Cherishing what is there

 

An old half-wild white rose blooming in the hedges, flat-faced and single-petalled, radiant. Roses out here (brought on ships from France and England and Holland) have been grown in gardens and graveyards for  nearly 400 years and  many of them are no longer found in Europe, but grow overlooked on farms and alongside country roads: Rosa alba, The White Rose of York, roses developed during the Napoleonic Campaigns and carried on sailing ships to the new world (Bourbons and Malmaison), the Holy Rose of Abyssinia brought down  by traders from Ethiopia, China roses and tea roses from the Orient taken as cuttings and  brought to the  Cape Colony on the ships of the Dutch East India Company,  The colours are simpler, not the  vivid  hybridised colours of  the 20th century, but paler pinks, mauves, creams and whites.

 

The housemate still  very unwell,  struggling with fever and breathlessness, and I  am chief bottle washer and  bullyboots nurse. Trying to distract myself with book reviews and a little editing, feeling helpless.

 

And sleepless. Got up at  midnight and found such a moving  snippet of correspondence on line, the blogger Dave talking about the ending of a marriage as the loss of  a human utopia.

It was in listening to you that I got my freshest insight into why this hurts so much more than the loss of a treasured but flawed love and into why there’s so little comfort in my friends’ plausible reassurances that I will find someone who will love me better. A utopia died. I would never have described it in those terms. Maybe it sounds unhinged to do so now — especially to a stranger over email. But what feels real is that my idealism can’t rebound from this, that I can’t be the equivalent of the type of chump who would move from the wreckage of one utopia to the founding of another utopia. So I guess I’m trying to find comfort in something you said in the interview: “community can be life-giving, even if it falls apart.”

 

How we go on hoping and dreading, beginning over, trusting that  something will work out, that there will be better days. Because that is all we can do, I suspect. We need some kind of dream to  hold onto, some hope of  community or togetherness, some notion of healing and restoration. Families, marriages, friendships, home. The stuff of everyday life, the stuff that gives meaning to  our work and   effort and  struggle to get better, to stay together, to give it all another chance. Not just a  fantasy of romantic love but the  relationships we have  chosen, communities we have created or joined ( recovery  forums, churches, faiths, co-workers, protest movements, political parties) the people we think of as family and who may leave us but will never be forgotten.

I guess what I mean by that is that the pain of (sometimes inevitable) losses is sometimes such a huge and overwhelming presence in the room that it’s easy to forget the beauty of the room itself. And the pleasure one once took there. And the quiet nobility of having been there at all. Because many people never have the courage to find a utopia of their own, or they do find one and lose it and don’t have the heart to try again, and it takes so very much to know disappointment on that scale and still nurture hope.

 

Very quiet birthday

Yesterday I had a very quiet birthday (not a sober anniversary). The housemate  ill with bronchitis and  rain falling steadily, the Internet crashing. I made more no-knead bread with a  slightly different mix of flours and planted out seedlings of borage, garlic chives and coriander whenever the rain paused for a  few minutes. When the household is back to normal we can have cake and  celebrations.
When  anything goes wrong with the housemate, I  have trouble with anxiety and go around mumbling to myself and anticipating the worst possible outcomes. The  small dog Chub who has OCD follows me around yipping nervously and absorbing all my  negative energies. Or is that a human projection? The Great Dane is out in the big wide wide world of the backyard digging up molehills in his he-dog  cheerful  manner. The  other small dog Chloe, a caramel cream puff with  some Pomeranian cuteness,  is lying on the sofa dozing contentedly.

Baby house sparrows are learning to fly off the low wall of the verandah, chirping loudly with excitement. The landlord came around to tell me that local  traffic inspectors are conspiring against him and won’t accept bribes from him for  minor  parking misdemeanours. I tried not to look disapproving. More bread is rising slowly and stickily in a ceramic bowl covered with  soft tea towels and I shall give this loaf to  my neighbour, if it comes out looking good. In the cleft of the  tipuana tree, an orb spider is repairing her web.

From Clarice Lispector:

How can I explain it to you: suddenly the whole world that was me shriveled up in fatigue, I could no longer bear on my shoulders—what?—and was succumbing to a tension that I didn’t know had always been mine. They were already starting, and I still didn’t realize it, the first signs inside me of a landslide, of underground limestone caves, collapsing beneath the weight of stratified archeological layers—and the weight of the first landslide was bringing down the corners of my mouth, making my arms fall. What was happening to me? I’ll never understand but there must be someone who understands. And it’s inside myself that I must create that someone who will understand.

To repair a web, so fragile and easily ruptured, not unlike the human psyche,  so vulnerable Scientists have found that orb spiders often  decorate their webs and this may be a way of  preventing further damage.

