Staying grounded

This is a tough time of year and I’m working at staying grounded and receptive to possibilities. Tomorrow I’m off on holiday to the lonely beaches of Cape Agulhas at the southernmost tip of Africa, where I can wake up in the mornings and watch dolphins in the surf from my bedroom window. Eat freshly caught fish grilled over coals. Play with my new puppies on the beach and explore rock pools. Let the well fill up as I ramble around the lighthouse and wander over the rocky promontory where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean.

 

An auspicious place, the tip of Africa, standing braced between two oceans.

 

And I want this year to end well. No regrets, no bitterness, no acting out. Just going gently towards the future, the unknown. Sleeping off the bone-tiredness. Soaking up sun and salt air and sea. Enjoying the company of friends and paying attention to the moment at hand.

No great schemes or ambitions or plans. Just gratitude at coming through this year in one piece and being alive to the present moment, my rootedness going down deep into sandy or rocky or fertile soils, down through basalt and ice to the blazing heart of the imagined world.

 

Love and thanks to all my fellow travellers and may this be a peaceful and blessed time for you.

Mulling over things

 

I haven’t posted here that often in recent months and I am not sure why. In part I supect it is because I have struggled to adjust to being back in South Africa. My inner life has taken a knock, I have not always felt centred or energised enough for rituals. Many of the concepts and symbols I have worked with feel threadbare and worn, not compelling.

 

It is rather like a snake, silver and green, shedding an old skin. I need to step out of a certain way of being in the world in order to move forward and that is not easy.

 

The Otherly intuitions and dream images and stories are as intense as ever. This is the pont where I feel most lonely and it is not easy to write about this. Many skills or understandings can be achieved through Magick or spiritual disciplines, slowly and patiently studied or embraced. But there are certain psychic ( how I detest that word) or inexpressible intuitions that cannot be acquired. You get them or you don’t. They come to you or they don’t. Some have to go in search of entities, others of us have to discourage them from monopolising our lives.

 

And most of what I read about this doesn’t resonate with my own experience, hence the loneliness.

Yesterday I realised again that I have an Otherkin relationship with many plants. It is not comfortable and I do not know what to make of it. For years I planted lovely greeny-blue rue all over my herb garden, keeping it away from basil because the strange pungent powers of rue kill basil stone dead. I would cut back my lime-yellow flowering rue and sip bitter teas with a few leaves in boiling water. Then I found I could not work with rue in sunlight because the skin on my hands would get inflamed and itchy. Last year I found I could not work with rue in shade either and that the irritation had become blisters. In the language of plants, rue had begun to inhabit me and communicate wth me. Now I dream about rue, dreams in which I eat rue and begin to sicken, fall down vertical tunnels into cellars that smell of bitter pungent chopped rue. There is a piece of music that comes into my head whenever I see rue growing, a flautist solo that I cannot name and it reminds me of a danse macabre. Rue sends me warnings and a coded invitation.

 

When I try to write about this, it sounds absurd. So I fall silent. But the intuitions continue anyhow. Later today I shall do some research on the etymology and plant history of rue from medieval times. I don’t know what I am looking for, but will know when I dream about it.

 

Sigh. Such an oddly poweress and puzzling existence, waiting on the invisible wind and unseen visitor.

Instead of a rant

African witchcraft is getting a bad press. In part that is because we are not thinking  in dialectical and political ways. In Western terms, we want to talk pathology or demonising or tarnished mythmaking.

 

Bear with me while I think aloud for a short space  here.

 

We’re taking about pre-industrial societies in crisis. The whole difficulty of magical thinking and resorting to the occult to instill fear and hatred, the scapegoating of elderly women or young girls is something that has echoes with European witchcraft and such incidents as Salem in Massachusetts, a kind of moral panic or hysteria around supposed possession by the demonic.

 

In the 1990s I attended a number of courses given by Terence Ranger ( Zimbabwean historian and sociologist) on witchcraft  in colonial Africa and I found what he said very interesting. Ranger looked closely at cases involving witchcraft from Sub-Saharan Africa, starting from West Africa, to Uganda, and concentrating on East Africa, mainly Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, ending in Zimbabwe, and South Africa. He argued that from three ponts of view (I hope I’m remembering this accurately) historical, institutional and military, colonial forcces clashed against existing African magical practices and witchcraft, and persecuted perceived witches. Existing witch craft practices then shifted to become in some cases useful instruments within political fights, sometimes with the object of violent oppositions and revolutions, sometimes with the object of supporting older tribal traditions against newer structures of policing and justice (district magistrates courts).

