Taken by surprise

The last day of February always takes me by surprise, 28 days clear/ and 29 in each Leap Year. Another month has passed, a hard month darkened by the very sad and unexpected news of the tragic death of a young person I had come to know. But I will write more on that at a later stage.

A momentous day — Pope Benedict XVI walks quietly off the stage of history into a secluded retirement. That too was unexpected. There hasn’t  been an African Pope since Victor I in 186, Miltiades in 311, and Pope  Saint Gelasius I in 492, who came from a Berber tribe in North Africa.  Suppose the next Pope should come from Africa? 

 

In less momentous  news my  small dogs went off to the new village doggie parlour to be shampooed, trimmed and groomed. They came back  beribboned and talcumed, smelling of chemical violets and looking like  fat  shorn lambs, so I have put them on a diet.

 

Finally took the bit between the teeth ( a satisfying  metaphor that one!) and voiced my  ambivalent reservations  about former best-selling self-help author Melody Beattie on one of my favourite forums. Nothing like a little controversy on a well-worn topic in recovery to spark discussion.

Sometimes in recovery we need to distance ourselves from people (family, friends, work colleagues, former drinking buddies) who represent a threat to our sobriety and peace of mind. Some of the people we need to get distance from are active alcoholics or drug addicts and that isn’t easy because over the years we’ve learned to rescue and caretake them, a pattern of relating sometimes called codependency.

In 1987 Melody Beattie wrote a book called Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself’ which became a self-help best-seller and regarded by some as the unofficial bible of Al-Anon, ACoC, CoDA, etc. She writes beautifully and her insights have helped many people. All the same, I personally think of her as the Teflon Goddess of Pop Psychology and disagree quite fiercely with how she over-simplified the psychoanalytic work of Object Relations, Kohut, Kernberg, Bion and especially  Melanie  Klein. I don’t think you can become addicted to a person in the same way as you can be addicted to a substance. I think Beattie’s definitions of ‘enabling’, ‘detaching with love’ and ‘enmeshment’ are superficial and naive. Relationships described as codependent are often so much more than a negative label or pathology. To cut off and distance defuses some of the anguish and intensity of loving a person who is seriously ill and unco-operative, but doesn’t resolve anything. Just my own thoughts –

 

ready with the speechless universe

 

Another end of summer ritual and I fish out an old frayed stripey butcher’s apron in preparation. Three huge crates of battered pulpy but red and ripe tomatoes ordered for Saturday so we ( household and neighbours) can all do the annual bottling tomato puree jamboree. It is hours of  back-breaking work, sorting and cleaning up the tomatoes, blanching, peeling, cutting up, boiling and simmering,  taking foam off the top, reducing down to unctous dark-red thickness, then  sterilising and heating Consol sealable jars, filling the jars, tapping for airbubbles, turning the jars upside down and letting them cool. Economically it saves us a fortune — I won’t have to buy tomato passata or  cans of  diced tomatoes until late next summer (January or February of 2014). We store jars on shelves, in cupboards and  in rows in the garage, perhaps 60 or 90 large jars of  ripe tomato puree. (I get roughly three meals out of each jar, luscious deep rich  tomato puree for lasagnas,  ragus, chilli con carnes, pasta sauces, etc.)

 

Lenten reading:  more Flannery O’Connor, journals of Thomas Merton, the  poems of Franz Wright in his struggle against addiction and alcoholism. Outside in the roads a grinding of gears, as tractors pull trailers heaped high with grapes for the press, fruit pallets  stacked with golden pears and  white fuzzy peaches, bunches of leeks crusted in dirt. A season of  abundance that is passing, soon there will be no work on the farms and  people  calling to ask for  slices of bread and  milk for hungry children. What we have  and what we take for granted, what we  long for, what we  do not need. Franz Wright:

Crossing briefly this mirrory still Galilean blue water to the heaven

of the affluent, the users-up, unconsciously remote

from knowing themselves

our owners and starvers, occupying

as they always have, to no purpose,

the mansions and the beauty of the earth

for this short while

before

we all meet and enter at the same door.

 

Lent, the season of doubt and uncertainty, who better to  explore the contradiction than doubting mystic Simone Weil,  discussed here? I  add her Gravity & Grace to my  pile of bedside reading.

