Wild Voices and Greater Matter - a chronology of purchases and words

Last July, I bought Wild Voices Messages from the Soul of Africa, a beautiful and helpful book and card set. 

I met the author, Anne Keating, at the launch of Greater Matter in October. 

In December, she wrote me the following response. I thank her for her permission to quote her response, as well as to share her poem, Wild Goose. 

Here is her email:

Hello dear Silke

I loved GREATER MATTER.

A stunning, amazing piece of work Silke, wrought from so much god-damn honest pain – flip.

I’ve read it three times and I know I will come back to it.

Thank you.

I want to share some of my story of how I remember Norman ...

With love to you

Anne

Here is the poem:

WILD GOOSE

I come to Greater Matter
Curious.
Who is this woman
Who speaks of Love and Death
Who takes poetry and writes a book
With a beginning, a middle and an end,
and in that order?
Soon I am intrigued captivated absorbed
Sometimes the story holds so much grief
I must close it,
open the small window in my loft for fresh air
Look down to see the living
Branches sway
Green
Gentle Ngunis, halo-horned, moo.
Our lungs easy to fill,
an insult to the struggle I read of
... and I remember the Norman I knew.
The Bard at High Riding
once a near neighbour on the mountain,
Wrote Tim and me a poem about
labyrinths, souls and the wild goose:

Our hand-built labyrinth, “Wild Goose”, radiates between two spreading
oaks
This long year so lovingly constructed
concentric earth paths,
tumbled river-stones and lavender
will guide the pilgrim
to the sacred centre
giving succour.
At last we complete the circles, tuck in the last stone

“This deserves an Opening Ceremony, maybe poetry and wine...”
Norman agrees.
He writes:

WILD GOOSE
The soul goes its road:
this way, that
- restless;
drawn,
a slow spin
to its own heart
- a wild goose
spiralling in
to land.
2004

*

Dismantled before Silke’s Great Suffering
This labyrinth was a place of joy to many pilgrims.
Guided by the sacred wisdom of the river-stone spirals
They spiralled to their centre.
They found their Wild Goose
And stroked his white neck
with reverence.
Silke, now the Bard at Wild Riding,
through spirals of ache, has watched her “soul goes its road”.
Confounded by pain
Yearning her lover...
Yet, resilient, she now recovers her centre.
Powerful, she holds this place.
With tenderness she strokes
the strong white neck of her Wild Goose.

                                        - Anne Keating

I am, now, no longer at High Riding, but, due to the enforced lock-down I am finally able to engage with and study Wild Voices as I intended to do when I bought it. How I look forward to absorbing myself!

For more information on Anne's book, please visit Wild Voices

If you would like a copy of Greater Matter, please email me at silke@silkeheiss.co.za
Alternately, if you would like to order my book via Amazon, please click on this link Greater Matter

And they lived happily ever after ... or: Start now

Once upon a time, I took a photo of fresh Cape clawless otter spoor at the Cape of Good Hope.
Upon a subsequent time, I painted an otter on a t-shirt.
(I found otter scat in the garden around that same time.)
Then I started a blog, and called it '... follow your footsteps'.
I obeyed and did follow my path.
It was an adventurous time.
My feet climbed a big book. (Greater Matter)
They stumbled upon another one. (Sweet Nothings)
Now the feet are sore.
They need rest.
They are living happily ever after.

The roll-back

Four launch/ reading events -
1. Hogsback (The Edge Mountain Retreat), 12/10/19;
2. Grahamstown (Reddits, Cafe D'Vine), 25/10/19;
3. Cape Town: Tokai (The Book Shoppe), 4/11/19;
4. Cape Town: Claremont (Exclusive Books, Cavendish), 5/11/19

Now, at my laptop at my parents' dining room table, I sit opposite my mother, quietly reading in her wheelchair. Her entire left side is paralysed and her body has as good as no independence anymore. She holds her lapidary brochure in her right hand. Flash photos of cut and labelled gems, displayed on royal red backgrounds, gaze at me.