 

The more ‘positive’ aspects of the resurgence of witchcraft in oppressed groups can be seen in several  historical figures. I know that BBC ‘documentaries’ show scenes that indicate a regression to ‘primitive’ practices and imply that all witchcraft across Africa is the same kind of mob hysteria and obscene and cruel behaviour, but that is not the case. As in Europe, you are often looking at chaotic and turbulent social formations  in which anarchy is taking a regressive or misogynist turn.

 

I only really know about two figures that really interest me as historical figures. The one of the notoriaous Alice Lenshina of the Lumpa sect in Zambia (1960s) and the other is Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana
.

Nehanda was born in the 1840s in Zimbabwe, near Mazoe. She believed herself to be the ‘lion’ spirit of one of the daughters of Mutota Nyatsimba, a founder of Monomatapa (remember Prester John?) in 1430. Towards the end of the 19th century, Zimbabwe was invaded and illegally occupied by colonial forces under Cecil John Rhodes and Nehanda began to prophesy war against the British South African Police and settlers. She ‘incited rebellion’ and helped organise the first war of indepedence or Chimurenga, was put to death by early settler authorities in Zimbabwe. Before she was hanged, she called out and said  “My bones will rise again’.

 

In the early 1970s, a new spirit medium for Nehanda Nyakasikana arose among the Shona people and reminded the people of the message of her earlier “reincarnation”, “my bones will rise again”. In fact her bones were now rising, she said. And they had to rise in the form of her “children”. She is again credited with inspiring resisance to the settlers in the Second Chimurenga or bush war in then-Rhodesia.

 

Many older black women in churches here, especially the older mission churches (Catholic and Methodist) are sangomas or witches. This is seen as an honourable practice. The rituals and intimidation inherent in witchcraft were replaced by the rituals and cultural intimidation  of the mission churches and many reverted to the older beliefs or continued to maintain them  alongside Christian  practices. Many such sangoma practices are stabilising forces in a rapidly changing society and indcate creative ways of working with traditional values and asserting the power of women and showing respect for nature.

 

There is a tendency by many neo-pagan groups in the US to glamorise or exoticise witchcraft in Africa, especially among the Yoruba of West Africa. This seems to me just the flip side of the demonising  done by more conservative groups. In some situations witchcraft evolves into a form of cultural resistance, a symbolic rallying point. In other situations, it functions as a form of repression and superstitious fear, the expression of social hysteria or magical thinking.

Like religion, witchcraft is inherently ambiguous. It contains and expresses both liberative and repressive dimensions of the context from which it emanates. If the West paused in its enigrating of African experience long enough to pay attention, perhaps another narrtive might emerge alongside the horror stories.

Taurus full moon lurking

Too tired for more than jottings. I couldn’t draw down the moon or clean the kitchen floor or deconstruct a lunar ritual if my life depended on it. But I am hoping for those deep wild energies to flow into dead space, can feel myself leaning towards faith. It has been a tough month.

 

The Overberg is flooded and it has been raining since early last evening. The house is muddy and damp and my new herb garden has been washed away. There is a Taurus full moon lurking somewhere out there in this Scorpionic month and I can’t see anything of the moon. Just darkness, rain and fog. But the Moon Mistress will be watching me with un regard oblique.

 

I’m thinking of apocalypse because I’m dreaming of a world flayed open and  overturned, raw and exposed, uncovered.

“Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing, and I think the process is already under way. We’re on the verge of transitioning to a dispensation of consciousness that’s more intuitive, mystical and shamanic.” No, I don’t know who said that.

 

The bathroom is haunted by the brooding presence of a large rain spider, poised to leap at me. I  have hung up bunches of lavender to soothe the savage breast, both mine and Arachne’s. What strange blood-dark tapestries might I not weave, what webs make and unmake?

 

I’m trying to recall more lines of the Whitman poem that has the phrase: “Mad naked summer night’. All the same, I have no intentin of unbundling and getting naked. It is too cold and rainy. I feel enshrouded  by rain. Will a naked soul do?