If you say that God is inconceivable, then you are conceiving God as inconceivable.  If you say that nothing can be said about him, then you say something about him, namely, that nothing can be said about him.  If you say that there exists an inconceivable reality, then that is different from saying that there does not exist such a reality; hence you are conceiving the inconceivable reality as included in what there is.  If you say that God is real, then you are conceiving him as real as opposed to illusory.  Long story short, you are contradicting yourself when you claim that there is an inconceivable reality or that God is an inconceivable reality, or that God is utterly beyond all of our concepts, or that no predications of him are true, or that he exists but has no attributes, or that he is real but inconceivable.

 

Which is all very well, knotting my  brain into a  loop of sense and nonsense, but there are dogs playing on the grass, that ecstatic rolling and tumbling of happy animals at play, flame lilies  reddening on my wall, red, purple, black, orange, pink, white, goose-green berries enough for all the birds in the valley. The gnarly tree leaning over the garden wall is  clustered with overripe sweet persimmons, that deep pink-orange. My friend will be coming home after  his successful open-heart surgery, there will be suppers and  conversations. And just for today, free of eye pain, I am  irrepressibly buoyed up with Love, agape and eros all  entwined, the human and the  divine, known and unknown.

 

Franz Wright again, hoping WordPress will not screw with the spacing that is so crucial in poetry, breathing  spaces and fine line breaks. A poem ending on a pause, an ellipsis, confession of darkness amidst affirmation.

 

PREPARATIONS

When I look at the bare fields in winter, the sunflowers are there.

When I gaze at the sunflowers I see the scarred snowy fields.

This is how you tell you are ready to leave

this beautiful and deadly place,

depart

and return there,

annihilated,

healed.

While there is time

I call to mind Your constant unrequited

and preemptive forgiveness.

And remember You are not

and never were the object

of my thought,

my prayer,

my words

but rather

I

was the object of Yours!

And I think I’m beginning to learn finally

what everything has been trying to teach me

just recently

again, and

for the past fifty years of forever:

total love for You–the mysterious gift of my life–

truly felt at each instant

and every day

of deepest recollection,

grace-filled apprehension, it

would

dispel all fear, as well

as the love that requires a response–

from others, other

ghosts (or

even

You!)

And I have always failed, yet

always know IT was there–this utter love–

And so am ready with the speechless

universe all word

my company,

my light,

my sunflower. Dark morning thoughts -–…

 

 

Dark and disruptive

Sun just breaking over the mountains, yawning and  making a  pot of freshly  grated  ginger & mint tea for sparkle on  Sunday morning.

The  Great Dane is  sitting on the grass watching suspicious behaviour on the part of a  pigeon. In profile the dog  looks noble, dignified and rather like Sherlock Holmes magnificently deducing  all that is to be known about a  fat grey pigeon who has committed a dastardly  crime against an earthworm. The pigeon looks unconcerned and intent on breakfast. Sometimes I am glad  that as humans we can’t read the minds of our beloved animal companions. Too much information.

 

On my bedside cabinet, wedged between the reading lamp and the wall there is a pile of books I am reading  for Lent. This week it is Flannery O’Connor, an unsparing writer when it comes to soggy thinking or  sentimentality, and I learn a great deal from her:

Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth…It’s a quality that no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so the word is always safe for anybody to use. Thomas Mann has said that the grotesque is the true anti-bourgeois style, but I think the kind of hazy, compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.

 

And thinking about  dogs and the mystery of the animals with whom we share this reality, I’m blown away by  Daniel Naude’s  images of wild African dogs in the powerful and haunting African landscape.

 

 

And, on the subject of animals and  living where I do, I am going to just mention writer JM Coetzee’s novella The  Lives of Animals which deals with  human cruelty to animals. How we collectively turn a blind eye to the industries that cause such pain and  unnecessary death to animals. The realities of inhumanity that are too painful and frightening for us to contemplate, what we are complicit in  concealing, ignoring, overlooking — even to write this makes me think of the long bloody history of  human cruelty, to  one another, to those defined as other or inferior, to whatever is  not human enough.

 

Flannery O’Connor again:

“The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive.”
- The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South

 

 

 

 

 

are your eyes shut?

Another brilliant scorcher of a day. The back garden is filled with health workers eating grilled Asian chicken with noodle salads  while they  sort out the  world’s problems over a working lunch, one bite at a time. The  d0gs have all been exiled to the front garden and are furious. Exiled from the party, so unfair. I make soothing noises to my pupsicles and carry out jugs of iced tea,

Summer is drawing to a close — the last alfresco  bruncheons, the last garden parties — and I have not yet made  my famous lemon and mint sorbet or put up jars of  tomato puree. There are  bowls of chilled ripe Genoa  white figs in the fridge and heliotrope flowering away in scented lilac splendour in the  garden, but slowly, inexorably,  the summer is fading away.

