'Never just routine' The story of Tigger's euthanasia

The story below was shared with me informally via WhatsApp message by artist Cheryl Flowers, a friend from Hogsback, who took it upon herself to look after the venerable old tabby, Tigger, in his last years, including taking him from Hogsback to Makhanda with her, when she moved there. I thank her for allowing me to use it as the centrepiece for this article.

Throughout my time in Hogsback, Tigger was generally known as ‘The Edge’s cat’ – which he was! My late husband, Norman, had known him as a kitten and he was sure the dignified, independent creature was already around 30 by the time I moved to the mountain, because Norman had been there for that amount of time!

The star photo of Tigger that still hangs in a frame at The Edge. Photo: Simon Pamphilon

* * *

The relationship between people and pets is a subject all its own. What I find fascinating about it is that, as in any close relationship between humans, the unique individuality of each being finds totally specific resonance with the unique individuality of the other. I have never been your typical ‘animal or pet-crazy person’. Certainly I find it impossible to “love” all cats and dogs, as some people are apparently able to do. Many pets resemble their owners so closely that I often feel quite bored by their nondescript presences, so tame and unsurprising have they become. Far worse are those pets who act out all their owners’ aggression, arrogance or unruliness, often much to their owners’ delight. However, I have known highly unique, independent-minded and self-respecting furred beings, who know their own strengths and weaknesses and whose souls my heart simply carries on carrying – one of them being my son’s cat, with whom I could literally communicate via telepathy at a time when I was still quite sceptical about matters like that (it actually happened by accident, after which I paid a little more attention). These days I swear his gorgeous, humorous, lithe little spirit still sometimes approaches me now and then, eight years after he died. We – my son, his father, his father’s partner and myself – had all been in attention the day Charlie died. I kept a wake over his corpse that night and the following day we buried him in a little, simple and light ceremony, as befitted his spirit. I do believe that the presence of our love, and the rituals we spontaneously performed, sealed living bonds between him and ourselves. 

Charlie in his 'shroud' - a childhood t-shirt from my son. So, when Cheryl shared the story of her trauma about having Tigger put down I asked her permission to publish it here. The story shares the conflict between her personal beliefs and what she submitted to on the advice of her perfectly well-meaning vet. I feel purposed to honour both Tigger and Cheryl by publishing her words – not because I want to push any particular belief or practice down my reader’s throat, or to suggest that any wrong was done. No, there is absolutely no accusation to be read into any of this post, please. My intention is simply to encourage you to examine your own feelings about the matter of euthanasia and to remember to take each moment for the gift it is. There are questions that do not admit of ‘principles’, questions that have their utterly unique answer, depending on all the complexities of a particular context – and one of those questions concerns how one dies, closely related to the question of how a being one loves dies. Very often, somebody else’s manner of dying is altogether beyond one’s own as well as their control. What happens, if that is the case? That is the question I would like to leave you with.    * * *  “Tigger passed away on 26th January this year from old age (he was 24 and a half years when he died). The last four months of his life were hard for him, because he grew more frail by the day, with heart-breaking symptoms of kidney failure. Even though he was still happy, he walked very slowly and lost a lot of weight and wobbled when he walked. I allowed the natural process to take place as I didn’t want to end his life – I personally believe that is murder. We had a close bond and I kept him comfortable and warm and took him to the vet often for checks and drips, etc. Only when he started to die, then Nicola said to me: "It’s time now, Cheryl.” What still gives me daily nightmares, though, is the memory of the emotions in his very expressive eyes just before he died. I was holding him and he felt the gradual shutoff coming on too quickly for him to understand. I felt terrible when I witnessed, first confusion, then total terror and panic in his eyes. I could read Tigger emotionally very well, like no other person could, not even the vet, because our souls were connected. Tigger's eyes after the first injection (a large sedative dose) were panicky and my heart went out to him, but there was nothing I could do. He had been an emotionally independent little fellow. His awareness shut down before Nicola administered her second injection (this was the one to gradually and completely stop his heart). But with the first one, I felt totally helpless to comfort him. It was very hard for both of us straight after the first injection. Poor Tigger looked absolutely desperate to know what was happening to him. I could see that in his eyes. I was heartbroken to lose him and it broke my heart more to read that expression in his eyes. It took me three months to mourn him and I still miss him terribly. He was a very special cat, little Tigger.” – Cheryl Flowers, December 2024