 

Tody I burned a pot of beans and the bitter smell still lingers in the kitchen.

The ex-lover is leading a life that is uneventful and idle and lonely, pure and sweet. But not blameless. He brings out the Lizzie Borden in me , poor man. We are an ideal couple, the unbeautiful and the beast, the beastly and the pure.

 

He asks after my health so tenderly, so earnestly and I want to slay him with an axe. That would make me feel very alive and summery. Rage is such irresistable energy, dance of the red queen.

 

I miss my Welsh witches, gathering berries of experience and weaving away in their winter hides, counting the days to snow. it is the season of Frigg spinning, the Norse ice-breaker deciphering the Wyrd.

 

Now I am going to light a red candle that will throw shadows. Not only houses are haunted. My spider is smiling at me and waving a thin black limb, one of eight.

 

The rain is wailing and stuttering like a CD of Alanis Morrisette I once listened to on a winter night beside the sea. When I have let the candle burn itself out, the rain might have stopped. But a river of unseen water will fill the house and the valley and the psyche of the unwary listener.

 

Anthony Hecht’s poem, After Rain:

‘Wetness has taken over.

From drain and creeper twine

It’s runnelled and trenched and edged

A pebbled serpentine

Secretly, as though pledged

To attain a difficult goal

And join some important river. ‘

A species of haunting

Years ago when I was doing post-graduate studies on the ivy-clad campus In Cape Town, a university set right up on the slopes below Devil’s Peak, I was standing  at the end of a corridor looking down through a large plate glass window on the second floor of the Leslie Building for Social Sciences. It was the most modern building on campus, split-level hyperbole with slabs of raw concrete juxtaposed with red brick. Its only hope was the ivy scrambling up and over the brutal frontage.

 

As I was standing there, waiting for a seminar or to see a professor, a bird, perhaps a pigeon, flew into the plate glass. It smacked into the glass with a cracking noise and dropped to the ground two floors below with a broken neck.

 

On the glass was a tiny starry fracture where the beak had struck the window. It looked lik the crystalline formation of a snowflake, fine cracks radiating out from a glittering puncture mark.

 

I began shaking and had to sit down, feeling suddenly faint and overtaken by an emotion I could not name. It was not the death of the bird that had stirred me beyond a moment’s compassion, but the sight of that death star in the glass, an etched symbol of violence.

 

I understood that something had irrupted from my own Unconscious, something archetypal and nameless, triggering an abreaction, sparking a deep fear and dread, an unwanted knowing,  within me. The incident has stayed with me through the years although in conscious terms I remain none the wiser.

Not that long ago another curious and inexplicable archetype entered my life and I am still trying to make sense of it. I had a dream in which I was in a schoolgirl hostel in a wood. I wanted to escape and go to a party held in the boys’ hostel, so I escaped out of the girl’s boarding hostel at night, crawled down a tunnel that resembled a narrow well, and travelled in the dark below the forest floor, hoping I would reach the boys’ hostel in time for the party.

 

Somewhere within myself I began to step out of character, prompted by that dream.

 

Some months later I was on a business trip to KwaZulu-Natal, a very difficult journey in heavy monsoon rains. I found myself a witness to distressing conditions among people living with AIDS. On an impulse quite unlike myself, I wrote to  a man who was almost a stranger, telling him what I was going through. He replied and we began a complicated, intense and ultimately unsatisfactory love affair. That is now over, and we are slowly becoming friends.

 

But there is another subtext or concealed narrative that puzzles me in all this. I began to dream about this man and call out to him in my sleep, something that bewildered my housemate. I have never talked in my sleep, but now I began sobbing and pleading and whispering wordsof love aloud during the night. Even when I was with him, I dreamt of him, dreamt he was abducting me from my father’s house, that I was unable to resist him, that I was helpless in his arms. That I loved and hated him, that I was enslaved by need and desire and fear of him.

 

And once I had left the man in real lie and returned to Africa, the dreams of the demon lover continued, dreams of pleasure or humiliation, dreams of being led underground like Persephone, or peering into a well in the hope of seeing his beloved face in a distant dark pool far below. Half-awake, I find myself roaming his house at night, standing over his bed, searching through cupboards, waiting and watching. Haunted  and haunting.

