The Bonfires of Samhain

As the Northern Hemisphere celebrates Beltane, we out here are in the autumn and aware of worlds thinning. It is Samhain and the time of bonfires and divination. I have a bowl of apples and nuts on the kitchen table and a collage of red and  yellow leaves over the mantel. Birds’ feathers — goshawk, turtle dove, red-eyed pigeon, blacksmith plover — waft into the garden. The strelitzia are throwing up spikes that will open into a glorious bird-of-paradise flower.

It is a time for speaking with the ancestors as the theme of return blurs boundaries between past and present. My ancestors on my mother’s side are a rough harsh crew and I have no desire to speak with them — pioneering stock who emigrated out here to the Overberg in the 1820s or 1840s before heading up north to follow Cecil John Rhodes into Matabeleland.  Gold prospectors, land-grabbers, cattle thieves.

 

Only recently did I find out anything about my father’s mother, Jean Hamilton, from Lanarkshire in Scotland, widowed young and bringing her children up in Edinburgh through the Depression years and World War II. Her children went their own ways — to Canada and to Africa. My father broke off all contact with her as a young man. I don’t know why. I assume she is dead but I have no idea when or how. I do not know if she ever heard of my existence, ever wondered about me.

If she should care to visit I would welcome any contact and connection. As I get older, that Scottish  and Celtic aspect grows stronger within me.  I know very little about my ancestors and have had no contact so far, nor sought any. A Scottish grandmother may well turn out to be a mixed blessing but the desire for contact is interesting in itself. Descendants of fucked-up expatriate families tend to scatter from the family bosom as soon as they are able.

 

When I was in Wales, what puzzled me was the fierce sense of belonging, of being there in order to find out something about that belonging. I wanted to visit Scotland but it was not possible. Yet the voices and connections kept coming to me all through that rainy spring and summer.

 

So tonight I shall light my bonfire and stare into the blue flames of the pine cones, peel my apples and stay with divinatory practices,watching and waiting by owl light. Noting the autumn chill and the halo around a waxing moon, the galaxies about me so strange-eyed and powerful. Staring through walls of time and place. Imaginging cattle being driven between two bonfires and a crone with her walking stick reading the peelings of the apples, the messages hidden in scored nuts and the runes scribbled on tombstones: hoping to glimpse the daughters and mothers and grandmothers circling the graves to mourn and celebrate.

A drop or crash of water

I am making a very large pot of split pea soup with chopped onions, garlic, carrots and some shin. Outside it is raining, a steady cold rain heralding winter. My small dogs are chewing up the underfelt of the carpets despite my stern warnings.

 

Earlier I went off to the hair stylist and heard about her long and unhappy engagement and came back with hair shining and loose on my shoulders. Then I had a fraught but vital teleconferencing session with media eople in Manhattan. Does anyone there ever pause to listen to anyone else?

 

Which made me think of the wonderful tragic poet Jack Spicer and all the really good poetry on my favourite pagan sites and about grounding into the reality here and now. The leaves on my pomegranate tree are bright canary yellow. Bougainvillea leaves swarm all over the north wall of my cottage, graceless but with power. Ditches are clogged with oaks leaves and the mauve ribbon bush is out looking like a small girl on her way to a birthday party.

 

Jack Spicer. His poem Thing Language. With love to Manhattan that was once a green island place by the ocean.

 

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

Language of the birds

It is a brilliant frosty morning. There are hadedas (a kind of African ibis) shrieking away from my rooftop. I am not sure what is being communicated.

 

Each morning I lie in bed and listen to the wild birds in my garden at dawn. The mellifluous singers are mostly males in good health calling out their territory surrounds. There are short sharp alarm calls indicating aerial or ground predators. There are calls for mobbing or flocking of a certain specues. There are birds with high wavering cries indicative of endocrine systems damaged by pesticides.

 

For years I have listened to birds wth great care, I have poor eyesight and so listening is how I get to know the species in my garden and neighbourhood. I have provided sunstantial herbaceous cover for nesting birds so calls are often high-frequency and prolonged, birds safe on home territory. These birds are not visitors. In spring there are numerous mating and then fledgling calls to summon the young.

