One post at a time

Taking my cue from Courtney and Ms Make Tea I’m going to fire off a 10-point bullet list. Here goes:

• Yay for Firefox as my new browser. I’m still grumpy about what Internet Explorer did to my blogfeeds and my computer generally. Slow. So slow. And inefficient. So Internet Explorer had to go. Firefox is proving faster and more reliable.

• Talking of blogfeeds, my not-so-reliable bloglines tells me I have 1838 posts to catch up on. Yikes. That’s at least 12 people’s posts for a year. Ouch. Maybe the blogfeeder is on the blink.

• I wrote a whole rant about how pissed off I am with the South African political scene. I think the upshot of it is this: I hate you so much right now! A few words: Jacob Zuma, corruption, charges about to be dropped, barring the Dalai Lama to appease China, crime, Aids, Zimbabwe, cronyism, arrogance, xenophobia. That’s about the gist of it. Also: Mandela, euphoria of 1994, where did we go wrong as a country?

• Yay for short posts. That way the 1838 list will be soon down to manageable levels again.

• Swearing at your children is not cool. Even when your son tells you you’re in his way at the sink and it’s mad family time on a Sunday and you’ve just come out of hospital. Not cool at all.

• Did I have a slightly smug smile when I saw that said parent bumped her car against the tree and now has a nasty dent in her car? No I did not. I feared that I would be blamed. I feared for the patient’s judgement (If she’s like this at 69, what about 79?)

• In the interests of mood-lightening, I’m turning to Rorschach cartoons. Will post here if I find a funny one.

• SA beat Oz at cricket and I felt nothing. 20-20. Pfft. Who cares? And why does the SA one-day captain Johan Botha look like Rommel on a bad day? Nasty.

• I have 19 working days to go here at the sick bay. Not a nice feeling. Anxiety starts creeping in.

• I almost finished a book. Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. As a light, feel-good book it does pretty well. A professor of virtual reality who is dying of cancer wants to leave a lasting legacy for his three young kids so he gives a moving and inspirational last lecture at his university. I had a few kvetches as I read it (eg. this sentence: I won the parent lottery.) But I enjoyed it and it served its purpose, in that it made me think and reflect on my own life. What do I want to get out of my life? Also, one step at a time. Or in this case: one post at a time.

Admirable Auster

This week has been a bit of a right-off (and a write-off). P and I have both been on leave but the week has just flown by with almost nothing to show for it. Monday’s a blur. Tuesday was Hospital Day. Wednesday was Betty’s Bay. Thursday is the day that Beauty works here, which is why I’m sitting outside the front door with P, who is now reading the latest copy of Woman & Home. This was supposed to be our week off (at the new, improved Betty’s Bay) but instead it has been largely taken up with concerns around my mom’s health.

I don’t really feel like re-hashing the whole hospital story right now since it’s been rehashed with the family quite a few times already. Basically the angiogram showed clogged arteries and the heart doctor put in a stent on the right side (where her pacemaker is) and we’re waiting to see how that will work out. She looks better and feels better but there are still some niggling concerns (such as blood clots). But for now (touch wood) she’s doing a lot better than she was last week. (I also realised that her health problems probably go a long way towards explaining why she was being a touch difficult.)

On the reading front, I really enjoyed The Brooklyn Follies and I think it’s an excellent example of polished fiction-writing. Charming, engaging, heart-warming and not too taxing. One of the reviewers commented that Auster is “at the top of his game” and that “this superb novel about human folly turns out to be tremendously wise”. I’ve never read Auster before so I can’t compare this to his better-known New York Trilogy. And tremendously wise? Perhaps, but there was nothing here that made me really sit up and take notice. I’m also not totally happy with it but am at a slight loss to say exactly why that should be.