 

It is such a strange experience and I cannot account for it during daylight hours, the conscious mind repudiates this hidden enthrallment. The Unconscious simply goes on with its own preoccupation. I do not want to resort to the tempting Jungian or Freudian explanations, I want to understand this as felt experience. I want my Unconscious to reach the end of the quest, the story unfolded, the love requited or transmuted to another feeling.

 

Th mood of this haunting has something in it of the trembling and pain expressed in a poem by the English mystic William Blake:

Never seek to tell thy love,

Love that never told can be;

For the gentle wind does move,

Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,

I told her all my heart;

Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,

Ah! she doth depart.

Soon as she was gone from me,

A traveller came by,

Silently, invisibly;

He took her with a sigh.

But there is nothing more I can say with any certainty. It is a puzzling event on the edge of awareness, a tale belonging to the night.

Charm, charism and power

If nothing else, the new president of the United States has grace, charm and presence. A promise of integrity. That conveys something in a world of glib and arrogant thugs with spin doctors unable to conceal the brute force and stupidity of their clients.

And how I love having a wordsmith in the White House.

 

I don’t know what might be possible but the word ‘change’ has a charm all its own. I’m less keen on the ‘Yes we can’ slogan but simple works for me. And it is a huge relief that America did not end up with a vice-president who did not know Africa was a continent. Palin thought of it as one big unimportant country or a group of unimportant countries filled with people who are the wrong colour and unsaved. Right-wing religion has a curious way of blunting and dehumanising its practitioners. I laughed at the Left Behind series of hamfisted novels until I moved to a village where evangelicals knew they were saved and could point to those unlikely to make it when the Rapture comes.

 

Our beliefs can shape us in unconscionable ways.

 

And there will be a new puppy in the White House which small detail gives me an excuse to talk about my new puppies, two tiny flea-bitten mongrels rescued by Una from a squatter camp  (or informal settlement, but both terms refer to overcrowded shacks of corrigated iron or crumbling RDP housing with no running water or electricity). Una bought the puppies for R50 each, less than a dollar.

 

They were infested with fleas, so we bathed them and put on a gentle form of Frontline. Sores all over their bodies but no mange, to my relief. Swollen eyes, gungy ears. Half-starved from scavanging in debris. Off they went to the vet and came back as dewormed, inoculated, inspected and approved domestic pets, named Chloe and Jezebel. With a scientific dog food diet, new bedding, new food bowls, one of my woolen jackets for comfort and to get the smell of me into their hearts.

 

Now my days are taken up with mopping up puddles and bonding and playing with them. They are too young for training, so it is all love and no tough.

I have almost 13 000 words of a proto novella scratched out for Nanowrimo. One or two good lines. But I write and write, especially when I don’t feel like it. The habit of writing fiction is hell to acquire. It pains me to realise I can write emails, letters/snailmail, blogs, features articles, political rants and keep offline diaries that fill up as if by magic, simply by dint of writing each day. But fiction just goes thin and tedious on me, I struggle to sustain any interest. But then, out of the blue, something goes right, a character comes to life (and invariably steps out of character) and suddenly the storymaking is all magic and a powerful process.

 

Tomorrow I am making an Egyptian Aubergine Tamarind dish to surprise my housemate, who is not as crazy about aubergine as she might be. I hope it is an overwhelmingly delicious success. The just-sour-enough factor of tamarind is hard to gauge correctly and I am using fresh tamarind.

That cooking feat will take my mind off the passing of Proposition 8. Damn you California, to deny the civil rights and protections of marriage to a LGBT minority! How could this happen in San Francisco’s home state?

We must never take power for granted, never assume that empowerment will last, that hard-won rights and freedoms can be taken for granted. I have learned so much from the experience of being deviant, outlawed, exiled and powerless in so many different ways. That I can write about this with equanimity  is due in no small measure to white privilege rather than any skills or virtues of my own. Hopefully that privilege is  being extended, little by little. And dismantled too, little by little. There is power-over and there is power-in-relationship. They are not as far apart as I would like to believe.

 

And yet I keep hoping for a safer, freer place we  might come to call our own. All of us bewitched and bewitching, outsiders, Others, left behinders. A hope rekindled by the presence of Barack Hussein Obama in the Oval Office, that impenetrable seat of power.