Family lines, or: Alchemising lineage. A pair of personal tunes

One of the most primal ways in which fear is programmed into our cells is through language and stories. The songs, rhythms, idioms, parables and tales we hear as babies and toddlers shape our thinking and feeling bodies for a lifetime. That surely is a reason why Struwwelpeter and Noddy, for example, have been much debated and, to some extent, adapted as to their ‘suitability’ for our children and, by implication, our future. The writer Janosch even made attempts to re-write the Brothers Grimm stories, censoring or altering the crueller parts into more innocent or jovial fare.

A case can be made – as Clarissa Pinkola Estes does in Women who run with the Wolves, and as Robert Bly does in his engaging discussion of Iron John – that conflict, rendered symbolically in frightening and gruesome incidents, conveys an indispensable message to our souls (much as the figure of Satan does in the Bible). We need to be aware that life is not without challenges, conflict and, above all, the presence of evil, whether that evil be “banal” and perfectly everyday, or self-consciously gleeful, like Heath Ledger portrays the Joker.

It is my own position that the vital factor is not so much the presence of what is ugly, awful and unwelcome, nor how the ugliness is depicted, but the happy ending. Happy endings seek to redeem the greatest horrors, if not with saving grace, then at least with understanding. Certainly a story addressing children must end or resolve, if not to happiness, then at least to peace and order. If it leaves disturbing questions hanging, it will very likely harm an innocent mind. A writer with the desire to disturb the peace needs to use their discretion as to whose peace exactly it is they wish to destroy in the name of whatever cause.

Two common German rhymes I grew up with have repeated on me willy-nilly throughout many decades. One of them is a proverb, which, however silly one may deem it to be, runs in its groove at the sight of a spider, as follows:

Spinne am Abend                                Spider at evening

Erfrischend und labend                       Refreshing and inspiring

Spinne am Morgen                              Spider on the morrow

Bringt Kummer und Sorgen                Brings grief and sorrow

Now any experienced person will quickly realise that these idle, easy rhymes (in the original)  can only come from an addict, most likely an alcoholic, whose mood of happiness at sundowner time has given way by morning to a hangover, and the spider – that mistress of endless, intricate creation and renewal – is roped into the human’s tragic cycle of self-harm and lack of will. And language, that treacherous tool, is only too willing to bend to human weakness.

Being one of those ‘sensitive’ people who are condemned to misery because of other people’s carelessness with words and images, I found that the power of those lines continued to force me to feel fear and anguish whenever the sight of a graceful daddy longlegs in the early morning triggered the ‘poem’. It was not the arachnid I was afraid of, mind you, it was the ill-humoured human rhymes.

Until I decided to act. I wanted none of this grief and sorrow thrust on me by ‘good ol’ tradition’ anymore and altered the lines accordingly:

Spinne am Morgen                  Spider in the morning

Geschützt und geborgen         Protected and sheltered [It rhymes in the German]

I repeated this whenever I saw a spider, until my new rhymes became so entrenched as to be triggered in place of the old, sour lines, reminding me each time, with a small sense of triumph, of my own true desires.

The second groundbreaking transformation came only two days ago, in relation to a truly horrific song, which my mother used to sing to us blithely as a lullaby. It goes like this:

Maikäfer flieg                                      May beetle [cockchafer] fly

Der Vater ist im Krieg                         Father is in the war     

Die Mutter ist in Pommernland           Mother is in Pomerania           

Pommernland is abgebrannt                Pomerania is burnt down

Maikäfer flieg                                       May beetle fly

This horrible ditty, with its innocuous tune, was triggered for me when I returned the hand-embroidered Christmas tablecloth to the cupboard and tucked it in underneath the hand-embroidered birthday tablecloth. My birthday is in May, and my grandmother’s hands had once upon a time lovingly stitched May beetles (cockchafers), birch tree catkins, ladybirds and four-leafed clovers into the cotton fabric that was smoothed over the table with my candle and gifts each year.

Embroidered May beetle

A spoiled child was I, to be given so much! Indeed, the wars featured magnificently and unavoidably in the transgenerational, mostly silent pain of my family on all sides, not eased by the fact that there were intermarriages with French, British and Jewish individuals, and the merry little melody with its dark lines perfectly captured the bitter contrasts. Historically accurate though they may have been, by the time we slipped into the year 2026, their purpose seemed spent and their energy far from helpful.

The birthday table cloth. Obviously I will only iron it when it comes out of the cupboard in May.

Again, I was gripped by a sudden urge to strengthen myself by means of linguistic alchemy. The mention of the Father and Mother figures in the May beetle song made me think of my parents as they are now – together in a home for people with dementia, both in nappies, my mother half-paralysed in a wheelchair for ... going on nine years in April. When she suffered her debilitating stroke, my father dropped his work, all future travel and research plans, and transformed himself from a pampered, tempestuous patriarch into a patient house husband and carer of his beloved wife. He learned to cook, took her on outings, wiped her bum, and generally ran the household as best he could at the tender age of 78. (Although I am the eldest daughter, I could not assist as I had been expected to do, as my husband was busy dying and I had to tend to him at the time.)

That was the one time in my life that I witnessed my mother eating with a hearty appetite! She put on so much weight with my dad’s dishes that we had to replace her kiddies’ wheelchair with an adult one. She’d been a pretty discontented wife all her life, and her frustrations had made her an expert at tiny, toxic remarks to and about my father, whose love she diligently kept at arm’s length, and whose retorts and behaviour in turn I leave it to you to imagine.

With my father’s self-engineered career change from award-winning physicist to devoted minder of my mother, she fell in love with him all over again, and her respect for him blossomed in a completely new way. Despite this, however, he never managed to upstage two rivals (whom he himself wisely never perceived as rivals), namely, Beethoven and the sun. Since her stroke, the sun is definitely my mother’s first love; as for Beethoven, he has always been the one she wants to be the first to greet her when she gets to heaven. Or wherever. She isn’t altogether sure about post-mortem geo- or celestiography, but that’s beside the point. She has always been touched by and grateful for my father’s goodwill and total absence of jealousy in this regard. I confess I have seen him just a little bit envious of her adoration of the sun every now and then. But let’s be bighearted enough as to let that pass.

My parents directly inspired my reconstitution of the May beetle song as follows:

Maikäfer flieg                                                  May beetle fly

Der Vater hat den Sieg                                    Father has the victory 

Die Mutter trinkt das Licht der Sonne             Mother drinks the light of the sun           

Beide haben ihre Wonne                                  Both are blissful, having fun

Maikäfer flieg                                                   May beetle fly

I wasn’t sure about the word “victory”, as it’s of course closely tied to violent conflict and war. I ran the lines by my sisters, who also felt that it was wrong. My youngest sister (she is seven minutes younger than my middle sister, as they are twins) – anyway, my youngest sister came upon this perfect solution:

Maikäfer fliege                                                 May beetle fly [above]

Der Vater hat die Liebe                                    The Father has the love

We are officially shedding the cruel karma planted through our soft ears into our bodies, and are literally singing a new song. I look forward to my birthday. It might take a lifetime to get to re-write ‘a harmless ditty’, but more’s the pity of you don’t!

My parents on their diamond wedding anniversary, in the sun, perusing their wedding album.

Diamond wedding anniversary outing.

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