Perhaps my main gripe has to do with the narrator, the eminently likeable Nathan or Uncle Nat. Now I know that fiction is not meant to stand up to the same rigours as real-life, and that of course things often work out a little too easily in fiction. Real life is messy, complicated, ambiguous and full of confusing questions and doubts for which there are conflicting answers. So what’s my gripe with Nathan? He’s just too nice, I think. If I compare his life before and after he came to Brooklyn, I’m struggling to believe that this is the same guy. The Nathan in the novel is wise, witty, charming, foolish at times but also warm, engaging and lovable. He’s almost a perfect stereotype of a wise uncle. But how to reconcile this warm Uncle Nat with the dissatisfied man who slaved away for 40 years as a life-insurance salesman, who was a “terrible husband” and whose ex-wife loathes him with palpable contempt? Now I’d be the first to admit that relationships are best understood by the two people in them and that the mere fact that his ex-wife loathes him doesn’t mean that he’s a bad guy. But the turnaround from lonely, crusty ex-husband to warm, family man isn’t entirely convincing. And Tom’s turnaround as well – from a depressed, overweight bachelor stuck in a dead-end job to a happily married man just looks too neat as well.

But perhaps that’s the thing with fiction. If everything falls more or less neatly into place and all the loose variables are paired off or rounded up, isn’t that what we want? Easily identifiable characters and dramatic events? It certainly works here.

Next up is a re-read of July’s People by Nadine Gordimer. I have very little recollection of this at all and I have mixed feelings about Gordimer but it looks short and do-able.

Comfort reading

Whenever I think of comfort food, the image of Nigella Lawson springs to mind. A friend once gave me one of her beautifully illustrated cookbooks and, interspersed with smiling, airbrushed photos of the domestic goddess herself, she devotes a whole chapter to comfort food. One favourite that I share with her is mashed potato (which needless to say has healthy dollops of butter). I also like to mix in sweet potato and butternut.

But back to the reading. My mood has been a bit up and down the last few days and one look at the pile of books next to my bed confirmed that things are a bit out of whack. In no particular order we have: Depression Matters, Trauma and Recovery, Jung’s autobiography, Stress Matters and then the lovely but rather wide-ranging and disparate “1000 Books to Change Your Life”. And that’s just the first four books. Lower down the pile we also have Jonny Steinberg on AIDS. Now I’m a great fan of Jonny’s writing and I did enjoy the first 50-odd pages of Jung’s autobiography but these titles were just not cutting it in helping to lift me from my glum state. So I did what any self-respecting book blogger would do and that is to go and buy a book.

Of course I could have borrowed a book in keeping with SA Library Week or have re-read a book that was already within easy range but there’s something comforting about actually buying a new book. Ok, this is sounding rather lame so I’ll just tell you that the book in question is Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies. There’s continuity here since I’ve been curious to read him since I enjoyed (his wife) Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American. And I also have a friend in Brooklyn so it seemed a good a choice as any.

So far so good. Easy narrative style. Engaging, literary, a basic plot with enjoyable diversions and stories within stories. Likeable characters with problems I can relate to. Just the thing. And enough references to New York to keep me happy.

As for the leave, things are picking up. Some retail therapy including a deluxe camping chair (trying it out before buying one for P too), some encouraging signs on the cricketing front and the end of the domestic Cold War. Just on that score, I discovered yesterday evening that my mother had had three fainting spells the night before which a) she hadn’t told me about (basically since we weren’t talking); and b) her doctor thought might be the precursors to a heart attack. We are talking about a 69-year old woman with a pacemaker here so this is no light matter. My sister managed to restore the patient’s spirits considerably with a flying visit. And she is also attending the appointment with the heart specialist tomorrow. The patient is looking a lot better, and I think scoring a victory over her son in the Cold War might have helped a little to boost her morale. (It might sound flippant but never underestimate the power of mothers.)

On the reading front, I also enjoyed an excellent article from the Psychoanalytic Review on a child case that read like a short story. Pilar Jennings writes extraordinarily well, and she’s made me curious to read Nina Coltart’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as well as some Wilfren Bion. I also loved what she said about good therapists staying in the present moment and working from a position of curious, not-knowing which allows them to try and meet the patient in the (psychic) place where they need to be met. I’m not expressing it well but trust me, it’s pretty profound.

As miserable as …

Here I am on two weeks leave and I’m as miserable as miserable can be. In fact I’m as miserable as …. (fill in your own analogy). Here are some options:

1. sin
2. Eeyore without his tail.
3. a bear with a sore head.
4. a misery guts.

The cause of this misery? In a word: internetlessness. Yes my friends, I too was afflicted with the social disease that brings utter despair to millions. Actually I’m not so miserable anymore since my Internet just got fixed. I might not be as happy as Larry but misery is now not the dominant emotional tone.

