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!

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.

Trinity of blogposts 1 The great mis-take

 “A mistake is an invitation to look again,

more closely, at something, so you can

understand better what is going on.”

 – Philippa Podlashuc

Shit happens. It happens in life, at times, that it tears you, suddenly, along with it. The tide of demands, which you feel are on you, can be so great, that there is no chance to think or ask yourself whether what you are doing is actually for the greater, or any, good. Being ‘caught off-guard’ happens to many of us, time and again. The wonderful thing about such times is that they usually, hopefully, come to some kind of end – possibly only when you are completely burnt out. But that point – the point at which something else occurs, enabling you finally to yell STOP! – is the turning point: the moment when you are able to “look again, more closely”, in order to get another ‘take’ and in order to understand a situation better. 

What you are about to read is the first in a trilogy of blogposts, in which I am allowing myself the freedom to understand my previous take(s) better. May it increase your compassion for and interest in your own mis-takes. Here goes.

A sudden heap of demands descended upon me after a two-year lull of sorts and I guess I was, at the time, too contented (blasé?) or too busy, to notice what was happening.

The lull occurred after my husband (who was a poet) died in July 2017. I’d stood by him without pause in his last months, when his health plummeted dramatically, but he also made dramatic comebacks, several times. When it was all over, I began to assemble poems I’d written in his bodily presence, as well as ones that were blossoming in his purely spiritual presence. In the space of two years, I published two solo collections, one fat and one slim, entitled Greater Matter and Sweet Nothings, which were launched in October 2019 and February 2020 respectively.

The creation, publication and marketing of these books signalled the beginning of my independence as a poet ‘in my own right’, and I was working hard on nurturing a small readership, as well as keeping up with the daily discipline of writing and self-editing, ever on the lookout for ways of improving my craft. Although I was still very much grieving, I felt deeply fulfilled by having finally learned to hearken my inner voice.

As anyone who has lived a little knows, whenever anything “finally” falls into place, it is a certain marker that one thing has ended and something else is beginning.

The momentum of my life upped significantly when I fell in love with a charming person, who was intrigued by the fact that I was a poet – a phenomenon he had not encountered before. His educational background at a technical school had been largely untouched by poetry, and famous titles from the literary canon had never been part of the curriculum. He’d made a life for himself as a businessman, who, amongst other ventures, had owned bookstores; he was well-read in crime thrillers and latched now, with happy fervour, onto my late husband’s extensive Zane Grey collection; journeyed from there through non-fiction and survival stories into, at this point in time, philosophical classics, such as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Love naturally pulled him closer to learning why poetry is special; he’s written some of his own poems and has, over the years, occasionally been a sounding-board for mine. 

As a poet, my prime interest is, of course, not poetry, but life itself. Intensely romantic and idealistic as I am by nature, as far as I was concerned my life was, here and now, presenting me with the most remarkable and undreamed-of opportunity! This man, no doubt, would sell my poetry books and turn us into a formidable team, with me creating and him promoting beautifully shaped words to reach and heal the hearts of all humanity. (Off-stage, whispering: mis-take.)

Well, to give him due credit – he did sell six copies of Sweet Nothings, the first nogal on the day we collected it from the printers – AND it was Valentine’s Day! I couldn’t believe it! We were on a roll! (mis-take)

However, to my naïve surprise, Jay (not his real name) had limited patience with things that are difficult to sell and, of all the things there are in the world that people do NOT readily put their hands into their wallets for, poetry wins first prize. To put it more succinctly, when it comes to saleability, poetry and ice cream are poles apart.

Well, Jay’s realism about marketing my poetry personally was a bit of a damper on my high hopes, but I still had my eye on life itself. He had (and still has) a shop in Hogsback, where he generously (at no profit to himself) gave shelf space to the poetry volumes I wanted to sell – my own, those by my late husband, as well as books by the Ecca Poets. This set-up has worked, and is still working; the books sell slowly, as is to be expected. I love to imagine the poems flowing out like starlight, reaching people long after they are first published. For THAT is their power. Unlike ice creams, poems do not melt.

