Alcohol as just another crutch

 

Crutches

Nikki Giovanni

it’s not the crutches we decry
it’s the need to move forward
though we haven’t the strength
women aren’t allowed to need
so they develop rituals
since we all know working hands idle

the devil
women aren’t supposed to be strong
so they develop social smiles
and secret drinking problems
and female lovers whom they never touch
except in dreams

men are supposed to be strong
so they have heart attacks
and develop other women
who don’t know their weaknesses
and hide their fears
behind male lovers
whom they religiously touch
each saturday morning on the basketball court
it’s considered a sign of health doncha know
that they take such good care
of their bodies

i’m trying to say something about the human condition
maybe i should try again

if you broke an arm or leg
a crutch would be a sign of courage
people would sign your cast
and you could bravely explain
no it doesn’t hurt—it just itches
but if you develop an itch
there are no salves to cover the area
in need of attention
and for whatever guilt may mean
we would feel guilty for trying
to assuage the discomfort
and even worse for needing the aid

i really want to say something about all of us
am i shouting          i want you to hear me

emotional falls always are
the worst
and there are no crutches
to swing back on

This moment we are given

Friday morning and the garden is blue with hydrangeas. If a small balding man with humpy wings and a scooped-up toga showing off his knobbly knees were to appear in my kitchen and announce: ‘I am the Archangel Michael! What is the meaning of life?’ I would start babbling on about needing to find the small ceramic and terracotta curved spoon I use for retrieving olives from tall jars. How can I have lost this invaluable spoon in my unimposing domestic kitchen? The meaning of my life is pitted and dented with  everyday objects that go missing just when I need them most: corkscrews, can-openers that have evolved from Swiss army knives, veggie peelers smuggled back from Italy, wire basket spoons bought at a roadside near Luanda in Angola, Art Deco  egg timers sent to me by a friend in California, tiny silver-plated cake forks I use to get caper berries out of narrow containers, etc. Elizabeth Bishop wrote a magnificent heartbreaking poem called One Art and I recite it to myself as I search for olive scoops and cake forks.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

This weekend I am gadding all around the countryside: brunches, a luncheon for 40 guests, supper parties. I groan aloud and complain to my housemate, say how much I wish I could stay at home slumped in a wicker chair with a book, but once I get there I will enjoy myself. There will be tables spread with white linen under green oak trees, friends in straw hats and sandals beaming with gossip and news, bowls of cold cucumber soup and pavlovas of meringue overflowing with cream and berries. What’s not to like? I take along my own bottle of still mineral water and a tolerant summery attitude. These days I hardly notice if someone pours herself a glass of wine, and in truth one of the great surprises in sobering up was to discover how little most people drink. Many of my friends don’t drink at all and I am used to lively, unlubricated conversations, unintoxicated laughter and elegant hospitality.

Ona good day I might be dancing the Steps: the meditation, the reaching out in service, the penetrating nightly inventories, the readiness to say sorry and move on, the steely resolve to change what needs changing.

Right now I am reflecting on this from Norman Fischer:

“Whether you like this moment or not is not the point: in fact liking it or not liking it, being willing or unwilling to accept it, depending on whether or not you like it, is to sit on the fence of your life, waiting to decide whether or not to live, and so never actually living. I find it impressive how thoroughly normal it is to be so tentative about the time of our lives, or so asleep within it, that we miss it entirely. Most of us don’t know what it actualy feels like to be alive. We know about our problems, our desires, our goals and accomplishments, but we don’t know much about our lives. It generally takes a huge event, the equivalent of a birth or death, to wake up our sense of living this moment we are given – this moment that is just for the time being, because it passes even as it arrives. Meditation is feeling the feeling of being alive for the time being. Life is more poignant than we know.”

There is a young papaya tree growing behind the garage next to a tree tomato and it reminds me of travelling down through Mozambique to Beira, the abundance of tropical palms and what we once called ‘pawpaw’ trees heavy with fruit and springing up out of the rich red soil of the coastal lowlands. Anything grows in my sheltered garden and it is a jungle of delights for me.

And there are days when writing offers some traction on reality and I feel I might be able to say something worthwhile and relevant, so let me go off and sit down with the Letters of Samuel Beckett and a pen and notebook and remind myself  how much remains unsaid — and unsayable, even from Beckett, the multilingual, uncondescending, self-revealing, poignant. The one and only Samuel Beckett whose subject is always loss.

He notes: “Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees & butterflies to elephants & parrots & speaking of indentures with the leveler. Barging through hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming and stopping to rest under color of admiring the view. I’ll never have anyone like him.” Several months later, the father dies. The son says, “I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.”

What the soul does for the body

My favourite insight of this bright and sunny morning is a half-frozen Mary Christine pointing out that the real fun of a sober Christmas is getting to spend the festive season with sober people. The friends I have made in sobriety are closer than family.

