Out of this nettle, danger

My neo-global landbase in Africa, the poinsettais bleeding into gravel, on the main road the ancient overloaded buses belching leaded blue exhaust, the fields wet and hail-smitten,  a solitary baby horned owl scowling in a hollow knot of the oak tree down the road. Nature red, tawny and besmirched.

Last night at the library committee meeting, a retired psychologist wanted to talk about gun control. Not a good idea. I just sat and  listened. My own feelings are that if you are reactive around issues to do with guns (and who isn’t?), you should keep your mouth shut. If you haven’t  shot and killed somebody and seen what gunshot wounds do to a person, it would be better not to talk guns. If you think killing someone with a gun is going to keep you safe from the victim’s vengeful family  or gang members, you have not  been there for the ongoing repercussions. Don’t bother talking about policy if the other person is talking about culture, entitlement, identity.  There is no point in talking about countries like Japan where there is  strict gun control and very little violence because South Africa is not Japan. All talk about guns is essentially utopian, to do with a world that doesn’t and may never exist, in which only  the disciplined and careful get to use guns, or  there are no guns at all. In reality there will be more incidents of criminal serial shooting, more suicides by gunshot, more  domestic violence featuring  guns — and gun  legislation  is about as useless as legislation on the war against drugs. There is a spiral of violence that is unstoppable right now. And some of us will go on trying to  bring about peace and some of us will go on arguing with  other reactive and  hostile gun-owners or gun-haters, pointlessly.

The cheerful gap-toothed street cleaner has a new Armsel Striker shotgun. he carries it around with him and  shows it to everyone who asks. It looks stolen to me, but who knows? Almost everyone here is armed to the teeth and trigger-happy.  There are Berettas in  bedside cabinets, semi-assault rifles in the garages, shoppers wear holsters with revolvers and keep pistols in handbags. Rossi, Smith & Wesson, Winchesters. You can buy  weapons under the counter almost anywhere, so  school children  have  guns in their backpacks,  homeless people keep guns in plastic bags, retired pensioners with  failing eyesight  own guns. A few of us don’t own guns because, well, because we don’t. But for many people, the right to own a gun is an objective and cherished freedom, until the  day  you are shot by somebody with a lawfully or unlawfully owned gun. Out here, lawful gun-owners commit  crimes with guns, too. The country is a thicket of illegal and legal guns, a violent and increasingly lawless society. And the  fatality statistics are appalling, as you might expect.

Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part II:

‘But I tell you my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’

Where do we find a safe-enough place if not within? What does it mean to think we deserve to feel safe, that we  can only feel safe if there are locks on the doors, a gun under the pillow?

So perhaps guns don’t provide the illusion of safety any longer. The concept of safety is a luxury, something many of us gave up years ago. We live amidst risk and threat and we need to come to terms with that. This is how it is. If we want fullness of  life, quality of life, we  must learn to live with the readiness to lose our lives at any time, randomly, brutally unnecessarily, as so many others here have done. Nothing privileged or special about any single one of us. And all of us will die at some point, none of us  will get to have much choice in how or when we die.

And one of these days we might even risk talking to one another about fear, danger and hatred of the Other, How we  feel about murdering someone who might murder us. How we are ready to kill someone who  steals  fruit from the tree in the back garden or  breaks into our house looking for food. How we feel when we see wild animals killed by  hunters who are not  hungry and for whom such murder is just recreation. The  white deer grazing in a forest clearing. The awakened sleeper in a house  full of  whispers.

 

From the poet James Fenton:

THE WATCHER IN THE SQUARE

I wake in the night with a start.
A log settles in the grate
And what was that?
A cat? A rat?
I hate them both with all my heart.
What business have they being up so late?

And what about that man
On the dark side of the square?
What harm has he
In mind for me?
What dark malevolent plan?
What business has he standing watching there?

The night is on the tiles.
A mood settles on the moon.
It gives the faintest of all watery smiles.
It will be gone soon.

But when the smile is gone
And darkness has its day
The watcher at my window will watch on.
He will not slip away.

The lovers hurry by
The watcher in the square.
They seem so busy in their ecstasy.
Hatred has time to spare.

Hatred knows no land,
No hearth, no wife, no brood,
And time lies heavy on the hater’s hand
And cold as the moon’s mood.

