Fleeing Muses

Resolutions

2012-01-30T14:19:00.000+02:00

This year I will colour outside the lines.
I will tell instead of showing,
if I feel like it.
I will use adverbs
wherever the hell I please
and be as general as I want
when writing descriptions.

I may not write every day.
What do you care?

Maybe I'll edit, rewrite and revise.
And maybe I bloody well won't.

Will I think of the reader at all times?
No, that freaks the shit out of me.
I'll pay attention to the voices in my head
and see where that gets me.

and the one thing
I definitely won't be doing
is reading those damn advice to writers pages.

Reza

2012-01-28T15:16:00.001+02:00

Everyone will have their stories of her. Everyone who knew her, workedwith her or was taught by her will have some little anecdote or snapshot thatthey will tell in tribute of her. Students discussed her endlessly, trying topin down what she was really. People wanted to get a handle on her. Theywanted words. Like Eccentric. Ethereal. Touched. Brilliant. Alchemist.Sorcerer.

For me the word that has been chiming in my head all day is lucent.She was just… lucent.

We all have our stories. These are mine.

1992: First year. End of year drama exam. I have not studied, I cannotremember much of the blur of theatre history lectures. But one of the questionsis on Noh theatre, and the essay I write comes out whole, intact, as I recallher lectures on Noh. She embodied the form, breathed the detail into us, sovivid, so enraptured. I remember every precise moment.

1993. Second year. My first acting class. The moment has arrived.Class with the fabled Reza de Wet. Nervous but oh so cool students cluster on theRhodes Theatre stage. She is - shell like, those Noh gestures that we’dlater understand as trademark, the fragility that we’d later realise wasrobustness. The transparent skin. The wicked laugh. She’s telling us tolisten, and to hear the mouse. There’s a mouse, she says…can you hear it?Shuffling and giggles, and then the silence as some of us get it and yes – Ican hear the mouse, scratching under the floorboards. Yes, there it is, yourmouse is over there, and it’s a shy mouse, or a frenetic mouse…she’s tellingeach person when they have heard the mouse and what kind of mouse it is.

That same lesson, the first one. 'Now stand… here on the stage.Stand…and look up at your feet. Stand….and look up at your feet.' In that onemagical marvellous moment, the world swings around, and I am, I am looking upat my feet. My head is down, I am clinging on to the planet with my toes,thoughts and hair and gravity streaming out of my head, and holding on by thegrace of who knows what… and then a raucous laugh as she sees it happening, andit dissolves. I am upright again.

Something deep inside me clunks into place like the sound of a safedoor finding its combination lock groove. I am here, I am in the right place.Thank God I ended up studying here.

That was second year. The year she berated me for shaving off my hair.Your hair is your antenna, she tells me crossly.

1994. Third year.

While the whole country is shifting around us, the first democraticelections are being held, those wonderful photographs being taken of queuessnaking outside voting stations and breaths being held about whether or notwe’ll make it over the transition, I am not in

South Africa

. Well I am, but onlyin body. For the rest, I am in the Russian countryside somewhere. Outside, acherry orchard is being threatened and I am ‘whining about going to Moscow’ asRichard E Grant memorably puts it in Withnail and I. Varya. And the joyfuldelight that Reza gets when we actually manage to give Yepikhodov a pair ofsqueaky shoes. In retrospect, I am not learning about acting, as my third yearself would believe. I am learning about writing. For Reza, Chekhov was morethan a muse, he was a regular visitor and adviser. But I am not learning fromChekhov. I am learning from her.

And she suggests I do an Ophelia for my 3^rd year end ofyear piece. Together we explore a multiple-personality, nervous, crass,eager-to-please Ophelia. Too interpretive, too conceptual, it bombs. But I knowshe fought in my corner with the external examiner.

1997-98.