When they repaired or rebuilt their webs, the spiders increased their decorating activity following heavy damage but not mild damage, he reported.

So he thinks the spiders deliberately make their webs more visible to passing animals that might unintentionally walk into them.

“The spiders tactically use the decorations,” he said, “distinguishing between normal web damage that happens every day (when the prey insects hit the web) and unusual damage by unwanted visitors.”

The delicacy of repair work and  decorations as visible scarring — these are the places I have broken, this is my  visible emblem of past damage, this is  what you need to see beyond beauty or damage.

 

When the going gets tough, the tough stop kneading

The housemate sick and grumpy. There are people for whom a day in bed is a grim punishment and they make bad patients.

 
It is wet and windy and the dogs are grumpy because they have to stay indoors. We’ll have blazing hot  weather soon enough so I’m glad of the  damp and coolness.

 
I’m making Claudia Roden’s chicken soup from The Book of Jewish Food (the trick is plenty of fresh flat-leaf parsley) for the grumpy invalid and perfecting my version of Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread, simple so long as you remember it takes 18–24 hours to  rise. It has a golden chewy crust and tastes wonderful, has the ‘holey’ texture of good sourdough. This recipe was one of the first  foodie recipes to go viral across the Internet after  Mark Bittman  posted a recipe by Jim Lahey in the NYT in 2006. I use my trusty orange  Le Creuset pot for the final bake and the bread comes out round and glorious like a French bowling ball or boule, has a satisfying hollow knocking  sound when tapped on the bottom.

The Chub is unhappy and  lies at my feet obsessively  licking her paw while glaring at me. We have played the ‘Take Your Mind off Your Silly Old  Paw’ game three times, in vain. Every now and again  she goes and barks her famous high-pitched head-splitting bark at the bedroom door of the sick housemate. Right now she is my Unfavourite Dog and I am am usually a person who has no favourites among dogs or friends. Later I’ll make more dog biscuits.

In between my domestic distractions and bouts of  work, I’m rereading old cookbooks. Laurel’s Kitchen, the original 1976 one with coffee stains on the opening pages and recipes for  wholewheat nutty bread so solid and worthy you could weigh down and anchor a dozen yachts with them. The Moosewood Cookbook (Molly Katzen, remember?), the Zuni Cafe Cookbook with Judy Rodgers recipes for  her beyond-ultimate roasted chicken and bread salad. And I also discovered a paperback copy of recipes from London’s first vegetarian restaurant, Cranks. It has  some very curious recipes full of  teaspoons of margerine and  chopped green peppers, which makes me glad we all survived the 1970s. What will future generations make of the 2012 penchant for fermented bean curd or quinoa? Oh, and there is my  old  secondhand copy of  Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking with a yummy Beefless Pie full of vegetable suet and  veggie burgers! (There was a time when  most vegetarians pretended they were just like meat eaters and surprised their unwary guests with  nut cutlets or Greek Moussaka Without Mince.) And  my 1971 copy of Jean Hewitt’s New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook , crammed with soybean dips and hefty helpings of bran, unsulphured molasses, brewers yeast or unrefrigerated wheatgerm with anything  frivolous or hedonistic.Food twinned with morality, no getting away from the good, bad and  what;s good for you but tastes bad, what’s bad for you  but tastes so good!

In my next life I might become a food historian and write  books on The Puritan  Legacy of Roughage or Who Moved My Hearty Sugar-free Eggless Wheatberry Muffins?

Getting through the day

 

Some days are like this, what else can I say? My friend’s funeral taking place today on the other side of the country. The housemate ill and running a high temperature, sleeping away the sad day.

 

A crazy house sparrow that keeps pecking at the study window  because he or she adores an elusive reflection of him- or herself. The old classical Greek legend of the boy Narcissus who fell in love with an image of himself in a still pool. In the background stands Echo, pining in hopeless infatuation with Narcissus for whom his wavering  fluid image on the surface of a still pool is the only self-object he can love. He can love only an insubstantial reflection of himself; she can only echo the words of love he utters to himself.

And I have  creamy white  and pale yellow narcissi blooming in the garden, ruffled petals tossing in the breeze, a thin sweet fragrance. Lovely innocent innocuous flowers and carrying their dark  associations down through history, misplaced desire, longing, fixation,all that is not love and leads to death.

 

How the ancient myths still resonate.

 

Rilke’s Narcissus

Encircled by her arms as by a shell,
she hears her being murmur,
while forever he endures
the outrage of his too pure image...

Wistfully following their example,
nature re-enters herself;
contemplating its own sap, the flower
becomes too soft, and the boulder hardens...

