If the heat ever breaks I am going to unpuddle off the sofa, take the ice cubes from between my parched lips and make a fennel and orange amuse-bouche, bechamel my way through a roast vegetable lasagna, do something ravishing with pancetta and walnut oil, toss pak choi in a hot pan. Or just hand the guests a tomato and head of baby gem lettuce each and let them make themselves a simple salad.

The guests are not pining for the city lights. They are comatose and weak from heat fatigue. No fun at all, and the small dogs are  hugely disappointed. Before I was overcome with heat fatigue myself, I washed the puppies one at atime in a cool bath. I found three fleas or some fragmented black pepper grindings, who knows which? The dogs are fluffy and angelic, squeaky clean. So am I. Drenched in dog shampoo, soaked to the skin, smelling  of wet dog and toasted almonds — I am currently  obsessed with green beans done the French way with almonds and a scrap of garlic.

Does this happen to everyone? The grand obsession with alcohol departs and  the addled mind fills up with all kinds of other preoccupations. I lie awake rewriting the Copenhagen treaty and making the world safe for rare species of anemone. I lie awake and invent new ways of coddling eggs and slicing French beans at a Gallic angle. I lie awake and matchmake for unmarriageable lesbian friends who  prefer horses or dogs to their own species. I advise the God of my understanding on how to fix an exploding red giant  supernova in another galaxy. Or something along those lines. My novel turns gargantuan with untested theories about hybridized apple trees and ghostwritten presidential speeches and created bubble cities on the ocean bed. The other night, with a white moon waxing fullish in Aquarius, I devised a new kind of oily yellow gremolata to accompany pork belly and a spinach-green couscous. In the old days I just thought about drinking — how bad it was for me, how much I liked it, how necessary itwas — and gloomed over ex-lovers and my depleted bank balance. Now I am sober and an existential menace rivalling the Creator of Worlds.

For supper  (we shall sit out in the garden under the stars at a small table lit by hurricane lamps, with hungry mosquitos needling our bare legs)  we shall have grilled rosemary chicken and a big bowl of slim green beans with toasted almonds.  Baked potatoes with salt-free butter. A big dish of salad with plum tomatoes, olives, capers and  lettuce leaves roughly torn. Then the guests can stagger off to bed and lie awake listening to the owl while I rewrite War & Peace.

Hot sultry weather unstirred by wind. Guests slumped around on sofas and in big armchairs,  dazed by the quiet and with puppies licking their faces. Tall jugs of icy homemade lemonade and gingerbeer, a glut of summer peaches. The garden humming and cooing with cicadas and turtledoves. As in the sensuous and symbolic Song of Solomon:

The flowers appear on the earth;

The time of the singing of birds is come,

And the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land

Insanity would be drinking alcohol in this kind of heat, dehydrating the body, whacking the blood sugar levels, adding to the exhaustion. I lie on the pillowed sofa and read detective novels while sliced strawberries sweeten in the fridge and bowls of yoghurt flavoured with mint and honey chill. All around the house there are tall glass vases of hydrangeas and agapanthus, blue on blue. Sobriety makes sense. The guests  tell me they are keen on good wines. by which they mean a glass or two of flinty sauvignon blanc with the grilled chicken or fish steamed with ginger and lemongrass. Most people don’t know what serious drinking involves, the dedication and persistence of downing several litres and then some. Wiping out the evening, the night, the next day, a lifetime.

There is a new book by Karen Armstrong on the bedside table, rebuting in part the New Atheists. I’m musing on faith, the impossibility, the necessity. How it all becomes simple when we are singlehearted in our quest.

“Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage.”

Anne Sexton — American poet, alcoholic, suicide.

Another glorious and blue-eyed morning on the far side of the universe in the Dark Continent. This morning I woke early and  threw open my curtains, then sat down on a zendo cushion chewed around the rim by unmindful puppies and meditated for 45 minutes. After that I had some wild Kenyan coffee and a cup of green tea to calm down the thrill of the wild coffee. Then I tidied the spare room because we have city guests coming to stay. In my next life I am coming back sober from the get-go and houseproud. I found pruning shears under the bed, an extra copy of As Bill Sees It, lonely unmatched socks in twirly patterns and the lid of a pale green Le Creuset pot I lost four years ago. And after that I sat down on the swept floor of the spare room and meditated again because my head was in a bad Hating-the-Inner-Slob mood.

