential donor matches, I couldn’t stop asking myself whether my heart was true. “The Crystal in Tamalpais” found me a month into my confusion by way of the coincidences and connections that occur when a heart and mind are open to poetry. My childhood exposure to Catholicism didn’t infect me with any particular religious faith, but as I stared down mortality, I craved contact with something beyond the self—some advice, some confession, perhaps some ethereal, knowing comrade to steady me as I sat in examination and waiting rooms or lay awake in bed every night.

All around me there are friends waiting, a curious time of uncertainty — waiting for  an operation, waiting for divorce papers, waiting for a house sale, waiting for test results, waiting for bankruptcy hearings, waiting for a son to be released from prison. I hope the waiting is over soon and that there will be healing and new beginnings.

Here is David Whyte’s poem in full:

Sweet Darkness

 

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

 

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

 

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

 

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

 

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

 

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

 

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

 

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

 

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

 

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

 

is too small for you.

 

 

Letter from Africa

Another streaky vermilion sunrise, icy cold, with all that  deep colour staining the  skies and landscape. A blood-red scarlet glory of a sunrise. Horned owls flying home across the  fields, blue cranes flying south towards the dam.

It is freezing cold, there must be snow falling on the mountains.The mountain peaks are hidden behind cloud and mist, but I can smell snow in the air. As I type these words I am wearing fingerless woollen mittens with pink and  dark blue horizontal stripes and  trying to finish off a long report all about  human rights, economics and how we fit in a little ecology as an afterthought, always a bad thing. This report must be  emailed off to a desk in Montreal and once it has been written and  checked and  checked again and sent off, I shall eat a poached egg on a  slice of  wholewheat bread as my reward. The soaring music of Bach fills the living room.

The sweet dog is waiting for his morning walk. A friend is waiting for me to call back. A mysterious new  fiction is waiting to be written. Bach’s Cello Suites go on soaring. More references. more footnotes, rewriting for concision. The mist drifting like gossamer down the mountain slopes.

And in between fetching more tea, Darjeeling in the small white teapot, and  checking my spelling. I scribble away on this blog, so companionable, so receptive and forgiving. What is the point of blogging, after all? Cathartic, a way of snaring the moment as it slips away, recording a mood, a passing whim, a  passing fear or grudge — there it is, written down, expressed, out in the open.

When I was small, we were encouraged to write to pen pals overseas in the Commonwealth, other schoolchildren who wanted to hear details about living in Africa. Every Friday afternoon I would sit down with my  blue airmail writing paper marked Par Avion and  I would write about giraffes and  lions and rivers  full of crocodiles. Then the  letter would be sent off to the city and  from there it would be sent by  plane to London. And weeks or months later, I would get a reply from somebody writing about football and Barbie dolls and the price of sweets called Liquorice Allsorts and sherbet fountains. My pen pal would ask if I lived in a jungle and  if I was allowed to run around without clothes. I would write back and explain that  we wore straw hats and  long-sleeved  tops because of the fierce sun. And then I would draw a picture of a hippopotamus.and ask my pen pal to draw a sherbet fountain. Wild animals did not interest me very much because they were  always there, out on the veld, in the rivers,  going about their own business.  If I tried to write about my real life, how  dogs needed to have ticks  gently removed after a walk in the veld, the heat at nights and my mother’s  nervousness about bats hanging upside down in the garage, the Shona  men and women  singing as they walked downtown to protest white racism, the delirious bouts of malaria I  suffered each summer, my pen pal would  ask  about the giraffes and  lions. She only cared for what she called the ‘real Africa’, by which she meant the African fantasy shown in cinemas and in  magazines about wildlife. I was not real to her and  she  once asked if I could get a bone to wear in my nose like little black Sambo. She  didn’t know any better and I had no idea  of her life, could only see her with pigtails and pink cheeks amidst red double-decker buses and English colonels in tweed jackets, eating her  Liquorice Allsorts. Our correspondence faltered and then stopped. My life did not seem that exotic to me, but her life had an ordinariness I envied.

And  my reports even today remind me of  those letters sent to someone on the other side of the world who  wants only the ‘real Africa’, the dramas and tragedies, the cost of mass starvation and  the cost of  rescue missions,a lurid and exaggerated fantasy of Africa,  not the patient complex lives of ordinary people privileged to live in one of the last areas of wilderness in the world, a vanishing kingdom of  giraffes, elephants, lions and embattled rhinos.