Though I take the forest track
Or ride the mountain trail
I’ll never shake the watcher off my back,
The wizard off my tail.

In the stable lantern’s soot,
In the soft step on the stair,
I shall glimpse the eye, I shall waken to the foot
Of the watcher in the square.

 

 

a link between shame and mercy

The horned owl calling from oak and camphor trees. Before the wind came up and began lolloping across the fields, chasing clouds like grey sheep, it was a deep gentle night, some moonlight,  many stars.  The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit, as Joyce wrote in Ulysses.

An addendum on shame. (I have been following the Affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, as well as readings in Melanie Klein’s Object Relations for those who might want to research  further.)

When I was a child I read all the novels of Charles Dickens, one by one, because we had them at home, lined up in  gilt- and green-backed volumes in the library next to my father’s study. Bleak House, Hard Times, Nicolas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers. On each shelf of the tall bookcase, there were white naphthalene mothballs tucked into corners to discourage  fish moths or silverfish. The ferocious pure smell assaults me still.
In books I found myself and in Dickens I found something that  spoke to the heart of my  own experience.

I looked for something in each volume of Dickens that I could not name, but with which I identified very closely, finding myself between the lines and in shadowy places. At night I would sit up in bed reading and rereading certain passages and  speeches.

Years later, I read about Dickens’ own childhood for the first time. The feeling of recognition, that ‘Aha, I knew it!’ sensation  was immediate. The secret had to do with Dickens’ year-long incarceration in a rat-infested blacking factory warehouse near the Thames when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of his father John Dickens for debt in 1824 who was sent to the debtors’ prison at Marshalsea.

A previously cosseted and sickly child, a bookworm dreaming great dreams, the 12-year-old boy  found himself blacking pots in a factory amongst near-destitute men, women and children with rotting teeth,  dressed in rags, illiterate, hopeless, homeless,  many of them alone in the world. The child was terrified he would stay there all his life, betrayed and  ‘sold into slavery’ by his feckless and improvident parents. The experience was hell, but it was also the making of the writer he would become.  Later in life Dickens described this time:

“The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty downstairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin.”

The writer was born, but a part of the  daydreaming boy died that year.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul…the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position… My whole nature was penetrated with grief and humiliation.

And out of that experience came  the great generosity and  tenderness Dickens felt for  the poor, especially frightened orphaned children but also those  sent to the workhouse to die, those thrown into debtors’ prisons, desperate women with starving children, society’s outcasts, those  who took up crime to  try and escape from that ghetto.

That was the more positive result — what also emerged were the  terrifying caricatures of villains, larger than life, the brutal headmasters, the  gaolers, the  hard-hearted wealthy tyrants, the greedy lawyers:  all of them  monstrous shadows leaping on the candlelit walls. And the  children of those books,  so helpless and  treacherously treated. For Dickens they were real, that was the  world of his imagination. He distorted reality in order to reach the imaginative truth of human cruelty. He knew too that his  terrors limited his  ability to write, that he was pursued by that dread of finding himself  again in poverty and helplessness.

There was a great artist trapped in the child and the artist would  spend  his adult life still imprisoned in that traumatic memory of the  blacking factory.

“I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that if a shilling or so were given me by any one, I spent it in a dinner or a tea. I know that I worked, from morning to night, with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to anticipate my money, and to make it last the week through; by putting it away in a drawer I had in the counting-house, wrapped into six little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount, and labelled with a different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond… I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell. No man’s imagination can overstep the reality.”

From the Canadian poet Anne Carson’s poem cycle on the biblical harlot Jezebel:

Shame Stack

Shame requires
the eyes of others
unlike guilt. Eyes
of Elijah the Tishbite saw
in Jezebel a person with much
to be ashamed of. There is a link
between shame and mercy people who
lack the one lack the other. Psychoanalysts say
shame ruins your capacity for reverie by making cracks
in the mind where it is dangerous for thought to wander. In
the end Jezebel’s own eunuchs throw her off the parapet. Her blood
is on the wall and on the horses.

What we do for shame

Let’s start here.

