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.

Four-footed Fire

I want to re-ignite momentum on my blog! 

Through a series of blessed synchronicities, I find myself here again, at last, after almost seven months.

Today eleven years ago I formally wedded that beautiful soul, the poet Norman Morrissey and, in the wake of that event, I created a hand-made book of poems for him - most of which have never seen the light of day.

I'm moved to share two of them with you. 

They are quite distinct in their energies. 

Four-footed by Silke Heiss

Four-footed

My ring has four loops
round the green eye

of the centre stone.

Wisdom is an animal:

four paws on the earth

keep the heart humble

and the mind

uninterested

in suffering.

        *

The above poem was written in Grahamstown, where I was staying with my fifteen-year-old son, who was not at all happy, at the time, about my marriage to Norman. Norman, for his part, had his youngest son staying with him in Hogsback, so we were both, during and very shortly after our wedding, more or less absorbed in parenting, more than we could be in one another. This was painful to me, but the ring (which I had designed myself) gave me strength, it gave me the sense not to indulge myself. At least, my poem led me there, to a better self, you could say.

The second poem is entitled Fire. I like it because, as far as I'm concerned, it reveals me to myself more articulately and more wittily than I could do. If that makes sense. Here it is.

Fire by Silke Heiss

Fire

Hestia and Aphrodite

- the virgin goddess of the hearth

and the brazen goddess of love -

in me

somehow combine -

Hestia's fire keeps

my loins loyal,

while the love goddess' spark

illuminates my kitchen

and all I conjure

in the heat there.

Ag, it probably sounds very grand and unlikely.

But it's true

my eggs are in two baskets -

both very 

near fire. 

    

       *

Hmm. I shall be curious as to whether this little bit of breath on that little bit of tinder does, indeed, re-ignite my blog.

Strelitzia - my chosen wedding flower,
blooming in Sunrise-on-Sea, where I now live.

Left hand lead

Those of you who follow my social media posts may have picked up a recent one, in which I share that I had been encouraged by a soul healer to allow my left hand to show me a way forward.

I tried writing with my left hand and found it a very interesting exercise. I have continued and it has led me to a fascinating creature - the chameleon. (If you have the patience to read the handwritten words in the accompanying image, you may be quite entertained to see how exactly my left hand led me.) 

Credo Mutwa, whose book, Isilwane, could be said to play the role of a kind of left-hand somebody (as distinct from a right-hand man) in my idiosyncratic questings, composed a beautiful praise song to the chameleon.

Praise Song to the Chameleon (extracts)

You, of whom warriors of old were afraid

And you, of whom the men today are also afraid

Little chameleon, what is the secret of your magic?

Why do the children of Africa hold you in such dread?

Even the bravest will quail at your touch

Even the mightiest will shrink from handling you

Only little children, secure in their innocence, dare to hold you in their hands

What is your story, chameleon?

[...]

Chameleom, the slow one, unwabu!

Chameleon, the beautiful one who changes his colours

Chameleon, the symbol of the sanusis, keepers of the hidden wisdom

They taught us in the great huts of grass

They taught us in the caves and in the holes in the ground

They taught us that we should be like chameleons, invisible to our enemies

They taught us to seek the knowledge of long ago and to see both into the future and into the past

To see both into the visible world and into the invisible world

Just as you swing your eyes, one looking forward and one looking backward

So we are taught to be like you

[...]

Anne Keating, in her wonderful book, Wild Voices, writes:

You have been taking a good look in the mirror recently and seeing a few of the masks you have been using to camouflage yourself. You realise what a burden they are becoming and are asking yourself WHAT FOR? Why am I keeping up this exhausting camouflage? 

When you are drawn to Chameleon it is a very positive and strong sign that you are now determined to face any self-delusion and remove your masks for good.

And this goes even further.

You will show little tolerance for deception in others in any situation. [...] You are looking for the REAL world [...]

 

Keating, furthermore, gives the key word for chameleon as PRECISION. The focused, carefully deliberated aim, with which chameleon's tongue is able to target and seize its prey, is a reminder not to rush and to allow pure intention to be the leader of your actions.

Left-handed journal entry, 17th January 2021 

Detail from the illustration for chameleon in Isilwane by Bowen Boshier.

Photo: Silke Heiss

Stretching himself to reach another branch. Photo: Silke Heiss

 

 

 

Stand up, out of the blue

Eight or nine days ago, one of my lovely nieces messaged me out of that place of mystery we intelligently call 'the blue'.

"I hope you are doing well!" she wrote, adding, "I had been possessed by a memory of you recently."