And one of my best friends  in the bleak and rainy UK has just sent me a fascinating recipe for a sage and onion lasagna which I shall test-drive and then post for those post-festive meals in January when we are all looking for recipes without turkey or goose or a jolly bronzed partridge. The secret ingredient in a sage and onion lasagna is spinach, you will be relieved to hear. Too much onion gives you heartburn.

Oh and while I’m skipping around  in search of amusing distractions, I see that the Swedish have renamed the hymen. Remember when we still had those funny little things? Anyhow, the hymen is now the vaginal corona. Not a great improvement as names go.

 ’Would you care for a gallop on my horse?’

 ’Oh no, kind sir, I might uncrown my virginal vaginal corona!’

My housemate’s medical  tests ruled out cancer and I am feeling suddenly lighter and happier, as if the terrible sword has been lifted up out of sight yet again. All that fear was quite pointless, trust would have been more steadying. (Easy enough to say in hindsight, isn’t it?) And how my heart goes out to all those suffering losses and with darkened memories at this time of year. Go gently, people.

What the soul does for the body, the poet does for her people.
- Gabriela Mistral

When it seems to me that the world is almost too amazing for words, with puppies in the garden chasing butterflies, an escaped peacock showing off  in the honey locust tree like a great green and purple fan dropped by a careless goddess, my neighbour holding up her small naked grandson over the garden wall so that I can ooh and aah — at times like this I turn to poetry and rejoice. To regain a life is no small thing.

From one of America’s greatest and most loved poets, Wendell Berry:

What We Need Is Here

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.

Sausages and power tools

The farmer’s wife who comes to me for French lessons says that she is very disappointed to find that French is not a sexy language when understood. ‘It looks so ooh-la-la with all that pouting of lips and waving of hands,’ she said sadly. ‘But then you find out that they are talking about washing dishes or catching a train that leaves the Gard du Nord at 8.30 am on the dot and it doesn’t sound sexy any longer.’ There you go, another  comforting illusion stripped from life.

And,  dear Samuel Ruiz, you may write to me as often as you like about your cosy retreat centre for those who deserve something better in life, but I am afraid I shall keep spamming you out of my comments because I don’t accept advertising on a private blog. And you know, Samuel, I don’t know that I would keep emphasisng that your exclusive and renowned rehab centre is on the doorstep of Disneyworld, because most of us have to get sober in a reality that is very far from Disney world. Sorry about that.

Encouragement for  the struggling writer who is short on plotting!

Antti Hyry has won the nation’s top literary award, the Finlandia Prize, for his novel Uuni, or “Oven”. The unhurried 400-page novel follows the construction of a brick oven.

This wonderful author is 78 and was educated as an engineer. Asked by a YLE radio reporter how he intended to spend the 30,000 euros in prize money, he replied laconically: “Sausages and power tools.”

Out here in the mountains it is humid and muggy. Each evening we have groups of enthusiastic carol singers coming around as the day cools into evening and warbling ‘Good King Wencelas’ and ‘Felice navidad’ as well as an isiXhosa version of ‘God Rest You Merry Gentlemen’ and 22 verses of uHamba-lom Hambi. Moving and neighbourly in a way, but unfortunately tuneless. And then there are three elderly men with trombones who do an imitation of Boney M’s ‘Little Drummer Boy’ without the drums. Pa-rup-a-tum-tum. It is an odd time of year and I find myself oscillating between wanting to fill the house with people and make them happy ever after, and the intense desire to climb into bed and put a pillow over my head to drown out  Little Drummer Boy, no more reggae twist on rup-a-tum-tum, rup-a-tum-tum; and then wake up like Sleeping Beauty renewed if unkissed, on  2nd January.

When I feel a little jaundiced or weary in spirit I either get into the bath with As Bill Sees It or I go out into the garden with an apple and a copy of the nature journals of Gilbert White or Thoreau. Here is Thoreau writing on a wintry morning, November 16, 1850:

“The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider-mill. But since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man! there are many pleasures which he will be debarred from.”

 

Wild apples in sobriety are far more delightful than even sausages and power tools.  The image above is of the last wild apples of Kazbekstan, soon to be extinct.  It is good to be sober and realistic on a Wednesday morning  at the end of the year.

Afraid of nothing

For Lydia who is afraid of flying:

Starlings in Winter

by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Conversations interrupted by the ibis

Up late after a sleepless  night and with an upset stomach from eating unripe peaches. My spirit lightened by the sight of a wildly flowering ivy-leaf pelargonium on a fixed urn high on the wall of the garage. Spilling magenta flowers high and wide, its leaves frilled and glossy green trailing down, a beauty decended from Pelargonium peltatum. The Dutch governor of the Cape, Willen Adriaan van der Stel, took this pretty  but tough little pelargonium to the Netherlands in 1700 and crowds came to admire the mass of bright soft flowers and ivy-like foliage. It lasts through droughts , veldfires and hurricanes and provides food for carpenter bees and the Water Bronze butterfly.

