Accompanying you into Beyond

 

 

A phone call, not unexpected, and I quickly found a small rose-scented candle, some sandalwood incense and a small bottle of mountain water.

 

A woman, a friend, dying of overian cancer, drugged far too heavily but responsive to touch. I sit beside her and the family goes out  to sit on the verandah. The small dark room is too hot, stifling and claustrophobic. I lift up and wedge the old sash windows to let in the wind from the mountains.  Place the candle in a sheltered place where it burns upright. The incense holds me in a dry cup of remembrance. A portrait of Norma Shearer in an oval frame made of tortoiseshell, a face you loved as a young woman. Your own face is closed, stilled and papery, but softening into the amazing flush of death, that brief space in which each of us suddenly looks so young and hopeful, girlish and amazed. We dance on the verge of our own death.

 

I take your hand and we begin the walk through the dusklands, the land of twilight. The sun will not rise again to your sight, and before the new moon has risen you will be gone. There is no way to explain this last companionship but we walk together across the quiet dusty roads and the homes of your past, the graves of children and lovers, the silent gardens dim as shadow. The rattle of your breathing begins like a ragged drum and I sit on with you in soft candlelight. Briefly your hand tightens on mine and for just a moment you look beyond me. The scented candle splutters. Your relative will not come in, she is a frightened child running fast across the vlei, jumping puddles and screaming aloud to herself. Later I shall find time to be with her. This is your hour, your moment between life and death, your passage into the next world, an extinction of sorts and a new beginning.

 

It is all we can do for one another because there is so much beyond us – and we cannot go there until the gates open into the true Beyond, that secret garden of the inexhaustible spirit.

Dark of the moon

 

It will be the New Moon in Pisces on 25 February here in the Southern Hemisphere, the beginning of the Catholic season of Lent which may well be based on the last season of Europe’s winter deprivation and fasting that has to be endured before the spring, the warmth and the first lambs ready for slaughter. Here, Lent’s symbolism falls flat:  it is hot with a dry wind that smells of veldfires and peppery dust.

I thirst for water in this heat: Pisces is to me a watery flickering symbol, elusive and whimsical.

 

The Sabian symbol is Pisces 7: ‘Illuminated by a shaft of light, a large cross lies on rocks surrounded by sea and mist.’ Ceres is in the earth sign Virgo, grounding us, nourishing the roots.

 

And right now the moon is waning, the dark is increasing each evening. I think of unsought changes and brokenness and some kind of shattered belief still luminous, scattered like glass on black rocks in the darkness, the mist entering my mouth and eyes, the taste of the cold sea, the crashing surf and sirens calling.

 

Fragment is my preferred form. I love the way that when we are shattered, the fragments begin to speak, partially but lucidly, gleaming and brittle. Right now I am thinking of Anne Carson’s extraordinary writing, Variations on the Right to Remain Silent , on the silence of Joan of Arc, the illiterate young French peasant woman captured in battle and then subjected to the corrupt and biased process of church law, a magistrates’ court, public interrogations. Her condemnation inevitable, her death a legal necessity.

 

Joan spoke Middle French and her answers were translated into Latin. Many of her replies were falsified or incomprehensible to her interrogators. Joan despised the process and would not answer directly, would not comply with the narrative being imposed on her.

 

When asked about the voices which the prosecutors saw as demonic according to the binary split of Christianity, she said only:

 

‘The light comes in the name of the voice.’

 

A statement so transformative, revealing and beyond language that I should like to have it engraved on the entrance to every law court in our modern culture.

A world apart

 

Got up long before dawn  to water my flagging herbs and then sat reading through pagan blogs and catching up on debates and lives and magical practices and the thinking behind them. It feels as if I am looking through the reverse end of a telescope at another planet sometimes.