 

Dreams follow me out from sleep into the morning routines and I  jot down  incoherent  notes and  images, letting this too distill. Thinking of Lars Iyer, the disenchanted philosopher of  post-modern dread:

Who experiences the dream? It is necessary to reconceive the locus of experience – not is it the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to sleep or wake, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the ‘il‘. The chance of this unfolding is there from the start, inhabiting experience as a kind of possible impossible. It is not a recurring dream, but what recurs in every dream; it is not the bearer of the personal secret, the key to a psyche which the psychoanalyst might unlock, but the exposure of the inside to the outside, the disclosure of the prior imbrication of the possible and the impossible, of time with time’s absence. ‘Perhaps one could say that the dream is all the more nocturnal in that it turns around itself, that it dreams itself, that it has for its content its possibility’. To what latent desire does the dream attest? To the desire to be extinguished in the instant where the ‘il‘ comes forward to take your place. The desire for the essence of the night, the interminable day.

 

 

My much-loved friend came safely through the  surgery  and  I feel we can all breathe freely again, pick up tea cups and resume conversations, play light music and .dare to laugh out loud. I sat over coffee this morning thinking about Lent,  deprivation and abundance,  mysticism, the eland coming down from the mountains to the  rivers, the small white bob-tailed buck jumping fences in the orchards, the  golden light on  mountains slopes all around the  valley,  while memorising  a poem titled The Field by Dana Levin

 

The antelope white against the charred hills
           eaten by fire,
the golden trees, the upstairs window,
           something

is running across the field,
           can you see it coming
through the yellow grass, can you see it coming
           from the windowpane,
are you closing the shutters, do you think it is rain?

           The wind banging the shutters back, the antelope,
the golden trees, the skirt of your dress
           caught on the wire, the trampled grass,
the barbed fence, something

           is running over the field,
do you think it is crows, do you think it is dust,
           are you huddled
under the window frame, are your legs cold,
           are your eyes shut?

Something is running across the field—
           The wind hurling the shutters back—
The antelope, the charred hill. The yellow trees,
           the parted field.

 

 

Snips and snails

Visitors for morning tea and the Great Dane was happy as only a  sociable puppy can be,  thumping his tail and  wanting to  get Up Close and Personal. Snips and snails and  puppy-dog tails. He does take up a  lot of space in any room and since many  people are not used to having an affectionate whiskery snout hovering over the sugar bowl, he had to go out and stood there on tiptoe  watching his new friends through the window. Getting to know you/getting to know all about you…

 

Big puppy-dog sighs and  a slump when they left. Now he is sitting all alone at the gate waiting for them to come back, making some excuse about having left behind a  purse or  pen, hurrying back just so they can see him again and pat his head. He is on patting terms with far more  people in the village than I am. In about 10 minutes his friends the jaunty pointer and a Yorkie companion will come trotting past on their daily walk and  all hell will break loose. Their human companion in her huge floppy hat  always apologises to me for the barking, but barking is how dogs indicate that they can talk louder than  humans and have more fun doing it.

 

I should be busy writing  fiction, but am proofreading because the Muse has wandered off to pick figs or something. Not an image or idea in my head. Never mind, here is a brilliant  poem from Michelle Chan  Brown in Boxcar Poetry Review

 

How to Write Fiction

Here is the way to build minor disaster:
a car, a doomsday joke, an opening line.
Say the dictator’s elegant wife is Vogue’s
Rose of the Desert, posed with her heirs
by the fountain full of huntable coins. Blow that up.
The people are software, she said. By all means,
use the old fairy tales, with an industrial mixer,
a matte finish. There will always be a forest—
the flowers are crepe, and the birds gorgeous metal,
their eyes the buttons of widows’ war coats.
The story is the slickest form of taxidermy.
The sidewalk is only the rain’s funeral.
It’s impossible to make a synthetic version
of the sand’s perfumes. The toxins
are subtle, threading yellowly to the hilt
of every front porch in America.
The mills have closed. There never was a product.
Every bottle of dye bought for the pageants
turns the May Queen’s hair into glossy algae.
The middle is the hardest part, and we are always in it.
We drive through Arcadia in our Sunday best.
Now all we have is the photo album.
Now all we have is the scrawled directions.
So much waiting for new species, to allow us
tolerance of extinction. We used to praise impatience,
call it national habit, call it the silver filling
in the laughing mouth, and cast its partner, dread,
as the black vastness in the unknowable throat.
Let’s re-draw the town’s boundaries. Let’s pen
a promissory note. Let’s hem the gown until we can
no longer see the rotting body. We drank a lot
before we posed the corpses. Our pleasure seemed
the only charitable act: in stolen Teflon,
weren’t we all cases-in-waiting? We didn’t follow
the critical election, but we assessed our personalities.
The new mills will generate a forest.
The stories end when we decide they do.
The children will wander off, and we’ll be left
to press our cheeks to the cool indentations of their footprints.