"My last moments with Tigger just after his little heart stopped beating. This was when I said a prayer for Tigger to commend his spirit to God."– Cheryl Flowers The panic Cheryl describes is something I take seriously as a ‘not ideal’ situation in relation to inevitable death. Could it be that the imposition of a human will that is acting ‘routinely’ is a problem for Life? Possibly, if Cheryl had been given a day, or even only an hour, to talk to Tigger, to explain to him what was going to take place, the panic may not have been there? I have no doubt that the cat knew his end was near, as did Cheryl of course. She says the shutoff came “on too quickly”. Does that not signal that anything ‘routine’, even ‘routine mercy’, is something to approach with alert caution, even with fear? Because, like birth, nobody’s, nobody’s death is ever just routine. That is the thought I believe Cheryl and Tigger’s shared experience is destined to spread amongst readers everywhere.  * * * – Silke Heiss, 15th December 2024

Me at The Edge with Tigger, 2019

A dynamic state of peace

It is pouring loudly with rain. The clouds are united in a pure, white sky that has neither definition nor limits. Trees, bushes and pot plants are swaying, shaking and drooping, though the arum lily stands undaunted. The strings of rain are close together, there is unity, harmony in this hard, persistent dance. 

My mind's inner eye is occupied (literally). It is claimed by an image observed yesterday, outside my head, just like the rain today. It is an image of a family of Egyptian geese, led by the male, with Mom as the rearguard. 

Eight or nine goslings paddled for what they were worth through the windblown ripples of their home lake, keeping in perfect single file and so imprinting their live bodies into the 'duck(ling)s in a row', which now inhabit my head.

Once the parents had got them all safely to shore and, famished from their strenuous outing, they immediately began foraging in the grass, Dad raised himself to his full height, stretched and shook his splendid wings, pushing out his chest with its dark brown medal in a momentary posture of proud glory.

Mom had meanwhile flown to perch upon a railing to groom herself in private, as it were, taking some time out from the family.

* * *

In the aftermath of a sorrowful division between dear friends and fellows of mine (a situation which remains painfully raw and as yet unresolved), the undemarcated sky and rain, the disciplined little goslings and their steady parents offer an objective correlative to my inner state: I have taken a stance that is aligned with my heart, mind, body and soul. My friends know where I stand and, most importantly, I know where I stand.

Balance is a dynamic state of peace. I wish this for each individual member of my great and varied human family.

Photo: thanks to Ken Barris

The orange bicycle of shame: A psycho-logical song of signs

The piano piece was in an orange book and I am sure it was called 'The Bicycle Song', or 'On my Bicycle'. Something like that anyway.

I had an orange bicycle. It had been given me while my family and I were still living in Germany and it had been loaded with the rest of our household onto a passenger liner, the Galileo Galilei, and shipped all the way to South Africa, where my folks were heading for a couple of years. (The couple of years turned into the rest of their lives, but that's another story.)

The first time I cycled to school on my, by South African standards in those days unusually brightly coloured bicycle, and rolled through the open gate, my peers starting jeering and calling, "Nazi! Nazi!" Back home, I asked my mother, "What is a Nazi?" I was all of 9 years old and that ignorant. I soon discovered that it was de rigueur for my English-speaking peers to use exclamations, such as "Jawohl!" and "Schweinehund", whenever I was present. It was tiresome and inescapable, nor has it, in 50 years, ceased in all quarters. One close family member, who worked for some years, up until 2011, for British Waterways in London, also suffered the daily "harmless fun" of this widely accepted racial harassment.

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When South Africa, in 1994, finally moved from being an oppressive racist state to becoming a fledgling democracy, my black-skinned compatriots could triumph in their collective achievement of having resisted abusive denigration and having successfully taken a step forward in honour of their human dignity and rights. To follow the example of anti-racist activism, during the 1970s and on, as a solitary German-mother-tongue child in an Anglophone context, would have meant standing up for myself alone to face my classmates. As was the case with the family member at British Waterways - there was no collective to help or sympathise with us. We learned to endure the mockery, as our innocent tormentors mimicked figures from movies I, for one, had never seen, and we took the insults as we knew we had no choice, because we'd been born in a shamed country, with a divided capital, containing the deliberately forever unrepaired Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church.

