So you can marvel

Give Your Writing The Edge's Nugget No.26, November 2022 reflects upon the value of work done with the hands. 

Not everyone has hands, not everyone has the use of both. 

Ever since I penned that Nugget, however, Brian Walter's poem Workman #2 has hummed in my brain. It's a perfect demonstration of how a man's mind, heart and body are integrated and fully engaged, as he is "grounded in his purpose, balanced in his humanity."

Workman #2

i.

I have to choose today

- whether to walk the forests

or get on with house repairs,

and soon I find myself out

buying a window frame,

a tad too big, so I must devise

ways to fit the casement to its space:

this cottage window, small

and pretty, for our bathroom.

I like to repair, to set things

to rights. I may turn from words

to maintenance, but am a dreamer,

too, and I wonder at the roads

I will not take today,

the paths I am not getting to pick,

between the right, untrodden,

or the well-worn left.

ii.

I glaze the window,

setting glass into the mullions,

tapping home the glazier's points,

thumbing in the softened putty:

I've been working this repair for days

and now it's almost done,

a new window frame set

and glazed so that one day

upon a time, morning bathed, you

can slip the bathroom window open

and marvel at the fresh outside,

at what metaphors do in spring.

 - by Brian Walter, in What It Is, Ecca Poets, Plettenberg Bay: 2020

The unhurried momentum of these lines speaks so well the non-machine, the un-preprogammed, living action emerging out of a moment's instinctual choice - "soon I find myself out/ buying a window frame"; which leads, then, to the work of blood and flesh - and continuous, self-conscious thought - "I wonder at the roads/ I will not take today".

This dreamer's dreaming does not delay his action, he glazes, sets, taps home, thumbs in - what a lovely roll of verbs to tell the process; even as the poet joys in the jargon and techniques of "mullions," "glazier's points" and "softened putty". Steady, patient, he gets there - "now it's almost done".

The penultimate stanza creates a garden of fairytale charm, allowing the sensual dreamer his in as he imagines his loved one "upon a time, morning bathed" opening the window he has fitted. The word "slip" in the third-last line adds the most delicate degree of mischief, as the poet at work slips himself into the frame, as it were, and walks off with the prize: the window glazed and set, the loved one bathed, it's the marvel at "what metaphors can do in spring" that flowers the finale.

It's the dignity of fulfilling work, creative action saves our souls and makes us smile.

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

 

 

Holy expansion

Holy expansion

 

Twice five k's on the beach

from Butterfly Blu to Buffalo Bay

and back again -

no one but you,

a couple of oystercatchers,

one little heron,

mussels on rock,

and the mad tide with its foam.

This is the sea our mother and father

taught us: strip, and run into,

to be bathed and renewed,

always they sought the isolated places

for their essences of bliss.

An excellent religion,

this womb of truth,

the dispassionate aggression

of the waves, attacking one another, joying

in complete trust that they cannot be tamed,

nor hurt themselves.

We'd return from the holidays

humbled and imbued -

they were holy expansions,

preparing us to wash each upcoming, 

difficult day.

- Silke Heiss

 

 

Free to be bitter

The season's grapefruits have brought much rapture. Whilst cutting them, they spray me, I am obliged to slurp the overflow before I can dare to prise segments of the flesh out with my fingers or a spoon. They have given the phrase 'to hold water' a whole new meaning!

My mother used to entice little me to eat grapefruit by disguising their bitter taste under a hilly topography of sugar, which immediately became wet and translucent as the crystals sank into the embrace of the juice.

My adult tongue, however, scorns such deceptions. Neither sugar nor milk in my coffee, please. I ward off colds and flu (including covid, by the way) with infusions of African wormwood, known also under the Afrikaans names Wilde els, or Bitterels. And oh, it is bitter - you just know it's good for you, equally as that legendary cleanser and healer, the bitter aloe.

Of course, the buds dispersed over your tongue, which hold your ability to taste bitterness, have an emotional and mental equivalent.

Bitter is the absence of God, of hope, of love and faith. This absence was felt even by Christ on the cross momentarily and is thus, surely, an emblem for the vital part it plays in human experience. 