Something is said, something happens. Your head and neck slump, your eyes lower or turn away, your upper body goes limp, your  face (and sometimes neck and upper chest) become red, and all communication with the other person is lost for a moment. Cognitive shock.

You are experiencing  shame-humiliation. Nobody can think clearly in that  moment of shame. You might feel as if your head is being severed from your body. The room shrinks. You  are alone and rejected, frozen, incapable,  smashed to pieces inside.

This is how the body experiences mortification, the hanging head, the blush, the wanting to be swallowed up where you stand, to disappear from sight and cease to exist.

What has happened? You have been  rejected. You are told you have failed, You are accused of theft. You are found out. You are told you smell bad.You have scars, you have amputations, you are no longer whole.  Your skin is the wrong colour. You are too poor to have nice clothes, you look cheap or  shabby or old. You are told that everyone thinks you are stupid. You are told that you are unloved or unlovable. You are made to feel you are not sexually attractive. You are told you are  sick or ugly or pathetic. You are told you are  dirty, worthless, useless. You are beaten or  sexually abused and  treated like dirt. You don’t matter. You might as well be invisible.

What happens next?

You  want to forget the shame. You want to  undo what happened. You  decide you will succeed in another area so as to  erase that  shame of failure. You will become famous and  nobody will ever shame you again. You will prove that other person wrong. You will win him or her back. You will make sure he or she suffers as you have suffered. You are filled with shame but also with  shame-rage or shame-fury. You hate the person who  caused you shame, who made you  feel so ashamed of just being you. You hate yourself for being shamed, for being shameful, for being shame-filled. You feel hopeless and defeated and you call this depression.

Let’s talk about escape. How do we make the shame go away? This of course is where alcohol, the fabulous dissolving lubricant, comes in. The smoke-and-mirrors magic of drugs. You  are someone with disavowed shame, and that shame is not felt until you are  told you are an addict or an alcoholic. Which compounds the shame. You want to forget, and  sobriety means remembering all the hard, angry, shameful  stuff.

Other ways to make the shame go away, other escape mechanisms. Unending competitiveness with others, showing you are better than others, you are unique, you are special, you come first. The constant search for  excitement, extreme adventure,dangerous  distractions. Promiscuity,.  If you are a  man you may take refuge in machismo, the  pumped-up exaggeration of being a real man and  physically  dominating other men, demanding submission from the woman in your life, exerting control over your children. The small shamed boy is nowhere to be seen. There is sex addiction and  the mindless pursuit of pleasure. There is over-spending, so you can  make yourself feel luxurious and pretty on the outside, to  mask what it feels like on the inside. What it feels like? Who is it? It is the shamed and disowned you, me, the self.

Let’s talk about attack, making others feel the shame instead of us. We attack others and shame them as we were shamed. We mock our own faults in others. We label them as we were labelled. We bully those we see as weak, we humiliate others sexually, we  hit and batter those who  cannot defend themselves against us. We dismiss those who don’t agree with us. We tease or torment animals, we  act out in sadistic ways, We have sex with people we despise and let them feel our contempt. We laugh at  people who are mentally ill, we mock the disabled. We threaten others with firearms or verbal threats, we  feel a need to see them cower and  cringe.  So long as we are not  arrested or  confronted, this  works for us. We are able to  feel that  the shame is out there, not in here.

And what was once acute shame (that cringe-making agonising moment of shock and  anguish) is now chronic shame, the stain that won’t come out, the tinge of habitual self-loathing. It is what we do to escape or  suppress shame (the avoidance, the withdrawal, the attacking) that  creates  ongoing shame. Our compensatory behaviours and compulsion to humiliate or criticise others make us ashamed of ourselves. We cannot escape the cycle of shamed and shaming behaviour.