When Reza was supervisor for my MA our visits were not frequent. Theydidn’t need to be. They were potent instead. I’m not sure that she reallyapproved of the directions my meandering research was taking me, too politicalfor her sensibilities, I’m sure. She’d have wanted me to delve into themysteries of the mask work I was researching (the gule wa mkulu masquerades),and I couldn’t, I had to talk about representation and identity and outsiderethnographies. But when we sat together in the office of the Anthropologydepartment and that Professor was grilling me about why this should fall undera drama research enquiry instead of an anthropological one, she fought in mycorner fiercely. Or would that be flirted? She endured the brutal espresso heprepared for us, gasping weakly for a little milk.

I will remember her in the latticed shadow of that room in her housewhere she saw visitors, afternoon light striking her sideways, she might havebeen a collection of dust-mites, she seemed to be dematerialising in the East Cape light. Butalso not. Also, more present than most people are capable of. She told me abouta plant that she had been sitting next to for many consecutive afternoons thatsummer. How this plant finally, one evening, gave itself up to her, and emanatedits essence to her, just released its …essence for her. Except she put itbetter than that.

We who liked to think we knew her thought we could see past theethereal, chaotic, discombobulated exterior she projected, we liked to saythings like, oh but that’s just for show, she’s really very grounded, its partof her mask, actually she’s really very organised. And things like that. But ofcourse she was much better at escaping definition than any of us were atpinning one on her.

When the visiting psychic came and we were only allowed one questioneach, and we sat, bristling with questions in the theatre auditorium, her onequestion was, “what is it I need to know?” Sensible to the core, where itmattered.

She was all the stories and myths that we spun around her. And she wasnone of them. I recently read of Oscar Wilde that he said “What is true about aman’s life is not what he does, but the legend he creates around himself… Youmust never destroy legends; it is through them we’re given a glimpse of thereal face of a man.” I think she got this on a fundamental level. But it wasinstinctive, never contrived.

1999

Now we are colleagues, we work in the same department and fights brewand simmer about workloads and contact hours. I remember one, in particular.Not the content, just the feeling, the hot explosive feeling of a small,intimate, family vibe staff meeting where things have been left unsaid for solong and emotions simmer under the surface. And her shock, her incomprehensionthat these are spilling over. Of course an empty office with her name on it ismore important than workloads. Of course it doesn’t matter that she hardlyteaches anymore and takes mysterious time off to write plays. I get it now thatmy youthful arrogance has simmered away. I also know now what that’s like, trying to juggle the student load andthe desperate need to fence off the headspace for writing. It must have been anenormous strain.

In the design studio, sometime in 1999, she is cranking up the wheezyold computer that we both had access to for email. After my grandfather died Idreamed about elephants almost every night for a year. I theorise endlessly toanyone who will listen. What does it mean? What do they want? She fixes thateye on me and says, “They want you to write about them”.

And when I did, when there was a production of one of my wobbly firstplays, she came to me after opening night, and asked me, laughing “Well howdoes it feel?” There was so much in that laugh and that question. Thegenerosity of asking it, the understanding, the knowledge that it’s a weird,mixed up bemused feeling at best. The way she had of never actually givingfeedback yet somehow imbuing you with the eye to be your own best critic.

Because today, this morning, from about 9.00am, I was hot and botheredand flustered and angry. My son was having a bad day and clingy and needy.Yesterday I discovered a script, 15 pages fragment of something I thought I hadlost in the first laptop heist. A draft, a fragment, but something that is worthspending some time on. And I am berating myself, in the car, for the time lost.It’s been 16 years, I say to myself, 16 years since I graduated from honours,and where is the work? Where are the plays, the novels, the stories I wassupposed to have put out there by now? And I know that it’s all about the waymundanity seeps through the cracks. Domestic creep. Choosing this over that.Grocery shopping over an hour at the desk. TV over reading. I think of Reza,and understand the fierceness that you need to protect that time. That to be awriter you need to be soft and open and whimsical, but also growling and toughand uncompromising.

And then, an hour later I hear this news. That this great mind, thislucent, embodied soul has hatched into her next phase of being. And I feel soso lucky to have had the time I did. I knew she was sick (only three monthsago, it happened so quickly) but I imagined her fighting it with that quirkyvitality, that cloudy luminescence.