 

Now that the exotic species have left on the long journey to Europe for summer, there are more indigenous birds singing and calling. No more starlings or thrushes or swallows. There is the Cape bulbul, the tiny white-eyes, the paradise flycatchers, blue herons, sparrowhawks, kestrels, redwnged francolins and button quail. Just writing these names and seeing the birds in my mind’s eye makes me very happy. Near the dam in sandy woodland  I hear the percussion of the grey-hooded kingfisher. Orioles, warblers and honeyguides. I cannot always recognise their cries but I know the syrinx songs of those I live with.

 

In medieval times, there were rumours that women, like birds, had a secret language only they could understand. Birdsong inspired lmagical languages and the practice of whistling.  Those who could understand the language of birds were diviners, honey guides and trailblazers. Number me among the listners.

Dark moon in Taurus

How bright the Southern Cross galaxies sparkle in the absence of the moon! The skies are black as charcoal until the stars come out to play. On 25 April it will be the Dark Moon in Taurus. I look around the windblasted garden, with wintry gales blowing down from the north, and wonder if I can use more trailing ivy for my rituals. Not in synchrony with the Bull perhaps.

 

Taurus is my personal symbol for the Minotaur and I always glance back just briefly here at my father, who thought of himself as a monster trapped in a labyrinth. Reclaiming the maze, the spirals and puzzles of intricate living, has been my own way of taking back power. I have unwound my red thread through many tunnels and mined the archaeology of hidden places with no visible doorways. And have been led up out of the labyrinthine passages and stairwells into the sunlight more than once, breathing in grace and wonder like pure blue oxygen.

 

And, no longer in hate with him, I can admit I am my father;s daughter in some respects, a lover of the great stubborn oxen of the veld and the bull pierced and bleeding in the ring. An indomitable beast but noble even in perversity. And I have a stubborn nature.

 

So there is the Taurean moon, slow and haunched over the skyline, just a rim of light showing. I shall once again enter the red tunnels, the womb-like places, the underground of the questing psyche. Right now I am living through transition ( how the autumnal thunder cracks and growls as I sit here at the laptop, the smell of fizzled electricity like blue gunpowder) and the Sabian symbol for this dark moon in Taurus is a cantilevered bridge thrown over a gorge. Transit to another element, another high place. That does not concur with my need to burrow, but in my mind’s eye I can see Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, the scaffolding and uncertainty.

 

I think of voting in South African elections yesterday and the laughing trickster at the helm — I think of the long patient queues of the elderly and women with crying babies. And that what will happen will happen. The fine scarlet thread wound around my finger, the link to the Underworld, the means of retracing my steps from below, across that split bridge with its slab thrown wide, the chasm below. And in my mind’s eye I am driving the patient ox, garlanded in silks and trustworthy.

Eye bright

Yesterday I underwent eye surgery, fraught because I have a fragmenting retina and cheloid scarring. Very rapid procedure and now I am resting the eye for a few days, lying in bed and listening to Beethoven’s Quartets, powerful, brutal, tender music.

 

During the night I dreamt I was making an infusion of rue to drink while my eyes were bandaged. When I woke up I consulted a homeopathic remedy manual  and found that rue distillations may be helpful for inflamed eyes.  So I went out into the garden with gloves ( I have become hypersensitive to touching rue in this last year) and picked a few leaves to make a tisane, with honey and a little grated ginger to take the edge off the bitterness.

Of course I am taking antibiotics and I have analgesics for inflammation. I cannot risk a serious eye infection and modern medicine, blunted and harsh in many respects, is also necessary when warding off certain infections. But herbal infusions and extracts are my wild card; they help to revive and stimulate the subtler energies and mitigate after-effects, working very gently and helping me treat myself in non-hermful and reassuring ways. I would use bilberries but have none, another traditional treatment like eye bright.