BUT. BUT. BUT.

Here I was, a novice poet still wet behind the ears, choosing to be with a person who could not be blamed for having no inkling of what it meant to BE a poet. I would have to teach him what that is and what it means to live with one. Did I turn out to be a bad teacher, phew! If one can excel at failure, then I am truly excellent. For, clearly, as it turned out: I did not know myself what it meant; certainly I did not know how to manage it in balance with nurturing a new love relationship. So, being a good woman (not a mistake), what I did try to do was choose to serve my love for Jay. I put that love higher than my love for bringing poems into the world. It felt like an ethical choice – that is to say, not a choice at all. Of course a beautiful, living human being has more value than words strung together! (Not a mistake.)

However, looking at it now, I guess that was the story I told myself – in order to justify the rather unbalanced belief system I clung to, which was: my relationship with a beloved other is more important than the relationship with my independent self.

AT THE SAME TIME.

My parents were growing increasingly dependent and, one month into hard lockdown, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I REALISED then (mis-take). Life is asking me NOT to be a poet (huh?), for that, I told myself, is selfish, irrelevant, economically unviable and socially irresponsible (???). Besides, there are millions of poets out there, with a few hundred of them bloody excellent, so the world definitely does NOT need to read anything I write. FINALLY I was going to be a PROPER PERSON, an ORDINARY person, just like everybody else, who PUTS SERVING REAL PEOPLE BEFORE WRITING POEMS.

It’s sad, or maybe it’s actually, ultimately, funny, but my poetry seemed to me to be nothing but solipsistic (mis-take); nature- but not people-centred; pampering nothing but my own soul and helping nobody (mis-take!). I ask, on my knees, forgiveness – for all this mis-taken, negative self-talk – from my loyal fans and readers. You guys truly helped me, privately, lovingly, patiently, with steady encouragement, to keep my waning little flame alight despite myself, during these years of my own stupidity descending, mis-take by mis-take, onto and spreading out its darkness within me.

Truth was, I felt I owed society something for having published two solo volumes in the blissful solitude of a paradisiacal house and garden. And here, before my very eyes, in front of my own door, so to speak - where one is, for good reason, told to sweep first and foremost - were my parents, one struggling with her own body (my mother is paralysed in a wheelchair), the other with his mind (Alzheimer’s is an unnerving disease for the person suffering from it). As for Jay, he was soul-searching, writing his own book, trying to understand his nicotine addiction. The last thing any of them needed, so it seemed to me, was my poetry, let alone the complications involved in creating it. I confess I imposed it – very gently – upon them, at times (if for no other reason than to give myself breathing room). I can testify that they were never the worse off. My mother’s and Jay’s responses were virtually always sweetly affirming. But, too often, their interest was painfully temporary. I see now, with a grimace of resignation, that I was looking to them to give my poetry the attention I wasn’t giving it!

As for the rest of the world – clearly it agreed with my negativity, so it appeared to me at the time. Covid and lockdown, government corruption, the continued desacralisation of nature, poverty, hunger and, later, war screamed at me: DO YOU FINALLY SEE HOW IRRELEVANT YOUR POEMS ARE??? I suppose, dear reader, that you might relate to some of this? When harmful self-talk blots all your blessings and sadistically breaks all your motivation?