Photo by Gregor Samimi on Unsplash

Sometime in the first decade of the new millenium I did, however, finally challenge one dear friend in the Cape Town poetry circles. I asked him whether he was aware of how enervating his mockery was. He was genuinely shocked and said that he had grown up learning that it was obligatory to make fun of Germans, to the extent that it had become completely automatic. He suddenly realised the mindlessness of it, and the one-sidedness, never having thought to imagine being on the receiving end of this ingrained custom, and he was glad to be able to apologise and stop the habit. The shame of the Germans after their hideous transgressions under Hitler has a very long tail indeed.

* * *

It was the same orange bicycle upon which I pedalled every week, in the company of my sister, to our piano teacher in Voortrekkerhoogte, taking the shortcut on the dust track beneath bluegums past the military camp. The teacher decided to host a performance evening, giving her pupils the opportunity to play in front of each other and their parents. I was her star pupil and one of the oldest, so she chose me to start the evening off. I got up and seated myself at the piano, opened the slim, orange book and faced the notes of 'On my Bicycle'. I lifted my hands up to the keyboard, but before my fingers made any sound, I burst into a tragedy of tears, leaped from the stool and straight into my mother's lap. 

My mother was mortified. The evening proceeded, I suppose, with everyone performing, but I cannot remember whether I played my piece or not. What I do remember is that my mother asked me to pass her a record sleeve of some music, which the teacher had put on after the children had played. It was lying on the table in front of us and for some reason I tried to indicate to her that it was not permissible for us to move this record sleeve from its position. My mother thereupon asked my sister to bring it to her, but my sister followed my example and refused. Another mother, seeing our strange reluctance, instructed her daughter to take the record sleeve to my mother and the child obliged without a murmur. My mother was now triply mortified. Back home, it was her turn to burst into tears. She lamented how ashamed she was of us and how painfully we had embarrassed her, me with my collapse from stage fright and both of us with our inexplicable refusal to do her a simple favour, such that another mother's daughter had had to step in.

My poor mother. She had her own loads of shame and insecurity to carry. She had not mastered the English language by a long shot, her Afrikaans was non-existent, and she lived in virtual isolation, cooking and cleaning for us in her European hippie gear, in a suburb that was dominated by the crimplene wives of permanent force members. In her own youth, she'd been her rather famous piano teacher's best pupil. Now, here she was, in a strange country among strangers, trying to enjoy a rare social event, only to be humiliated by a cowardly, obstreperous daughter and her incomprehensible sister.

 * * *

Notwithstanding these ignoble beginnings, I have sort of kept up, more off than on, with the piano playing, for the last 50 years and was approached last year by retired professional soprano and singing teacher, Gwyneth Lloyd of Starways Arts Centre, whether I'd be willing to accompany her newly-formed ensemble. I agreed and found myself learning "popular" and "well-known" songs, which I have somehow been shielded from all my life. In other words, much to the disbelief of the singers, many of these songs are not at all well-known to me and I have painstakingly to learn them, thus slowly repairing my cultural ignorance. We have performed a few times to sympathetic and grateful audiences and I have been humbled, losing perfectionism and uptightness.

For the most recent performance, last weekend, the dress rehearsal went very well, which, as anybody involved in theatre knows, is not a good sign. True as bob, the next day, as we gathered half an hour before the performance, the plug for the keyboard was suddenly dead. We were each of us required discreetly to subdue rising consternation and, indeed, in my case, panic. Fortunately, the organiser of the event found a replacement plug and the keyboard could once more produce sound.

The performance began with a couple of exquisitely rendered A capella numbers with five voices, then it was my turn to introduce 'It Don't Mean a Thing' by Duke Ellington and Irving Mills. For no reason at all, I missed the notes in the last chord of this introduction, my fingers simply landed on keys beside the correct ones. This can happen. It is called nerves. I tried my best to keep going and made my way through the pieces, despite the fact that my heart was jackhammering in my chest, my fingers played imprecisely over and again, and I kept seeing an orange bicycle like a mirage in the distance of the rather hot venue. At one point I actually played a musical introduction over, telling the audience that I was doing so, as I kept on missing the right notes. Mostly, this was thankfully not noticeable either to the singers or to the audience, but in the middle of 'Poor Wand'ring One', when a gust of wind blew the score from the music stand, I was certain that I would collapse from sheer stress. Dear Norma, who was singing tenor, but whose voice was not part of that song, rushed to my side to rescue the situation, and Gwyneth, Estie and Stephanie held their parts bravely, while I miraculously stayed seated upright and, don't ask me how, picked up the thread of the music to resume my accompaniment, as the mirage of the orange bicycle slowly receded.

