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.

Self-tuning: The Tonic of Choice Words

I would like to present you today with two poems by Norman Morrissey, which perform very lucidly a dance of change in the spirit of a man. This change concerns a self-healing process, recorded in words, moving from a divided to a more integrated sense of self. 

For me, one of the most remarkable qualities of my late husband Norman – as man AND poet – was his determination to self-examine, to self-edit the tissue of his being and writing alike, in order to enact a continuous transformation of both poetry and psyche into a truer timbre. Self-tuning would be a choice word here.

 

Conscientious nerves

 

You talk

of a life

without regrets

 

– some line walked always true

so you never must

ache for your myriad mis-steps.

 

I’ve never been

that lucky,

there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop:

memories,

conscientious nerves

 

rooting

in

my marrow.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in Sound Piping, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2015

 

I confess that I’ve long felt accused by this poem – of failing to be ‘conscientious’ in examining my wrongdoings – but this is probably due to the fact that the poem models the act of self-accusation by means of the conscience: describing the man’s very bones (“my marrow”) as being strung through with “conscientious nerves”. The lines, which alert the reader to this, are:

  there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop

 

There’s an open display here, a FREE EXPRESSION of feelings of low self-worth and shame as performed by the body. 

Now I remember my father – a self-proclaimed atheist, fervently reverent of life – reminiscing on conversations with a pastor friend, in which he took issue with the Christian term ‘sin’. I can do wrong, he maintained, I can, as a human, do harm – but that does not make me a sinner. 

Hiding in this rejection of a fallen state is the heathen’s freedom, but also his innocence (though innocence is, of course, not necessarily innocuousness). The word ‘heathen’ originates as a designation of the ‘uncivilised’, but probably largely harmless, folk, who populated the rural areas (heaths) beyond the precincts of state and religious control. The online etymological dictionary observes:

It is most probably that the Germanic word haiϸana (heathen) referred to a person living on the heath, i.e. on common land, i.e. a person of one’s own community. It would then be a neutral word used by heathen people in order to refer to each other rather than a Christian, negative word denoting non-Christians.

I don’t see an untouched Bushman with “stooping shoulders” due to a deep, inner “ache” for his “myriad mis-steps”. But, on being told he is a sinner, surely her or his posture will change.

Nietzsche, in his critiques of the tenets of Christian civilization, examined the ominous build of resentment in the collective human psyche, due – if I recall his writings rightly – to unacknowledged guilt and shame over the fact that our species had murdered God;  resentment, then, being a phenomenon whereby negative feelings (grief, horror, shock, rue) are not felt and expressed, but denied and repressed, thus generating a continuous acid reflux (the metaphor is mine) of powerful energies denied the opportunity for natural transformation or –mutation back into the flow of life. 

The miraculous turning-point in the Christian story is, of course, that our wrongdoings, including, I would guess, the murder of God – surely our ultimate crime – are forgiven and, moreover, REDEEMED, through penitence before that same God, resurrected. The orthodoxy (Bible) prescribes words for us, with which to realise that miracle, which I understand even today serves the more non-verbal among our species, who are not given the listening tongue – but, for the poet, there is a different kind of freedom, that is to say, the freedom of conscientiously elected words. Consider the “shift” in the heart of him here:

The story

 

Something has shifted

in the deep of me:

the constant memories

 

– starting like a grouse at my feet –

fly differently,

don’t lurch

 

sickly

into shame and griefs

and thoughts

 

of clumsiness and wrong-headedness

– of ineptitude and folly.

There’s still

 

the whirr at my feet

and the wings beating

at my face:

 

but each visitation

starts to whisper

new words:

 

starts to hint

a new

language of belonging,

 

the replays

start making a movie

that shows the essential me.

 

I still have a script

of bungles and crimes

– but at least

 

it’s becoming a screenplay,

becoming a history

that makes sense:

 

and that changes

the shape of the story

as something to live with.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in This Moment’s Marrow, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2017

 

What I notice in this poem is the transition from a prevalence of guttural sounds and clipped consonants in the first four stanzas – sh, ch, f, t, c, s – to a lovely in-breeze of gentle w and wh sounds, and even the s in ‘visitation’ is heard as a soft z, in stanzas 5–7 – as if the breath itself were taking command to expel fearful tension in the body. 

The image of the grouse in stanza 2 – which strikes me as strange, foreign, even – suggests itself, to me at least, as an unconscious memory, “in the deep” of the poet, of the German word Graus (horror) – a word, which is pronounced the same as ‘grouse’. In the fifth stanza, this gives way to a softer, much more English-sounding “whirr”. 

“each visitation/ starts to whisper/ new words” we read, as the last four stanzas take on more measured, calmer rhythms and employ longer, soothing vowel sounds; while a prevalence of alliterative s’s snake confidently through – perhaps delivering a shimmer of Hippocrates’ staff of healing? Indeed, that staff is invoked in ‘Grasp’, a subsequent poem in the collection, whose last line names ‘This Moment’s Marrow’.

The poet’s use of the word ‘story’ to mean something he has shaped “to live with” must be firmly distinguished from recent usage of the word in a negative sense as ‘the story you tell yourself, which repeats old patterns’. Norman’s “story” is one which he has built himself, resulting in a sovereign, “essential me” – HIS history and life, which, despite “bungles and crimes”, he CAN live and, by implication, be at peace with. 

The choice of the word ‘crimes’ is particularly interesting, and, in my view, suggests that – unlike the sin-free heathen, or atheist – the poet faces his “essential me” as inextricably entwined into a species NOT FREE OF a violent and sacrilegious past.

Between ‘The Story’ and ‘Conscientious nerves’ lie two years; the last two years of the poet’s life. They record a process that took place inside the man, and allow readers to witness genuine self-healing, self-tuning, as it were, by the tonic of choice words.

For a more indepth examination of the minute particulars whereby Norman tuned, exercised and trained his voice to become the medication it could be for his soul, see John van Wyngaard’s superb Introduction in Gripscapes. This posthumously published book contains two of the three poems referenced here. Reading MORE of my beloved late husband’s carefully crafted poems CLOSELY may be the best thing you could do today, in order to prepare for tomorrow.

– Silke Heiss, February 2023