Bitter it is to turn your eyes away from Christ on His cross, because you then immediately become aware of your own. Bitter purges me of sweetness as a disguise, it forces me to face the fact that, suddenly and inexplicably, my prayers ring hollow and my heart feels like a scar. Neither milk nor sugar please: my husband died, my mother is paralysed, my father has dementia, I've no stable income nor home, etc.etc.

Such a moment of darkness, if it extends, easily deteriorates into depression or resentment and so loses its medicine. (An excess of Bitterels will also make you sick and too much citrus gives you the runs.)

But if I treat the absence of God, the loss of connection with Beneficence (however you conceptualise it), as a living season of juicy grapefruit, the bitterness on my tongue reveals itself as a pearl and my heart-scar starts shimmering again! I can share the dawn with my beloved, and even with you, my reader!

Bitterness is a fast, a purge from safety and security, from harmony and confidence and trust. It frees you up, vaults you on. Just don't turn it into home, but see it as a spa. And let that metaphor hold water.

Happy to be sad

I had become wary of building my writerly career online, because of a sense of the ephemerality of the online world - load shedding in South Africa is a reminder of the tenuousness of electrical power; during the 'dark hours' (which can happen at any time during the day) one is obliged to turn to the tangible world for activities, duties and amusement, and there is much reassurance to be derived from going for a walk or taking a rest, because there is simply nothing else to do at a particular moment. Of course, there are always dishes; and perhaps one browses through a forgotten book and finds phrases and fragrances beyond the reach of the internet.

The second, more complex, reason I sidelined the supposed career, which I was building in my imagination, is that my elderly parents became increasingly needy, and I simultaneously said yes to a new love relationship. I was thus obliged to choose between paying attention to my 'career' or to real human beings and it seemed unethical to prioritise the former, as it is a vanity, while my parents, and my beloved, are irrefutable.

And so I neglected my online writerly presence and productivity. The decision to do so has lost me much energy, as there is little that refuels my soul as effectively as when I release my poetry and feminine philosophy into the unknown currents that run the worldwide web. It turns out that supervising my parents' combined wilting as compassionately as possible saps my life force in the extreme. Not infrequently, I have felt the need to die in advance of them, in order to show the way - a mood, which it would shock them to know I experience, if they had the presence of mind to know it, which is a presence they do not, fortunately however, have. 

I have been in shock, though, for the past three years - ever since leaving Hogsback, arriving on the Garden Route and covid lockdown slamming the brakes on any forward movement. I have, I realise, lived in a state of shame about the unutterable sadness of my life. A shame, which, on learning that I am once more forced to move house - the third move in three years - has suddenly left me, and lifted me up, this spring, to the joys of complaining unrestrainedly. I am pushed beyond endurance! Praise be to complaint! And praise be to my beloved, who endures it, and you, my reader, if you are here. I need no comfort other than to utter what saps and uses my loving, giving heart beyond her limits.

So it could be that complaining may yet help me to prevail. Thus, this blogpost is a preliminary blub and my online writerly presence resumes in a spirit of watery melancholy. 

In short, I am happy to be sad.

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.

The cross

It was at one of John Homewood's talks that I first encountered the figure of the cross as a living articulation between our breath and time itself. 

The timeline of our lives creates the horizontal axis of the cross, made up – if you jot down the events of your life – of the buzz and chaos, with its joys and trials, of every human’s count of days on earth. 

When I inspect my own timeline, I have to admit that it’s a pretty ragged thread of sorrows and misfortunes. Until recently, I was embarrassed by the fact that, in terms of actual incidents, my life seems to be peppered by what most of us would, I guess, call misfortune, bad luck and sorrow. I’ve lost that embarrassment as a result of chronologically listing the basic events of my circumstances, and then reflecting on what endures, as follows. 

During a materially comfortable childhood, I witnessed harsh human dissent and loss of self-control as a given.

