Light from such a house: the making of a lamp

21 years ago, an African Art collector commissioned me to create an 'African totem pole'.

As we worked to manifest her visions and dreams, it quickly became evident that the totem pole should also be a functional item, namely, a lamp.

She approved my design of an 'African ceramic standing lamp', in which the light would be an ambient one, streaming out from the open door and windows of a rondavel perched on top of a three-legged pot. The rondavel would be decorated with a mural.

This story is about the mural. When I delivered the final art work to my client, I gave her an accompanying write-up to the motivations and the research that had guided me. Here are the words that clarified the patterns on the rondavel:

To make the house beautiful is a female art. Mural art is a traditional activity for many African women.

The mural design of the lamp's rondavel is based upon the designs of an artist, Malvel Dani, living in the Free State. The authors of the book in which I discovered her designs visited her again and again. Each time, she surprised them with a fresh design on her house. They describe them as "a floral kaleidoscope of mellow earth shades" which blended completely into the landscape:

"Her home was barely perceptible in the distance and as we approached, it slowly came into focus."

Then, one day, when they visited again, she was gone, and so was her house:

"Her home had melted back into the soil."

What has happened to Malvel Dani I do not know. In accordance with your directions, however, her name is written over the door, as a tribute to her soft, earth-bound, transient art. 

The memory of this art piece, and its inspiration by a housewife artist as unburdened by status as Malvel Dani evidently was, hums now for me again, in the present moment - as a reminder of the value of being at one with what you create, at one with what you do. How could light NOT stream out from such a house?

African ceramic standing lamp by Silke Heiss

African standing lamp by Silke Heiss. Detail. Mural on rondavel based on design by Malvel Dani.

 

 

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.

Navigating a self-altering future

The attractiveness of 'the law of attraction' in everyday life is that it declares that you have the potential to control your thoughts. Of all things possible to control, one's own thoughts are perhaps the most rebellious of all. It is a sweet victory to be able to claim truthfully, "I control and, indeed, lead my thoughts." Even where one manages to achieve it occasionally, my experience teaches that it remains, daily, an effort. Writing down your thoughts does help.

The elusiveness of our thoughts may be, because many thoughts are not exactly conscious; nor, frequently, are they owned by, or originate from within, the self. 

In 'Staying Connected', Rudolf Steiner went so far as to say that our thoughts are infusions from the spirits of the dead in their attempts to lead (presumaby they could also mislead) us. I have yet to get through, let alone understand, his book Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. I do not have my own copy and vaguely recall early passages in that book being concerned with discovering one's true motivations; I confess that I still belong to that class of lesser mortals for whom dwelling on true motivatons initiates a definite adventure into smoky territory.

I won't even mention the infusion or influence of thoughts from the living into our conscious- and subconsciousness - I am sure that every person reading this can attest to the confusions, convictions, delusions and intoxications caused by mental and physical continguity with the living. 

Yet everywhere, these days, is the popular slogan seen - 'Build the future YOU want'. On one level, this could be seen as an open rebellion against David's plea, 'I shall not want', in Psalm 23. (Some bright sparks have deemed fit to translate this line as 'I lack nothing', but that is too monodimensional for me.) Yet it would be fair to give the slogan the benefit of the doubt - building what you want can by all means chime with the laws of Nature, or God, or the general good, all of which are forces far more long-lived than the potent little microcosm of your self.

The climate of the times tends strongly towards encouraging the assertion of individual human will over him- or herself, in order to harness and calibrate experiences, decisions and choices, and I strongly motivate for self-control in thought and action - it's a pretty exciting thing to be investing time and energy in, mainly because it grants you the possibility of genuine friendship with the most elusive aspect of your life: your embodied self on this earth, thoughts and all.

Once you begin to be able to change ancient patterns in your behaviour, you are rearing, or re-parenting, your self. This generates new imaginative possibilities for you - possibilities beyond imagining, so to speak. It does mean no longer tolerating stuff that once used, maybe, to be 'inevitable'.

Perhaps some of these free-flowing strands are useful to you as you navigate and build.

Blue cranes in fallow fields. Photo by Sigi Heiss.

 

 

  

When nature claims a brand

A while back, one of my fellow-poets invited us to generate poems for a new brand of naartjies, Clemengold. They were awarding prizes. A few of us rose to the occasion with grace and aplomb. I was not among them.

I see they make gin and all sorts with those fruits, which I have yet to taste.

Out of the blue, or the still grey, rather, this morning, the word clementgold suddenly became a need: a colour of sound. Merciful gold, orange gold, fresh gold in a lung bodying forth song. You'll understand this little yodle better if you read the poem below.

I thought that the 't' had been there all along, but then discovered that nature had added it back in - for 'sing' to have an edge, a 'sting', perhaps?

So here, at last, is my tribute not exactly to the commercial brand, but to a brand-new colour given me on Mother's Day by a bird's warm joyousness: clement gold.