Shame can be unlearned. I found this out when I was able to find a safe place in which to  talk about shame in therapy, in a boundaried and caring  environment. In  recovery meetings in  a nearby city, I know of  one long-sober woman who  recommends that men and women who have been sober a couple of years go for  assertiveness training  classes in order to learn affective ways to  recognise, name and challenge patronising behaviour or humiliating put-downs. Many of us didn’t acquire useful social skills in the drinking years or in families where  domestic violence was the norm. There’s a place for owning  past behaviours that harmed or  offended others. There’s also a place for being able to  see the shaming tactics of others, the prejudice or  insults, for what they were, that they had nothing to do with us. For telling the secrets around incest, speaking out against racism, denouncing homophobic prejudice, not blaming the poor for their poverty

Shame-humiliation isn’t the only dynamic (I  don’t want this to sound like a single-issue narrative, as if  locating and overcoming shame was the answer to everything)  and there are many other complexes or  tensions (that hollow rage of the narcissist where grandiosity is the defence against inner emptiness). Yet shame, the patterning and echoing of  shame at many levels and in many contexts, is  something that  can stay with us all our lives and it thrives on secrecy and displacement. Shame out in the  daylight is just another bogeyman.

And it is a cultural practice, this too. The  parent makes a small child ashamed of  playing with herself in the bath, slaps her hands and tells her that the place between her legs is dirty or forbidden. What was innocent and natural becomes forbidden, unnatural, secretive. The urge is still there, the pleasure is still there. But so is shame, the conviction of indecency, that I am a bad little person with a dirty body that doesn’t really belong to me. The shame compounded by the  image of a God who spies on children to see  what they do when nobody is watching. How do you honour a parent who has no concept of honour, who is intent on shaming, who is ashamed?

And there are different cultural approaches. this shaming  is not something hard-wired into  human behaviours or physiology. In Zulu tribal society, sexual play and  exploration is encouraged in children. All too often in Western society we are split from our bodies and  emotions and sexuality in early childhood, even before we can speak. The intrusive prurience of the curious parent. The lack of boundaries in the family that stops an adolescent from  being able to claim privacy. The excessive need of the shamed parent to derive gratification and  unfailing love from the child. What the  son or daughter feels when they read blogs written about them without their  consent, without space to  voice their own truths or  arguments. The voyeurism on Facebook (Stalkerbook) with so many contrived and retouched images, snapshots,  close-ups, so  many comparisons around  vanity or  ugliness or  not-pretty-enough shaming, so much bullying from strangers who sit next to you in class or  who don’t tell you they are  predatory adults.  Moral vacuity in  every area of our waking lives.

There aren’t any easy answers. We talk sometimes in recovery circles about experiencing ‘ego deflation at depth’, a useful  analytic concept in a certain context, but all too often, there is no stable ego, there is only the false self, the  facade  hiding the shamed and deficient not-quite-self. The person who never became. What we encounter in ourselves and others is the depression and rage of the shamed and broken person. Too fat, too  much in debt, too disgusting, too mentally ill, too bipolar, too eating disordered, too dishonest, too hopeless a case. How to touch someone who  believes he is untouchable? How do we embrace in ourselves what we  hate and fear in others?

And behind all the posturing and  vanity there is  only this, a small child covering her face in the darkness and wishing she was dead.

Talking to oneself

Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, wasn’t it? The opening of the Olympics was  surreal, bonkers, crackpot, with magnificent moments — a punk-trashy take on  British  culture and history that was  also  affectionate and  very much an insider moment. I loved it, went to bed with my head buzzing, full of  spectacle and music.

My favourite moment though was  earlier, watching a too-brief BBC interview with the English author Iain Sinclair protesting against the Olympics, talking about the erased working-class communities of East London. The interviewer looked nonplussed, the spokesman who built Canary Wharf looked exasperated and  gangling reticent Sinclair  just went on trying to say what nobody wanted to hear. How I love that man.

Up at 4am because this is a working weekend. I’m  slowly drafting out a blog post on  shame, not one of my  off-the-cuff  dashed-down  posts, just a chance to think through what I understand of  what is not a ‘single issue’ but a patterning that is  hard to shift, a cultural practice that is hard to unmask, a source of  long-term suffering.

How we talk to ourselves about ourselves. All the time, some of the time, when we are angry with ourselves, to encourage ourselves, to berate ourselves. Is it possible to end that incessant inner flow of self-directed monologue and give ourselves a break? To pray to an unknown God, to  write an imagined letter to a friend, to listen to  someone else’s voice in our heads, to stop thinking  about ourselves, to stop thinking.