For, despite this illness in my soul, my guardian angel, and my God, called me – often – and gave me motivation and encouragement. The extraordinary blessings in my life during that out-of-synch period put ever more real conflict inside me, making it impossible to COUNT those blessings. I was invited to read alongside other poets, musicians and dancers, at the African Women Writers’ Symposium in 2021; I painted poems onto a public wall, working alongside formidable artists in Knysna in 2022; I publicly read a well-received poetic tribute to those artists at the launch of that wall; I collaborated in an amazing poem-dance at an animal charity art exhibition. I organised two successful poetry readings in the privacy of my home; AVBOB accepted three of my poems for their poetry library, and also, very kindly, did a punt for me; I had poems and even art published in respected US literary magazines; I walked and wrote daily (for me, those two activities belong together) and continued, albeit erratically, to trial modest poems on my precious private readers – all the time at war with myself, feeling completely fake. Why? Because: I was failing properly to acknowledge these achievements, they were strange, if exhilarating, puzzles, more than anything else, to my confused mind. (No-take) I cannot emphasise enough that the word “count” is all-important in the idiom, “count your blessings”. Alone to create the links now to all those precious moments has been more than humbling.

At the time, all the puzzledness and confusion, by the way, was taking place OFFLINE. Online I continued to show a more ‘professional’ face, as best I could, hiding the grimy truths of my soul and – even though I did try to be honest and published some posts on this blog about bitterness and sadness – the fact was that I felt utterly out of control. The best I could do was to announce that I was taking ‘a Sabbatical’.

During that ‘Sabbatical’, I burnt myself out in the service of loving my needy loved ones.

Organising my parents’ household from afar; being there for them emotionally on a daily basis; driving the long journey to visit them once a month; being there emotionally as well as in very practical ways for Jay – all of this, thank the Lord, I could do and did. (Not a mis-take.)

But, prioritising this service, and simultaneously trying to make THEIR PRIORITIES mine, giving insufficient time, attention and authority to my craft, my readers, my finances, was a mis-take. I felt unseen, unacknowledged: I had been caught in the web of a plight endured by far too many women and men, who attend to their loves at the cost of paying attention to their independence, inner balance, fulfilment and own resources.

My vicious temper, which had disappeared with the appearance of my poetry publications, returned.

My feelings of serenity and fulfilment, which had blessed me when I was centred in my independent creativity, evaporated.

My experience of being at one with myself gave way to feeling more and more torn.

Stress will always show the places in you that require further attention.

Yes, I was still feeding morsels to my Facebook Page and social media platforms, was still showing up here and there, as I could. An online persona really gives one the option of faking it – not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, as you can give faking it your all until you actually do make it. I couldn’t bear to come out publicly with the conflicts on my heart and the severe loss of a sense of control I suffered privately, because, on the one hand, the world seemed to be ending in disease, lies and violence, how could I possibly, in good conscience, add to the bad news? On the other hand, I also did not know in the least how to write about my stuff WITHOUT mentioning all the dearly beloved non-poets I was so focused on – so, on top of everything I was in a permanent spin about the ethics of what poetry and writing were asking of me. Posts on this blog, in which I came out with some of the facts of my life, were a source of inner pain and turmoil.

Closer to home, my duties towards the Ecca group kept me strung into those beautiful people, who had once been my fellows; friends, who still saw me as one of their own.

I tried as best I could to conceal it, but I grew increasingly unsure of myself. I actually became afraid of speaking publicly, especially, for some reason, of being seen on the zoom poetry readings at Off The Wall and The Red Wheelbarrow (where I was even featured!) all too often I’d want to say something and then just sit, with a horrible hardness locking my throat. I can’t believe it myself, and I won’t blame you if you don’t, but I actually cringed with the sense of shameful inferiority I felt in the presence of other poets.

I began to doubt the power of love itself, I felt abysmally disappointed in myself and convinced that I did not love enough.

As time went by, however, I gradually began to understand that – like so many PROPER PEOPLE, like so many ORDINARY PEOPLE, who put THE PRIORITIES OF THOSE THEY LOVE BEFORE THEIR OWN PRIORITIES I was living a life of “quiet desperation”.

Thankfully, by the grace of God, I would be given opportunity to course-correct. Seeing your MIS-TAKE is always an opportunity for a RE-TAKE.

 To be continued.