As the unforgettable and unforgotten David Foster Wallace puts it:

‘As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.’

City guests  sometimes known as friends turn up frazzled from the traffic on the highways. They sit in the garden and smell the musk roses and listen to birds. They wonder aloud why they don’t live out in the country, why everyone does not live this way. They have long baths in soft unpolluted country water and cups of tea and sticky buns. Then they say shyly that they want to pop across to the chemist for something. The lone star chemist closes at noon most days. The guests get restless. They want to go out and drink espresso at fabulous buzzy little cafes and nibble on sushi and look at glamorous celebs mingling  and thronging in shopping malls. They cannot believe I live without television or video. They don’t want to listen to sublime Bach on the old grungy player. I let them do Internet shopping online. They  want to do exciting clubby things when it gets dark and everyone in the village goes to sleep. The country air makes them yawn. They go to bed and the owl keeps them awake  in the small hours. They get up and jog around misty vineyards but miss the traffic noise and grey fumes. The quiet becomes a little sinister. They miss the crowds and the delis and the ambulance sirens. There are large spiders lurking under the eaves and fruit bats that swoop through the garden at twilight. Cobras under the plumbago bushes at the back of the garden.  And yet despite the dangers, nothing much happens. They find their own thoughts boring. Nothing to buy, nobody to fight with, nothing to do. The old mirror  in the bathroom makes them look fat. They make implausible excuses and dash back to the city with relief at the crack of dawn on Sunday.

It is of course a retake on Beatrix Potter’s story of Johnny Town Mouse and Timmy Willie the little country mouse. (I once had a wonky tricycle I called Timmy Willie because it preferred ditches to the road.)

TIMMY WILLIE received him with open arms. “You have come at the best of all the year, we will have herb pudding and sit in the sun.”
“H’m'm! it is a little damp,” said Johnny Town-mouse, who was carrying his tail under his arm, out of the mud.

“WHAT is that fearful noise?” he started violently.
“That?” said Timmy Willie, “that is only a cow; I will beg a little milk, they are quite harmless, unless they happen to lie down upon you. How are all our friends?”

Wishing all my American friends a sober and peaceful Thanksgiving. Enjoy family togetherness and food cooked with love and make space for the lonely stranger or orphan at the feast. And when the beloved family members tread on toes and push the same-old-same-old buttons, breathe in deeply and surrender it all, let it go, take another slice of honied pumpkin pie  –

My Nanowrimo novel-in-the-making has reached the sum total of 32 000 words and I am about to give up. I may have a short story there, buried in the digressions and Maryness and good intentions paving the road to hell or writer’s block.

Intriguing review of a new tell-all non-fiction book on alcoholic film actors, Robert Sellers’ Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed. An element of riotous drunkalogue perhaps:

Peter O’Toole:  “I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one’s local in Paris and woke up in Corsica.”

But the reality is a much sadder and more predictable story.  Alcoholism had the last word.

Anyone horrified by the reckless abandon of “Hellraisers” should know what its ultimate effect turns out to be. This fun-loving celebration of drunkenness proves to be an even more sobering cautionary tale than some of the most serious addiction and recovery memoirs. And the fact that none could entirely stop drinking, even when it became a life-or-death medical necessity, makes it that much sadder. Funny as it is, the book’s boisterous beginning gives way to grimly premature states of illness and dotage, with Mr. Harris as the member of the foursome most aware of his behavior’s high price. “I didn’t even have the joy of remembering my own exploits,” he said, after realizing that alcohol had wiped out much of his memory.

Today I am making  huge sagging peppermint ice-cream cakes for a Christmas party given from small children from disadvantaged communities. Outside, a heat wave is building like a solid wall of fire.  Given the rate that the ice cream melts, this is going to be a very messy and sticky party, but such fun! I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

And a dear friend who is usually cynical and fond of throwing cold water on my  enthusiasms and faith in humankind has just sent me an email in which he surprisingly says: Let’s remember the thanks in Thanksgiving. How touching and unexpected.