Tim Parks the  writer sudden stricken with mysterious pain and debility, wrote a narrative of healing himself through Vipassana meditation. He says: “Teach Us to Sit Still ended up being a criticism of narrative. It was saying that one’s constant engagement with narrative – the presentation of one’s own life to oneself as an ongoing trajectory – is what feeds the frenetic voice in your head. I don’t think of myself as Buddhist, in spite of all the meditation, but I’m attracted to some of the common sense of Buddhism. And one idea is that maybe it’s possible to live without that sort of self-narrative.”

Let me go and  have some boiled lentils  for an early brunch  and think about shame –

The Boss in the Off Hours

He’s 62 years old, sexy, grizzled, a ball of fire, even though there have been rumours about his struggle with suicidal bouts of  depression through the years. Bruce Springsteen has ruled the rock concert  circuit for  more than 30 years, right from Born to Run in 1975.

The Boss.

“You’re the shaman, a little bit, you’re leading the congregation,” he told me. “But you are the same as everybody else in the sense that your troubles are the same, your problems are the same, you’ve got your blessings, you’ve got your sins, you’ve got the things you can do well, you’ve got the things you fuck up all the time. And so you’re a conduit. There was a series of elements in your life—some that were blessings, and some that were just chaotic curses—that set fire to you in a certain way.”

 
In the latest  New Yorker David Remick takes the lid off  what was happening behind the scenes,  what Springsteen was going through. It’s a brilliant/compassionate/ironic and go-read-it-at-once article

Springsteen was also experiencing intervals of depression that were far more serious than the occasional guilt trip about being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” as he sings in “Better Days.” A cloud of crisis hovered as Springsteen was finishing his acoustic masterpiece “Nebraska,” in 1982. He drove from the East Coast to California and then drove straight back. “He was feeling suicidal,” Springsteen’s friend and biographer Dave Marsh said. “The depression wasn’t shocking, per se. He was on a rocket ride, from nothing to something, and now you are getting your ass kissed day and night. You might start to have some inner conflicts about your real self-worth.”

Springsteen began questioning why his relationships were a series of drive-bys. And he could not let go of the past, either—a sense that he had inherited his father’s depressive self-isolation. For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘What you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’ ”

Extreme wealth may have satisfied every pink-Cadillac dream, but it did little to chase off the black dog. Springsteen was playing concerts that went nearly four hours, driven, he has said, by “pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred.” He played that long not just to thrill the audience but also to burn himself out. Onstage, he held real life at bay.

“My issues weren’t as obvious as drugs,” Springsteen said. “Mine were different, they were quieter—just as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage. It’s both things: there’s a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time. You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. There’s no room for them. There’s one voice, the voice you’re speaking in.”

 

What the depressed need from those who love them is very simple. Empathy. That may be all we can offer. We can’t ‘help’ or cure or  talk them out of  that hellish place, we  may not  be able to  communicate, we may say and do all the wrong things, we may feel pushed away or  drained or  scared.  What matters is listening,  trying to understand,  trying for empathy.

“You are isolated, yet you desire to talk to somebody,” Springsteen said. “You are very disempowered, so you seek impact, recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you. It’s all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness! It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. That’s what we do for one another.”

Gone in a puff of smoke

In the cold morning air my breath is a cloud that might turn to ice.

Tonight we  will be watching the opening of the London Olympics with friends and eating a large pot of vegetable and chicken curry, helping ourselves to  poppadums, naan breads,  mounds of basmati rice, chutney, raitas with yoghurt and fresh coriander. Such fun — what would life be without friends?

And I have been  relishing an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books entitled For Future Friends of Walter Benjamin, the  gifted Jewish  thinker  whose  short life was so marked by poverty, illness, internment. He crossed the border into Spain as a refugee in 1942 and  was told he would be sent back into Nazi-occupied France, a death sentence. He committed suicide that night, but his  friend the Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem created a safe archive of Benjamin’s writings, for the sake of ‘the future friends of Walter’.

Among many other things, Benjamin wrote metaphysical treatises, literary-critical monographs, philosophical dialogues, media-theoretical essays, book reviews, travel pieces, drug memoirs, whimsical feuilletons, diaries and aphorisms, modernist miniatures, radio plays for children, reflections on law, technology, theology and the philosophy of history, analyses of authors, artists, schools and epochs. His intense, precise, enlightening intellectual engagement grasped miniscule events and tiny details — a motto on a stained-glass window, 17 types of Ibizan fig — while at the same time, in the same movement, retaining a sense for history’s longitudinal waves and metaphysics’ worlds behind the world. Although he often lamented his own indolence, as both a writer and a person Benjamin was mobile, endlessly inquisitive and engaging, and exceptionally productive.