Two of the very good reasons I am infinitely grateful to have made my mis-
take: and why I have not a single regret!
Photo: Brian Bartlett

Entreaty for a tempered solitude

Most human beings are not made, ultimately, for solitude.

Yet a person's self-awareness benefits from regular retreats into solitariness - which is really a state of being free of burdens and responsibilities, when you may open up like a great hollow in a weathered rock, through which the wind pipes hitherto unheard tunes.

It can be frightening or strange to be thus 'free', strung through by unrecognised moments to your self as they come and go in terrible, relentless succession.

It is often fulfilling, even saving, to attend to the needs of others, to be distracted out of our inner emptiness by their calls for our help, strength, counsel. For, who are we, when we are not serving others?

God's company (though by many names He be known) is essential if one is to enjoy one's solitude and come away refreshed. Being in nature, whether actively or passively, uplifting music and reading, inspired creative work and craft, even chores - these are, when your solitude is tempered by God's presence (more commonly called love), all infused with holiness, filling a person's alone time like rain swells a stream.

Or simply attending to (meditating on) a beautiful scene or object, opening heart, eyes, ears, nostrils and skin pores, to breathe in the moment's undemandingness, will allow that out-breath that releases excess of individuated thoughts and feelings, returning you to sweet anonymity, your very own lightness of being, in the hammock of creation.

And yet, the following sonnet by John Keats, extolling solitude in nature, ends tellingly:

"The sweet converse of an innocent mind, / Whose words are images of thoughts refined, / Is my soul's pleasure" too. It is my experience that the most blissful state of grace on earth is when you can enjoy any of the holy activities I've mentioned, in the company not only of God, but also of your Beloved.

Despite having been advised, repeatedly, to 'stand in my own power' and 'be my own woman', it is my experience that I stand best, firstly, in God's power, that is to say, in the power of love; and, secondly, that I am (mostly) my favourite own woman tempered in the vicinity of my gentle Beloved's fragrance and breath, unimposing though they may, and must, be, as we each spin our separate strands on the mystery web of life.

A space for everyone

Dearest Hugh

Thank you for wanting to hear me read my poems and for introducing me to Off The Wall.
Thank you for encouraging me to write a verse novel and for publishing it - for involving me so closely with the bold experiment of serialising a contemporary verse novel. It was a superb experience!

Thank you for writing me a reference for a creative arts fellowship.

I wish I could have fulfilled your wish to publish The Griffin Elegy as a complete set.

I wish I could have fulfilled your wish to hear it more in performance.

Thank you, Hugh, for believing in my poetry.

Thank you for being a friend - a critical friend, a natural friend, a poetry friend.

Thank you for all your precious sms poems, which showed so plainly how woven into everyday life our poems are. 

For being kind to Norman, to the Eastern Cape poets, to different kinds of voices. 

For being so very supportive of Lewis - his five books would not have come about without you.

For inviting everybody to read in the language of their choice - from Sweden to Argentina and back home.

For giving a space to everyone - from pastors to bergies - at Off The Wall.

I was so happy when you and Julia found each other.

I have been sad to see you unwell and suffering. 

May you travel well, as your soul unfolds its further mysteries.

Love from

'Silkiness!' ... as you always, with a smile, called me, always, somehow, in a tone of surprise.

Towards breakfast, a flower

Oh, my dear God,
sweet Christ: who would believe

this estuary of us -

who is the river and who

the sound

of

the sea?

Longer than the count of years,

my life has been, and now

you lead me to this threshold -

saturated by peace, and crabs,

kingfishers, and fish,

and fishermen, and other birds.

Keep me here, my darling Lord,

thank you for bringing me through,

to talk with you, at this kind hour.

Before me now: two fishermen,

oaring musically

their small boat, stacked with rods,

towards breakfast.

Ah, this Flower,

singing

on the water!

- Silke Heiss

The value of the beholder

We were getting my disabled mother dressed, or changed and ready for bed - I no longer remember which.

