Saturday in the garden

It’s a gorgeously hot Saturday today (36 degrees C) and I spent some of my day in Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, which was full of the scents of summer and packed with people. I had my picnic blanket, some fruit salad, water and some reading. What more did I need?

The garden was busy but by walking up hill for a few minutes I managed to find a tree with some shade and plonked myself down to take in the scenery. Let me see if I can show you a pic.

Now that photo is misleading since it makes it look quite dry. Mid-day light I guess. And then I thought I should put myself in the picture.

See how I can barely keep my eyes open? Not long after that I was flat on my back with my reading in front of my eyes and I managed about three pages before I started dozing.

It’s a pity because I’ve started a post on “reading and depression” which mentions Virginia Woolf and has some excellent quotes. But that can wait for another day. Winter perhaps!

In the meantime I was enjoying the garden and even with my rubbishy phone camera you can see why the yellowwood is the favourite of all SA trees. Yellowwood furniture has this wonderful glow to it, and sadly the best examples of the trees are to be found in nature reserves such as this one.

I must also apologise for not getting round to my usual blog-reads. The heat is addling my brain and rugby season has also just started here, so I will be a Stormers fan for a good few weeks before I start to get a little disenchanted again. Every year we say the same thing: This year’s the year. They’ll make the semis for sure. We’ll see about that.

Update: Just wanted to add that I’m loving The New Yorker Fiction podcasts. Listened to Julian Barnes reading Frank O’Connor, Orhan Pamuk reading Vladimir Nabokov and somebody ferris reading George Saunders. The Saunders was amazing. Saunders himself reads Isaac Babel. Also great. I love hearing these authors’ voices. Julian Barnes sounded a little like Tony Blair for a few moments there. I wonder if he knows!

What I learned in my holidays

1. Betty’s Bay is good for the soul. This is the loft where I sit with my laptop and read blog-posts when I’m not gazing out at the view instead.

2. The sunsets aren’t bad either. This is just from my phone, so you can imagine how much better it is in reality.

3. You shouldn’t trim your bushy eyebrows with nail-clippers unless you’re trying for that slightly moth-eaten look.

4. Old cars need to be serviced once a year. Writing a reminder in November that I should “check for last service and schedule new one” didn’t help me in February when the car konked in.

5. Small-town mechanics can basically name their price. The expression “having you over a barrel” springs to mind.

6. If I want to get some writing done, I should be stricter about blocking off time and not getting distracted. I started working some old journal material into a story and then ran out of steam. I petered out.

7. Whoever came up with the expression “petered out” has some explaining to do. I’m sure I’m not the only Peter who objects to that phrase.

8. Being single on Valentine’s Day needn’t be so bad. I’m thinking of it as a celebration of love. Pet love, family love, friend love, book love. Romantic love can wait.

9. I should read more Alice Munro. Picked up her collection “Runaway” and was blown away. Not immediately but she has this way of working into your heart and then you wonder how you lived without her. Ok, perhaps not that dramatically. But she writes so simply and evocatively. Her short story “Runaway” has what Karen Russell (commenting on Carson McCuller’s story The Jockey on a New Yorker podcast) calls “unexploded bombs”. I would just say: read this story.

10. I tend to over-analyse things. Perhaps it’s part of my training. And I am a big fan of insight, which I now regard as necessary but insufficient for meaningful change. One of my supervisors used to say, “Just stay with the feeling”. You could probably say the same about writing. Don’t think your story too much. Feel it. Easier said than done though, right?

Some notes on To the Lighthouse

One of the best things I did in my holidays was to read To the Lighthouse (TTL) by Virginia Woolf. I started with the Naxos Audiobook (read by Juliet Stevenson) but then she was leaving out huge chunks and I was getting confused and so I switched over to both reading and listening. I also read what some of the bloggers participating in the Woolf in Winter reading challenge (hosted by Emily) had to say about it.