This week I ventured into a recovery chatroom online. It was disconcerting. Strangers asked me for my sobriety date and my phone number. Feeling at home with my own, I dashed off erudite , charming, witty and lengthy replies, fingers flying on the keyboard, scattering typos liberally and quoting Colette, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Sarkozy and dear old BillW. The typos were my downfall because other chatters began telling me I could get sober this very day if I choose to do so. In their time zone it was 3am and they did not want to discuss global warming with somebody unable to spell ‘meteorological’.

This morning as I was dosing myself with lemon juice in hot water, puckering up like a bride of 85 years and counting, I had a call from somebody wanting to get sober. Excited, I rushed out into the back garden for better telephone reception, where a flock of shrieking African ibises  (or hadedas as they are called locally)  made the conversation sound like a ritual murder. To my disappointment, the wanna-be non-drinker Stan-the-Man thinks he will start his sober life after New Year.  So as not to miss out on a miserable hungover  festive season in which Stan-the-Man kicks the dog, pukes on the wife and falls downstairs breaking both legs. But motivation is key and those who don’t want to quit, just don’t quit. He told me he is a ‘party animal’ and I wondered idly what kind of animal he had in mind: a maddened buffalo or a sneaky anaconda or a drunken panda bear? We agreed that 2010 was a good year to acquire a new life and I wished him compliments of the season. Stan-the-Man sounded like a man ready to crack open a nice cold beer at 10am just because he could. I used to think like that too. Is there any good reason not to welcome the day with a few mouthfuls of revitalizing alcohol? I would ask myself and my common sense knew better than to argue with the crazy woman in the attic.

Later this week we are having friends around for drinks and festive snacks. I have devised an apple punch (non-alcoholic) with mulled apple juice, a cinnamon stick, cloves and honey, topped with fresh mint. I am also making a Roquemola, a dip  of mashed avocado and Roquefort or Gorgonzola cheese spiked with a little chilli. Party time! My housemate has devised her own version of non-alcoholic Long Island tea with lemongrass, cranberry and freshly squeezed orange juice and is going to grill chicken drumsticks marinated in honey and soy sauce. I suspect the guests will bring their own commercial fizzy cool drinks and think it safer to drink those.

And we are going to have to put up the small and battered artificial Christmas tree on a cabinet or table where the dogs cannot attack it. Last year my puppies were tiny and overawed and obedient. This year they are individuated adults and  inclined to chew anything bright and glittery. Challenges, challenges!

Gazpacho on a hot summer night

It is cloudy today but very hot and I have been sipping  mugs of honied ginger tea from Vietnam, a gift from my newly widowed neighbour Lucille. I have written an insightful  but brief paper on aspects of Lacanian analysis and my brain is now feeling very tired. My memory isn’t as sharp as it used to be, I forget the oddest things:  names once very familiar escape me and I struggle to grasp new concepts. It could be worse and would definitely be worse if I weren’t sober.

Now I am taking a break to play with pups, fleabitten beasties, and plan a gazpacho for supper, that Andalusian tomato soup served up chilled. The tomatoes are very good right now and we have a glut. And I have ice cubes to toss in after the soup has cooled in the fridge for a few hours. This is such a flexible summer soup — I am not sure if I have cucumber but I do have some roasted red peppers peeled and doused in red-wine vinegar.

Gazpacho

8 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 red onion, finely chopped, or three spring onions, finely chopped
1 cucumber, peeled, seeded, chopped
2 sweet red bell peppers, grilled, peeled and diced

1/2 stalk celery, chopped
1-2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
2 Tbsp chopped fresh garlic chives
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice and I do a little zest
2 teaspoons sugar to taste
Salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste
6 or more drops of Tabasco sauce to taste or a minced fresh chilli
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce (omit for vegetarian option)
4 cups tomato juice or light passata

Combine all ingredients and whiz to desired consistency. Place in non-metal, non-reactive storage container, cover tightly and refrigerate overnight or for a few hours, allowing flavors to blend. Toss in small ice cubes into serving bowls, garnish with parsley or coriander.

Serves 6.

Illuminating the dark

Woke up at 4am and let the dogs into the garden that was bright with moonlight, unshadowed and open as a book. Terrific still heat — my neighbours were sitting out on their verandah talking, waiting for dawn and a small wind. Further down the road I could hear the lawn sprinklers splashing in another garden. Roosters crowing in the next street, the moon bright as any sun.

The quiet beginning to another week, drafting out articles and chapters in a notebook, my hand holding the pen and moving across the page, line after line, slow but steady.