After the show, warm words of gratitude and gentle praise were poured over the singers from the audience. To me, Gwyneth said matter-of-factly, "We all made mistakes," and Norma joined in, "Nobody focused on the mistakes. They just flowed away." Her husband, who had come for support, declared, "The most important thing is that the audience enjoyed it - and they did!" When I told another friend, who'd not been able to attend, what happened, she said, "You did your best, carrying on while you were going through all that inner stress!" And my companion, Ed, messaged in response to my sobering report-back, "mistakes make it more real (human)." Indeed! But the light-heartedness, and the loving words of comfort all round, brought what continues to feel like lasting medicine to my soul.

When I returned home the next day, I remembered and felt urged to find a particular poem - a poem, which Ed had uttered casually, more by way of a self-ironic joke, two years back - which I'd enjoyed so much that I'd written it down. We'd had pizzas at Café Mario in Knysna at the time and Ed had seen an orange bicycle leaning against the fence outside the window. He thought that it made a very beautiful composition and had run outside to capture it. It had been raining and he slipped and by the time he gathered his balance, the bicycle was gone. Here is his poem as I captured it.

Slipping on mud

while chasing the lady

with the orange bicycle 

- all my camera caught

were the black-eyed Susans

opening their hearts to me,

while she disappeared 

around a corner.

* * * 

The web of these incidents and memories, the strands of colour, the bicycle, the feelings of shame both personal and collective, mistakes both great and trivial, the open hearts of friends and fellows, the living witnesses of flowers - all of these aspects thread together a crazy coherence, a zigzag psycho-logic of signs and signals through the decades.  

One of my late husband's favourite English idioms was: "I've turned a corner". I would like to think that this applies to me at this point. And I am, hopefully, again "on my bicycle" - only this time I'm no longer a target of shaming. Orange can once more be the beautiful colour of creativity and black-eyed Susans can laugh out loud in continuing abundance.

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Haiku and plastic - where do we place our gaze?

On Saturday, 21st September, I had scheduled another Hiku Hike. It was to be with a difference, as I sought to impart some of the principles of the Haiku form and to facilitate a little elementary practice of that form during the two-and-a-half hour workshop.

There were a couple of people who apologised for being unable to make it and, for the first time this year, nobody attended this Hiku Hike. I took this as a twofold opportunity. Firstly, it gave me a break from holding space for much-valued others and offered a chance to do that for myself for a change. Secondly, I thought, I could probably assimilate the principles of Haiku more thoroughly, before trying to impart them to others. Thus, I spent the first part of my solitary workshop reading aloud to myself Raphael D'Abdon's comprehensive list of essential principles of Haiku, on p.4 of his article on African and South African Haiku. Thereupon I meandered and jotted and finally tried to compose a few Haiku poems.

One of the Haiku that came to me, which I was - at least provisionally - satisfied with, reads as follows:

 

First rains,

fresh otter tracks,

shreds of plastic hug rocks.

  

Mistress of verbal threads and natural laughter

Margaret Clough died this week, at the age of 90. This is my tribute to her.

"What a joy to read your review of my book," she wrote to me in March 2017, continuing with these words: "Reading is one of my greatest pleasures. The best thing about writing is to be able to give that pleasure to other readers. Nothing can make me happier than to hear from someone who likes reading my poems. It is especially great to have praise from you, a poet too and one whose opinion I value highly. Thank you so much!"

Both her joy in writing and giving pleasure to others by means of her poems, as well as her innate gratitude to life, her simple grace and good manners, radiate out of those few sentences. Accompanied by no fanfare other than that of natural laughter, she was a woman of complete integrity. 

I had written an unsolicited review on her self-published book, Portrait in Thread, which she had given to me as a gift in October the previous year.

After having had two titles brought out by Modjaji, At Least the Duck Survived (2011) and The Last To Leave (2014), she self-published, to my knowledge, four more collections, namely, Portrait in Thread (2016), A Pious Pachyderm, Living Locked Down and This is Music (2023). She also wrote plays and short stories, some of which I helped her edit at one time. 

I first met Margaret through Paul Mason, whose informal creative writing sessions on the Cape Peninsula she joined in the 1990s. He recalls her as follows: 

"A beautiful being who enjoyed a long innings. I have wonderful memories of many nights sitting with her and the others at The Harbour Cafe, writing and reading and eating and quaffing. Of course, Finuala [Dowling] picked up the baton from me, which brought Margaret to living her truest creative voice."