It's the return of all desire that enters
toward all life embracing itself from afar...
Where does it fall? Under the dwindling
surface, does it hope to renew a center?

Translated by A. Poulin

to reach beyond ourselves

All night the north wind has been banging around the house, noisy and restless in the dark. No moon, no stars.

 
On the verandah I have a small planter with a Crown of Thorns succulent thriving in it, Euphorbia milii, originally native to Madagascar.  My thorny yellow-flowering  Crown of Thorns has grown from a cutting made for me with great care (spiny thorns and poisonous latex sap) by my friend Trish, from a plant she had growing in their seaside home. You still find Crown of Thorns in hedges surrounding old-fashioned gardens out here. It is an old  plant accompanied by old stories, perhaps taken by a sailor from Madagascar to the Middle East at the time of the Crusades, where the piercing thorns and  red flowers reminded Christian pilgrims of the circlet of thorns worn by a bleeding Christ as he was crucified, so this little succulent is sometimes called Christ-thorn. It flowers nearly all year round with little attention and the  small flowers are primrose yellow, soft and bright.

And as I knead dough for foccacia (that dimpled Italian flatbread spiked with rosemary and  a little flaky sea salt)  in the kitchen, fill up the dogs’ drinking bowls with fresh water, compose fictional sentences in my head, I think too of the agony suffered in Syria and  lines from a poem by Muriel Rukeyser come to me, a woman poet writing in a dark time, the early years of  another dark century:

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

the difference between memory and grudge

Thank you so much for all the kind comments and supportive emails. I do feel so sad, as does the housemate who knew and loved Trish as I did, but it was a friendship without regrets or shadows and I am  glad she is  no longer suffering so much. And yes, . I shall miss her more and more as the years pass and  she is no longer there in my life, that laugh on the phone, that quirky quick mind brightening  the day, that  love she had for all around her.

 

Unexpected encounters with the sober self. I see the musician Neil Young has decided to sober up after 40 years and is a little bemused  by what he finds:

“The straighter I am, the more alert I am, the less I know myself and the harder it is to recognise myself,” Young explains in his forthcoming memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. “I need a little grounding in something and I am looking for it everywhere.”

Ain’t that the truth.

 

How do we  relate to the past and to our memory of the past? I was wondering about this while reading Syd’s account of going back to his hometown and deciding to  pay a visit to the graveyard where his parents and their parents lie buried. We honour the past, we  don’t turn our backs on the past — and yet we  resist any temptations to live within the tyranny of the past. Came across another thinker who has written on this, the historian who wrote about Rwanda’s genocide, Philip Gourevitch:

But what really interests me ultimately is not to record the past, so much as how people live with the past and get on with it. There’s a kind of fetishization of memory in our culture. Some of it comes from the experience and the memorial culture of the Holocaust—the injunction to remember. And it also comes from the strange collision of Freud and human rights thinking—the belief that anything that is not exposed and addressed and dealt with is festering and going to come back to destroy you. This is obviously not true. Memory is not such a cure-all. On the contrary, many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in large part in the name of memory. The difference between memory and grudge is not always clean. Memories can hold you back, they can be a terrible burden, even an illness. Yes, memory—hallowed memory—can be a kind of disease. That’s one of the reasons that in every culture we have memorial structures and memorial days, whether for personal grief or for collective historical traumas. Because you need to get on with life the rest of the time and not feel the past too badly. I’m not talking about letting memory go. The thing is to contain memory, and then, on those days, or in those places, you can turn on the tap and really touch and feel it. The idea is not oblivion or even denial of memory. It’s about not poisoning ourselves with memory.

And  as I  busy myself gardening this morning, going out with a small spade and watering can in the sunshine, I’m very conscious of  the present becoming past, time flying past. The conundrum of time. The  sweet Celtic melancholy of Enya’s Only Time in closing, then…

 

 

 

Losing a friend

Spring rain falling, predictably just after I had  watered the  front garden.

I’m feeling very sad today because my much-loved friend Trish died yesterday after a long battle with lupus and heart disease. She was 58 and wanted so much to have more time with her small grandchildren. Although she never saw me drunk during our 18 years of friendship, she knew me as depressed, tired, anxious, prickly, touchy, etc, all the stuff that goes with active alcoholism, and I am glad I could be a better friend to her in recent years.

I shall miss her so much.

Cheap and cheerful

Spring sneaking around the corners. Another fine windy morning and I  wish I could run down the road flying a boxy red and blue kite. How fast the years fly past and turn us crochety and respectable! I’m sure I have a kite somewhere  in the garage, the ball of  string all tangled up and the crepe paper torn.

