A little rain at dawn, the  sunlight darting through cloud, then  rain  again. Poinsettias out like scarlet flags waving in sun and rain. The garden is heraldic with purple  ribbon bush (Hypoestes aristata) and  yellow from the winter-flowering Tecomaria capensis.

The  Great Dane has gone out to  Do Battle with his Sworn Enemy, the pug from next door.  The pug doesn’t care for too  much battle and tends to waddle off after a  short  bout of frenzied barking across the garden wall. The  Great Dane as Hero  waits hopefully for the Sworn Enemy to come back and  fight like a Real Dog.

If the sworn enemies meet in the street or at the garden gate, the sniff at one another like polite strangers. They only fight if there is a wall between them. Very human, that.

Note to self: stop writing about The Iliad. At the moment everything is tinged with an old Homeric aura and all I can think about are apple branches,  olive groves and girls dancing and singing within sight of the blue Aegean. Encounters with the daimon, fragments of the wedding song that is also a lament, the grief that  will be transformed into song and  last forever, come down to us through the centuries. Stop, I tell myself, stop –

In between stints of writing and editing, I brush my hair, put on a clean sweater and dash off to workshops, adult literacy classes, the library. Losing umbrellas and  leaving behind rain jackets as I  dash back and forth between  sun and  downpour in a wet shining oasis. The world dazzles.

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories,” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

Wasted time. Thinking how  often I find myself exasperated and bored after being lured in to read some website article or  editorial argument by a sensational headline, only to find padding and  emptiness. It takes vigilance to avoid reading rubbish.  Daniel Dennett’s tools for thinking:

…when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don’t waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by ideologues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theatre, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it.

Dreaming of  bare dusty plains all around Troy, the sea glittering in the distance.  Daunted as I read by  my ignorance and  misunderstandings, that I keep trying to read into the ancient text and not from it. Glimpses of a world that was  so utterly different, so utterly itself. Virginia Woolf (who  learned about  the great Greek  myths from her brother  Thoby and his fellow Apostles at Cambridge, Virginia the daughter of a Cambridge literary scholar, herself barred from academia, barred from academic clubs and societies, Virginia reading  the Greek classics all the same in a room of her own):

Does not the whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the young. The nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles and she sings; the grove has only to be called “untrodden”, and we imagine the twisted branches and the purple violets. Back and back we are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of a northern winter.

Although the texts that  are keeping me so happily occupied this winter season are  demanding, difficult and obscure, we have reminders of  beauty and pathos in  contemporary performance art. For the ancient Greeks, the great defining moment of life is the  final moment of death. In this final moment, the dying man or woman speaks a last farewell and  says something of what has  been a guiding force in life, what  they now glimpse to be the deeper purpose, the meaning of that life, short or long, tragic or glorious.

We don’t think like that any longer, we fear and avoid mention of death as a teacher, even though we  feed ourselves images of ghoulish and violent  death as entertainment. But here in  the film Blade Runner (from the Philip K Dick novel Total Recall), as the character Roy is dying, he gives what  the ancient Greeks would have called a soliloquy, the god speaks through him, he grieves his  ebbing life and then he lets go. He is not ‘human’ perhaps, he is filled with replicant memories, but at the moment of his death his memories become his own – ‘I’ve seen things you people would not believe‘ — and he  reaches full personhood,the deepest  fullness of grief and  is able to do honour to his own life.

His great grief is  that ‘all those memories will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.’ He transitions into  the recognition that  all that is unique and loved and irreplaceable in our individual lives is also blurring, dissolving, passing away. Nothing of us may survive.  And yet — as he dies, he releases the dove  held in his hand, he lets go and we see that white dove soar upwards and  another moment is created anew from time [hora], the unceasing flowing passage of time. A time for letting go.

Another icy cloudless dawn.The sage bush frost-bitten. The housemate  left before dawn to drive over the mountain to her clinic and just near the bridge where so many accidents happen she saw  a car’s headlights in front of her on the  lonely road. She slowed down and looked back in her rear view mirror. When she looked forward again, the car had disappeared. No roads turning off, no car parked anywhere  on the verge. She shivered and drove on over the bridge. The housemate is  deeply intuitive but doesn’t have  my febrile and zany imagination, so she stopped short of saying it was a ghost car. Very strange all the same…

Sunday is study day, so I’m busy rereading  the Iliad along with 27 000 or more students. Last year a friend from California sent me a copy of Alice Oswald’s Memorial which is a lyric  lament for  each of the soldiers named in the Iliad and who died in the  ten years of the  Trojan War. A remarkable, poignant  long poem. I couldn’t get the lines and images out of my head and  decided I must reconnect with Homeric poetry, go back to the classics. Ancient texts are difficult and even though I did Latin and Greek at school and  read  the story of Troy and  the travels of Odysseus, I wasn’t sure where to begin.