Clement gold

The common Cape robin's

exceptional liltings

waken me, pull a smile

from me, easily, through

the lightening curtain folds.

Her* thoughtful trills,

flutings, flourishing frills,

spring clear, fresh from

her clement-gold breast.

- Silke Heiss, 9th May 2021

* Female robins, I read, sing as well as do the males. 

The charm of trust

Not long after my husband's death, I received a phone call from a charity organisation, offering me a calendar set. Swaddled in the cocoon of love, which my late husband had woven around me in his last weeks and days, I was naked as a newborn in the world. I did not know how I would be surviving, financially, emotionally and mentally.

The lady on the other end of the line was sympathetic and very real. She told me that they sent calendars to people who said yes to their offer. There would be an invoice and the client would be trusted to pay the charity.

"You send the calendars on trust?" I asked in disbelief.
"That's how we do it," she replied.

"I will take them!" I cried. "You have no idea how healing it is for me to hear that you operate on trust!"

She chuckled and took down my details.

When the calendars arrived, I saw they were comprised of artworks by Lisa Halstead.

I am not generally a fan of representational art, and my rather snobbish education had taught me to dismiss such images as kitsch - but Halstead's images showed skill and love for her subject matter, which, that year, was wildlife. Each calendar image was with me for a month, during which I learned to appreciate the specific intentions behind the artist's hand - her devotion to the animals, as well as to her craft.

For three years running, the charity trusted me and Lisa Halstead's art became a kind of emblem of something subtly and deeply strengthening in my life. I should add that the calendars were very competitively priced and always affordable.

As 2020 came to an end, however, I noticed that the charity had not called. I began to feel sad about the prospect of having to go through 2021 without the comfort of Halstead's work, which had also included birds and flowers.   

I searched online and saw that the charity only had year planners: lockdown had stopped their usual business. I went so far as to call them and they confirmed that they had not been able to commission the artist to produce more work, let alone print new calendars.

Early this year, I received a few phone calls from the charity. I was on the road each time and was forced to request they call back. They did not give up on me and eventually one of their volunteers caught me in a good moment.

I was disappointed that they did not have calendars. Instead, I was offered a coffee table book, entitled In My Nature, containing a wide-ranging collection of the artist's work. I accepted and then the moment of truth came: the charity did not have the funds to cover postage of ordered items. They needed me to pay upfront, whereupon they'd dispatch the book. They had trusted me for three years. Now it was my turn.

The book is a bit imperfect - some of the pages were still joined and I had to separate them with a sharp knife. Some of the images are cut off at the top, which is a pity.

However, even so, against my own expectations, I find In my Nature quite splendid - not least because of the way it challenges my education and everything I have learned about art. I have absorbed myself in images I would otherwise never have studied. If I have a pet hate, it is representational art featuring pets. It turns out that this range was in aid of the Animal Anti-Cruelty League and the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. My heart and mind have expanded by contemplating the drawings. Truth be told, I have wondered whether I had previously dismissed such art as "sentimental" perhaps more as a result of clinging to a narrow, 'high-brow' identity than real understanding?

I was particularly struck by one of the artist's own favourite images, featuring two Afghan hounds. The differences in personality and character capture two souls. If I give myself over to the drawing, their windblown hair only enhances the spirit breathing the creation.

I have been charmed in ways I could not have imagined. Even if I might not choose to frame any of Halstead's images on my walls, my narrow-minded judgments have disappeared. I simply have no more need for them.

All because of trust.

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.

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

Wild life is a tangible dream

Just before lockdown last year, my beloved and I moved from the mountain hamlet of Hogsback to a house on a coastal dune, where kikuyu grass had been planted without thriving.

Behind the house is farmland, where wilde els, afrikaners, arums, metalasia, vygies, felicias and dune daisies, christmas berry (chironia baccifera), bulbinella, buchu, salvia, podalyria, varieties of restios and other fynbos species make a life for themselves between invasive acacias and reeds (which the farmer clears occasionally). To our joy, we discovered that a healthy number of species of wild birds, tortoise, mongoose, porcupine, duiker, possibly even Cape grysbok, share this area.

Amid the wild sub-alpine grasses in Hogsback, I had grown accustomed to the close company of birds, bees, beetles, skinks and shongololos; it made sense to create similar meadow conditions now, once more inviting the small creatures near. Wild life keeps me sane.

To begin with, we let the wild grasses and bushes completely take over - you could say that we deliberately neglected the ground. Small felicias appeared in spring and clovers blossomed merrily. Then, between them, we planted an array of lavender bushes and butterfly-bush (gaura) from a nursery. We left all the weeds and scraggly grasses to continue to do their bit between the molerat hills, trusting that over time, a natural balance would even things out.  