Margaret freely admitted that the informal sessions with Paul had been her foundation and springboard, but the guidance she received from Finuala was exactly what her wonderful wit then required.

For this occasion, I'd like to gift readers with my review and re-affirm my praise of Margaret as person and poet. We are blessed to have met you!

The flame in your temple

My mother loved going to concerts. One of her motivations here had little, or only obliquely, to do with the music. Rather it was that, as she confessed, "I like to fall in love with the soloist." She was capable of falling, and did fall, in love with painters, sculptors, filmmakers - so long as they were celebrated. So Dalí and Picasso were "geniuses" [speak the word with terrifying reverence] and, as far as I am aware, to this day she wishes for none other than Ludwig von Beethoven to welcome her personally when she arrives on the other side.

The human love of human 'stars' has, probably, everything to do with being overcome momentarily with the feeling that you've champagne, or even the cosmos itself, in your veins, rather than blood. However, I do wonder whether this feeling is aroused by the artwork you're apparently appreciating, rather than by the contiguity you find yourself in, beside awestruck fellow humans, all of them in a thoroughly heightened state. Mob mentality does not kick in only when it comes to demagoguery, violence and war.

In the arts, rock concerts have exploited this human weakness - the deliciousness, the necessity, even, of losing the self - to an extreme. The Dionysian frenzy that fans whip up in their orgasmic surrender, to whoever it is they are united in worshipping at that moment, has been obligatory for at least as long as we have had electricity - though several millennia back, thousands of ancient Greeks would apparently weep and tear their hair in unison on seeing Oedipus Rex or the Medea, performed live in their amphitheatres. The very word 'fan', used in this sense, derives from 'fanatic', which originally meant a "mad, enthusiastic person inspired by a god" and, even nowadays, is not imbued with wholesome meaning. 

It is naturally cathartic to self-forget, to lose oneself to something that is blissful or terrible, overwhelming and literally awesome. What worries me when it comes to fanship, however, beyond the excessive enthusiasm it can stoke, is the one-way-street of stardom.

At times, it feels to me as if we've lost touch with our primitive (wholesome) worship of the sun, stars, moon and planets, because we've put human beings in the place of the heavenly bodies - sacrificing how many new Prometheuses to be daily divested of their livers? For, as everybody knows, the industry of fame can be a gory one indeed.

What worries me, perhaps most, about that industry, is that it transactionalises love. The lovers are turned into a clientèle, whose hunger is fanned by their own fanship, which is by definition a state of being in which you do not inhabit yourself. Indeed, who remembers to nourish their own flame when super-ignited by spectacle and sound effects, heated by a fired up crowd? Nowadays, this kind of experience is available 24/7 via video footage with shrieking applause and mind-numbing lighting aerobics.

There is naturally a place for (harmless) madness in this world, and music fests are a cheery way of allowing us to express that madness. I share reverence for a particularly good phrase or piece of writing, or piece of art or music and, along with other poets and performers, I do love mesmerising an audience with my voice at times. But what matters ultimately is surely what is stirred in you, rather than what is happening outside of you? A resonance, a flame that continues burning even when the lights dim down and everything is quiet again.

The Latin word fanum, whence 'fanatic' comes, meant 'temple', 'shrine' or 'consecrated place'. If my work should enjoy devotees, I would hope that it's because I've managed to introduce you to a consecrated place inside your own precious soul - helping you to remember, rather than forget, your dear self.

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

'Lovelight' (ceramic by Silke Heiss)

An imaginary maiming

It came to me yesterday that it would be instructive to have all human beings' vocal chords removed and all human beings' hands cut off, or bound - temporarily. For a week, say.

Imagine a world where, for a brief moment in time, no human is able either to speak or to type, or write, or to manipulate any thing, least of all language.

If we all, but all, had voiceless, handless bodies, for a short period of time. (Those without sight, and those on crutches or in wheelchairs, could still use their hands for mobility, but not for communication.)

What kind of experience would that provide for our species?

Would we hear the fish singing? Could we sense the sap oozing up through wood into the leaves of trees? Would we perhaps flutter in natural sympathy with the fan of a seahorse's dorsal fin and shudder in bliss, with the feel of such fragility? We might grimace with rocks weathering salt winds, or totter with tiny calves looking for their mothers, who are crossing busy roads in dust storms.

I believe that such an experience could make the human heart become terrifically palpable inside each of our bodies. 

Pumping so much more than our own blood!

PS. Probably many of us would begin to dance.