Unexpected flame

 

Crushing slow heat — I threw open the shutters and windows after midnight and  a host of tiny flying insects  filled up the dark rooms. Not a breath of wind.

Went out before dawn into the shadowy garden and  discovered that a small flame lily (Gloriosa superba) has rooted itself in a wall planter and is flowering away. A reminder of my Zimbabwean childhood. I don’t  plant flame lilies in the garden because all parts of the plant are so poisonous (toxic alkaloids), but it is safe enough so high on the wall and a joy to behold.

Thinking about creativity and addiction: this succinct and bleak comment from the poet  Franz Wright

[Drugs] had a huge effect, for about twenty-five years, but largely a negative one. One of the most sinister things about addiction is that in its initial stages, in the early years, it seems to produce a state resembling religious enlightenment, or a Blakean sense of the infinite in the small and particular, the eternal in the moment. And this is the right thing to be looking for, but drugs only produce the delusion of having this experience, and pretty soon (if you’re made that way) you start needing them just to leave the house and function in the world, forget about visionary sensations. The other effect they have—Ill Lit is a good example, Berryman’s Dream Songs are an immortal one—is that they may lead you into writing what amounts more or less to a textbook on what it’s like to be a narcissistic and terrified psychotic.

 

Don Paterson, the Scottish poet, a poet who  looks at modern nature, contemporary relationships and is very much  a poet for grown-ups:

 

The Landscape

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath
filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame
lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked
the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,
or flared an instant, just where the road forked.

It is the star struck under my heel in the night.
It is the word no book on earth defines.
it is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.

As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.
The street fall nameless, and the knots untie.
Now, with this landscape, I fix, I shine.

 

The first mists of autumn

 

Woke up to  the valley blanketed  in mist, the first  of the autumn mists, Damp white and  low cloud right across the fields and  mountain slopes — I couldn’t see to the end of the back garden. And by 9am this solid white fog had burned off in the sun.

Spending time with someone who  grows apricots, saffron  pears,  quinces and  pomegranates in her back garden. She preserves and bottles them, following an old recipe for pickled peaches with vinegar, bay leaves, cloves and chilli that dates back to the French occupation of the Cape in 1803. Her family farmed near Ceres and came over the mountains in ox wagons in the 1920s to farm wheat on the  rolling slopes around here. We sat talking on the  sunlit porch or stoep under a trellis of reddened vines, drinking strong coffee while she told me  family history. Her grandmother used to sit out in the same spot shelling peas into her starched white apron and smoking an old  hand-carved calabash pipe, unusual in a woman then, but she was a skilled midwife and highly respected in the area. She smoked her own fish (snoek, kabbeljou, geelbek) caught down at the coast and  hung up to dry with  plaited strings of onions next to pegged washing, starchy Sunday-best  suits and  cotton frocks  all suspended together in the tiled  laundry room at the back of the  house. White shirt fronts  imbued with  a whiff of  smoky fish…

Shielding my eyes from the  last of the summer sun, the  sky overhead a dome of  sheet-metal at  noon. Today the  eye is rested although still aching a little. There are  luscious pink and white nerines coming up in  all the gardens down this  street,  wild unhybridised nerines known locally as ‘March lilies’. A few retired homesteaders have  white dovecotes standing tall  in their orchards, so that white pigeons are wheeling over the  oaks in perfect formation. And the oaks are now heavy with acorns, fodder for  squirrels and  pigs. All around the valley there will be wild eland and grysbokke come down from the mountains to graze on fallen fruit.

Meditations on country living. The pace of life is slow here and ‘nothing happens overnight’: back home the dogs are all asleep under the avocado tree and lizards are still basking on the back step, a small grey cat sleeping curled up under a berried viburnum bush. Too slow a life perhaps, but in truth I can’t imagine myself growing old in a city, away from seasons and tides and leaf fall..