 

Many pagani in the First World use the term ‘hedgewitch’ to indicate solitary-by-choice, simply staying apart from other groups or covens, preferring one’s own company. This is not my position in some ways, although I think much of my practice would have been solitary in any case. But a decade ago I moved away from the city and began living out in the countryside, commuting to the city for work but living in farmhouses in lonely areas. Over the years I moved further and further away from the city and urban influences and lifestyle habits waned and altered as I began to connect more deeply with the cycles of the seasons and the farming life, the planting, irrigating, harvesting and pruning all around me, the raising and slaughter of livestock, the struggle to survive heat and drought, flash floods and plagues. It is a hard life out here and the communities around me are conservative and bibilical and yet retain great folkloric wisdom about the land and the ways of nature.

 

I live in a country where it has never been safe to speak of the Craft but which has a very powerful and problematic shamanic tradition, the centuries-old sangoma practices which were disrupted by colonialism and driven underground, even dispersed and distorted by societal crisis.

The blogging community of pagans, wiccans and other green or anarchic practitioners has been a wonderful way of connecting and I have been lucky enough to meet and get to know a few of those whose blogs and websites I so enjoy. But I remain very geographically  isolated and in many ways very ignorant of the First World controversies and debates. The dynamics however are not very different from those I have encountered in  media circles and feminist activist groups, or academic life and political organisations, a key difficulty relating to the responsible use of power and taking personal responsibility for the power we choose to exercise. I am not a fan of the kind of ‘magical thinking’ best exemplified in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in which the grieving widow resorts to primitive emotional defences and superstitious emblems to ward off an unbearable reality of loss: Wishful thinking is often just a reluctance to accept realistic limitations or painful truths. We need to move beyond bromides, evasive devices and chicanery around exploitative sex magick or ritual baubles or borrowed spells. I sometimes feel I am reading missives from a generation of Peter Pans, adolescents in their late 40s and even 50s who have the puer gaiety and petulance of those who never grow up, delightful but infuriating and forever misunderstood.

 

It is always tricky when pagans and witches believe they can manipulate or control the deities they invoke and claim to worship, that power derives from perfecting esoteric techniques or extreme acts of violence or personal achievements or supposed status in an uncritical and youthful pagan community. Most of us know that staying receptive to Otherness is as much as we can hope for. The Other follows her own sweet bent, the spirit moves where it will, the wind blows free. Those of us who find ourselves enmeshed in a celebrity-crazed culture will struggle to find authentic mentors and leaders and visionaries whom we can trust. Every other day I read  blogs and see Nelson Mandela quoted blithely by someone who would never consider sitting in a prison cell on a small island for 27 long years in the hope of a greater  freedom than one’s own personal liberty.

Transparent to the day

 

It is early evening and the sun is still hot on the distant fields. There are white butterflies hovering over the rosemary bushes and my small puppy still has a swollen jaw from a bee sting. The tall  fennel is dying to a waxy yellowish brown, seeds crackling in the heat, reminding me of how dessicated wisteria pods twist and snap like pistol shots on summer nights.

 

The dark moon is approaching and it will be in Pisces. I am mulling over how to get the place alone to myself to do a ritual and checking that there is enough kindling and  firewood so that I can build up a fire in the back garden. I am reading the poetry of Georges Szirtes and thinking of his wonderful lines on lonely Greek beaches at dawn and the tenements of Cairo, the homelessness like a broken heart in so much of his writing.

 

A friend is travelling up to the Free State for a very sad family funeral, a young niece killed in a head-on collision, and my friend is bracing herself for the late summer rains like great sweeping torrents that blot out the skies and the endless stretching vistas of the mealie fields and thorn trees. We talk about how we think of ‘heaven’ as a garden in the African highlands, the light fierce and distilled to pentimento, a lovely flowering wilderness full of butterflies and samanga monkeys, horizons marked with hawks and eagles,  and our passage to the garden of heavenly delights made complete by the bright-eyed loving animals who have companioned us for so much of our lives. She begins to weep for her niece and I make her a rosehip tisane to drink as we sit looking out at the fields still burnishedwith sunlight. Tomorrow I must speak at a conference on political economy, must get notes together, enter the mundane and defended places.

 

But for now I am in my own home, free and easy. As we sit together, my sorrowful friend and myself,  I am gathering stillness, holding her grief in my arms. Presence fills me, surrounds us, and as always I am amazed at the directness of the Mother, Guiding her daughters through the wilderness with a sureness of touch.