And  now I must end this three-minute blog and  finish my  report, no more three minute breaks, no more time spent at play, not even two minutes to take away a pillow from the dog, not even a minute to spare. Here’s Tim Minchin’s Three-Minute Song:

Kind and tender living

Mild early winter weather, not unlike a cool summer day, the valley sleepy, fields ploughed gold and contented bees thrumming away. I’ve hung out washing and  watered plants, set out spring onions ( scallions) and bunches of parsley and coriander, young carrots and  a small drumhead cabbage to be  peeled and sliced fine for some kind of Asian slaw. A solitary ripe mango and two limes. A little cold cooked chicken breast in the fridge, a handful of  what the Italians call ‘blettes’, the  central rib of Swiss chard leaves, saved from last night’s minestr9ne. Nothing  wasted, simple cooking in small portions.

I found  an interview with food writer Tamar Adler that resonated  so deeply for me on this question of  how we learn to eat well and   stop wasting food, pay more attention to  preparing food with  care and thoughtfulness:

[S]ustainable cooking — real sustainable cooking — not simply sustainably raised ingredients, but the kind of cooking that’s required if we’re going to be responsible eaters, which means using everything. Practically and inevitably, if you use all of something, you’re completely changing the impact your consumption has on the world. You become an incredibly low-impact eater if you start using your stems and peels and stale bread. And I feel — as I said about drawing people away from something — that drawing people to a good practice that would inevitably move them away from bad practices is better than saying, “to eat sustainably you need to use all of everything.” Using everything, as opposed to seeing what you have and thinking about what you’re missing is what we’re talking about as kind and tender cooking. That difference in perspective is at the heart of all kindness and tenderness — right? It’s the fact of having, versus the fact of having and thinking you still need something else.

Without falling  into  sentimentality, I do think that  kindness and tenderness are as necessary, as needed, in the kitchen as  next to the bed of a sick friend. Whatever softens within us at the sound of another’s pain,  reaches out to offer help or support or just being there as a loving witness. The place in us that glows with warmth when we see children playing or hear loved  pieces of music. The heart of flesh that was once oblivious, a heart of stone, now tender and  filled with  aliveness, longings,  heartbreak, hopefulness. The toast we butter, the soup we offer, the  left-overs reinvented.

I’ve  posted this from Naomi Shihab Nye  before, but it always touches me:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

The landscape I call home, a place that for me is filled with  memories and  stories. This is a promotional video, so not gritty enough or nakedly truthful enough, but  it is all I can find –

Literal deluge

The  new hot-water cylinder/geyser in the loft exploded at  about 8am this morning and flooded the kitchen and bathroom. Water  gushing down through old wood beams. If the house had modern ceilings, they would have  come crashing down.

Neighbours heard the  loud bang and rushed over as I phoned the housemate on my  low batteried cell phone and  she called the electrician/plumber, the landlord, more neighbours.  The  dogs were safely herded into a dry room, we moved furniture. The landlord arrived and  promptly lost the keys to the  gate, began shouting orders at everyone. I had turned off the electricity (my terror of live  electricity, water and lethal shocks) and  was setting out buckets as rugs  rippled on a tide of muddy water, fruit bowls  overflowed, and cordoned dogs barked furiously, Slipped in the kitchen ankle-deep in water and wrenched my back, my neighbour skidded  down to join me. We helped each other up, laughing  and reassuring one another. The kitchen and bathrooms sluiced with  a torrent of water that flowed out into the back yard. The water mains were turned off and  the loft  mopped down, then  we  set to work on the wooden and tiled floors. A river flowing  right through the house, water everywhere, tide marks on  table legs, the skirting boards stained and swollen.

‘A flood!’ shouted  my  elderly neighbour J as she  and her husband came over, bearing flasks of coffee and  dry blankets, old towels in case the dogs were wet and needing a rub-down. The housemate rang every five minutes to check that the dogs were fine.The dogs of course were in seventh heaven with all the noise, excitement and attention.

‘Think of this as a good  spring-cleaning opportunity!’ joked the electrician/plumber. I  smiled weakly at him. He has just had a heart bypass and must not be upset or agitated by anyone. I have no idea what went wrong with the new  hot water cylinder, but he  went up with three assitants and  replaced the  cylinder within 40 minutes.