My parents' presence at the Cape launch of Greater Matter at Exclusive Books, Cavendish, Claremont, on Tuesday was one of the most precious gifts to me personally.
"If I could, I would have got up and embraced you," my mother said.

Having had to have been so publicly present, both online and off, for the sake of marketing and selling my book, has felt unnatural, even stressful.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading aloud to people, I love intimate public events, which poetry readings mostly are. I love the microphone, which allows for whisper-soft words to slink into listener's hearts. And I love the fact that readers have bought Greater Matter and are being nourished by it.

But the tide is rolling back now.

I look forward to being in the arms of my beloved. I look forward to composing poems again, applauded by the stars and grasses. Perhaps more people will come towards me, who have felt themselves privately heard, or who are questing for more of the chime they sense hums in my book. 

There'll be further books, further readings, to build and nurture the "good/ By quiet natures understood" (W.B.Yeats, Prayer for my Daughter).

I thank Exclusive Books, Cavendish, and Eva van Belle for the photographs from Tuesday's launch.

Adventures on the countdown

The widow messaged me. Because my book is available on Amazon, she thought I was abroad and was delighted to learn that I was, in fact, physically within her reach. She drove from Ngcobo in the Transkei to Hogsback and we met at The Edge Restaurant over coffee on the deck in the morning sun.

She honoured and humbled me by what she shared. Her story reminded me to keep my focus sharply on what is perhaps the second-most important thread in my book ... namely, that what happens in our physical (visible, tangible) life is a reflection of invisible activity in the spiritual realm. And that the elemental realm is literally animated by our imagination and our traditions.
(The first-most important thread is of course that love simply flows through apparently impermeable boundaries.)

The woman's quest, properly to balance the questions that are natural to reason against trust in her own intuition, is a quest I value - it mirrors mine.

My book is taking me on beautiful adventures. The first box of them is going down at a lovely pace as I post or hand-deliver copies basically every day. I thank all my supporters from the heart and wish the poems take you on the adventures your souls need.

The picture shows you the launch venue - the path leads through the back courtyard of The Edge Restaurant, and the roofed, windowed place is the Tin Shack (that's where the pizza oven is). It's not yet set up for the weekend's events - you will certainly be provided with seats when you attend the launch! To the left of the picture you can see just a touch of the local craft shop.

The frogs sang their love songs again last night and this morning, so it looks as if the earth and our spirits will once more be refreshed.

Learning how to partake

Partaking is an art.
Partaking balances the gestures of giving and receiving.

It is far more difficult than I thought.
Giving is a habit. The habit of a lifetime. For most of us, this is true. Most of us ... at least I think it's most of us ... give more than we receive.
Perhaps that is partly why there is such an uneven distribution of wealth across the globe?
Many habitual givers consistently clamour their outrage at the greed of a few takers, a few people who (apparently) take more than they give.
But perhaps habitual givers should change their habits, if for no other reason than to balance things out a bit?
If our giving is out of balance with our receiving, aren't we tempting others to be unpleasantly greedy?
I think so.

My to-do lists consist of mouse-feet-sized steps, each one leading me a little further towards the imminent launch of Greater Matter, and towards enabling those who wish to own a copy actually to purchase one.

Being a poet has been, in my case, a revelatory disability in many respects. I can, maybe, brag about walking the ether and inhabiting heart-space with birds and serpents, duikers and hares; but the big question now is: can I walk on ground my consciousness has not actually touched?

The advantage is that it is not too late to learn. And it is not unacceptable to say, Wait for me, I need to catch up with the rest of you guys. I still need to learn the ropes of this vast ship called business.

As for 'you guys' - have you touched MY ground with YOUR consciousness? Have you dared blink into the dew-glinting threads I spin? Because they'll bowl you over, they'll make you drunk on the very water of life, man!

I feel immense gratitude towards those who have already bought their copy of Greater Matter: we have already embraced in the dance of the partaking.

The more you take what I have to give, the more with you I shall know myself to be: partaking simply and gently and ecstatically in the flow of things. Yay.

On the road we picked up the books

We left our homes and drove the road to where the land and sea are joined.