Ecstatic reds of the roses

 

Autumn is hovering in the windy heat of February here at the southernmost tip of Africa. I sit out in the garden eating juicy pears and peeling russet apples and thinking about pecan nuts and wild honey, and small striped pumpkins that I roast whole in a hot oven.

 

For years I wrote about the intricacies and ruthless shaping visions of landscape architects, the synthesis of art and engineering and horticulture and, voila! Serendipity.

 

I wrote about how Dan Kiley grouped trees as if in conversation together, the gentle curvilinear parks for the disabled of Topher Delaney, the layering of Im McHarg. I decried the notion of the domestic garden as an ‘outdoor room’, an extension of the manicured and contrived interiors with their dado rails and chandeliers and mirrored surfaces and textural contrasts between shagreen and painted silk. I turned my back on Jacques Villeneuve at Versailles. Year after year I walked around the sci-fi garden sets at Chelsea Flower Show, questioning myself as much as the nervous designers.

Louise Gluck:

‘The garden admires you.
For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,
The ecstatic reds of the roses,
So that you will come to it with your lovers.’

 

If you woke me from a deep sleep and shook me awake, saying: ‘Tell me one garden designer who celebrates wilderness?’ I would cry out without hesitation: ‘Derek Jarman!’

 

Because his garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness, on a shingle beach in the teeth of winter gales and with a power station winking ominously across the bay, embraces the wilderness of our inhumane society.  Wild dogroses bloom, improbably, despite the salt spray and stinging winds and lack of soil. There are found sculptures of rusted metal and blasted bone and shell, the bleakness and glory of gorze and salt-tolerant grey bushes that flame with blossom in the spring. Jarman was living with Aids when he created this garden in the 1980s and recorded it for posterity in his Modern Nature. It is the most beautiful and rawly honest garden of the 20th century.

Garden politics

 

Years ago I thought gardening was a kind of political quietism because of reading Voltaire’s advice in Candide that inteligent human beings should avoid the strife-ridden courts and wars of the civilised world and focus on gardens. Montaigne amongst his cabbages.

Now I believe that my pocket garden is the avant garde rebel fighting a protracted war on nature. I am an organic gardener, I am opposed to GM, I grow much of the local food I eat, I plant heritage vegetables and herbs from old kitchen gardens of the Cape, I grow more indigenous bushes and trees than exotics. I am a waterwise gardener and I have planted for drought, tough species that can tolerate little water and dry winds. Because I see my garden as rooted in a living landscape of insects and reptiles and birdlife, I plant bushes with berries, nectar-bearing flowers, create thickets for nesting birds, leave rotting old tree trunks for spiders, mulch and use groundcovers which also shelter wildlife.

 

But that is just the beginning. I have long and tiring debates with my pesticide-loving neighbours, talkig about the dangers of wind-drift, I protest the use of pesticides on the farms surrounding the village, I fight for land workers’ rights and sign petitions, write article on conditions on remote farms where landless people can be exploited in what is nothing better than slavery. I work with trainee gardeners teaching them to design garden beds and plant in spirals rather than squares or rectangles, how to propagate, how to work with companion planting, what permaculture is all about. I encourage the swapping of garden produce in a barter system, support local farmers’ markets, attend workshops on creatively dealing with surplus produce. I tell everyone I meet to lose their lawns, the great rolling velvet green eyesores which consume far too much water in a country where water is a scarce resource. I fight to have local trees planted rather than invasive exotic species. I counter the ignorance about spiders and snakes and mean-eyed bugs by lending books on holistic gardening to newbie gardeners.

 

I request literature on informed herbalism for the village library and work to set up structures for recycling garden waste. Donate to groups clearing our mountain ravines of the black wattle that destroys fynbos, our local ecology.

 

And it is not nearly enough. The guerilla gardener I admire the most was a sedate nineteenth-century Englishwoman named Ellen Wilmott who always carried seeds in the pockets of her shapeless cardigans so that she could scatter seeds along roadsides and in underplanted gardens, seeds of wild flowers native to the English countryside and in danger of extinction. One of those flowers is a now flourishing species of Eryngium giganteum known as ‘Miss Wilmott’s Ghost’. A perfect haunting of its kind.