On reflection I think the miserable feeling was pretty justified considering that I was on leave and still trying (and mostly failing) to achieve a suitable state of leave-bliss. Lots of stuff to do, including a compulsory medical, getting my internet fixed, and then just a whole heap of admin, including the annoying task of trying to fix a Toyota window-winder. Tough buggers to fix, especially if you happen to be a total idiot in the car maintenance department. After 20 minutes of effort, I managed to dismantle one back-door of the Toyota in an attempt to learn (through a process of deconstruction) exactly how to fix the front door. Duh! Moral of the story: Leave deconstruction to the written (or spoken) word. Take your car to the mechanic.

I’ll spare you the medical angst (compulsory medical in order to join the military) suffice to say that there is not much dignity and ego when you have to pee into a glass jug and then submit to all the other normalising devices of a medical examination. Thankfully no rubber glove and no x-ray etc.

Item two on the causes of couchtrip misery is the ever-reliable source of disquiet known as fighting-with-my-mom. Not so fond memories of many, many holidays tinged with an atmosphere of underlying hostility! Now it’s a case of low intensity conflict / Cold War which suits me fine. I’ve got stuff to do and blogs to read. The less time spent worrying about bruised egos means more time spent chilling out.

On the internet front, I can’t tell you how horrible it is to be deprived of you, my favourite bloggers’ entertaining posts. I thought the internetlessness would just go away but it necessitated a trip to the Internet store where I had to leave my precious computer with a mostly-friendly internet technician. Initial paranoid thoughts of “what has he installed on my machine?” are giving way to the sweet pleasure of surfing again. What did we do before the Net?

Waiting for Betty’s

On leave for two glorious weeks. Initially the plan was to take my leave at the parent’s newly renovated place at Betty’s Bay but that’s not quite finished yet. It’s getting pretty close though and we’re eagerly awaiting the occupation date.

There have been a few stuff-ups along the way with some horribly pink tiles in the kitchen (what was the tile woman thinking?), the wrong granite being delivered and also the building of the world’s biggest braai (WBB). I’m seriously hoping that the WBB will shrink a bit when there is a wooden deck around it to make it blend a little into its surroundings. (And we’re not really one for braais anyway so I think the builder got a little carried away.)

But we reckon the house will definitely be finished for Easter. Here’s a taste:

front deck

Silversands beach by Crinity at Flickr

Jung, Calvin and Hobbes and the Unconscious

There’s a lovely cartoon of Calvin and Hobbes which illustrates (for me at any rate) how the unconscious can work. Calvin and Hobbes are in their snow fort, which Calvin declares is invulnerable to attack. Inevitably what ends up happening is that Hobbes catches Calvin unawares with a snowball attack from inside the fort. It’s a lovely example of dramatic irony and I liked it so much that I pasted the cartoon onto the cover of one of my journals when I was a young student.

To me, this seemed a good metaphor for the unconscious. Against all our reason and plotting and designs, our unconscious can catch us unawares with a surprise slushball.

Re-reading Carl Jung’s autobiography (Memories, Dreams, Reflections) I’ve found a much more organic metaphor for the unconscious. In the Prologue, he more or less summarises one of the guiding ideas of his life.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilisations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. (p.18)

I like the idea that an inner core of unconscious material is ultimately what can give our life meaning and drive. Maybe it will present itself sometimes as a slushball in the face, or maybe it will be an inner urging to continue our inner growth and development. However it manifests itself, that inner voice needs to be listened to (and wrestled with), perhaps more than the many outer voices around us all the time.

The image of the unconscious as a life-giving inner core is a lot more reassuring than Hobbes’s slushball. While the latter would maybe encourage a more defensive stance – so that we’re not caught unawares – Jung’s image suggests personal development is a gradual unfolding of inner material. With the snowball, there’s always the risk that the unconscious will ruin something (a relationship maybe) or get me into trouble. I’ll be interested to see how Jung develops his idea in the remainder of the book.

Incidentally, it’s worth checking out the Calvin and Hobbes snow gallery here.