Another random memory – 2003. I’ve not lived in Grahamstown for over adecade. It’s the end of festival, my show is done, its late at night, I’mpartying at Guy’s house. Earlier that day I bought two copper snake braceletsfrom a hippie near the bowling club. The kind you wear high up on your arm. Ahealing snake. A random impulse grabs me. I head out into the cold and up thefamiliar road to Reza’s house, a walk I can do in my sleep coz I used to livenext door to her, and –actually I run, it feels like one of those moments whenthe spirit grips you and you have to obey. I’m not really on popping in termswith the de Wet Reardons any more – its been ages. But there they are, awake,and talking through the festival fare that they have watched – what has beenmost nourishing, what’s bland and soulless. I’m breathless in the doorway, andI hand her the copper snake – “I bought this today, I didn’t know why I neededtwo, but here, it’s for you. It’s definitely for you.” And she graciouslyinvited me in for a midnight cup oftea.

I will remember her smile.

I will remember those hazel-hectic eyes, one searching within, onewithout.

I will remember her cranky blue Mazda which she famously drove infirst gear and could never reverse.

I will remember the way she tasted the words as she inhaled before speaking.

I will remember her multi-coloured coat.

I will remember the last time I saw her, at the Drostdy Arch after aButoh performance, a couple of days before her second grandchild was born. Shehad that deep soul-satisfied look that she got after seeing a performance thatfilled her up, as if the air around her had suddenly become delicious.

And from yesterday’s Facebook tributes, these are some things thatothers remember:

“I'll never forget Reza stopping me onthe stairs in the drama department one day. "Timothy you need to movetoward light. Stay away from all this dark shit." It wasn't hollow adviceand I did not miss in her sentiment a great deal of sincere concern for mysoul. And that's how I saw Reza; A Sorceress deeply involved in the world on anethereal level beyond my understanding.” –TimRedpath

‎'See the art within yourself, not yourself within the art' -Reza de Wet. RIP. Thank you.

'She made her mark like a kaleidoscope' - Fernande Wybenga

And is it arrogant to ask, now that sheis in the great cherry orchard in the sky, that she may pay us the occasionalfleeting visit as Chekhov did with her?

Rhinos

2012-01-08T22:55:00.002+02:00

Chibembe, sometime in the late 1970's
My first writing assignment, the first to give me a fair wobble of stress and publishing angst, was an essay about my day, or about something from my daily days. It was a school assignment, back in the days when my mother home-schooled us via correspondence course. We agreed that I would write about a game drive. That was a typical thing we did, game drives. I remember the drive in sharp detail - that riverine road between Chibembe and Nsefu lodges. Scratchy tawny plains in between. We saw seven rhinos that day, including two calves. I didn't want to write the story about our game drive. I had an uneasy feeling about doing something so important as setting pen to paper and making words and a story about something so mundane as a game drive, and one in which no leopards were to be seen. Just boring old rhino. I think I overcame the problem by dictating the story to my mother and she wrote it down. I was suspicious of authorship, even at six years old.

Mfuwe Lodge, South Luangwa, circa 1982.
Mom wakes us early to look at the two male rhinos fighting. Locked in a struggle, in the middle of the sloshy, muddy lagoon. They try to circle one another at the pace of glaciers melting. They make strange noises I haven't heard rhinos make before. Its a Sight. A Gargantuan Battle, says one of the grown ups. They are there so long we eventually get bored of looking and go back to throwing wild mangoes at the monkeys.

On the Baobab road, circa 1983
A rhino has been poached. In the National Park and everything, so brazen. Its horns have been hacked out of its skull. Really there is no better use for the word. Hacked. I peer into the cavity of the vulture-shit-streaked hull. Inside, there are maggots. Many swarming, teeming, writhing maggots. Phil Berry, proper in his khakhi knee-highs, counts the number of maggot species. More than 11 different kinds of maggots in that rhino's belly.

On the Chinzombo road, mid 1980's
Patrick was always up for a wrestle or a wrangle, whether with a Land Rover wheel or a black-necked spitting cobra. Preferably an encounter that involved some kind of injury. I don't know if these moments helped him to be more successful with women than he would have otherwise been, but the arm-in-a-sling look was big with him. Naturally he was delighted to hear that a rhino calf had been spotted on the Chinzombo road. Ropes and lassoing and loading it onto the back of the vehicle and maybe a somersault in the air off its back, rodeo style. I wonder what happened to that baby rhino. Perhaps it got to the Frankfurt Zoo.

