The blue moon overhead

Once in a blue moon — and we have a blue moon in springtime. An enormous moon and  the blossoming apple and peach trees in sheltered orchards look luminous by moonlight.
Wordpress  won’t let me leave comments. I’ll keep trying until  it relents.

Heard last night about a friend who had a horrible relapse and I felt quite weepy, mostly because of having sinusitis and flu. Usually I just accept that drinking is our default position and if people don’t really want sobriety enough to do what is necessary,  they just don’t want it enough — but I do hate the waste and suffering, the awful fog and insanity into which friends disappear when the drinking is all that means anything to them.

The great avant-garde film maker Chris Marker has died at the age of 91 – I remember his Sans Soleil with a small chill of loss. Much of  my 20s and some of my 30s were spent huddled in  flea-ridden dark and dingy art cinemas looking  at the films of  Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa. Long rainy obsessive afternoons just absorbing film, getting lost in the visual,surreal  images and music and  shutterspeed blazing through  my  mind, pushing aside all other kinds of problems. A solution of sorts, it seemed then.

Anyway, Sans Soleil: you might loosely describe the film as a travelogue through time and geography, from mid-1960s Iceland to early-1980s Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Japan. But  there is so much else going on, a collage of  losses and dreams — the film begins with an opening shot of three Icelandic children frolicking through a summer field and ends by panning across the same town several years later, buried up to its church steeple in molten lava.

“He wrote me,” the narrator says, speaking of the imaginary documentarian who is supposed to not be Marker, “that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory… In the spiral of [its] titles, he saw Time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains, motionless, the eye.”

Standing high on a ledge looking over

The dinner party went  very well. Except for the Great Dane, who  jammed his head under my chair and began his play-growl at my feet which made all the guests nervous. Then he  played his jumpy-jumpy game as he was removed from the kitchen and nearly knocked me over.  Not a proud moment for a dog owner.

I’m still sick and  feeling low. Minor stuff, sinusitis and  feverish fluey symptoms. Cancelled for a birthday supper tonight and I may cancel for a birthday brunch on Saturday. I’m taking spoonfuls of  local honey to  see if that lessens the hay fever  Listening to Miles Davis because jazz  makes me feel more ‘bluesy with a purpose’.

Reading Sven Birkerts on Sebald, the fired-up  intensity of discovering a writer who  reminds you what books are all about:

 

Books are so easily masked by familiarity, crowded into indistinctness by others of their kind, their original explosiveness gone latent, awaiting some circumstance in the life of the reader to make them actual, as the writing was for the writer. Books are singularities, trade routes for private intensities. We forget this. Reading itself falls to habit, the eye switching back and forth down pages, down the lengths of columns, just another thing we do, until one day a book comes along that has the force, or is such a fit to what we need, that it renews the act for us. How did we ever forget what happened that first time, whenever it was, with the eruption of another’s voice, that stark surprise breaching of time and distance, the sense we had of standing high on a ledge looking over?

We need more poems about work, the different kinds of work we do, the mundanity and  necessity and goodness of work. I’m thinking this today because I can’t do much work with a  clogged-up head. But I can read poet Susan Meyers on work and motherhood –

Mother, Washing Dishes
         She rarely made us do it—

we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased

that some day we’d train our children right

and not end up like her, after every meal stuck

with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring.

The one chore she spared us: gummy plates

in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas,

globs of egg and gravy.

 

                                Or did she guard her place

at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss

of the magnolia, the school traffic humming.

Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings

of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon,

delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.

 

 

Laid low with spring fever

Laid low this week with what the villagers call ‘appelkoossiekte‘ or ‘green apricot sickness’ along with spring hay fever. Sneezing and streaming and  feverish, crawling in and out of bed and  blankheaded as a sheet of paper.

[Sits and looks at desktop page for 20 minutes.]

Tonight we are giving a dinner party for a Sotho friend about to leave for Gauteng and I am hoping I can get through that without dissolving into a small puddle of wet tissues and  delirium.