My family moved to South Africa, where we lived literally on the edge of a military zone called Voortrekkerhoogte (now Thaba Tshwane). The State at that time promoted and defended racist practices by policy, causing my father to declare that he would be quite content if my sisters and I failed Afrikaans at school – that seemed to be the way he felt he could best contribute to the anti-Apartheid struggle. Friends and boyfriends were conscripted and suffered abuse and violence on all levels.

I left home, and experienced armed soldiers searching my room, friends being sjambokked by police, a pregnant lecturer imprisoned without trial. I taught in violent townships, and in tiny sanctuary spaces offered to township children. I lost my sanity, benefited from the balm of therapy.

Mandela was released and the New South Africa came into being.

I married and experienced the gift of motherhood. My husband and I were economically on the margins, however, to save money I did not eat properly, suffered from overwork, broke down and succumbed again to mental illness, from which, again, I managed to recover. My husband was unwilling to continue the marriage and eventually we divorced.

My second marriage gave me deep spiritual fulfilment, my husband and I published many poetry books together, but he was frail, his failing health was ever a shadow over us. Economic pressure was a constant, he carried much debt.

Then my fit, nimble mother suffered a stroke and was consigned to total physical helplessness. My sister lost her sanity, and my beloved husband died.

I published two poetry books solo.

I was required to sell my late husband's house and leave the village that had become my home. At the same time, Trump was making headlines with his tweets.

I was lucky in love and did not have to move alone. Within weeks of our move, Covid and hard lockdown razed human lives and economies. I lost work and marketing opportunities for my new book. Friends and family fell ill.

My father’s memory began to fail and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, requiring me to run my parents’ household and take responsibility for their daily needs and overall care.

War continued to ruin the beauty of the Middle East.

My sister is currently in a mental institution and I am praying constantly for her. My Beloved’s heart has urged him to leave me for crucial time to himself – whether temporarily or forever is uncertain.

Russia has invaded Ukraine and I hear alternatingly tragic and hopeful details of the victims from friends who have connections there.

So much for the horizontal axis of my personal cross in a broad sweep – living such a timeline is great training in patience, I’ll say that much. And patience – please consider this carefully – does not mean simply waiting for undesirable situations to pass. Patience is the active (gracious) carrying of an unwanted load towards its end. It’s notable that, except for love and marriage, motherhood, the recovery from my illnesses, and the activities of teaching and poetry publishing, none of the other events on my timeline were chosen by me! I couldn’t have asked for a better, or harder, school than this life to teach me a little graciousness.

I wonder, if you were to make a list of events on YOUR timeline, what the ratio of chosen to unchosen would be. How would you rate YOUR ability to carry unwanted burdens?

♥

Now for the vertical axis – the one, which, I recall John Homewood observing, you plumb when you stop focusing on the “school”, that milling chaos called ‘the wheel of life’. I tried to outline it in poem form –

The vertical axis of my cross

is prayer, my heart –

vessel of joy,

 

my pen standing up

for me in spite of trouble,

noting my small noticings –

 

fine sword of God, ensuring anchorage

in places

of peace.

 

Thus, I write

of deer, of dew, of weather and birds –

they are my breath,

 

preserving me, wrapped

in Christ’s playful smile,

on my cross.

 ♥

The loveliest insight, for me, which the above reflections yield is that my chosen, voluntary WORK – my writing (published and unpublished) and my visual art – by and large expresses not the vicissitudes of my timeline, but the spiritual anchor of my self in the vertical axis. I realise that my life’s work, mainly my artistic output, has never not been first and foremost a spiritual path and practice.

All of what I have done and continue to do is subordinate to the naked flame that has steadily been alchemising my soul beyond the edge of time. 

♥ 

As for you – I’d be curious to hear where you feel the ‘vertical axis’ on your cross breathes most freely.

 ♥

Sunbirds in your soul

This coming Monday evening's the second zoom launch of Gripscapes Newly Selected Poems by Norman Morrissey - Jim published it last year, when you were already four years gone.

As we did for the initial launch, your old friends and colleagues, Jim, John, Brian and I will read from your poems. In preparation, I've leaped and clambered through our lists anew. I say 'leaped and clambered', rather than 'read', because your rhythms, fretworked with consonants as they often are, make a terrain less for my mind (which was, after all, never cradled in English), than places for my feet and heart to keep moving, delicately, through.