The first time ever I saw your face

As I was looking over the contents page of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book last night wondering what kind of post to write, I caught an echo of this song, popularised by Roberta Flack and most recently by David Cook. There’s a link to the first chapter of Pamuk’s novel, which is “The First Time Galip Saw Rüya”. The rest of the novel pretty much describes how Galip misses his wife and his cousin Celál (the two have disappeared together) and almost goes mad looking for them, all the while interspersing the action with Celál’s imaginative and wide-ranging columns. In the spirit of Celál’s writing, here’s a riff on The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the empty skies my love.

The first time ever I saw your face … in real-life was at the Seattle coffee shop in Durbanville. It was a Saturday afternoon and you were wearing your favourite red top and blue jeans. When you saw me your blue eyes lit up with a mixture of relief, anxiety and possibly admiration. My eyes lit up too and in those first few moments I could tell that there was a mutual attraction. That first date was nine hours long and included a slightly iffy movie (What Happens in Vegas) and a lot of first impressions over coffee, drinks and dinner.

“The first time ever I saw your face” makes me think of love and relationships. What’s it like the first time a mother and baby catch sight of each other? The baby sees only in parts so it’s not like there’s a flashbulb moment – “Aha, so that’s my mom” – but at some point that flashbulb moment does happen and it lights up its whole face. Scientists have mapped a mother’s brain chemistry when she sees her infant smile and it’s quite amazing. I’d be interested to see what happens with fathers and the random control group!

But “the first time ever I saw your face” also makes me think, quite appropriately for The Black Book, about faces and mirrors. We know that mirroring is an essential part of parenting. The infant’s self-concept develops out of the self that is mirrored back to him/her. And if it wasn’t so hot in this office I’d find some links to self psychology and the development of the self concept. But while on mirrors and mirroring, there’s another song that springs to mind. When Michael Jackson sings that he’s talking to the Man in the Mirror, who exactly is he talking to? Is it the (black) Michael that he was or the new, supposedly improved (white) version? Which reminds me of this: “The most powerful man in the world and the best golfer in the world are both black men. Michael Jackson must be kicking himself.”

The first time I ever saw your face … At what age do we first see ourselves in the mirror? And at what age do we notice for the first time that if you hold up a mirror to a mirror then you have an endless series of reflections? Perhaps it’s the same way with our imaginations – an endless series of reflections and projections.

Looks like I’m all riffed out for the day. But if you want the link to David Cook singing his version then you’ll find it here.

Good news

Short and sweet today. After four weeks of waiting, I heard today that I passed my Psychology Board Exam! It was pretty close but I passed it. (I keep repeating the words: I passed, I passed, I passed). I needed 70% and I squeaked in with 72%. Now of course I’m very curious to know about that 28% that I didn’t get but I’ll settle for the score I got. P and will celebrate tomorrow evening but other than that it’s business as usual.

The next step is registering for “independent practice” even though I’m taking a one-year contract with the military in the interim. The thought behind that is to buy some time, build up contacts and experience (and finances) so that I can tackle the big, brave world of private practice with renewed vigour in 12 months’ time. For now though: yay!

The current state of play

In times of uncertainty – or just on a Sunday afternoon when I want to escape – there’s nothing better than a South Africa versus Australia cricket test match. Before we get there though, there’s good news on the relationship front. After some consulting with the inner match official and as much of a heart-to-heart as can be had on a sunny Clifton beach with screaming kids, arbitrary hat sales-people and two small tumblers of sherry, P and I decided to give the relationship another try and to seek out some couple counselling as well. I think I have a pretty good idea of where we went wrong and what it will require for us to stay on the right side of the line of no return. Funnily enough, the break-up session with my therapist helped to put things into perspective for me. And I’m very glad that I chose to stay with P rather than with my now ex-therapist!

But back to the cricket. I was planning to live-blog the cricket yesterday but it’s been a busy morning and we’re about to lose so I’ll just keep this brief. Yesterday’s action was very exciting and there was a small possibility that the South Africans could have pulled off the impossible 454 needed for victory if Smith had managed to stick around. He wasn’t and the writing is now firmly on the wall with a score of 247 for 5 at lunch. In fairness I think the Aussies deserve to win this one (as weird as that sounds after 20 years of Aussie dominance) because they have largely been the better side over the five days. Apart from some brilliance in the field to bowl the Aussies out for 207 in the 2nd innings and a superb knock from AB de Villiers, the South Africans have not really had the same intensity. Bring on Durban and Cape Town. The rest of the series should be pretty interesting.