Impermanence like dust and snow

 

The image here shows a woman seated at a prayer wheel in Llhasa province, Tibet, in perhaps 1936, photographed by a British photographer attached to the colonial mission. It comes from the magnificent collection of 6 000 photographs put up on the Internet by the British Museum for The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet 1920–1950.

 

A vanished world. Yet even in grainy thumbnail sketches the lived reality is compelling and bears witness to what it was like then: wheat threshers on an empty plain, yaks loaded with wool for the trek to India, the shrines high on rocky peaks where ‘offerings could be made to the spirits’, women with grain baskets on their backs coming back from stony fields, long-gone monasteries and finicky bridges across ravines, and bright blue gentians glimpsed at the roadside in spring.

 

Village children dancing, dogs being fed under bare poplars, valleys with snowmelt streams and apple trees, mummers performing in bazaars, prayer flags strung up alongside lonely tracks over mounatin passes, horseriders galloping across wide plains in cold sunlight. A hermit’s cell with a small opening in densely packed walling. Groups of very young Buddhist monks grinning and waving goodbye to the cameraman as they file into the monastery courtyard.

It is one of the saddest and loveliest collections I have seen in a long time.

Psychogeography by any other name

 

 

His new book is out and I am ravenous to read it. Will have to wait six months or a year, fight with librarians about ordering it. The book is Iain Sinclair’s Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire and it is once again all about walking the same streets again and again, talking to those who live on those streets, imagining the lives that have gone before, the bedlams and prisons and slums and quiet terraced houses with all hell breaking loose when the soldiers come back from war or the women go out to work. The name for this inspired naming of places, intuiting of personalities and detective work into the spirit of place is of course ‘psychogeography’ and nobod does it quite as convincingly and with the genius verve of Sinclair.

 I had been trying to talk about something akin to this for years and failing. How we inhabit cities through dreaming them into life, allowing them to possess us, following hunches and side alleys and stumbling around derelict ruins and obscure churches, peering at the headstones of mossy tombs. Sinclair’s sentences are the most unexpected excursions and dramatizations in contemporary literature and you never know where you will end up. He is a flaneur driven mad by history and conspiracy theories and the idiot genius of place. I have read everything Sinclair has written perhaps six or seven times. Nobody can match that zany passion for tidal scum or epiphanies in trucking cafes and horrible but telling coincidences and the lurking underworld and the beauty of seedier London in  its morbid moments. The wealth of London, sheer and impersonal, uglified, and Lord Archer turning his criminal dross into gold, like some deluded alchemist. The paeans to his home suburb of Hackney. He has lived in Hackney for 40 yeasr and quotes the poet-visionary William Blake: ‘Tho’ obscured, this is the form of the Angelic Land’

Well, of course, Iain Sinclair is from Wales originally, that place of fantasy and scarred valleys and cursing wells. His novel Landor’s Tower looks at radical nostalgia in Wales and everything else too. He set out to write about ‘what happen to utopian consciousness when people move out of the city and set up rural communes in places like Llantony in Gwent’. The madness observable in later decades.

 

Daniel Weston writes: ‘The practice of psychogeography, broadly defined as an awareness of and openness to the psychological effects of environmentand space upon the individual, and the writings of its practitioners, are currently the focus of sustained critical attention.’

 

That definition is  a starting point, but not complete or crack-pot enough: you see it is all about the fact that strange things keep happening in likely and unlikely places, unmitigated by common sense and letting in the bilge water with the leylines of historical collisions. This is psychogeography as an occultist primer. Iain Sinclair realised Thatcherite Britain was demonic — the way Breytenbach looked at the great bleeding flaw running right through South Africa during Afrikaner Nationalist apartheid, the way JM Coetzee revealed in Waiting for the Barbarians that the barbarians were already here.

 

And the plague pits and murders and pagan influences of Hawksmoor the church architect are all there in the novels, London revisioned, from Lud Heat and White Chappell Scarlet Tracings onward. Victorian mayhem and in Downriver an apotropaic ritual: ‘You have to show what you fear most and damn it to actually happen.’ Sinclair has been called a ‘magico-Marxist’, but his work is so original that it vaults over the stereotypical hurdles.