Outside the walls of my sickroom, the trees are fuzzing up green, the ditches  white with arum lilies, lambs cavorting in the fields. New baby barn owls have been spotted in a gnarly crevice of the old oak down the road. The verges of the road are brilliant with tiny wild flowers, scarlet, blue and yellow, Nemesias, daisies, arctotis, the mauve wild garlic Tulbaghia.

In between making endless pots of tea, I am dipping into the Confessions of the wonderful St Augustine on his Feast Day, feeling about as unsaintly as  you can get. A bit martyrish maybe.

“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

If you go down to the woods today

A small miracle before breakfast. A young lemoenduif, what we call here a lemon turtledove flew into the kitchen and I saw it  crouching on the windowsill, trapped against the closed window. Without thinking, still blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I went over, opened the window with one hand, picked up the  unprotesting dove in my other hand,  held the little bird out into the morning air and released it. A wild bird, unafraid of me, my confidence in what I was doing. And the memory of doing this before when I was a child, able to call wild creatures to me and  hold them.

Dream fragment: I was going down to a holiday house  on the coast in the hopes of warding off a looming breakdown and asked a friend for a lift. All the way down to the coast we sang the Teddy Bear Picnic song.

If you go down to the woods today

You’d better not go alone

I was afraid that when I was there in the tiny fisherman’s cottage facing the sea, the loneliness would be too much for me. But it was a school holiday and when we arrived, there were  several families, children carrying buckets and spades, parked cars and sailing boats. A former work colleague came up to greet me, I was wearing a child’s pinafore and unsure why I hadn’t changed my clothes.  I showed him a graphics comic of Spiderman. He looked at the inked signature and date (29 May, 1965) and told me the  comic belonged to someone else.

How the twentieth century flies away from us who were born then — Neil Armstrong, who became the first human being from earth to walk on the moon, dead at 82. Another  giant leap or small step into infinity.

Reading an appreciation of the Welsh poet Dannie Abse who  titled his  latest book Goodbye Twentieth Century. His memory of growing up both Welsh and Jewish:

“My mother knew many things. She could speak Welsh as well as English, Yiddish as well as Welsh. Some of the ‘wise’ sayings from Welsh and Yiddish she loosely translated into English. I know them still — but I am not quite sure, even now, which proverbs are Welsh, which Yiddish.”

Her son remembers this remarkable amalgam of the Welsh and Jewish celebrating a wartime festival very different from their customary jolly family occasions:

“But April 1st 1942, only my father my mother and I sat down to the rationed evening meal. And instead of a Seder ceremony my mother lit two candles, put her hands over her face and mouthed a prayer silently. Then she said out loud, ‘Next year may there be Peace in the world and all the family be together again.’ That night no door was opened for the invisible angel and the flames on the two candles did not tremble but continued to stand up straight like two small, yellow, clown hats.”

 

The wrongness of always being right

Rain and a hard cold wind blasting in from the north, toasting muesli this morning, roughly following my friend Annie’s excellent recipe for granola. Rolled oats, a spoonful of bran, honey, chopped hazel nuts  or whatever  nuts I have around — pecans or walnuts — perhaps some dark-brown Demerara  sugar, a pinch of spice. A warming toasty start to the day.

 
Suppose self-righteous indignation were revealed to be another kind of addiction? We all know the  outraged and righteous of the world, especially on political or religious forums, always frothing and pointing  fingers, always holding the moral high ground and never wrong. So tiring.

But the notion of self-righteous indignation being a drug high seems to develop naturally out of recent scientific results that show that addiction is actually the most natural of human processes. You’ve heard the phrase “addicted to love.” Well, you can deliberately enter less salubrious mental states. You can deliberately go to Las Vegas, and the slot machines are now tuned to track the pattern of your behavior at the slot machine and change their rewards pattern so you start getting more rewards when it calculates that you’re about to stand up and give up and leave. So there’s gambling, thrill addiction. Well, it turns out that there’s substantial evidence that self-righteous indignation is one of these drug highs, and any honest person knows this. We’ve all been in indignant snits, self-righteous furies. You go into the bathroom during one of these snits, and you look in the mirror and you have to admit, this feels great! “I am so much smarter and better than my enemies! And they are so wrong, and I am so right!”