PPS. Bullies and teasers would become identifiable pretty fast.

Loss of enchantment: an exercise in self-editing (in real time)

On 3rd August, I hiked up Muizenberg Peak on the Cape Peninsula, in the company of my son and his friend. The period of deluges in that part of the country had given way to a splendid sunny day and there were several other people about, who had had the same idea. 

This included a number of people who had not come to hike, but who, once reaching a chosen altitude or particular spot on the mountain, prayed aloud in a language I do not understand, nor did I, for discretion's sake, pay any attention to them or to what they might be saying. They had not grouped together, but were separately absorbed, at distances to one another. 

Water was running plentifully down the mountain, whose slopes still partially bore traces of some of the ravages of the previous summer's hectic fires. From the heights of a perfectly blue sky, sunrays pierced and lit the tanniny brown hue that is typical of water in fynbos regions, turning it to gold. All in all, the scene, and all the physical activity in it, conspired to enchant me utterly and, in that state, I created this poem:

Going up Muizenberg Peak

We see prayerful Xhosas,

dotted alongside the stream

that's hurrying down

the mountain slope.

Between, and upon, rocks,

beside the tannin-gilded brook,

they sit or crouch or sway, 

eyes closed, worshipping aloud,

at distances from one another.

One man, at a far off cliff,

holding onto a ledge,

bends and straightens his knees rhythmically,

vocalising passionate pleas

that echo across the valley.

Another, higher up, close to us,

immerses himself

under a small, golden waterfall's fresh, icy water,

and his lean body shivers gladly in the sun,

as his friend holds up a hand in greeting,

and we three step

further up the superbly chiselled path,

built by unknown ancestors, 

Italian prisoners, perhaps.

While these select people claim the body

of the earth and its waters,

chanting it into their bones, 

and into mine.

- Silke Heiss, 4th August 2024 

A few days later, I met a friend and told her of my experience and she educated me: things may not have been as they seemed. I had to face the fact that, as Robert Frost put it so memorably in his poem: Nothing Gold Can Stay. I realised that I was obliged to revisit my enchanted poem, which I had allowed to gush out of me in a state of ignorance, which I now felt shamed me. I spent a few days rearranging my disenchantment. This is the result:

Firebreak poem

Going up Muizenberg Peak revisited

 

i. My friend says

 

My friend says, the worshippers on the mountain

are likely not locals. She says, as a part of their rituals,

they’re sometimes known to make fires,

which they don’t always fully extinguish.

She says, she’s not saying they weren’t Xhosas,

or that these particular people made fires,

but she’s heard there are Malawians,

who practise religious rites above St James,

and on other slopes of the Table Mountain Chain.

 

But, she adds, there are also many homeless people,

living in the mountains, who make fires,

who use the buchus and heathers and proteas,

sometimes forgetting to kill the coals.

She says she’s come across little, glimmering hearths

she’s had to put out herself, to protect the mountain,

its plants and animals and people’s houses,

because a single gust can fan a blaze,

as we know.

 

ii. Incendiary property

 

And I think how dangerous a little knowledge is,

how lethal it can be: not to know.

What did I know, what do I know,

about the folk whose voices touched my soul the other day?

Do they – Xhosas or Malawians or the homeless –

know the incendiary property of fynbos in the Cape winds?

 

iii. Next door neighbours

 

And I think about the ‘homeless’,

whose shelter is the mountain,

whose roofs are rock overhangs,

whose stoves and heaters are fuelled

by the vegetation they are helping themselves to

indiscriminately – without knowing.

Whose beds are enclaves of soft bush and dry sand,

whose showers are waterfalls,

whose society are dassies, caracal, snakes and tortoises,

and other small wildlife, which we value (unlike the homeless)

as our next door neighbours.

 

iv. Consideration

 

And I think, who are we? Who is we?

I buckle, language buckles, crackles.

Language, too, fans fires

in people’s hearts and minds.

 

Look at yourself, reading these lines, and ask:

Where’s my heated mind leaping,

what glowering feelings

are fuelled by these dry twigs of grammar,

what burning thought does this brush of questing words feed?

 

Ask, ask, and perhaps we (who is we?) can find

a little golden water, some sunlit pool of calm,

along this rough attempt at a firebreak poem

 

– in consideration of all

we (who?) don’t know.