When I first read your name, late in 2008, I was turning Triptych over in my hands at the local bookstore. What drew me in, to its pages, was not the poet, it was the man: You. I had to admit, in the dim light of that back corner of the shop, where the poetry books were, that I was sensing the heart of a better human being, a soul way more wise than I was. Someone capable of the most exquisite compassion, the starkest, most resonant self-reflection, carrying love not as mere wish or willed choice (though it was that, too), but as a basic instinct.

John, in his rich, fine Introduction to your book, discusses 'In Defence of a Drab Sunbird' as a poem of courage, with "much to say on behalf of human freedoms, communally and individually" - and it is from that poem I want to yank lines out of context, to serve something here, something, which you told me you valued more than anything else: a hard and simple ambition that linked us, which was to become a better human being.

"simply being who I am" you write, "affirming the holy freedom of my own sweet will" -

no cock bird performing on a public twig

- but nevertheless demonstrating, all on my own,

the independent self-sovereignty 

I protest

I want for everyone  

1990-03-29

The lines attest a gorgeous solidarity with unostentatious femaleness; but there's also a lunge, beyond that, at an original wildness there, that part in us that links to the animal world, a flexive world beckoning humans forward to conscious awareness of our self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting souls.

To pore over the poems in Gripscapes is to do more than read poetry. It is really to witness a man setting an example, doing his best, against pretty shitty odds at times, using his mother tongue as a chisel to carve himself, finally into something not drab at all, but truly shimmering: a human.

Norman Morrissey, July 2010

 

Re-balancing seriously squif habits

I'm not officially back on this blog. Not at all. I am still on a self-granted Sabbatical, shielding me from feeling that I have to share or speak out in public about anything.

However, after inspecting the latest edition of  The Marginalian to sail into my inbox, there are a few thoughts that this outrageously named blogsite is whispering I tattoo upon it immediately, so here goes.

In the above newsletter, the conversation between Bill Moyers and Martha Nussbaum about human goodness leads her to tell him that being a good human being means caring, staying true to and, in fact, sticking up for, your values - to live life, as she says, "with a deep seriousness of commitment" and "to wrest from the world the good life" you desire. And this naturally sometimes leads, undeservedly, to tragedy in the good person's life.

She is firm that a detached person who no longer expects fulfilment or gratification from the world cannot be considered properly human, because of the decisive disconnect between themselves and others and the consequent immunity to tragedy, or profound hurt.

Now, during two years of pandemic and lockdown, I have witnessed a significant portion of my fellow humans forced to detach themselves socially and psychologically more than they have ever done before. This includes myself. It has led me to experience my living self, indeed, as not-quite-human; with the exception of my family and friends, as utterly irrelevant to humanity and the human world. As bewildering and unwelcome as this perception has been, it did bring with it simultaneously a certain sense of not caring - in the best sense of that word: the sense of being carefree.

Yet there's a totally illogical fundament to this. Globally, the pandemic and lockdown, the medical, economic, political and social stresses, have been hurtful, traumatic, tragic. Simultaneously, there have been unforeseen griefs in my own, as well as the personal lives of others I know. How can all this lead to more lightness?

Hmm. Tough one.

I am a person who has cared, i.e. carried, perhaps, too much for too long, and so, 'not caring', in my case, could effectively be a sensible re-balancing of a seriously squif set of habits; divesting myself from a lifetime's overload, as it were, and thus facilitating a redistribution of my dubious wealth (aka load of responsibilities).

Caring, or carrying, less (those words are actually synonymous for me) has been a shift that has caused me, paradoxically, to care enough - about being a good human being, I guess - to be here at this moment. 

So, that's the 'tattoo' my blog wanted, to start two thousand and twenty-two. A kind of decorative whirl of gentle hmms.

Now where was that Sabbatical? I'm still happily riding into both sunrises and sunsets upon it. Let's keep going, Sweetheart.

Photo by TS Sergey@ttsergey

 

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.