And if we were to recognize that self-righteous indignation is a bona fide drug high, and that yes, just like alcohol, some of us can engage in it on occasion — as a matter of fact, when I engage in it, I get into a real bender — but then say, “Enough.” If we were to acknowledge this as a drug addiction, then it might weaken all the horrible addicts out there who have taken over politics in America.

 
A friend of mine has  just had heart surgery and I jump each time the phone rings. Mumbling prayers under my breath, keeping fingers crossed, sending off loving hopeful thoughts into the  indifferent ozone.

And for another friend who has stopped smoking and wonders why she can’t stop romancing the damn habit, this poem from Patrick Phillips, via American Poetry Review

Elegy for Smoking

It’s not the drug I miss

but all those minutes

we used to steal

outside the library,

under restaurant awnings,

out on porches, by the quiet fields.

 

And how kind it used to make us

when we’d laugh

and throw our heads back

and watch the dragon’s breath

float from our mouths,

all ravenous and doomed.

 

Which is why I quit, of course,

like almost everyone,

and stay inside these days

staring at my phone,

chewing toothpicks

and figuring the bill,

 

while out the window,

the smokers gather

in their same old constellations,

like memories of ourselves.

 

Or like the remnants

of some decimated tribe,

come down out of the hills

to tell their stories

in the lightly-falling rain—

 

to be, for a moment, simply there

and nowhere else,

their faces glowing

each time someone lifts,

like a gift, the little flame.

Simple enough for now

Woke up with a  small ganglion cyst on the knuckle of my thumb. The housemate, a trained nurse, was not interested in peering at it and discouraged me from smashing it with a heavy edition of the Jerusalem Bible or lancing it with a needle passed through flame. It is not painful at all unless squeezed or prodded and I see from Googling ‘ganglion’ that it may clear up by itself. Such ganglions are sometimes called ‘Gideon’s cysts’ because  people do crush them with Gideon Bibles, and then complain of bruising and infection.

The housemate pointed out as she hurtled through the door with her packed lunch and armfuls of adult nappies intended for incontinent patients, cell phone going,  brushing dog hairs off her nurse’s uniform, that I have had a wrist ganglion before and  did something to make it disappear. Perhaps I should wait until full moon and then wrap the thumb in datura leaves and  whisper incantations while burning sage leaves in a cauldron for incense. Surely that’s not what she meant?  I don’t remember the wrist ganglion at all, but I do have a  little black notebook somewhere with useful sangoma spells for getting rid of warts or difficult lovers, and  overcoming  writers’ block, alongside recipes for aniseed rusks and  a good spinach and  leek soup with  pumpkin fritters.

A new biography of David Foster Wallace has appeared with an extract  online, which I hated. How infuriating when this happens. The New York Times reviewer, the formidable Michiko Kukutani,  is much kinder about the  biography that I would be. I don’t think people who  don’t get alcoholism, depression, halfway houses, love affairs in sobriety, philosophy, literature, existential angst, desperation, suicide –  stop me here — should write about DFW. The tone is all wrong, the  glibness  appalls me. But that might be  just me.

 

Here’s Kakutani, who does understand DFW

In “Infinite Jest” David Foster Wallace described clinical depression as “the Great White Shark of pain,” “a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it,” a “nausea of the cells and soul,” a sort of “double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible,” a radical loneliness in which “everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution.”

The Great Dane has stopped digging holes and is now lying on the rug chewing his paw and watching me out of the corner of his eye to see what I will do to distract him. Does he need a dog psychologist? More walks? More biscuits? Maybe I should lie down on the rug beside him and chew my thumb ganglion.