The Breakfast Table, mid 1980's
They are starting a thing called Save the Rhino Trust. My grandfather is asking us kids for catchy slogans. They will be making T shirts. They will be going on patrol and stuff, to try to catch poachers, but they also need to do something called Creating Awareness. Spreading the Message. So that other people who don't have rhinos on their back doorstep will care about the rhinos getting poached. Chantal suggests "My Horn is My Dilemma". She has to explain it to me. Even at nine years old I know that this slogan is not going to cut it.

The Wildlife offices, circa 1986
My mom and dad and David and Judy and Derek and Bev Joubert are making a documentary together. Its all arty and stylish Peter Beardish, but its about hunting and wildlife and human's fascination with killing animals. They ask permission to photograph the skulls at the Wildlife Offices. Piles and piles pf elephant and rhino skulls, picked up On Patrol. There's a photo of me sitting on the step of that piled high room of skulls. My face is sad.

A half-term break, circa 1987
Debbie swears she sees a rhino in the half light, that gloaming time when were are driving fast to get home and not really game viewing anymore and the combretum bushes obscure everything on the side of the road. We reverse to look but no-one else sees anything. I, for one, think she must have been mistaken. You never see rhino here any more.It happened so quickly. Really, before anyone could really mobilize properly or come up with a decent slogan. That was in the South Luangwa National Park, where they no longer exist. In less than a decade. It is happening in South Africa right now as we speak. It really doesn't take long. I, for one, will really miss them. But no-one has time to care.

The easy part

2011-10-21T13:20:00.004+02:00

Disclaimer: this is part three: very long and erm, laborious.

After the walk Xoli puts on her rubber gloves again and I try not to punch her lights out while she fiddles around in the heart of the storm. Eye of the storm is what they say though, isn’t it? Still not, she tells my sinking heart. Then, she’s frowning…Sorry…her fingers probe my depths and I want to cry. She looks at me. She’s released something. There was a clench. Or something. I just went from 0 to 3 in under a second. They give racing drivers medals for stuff like that.

The next hours are a blur. Images through smeared glass. Some vomiting, some walking. Some squatting. And then: you have only progressed one cm in three hours. The world flattens out when I hear this. It’s truly discouraging. Everything is through thick sheets of glass. Underwater.

These are your options, she is saying. We can wait, walk some more, keep active. Or break the membranes … put you on an oxytocin drip to speed up the contractions. I don’t want to do that but you may have to. Something about Dr Mia and the length of time you are “allowed” to labour before they want to intervene.

They call in Elizabeth, she’s a doula. Her touch is angelic. Hands on my sacrum. Feathery stroking of hair and shoulders. Ntombi is here now. Angel. Music, sitting on the ball. Light touch brings relief, endorphins. How do you feel, asks the gentle Elizabeth. I feel like I’m on drugs. Good, she says. Beautiful, these amazing women. Bernd is relieved too, I’m aware of his unclenching. Elizabeth says I’m holding it in my shoulders each time (Of course I’m fucking holding it in my shoulders). On the ball, leaning forward. Easy. Oh, this is good, can I stay here….

Problem.

This sitting business. On the ball, on the stool, leaning forward, the contractions ease off. It feels good. But, um…its not bringing the baby any bloody closer is it? I’ve got to walk again.

Bernd walks me with the patience and humour required to support a doddering geriatric. From the white wall to the hedge with yellow flowers. From the hedge with yellow flowers to the metal pole of the washing line. Step. Grind of bowlingball on pelvis. Step. Surge. Lean. Breathe. Or round the jungle gym outside, sunlight braai-ing my eyeballs. Walking around a jungle gym the size of a small bathroom feels like the Otter Trail.

Writing this now, looking at the notes I wrote a few days after, the writer in me is asking me to edit, cut, package, put in sub-headings. But the teacher in me wants you to feel it – how boring and protracted this birthing business can be.