Here are some of my notes:

Interesting to read the Wikipedia entry on VW as a way of getting invaluable context for her writing. The wealth of written material on her for a start. And then the basics of family, works, Bloomsbury Group, relationships. The background makes it easy to make the connection between the great beauty of VW’s mother and the great beauty of Mrs Ramsay for example.

VW’s own depression gives these lines a particular resonance for me:

Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole around window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say ‘This is he’ or ‘This is she.’ (p.117)

And consider this reflection:

“At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty — the sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the moon, and children pelting each other with handfuls of grass — something out of harmony with this jocundity, this serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath” – p.124

For me, this is part of the genius of her imagination. To see the beach and the sea infused with the blood of those fallen in the First World War (which she mentions matter-of-factly the paragraph before). It’s the kind of ‘madness’ if you like that trauma imposes on people’s perceptions.

I love the metaphor of the lighthouse as a beacon of hope, of love, structure, solidity, promise. VW uses the lighthouse as the centrepoint of her novel.

One of the things I liked about TTL is the way Woolf can take such simple events – a trip to a lighthouse, a dinner, Lily painting — and spin such perspectives and memories and stream of consciousness out of them. The art of the narrow focus, and the grand focus too. Large and small. She’s not driven by plot but by subjectivity.

There’s also the issue of her depression and the role that writing (and reading) played in alleviating it or perhaps making it worse. For me (and many others) there’s a fascination with writers (and other artists) who have committed suicide. Can we see it in her writing? What are the similarities with Plath? Could this happen to me or to others I care about? Is writing (or reading) somehow a dangerous activity, likely to lead to morbid introspection and ultimately suicide?

Thinking about my own reaction to TTL, I enjoyed it more because of Juliet Stevenson’s reading of it. She carried me along in the middle section when I was losing my way. And then I got fired up for it again. What the audiobook did was to impose some additional (and quite helpful) structure on the book. For example the last four tracks are called In the boat, Perspective, Approaching and Arriving.

There were several great moments in the book but one that stands out for me happens in Part Three between Mr Ramsay and Lily:

Mr Ramsay sighed to the full. He waited. Was she not going to say anything? Did she not see what he wanted from her? Then he said he had a particular reason for wanting to go to the lighthouse … [...] He sighed profoundly. He sighed significantly. All Lily wished was that this enormous flood of grief, this insatiable hunger for sympathy, this demand that she should surrender herself up to him entirely, and even so he had sorrows enough to keep her supplied for ever, should leave her, should be diverted (she kept looking at the house, hoping for an interruption) before it swept her down in its flow. (p. 142)

There’s a wonderful contrast between Lily Briscoe (with her little Chinese eyes, desperately trying to paint) and the dominant and yet rawly vulnerable presence of Mr Ramsay with his demand for sympathy.

I’ll be back next time with some more Woolf.

Kermit starts to croak (and a small-town murder)

It all started on Saturday as I was driving to my long-anticipated week-long seaside retreat. It was mid-day and I had just passed the turn-off to Pringle Bay and was approaching the hill which leads to Betty’s Bay. Suddenly my car started making a ga-da-ga-da-ga-da kind of noise. I couldn’t decide whether it was coughing or spluttering or knocking. Whatever it was doing, it wasn’t happy. The oil light came on and then the engine started wheezing and I was preparing for the death-rattle. It started making something like a seizing-up type of noise, which is just about the worst kind of car sound that you can hear if you’ve ever, like me, had a car engine seize up on you for lack of oil.

I was scared. I don’t think I was trembling like the women seem to do a lot of in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White but I was alarmed and anxious. And my heart beat faster and I feared the worst. (You see, that’s what reading thrillers does to you.) Anyway, my legs might have started feeling a little wobbly and my breathing was certainly shallower.