The cicadas are going crazy in the sycamore trees as well as in the oaks and honey locusts and catalpas. This is the sound of high summer, the remarkable acoustic talents of the cicada with its wide-set large eyes and veined transparent wings. Male cicadas have loud noisy timbals on the sides of their abdomens and they collapse their abdominal muscles and membranes to turn their bodies into resonance chambers. At the same time they wiggle back and forth on the tree they are perched on, a kind of high-spirited drumming dance at the hottest time of the day because cicadas love dry heat. They sing different songs: a distress call if one of them is attacked; a number of different mating songs to attract different kinds of mates; and a courtship song to welcome the female who arrives to join the lonely jiver. In Aesop’s Fables the nonchalant cicada sings all summer long while the diligent ant stores food. Unfortunately the cicada can live up to 17 years while the ant, well, doesn’t.

To know what a the sensuous buzz of a cicada sounds like, put a brown paper bag over your head and hum along to Amy Winehouse singing Valerie while thumping your midriff with a soft fist and thinking pleasurably dirty thoughts. The kind of exercise you can only do sober and at home alone —  don’t try this in public, people.

There are too many lonely people in this village. Last night we had somebody over for supper because she lives alone and goes up to the library  each day just to see human faces and quarrel with the librarians. The spectrum of schizo-affective disorders is vast, and vastly misunderstood. Shelley, as I shall call her, ate her roast chicken with a spoon and talked only to the dogs. They empathised more attentively and affectionately than any human could ever manage. It was a wonderful evening and I was reminded that when our hearts break a little they open wide to other understandings of gift.

I’m still thinking about memory, echoing the one and only Proust:

“When from a long distant past nothing persists, after the people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, still alone, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long, long time like souls, ready to remind us, waiting, hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest, and bear unfaltering in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence the vast structure of recollection.”

The agapanthus are flowering all around the Cape and in every village garden. Agapanthus from agape, the Greek word for a pure and selfless love, a tall-stemmed flower with a cluster of electric blue or sparkling white flowers. I catch my breath each time I see them. If heaven is not a garden I shall come back to earth and just listen to cicadas for an indolent eternity. How good it is to be sober.

A friend has given me a large jar of vanilla-scented bath gel. I took a luxurious long bath, all sudsy and spiritually enlightened, and when I got out and wafted into the living room my puppies sniffed at me suspiciously and my housemate said: ‘You smell like Aunt Betty’s Original Sponge Cake mix. If you go out shopping smelling like that, an unrecovered diabetic will come along and take a bite out of your tittie.’ Charming.

How many cabs in New York City, how many angels on a pin?
How many notes in a saxophone, how many tears in a bottle of gin?
How many times did you call my name, knock at the door but you couldn’t get in?
- Paul Kelly Careless

Mary Christine’s post on the year 1977 has led me to reflect on obliviousness. The way life slides out of sight while we are drinking. Thinking back almost three decades, I remember going to speak with somebody I had spent time with over the weekend and asking him if he recalled anything I might have said or done in the course of about 15 hours I could not remember. He was scornful and uninterested in talking to me. ‘You just don’t want to admit to yourself that you are a heartless vicious bitch,’ he said. ‘You’re just looking for ways to excuse your behaviour.’

It was beyond mortifying and if I think back, I would still give a great deal to be able to find out what happened and make amends for that behaviour. Hopefully he has learned something about alcoholism as an illness somewhere along the line. It was my eighth or ninth alcoholic blackout and I was terrified. I had frequent nightmares about killing someone in a blackout and being put on trial where nobody would tell me what I had done. Secretly I wondered if I might be a multiple personality (we didn’t call it dissociation back then), a Jekyll and Hyde monster.

One of the most brilliant insights  uncovered by BillW and his companions was the realisation that only one alcoholic can understand another, can speak truth into another’s addled mind. Two drunks together while drinking are hopeless — slurring and colluding in denial and swearing eternal love to one another as they gulp down another drink at the bar counter. But any recovering alcoholic knows from within how it feels and how hard it is to admit the truth of our powerlessness over alcohol. And as recovering alcoholics we have immense compassion for one another as we learn how to stay sober one day at a time for the rest of our lives.

Outraged friends or acquaintances were not being deliberately cruel in withholding information from me – they had distanced in order to protect themselves and owed me nothing. They didn’t understand alcoholism, had no need to understand it because they stopped drinking when they knew they had had enough.

I had no plans to join Black Sabbath. I went out with Geezer and Tony and we got drunk, and I found out the next day that I had agreed to join the band.
- Bill Ward

Obliviousness.