My housemate has had a misshapen mole removed and we are waiting for test results. I wish the threat of cancer was not such a paralysing fear. It is all I think about most of the time right now. Fear crowds out so much in the consciousness.

This morning’s highlight: reading a Guardian review of the work of the late John McGahern, one of Ireland’s greatest autobiographical writers.

“The light was beginning to fail but he did not want to go into the house. In a methodical way he set out to walk his land, field by blind field . . . . It was like grasping water to think how quickly the years had passed here. They were nearly gone. It was in the nature of things and yet it brought a sense of betrayal and anger, of never having understood anything much. Instead of using the fields, he sometimes felt as if the fields had used him. Soon they would be using someone else in his place . . . . He continued walking the fields like a man trying to see.

Dark had fallen by the time he went into the house.”

So the dark falls, but what the book leaves you with is not a sense of darkness, but the feeling of illumination, of everything having been fully understood.

And thinking with pleasure, amidst my funk, of the long sober hours of work ahead, the exchange of phone calls and emails with friends, that I shall make a chilled  gazpacho with ripe summer tomatoes and roast red peppers, attend a workshop on bereavement, go and look at the latest paintings done by a friend on her trip into the Namib a few weeks ago. Just stay in the present, stay sober another day and create the possibility of a sober tomorrow, a sober future.

High summer

If I hang up wet washing at 6am, it is bone dry on the line by 9am. From now until April the furnace heat will intensify and there will be water restrictions and a heightened risk of veld fires.

My herbs are bolting, racing towards flower and seed in the heat. Great bushes of opal basil that are dark and purply with a tiny white flower, feathering coriander, rocket flowering white or yellow, umbellifer seed heads of fennel, pagodas of small cabbage. But to be out in the herb garden at dawn is still heavenly. As I water and snips away, I wonder aloud to my small flea-ridden dogs if the Copenhagen summit will succeed where the Kyoto Protocol failed. My pups care about as little as most onlookers and race back and forth across the lawn in pursuit of lizards and butterflies.

I say Mary Oliver’s poem Morning to myself as I work out in the garden, pausing to admire malachite sunbirds and thinking back on all the hundreds of  missed mornings of my life when I lay groaning in bed until noon, unable to face the sunlight, wanting only merciful death or another drink.

Morning Poem

 

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

 

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

 

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

 

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

 

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

 

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —

 

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —

 

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

 

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

 

Ordinary blessings

A mild summer’s day with the skies streaked with milky dashes of cloud. I woke early and meditated. I do at least 45 minutes of meditation each day but I am often at a loss to know what to say about the habit of meditating. Much of the time I am sleepy, bored, distracted. Sometimes I am not. Sometimes I feel I am listening. Sometimes I am planning the day ahead. Sometimes I feel spacious inside, as if my rib cage split open to reveals sunlit plains of savannah with wild horses galloping about. Sometimes I get up creakily from meditating and haven’t a clue what I have done with the time.

If you do enough meditation, it becomes as essential as breathing.

The first spanspek are being sold at farm stalls all over the valley. Spanspek are called honeydew or canteloupe melons elsewhere, to the best of my knowledge. When I bite into the first dripping slice of apricot-tinted spanspek each December, I make a wish. Next week there will be large stripey green and white watermelons on sale. And the week after that the peaches and hanepoot table grapes will be  on sale.

The house floats on the fragrance of ripe spanspek, that honey dew sweetness.

We took our puppies to the vet for a check-up this morning. Next to us was a bored young woman with a furious chocolate-brown cat in a travelling cage, glaring at everyone and especially the vile dogs present. There was a happy woman buying a new harness and leash for her black labrador puppy. A very tall and wide-of-girth man with a tiny poodle. A sleepy elderly couple with a sleepy boxer. A sulky African grey parrot called Amandapanda.

The vet delivered the bad news: we have an infestation of fleas, probably from feral cats. The alarmed pups were dosed and sprayed. All their bedding and the sofa covers are to be washed and sprayed. I am to sprinkle coarse salt under rosemary bushes which may or may not dehydrate thousands of incubating flea eggs. The vet explained The Life Cycle of The Flea, parts i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii etc to all of us in the eager and dulcet tones of a man who finds his own thoughts endlessly fascinating. The pups looked at him as if they were meeting a  very powerful and rather stupid God.

On the way home we looked at donkeys grazing in a swampy field, pink heather on the mountain slopes, flowering acacia and yellow gorse, discussed the possibility of getting  a Great Dane. I listened to Debussy while I cleaned the sofa covers and bedding and swept and sprinkled salt. The dogs have stopped scritching and rootling about in their furry groins.

When I am meditating, I have a few things I say to myself like a mantra or litany. I say ‘Thank you’ a great deal to the higher power of my evolving understanding. I say to myself ‘That was then, this is now’. I say ‘Let it go’ very often. And I remind myself to breathe in and out and keep my belly soft.