 

There are local indigenous remedies for eye diseases that use herbs and roots from the Karoo and fynbos or renosterbos, but I am wary of them because all plants grown in the fierce sun and baked soils out here are very strong and I have no reliable guide to measurements or safe quantities. Many have powerful diuretic effects or purgative qualities and we are not going there, oh no.

My vision is brighter and sharper but with nasty black floaters and my near-vision is still distorted. My eye feels very tired and I wish I could sleep more easily during the day. Out in the garden there is a rainy sweet-smelling wind and I would love to go for a walk, breathing in the new smells of autumn. I may not be able to go out to the berry farm for an alfrsco lunch tomorrow after I have voted. National elections — but I am not going to talk about that, the sense of unhappy compromise that dogs this election in the beloved country. I will stay in bed and listen to Beethoven, letting the emotions roar in me like a tumultuous ocean.

Song of the intimate: Deborah Digges

So sad to see one of my favourite poets dead: Deborah Digges of suicide at 59.

 

And who of us has not stood on that cliff above the sea?

 

My life's calling, setting fires. 
Here in a hearth so huge 
I can stand inside and shove 
the wood around with my 
bare hands while church bells
deal the hours down through 
the chimney. No more 
woodcutter, creel for the fire 
or architect, the five staves 
pitched like rifles over stone. 
But to be mistro-elemental. 
The flute of clay playing
my breath that riles the flames, 
the fire risen to such dreaming 
sung once from landlords' attics.
Sung once the broken lyres, 
seasoned and green. 
Even the few things I might save, 
my mother's letters, 
locks of my children's hair 
here handed over like the keys 
to a foreclosure, my robes 
remanded, and furniture
dragged out into the yard,
my bedsheets hoisted up the pine, 
whereby the house sets sail. 
And I am standing on a cliff 
above the sea, a paper light, 
a lantern. No longer mine 
to count the wrecks. 
Who rode the ships in ringing, 
marrying rock the waters 
storm to break the door, 
looked through the fire, beheld 
a clearing there. This is what 
you are. What you've come to.

Rainy season

It began raining sometime towards dawn, a steady downpour of cold rain. I woke and knew by the smell of the parched garden suddenly soaked and revivified that the rainy season had begun. Here in the Cape this is a winter-rainfall region and much depends on the sufficiency of winter rains. If there is no rain, the levels of the Elandskloof dam will drop and we shall have water rationing, the rivers will be baked mud and pebbles, the crops will shrivel in the fields. A terrible summer will lie ahead with no water for gardens or orchards, and people queuing for rations from the water trucks. The water wars of southern Africa are so far mostly skirmishes over the installation of water meters forcing the poor to pay for water at exorbitant rates while industry wastes tonnes of water and more golf courses are built each year across the brown arid veld. But worse will come as the desertification of Africa continues.

 

When I first came to live in the Cape I could not get used to the fierce and relentless winter rains, the flooded streets and galeforce winds, the storms that blew shipping into havoc in Table Bay, the oaks and Cape chestnut trees uprooted. I had grown up in countries without winters, the lush swampy tropics of Kenya and Zimbabwe and I knew only the burning monsoons of Mombasa, the endless sunshine of the Zimbabwean kopjes.

The climate has changed since then; winters now are as windy but less wet and often a drought follows flash floods and unseasonal heat. Like the rest of the world, our weather has become unpredictable and more extreme.

 

But for two years now there have been good winter rains and the farming communities have rejoiced. So today I went out into the saturated garden and churning red mud to make a wish for the winter to come. The ground a crazy quilt of fallen leaves, the bushes dripping and glinting in the grey light. Rain is resurrection in Africa, it is promise and renewal, never taken for granted. I shall bring out my rain-water barrel next week and then I shall be able to wash my hair in water soft as silk and store great milk churns of precious water for the cold dry days when the sky is cloudless and the sun like a small hard grimace in the skies above.