There, we picked up the books, in two heavy boxes.

They didn't have to deliver them, because we came ourselves to load them.

You carried the boxes, up the steep stairs. Up the steep stairs your carried each box, and after the second you caught your breath.

Today we will offer the books to people.

I will keep quiet. I'll watch you, taking and offering, and I'll see the faces change, and the hands open and close.

We will carry the books, with their stories, and drive the road that follows us.

- Silke Heiss, 17th September 2019

My tortoise journey with poems

The adventure with my book continues. Flow (Poetree Publications) is busy proofreading it and Mike (Max Design) is working on a cover, a draft of which a few of my private readers have already shown thumbs-ups to: thank you.

Books are written, printed, published, launched, marketed, sold and, alas, pulped every day. Millions upon millions of them. Written, printed, published, launched, etc.etc.etc.

Only one of those millions upon millions is my book.

Only one.

At last.

Certainly no one can accuse me of speeding.

Fireside talk: a beautiful new world

Relaxing by the hearth before a lovely blaze, my friend says, 

"If you say you have a book of poems I must read, I'll tell you straight away that I won't. I mean, why should I?"
"Well," I reply, "my book tells a story in poems. It's a story of love and death."
Now he looks interested.
"It's about losing," I continue, "the person dearest to you and the way grief takes you on an adventure of becoming a whole new self."
"Ok," he nods, "that's something I can relate to easier than just a bunch of poems - because now it's got real meaning."
"The book has eight parts," I tell him. "The first part is the story of Norman's and my love, our closeness. But he was sick from when we first met - I never knew him not sick. So I've chosen poems that show my awareness that I might lose him. And how Love said: don't worry - sickness and death don't frighten me.

"Then the second part is the crisis of Norman's last months, his physical deterioration, our ups and downs, wild hopes for miracles, despairs, and ultimately the healing of soul, which death wants, before it can happen.

"The third part is the time that immediately followed his death. Where his voice still rang as if from his actual voice box - loud and strong and clear. And my vulnerability - as if I too was newly disembodied in the ether with him. I've been told that's like when the Xhosa people put white on their faces.

"The fourth part - now I'm having to start dealing with worldly stuff - the estate, and so on. But it's a psychically treacherous balancing act all widowed or bereaved people would know.

"The fifth part - now I'm getting on, a bit better with everything, but I don't recognise myself. I'm changed. The dead are with me. Not just Norman. My world and their world overlap. My sense of time is far more fluid.

"Then I have a kind of breakdown. It felt at the time like a shamanic initiation. Many spirits visited the house. I went through pantomimes of experience. Sometimes it felt as if I were walking through the stars. That's the story the poems share in the sixth part.

"The seventh part is specifically about embodied love. When the body of your beloved disappears, it's such a massive physical loss, massive. Because the soul IS the body, in each incarnation. I was content to mummify my heart: I had had the ultimate and wanted no other. But God had other plans for me. Love continued to flow into my life, making sure my heart would stay open, vulnerable, alive. So, new love poems appeared to testify to these greenings even on the ashes of my husband. Those poems make up the seventh part.

"And then, the eighth and final part is my ultimate tribute to Norman: I, who have only ever been the poet's wife, rather than a poet in my own right, am led by the creative process of grieving into a new becoming. I see the facts of my blood are the facts of Norman's blood - we are poets and I can and must stand now on the strength of all I've suffered and learned.

"That's the story of Greater Matter: A Journey of Poems to Death and Beyond."

"This is awesome," says my friend, "because the poems will make more sense to me now when I read the book, and there must be other people out there, that will relate to these different stages that you've gone through, and appreciate the poems."

" I hope so. Because the poems tell the story of a soul-journey, and also how death doesn't part you from a loved one, it expands you."

"Gosh, looking at poetry for the first time in my life has really opened up a beautiful new world for me, and I've even now started writing my own poems."

Tuesday tidy-up by Tortoise

There is a calm. Pleasant and unfamiliar.