 

– Silke Heiss, 6^th – 9^th August 2024

There is one overarching aspect that brings these two poems together of necessity, and that is the somewhat painful self-editing process, requiring a degree of honesty that is not at all pleasant to the ego. My main cringe is that I could not even identify the language, which the praying people were speaking. While it is true that I 'switched off', and did not tune into either their faces or voices, because I feared to intrude on them with my conscious interest, I judge that timidity or fear, in hindsight, to have been a deliberate stupidification I committed on myself.

The second poem, however, allows me to redeem myself in my own eyes, in that I dive into that place I feel I know best: the English language, using it to affirm one of my dearest values: Know Thyself.

One's self is, after all, perhaps the only phenomenon that is vaguely knowable in this life.

To live happily ever after

They were born into Hitler's Germany in the first years of the Second World War. They spent their early childhood being ushered into bunkers to hide from the Allies' bombs. As they grew older, they experienced the occupation of their streets and neighbourhoods by French and American troops respectively. They were divided from family by the Berlin Wall. They were taught by teachers, some of whom had been dug out of ruins. They experienced the 'Wiederaufbau' - the re-building - of an utterly traumatised society and totally broken country.

When the counter-culture movement blossomed, they met and fell immediately in love. Within months, they married - on 1st August 1964. Nine months to the day later, on 1st May 1965, their first child was born. Two years later, they were given the blessing of twins. He provided for their physical needs, she became a full-time mother and housewife.

They adventured to South Africa and, against all initial intentions, remained provisionally, becoming permanent residents and intrepidly exploring the southern continent with their three small children in a VW station wagon, later replaced by a Combi. Life was flow and they rowed the currents and torrents as well as they knew how.

When their 40th wedding anniversary came along, he asked his eldest daughter, the only one of their children who was then still in the country, "Do you want to celebrate our forty-year war with us?"

The quip was to the point. The depths and heights, the joys and horrors, the tedium and adventures, the truth and the lies, the heat and the ice I'd witnessed during their marriage gave me an education as rounded as anyone could wish for.

Today, 60 years on, vulnerable, but fortunately well-cared-for, neither of them is mentally or physically independent anymore. Still, they recognise everyone present in their wedding photographs.

"You are so cute!" my mother exclaims, gazing at the tall, blond 25-year-old in the album, "I would marry you again."

"Oh, I'd go along with that," retorts my white-haired father, adding, "We loved each other then and we love each other now."

When love outlives all pettiness.

Amen.

The touch

There was a big arrowhead of rock, which was split off from the mother rock by the most recent surge tide and it pierced the air with a new shape.

Today I see that this arrowhead, its granite neck and abdomen, have been pushed away from the rock family, further up the beach. It reclines now, offering the kind of couch I'd love to have in my (sadly couchless) lounge. But this is nature's gift, which I accept in joy and wonder, and I settle in, protecting my butt from the rock's cold surface with a folded cloth.

And that's when I see the breaching whale, his fluke cartwheeling over the deeps. And a huge container vessel too, ploughing forward, east to west. The sun's on my left shoulder. Both vessel and whale are heading to where the sun will set later, to my right. 

Whale, you library of blood and flesh, intelligence and blubber, the engine's drone hurts, I know. Above the water, too, many humans don't have the marrow in their bones to feel the sounds, which they create in ignorance of the responsibilities of power. 

Parnassian philosophising! The whale's dived down, out of sight, as I've droned on.

Alright. I'll follow you down where you may be. No longer is it necessary for me to explain or to prove anything. The material I create is its own justification. Neither fans nor critics, nor those who will never read a word of what I write, can match what I do, the vast majority want answers. That is one thing I do not provide, cannot give - because that's not a need. Whoever heard of a mouse or an eagle wanting answers? Riding the wind is enough, hiding in a hole is enough, nibbling grass seeds, tearing apart a dassie, breaking dead wood, caressing a human cheek - all that is enough.

Touch is enough. As I touch all I write about, and all I write about touches me.

At this precise moment, I lock gazes with a dog, about fifty metres off, who sits down at my return look. Dog and I mirror each other - straight-backed, cautious, alert, self-controlled. Measuring one another up.

But now it starts barking - is the owner close? The dog is gradually, somewhat nervously advancing towards me. A pair of geese swoop overhead, a private plane buzzes by. The dog disappears as the geese and the plane divert my attention - no, he has run past behind me, surreptitiously, on to the other side of me, my left side, towards the sunrise. When I bent down to the page, he seized the opportunity, plucked up the courage to pass by behind my back. Funny thing! So proud of himself now, dancing lightly off upon his doggy toes. Uncommanded, dignified, opportunistic, self-preserving, forward-moving. Blessèd instincts, precious, self-motivated creature!