When they check me again I’m about 5cm. We’re trying to get to ten, remember. And my waters still haven’t broken. But always, every time they check, the baby’s heartbeat steady as it was in all the weekly check-ups. Patient fellow. Another walk to Zoo Lake with the gentle Ntombi. Dimly aware of how this must appear – this strange slow animal presence, a woman squatting on the side of the road. I feel invisible though, like I’m in another dimension.

Back in the cool dark of the Genesis room (I’m hot, then cold, then thirsty then hungry then vomiting. And very very tired.) I squat. And suddenly there’s a gush. Waters breaking at last. But I’m still only five cm and only one layer of membranes has broken. Ntombi’s voice is serious now. We have to get these contractions to progress. She has to break the second layer. And the oxytocin drip. She’s worried I won’t have enough energy for the push. The push? What’s this push everyone keeps talking about? Oh yeah, I remember now. There’s a baby coming. I’m going to have to push a baby out of me.

She says to have a sleep. An afternoon nap, as it were. Bernd suggests the rainbow relaxation CD. Good idea. I sleep, dimly aware of the tickticktick of Bernd playing Quadrapop on his phone. When I wake I am determined, fresh, clear. I am going to walk around that jungle gym one more time, dammit.

Actually my sequence is totally out. I don’t know in what order this happened: sleeping, walking, Ntombi breaking the membranes, Bernd’s tense voice saying I must walk when all I can do is lie there and moo like a buffalo. Hushed voices around me. Deep in my sleep remembering Ntombi saying I must get my head in the right place for the next phase.

Yes, that’s it – that echoes in my sleep and when I wake I go walking, on my own this time. Get back to the room and the clouds part in my head. Of course. There’s a next phase. I have to do this. No one else can do this. The drip. I need the drip. Lets do it.

As she’s getting needles and tubes lined up I say, I’m scared. I have some fear.
Ok, she says. What is the fear?
That it will get too intense for me to handle.
The pain?
Yes, the pain. (yes, I will use the word. The Pain)
She tells me my Plan A pain relief is the bath: getting in the water helps.
Plan B – I can ask for Pethedine. But remember, you need to welcome the pain. You have to have the intense contractions, that’s what you need.
Ok. Ok. Lets do it.

I waddle to where Bernd is sitting outside. I’m going to do the drip, I say.
Good, he says. Everyone is concerned. I’m concerned.
Its ok, I say. Its going to be ok.

Ntombi tells me I am surfing very close to Dr Mia’s cut-off point. Or, his cut point, as it were. I don't want to be cut. Lets have tried everything, she said. I’m prepared to push it a little past that point because I know this is what you want.
Yes. This is what I want. And always, the baby’s heartbeat, so steady.

Within minutes of having the needle in the back of my hand the waves come thick and fast. Yes, its intense, but I realise that what was wrong before was that they were so irregular. Now each one lasts for exactly three breaths: the first is the gathering swell, the middle one is the peak, the third helps to ebb it away. Its just me and my breath now. No sightseeing on this heavy weather surf. Ntombi’s voice saying you need this pain its helping you. Welcome the pain. My voice, at some point, saying everyone switch off your phones. Now.

In no time, I get that need-to-poo feeling they spoke of. I want to push. And waiting for them to bustle around and fill the bath seems to take longer than the whole labour so far. I need to push Now guys, like really Now. Hurry the fuck up.

I don’t know how I got into the water but I’m here now. Candles. Cool. Yoga CD. id I ask for that? Oh look that’s weird, there’s Monica from the health store, what’s she doing here? Doula on duty. She has a night job. Hi Monica. Bernd and I touch fingertips, lock eyes. Here’s another one. In out in out in out. Done. And again.

Ok, work with the contractions, use all your energy to push as if you are going to do a poo. I hear Miranda’s voice in my head: chin into your chest and puuuuush. I breathe in and make a kind of grunty rattle sound. Ntombi says that one was in your throat. Push right down into your bum.