It's an effort, for her, as much as for the carers; and when my dad does it, occasionally with my help (as used to be necessary over weekends and holidays), the effort multiplies all round.

Anyway. Eventually we get there and she's ready - for the day, or for the night.

"You are so beautiful!" my dad cries, having stood back to admire our achievement.

She slumps in the wheelchair, dejected by her helplessness.

"If only it helped," she retorts glumly, "the beauty".

"Oh," he fires back, "It helps me! Me it helps that you are beautiful!"

And so Beauty gets to smile again, and everybody can go on.

The strange momentum of the unimportant

The gentle memory I referred to in my last blog, so generously conveyed by my niece, is terribly unimportant.

Unimportant in the sense of not carrying a heavy load. It's a light, a delightful memory.

She loved, as a girl, when she visited the coastline I was living at, at the time, to stand at the edge of the sea's reach, letting the waves pull the sand out from under and behind her feet, sinking deeper and deeper in towards her ankles. The sensation would cause her to giggle exultantly.

Her memory is nothing more than that I stood with her in the same joy, with similarly buried feet, in the same, exulted at-oneness with foamy mother ocean playing the same game, over and over, around our toes and soles and bodied spirits.

The others walked on. She could forget about following them - they'd not worry about her, so long as I kept vigil. So we wallowed freely in pure joy.

She says (and I thank her for allowing me to share this): "I'd been standing in the sand with my feet in, and you were always somebody who understood the physical aspect of a relationship with nature, and I'd be standing with my feet in the sand, and I used to giggle, because every time the water would pull away from me it would bring some more of the water with me, and I would laugh, because I would just stand, and my feet would fall deeper and deeper into the water, and I would love that. And you would always stand with me and, like, feel it with me, and enjoy it with me, and everybody would walk away, and they would keep walking down to the restaurant along the beach, but you would always stand with me."

If you are still reading, it probably means you're transported to unimportant, delightful memories of your own. Memories, perhaps, of physical experiences in nature, with someone you love and feel safe with, who shares the joy you're feeling.

Wallow! It's worth it. Such stuff provides direction for the momentum of lighthearted souls.

Photo by Thabang Mokoena on Unsplash

U/7Lboots on the reddit app tells us the science behind the joy.

Sacred vessels

It's a while now that I've not been attending to this blog as regularly as would fulfil me.

When the blogsite was kindly set up for me, it was announced on my website as

a space where Silke dreams her dreams, speaks her mind, shares her journey and sometimes disappears from - a sign that she's enjoying her solitude.

A lovely disclaimer, "enjoying her solitude".

But my infrequent blogs these months have not been due either to enjoyment or solitude; they have been due to a heavy heart that will not speak.

Way back (nearly forty years ago), a fellow at my old school gave me a note, on which was written:

To understand people, you have to be able to hear what they are not saying. What, perhaps, they will never be able to say.

I did not understand why he gave me the note and I don't remember him telling me why he did. At the time I assumed he was sharing something of his own, painful silence, but now I wonder whether he sensed something about me instead?

There is much focus, in this time, on truth, exposure of lies, on revelations, clearing blockages and festering obstacles on all kinds of levels - economic, political, social, racial, spiritual and psychological.

All through this time now, my heart feels strained, broken, aching, sometimes panicky.

A heart is a place of very few, choice words.

Perhaps the only words that can be at home in a heart are 'I love you', and variations thereon.

Those words and their variations fulfil the purpose of words as cups of mystery, cups filled with the elixir of a kind of pure existence: I am, you are, we be, and how strange and lovely is that.

It may be age, it may be the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - whatever it is, there is great, urgent, profound and uncompromising need, in the heart writing this, to retreat. To be a leaf, melting gradually into its own ungreening.

Writing these words give ease. The metaphor conveys me into the foliage my soul needs.

I am no longer strong enough for any other kind of habitat, other kinds of words.

Living in peace is possible (for me) only when words are respected for the sacred vessels they are.