 

S.O.S.! Respect for the soul at work

About two and a half weeks ago, my friend, Tony, from the days when we both still lived in Hogsback, called out of the blue.

Out of that day's unclouded sky, Tony brought renewed focus into my mind's unexpecting eye.

He asked me to clarify Table Love. He said he is busy writing about Table Love, because he feels it's important for people, for the world.

In that moment, he did something important for me: he took me back to a ritual, which my late husband, the poet Norman Morrissey, and I began for the first time on the 3rd of July 2010. It was really simple. We sat down together at his big oak table and absorbed ourselves into a companionable solitariness. Each listened to what came to him or her out of the silence. When something arrived that was more or less pleasing, true, satisfying, playful or significant, we wrote it down. In silence.

Whoever finished first, waited quietly, for as long as it took the other to complete 'their thing' - thought-string, piece, or poem. When both pens had been re-capped, we read our 'things' out to one another. Invariably we hummed and gave our sense, our understanding of what the other had done. Sometimes we commented, made suggestions, and sometimes we praised one another's creations. So there was a natural flow from companionable, silent solitude to sharing, responding and communicating.

There is nothing quite like sharing an absorbed, creative silence with another or, indeed, with others.

It occurred to me, after talking to my friend, that the Hiku Hikes are really extensions of Table Love, with the added benefit of being outdoors and susceptible to all the fresh air and stimuli offered there. In the Hiku Hikes, too, we move from silence to sharing, to further silent work, to further subsequent sharing. It's dynamic, peaceful and stimulating, nourishing both individual and communal needs.

The single most crucial aspect of both Table Love and the Hiku Hikes, I would say, is respect for the space of another human soul at work. The soul works in the dimension of what is sometimes known as 'the dreamwork', that is to say, in a dimension that is temporarily independent of pressing or immediate worries and concerns, a dimension whose concern is a lucid state of consciousness, whereby time and space are inhabited simultaneously without undue friction, and without the body necessarily being in action.

When you are truly engaged on a creative level, you cannot think yourself into another space, nor another time, than the one you are inhabiting at that moment. In other words, a kind of unification takes place between body, mind, heart and spirit. I venture that it is that unification, or unity, which we call soul. It is frequently felt as deep concentration - the choice of the word 'concentration' for this state of being-doing is not accidental. All parts of us are brought to a common centre or fulcrum. 

When a person has had no opportunity for and no experience of this, they cannot understand this process. A person who keeps their dreams away from the everyday, indeed, away from themselves, who is unaware of the needs of their soul, will automatically suffer impatience, there is a restlessness that prevents them from giving themselves or the other person silence and proper solitude. With this inbuilt lack of generosity and lack of respect for Time and Space, our industrialised, digitalised modern culture has been, to quite a large extent, dangerous to the dreamwork, if not lethal to the soul.

The peculiar need to throw stones into the still ponderings of others is motivated by mischievous jealousy and greed, not for anything material, but for the substance of their souls. It connects to a need to own the other person's time and space and to command it. It consumes what the other has, because oneself does not have it. Many people are anxious to prevent others from having what they themselves do not have. And many more compulsively inflict injury on others to avenge injuries they themselves have borne and have not tended to, let alone healed.

Human beings everywhere are doing what we can to remedy the situation in numerous ways, we are, many of us, occupied with the vital question of how to save our souls. The open secret, of course, is that it is for each of us to save our own, hence the emergence of healing modalities, such as soul retrieval, somatic trauma release, mindfulness workshops; bringing in fresh concepts and vocabulary to assist understanding, such as 'enneagram' and 'ecopsychology'; along with truly mindboggling advances globally in overall emotional and psychological literacy for everyman and -woman, for everygirl and -boy.

To paraphrase Pearl S. Buck, where the human soul used to be the most underdeveloped terrain on earth, it has become a hotspot of attention for the very good reason that reason alone has proved to be not enough!

It is a question of protecting the creative self, of preserving the creative flame, for it alone is the carrier of human souls forward. That, and the freedom of laughter, playfulness. Such insight comes not in garrulous, excited, or fretful company, but murmurs in the unruffled privacy of ponderings.

by Silke Heiss, published in Greater Matter

by Silke Heiss, published in Greater Matter.
The playful layout is thanks to Flow Wellington of Poetree Publications.