Ah yes, the drug memoirs of Walter Benjamin. Like many of his fellow writers, scientists and thinkers, he experimented with hashish, opium, mescalin. Freud preferred cocaine. There was of course  none of the  climate of  disapproval or  moral opprobrium we would  attach now in terms of  addiction or recklessness — young men experimented with drugs quite guiltlessly in a society where  most who afford to do so  smoked cigarettes and pipes all  through their lives, drank far more than we would consider healthy. Some of them  became addicts, some did not. Although Benjamin took drugs with friends and published his  impressions of the ‘illuminations’ experienced under the influence of  hashish, he was never addicted.

Are drugs a gateway to  mystical or  heightened spiritual experience? The question that  preoccupied Jung and many psychologists and religious thinkers after him. That possibility of drug-enhanced enlightenment was the  appeal  mentioned quite openly by  Benjamin and would  continue to be regarded as a valid scientific  exploration up to the time of Aldous Huxley: It wasn’t a  kind of cheap mysticism or  ‘cheating’ back then. Drugs might offer an authentic  path into the complexities of the unconscious, might open up  the imagination, might be a doorway openeing on the beatific  vision. It was  a more naive age, even as  tyrannies engulfed that  optimistic and innocent  Europe.

By the time Benjamin tried drugs, he had been reading and wondering about them for years, and when the moment finally came it proved to be a letdown, at least in the philosophical sense. This is not to say that Benjamin did not experience, and enjoy, all the usual effects. He felt mellow. “Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes,” he noted during his first attempt. He saw weird visions, such as “a long gallery of suits of armor with no one in them. No heads, but only flames playing around the neck openings.” He even got the munchies: “I had been suddenly unable to still the pangs of hunger that overwhelmed me late one night in my room. It seemed advisable to buy a bar of chocolate.”

But what Benjamin called “the great hope, desire, yearning to reach—in a state of intoxication—the new, the untouched” remained elusive. When the effects of the drugs wore off, so did the feeling of “having suddenly penetrated, with their help, that most hidden, generally most inaccessible world of surfaces.” All that remained was the cryptic comments and gestures recorded in the protocols, the ludicrous corpses of what had seemed vital insights.

 

Stray thoughts in a dry winter

The japonica or quince is flowering cherry-red all along the ditch. Sweet brightness. When it thaws a little I shall go out and fill pots with  soil, loosen pot-bound roots, replant  a few succulents. Manual work is  so helpful at times of great anxiety, to be able to  work with one’s hands out in fresh air.

Had a  letter from a friend in  Canada and  I sat studying her handwriting  for a while, the generous sloping curves, the  girlish way she loops her e s. Once, back in my  20s, I knew the handwriting of all my friends. That was the  Era of Snailmail, the last gasp of the age of posted correspondence. We sent one another birthday cards, Christmas greetings, letters of condolence, long gossipy letters, love letters, news of  graduations and travels, postcards from foreign countries. We waited for weeks or sometimes months for the post to arrive. We kept one another’s letters in bundles tied with ribbon, or tucked into brown manila envelopes, torn envelopes and  refolded letters stuffed into old suitcases or  brass-bound trunks, the overflowing drawers of dressing tables. The letters crumpled and yellowed, but  we could still take them out and read them with nostalgia and affection. So unforgettable, so precious as keepsakes. So unlike the  hasty immediate  conversations and   spontaneity of  Internet emails,  erased without a second thought because there will be more later, another  post tomorrow,  more gratification, more entertainment, more future than past.

I still have the rounded schoolgirl hand of  those days, my handwriting has not changed or aged. When I was little and living out on a forest reserve, I was taught to  draw numbers, tracing 3 the wrong way round, a bobbly  8, and made to print out the alphabet with a porcupine quill dipped in a bottle of blue or dark green Quink ink.