When I was 15 and at school in what is now Zimbabwe, we were studying James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Our teacher Mrs Maddox was called out of the classroom to take a phone call. It was a hot afternoon and I sat and looked at msasa trees in the grounds below the school, daydreaming and waiting for the lesson to end. Mrs Maddox came back and was flustered, unable to find her place in the book we had been studying. ‘It was page 43, halfway down on the lefhand page,’ I said without a copy of the book in front of me. I had an eidetic memory, that captured pages as a camera might. I had read the novel the previous year and as Mrs Maddox read passages out aloud I would see the pages turning, the headers and paragraphs. I had a very unusual memory that I took for granted.

In the drinking years my memory took on what a lover once called ‘the bitter memory of history’. I nursed grudges and cherished grievances. I could not be dissuaded from the detail my memory provided, I sulked and brooded over wrongs and insults. My version was always the right one. I had not idea that this kind of exact and hostile recall might impede forgiveness, because I thought of myself as somebody who neither forgot nor forgave.

At the same time, my memory often gave me pause: I would realise that the remembered facts contradicted the mood I felt in. I was also very aware that I edited facts and remembered selectively, that over time I revised and altered my memories, subjectively and at a certain cost to the truth. My memory was unrelaible, could not be trusted.

Only in my 40s did I begin to understand the connection between memory and attention. It was bothering me more and more that I knew so little of my friends’ lives, that I had gaps, lacunae, ellipses in my memory, long periods of forgetfulness like blank pages in a book. I wasn’t paying attention because my alcoholism excluded awareness of daily realities. I tried not to think about many things. I lived in a blurry dreamlike world of drunkeness — what I thought of as my ‘lost summers’, endless hot afternoons drinking alone and listening to music, nights sitting out on a balcony looking down at the river and drinking. I could not recall if anyone had been with me. I could not  recall what had made me weep.

In those years, I finished theses, wrote essays, chapters, conference papers on days of nominal sobriety when I was hungover and desperate to complete projects, forcing myself to read and reread, hand in assigments and publishing articles that I would later look at with no recollection of having written them. I was running on empty, driving myself with only a limited talent to help me keep the facade intact, the sham of being an academic or writer. Unsurprisingly, the writing suffered. My mind was cutting itself to pieces.  In my late 30s I found I could edit well enough — and editing was easier than creative writing. So I called myself an editor and a whole part of myself, that shining golden ball of  hopefulness, rolled away out of sight, sliding into darkness. I found softer, easier ways to keep going because I no longer had the energy or persistence to keep trying. I had forgotten what it felt like to be me.

Alcoholism is a search for a common language, or at least, it is a compensation for a language that has been lost.
- Octavio Paz

And when I began going into meetings and listening to the life stories of others like me, I began again to remember. This is what it felt like. This is what happened. This is what was lost. Women who scarely remember the faces of children taken from them as babies. Men who live with the knowledge of their own criminal wrongdoing but not the memory. Those who know they are no longer welcome at family Thanksgiving but have no idea why. The terror of waking in the morning to a body that is bruised or bleeding and there is no way to find out what was done during that night of blackout. Waking in prison or hospital and recalling only the day before. That happy-go-lucky impulse to have a beer on the beach before heading home. To stop at a neighbourhood bar for  a glass of wine and some conversation. To pick up a drink on a Saturday afternoon, meaning no harm. And then to walk that inner circle of hell reserved for alcoholics.

Remembering what it was like: the collective memory of sober alcoholics together reminding one another what it was like, holding open the door of memory for one another. And how the story of forgetting and  loss became one of redemption, restoration, recovery. What happened; what we are like now.

Bolt from the blue — a friend of mine relapsed  this weekend and I am feeling heartsick and anxious. I so wish that people would talk about the desire to drink before they pick up that first drink. But I know from my own experience that  sometimes I had been planning a return to drinking for weeks beforehand, had just wanted to go away and drink no matter  how bad an idea this might be. Over the decades of my drinking I would make pacts with significant others to stay sober, I would enlist the help of concerned but clueless friends. Sometimes I would spot the shift in myself towards  a desire to drink (so small and insignificant a shift) and I would tell somebody and sometimes the desire would go away. Sometimes it wouldn’t go away and I would cheerfully lie to the friend and drink anyway. But often all the arguing  went on in my head (should I? shouldn’t I? if not why not?) and I never won an argument with myself over drinking. Not once that I can recall.