Out of the blue I discovered that Harvard university was offering a MOOG or massive open online course on ‘the ancient Greek hero’ with Professor Gregory Nagy. The course officially began in March 2013 and will end in June. More than 27 000 students from around the world registered and began setting up study communities on Facebook, Twitter, online workshops,  discussion forums and tutorial schemes. The course is offered in French,  Spanish, Greek and Russian and many former alumni of the course which has been taught  by  Prof Nagy at Harvard for  nearly 40 years volunteered to help, along with teaching fellows, media  graduates and  other students. All the literature needed is  freely accessible online. These  online study courses are all about participation and building a global learning community, especially  intended to draw in those who can’t afford  university courses and/or who live in remote places with technology access but few cultural resources. It is wonderful and  I take out my books each Sunday night and  watch videos, close-read passages, post questions and complete assignments on the Iliad, Plato and Pindar.

It is also like time-travelling back to the dawn of human history, 13 centuries before the birth of Christ, the Bronze Age in  Mycenaean  Greece. Right now I am  reading  the  words of Achilles as he tells his friends of the choice that he as a young man and soldier must make: either to fight in war and die, to enter into the  glory of those who die in battle — or to return home and perhaps enjoy a long and fruitful life, the love of a wife and children. He is homesick for his dear land, he yearns for family and  the fullness of  a long life.Will he choose life or death? There will be no second chance, no going back. And even as he speaks, his listeners and we who read him so many centuries later, know he will choose death. And that the glory (kleos) of which he speaks will be that he enters into song and  poetry, not the  passing glory of war, but the enduring beauty and pathos of  loss recalled in art

My mother Thetis, goddess with silver steps, tells me that  I carry the burden of two different fated ways leading to the final moment of death.  If I stay here and fight at the walls of the city of the Trojans, then my safe homecoming will be destroyed for me, but I will have a glory that is imperishable . Whereas if I go back home, returning to the dear land of my forefathers, |₄₁₅ then it is my glory [kleos], genuine as it is, that will be destroyed for me, but my life force will then last me a long time, and the final moment [telos] of death will not be swift in catching up with me.

Sleeping better this week despite continuing anxiety and going through a burst of enthusiasm for steaming vegetables. I carted back a bamboo steamer from Asia a decade or  more ago and it opened my eyes to how good vegetables taste cooked simply. I cut up  early winter vegetables: broccoli, purple-skinned sweet potatoes, butternut, French beans, spring onions, grate over a little  fresh ginger and sprinkle some sea salt, then  put the steamer baskets over boiling water. It cooks fast (slow cooking with legs, if you get me) and then I put the steamed  vegetables into a bowl with a splash of toasted sesame oil or some crumbled feta.

Mauve ribbon bushes in flower all around the garden.

Have you seen her dressed in blue
See the sky in front of you
And her face is like a sail
Speck of white so fair and pale
Have you seen the lady fairer

If you’re looping from relapse to relapse and struggling to stay sober, you might want to sit down and do some thinking. Comparisons are pointless, because some  people  can just wake up one morning,  stop and that is the end of the story. Some people take years, but then just  stop and that is that. Some people have to do a lot more to get to the’ just stopping’ stage and that’s all there is to it.  I have two little maxims: You don’t have to do this alone. And: Taking action beats just thinking about taking action

Here are six challenging and  common-sense suggestions from Spiritual River:

It is not about raw willpower. We all know that willpower is typically not enough to overcome a real addiction. This is more about reprogramming your mind in early recovery. The thought of relapse should become like poison to you. The idea of taking a swig of alcohol should be like touching a hot stove. If you are not at that point, then something needs to change.

The sun is shining but seems so much further away at this time of year. Washing takes longer to dry and the dogs all roll on the grass wanting more warmth, more sleepiness, more glow.. African dogs who love heat and  dust.