Naturally, I replied to her questions, but I was not going to let niceties get in the way of the real (true-blue) stuff. 

"I would love to know what memory it is that possessed you," I said.

She then sent me a voiceclip with two stories. The first was one I'd as good as forgotten. I thank her for granting me permission to share it on my blog.

She was in Grade 6 - that would have made her roughly 11 years old at the time. She went to a party, safe and supervised and so on. A boy approached her, spoke disrespectfully - "rudely, very rude". He was "disgusting", and also flashed her.

She hit and kicked him, kicked him.

Back home, she told her parents, everything. 

Her father was upset - with: everything. The boy, her, just everything. Her mother was worried about her impulsiveness, the risk she'd taken by her spontaneous, violent self-defence. It was an unresolved issue in the home, and in her self.

A week later, I visited with my family. We were told the story. Apparently - I remember it, now that she's re-told it all - among all the adults present, I got up and went to her in the playroom, where she was watching tv or playing a video game, and I gave her a thumbs-up.

"You did good," I told her, "you gave that boy exactly what he deserved."

I remember feeling that it was important to let her know I trusted and approved of her body's spontaneous response to the disrespect, which had injured her spirit and person.

She said that I was the only person, until that point, completely to support what she had done. Coming from her aunt, it was clear: "It was okay for me to stand up for myself as a girl."

Photo by Sam Schooler on Unsplash

The second memory is gentler. It belongs in a separate blog, which will arrive in time, out of the blue.

Against an automatic cringe

In a recent review of Finuala Dowling's latest poetry collection, Pretend you don't know me, published by Kwela, Reg Rumney writes:

"In an age of self-obsession and poetry as therapy, poet and novelist Finuala Dowling’s work is outward oriented. She makes it her business to have an audience. Her poems talk about what is most painful to us, publicly and privately without inviting voyeurism and she’s not afraid of politics beyond slogans. And she enjoys performing her poems. They are not internal monologues."

Rumney's point is valid and I completely chime with his praise of Finuala Dowling's work. I agree with him that any reader would benefit from possessing a copy of Pretend you don't know me.

However, I would like to invite you to rewind to his words, "In an age of self-obsession and poetry as therapy", going on to imply that, in this 'age', much poetry amounts to no more than "voyeurism" of "internal monologues".

I do not question Rumney's feelings about selfie-type poems. These feelings are perfectly understandable.

Nevertheless, I would like to invite you to look again. 

Yes, there is much preoccupation with the self in recent poetry - the self both in its psychological as well as physical manifestations - during this year, and the last, and perhaps the previous ten to twenty; a trend that was arguably begun by William Wordsworth more than two hundred years ago. To offer my own eye on this trend, I would say there is far more going on than can be simply dismissed as an irritating literary aberration, due to a lack of education among emerging poets as to proper poetic attitudes and style.

Yes, it is exhausting and enervating to plough through hundreds upon hundreds of poems, often imaged as memes by (frequently) young, often love-struck, more often love-starved, psychologically struggling folk, who may be on medication or not, using words as a way to keep themselves from drowning in loneliness, despair, and social neglect. I am not even mentioning the environmental and political crises shadowing the globe. 

And yes, it behoves a critic and reviewer to remind readers and writers of modes of expression that would take them beyond themselves and outside their anguish, no matter how desperate they might be. For example:

"I have sweated metals and fused quicksilver to moonlight.
Equations have haunted my walls in a race against time." - from The Alchemy of you by Jessica Denyschen, in The Magic, The Madness and the Loss, Poetree Publications, 2018 

Even out of context, these "self-obsessed" lines are potent, reaching deeply into self in a formidable and rhythmically utterly convincing way. 

Overall, I would caution protectively against an automatic cringe in response to the search for self in an age that requires and facilitates the individual's search for their own soul more than ever before. I think it was Pearl S. Buck who said that the human soul was the least developed area on earth. If our young writers are searching so, who are we to dismiss the awful - and it is by definition awful - struggle?

Dowling is not a part of the new generation; she is older and wiser and it shows in her writing.

Please do not condemn the young who are going through struggles we oldies will never even taste. I daresay Nuala - yes, I do know her a little bit, well enough to call her so - would be highly unlikely to dismiss emerging poets grappling with their human selves by means of trying to make poems. However poorly for now.

I would go so far as to say that a true poet does not put their craft before their soul. Even if critics and reviewers may at times wish that we do.

For the full review by Rumney, see  Reg Rumney Review of Finuala Dowling  

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!