Silliness aside, the pile of work on my desk slowly diminishing — friends coming over for supper so we shall have a green Thai curry with tiny white eggplant sold at the roadside market. Mounds of steamed basmati rice, chutneys, salsas of mango and  freshly chopped coriander, small bowls of  sweet chilli jam. We’re hovering on the edge of spring, we’re all getting older, we have lives filled to the brim and overflowing, lives none of us deserve, so good and complicated and  simple if  we look at them simply enough. It could be otherwise.

 

A poem from Raymond Carver:

 

Happiness

So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

 

Bread and not a stone

The daily routines, holding structures as I still think of them. Another icy morning out here, rain fell again overnight and  everything is a deep juicy green — unusual out here — saw two red-bellied tortoises out in the veld when walking, streams swollen and rushing down from the mountain slopes. Counted five  kestrel and two  hawks on rocky outcrops. The Great Dane has just come in smelling wonderful because he has dug up a rose-scented pelargonium — going out to fill in the hole, I see that the montbretias and chismanthus are flowering, great trusses of  orange and red. Everything very messy and overgrown.

How sober life fills up with what really matters. Good strong coffee brewing on the stove, tender  emails from friends, baby birds  squeaking in fragile weaver nests,  meaningful work and  the phone calls that ask how we really, really do feel here and now.  Here is the dog nudging me with his wicked  sandy black snout and looking up at me with complete trust and happiness, so that I remember this poem from Jane Kenyon:

 

Biscuit
By Jane Kenyon

The dog has cleaned his bowl
and his reward is a biscuit,
which I put in his mouth
like a priest offering the host.

I can’t bear that trusting face!
He asks for bread, expects
bread, and I in my power
might have given him a stone.

 

A model, a metaphor, a story

Rainy again this morning — the Great Dane digging holes around the garden, unearthing a small Greek origanum  bush of which I am very fond, barking  loudly and  aimlessly at the back wall. He’s bored, ignores me when I call to him.

A friend calls from the city to say she  is surfacing from  seasonal depression now that  winter is nearly over, a mild enough winter on the balmy  bay lined with palm trees, not balmy enough for her though. What causes depression?   Is there any explanation that really fits across the centuries and cultures? I’m reading a Rumpus history of  depression and wondering what novel explanations might  appear next month, next year –

The next great theory of depression belonged to Freud. To him, depression (he used the Greek term, melancholia) wasn’t an aesthetic mode but a state of feeling, an emotional reaction caused by loss. The loss could be of anything: a relationship, a possession, even a long-held hope or cherished belief. Often the loss wasn’t conscious, but the feeling was. Melancholia felt like grief, with the addition of bitter feelings of anger, guilt, and reproach heaped upon the self.

Freud didn’t think that melancholic reactions were healthy, per se, but he did believe that they were widespread. Vulnerability to depression was one of the hazards of loving and connecting, and particularly of over-identifying with the things one loves. Anybody could fall into melancholia from time to time, but particularly at risk were those who find their self-worth in attachments and achievements rather than inside, and of eager-to-please individuals who keep their aggressive feelings pent up inside. In an increasingly individualistic society, Freud gave us a vision of grief whose roots were interesting and personal, springing from the bonds and experiences that make us who we are.

And as with theories of alcoholism, the discrepancies, similarities, contrasts  go on in  their own mysterious way. Sometimes medication helps, but we don’t know why. Some of those in recovery find anti-craving medications work like a charm; for others the urges go underground, switch focus or simply persist. Might the answer lie in  a theory of chemical imbalance, like seasonal affect disorder, something external, not originating within at all? We simply don’t know.