Have you seen her all in gold
Like a queen in days of old
She shoots colors all around
Like a sunset going down

The original Rolling Stones — yup, I know, probably a ’60s druggy anthem — that I heard aged about six years old and  making up my own words as I sang along:

Meditations on these cold mornings  are just  times for dozing upright. All the same, I get up, dress and  sit cross-legged on my hard pillow for 45 minutes, blinking like a  muddled owl and yawning when I should be inhaling mindfully. Then I eat muesli and bananas,  make a pot of green tea or fresh mint tea from the garden, go and sit at my desk.

Novelist TC Boyle on the writer’s life:

Iron discipline is at the core of being a novelist – you must maintain tone and attitude over a long stretch. I work seven days a week, beginning after breakfast and a good weep over two newspapers and the depressing state of the world, and ending at two or three in the afternoon, depending on what stage of a given story/novel I am in.

Doesn’t that sound ominous and super-human? Right now I am in one of those exalted creative spaces when I can’t stop writing. Ideas, images, plot devices and a myriad of voices pour out of me. Some pages read like  utter unequalled brilliance and some like  recycled garbage (which are which? I ask myself) but on we go. The writing imperative.

The housemate calls me from her rural clinic and I listen music on my cell phone,  singers (nurses, family, other patients)  practising a Xhosa hymn for a funeral. The dying patient is listening from her bed and conducting with a frail hand. She is expected to die this weekend and the funeral will be held on Monday,  She wanted to hear all her favourite hymns and readings beforehand, so there is a sublime rehearsal under way for the real thing, nothing morbid there. We should all have some of that  generous and peaceful spirit of acceptance.

The hymn I’m hearing is a translated version of Samuel Crossman’s  My Song is Love Unknown set to the tune by John Ireland, with added isiXhosa antiphons. Achingly beautiful, those effortless sopranos. A gift  of love and a promise to all those who  feel themselves to be broken on the wheel, unlovable, loveless,  alone. The final letting go, the  surrender to the unknown, to the  hope of  Love beyond the grave.

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take frail flesh and die?

Here, in a very different context.

*

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

*

The Great Gatsby, like Tender is the Night, is also a book about  Scott Fitzgerald’s nascent alcoholism and the loneliness that  lies at the heart of  all kinds of emotional illness and addiction:

Fitzgerald: “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

*

While drinking hot coffee to ward off ice in the air this morning, I came across an article  on loneliness, The Science of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You and  met up again with an old friend, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, perhaps one of the wisest women who ever lived. This article on her  work and attempts to show that loneliness and rejection can kill you just as smoking can kill you is so good I  wish I could copy it out line by line.

Among analysts, Fromm-Reichmann, who had come to the United States from Germany to escape Hitler, was known for insisting that no patient was too sick to be healed through trust and intimacy. She figured that loneliness lay at the heart of nearly all mental illness and that the lonely person was just about the most terrifying spectacle in the world. She once chastised her fellow therapists for withdrawing from emotionally unreachable patients rather than risk being contaminated by them. The uncanny specter of loneliness “touches on our own possibility of loneliness,” she said. “We evade it and feel guilty.”

*

What characterises true loneliness is the inability to be close to another person, to let others get close to us. The fear and secrecy, the dependence on a  substance that comes between us and  others, the terror of intimacy that might lead to rejection or betrayal, the distrust of any kind of closeness and emotional claustrophobia, the sabotaging of ties and burning of bridges when faced with the possibility of intimacy, the unfamiliarity with sustained intimacy because we never knew  it as children. Think  what might go wrong!  Intimacy is all about risk and that is why it is  so hard.  Social isolation, however. will kill us.

Fitzgerald: “I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

*

For writers, loneliness is an occupational hazard — we spend too much time in the giddy unreal playhouses of the imagination, we depend too much on the vagaries of memory. I often think of the reticent poet  Elizabeth Bishops writing to  another poet Robert Lowell, ‘When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived,’ Matter of fact, not melodrama. The solitude needed for creative work can become a solitary prison with invisible walls. Fortunately  in these days of the Internet, writers and poets find one another  across distances and space: we can touch lonelinesses, as it were.

*

The hardest time to reach out is of course in times of crisis and I read newish bloggers on recovery and see that struggle. The old patterns of withdrawal and denial go so deep in all of us.