 

From Stanley Kunitz’ End of Summer

An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

Limp biscuit

Mysterious twinges of eye pain, not good in someone with a  history of  glaucoma and retinal detachments, so I have been lying in a darkened room with a wet cloth over my eyes. Dogs mystified. It might be just the effect of too much harsh sunlight and I feel better  now.

Better, but invalidish and a  bit pathetic. The last surge of  summer and I would so much rather be outside pruning roses or walking under oak trees, meeting with friends, finishing first and second drafts of  stories, essays, reviews.

Moving back and forth between Proust and Henry James with  slow almost voluptuous pleasure. My heels are cracking from running around barefoot in dust and gravel so i cream them and prop them up on  old pillows while I go on reading. or lying down with a wrung-out cloth over my face and a dog whining at the bedroom door.

The housemate perfects siesta smoothies with  ripe bananas, passionfruit and yoghurt. Tall glasses of coolth in the stifling heat. On the  back step and  brick paving there are motionless silver and grey-green lizards glistening in the sun, thawing a little from their reptilian cold-bloodedness. The olive trees are bristling with green pips that in time will become green ovals and then big purply-black olives.

Note to self: do you want buckets of brined olives standing about in the kitchen for three months? Go on, the results will be worth the trouble.

“Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?”
― Henry James, The Ambassadors

 

 

The little kissable mouth

There is a spot in the  garden where the  overgrown and seeded-out fennel was uprooted. The phantom scent of fennel lingers on, inexplicably.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all the romantics in bloggerland!

For the resolutely unromantic, a good anti-love poem, from Billy Collins’ The Breather

Just as in the horror movies

when someone discovers that the phone calls

are coming from inside the house

so too, I realized   

that our tender overlapping

has been taking place only inside me.

All that sweetness, the love and desire—

it’s just been me dialing myself

then following the ringing to another room

to find no one on the line,

well, sometimes a little breathing

but more often than not, nothing.

***

A close friend in the village, older and  seemingly immortal, has to have open-heart surgery and I fight a towering wave of  anxiety on hearing this news. It will be fine, it  will all work out in the end, hope matters, we each live by the flickering brave tiny light of hope. But fear is the  dark wave sliding down again, rearing overhead, the sheer  towering unknowability of it all in this life.

***

Poetry floats me through the day. From Tony Hoagland

Windchime

She goes out to hang the windchime

in her nightie and her work boots.

It’s six-thirty in the morning

and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest

tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

*

windchime in her left hand,

hammer in her right, the nail

gripped tight between her teeth

but nothing happens next because

she’s trying to figure out

how to switch #1 with #3.

*

She must have been standing in the kitchen,

coffee in her hand, asleep,

when she heard it—the wind blowing

through the sound the windchime

wasn’t making

because it wasn’t there.

*

No one, including me, especially anymore believes

till death do us part,

but I can see what I would miss in leaving—

the way her ankles go into the work boots

as she stands upon the ice chest;

the problem scrunched into her forehead;

the little kissable mouth

with the nail in it.

Week of surprises, surmises, lob-lolly ices

This has been a very rushed week and it is only Tuesday. Flabbergasted by the resignation of  Pope  Benedict XVI, imagining all the  drop-jawed cardinals wandering around  Vatican City in a daze. The first Pope to resign or abdicate in 600 years. This is going to be a very strange Lent.

Busy writing a monograph of the  Portuguese writer Fernando de Pessoa who  spent his youth in South Africa in the early 1900s. Fascinating work, impossible deadlines.

Village funerals and more busyness.

A difficult  argument with the gardening services manager,  too many mutual misunderstandings to be resolved  without long negotiations through  sulks on his part, meaningful silences on mine. .

I’m starting to  revise my out-of-date blog roll. If you stopped blogging and don’t want to be ejected, start up again and I’ll put you back on. If I don’t know your blog and you want to see it shining brightly on my blog roll, send me  your url.

The playful sweetness of dogs as a constant distraction from work.

Return of  summer heat  and I crave homemade ices,  raspberry and mango, melting on the tongue.

Should I make pancakes for Shrove Tuesday? I am the clumsiest pancake tosser ever. Why does Lent catch me unawares each year? Metanoia, transformation, staying receptive to the unexpected. Will the next Pope be African?

Fernando de Pessoa, a truly plural person who wrote under many heteronyms. Another Whitman embracing  multitudes.

 

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt. 

I have more than just one soul. 
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

Fernando Pessoa as Ricardo Reis, from Odes