Loving Samuel

My nights are taken up with the first volume of the Letters of Samuel Beckett and I am so enthralled (all over again) with his bleak but bracing vision that I wander around muttering phrases and lines from letters as I dip my puppies to ward off parasites, and make up food parcels, and dust tables and shelves in an unmindful way. I have been here before: reading Murphy as I walked home from Kingston’s corner bookshop and pausing under flamboyant trees to get the ring of the sentences. Sitting in a darkened theatre and watching two dishevelled tramps on a stage, goosebumps running up and down my arms as I heard the unanswerable questions of Waiting for Godot. Listening to a radio broadcast of Endgame, the soliloquies on despair.

To try again and fail better.

The young Beckett is gaunt and hungry and restless. Full of lively obscenities and jokes and self-deprecating comments. He sits lightly to his own polyglot erudition. Footloose and penurious in a Europe on the brink of war, he spends a great deal of time listening to music and looking at artworks (many of which disappeared in the conflagrations of World War II). He reads widely and deeply, noting his response to Proust, Holderlin and Fielding. He works for James Joyce (Shem the Penman) on Finnegans Wake while trifling with Joyce’s disturbed daughter Lucia, something he will live to regret. He grieves almost wordlessly over his father dying at the age of 61. He grieves too when his fat asthmatic dog dies at the age of 10. He excuses the debts of his hard-up friends. He goes into psychoanalysis with the great Wilfred Bion and is able to acknowledge of his difficult mother: ‘her savage loving has made me what I am’. His creative work is rejected by publisher after publisher. He fears he is unemployable.

This scrupulous but somehow freewheeling education of a writer reminds me in so many ways of the apprenticeship many of us have undertaken in the ways of the Craft. (I can see the pedantic editors of the Beckett oeuvre raising their eyebrows in condescension. Never mind.). But I think of myself memorising books on dendrology back in 1996 so that I might recognise a particular quiver tree in the deserts of the Northern Cape where the mist banks are called malmokkies. Writing long and sometimes despairing letters to other hedgewitches. What were we to call ourselves when no words exist for this kind of becoming? Learning from the gracious animals who shared our lives for too brief a space. Travelling, and searching out the forgotten folk lore  and leylines of old drovers’ roads and Roman bridges. Visiting museums and looking at ancient verdegris goblets and playing cards locked away in glass cabinets. Learning to grow herbs and cook vegan dishes to entice carnivores. Learning deep ecology, beginning with the tree next door. Making pilgrimages to Knossos and Stonehenge or the Kalahari Gemsbok Park, and the Dorset village where Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Valentine Ackland lived, the Grasmere cottage where Dorothy Wordsworth  wrote her nature notes.

 

An ongoing apprenticeship. And along the way many of us became writers and artists and musicians and botanists and healers. Astrologers and herbalists. But we also became whatever it is we call ourselves when the dark moon lures us out into the garden once a month.

A queer farewell: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

 

Back in the 1980s in a country consumed with the struggle against apartheid, I found a book right at the back of a section on feminist literary criticism, entitled Epistemology of the Closet.

 

I opened the book and began reading about something I had always known but never seen described before: hidden same-sex desire in literature. That men talk to men, connect with men, hunger after and struggle with, and enduringly love other men in the most heterosexual of novels and poems. Here was a queer but apparently heterosexual woman talking about having a queer eye for the straight guys, smashing through the old labels and boundaries and turning Proust on his head.

 

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, trailburner and queer academic and artist,  taught me to read defiant desire into the text, to discover flagrant otherness already there and waiting for me to notice. By the time I read Tendencies, I knew she was batling breast cancer with courage and gaiety. I read something about her living each day with a ‘teaspoonful of energy’ and thought of her often.

 

And now she is dead. A close friend comments:

“According to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying — which Evie did a seminar on, at Duke — she will be in the Bardo of Becoming for 40 days after the cessation of respiration. According to her belief, thoughts and prayers of the living will steady her soul as she passes through the bardos to the next life. And there _will_ be a next life.”

 

Hamba kahle Eve, go bravely and with steady step. Thank you for sharing the vision.

Fire and apples

In this valley we have a warmhearted but haphazard barter exchange system going for food produce. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn’t, but it means that we have food in the house when there is no money in the bank.