I’m getting it now. Three pushes per contraction and a tiny rest in between. Actually, no rest in between. Just enough time to refuel on oxygen before the next ten-footer comes bearing down on me. Bernd keeps shoving the straw in my dry mouth. I want to drink but need the air first. It takes about ten rounds before I manage to make the words: breathe first then drink.

Ntombi’s voice my anchor: “brilliant Tamara, you’re doing so well. Keep going.” The repetition bouys me along.

Change to a squat. Sometimes the wave knocks a sob out of me as it comes. Push push push, breathe, sip – and again.

Eventually a new feeling – stinging, burning. Baby’s coming says Xoli. Ntombi: Push past the ring of fire. Push past that burning ring. I know what she means but that burning ring doesn’t feel like it has a beyond. At some point I feel sure that I have done enough and can stop. Someone else must please finish up for me. I’ve done my best.

Xoli says, I can feel his head. Next time, put your fingers here and feel his head. I expect to feel more than the puny 50c coin size that I can feel. Am I only that far?

Now its serious business pushing. Ntombi’s voice, the music – the yoga CD. Long Time Sun. Ah well, so he won’t be born to that song…..

Push Tamara you're doing so well push past the burning ring you're doing so well baby’s coming.

I PUSH and I push and I push. Now I can really feel him coming. I’ve never worked so hard or wanted anything so so much. I push as if my life depends on it. My life does depend on it. So does his. Two lives. Lets go.

At some point, I know, this is it, its coming. When that round is finished, I gasp – oh no he’s gone back in!
Its ok, you’ve stretched, next time he’ll come further.
Its true. Next time he does.
And the time after that a tiny bit more.
And then many times when its just in one place. Then more.
And then they’re telling me to pant like a dog. And I do.
I push – the biggest one, like I’m trying to get an overland truck up the hill all by myself. Still not.
Again.
Again.
And then it happens. He is out. And the rest of him slithers out like a slippery fish and now they’re putting him on my chest all pink and white and yellow and red and I’m behind three layers of glass but there he is. I have done it.
Now Xoli vacuums his little nose.

Now she says “I’m not quite happy” and the world swims away from me. There’s a pause the length of the entire day. What?

The cord is around his foot, tightly wrapped three times. She unwraps it, he kicks like a foal. My baby is here. He’s on me, so quick. That was so easy, I think. Someone says what’s the time. 9.55.
Bernd cuts the cord. Red and blue gristle, like electrical wire.

Now they’ve taken him already, he’s being measured and weighed.
He’s with Bernd while they help me deliver the placenta. Its such a rich dark velvety colour, its veins like embroidered seams. I want to thank it. I understand why people worship it – it seems alive. No calcification. My date of the 17th was correct, in spite of what the gynae said.

I’m in the shower now. They check me. I haven’t torn. I stink like a beer-drinking pheromone sipping dock worker. There’s a mushy substance between my legs. I realise its my vagina. Numb. Still underwater in that glassy world. I am being taken to the bed now, where Bernd has my son. They put him on my breast.

I have nothing. No feeling no emotion no tiredness no elation no sadness no flatness. The glassy world. Bernd is in love, this I see and I know this is good. But I feel as if I have also pushed myself out into the bathwater.

Nothing will ever be the same again. I suppose I sleep. I know I phoned my mother, but when I couldn't say. When I wake my shoulders are frozen cold. I close the window. The 4 am glassy light coats the glass. I go back to bed and lie next to my baby. I am also born. I will love this child forever. A neat line divides my life into what was before, and what is now.

I have a child.

And now, a year later I know that that was the easy part.

A piece of cake

2011-10-18T11:15:00.008+02:00

It's never taken me this long to make a cake. Every time I remember where I am in the process another contraction sweeps me away. I am also repacking the bag I packed last week because I don't trust anything that I did last week. Anything I felt before this morning must have been wrong. That phrase, take the rug out beneath your feet? Yeah, like that, except its the deserted wilderness and the whole ground is being pulled out from under me as I walk.

Everything is changing.

But I must make this cake.

Where was I?