Sometimes I would just  drink again without having any intention to do so, standing at a party and reaching for a glass, lifting and swallowing with no  formulated intention to do so. Sometimes I would make the decision so fast and drink so immediately so that the decision and the action slid together as one fluid indivisible motion. Sometimes I would plan to get away so I could drink unobserved. Nobody would know and that included me because I was a nobody to myself.

Each New Year’s morning I would write a stern letter to myself about stopping for good and living without  any alcohol in my life. Along with resolutions about  being less volatile and bad-tempered, less of a coward about speaking my mind, finding a diet to improve myhealth,  getting more exercise, going to another therapist, committing to a spiritual practice, going back to church, not hiding from life, getting a life, finding myself, sorting out my life. Oh and not drinking so much, perhaps even stopping for good. What about becoming vegetarian? Meeting new people and not needing drink as a social lubricant? And learning yoga once I had lost weight and stopped or cut down on the drinking. At least 25 resolutions cast in stone to help me launch into a new year.

And within a week the resolutions would have all been put aside as unrealistic. Or just forgotten.

For year after year I underestimated the force and progression of my own chronic and severe alcoholism. In later years I didn’t experience urges as strong or problematic because I no longer fought urges. The desire to drink always seemed a faint unimportant urge, a little echo in the back of my mind, insignificant because I was going to drink anyhow. Drinking was that secret peripheral problem lurking in the shadows while I anguished over relationships and job decisions and all the different things going wrong for what seemed to me a number of complicated reasons. Alcoholism ran through all of this like a fine and almost invisible thread. I was always tired, often confused, irritable and  increasingly panicky, haunted and troubled. My own personality bothered me, I had the kind of personality that was inherently unlovable and weak-willed. Such a pity that some fairy godmother had not lavished gifts of perseverance and charm and a sunny dispostion on me when I was in my cradle! I had turned out to be like Cinderella’s ugly envious step-sisters in an unfair twist of destiny. No golden pumpkin coaches or glass slippers or handsome princes. I had bad taste in froggy men, attracted  the troubled and troublesome as friends. I hated crossing brdges in a car, driving over open water far below. I was afraid of the phone ringing late at night, afraid of bad news, the catastrophes dogging my heels. Early mornings were often  frightening, the hard morning light a blow in the face. Friends and lovers came and went, there were fraught relationships  crowded with  misunderstandings and despair. Recurring nightmares about  loss, failure and death  made me afraid to go to bed at night. I felt that nobody was really there for me, nobody could be trusted, others would prove as untrustworthy as I experienced myself to be.  Out there were past lovers to be avoided, unresolved issues, unpaid bills, enemies. All around me I detected malice, danger, threats and menace. These were the problems I faced as a lone woman in a harsh world: alcohol was my comforter and refuge.

Until it all changed and I was unable to stop drinking, found myself fighting for my life and  terrified beyond words, insane and  drinking myself to death. That fury of alcoholism drove me into AA where I found others just like me and  a new hope for a sober life.

The Promises

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.

We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.

No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.

Self-seeking will slip away.

Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.

Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.

We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not.

They are being fulfilled among us  –  sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

They will always materialize if we work for them.

Working through the weekend to meet assignment deadlines, Nanowrimo put aside at 22 000 words of which perhaps 200 seem usable. But I shall resume the writing spree again later in the week. At least I know now what doesn’t work as far as the fiction is concerned.

The writer Mavis Gallant at 87:  “I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river.”

I’m tired and irritable in this heat. Earlier this morning I went out and it is too hot to walk anywhere, the furnace heat of summer that will last until March. Grateful all the same that I’m not gnawing on a Thanksgiving turkey in the snow!

While reading the Dining & Wining ( in my case Dining only!) column of the New York Times I came across Julia Moskin’s amazing side dish of minty sweetcorn toasted in a skillet with butter. A wild Sicilian mint is running  riot in my herb garden and fresh cobs of sweetcorn or maize are in season here so I adapted the dish and had it for supper with some grilled chicken breast. Very zingy and unforgettable.

My new plants are wilting in the heat. The work is going far too slowly and I feel inadequate and disgruntled. At times like this it help to go and sit in a cool Radox bath like a small pine tree fizzing with soapy bubbles and read passages from the soggy but inspiring Big Book, reminding my Inner Grump about a few things. There is a solution.

“The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God’s universe.”