Fitzgerald: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

*

And to find intimacy often means change. I once went to speak with a spiritual director, an elderly priest who was ‘kind to a fault’, as others said. I must have touched a live nerve in him because he listened to me and then said brusquely: ‘Change your life. You’re frittering it away and spending too much time with  people who don’t want you to change. Get some reality in there.’ Neither of us  spotted the spectre of alcoholism, but I  went away and simply tried to forget what he had said. What could an elderly celibate know about relationships? I put up the safety chain and lock on the front door of my flat and curled up on the sofa with a good book. And by destiny’s nudge or  chance, I had picked up Rilke to read and this time I heard the command.

*

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The Promise

What I’m doing when I’m not working: I’m planning to bake some Pasteis de nata or Portuguese custard  tarts this morning. I made a custard yesterday for some grilled bananas that was  good and I want to  get the technique right. My last  attempt  at these tarts didn’t work out well, soggy bottoms and  liquid custard but I have a new recipe for short-crust pastry and not-too-sweet custard. I used to eat Pasteis de nata in Beira, Mozambique, bought and paid for with escudos from a shop at the back of a grimy garage and given to us in crumpled brown paper, the tarts blackened at the edges from a wood-fired oven, no cinnamon, flavoured only with scraped vanilla pods and very little sugar, but  plenty of egg yolk and full-cream unpasteurised milk. Obrigado, obrigado! Delicious. That is what I want to get again, that rustic goodness and simplicity. A farmer nearby has a glut of organic eggs from his new Leghorns, so I can use  eggs with impunity.

It won’t taste the same of course, it never does. Memories are unmatchable — not even the famous  madeleine dipped in a lime-flower tisane by the young Proust tasted as good as it did before, even if it  recalled his forgotten childhood like a sudden resurrected  cathedral of memory.

Into the flow of life, we go anyhow,  memories scattered behind us, the sun hot now on wet fields, the sounds of Bach playing, dogs snoring at my feet. It is what it is. Sometimes happy, sometimes troubling, the  stream of lived life that just flows on as we wade and  swim and flounder in the swift current, striking out for the bank on the far side, diving deeper as we gain confidence. Happiness isn’t the point, really.

“We continually look and hope for a new, special thing that is going to last or make us happy, fulfill our needs, answer all our questions. In actuality, what are we going to get? We will get more seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. That’s it. That’s what life is.”
- Jack Kornfield

Great Dane lunatic pup: What was that standing so oddly in my running spot? Boomph. Now it is on the grass, so I can jump on it and  make sure it poses  no danger. Jumpy-jumpy jump!

Mary: Bad bloody dog. No, don’t  lick my face, go inside while I pick everything up. Now.

Great Dane pup: Here I am running indoors and morphing from good to bad lunatic dog type,  circling back to have another go at that unknown standing upright useless object. Watch me jump again! Boomph.

Entire days can pass like this.

Right now on the Internet, there’s a scary and wonderful post by Allie on depression that is almost too accurate to  be bearable. It is especially worth reading if you are in recovery, find yourself  sober but  severely depressed and  having to endure the well-meaning syrupy optimism of  others in your meetings; or if you yourself are struggling out there in no-man’s-land surrounded by self-appointed critics  who  think it is your own fault you are not grateful or  making progress, or if you are a compulsively helpful type who  thinks your role in life is to cheer others up.

It’s weird for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They try to help you have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it’s frustrating for them when that doesn’t happen. From their perspective, it seems like there has got to be some untapped source of happiness within you that you’ve simply lost track of, and if you could just see how beautiful things are...

Oh, and ending with a poem for Mother’s Day tomorrow. Our indebtedness to those who gave us life and so much more, who helped and hindered  us so that we might become ourselves and not them. From Judith Kroll:

Your Clothes

Ah yes, humans at play. Out here we’ve just had whip-around tours from Bon Jovi and  Justin Bieber. In the same week  Uneffingbelieberble, says the housemate, who does not understand the boy-band phenomenon. A crowd of about 40 Beliebers, girl fans,  waited near the Waterfront to see baby-faced Justin in his knee-bagged pants and baseball cap turned backwards. They were thrilled to spot a sweeping convoy of Mercedes Benz vans with tinted  windows. That was Him, Bieber Boy! Unless it was another of our more wayward politicians going incognito while awaiting trial for  bribery and corruption. On his arrival in Cape Town, the Beiber tweeted a single cryptic word to all his billions of undiscerning fans: AFRICA. The continent of darkness may never be the same again.