I've revised my Timeline at the end of my book; applied the changes suggested by one of my beady-eyed editors; and emailed the other editors saying I need their final input by mid-April, so the proofreader has enough time to work his miracles before I submit the manuscript to PoeTree.

In all my years as a writer (I made a start in 1974) I've never published anything in this way before: I have no solo publication with an ISBN number, nor anything loaded on Amazon.

I breathe a sigh of relief at my vegetative slowness: I like myself being this late. It is wonderful being a slow developer. My disappointments, failures, resentments, frustrations, hopelessnesses, madnesses, despairs, depressions, manias and resignations have made the most extraordinary compost: it is soft and warm with my failures, my traumas, my giving-upnesses over and over again, having to gather my broken bones and reconstruct my self and my life.

Upon this compost of psychic energy I am now carried forward - by the force of my own shit, you could say ... transformed over the decades into a mysterious source of quiet, something is happening, which I've been dreaming almost since birth. Or before. Who knows?

I am producing a 'real' book. A book with an ISBN number, which I will market properly and make available to online buyers.

This is truly nothing special. The book industry is a zillion ants in their antheaps, and there are only so many ant-eaters about to devour them.

And yet, like the birth of any living baby, my book has its own bright star. As it currently stands, there are 238 poems carrying the narrative - the journey with my husband to his death and beyond. The poems are like 238 survivors of the 1000 eggs the Tortoise I am has laid in the sand over the past 20 months, with the patient sun of time now finally close to hatching them.

I am grateful. Keeping close to earth.

Photo: Silke Heiss

   

Learning to stand!

"...

those last months' refrain
is still in my head,
you tied to the bed:
"I can't get well
if they won't let me get up
on my feet."

..."

- extract from What never was (After 'Five Pinecones' by Arja Salafranca), in Section 8 of Greater Matter - Facts of Blood

Gearing up for tonight's reading at Off The Wall at Roxy's in Woodstock, Cape Town, I'm looking forward to seeing my dear friends and brave editors, fellow Ecca poets Ed Burle and Jacques Coetzee, as well as OTW veteran Hugh Hodge: whose poetic midwifery started and nurtured me on the first leg of my journey 13 years back, as my poems slowly traipsed their way into more and more public readings. I'm also looking forward to greeting people I've not met before ...

I'll confess it here: it feels like a part of the journey of becoming me, as if my feathers were losing fluffiness, growing by some inner secret programme into sleekness and I'm learning to oil them by fluids I did not know before were there.   

It's a journey taken before by a million others, but, like any baby born, it's the first of its kind and will never be again. Learning to stand!

Epigraph for Greater Matter - a hitherto unpublished poem by Norman Morrissey

Future

You say

you've finally found

where you must die

– here, with me

or in the aura of my own passing.

That is a future indeed.

– Norman Morrissey, 6^th July 2010

Facts of Blood

The fourth draft of Greater Matter is complete. I spent this morning contacting a number of people to help me with the way forward and am feeling frankly excited.

At the last minute I decided to change the title of the final (eighth) section from Blood in Ink to Facts of Blood - the former poem was published in the latest Ecca book, Throw in your Song; but the latter poem is more permanent in its meaning. Here is an extract from it:

"[...]

see the pink lamps

of flowering wild grasses bending

on long stalks in a kind of ecstatic submission to

the sun, as it turns

iron-red the luminous trunks of pines in

the plantation [...]"

- from Facts of Blood, title poem of section 8 to appear in Greater Matter later this year.

As it happens, I've simultaneously just switched off an overnight bisque-firing of a kiln-load of ceramic parrot-broaches, ordered by the Cape Parrot Project for taking along to Ohio next week, to a parrot-lovers' indaba. Why is there a feeling of such beautiful order in all of my creative chaos? 

Some of last year's batch of parrot  broaches, photo taken in October 2018.

Shaman (fourth draft) - extract

"[...]                    I am

learning to read

cowered over distances:

my ear close to sounds of antelope

a-galloping under the kitchen floor."