A literal deluge.  But there we are with hot and cold running water again, insurance claims to be filled out, the  floors drying, the house scrubbed and  neat again, habitable. Rugs and tablecloths  hanging up outside in the bright winter sunshine, cushion covers soaking  in  sudsy bath water. Neighbours chatting over mugs of coffee. Dogs  running around outside and  sniffing the mud. In a short while I shall  lie down with a hot-water bottle tucked against the small of my back and reflect on  how to go with the flow, how to ride the tide of circumstances with equanimity.

Not having meant to keep us waiting

Monday morning and I’m listening to  the late Robin Gibb of the BeeGees as well as snatches of the late Donna Summer — a season of  elegies for disco divas. I wasn’t into ’70s disco or ’80s pop much and nobody could have been more surprised by the Abba revival than I was. But lovely music, in retrospect.

Went out in the early morning sunlight and shooed away  wild guinea fowl pecking in the back garden because they are  fat and lazy from too much new grass after rain and my small dogs might catch one. The Great Dane  doesn’t catch anything.

Steaming quinoa for   lunch after reminding myself how to do it properly. Couscous gave me trouble for years because I wouldn’t read the instructions on the packet. And I  don’t know I ever quite got polenta  right, it takes  so long before the  yellow porridgey stuff pulls away from the side of the stove! By then my arm has  fallen off.

Moved to find this reflection on memory and the Resurrection from one of America’s most  thoughtful and subtle thinkers, Marilynne Robinson:

There is so little to remember of anyone — an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long,

 

And here, a memory — Robin Gibb singing Saved by the Bell.

Dismantling an engine, disciplining the mind

Up before 5am on a chilly clear Sunday morning, stars  bright and no dew on the grass. The housemate  opening the security gates so she can drive out, the dogs called in from the enclosed yard and the back door bolted,  security lights switched on in the garden. What I would give to  not have to live like this, the awareness of danger always too close, too  much of a possibility.

But  reality is what it is. Some realities can be challenged and changed, some realities must be accepted. We work for change, for a  kinder and more equitable society, and  at the same time  adjust and brace ourselves to survive in a reality that is not  equitable and certainly not kind or safe.

More writing laid out on  on my table in the study for inputting and editing, to be reworked and cut back and amplified, polished or  left rough in places. Reading the spiky and brilliant Jeanette Winterson on teaching creative writing:

If the new writing phenomenon is to be positive it needs to be bold. I believe that we are all part of the creative continuum, but I am sure that there are different doses and dilutions of creativity. We are not all the same and we do not have the same aptitudes or talents. I can’t make you a writer. What I can do is show you how to strip a piece of text like dismantling an engine – and put it back and see why it roars or purrs. My own method is oily rag and spanners. Words and how they work is what interests me.

I was born in Manchester and I grew up in a working-class tradition of self-help that included Worker’s Extension Lectures and the Mechanics Institute – one of many radical and pioneering Manchester initiatives for uneducated workers. I know from my own experience that learning how to read deeply – and that means diverse and sometimes difficult texts – trains your brain and improves your sense of self. Learning how to write, even reasonably well, gives fluency to the rest of life.

As I  set out my notebooks and reference material, I wait for a call from the housemate to let me know she has crossed the mountains safely and arrived at her destination without any trouble. We have had cars hijacked on that lonely road and I  will not be able to sit down and work until I know she is safe. Living with anxiety  day and night is wearying. And anxiety, whether it is real or  somatic, is very painful to live with — that tense coiled spring inside, the inability to relax, the  overwhelming sense of dread and helplessness, the imagination jumping to  its own frightening conclusions, the  slow disciplining and calming  of  runaway thoughts. An emotion that comes in many uncomfortable shapes and forms. My friend who is going through an unwanted and painful divorce tells me how she wakes each morning to a knotted stomach and  the sensation of panic — she has constant  headaches and an upset stomach, has lost weight. Another friend who says she has ‘nothing much to worry about’ at two years sober has the same symptoms, just as real and  distressing, and she is tormented because she  says there is no reason for her to feel this way. Anxiety disorders are  hard on mind and body.

There — the call as  dawn breaks over the mountains, the small buck (klipspringers)  scattering at first light, running up from the river in dappled swift formations. She has arrived safely,the security lights can be  switched off, the back door  opened, the day can begin. And perhaps one day we shall not have to live in fear of one another,  perhaps one day the thief in the night, the armed and desperate  intruder, the  ruthless gangs roaming the rural areas, all of them  will have found safety too and we might all learn to become human together.