Yet despite the promise of definitive, modern understanding conveyed by the chemical imbalance account, the biological reality of depression still floats away from our grasp. Twenty-five years later, scientists still haven’t achieved a satisfying explanation of just how or why antidepressants work. No benchmark for a normal level of brain serotonin has been established, nor have depressed people been shown to have less serotonin in their brains than the non-depressed. Antidepressants are effective for many, especially in cases of moderate to severe depression, and we understand the brain better every year, though an unfathomable amount still remains to be learned. But on close inspection, “depression is a chemical imbalance” turns out to be is every bit as much a model, a metaphor, a story, as “depression is an excess of black bile.”

 

Outside the dog jumps up and down, barking himself hoarse. I  must  get up from the keyboard and go and play with him. It is too rainy for a walk and his small dog companions are fast asleep. Is he developing a bad habit? Or just, like all of us, prone to  irritability and  grumbles on Monday mornings? Perhaps the cat from next door is teasing him again, perhaps he hears something I can’t  hear with my  dim human hearing. Is he  suffering the pangs of delayed  spring?

The stories we tell ourselves, the stories that change over time. Snow fell on the mountains above the village last night and is powdery light- blue, a child’s paintbox colour. Loss moves back and forth inside my mind like the passing of winter, but I  do not suffer from depression. I’m lucky. Elsewhere the snow is still falling, black clouds gathering in the valleys.

Comforts of the sun

Rushing headlong into spring, I exclaimed to myself — quite wrongly — because I saw pale yellow tiny flowers bursting out on a  blue-green bush I can’t name, perhaps indigenous or from a Mediterranean hillside. The scarlet bracts have fallen from the old poinsettia, locquat fruits are ripening from green to a beige-yellow, the turtle doves seem louder and more amorously insistent. All the same,, it is still icy cold and I began the morning  with hot coffee and learning a poem by memory as I  tore up chunks of  sourdough bread for panzanella, an Italian bread and tomato salad with red-wine vinegar and olive oil, freshly ground black pepper, ripe tomatoes. We get ripe-enough tomatoes all year round here — at their best though in February-March-April towards the end of our long long summers.

The  great black dog is lying sprawled in a panel of sunlight falling through the open front door Each time I walk past he wags his tail, happiness thumping on the wooden floor. The lines of a remembered poem by Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, run through the back of my mind like a narrow but deep river, fast-flowing, rich with silt, sun-warmed with shining surfaces:.

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, 
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth, 
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

 

So it is still winter, the dry powdery snow  on granite peaks I can see from the front door, no wildflowers yet, the  branches of the apple trees still dark varnished brown, no blossom yet. All the same I  am looking up recipes for artichokes and thinking of friends coming around for asparagus and bringing armfuls of  spring flowers, red tulips like  expansive hearts, the scent of  white or golden freesias, that sweet thin  fragrance of another grateful spring. The sun fills up the rooms and  everything is floated on happiness, gratitude, possibility. And this too, bitter-sweet reading, a voice familiar but from a long time past,  the misery and heartbreak of  addiction — unending repetitive sadness — from Franz Wright

 

To Myself

You are riding the bus again

burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,   

the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.   

And I am with you.

I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance   

(in one of those rooms we are   

living) and I am the rain

and the others all

around you, and the loneliness you love,

and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,

the nicotine crawling on your skin—

and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,

and if you vomit this time I will hold you:   

everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.

It won’t always be like this.

I am going to buy you a sandwich.

Of poetry and pilaff

For some reason I keep thinking it is spring rather than 9am (Lou) on a Friday morning in late winter. Everything is green and brilliant, the mountains white with snow but  trees and bushes budding. A poet friend is coming over for lunch and I shall make a quinoa and millet pilaff, light and  fluffy and springlike. I found the original recipe here in Lucy’s Nourish Me (a great title for a food blog) but I  toss in broccoli and  chopped cashews or almonds, anything I have  left over and needing to be used up, Not as sloppy and thoughtless as that sounds, just  good vegetables hanging around waiting to be asked to dance.