- Extract from Learning to read, in Shaman (Section 6 of Greater Matter)

... the fourth draft of Greater Matter is almost complete - just one more section to edit ...

Wine in the spirit (extract from Between the Realms)

So happy. Am over the halfway mark with the fourth draft of Greater Matter. Having to re-read and work with the poems, it's making me miss Norman more again and simultaneously feel him closer than ever. I actually feel guilty for the irreverence of Life: at how hard I have to slog to stay close to what matters. This is slog like I've never allowed myself: not the usual duty and drudgery that's helped build my life in the past, it's more vital, but harder than anything I've ever experienced before. Destiny-type stuff. Even a mouse has a destiny ... each day, my own weakness is a revelation. And yes: I'm happy.

Slowly galumphing ...

Greater Matter is slowly galumphing its way into the world. I'm onto the fourth draft of Sacred Space, which is the third section of the book. And I even managed to get the Contents Pages for Sections 1 and 2 done the other day! 54 pages, thus far ... though I spaced the poems more in Section 2 ... not sure it'll stay that way ...

Anyway, here's a poem from Sacred Space, a section which records the story of the singular adventure of Norman's wake -

Wrack of sobs

Forced back home the day after you die in my arms

because our house has been burgled –

en route must pull over, stop the car

for sobs so strong

they’d crack my skull on the steering wheel

were I not at the same time catching my head –

wracked this way I feel

the elemental Force of Love

thrusting me each time

helpfully forward.

- from Sacred Space, Section 3 of Greater Matter 

And here - I'm so proud - writing down the page numbers. What a slog.

   

Path of Beauty

In preparation for a Soiree of love songs, poems and stories - to be performed at The Rose Theatre on 15th February by Gwyneth Lloyd, Trevor Webster and myself - I've assembled twenty love poems of mine, ranging from the early 1980s to the present, in a collection I've entitled Path of Beauty. (Twenty-one, actually, if you count the poem on the back cover.)

Artist Michael Chomse has kindly given permission for me to use his portrait, Norman leaving, on the back cover.

My printer's colour cartridge is just about empty, so these prints are pretty wasted-looking - but they give you an impression anyway, and hopefully whet your appetites for what is to come.

If you want a copy of the book, you are welcome to pre-order it. (R50 per copy, add R20 postage inland, R40 overseas.)

I'll post some extracts or poems from the collection as things start warming closer to Valentine's Day.

Many of the recent love poems in the book are extracted from Section 7 of Greater Matter - a section which I've re-titled Path of Beauty - so if you want to hold a sneak preview in your hands, this little book would be it.

Path of Beauty front cover

Path of Beauty back cover

Christmas the Colour of Mousebird (from Between the Realms)

Another Dinosaur Dust creation by Riccardo Smid-Magnanini, featuring a poem, from Greater Matter, entitled Christmas the Colour of Mousebird, which, like all my poems, tells a true story. (It's in Section 4 of Greater Matter - Between the Realms.)

I am fascinated by the way in which Riccardo's eye sets the poem in a way far beyond what I could have imagined. 

All this is work in process - the best kind of work there is. ENJOY!

https://youtu.be/_X8uUQDUsSc

BIG MOMENT: the quiet, happy birth of my Heffalump

I have sent Section 8 of Greater Matter to my readers. Here is the title poem for it - Blood in Ink (previously published in the latest Ecca book, Throw in your Song).

Now to incorporating my readers' feedback to create a sleeker or at any rate fully mobile fourth draft, while also stepping away from my book to face it with my head in editing mode. A kind of freedom. The heffalump is born. Now to learn to ride her. 

From Throw in your Song, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2018, p.40

The third draft of the second-last section of Greater Matter is with my readers.

Step by step I climb my Heffalump. Minnesinging is the penultimate section, confronting the socially disturbing presence of the single woman. And the question that burns differently for every widowed creature: where to with love when your loved one dies?

Epigraphs from the first hard copy

The first hard copy will, I hope, allow me the necessary detachment for a decent self-edit ...

The 'greater matter' quip derives from an sms exchange; Norman's poem is one of the first Table Love poems.