 

Right now I have rows of jars of quince jelly and a truly unspeakable sticky peach jam in a tall cannister. A handful of spring onions, some mint, two oxheart tomatoes. In return I have given over portions of lamb casserole in tupperware and bunches of fresh herbs (parsley, coriander, origanum), the last of the figs and some lemons. In addition, a bonus, I have half a large white organic pumpkin and some clean tripe in a tin basin. Oh yes, the joy of dealing with offal in the country.

Because the terms of the barter are fairly open-ended to allow poorer people to participate, we have to work with what is there. Over the last four years I have come to understand how to cook through gluts of certain produce (peaches, butternut, large brown-skinned onions) and shortages and how to simply cook and eat what may not appeal to me that particular day. If I have lemons and garlic and black pepper in the kitchen, I can cook almost anything.

I live in a part of the world that suffers terrific water shortages, so I do square-foot gardening in a raised wooden slatted fruit pallet, lined with hessian and filled with compost and good nutrient-rich soil. Intensive gardening of Swiss chard (hugely rewarding) and herbs and bush tomatoes and small compact shrubs of chillies. Right now I am more interested in a very pretty mottled small snail that has eaten a seeding basil plant, waving  and gesturing with its viridian horns. A beauty.

The key function of the (unwatered, drought-tolerant) garden is as a wildlife habitat along with being a kitchen garden. It is a refuge for chameleons and spiders and cobras and dozens of bird species. A place for rare medicinal herbs and threatened fynbos species and waterwise stoics that will carry the green space through a severe drought.

I love wilderness. Not in a sentimental or romantic way, because my small garden’s wilder aspects are not going to change the destruction of my local landscape, the sprawl of invasive species, the extinction of insects and wildlife, the hazards of monocropping with GM.

 

But in amongst the grey olives underplanted with restios, the elders and tulip trees (Halleria lucida), the polygalas and plumbago, the salvias and daylilies, the tumbling fragrant cistus, lavender, rosemary and viburnums, there is space for anything to happen. That is the delight and the mystery. My agapanthus has rooted deeply and the roots retain banks of earth against walls thrown up by neighbours. There are lizards and geckos and ant colonies and dragonflies. Bulbs that throw up delicate stems and scarlet or mauve flowers, grey and weaving helichrysum, durable succulents. It is a companionable garden and a place of learning for me. I can sit and watch the golden moles at the far corner aerate the earth with savvy tunnels, I can listen to white-eyes chirping  in the lemon tree, I can see fennel’s umbellifer seedheads drying in the sunshine. Nature is not utilitarian, nature is Herself, abundant or raging or struggling or fighting back, diminished or depleted or driven out, to revive again elsewhere. And these years are blessed, to be able to live here and let my garden become a sanctuary.

This is the first space in which I have been able to hand the garden back to Nature, to dig up water-guzzling lawn, throw out stiff formal roses, plant trees and berry-bearing bushes. If I am the only one changed by the experience, challenged and renewed, it will still be worth it. Deep eco-magick takes time and experience.

In previous years I created hanging gardens on balconies, passionflower climbers on bamboo trellises that gave me armfuls of dark purple grenadillas, a wilful courgette that overran its barrel, pots of juicy nasturtiums, pelargoniums and a sedate bay tree. I have crowded kitchen and bathroom window sills with pots of tarragon, Italian flat-leaf parsley and banana chillies. Shared bedroom spaces with lush birdsnest ferns or damp-loving orchids, allowed plump rambling blue-grey succulents to monopolise bookshelves and fireplace mantels.

 

And in the evenings I sit by the fire and look at light reflected in a bowlful of autumn-red apples, and want to throw open doors and windows to the garden, allow creepers to edge along dada rails and across ceilings, share the bath with jewelled African violets or sheets of Spanish moss and be greeted in the mornings by air plants, the enchanting tillandia, tangling with door jambs.

 

Re-entering the forest, the recurring paleo dream of womanpower before civilisation. O such mytho-poetic joy! Now I must go and scrub tripe with a little nail brush.