No, I don’t know why. We had Biro pens in the house — my father had  several Parker fountain pens, and there were pencils and coloured crayons. But long ago in the 1940s, my mother had  been taught to write by dipping  porcupine quills and  feathered quills into  an inkwell of heavy silver, and perhaps  she wanted us to share something of that  experience. She remembered the  dark rosewood dining-room table in the thatched rondavel of a pioneer farmstead, how  the furniture smelled of  sweet almond oil and  a chalky dust  sprinkled on the  cement floors to repel ants (carcinogenic as all hell, I imagine). She would be  locked in the dining room and left alone to learn her letters, sitting there  writing  about the dog barking and the cat on the mat, while the sun beat down on the veld outside and  the long afternoon wore on. She would be hungry and thirsty, desperate for  a pee, by the time she was let out. Her  sisters and brothers were away at boarding school and  she was  made to learn on her own because — well, because that is how  children were taught out  in the colonies in those days. After an early supper before the sun went down at 6pm, she would be taken into the  more formal  living room with the  blinds drawn, the furniture covered in grey dustsheets and  heavy  karosses on the floor. She would sit there practising the piano until called to go to bed.

And that is how my mother who had once been a concert pianist taught us too, her own children, decades later — we were given quills and  lined exercise books, volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, sum books full of  graph paper, erasers,  pencil sharpeners and an Oxford English dictionary that dated back to 1879. If we had not finished  our schoolwork assignments, memorised our times table and completed all the set sums  by the end of the day, we would be sent off to bed without supper. Once a week we would be taken into the shaded  living room and  would sit on stools listening to the crackling static of the mahogany radiogram as a broadcast came  over from Schools on the Air, the BBC World Service outreach to  children in remote parts of the Empire.  I thrived on this solitary regime of writing and  self-education, read voraciously and wrote endless made-up stories in  my exercise books, pored over the Encyclopedia Britannica of the long-gone 1950s. My sisters did not thrive on this lonely  schooling and  remained uneducated and wild, hating books and  the boredom of  learning.

When I went to ‘proper’ school in town, the  teachers were appalled that myself and my sisters had  been  brought up in what seemed absurdly like a Victorian schoolroom, nothing modern or  appropriate at all. I had to do a crash course in calculus and learn cursive handwriting all over  again instead of my twirly copperplate. Learning about history or geography while sitting in a class surrounded by other  students and  with a teacher hanging over one’s shoulder was  very strange to me. My handwriting slowly changed too from the  curly loops and  flourishes I had taught myself from examples in the  books given to me, into something plainer and more legible, the same handwriting I have now. Only my stories remained   my own, daydreams and nightmares and  wishes  making their way into  improbable fictions that sometimes won prizes and sometimes made teachers uncomfortable. I had not yet learned to write for others, I still enjoyed the bliss of writing only for myself, following tides in the bloodstream of the imagination, the uncensored dance of the mind.

My handwriting is  still very similar to my mother’s handwriting  when she was sober enough to write letters,  and I wonder who  taught her to  surrender the deep looping and  royal  flourishes that pleased us both so much back then. And I wish i had  a letter from her tucked away into a suitcase, so that I might read with hindsight and compassionate love, learn something  of who she  was and might have become.

Reading the poetry of David Whyte:

Everything Is Waiting For You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

 

What we need is here

From  reflections on the  mystical journeys of Merton to more  immediate and down-to-earth concerns (isn’t that the way it always is?). Funding cuts announced without warning, so out here projects and workshops will have to be cancelled, writing projects  abandoned — ugh, ugh, ugh. So stressed that I threw up twice this morning and  the housemate is grey with worry and grief. Living from hand to mouth, and it gets tougher each year.

But somehow we will carry  on, find a way to keep things going. There are blue and white butterflies dancing in the cold sunlight, the dog is  digging a hole in what used to be the front garden, a small squirrel in  climbing the old oak tree in search of a hidden cache of  acorns.

Immanence. Just to stay here now and breathe deeply.

 

What We Need Is Here
By Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

Unknowing as reality

We need structure, wrote the  inventive  composer John Cage, so we  can know we are nowhere.