I managed to get up the hill and coasted down again and when we were going about 5km/hr I noticed that a silver golf GTI was cruising very slowly behind me and its four occupants were swaying along to their music, apparently oblivious to the croaking catastrophe in front of them. I waved at them to pass and they waved out of the windows in time to the music and seemed surprisingly merry. Perhaps they were a little drunk. I thought of the irony of the phrase “not waving but drowning” and waved at them again. This time they drove past in a rush of mellow R&B and seemed hardly to notice that their fellow Betty’s Bay traveller was about to come to a forlorn stop on a lonely country road.

I decided to jump out while the car was still moving and to use its momentum to help me push it as far as I could. This was not very far. I almost made it to a side-road which leads to my parents’ holiday house but not quite. And then we stopped. I thought of the food that would go off if not refrigerated within a few hours. My laptop and my luggage. How many trips would it take to lug all of this to the house and back?

And then I thought I would try and start the car and, surprisingly enough, it spluttered back into life. We chugged and wheezed and knocked our way to the house where I parked the car in the garage and left it alone to consider its fate.

To cut a long story short, I left the car for two days and then slowly drove it to the closest town (Kleinmond) this morning where the mechanic gave the verdict. A total engine overhaul which will cost at least about R7,500. By this stage I was not surprised. I was not terribly alarmed anymore. I was thinking about my car’s new name, given in honour of its croaking performance over the past few days. Add in the colour, which is a bluey-greeny shade of metallic green (or perhaps petrol, who knows?) and you have Kermit the frog, sadly lacking his Ms Piggy who seems to have long moved off to greener and less-croaky pastures.

I was already thinking of the blog-post that I would write and I was sufficiently distanced from the calamity to be quite entertained by the passing traffic on Harbour road, which is the most interesting street in Kleinmond. There are art galleries and a bar and coffee shops and restaurants and at least one pottery studio and also a beauty salon. I wondered what would happen if, Borat-like, I approached the beauty salon across the road with a secret camera and asked the bored assistant in the black top whether they provide happy-ending massages. I imagined a moment of strained hilarity as the Afrikaans girl tried to understand the correct meaning of this term. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so funny after all.

And then it was time for some reviving tea and to watch the two middle-aged guys a bit further down drinking coffee and commenting on anything interesting that passed by in the road. Just at that moment there passed by a double-cab bakkie painted in camouflage stripes.

“Now that oke has a complex,” said the pony-tailed guy, as if he and his friend talked about people’s complexes all the time. I wondered if they were also psychologists.

“Ja, maybe he’s in the army or he wants to be in the army,” commented his friend in the short-sleeved white shirt dismissively.

The mention of the army made me frown into my own tea and I thought of the camouflage outfit that awaited me when I returned to work.

On the drive back to Betty’s Bay the mechanic’s wife was all chatty and told me how Otto (her husband) and she moved to the town 10 years before and how their children still went to school in Paarl. And then we got to the real gossip of the town. A local murder and a suicide.

“It’s all in the forensics,” she told me concerning the murder. The angle of the bullet into the husband’s own leg and the angles of the bullets into the two coloured assistants who were lying on the floor.

‘What they don’t know,” she continued, “is whether he shot his wife himself or whether it was one of the other guys.”

“Shocking” was my reply. “Do they know why he did it?”

She rolled the thumb and middle finger of her left hand in the air between us and said simply “money”.

“He had an R11 million life assurance policy out on her,” she added, “but I knew something was fishy from the start. Who goes out leaving his front door unlocked in this day and age?”

“You’re right,” I said, trying to imagine the kind of man who could do such a thing to his own wife, and all for money.

“How old were they?”

“In their early thirties. And they had young children too.”

I’d forgotten all about my car by now. A murder! And right in this sleepy seaside town, hardly a block away from Otto’s workshop.

Mrs Otto then told me about the suicide, a tragic case of youthful depression. She struggled with the term “bipolar” and managed to explain that the 19-year old girl, a policeman’s daughter, had suffered from manic depression.

“It’s very sad,” she said, not looking particularly sad herself and I noticed that I was feeling a little sad but also relieved at the same time. I was at least safely back home, even if Kermit’s fate is still unknown.