Business Insider has produced a mathematical Bieber Fever Study:

Figure 9. Media pulses for fast boredom (b = 2 and thus R0 = 0.59). A. The phase plane, showing that susceptible individuals are phased out, but that Bieber-infected individuals do not approach an equilibrium, but instead continue to oscillate in impulsive periodic orbit. B. The time series. When the disease would otherwise die out, media pulses can sustain Bieber Fever. This is what keeps PR departments in gainful employment. So now you know who to blame.

So much  rock joy! A group of villagers hired a  mini-bus, back-combed their hair, loaded on the rhinestone bling and glam metal retro-’80s androgynous outfits and  travelled down to  the coast in the rain to watch  Bon Jovi. All that spandex, headbands, cheekbone glitter, poodle band snazzy stuff! The driver of the van got lost three times in the big dangerous city. But  getting to see Bon Jovi live  was Epic and  Super-Wow, everyone sobbed when Bed of Roses was played and everyone screamed in bliss to hear Living on a Prayer. It was wildly debauched in a nostalgic innocuous kind of way, like putting five spoonfuls of extra sugar in your  hot cocoa. So bad for you it feels wicked. The acoustics were  lousy, but who cares? Dedicated post’80s glitterati are all getting too old and deaf to mind a few missing soprano notes from the grizzled singers. They pre-date kareoke, imagine that…

Now we just have to wait for David Bowie or the Stones.

Let’s sing a song for the brokenhearted –

The eccentric landlord, well into his 80s,  calls late at night and threatens to sell the house because managing finances is  all too much for him. He doesn’t trust his family, he wants to  build great apartment blocks, he wants to fill up his properties with desperate immigrants who will pay him more money and  be unable to  answer him back. He is filled with vengeful and  crazy schemes, he has no idea really who we are any longer. On and on late at night, that demented  shaky old voice that inspires pity as well as  dread. His adult children are at their wits’ end.

Ageing then, the delusional, frenzied behaviour as the  mind disintegrates. We all hope to be spared that, but who knows? Outside there is a black storm wind rising, dark clouds stacking up over the valley, windows rattling, trees now denuded of leaves and pale branches blown back. A falcon riding circular eddies of  turbulence high above the fields and rivers, that  skill and beauty in negotiating danger.

When the going gets tough, the tough keep reading. I read  writers’ forums, the  years of rejection slips accumulating in the desk drawer, the  years of  paralysis when faced with a blank page. Read recovery blogs and  silently applaud those coming up for air after  years of obliviousness and  mornings-after. There’s no wrong way to get sober. I read the day-by-day posts on cancer blogs, heroic endurance. As if they had any choice — sometimes enduring is all that is left.

I read about women coming through messy heart-rending divorces, coming through but altered, stripped down beyond recognition. The blogs of  bereft parents mourning in an impenetrable fog or  flaming whirlwind of loss, parents with  kids trapped in addiction, parents with  adult sons and daughters in prison, or incarcerated in asylums or locked wards. The blogs written by those inching their way through depression, the  diaries of the lonely, the  grief and terror of those living through the  chaotic wars of the 21st century, writing to a faraway world that doesn’t want to hear what  might be happening to them. Compassion fatigue, they call it. Emily Dickinson: This is my letter to the world/ That never wrote to me. There’s a world of pain out there. But also a world being made anew, such courage and tenacity. Bravery is contagious, and I store that knowledge away like acorns pouched safe for winter.

And as I  read through blogs and follow random mysterious links, I come across  the dreams of others,  dreams of  strange red cratered planets,  dreams of ghosts, dreams about the dog the writer had when he was 12, dreams about the abandoned wooden frame house in the woods..Dreams of fleeting trivia or dreams thick and  luscious with mythic archetypes. I too have a  notebook beside my bed with dreams  written down on every page. Some seem to make sense, others are snatched from the collective unconscious that flies like a great  black bird through the sleeping world each night. Dreams that  may signal new stories, shifts in perspective, messages in a bottle thrown into a stormy ocean.

Margaret Atwood in the NYRB:

Towards the end of her life, when she was already blind, my mother told me about a dream she’d had. She was on a canoe trip—something she’d loved doing—but suddenly no one else was there. It was totally silent; she was all by herself, climbing up a hill of bleached sticks. This dream impressed her enough that she told me about it, which wasn’t usual for her. What was she trying to convey? That she was frightened, I think. That she was sad. That she felt alone.

After she was dead, I put my mother’s dream into a story, which she must have known I would do. She understood, by then, what manner of creature I was.