Talking with a friend this morning about the unfinished and unresolved business of life. We end, as we began, without answers or a satisfying plot line or a neat denouement that ties up all the loose ends. All through our lives there are  puzzles and  mysteries, difficulties and stuckness, breakthroughs and more stuckness. We think we have found answers in faith or sober living or abstract principles (we think we  know what we believe) and then  another  void is revealed, a new conundrum presents itself. We join a faith community, we return to the church, we decide  on a political  stance, we feel we belong in a particular  neighborhood or  place — and then we are faced with doubt or  changes, we see strangers moving into our street, we hear a sermon that gives us indigestion,  someone laughs at our certainties. We find that we don’t believe what we believed a year ago, that we are not able to keep promises we  sincerely meant at the time, that we  can’t go on in the same  groove –we are called out into the desert or wilderness to go on searching, we find ourselves in a realm of unknowing.

In the early mornings I sit up with a mug of tea reading  about Thomas Merton’s journey into Buddhism, his desire to become a good Buddhist without renouncing his Catholicism. His life a scandal and enigma to many.

Unknowing, the gift of  knowing we know  so little. We stop giving advice, we stop thinking we can rescue or  set others straight, we stop thinking we know better. Others may need their muddle and confusion and stuckness, they may need to stay with brokenness. We’d love to  make it nice,  be of use, help them  get over it, remind them  of rainbows and happy-ever-after endings. Say things that are encouraging and useful. But life isn’t like that. Compassion is  at its heart unsentimental, hard, truthful, able to  hold the hardest and most bitter of truths, able to look death in the face.

And there is Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and  mystic, the student of Buddhism, nearly at the end of his own Asian  journey (he will die on this journey, accidentally electrocuted in a Bangkok hotel room, his questions unresolved) and he encounters the serene smiling statues of the Buddhas at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka:

All problems are resolved and everything is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya… everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely… my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

 

Knowing we are nowhere, that we shall stay unknowing.

The night the ghost got in

A feral cat yowling hoarsely in the garden last night so none of us slept well. Winter here and  there are feral cats hunting for  food  in the cold.

Brittle bitter cold. Another week opening up, the  reluctance of Monday morning, just to get going, to get the  usual routines and effort underway.

Showing compassion towards the self, a reminder we all need from time to time.

Contrary to what many people think, treating yourself kindly is also good for achieving your goals. “People believe that self-criticism helps to motivate them,” Neff says. Those low in self-compassion think that unless they are hard on themselves, they will not amount to much—but research reveals that being kind to yourself does not lower your standards. “With self-compassion, you reach just as high, but if you don’t reach your goals it’s okay because your sense of self-worth isn’t contingent on success,” she explains.

 

And showing  compassion to others rather than antipathy, suspicion or criticism  is another doorway to  feeling more compassionate towards yourself, letting go of all that punitive inner judging:

“There was a unique benefit to giving support—the benefit wasn’t just from feeling connected or realizing that others had problems, too,” explains Breines, a doctoral candidate in psychology and the study’s lead author. During tough times, people naturally tend to focus on themselves and find it difficult to support others, she says. “But actually, as many people intuitively discover, taking the opportunity to support other people can make you feel better about what you’re going through.”

Saturday night the dog  was convinced there was a ghost in the house. He sat staring at the wall and trembling. Then he sat barking at an empty doorway. Disconcerting, to say the least. I suspect  that  there was a tiny earth tremor or thunder in the distance that disturbed him, but it made for a very restless, haunted kind of evening. We reassured the dog and kept peering into empty rooms and listening to see if we could hear anything. The dog sat staring into space and  growling at whatever was bothering him. The other small dogs just ignored this  psychic medium in their midst and  went on snoring  on the rug.

So we sat and  told one another ghost stories:  the figure beckoning on the stairwell in an old Edwardian homestead, the  young man riding a black horse across the veld and  suddenly vanishing, the  hearse speeding on the old road over the notorious mountain pass, stopping only for the dead, a hearse seen by many travellers. The road that runs through the Eastern Cape where a young girl stands at the roadside  hitchhiking, a thin arm  held out to  wave down cars. Passing motorists have stopped in  the mist and  offered her a lift. She climbs into the back seat and  disappears as the driver approaches the nearest town. An enjoyable and scary evening. The dog finally  grew bored with the supernatural and put himself to bed.  The ghost quietly left the  building.