Our neighbours on one side, who are only seldom in their house, employ a garden company, which regularly, noisily razes their sun-scorched 'lawn' further down to sand, no matter the white-flowering succulents that try, despite everything, to survive in the barren ground. Recently we noticed candelabra flowers (brunsvigia) popping speary red shoots out on their property. Luckily, the neighbours came for a visit just then and we could get their very glad permission to move these glamorous plants, before they be decapitated by the machine-minded company.

No sooner had the candelabra flowers been transplanted than three greater double-collared sunbirds - two females and a male - came to feast on the nectar. They were completely unafraid of our proximity, showing us that our dream is perfectly tangible.

Our dune stands out in the suburb by looking 'untidy', 'wild', 'neglected', even. Yet no: it is cared for and loved, for being at one with the dry season coming, now, to its natural end. Nor is the space unnecessarily howled upon by that terrible suburban neurosis, the leaf blower. 

We hope that our tiny farmland-type garden might, over time, set a trend. Reeling your dreams in, bringing them home to where you actually stand and walk, gives simple happiness a chance. 

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.

Valentinian reflections and some extreme declarations

From 2011 until 2019, Valentine's Days were quite a bit of work for me - during those years, I published books of love poems every Valentine's Day. All but two of those were co-authored by my late poet-husband, Norman Morrissey. We used to read antiphonally on each occasion, launching the books by way of a romantic event for poetry-loving fans - as per the images below.

Our love poem combo show in 2011

Our first love poems in dialogue, 2012

Love poem book no.2, 2013

2014

2015

Love poems with a difference, 2016

The last book of love poems we published during Norman's lifetime. 2017

A dialogue of love poems published after Norman's death. 2018

2019

Last year on this day, I collected the print stock of Sweet Nothings (with Notebook) - my tribute of poems to High Riding, the property I had lived on and grown to love during my Hogsback years. My Beloved encouraged me to take this photo to commemorate the moment and how glad I am that he did so - 

Celebrating the collection of stock. 14th February 2020

Now, finally, it is time to reflect on all this Valentinian bustle. (Incidentally, the name 'Valentine' derives from the Roman word valens, meaning strong and healthy.)

The figure of a Beloved has always been a priority in my life. The relationship with a Beloved is the very sun, around which (at least for me) all other relations are constellated. It is the source and centre of warmth and light, without which my heart withers.

By no means do such extreme declarations diminish the love I feel for my son, my parents, sisters, extended family, circle of dear friends and fellows, teachers, pupils, readers, writers, and in general my kindred spirits, who light up the entire globe with their irreplaceable souls.

On the contrary. A Beloved allows for a bubble of peace that is beautifully broken, if not by bliss, then by the most valuable work there is: the work of consciously and fully getting to know an other and, therefore, one's own, expanded self. Speaking for myself, there is no greater possibility of migrating properly beyond the dreadful limits of selfhood than through the consummation of a relationship with a true Beloved.

Why is this? Could it be that here, as in friendships, I find equality, balance of power? As in parent-child relationships, I find nurturing, safekeeping, learning? As in teacher-pupil and work relationships, I find respect, patience, discipline? As in sibling relationships, I find play, laughter, forgiveness? 

Yes, the relationship with a Beloved lends all those possibilities. But also - and this is perhaps the ultimate card - I find utter vulnerability, both ways: a vulnerability that is inaccessible, but in the relationship with a Beloved.

The mutual vulnerability of true lovers in respect of one another has held (at least in my case) enormous potential for unlimited expansion into my best self. (Of course, there is constant and real risk of the opposite happening!)

I've built a 'career' of sorts with my poems and writing. But, under that 'career' is a foundation and that foundation is the beauty of the Beloved as it shines for me inside my heart. Maybe you could say my Beloved gets closest to the mercy and grace of Christ in my heart; thus, also, to my creative life force.

Neither my poems nor my love have gained me a sustainable income (at least, not directly so). But they have won me this humble platform, this provisional confidence and this uncompromising desire: to tell you what I've won.

May you, likewise, trust yourself to pursue that, which you love to do, according to the love relationships YOU are best wired to joy in.

My old elephant bod with my old peace rose, back in 2011. (They are both still alive and happy. The rose is busy on her 10th bud this season!)

 

   

You don't have a choice from where you aren't

That's the small print.

Choice is always only as wide, or narrow, as the radius you give yourself.

For example - what image do I choose to accompany this post? A photo of a fork in the road? A deliberating human head with their chin in their hand? A cartoon face with question marks over it?

No.

None of the above-mentioned images come naturally to me, as companions to my theme. I aren't there, so to speak.

This glass egg, however, was right under my nose on my desk. I could pick it up and snap it with my phone. It caught the light as I could never have predicted.

And so, a post, which began with but a solitary sentence, unfolded richly into its immediate surroundings to share with you.

Yes, there is now. But also - don't underestimate the power of right here: where YOU ARE.