Painted papyrus by Eva van Belle

 

Rather just feel it

A writer can't be squeamish when it comes to emotions.
The 'bad' human emotions all have a place.

I first learned the value of jealousy when I fell in love with the man who would become my second husband.

Prior to that I had, of course, naturally felt jealous, frequently. I was jealous of my sisters when they were born (they were twins, born prematurely when I was not yet 2 years old). I continued to be quite acutely jealous of them every so often, the way that siblings will be, when parents try to be as fair as they can be.

In my 20s, I was jealous of ex-girlfriends, whom my then-boyfriend declared he still loved in his heart. I was passionately jealous, at times, wilfully cutting up photographs, yelling and tossing cups about.
My passions were ugly and violent, and so I felt that my jealousy was wrong and tried to suppress it. The ex-girlfriends were beautiful women, after all. They were innocent - it was not their fault that they were loved.
I visited and even hosted ex-girlfriends with my boyfriend, and later with my first husband, mostly swallowing, or trying to swallow, the terrible feelings I harboured - feelings of possessiveness, which I did not know then were hiding dismay that I was not being treated with respect, that is to say, that I was unable to own my feelings or express them in an acceptable way.
The jealousy made me feel ugly and I did not want to be ugly.
Influenced by the ethics of the hippie era, we were probably many of us trying to deny all 'bad' feelings, all feelings excepting love.

Late in life, I fell in love with an old hippie. (Norman, for those of you who know me.) He was 60, I 44.
We were honest about the fact that we each loved people before we had met one another.
Our love for one another cancelled no other love.
I loved him for having such a big, warm, loyal heart. In any case: I knew I could not love a man who disowned or relinquished the love he had felt for other women - women just like myself.
But my love reached a limit when I realised I did not want to share him.
I knew that the jealousy was an issue between himself and myself, NOT between another woman - who was beautiful and could not be blamed for being loved by him - and myself.
Although we were living apart, I expressed my problem to Norman and he immediately understood, respected and acted on it by committing himself unreservedly to me, notwithstanding the physical distance between us.
This was a completely new experience for me: I was being honoured. My 'ugly' feelings were being taken into account, because I had finally found someone I trusted sufficiently simply to express them.

It was a turning point.
Suddenly my jealousy found its rightful place: its function was to declare a limit, a boundary.
My possessiveness wanted our love in a sanctuary: a paradise, which was closed to all but ourselves.
That is how I made friends with my jealousy.
Now I know better how to guard my heart: when I feel jealous, I always ask myself whether I am maintaining proper boundaries. The jealousy is a warning sign that I am not sufficiently protective of an important sacred space. This can apply to any situation, including my work, my solitude, my very identity.

If you are not friends with your jealousy, it will become a passion and endanger the unlimited love in your heart. It will take control, make you controlling, even violent, and then you can't be free.

Rather just feel it.

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."

REVIEW FEATURE: No Addiction to Writing?

Today, I have extracted my review of Marc Schroeder's Sleeping with Dogs from my recent newsletter, in order to give this wonderful read more exposure. Enjoy the write-up and then get yourself the book - it's important for many of us, in different ways. Purchasing details below.

REVIEW FEATURE: No Addiction to Writing?

from Give Your Writing The Edge Newsletter No.45, March 2019

Sleeping with Dogs by Marc Schroeder

Reach Publishers, Wandsbeck, 2018, ISBN 978-0-620-78725-3

You won’t regret it, no. You’ll turn the pages like leaves in the wind and then close the book with a feeling of awe at the young (well, he’s only just over 40!) author’s spirit – his courage, his stamina, his honesty, his humanity and, not least, his uncompromising love of life. I’m talking about Marc Schroeder’s Sleeping with Dogs – a personal (autobiographical) tale of the war of the self against the self, or perhaps more accurately: of the battle to quell the mind’s interminable justifications and rationalisations, by soul’s song finally pulling the human body “into the wild, to where I’d been called for so long.” (pg. 262)

The book begins in 2011, set in Cape Town during the French Open Final, with our ‘hero’ before the television, telling his reader how much he loves tennis, saying things backwards, and the words ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ on his cocaine-buddy’s knickers before he inhales “the snowy trail” she’s offering.