 
My poet friend  is from an older generation (doesn’t acknowledge the existence of blogs or even the Internet  so I can write more  freely about her) who lives for  small print journals with  sterling reputations and  zero circulation, no payment for contributors, devoted and slavish copy-editors and a shrinking group of discerning readers,  How this depresses me, that poets go on starving for attention… Anyhow. For decades she lived as a deeply closeted lesbian, filled with guilt and  savagely repressed emotions which has made for a gloomy life but marvellously restrained and subtle poems. How complex it all is, lives, relationships and creativity, truth-telling or reticence, blurting  out confessional details or  keeping tactfully silent.

My pilaff might be too frivolous a lunch for  this  suffering poet. Like me, she  has great admiration for the  poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, another  lesbian poet who battled  alcoholism all her life (odd to recall that  AA was not widely known back then between the 1930s and 1950s and  most  people put their  faith in aversion therapies or  long periods just locked up in a drying-out clinic so as to be kept out of harm’s way).

It interests me that Bishop experienced her alcoholism as a physical thirst,  a feeling of being parched and  arid as a desert, needing liquor as someone dying of thirst might need a glass of water. For many of us the physiological addiction has less effect than the psychological, even if we  speak of  an ‘allergy’ or  bodily craving.  Yet in one of her poems, a very richly layered and  intense poem,  Bishop ascribes  her ‘thirst ‘ to the trauma of witnessing a  great fire when she was very young. The fire took place in Nova Scotia on 25 June, 1914, when  Elizabeth Bishop was three years old,  and is termed in Frances Diane Robotti’s Chonicles of Old Salem (1948) “the greatest disaster in Salem’s history.”  It devastated 252 acres, destroyed 1 800 buildings, and rendered 15 000 people homeless. This  for Bishop may have been the initial trauma that  gave rise to her alcoholism.

 

I’m putting this far too crudely:  we know so little even now in the 21st century about alcoholism — despite all the research and neuroscience — that symbolic intuitions and  convictions still hold undeniable force. A source of  tension and pathos in the poem is the mention of Elizabeth’s mother, who in 1916 when Bishop was five years old would go mad and be sent away to a mental asylum. Although her mother would  live on  in the asylum until 1934,  Bishop would never see her again. A brutal orphaning.

A Drunkard

When I was three, I watched the Salem fire.
It burned all night (or then I thought it did)
and I stood in my crib & watched it burn.
The sky was bright red; everything was red:
out on the lawn, my mother's white dress looked
rose-red: my white enamelled crib was red
and my hands holding to its rods--
its brass knobs holding specks of fire--

I felt amazement not fear
but amazement may be
my infancy's chief emotion.
People were playing hoses on the roofs
of the summer cottages on Marblehead Neck;
the red sky was filled with flying motes,
cinders and coals, and bigger things, scorched black burnt.
The water glowed like fire, too, but flat.
I watched some boats arriving on our beach
full of escaping people (I didn't know that).
One dory, silhouetted black (and later I
thought of this as having looked like
Washington Crossing the Delaware, all black--
in silhouette--
I was terribly thirsty but mama didn't hear
me calling her. Out on the lawn
she and some neighbors were giving coffee
or food or something to the people landing in the boats--
once in a while I caught a glimpse of her
and called and called--no one paid any attention--

In the brilliant morning across the bay
the fire still went on, but in the sunlight
we saw no more glare, just the clouds of smoke.
The beach was strewn with cinders, dark with ash--
strange objects seemed to have blown across the water
lifted by that terrible heat, through the red sky?
Blackened boards, shiny black like black feathers--
pieces of furniture, parts of boats, and clothes--
I picked up a woman's long black cotton
Stocking. Curiosity. My mother said sharply
Put that down! I remember clearly, clearly--

But since that day, that reprimand--
that night that day that reprimand--
I have suffered from abnormal thirst--
I swear it's true--and by the age
of twenty or twenty-one I had begun
to drink, & drink--I can't get enough
and, as you must have noticed,
I'm half-drunk now ...

And all I'm telling you may be a lie ...