 

There are lines of burning energy that criss-cross London and Iain Sinclair has charted them and those who have walked them, marking the spots named X. Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital. Walking a city become unrecognisable, its borderlands, liminal spaces, motorway corridors, the generative power of urban decay. How can we explore the metaphysics of the concrete island? How do we chart foosteps and memory traces except through our own tracks observed and the imagination leaping ahead, slavering at the lead?

Work of the imagination

 

A red-letter day — saw the postman cycling down the road and waving my monthly copy of the London Review of Books at me. Such a treat! As I went out to meet him I saw the red-hot pokers upright and blazing, scarlet and yellow sentinels of the veld. Lizards whisking into the undergrowth, the skies blue and leaves darkening on the catalpa tree.

 

Sat out in the garden, in shade, devouring the crisp pages fresh from a London printer. Puppies panting at my feet, a malachite sunbird flashing  in the olive trees. Here is Susan Sontag saying we need an erotics of art more than a hermeneutics of art; Katherine Anne Porter using memory for self-deception  or self-justification, remythifying her own life; August Kleinzahler’s poem describing the old caretaker, ‘the depth and intricate plots of his dreams’.

 

When I put the Review aside at last, sitting back and watching the garden turn black and gold with noon sun, I admit to myself I am lonely. Starved of ideas, hungry to walk through art galleries, talk to art lovers and poets, watch plays or new films. The village sunk in its usual wordless silence, the tractors out in the fields, the bees thrumming in lavender bushes. It is such a beautiful valley but when I came here I began to truly understand the war on the imagination and to fear the church-going and blinkered complacent bigots as never before. The indiscriminate use of pesticides, the trees chopped down at a whim, wild animals poisoned or trapped, the children expelled from school for sex play, the ignorance and bedrock prejudice. In the silence here, a silence filled with threshing machines and cicadas and tingling telegraph wires and wind from the south-east, I close my eyes and think of the vineyards running alongside foothills, the rocks dug out, the vines irrigated, the season now for picking, for harvesting the green and black grapes, the pinotage, the hanepoot. The workers are often women and sometimes children and they are paid $3 or $4 a day, long days when labourers rise at 4am and walk miles to the vineyards and only return home long after dark. They have no health care, no pensions, no recourse to justice. Nobody imagines what that kind of destitution is like, the incessant nature of that struggle. And that there are solutions, equitable, graceful, elegant solutions brimming with compassion. There are always solutions if we open our eyes and look hard enough.

Lovely beyond any singing

 

For weeks now I have had my heart in my mouth as I follow the news broadcasts of the transitional government coming into power in Zimbabwe. I long for good news. All I read about has to do with the cholera death toll rising, the wide-spread starvation and destitution. My home country. And it is very evident that nobody is going to donate funds or invest until President Robert Mugabe is out of the picture. Prime Minsiter Morgan Tsvangirai’s power may be only token. And the tyrant Mugabe will not relinquish power until he is carried out in a coffin.

 

I was born on forest reserves in the mountains that run along the eastern border of Zimabawe, some of the most beautiful countryside in the world, a landscape of savannah plains and deep rainforest. My childhood was spent among the Ruwa Shona people of the Pungwe region, and I spoke a Shona dialect long before I learned English. In dreams I still hear the old names for trees and wild aloes and caves. Deep down within I have always believed that I will end my days living back in those green mountainous valleys, teaching literacy and farming maize and walking barefoot to the river, hearing the fish eagle crying over the deep brown rivers at sunset.

 

Years ago when I was working and studying in a grimy and bitterly cold London, travelling around in crammed trains on the Underground and queueing for sandwiches at cheap takeaway stalls, homesick and lonely, I would walk a mile or more twice a week to a local library and take down the same book and read the same passage over and over as if feeding myself on memories of sunshine and hopefulness, hearing echoes of kwela music in my ear and dreaming of the winding dusty roads of Africa, the untamed places of the spirit. The book was a forgotten classic, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country.

 

‘There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbroke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Imzimkolo, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.’