In two pages, we are served (pun intended) it all: an ordinary, South African, sport-loving, fun-loving, straight male, drug-doing self. If you get nothing from this story other than – Here’s someone who knows how to string words together so they pump – it will have been worth your while.

Schroeder uses the tennis match motif as a way of keeping score throughout his journey. As he fights his addiction to various drugs by doing the Ironman race; the Mont Aux Sources Mountain Challenge in the Drakensberg; a cycle ride backtracking the Camino de Santiago to cross Spain and France; going into rehab; joining a church; returning to live with his parents; planning marriage; we see the following –

pg. 59              Addiction 1 – Religion 0

pg. 67              Addiction 1 – Independence 0

pg. 98              Addiction 1 – Ironman 0

pg. 98              Addiction 1 – Rehab 0

pg. 212            Relationships 0 – Addiction 1

pg. 226            Hypnosis 0 – Addiction 1

pg. 243            Psychiatry 0 – Addiction 1

pg. 262            Love 1 – Addiction 0

These scores provide a neat outline of the ongoing skirmishes in the war against what Schroeder calls “the wolves” – whose purposeful, menacing spirit is beautifully captured in the cover artwork by Nicole Goss; indeed, the cover matches the heart of the entire story as could only have emerged out of an artist’s empathy.

The metaphor of the ‘wolves’ effectively conveys the soul’s refusal to lay down arms in the war against unhappiness and self-loathing. On pg. 142 we read:

I was afraid of the harm my soul was demanding from my body.

And 100 pages later:

I believe the further we stray from our life’s purpose the harder life will come down on us, attempting to shake us and bring us back to our true calling. My inability to heed the calls from my spirit resulted in the drugs taking control of my life. I was thirty-six years old. I’d fucked up every relationship I’d ever been in and cared about. I found no purpose or gratification in my chosen vocation [financial advisor]. I was the exact opposite of what I’d hoped for and dreamt for as a child. Yet on paper, I had it all. The sense I had wasted my one life and was continuing to do so, was overwhelming. (pg. 242)

These paragraphs are important for two reasons. First, the words “life’s purpose” and “true calling” reveal the underlying premise of the book. To an attentive reader, the drug addiction turns out, in fact, not to be the main concern – the addiction is clearly showing but ONE POSSIBLE way, in which the wild and purposed instinct (as embodied by the “wolves”) in the author’s own soul refuses to be tamed. (Depression, suicide, crime, addiction to sex, or to gaming, and social and domestic violence could, in my opinion, be other ways of revealing the same existential problem.)

As soon as Schroeder finds himself in the wild, the addiction ceases, because:

My soul was afire. […] I’d fallen in love with the mountain state of mind. (pp. 174-5)

The second theme revealed in the paragraph on pg. 242 is that of honesty. The nasty chasm – between a “paper” life and a real life filled with true soul adventure and opportunity for growth – is more than Schroeder’s body-soul is willing to bridge. In many ways, I read the halt-less drive towards revelry (described in the party, drunken driving and drugging scenes) as a – perhaps unintended – social comment on a culture that is not only too materialistic and fearful for the author’s superficial comforts, but is also deeply rejecting of the Dionysian (ecstatic reveller) and Warrior archetypes – a rejection that may overall hit males harder than females, but which is one the Western world generally has been suffering under for too long.

