Praise song to what we have not lost

I did not know him well by any means. But I did meet Bernard Levinson a few times, and found him jovial and wise. I remember him doing Tai Chi at Fish Hoek Beach near the lifesavers' block, decisively oblivious of all the people staring at him.

At the McGregor Poetry Festival in 2017 I heard him read from Weskoppies Asleep. Poems from the Dark Side of the Moon - an informally bound poetry collection he dedicated to Anne Sexton. It contains what I would consider to be deeply important, poignant poems and scissor collages by him. The poems brim with compassion and human understanding for the suffering, which the mentally ill went through in those days, ca. 1950s (I think), when treatment of mental illness was still in its infancy. 

He had been on my mind, and when, shortly after Easter, I happened, in a second-hand store, upon Mike Lipkin's book, Lost and Found, on Depression, I impulsively bought it, for Bernard's Foreword, in which he describes his failure as a psychiatrist to help a suicidal person, who falls in front of a train moments after seeing Dr. Levinson -

"Under the arc lamps and amid the frantic hubbub of the police and the ambulance men, I had a moment to reflect on the sad, inept magic of my prescription. I had not really heard him. He was talking a language I had never been taught to understand. Even more basic, I had not been taught to listen. We had missed each other completely. He was calling for help, and I was obsessed with pills."

These self-reflective words, and the poems in Weskoppies Asleep, which I am privileged to have in my possession, provide an in to what we have not lost, even though, sadly, the man himself is no longer among us: he died a few days ago at the age of 94, I believe.

Bernard was one of the first to grab the opportunity to buy a copy of Gripscapes, the recently launched book by Norman Morrissey, with its fabulous Introduction to his oeuvre, by John van Wyngaard. I would wish that Bernard still had time to savour at least a few of the poems in that book. 

For his review of Norman's Selected Works, Strandloop, please click Bernard Levinson's review of Strandloop

If you would like to know more about the man and his professional work, as reported in an obituary in the Sunday Times Live, please click Bernard Levinson obituary

The poems and images below give you a glimpse of his compassionate and also creative heart.

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

 

Your Depression ... footsteps of a grounded butterfly

I often hear in my mind Mandela's words I once saw quoted - "It's not what you are given, but what you make out of what you have, that is the difference between people."

My darling Norman suffered from clinical Depression. You could say that's what he HAD. And what he made out of it were the poems he promised to write from the moment he'd made that pact with himself in 1979 faithfully to record the moments as he experienced them.

When we met, I'd experienced what I suppose might have been diagnosed as Depression periodically in my life; Norman persuaded me to go onto anti-depressants during one particularly hellish year we had together. (It was hellish for reasons external to ourselves.) But overall it was a condition I've never had the humbleness of spirit to pay attention to either in myself or others.

It's as if, during this second year of grief, I'm being ferried through a deeper understanding of my late husband and his heartaches. That's how I see it, anyhow.

I don't know where it's leading. There's a weird, blind trust. I've not lost my footing ... the fact that I can put together an image such as the one below I'd like to believe is proof that, step by step, I am still going ... somewhere ... not forgetting that, unlike reserved and private and strong Norman, I am, I guess, willing to be 'weak', that is to say, receptive to the most unbelievably sound support among my friends and community ...

So please see this post not as a desperate cry for help on my part, but as just a cry, a cry that, by crying itself, IS its own help ... that is to say, an expressive demonstration of what you CAN DO even if you are totally DOWN ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 

   

The first Table Love poems