Steamed quinoa and scallions with a little lemon juice for lunch. I would rather bake and  serve myself a  dense moist  coffee and walnut loaf (two helpings or more!), but there we are. My economies are leaving me feeling  embattled and overworked this month. Some small comfort that last year’s capri pants fit so well.

Embrace your vulnerability, I tell myself while grumbling away in email about writer’s backache, the hours at a desk pounding a keyboard while  my spine just dents and crumbles away. Here’s a forthright Texan on  the power of vulnerability:

Both women and men could benefit from allowing themselves to be vulnerable. ‘I think vulnerability and shame are deeply human emotions but the expectations that drive shame are organised by gender. For women it’s “Do it all, do it perfectly and never look as if you’re working very hard” – which is a disastrous set-up. And for men it’s “Don’t be perceived as weak”.’

She makes it clear that there is a difference between vulnerability and laying it all out there. ‘Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That’s an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can’t cheat real connection. It’s built up slowly. It’s about trust and time.’

 

And there’s always perspective — that vulnerable, tetchy and quinoa-overloaded or not, it could all be so immeasurably worse and that each day is opportunity and gift. Then there’s always the great Charles Bukowski to  help us see  what’s coming around the next corner.

the suicide kid

I went to the worst of bars
hoping to get
killed.
but all I could do was to
get drunk
again.
worse, the bar patrons even
ended up
liking me.
there I was trying to get
pushed over the dark
edge
and I ended up with
free drinks
while somewhere else
some poor
son-of-a-bitch was in a hospital
bed,
tubes sticking out  all over
him
as he fought like hell
to live.
nobody would help me
die as
the drinks kept
coming,
as the next day
waited for me
with its steel clamps,
its stinking
anonymity,
its incogitant
attitude.
death doesn't always
come running
when you call
it,
not even if you
call it
from a shining
castle
or from an ocean liner
or from the best bar
on earth (or the
worst).
such impertinence
only makes the gods
hesitate and
delay.
ask me: I'm
72.

the threadbare art of my eye

Breezy, bright and cold  morning, the Indian hawthorn coming into creamy flower. Distressed to read that eight South Africans have been killed in a suicide bombing attack in Kabul. There are so many from southern Africa working in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. Not good, but that is the power of the dollar.

 
The day ahead shaped by writing, facilitating a workshop, writing, gardening, the preparation of meals, walking dogs. Not a bad  way to have a day take shape. I’m thinking about women poets and the tensions for women writers between  living traditional lives as  wives and mothers and  forging an identity as a poet, the invisibility of lesbian women, the  challenge of ageing gracefully through illness,  loss of mobility,the  loss of older identities. How we find new creature comforts once we  give up  the  older more treacherous comforts of  drinking, drugging, eating too much, falling in love too readily, daydreaming like young girls centre-stage in their own lives.

Outside the garden surges up into a gentle rich chaos of  blossom and  leaf. I need to let go and live with some of that fructifying chaos, the light falling on tangles of jasmine and musk roses and  overpoweringly sweet-scented  baby-pink Daphne.

From the poet Robert Lowell:

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme⎯
why are they no help to me now
I want to make something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

Shine on, you crazy diamond

The wind banging across the fields straining at the sky like a tent pulling pegged ropes free. A dusty landscape smelling of  dirt and jasmine, glittery at the edges. Pink Floyd bellowing in the room at the back of the mind.

Sometimes writing is like sweeping up unused fragments on a factory floor, scanning them to see what is usable, what  must be thrown away.

 

Moral fables for  celebrities. Extracts from the newly published diaries of the actor Richard Burton, purportedly about films, the  lifestyles of the rich and famous and  tumultuous love affairs, but  really only  indicating the  inexorable and relentless progression of alcoholism

 

22 July 1969 Dorchester Hotel. I have more or less stopped drinking and the shock to my system is obviously pretty profound. The effect at the studios [where RB is filming Anne of the Thousand Days], I mean on me, is awful. I am fundamentally so bored with my job that only drink is capable of killing the pain. The thought of doing a whole day’s work with, for instance, John Colicos [fellow actor], which is my chore tomorrow, without at least half a bottle of vodka to ease back the yawns is like deliberately inciting a nightmare. [Without drink] I have been like a mad and highly articulate bull with all kinds of people I normally have great respect for. This is par for the course when I am drinking heavily, but I’m surprised that I still do it when sober. If it is still the same in a month I shall go back to old father booze and find out how long it will take him to kill me.

Experimenting with thin-crust pizza bases for a roast vegetable pizza we will have for supper and eat out in the garden at dusk, under olive trees. My  friend in hospital has come out of her coma but is very weak, and I keep the phone beside me, waiting for news.

 

From Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.