Adventure, wholehearted lovemaking, dancing (all of which genuinely alter one’s mental state), and self-discovery through physical trials, such as sport offers – all these doings are essential, to a lesser or greater degree, to any human soul. They are embodied in the archetypes of Dionysus (equivalent of the Roman god Bacchus) and Ares (Mars). Dionysus is the Greek god of wine, rowdy festivity, mystic experiences, and spiritual wanderings outside human civility or politics; while Ares is traditionally held to be a bloodthirsty god of war, but, in his most positive aspect, he is also the most sanguine of all the gods on Olympus, outdoing the lot in the arts of dance and lovemaking. (Ares is for good reason Aphrodite’s favourite lover!)^[1]

Sleeping with Dogs is thus, for me, primarily about the bid for those rejected energies to be accepted into the author’s life; even though the author himself does not go as far as to make that explicit. But the dogs of the title, whose loyal love and acceptance of him see him through his most wretched states are, after all, descendants of the wolf. Is it surprising, then, that it is them it hurts him most to give up at the end of the book, in order that he may build a new life for himself in the Himalayas –a life that promises to honour the wild “wolf” inside himself: wolf, that loyal teacher, whose nose follows the ‘inside track’? (In their beautiful handbook on the totem animals of Native Americans, Jamie Sams and David Carson write: “Wolf would not come to you unless you requested the appearance of the tribe’s greatest teacher.” – Medicine Cards, St. Martin’s Press, New York: 1999, pg. 98)

So the score of 1 for Love in the book’s final pages is a score for self-love gained by escaping a milieu totally unsuited to a natural man’s soul. I use the words ‘natural man’ deliberately to echo the concept of ‘natural woman’, beautified by Carole King  – but Men who run with the wolves has yet to be written (though I’d argue that Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and also Robert Bly in Iron John, did give it what they were worth).

 

One score I would dispute is that of 0 for relationships. Schroeder’s criterion is a secure, cosy marriage, and he suffers repeated disappointments in himself for failing to become a stable boyfriend, let alone a husband and father. However, his friendships with men and women alike are remarkable for the shared joie de vivre and total trust that emanates from them – a joy and – dare I say canine – trust that I hazard might well be the envy of many a tired family man worn out by the endless monkey tricks demanded by having to provide for and protect his clan. Schroeder spells it out in a simple tribute to his friend Lisa:

Lisa was anything but mainstream and loved things I loved – music, the sea and, of course, sharing passion through chemicals. I knew it wouldn’t last forever; eventually, one of us would find purpose and move on. However, for those few years, we enjoyed what we had – a wonderful variety of freedom, where we could be who we were without fear of judgment. (pg. 153)

A few of the descriptions of the drug trips at their peak echo the beautifully wrought descriptions of the great outdoors – an echo, which only proves the NEED for the natural altered states Nature in her grandeur provides us with.

Sleeping with dogs is as real as real can be. Run with your own shadow, it seems to say, and you will sleep with your wildest instincts brought into the fold of your inner peace – a peace, which in Schroeder’s case is gained by the highs and lows of outdoor activities and friendships, but perhaps, above all, by the satisfaction of WRITING IT ALL DOWN with an exquisite sureness of rhythm and word choice.

It’s with pleasure that I let this storyteller-sage’s talent flag the end of this review. May his question reverberate in your own hearts – it may well be more pertinent at this stage in our human history than ever before:

I wasn’t aware I was such a fraud, a boat without a keel, a drifting ballast-less at the mercy of the sea and the wind. I knew I wanted love; isn’t that what we’re all looking for? However, how can you love another when you have no love for yourself?

– Silke Heiss

Hogsback

March 2019

œ

You may purchase Sleeping with Dogs from Amazon.com –

https://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Dogs-Marc-Schroeder/dp/0620787252

The kindle version costs $9.19 (ca. R135) while the hard copy is $15.99 (ca. R235)

---

^[1] Jean Shinoda-Bolen’s books, Gods in Everyman, and its counterpart, Goddesses in Everywoman, offer a Jungian perspective on the major divine figures on Mount Olympus, providing a deeply helpful handle on the possibility for balance and integration of the multitude of different energies, which typically jostle one another in the mixed bag of the human psyche.