Gluten free flour. Sugar. Butter. Where's the recipe gone? Woah. Steady now. Breathe. Did you write that one down? Its 20 minutes now in between. Or is it still 25? Did you write that last one down? Is it ten actually? Oh sod it. 150 g of butter. How much is that in Tablespoons? Where's the recipe gone? Do I have enough juice in my bag? Will I be thirsty? Am I thirsty now? Where the hell is my husband? Why isn't he writing down the contractions? I still need to make a group on my Blackberry of people to sms when .... woah. Ok. breathe. breathe. breathe.

Dammit I must finish this cake. The phone, the phone. Who gets a new phone the day before they go into labour? How does this damn thing work anyway? The timer. Time your contractions on the timer. Is that the timer or the stopwatch? What the hell is the difference? Oh shit, I'm getting stressy. Don't get stressy, be in the moment. be in the moment. Make the cake. Make the cake.

In my notebook for the 18th October 2010, it says:
"Beautiful crazy day. Blood/birth/mucus show at 9ish.
Music. baking.
Bath.
Surges mostly 40 minutes apart then 30.
Sex! good sex.
Bit more blood. Is that ok?
Cake. Trying to make a bloody cake. Bernd funny and wonderful and hilarious."

There's a stringy list of times that get closer together, some in Bernd's handwriting some in mine. Then at about 6:30 they are 5 minutes apart and I write that I'm going to sms the midwife. Also: the cake is done. The cake that I started at 11 o'clock that morning. Put the cake under foil. Put the icing in the fridge. I want to be in one place now. I want to be settled. Ok Bernd, take me to Genesis.

This was a bad idea.

Note to first time birthers: do not sit. Sitting is bad. Do not sit in the front. Be on all fours on the back seat. Your baby car seat does not need to be in place yet. I guess I thought I was bringing home a baby at midnight. Or something. I guess I thought it would be a piece of cake. Car is bad. Motion is bad.

For the first time it feels like pain. Deep, knock the breath out soreness. Stop the car you fucker let me get out and walk. Wait for it to pass, this universe expanding sensation of... how to you describe a contraction? The words we have are puny: "a tightening"..."a hardening".

As the uterus moves through a surge your whole consciousness turns inwards like a sock folding itself inside out, folding in on itself. Breathe, focus, visualise. Expand.

Walking into Genesis I pause to lean at the counter before politely explaining that I am in labour and Xoli is on her way. Being the experienced midwife she is, Xoli is of course not on her way, or not immediately anyway. She had said I must only call her when the contractions are a minute or two apart. I am early. Woess. And also, the beastly car ride has slowed things down considerably. For a minute I wonder if its all true. Maybe I'd just imagined it. Maybe I can go home and eat that cake.

Instead I submit to the kindly doula on duty, who shows me where to press on the inside of my calf to help dilate the cervix. Which is of course, what we are trying to do here. But when Xoli comes with her snappy rubber gloves I hear the impossible words, "you are not dilated at all. Maybe, like your sister, you will have a slow dilation and a long labour. It could be that it's genetic. You can stay here if you want, but perhaps you should rather go home and get some sleep. I'll check you again at about 2am."

I didn't want the car. Again. But did it. With many many stop and let me get outs. At home I lay on the futon with my new Blackberry in hand and tried to time contractions. And dozed off. There is a snaky list. It seems they were about three minutes apart, sometimes more, sometimes less. They lasted 30 seconds. Or 45 seconds. or 20 seconds. Never the same.

At 2 am (after another murderous drive) she says the same thing. At 6 am the same. How is it possible that after a full night of at least as many waves as Dungeons* gets on a gnarly Sunday I have NO DILATION AT ALL?

Walking down the 200m road from Genesis to Zoo lake at 6.30 am. Leaning up against the lamp posts for contractions while commuters start their day alongside us. I say to Xoli how many do you want between here and the end of the road? She says, three. Big slow surges that I breathe through. I don't know how long or how far apart. In between I talk to her. How does it work with Notmbi, your partner, do you take shifts or work at the same time? We do both she says. I feel badly calling her because you don't have a relationship with her. But I like her, I say. It would be fine if you called her. I know Xoli is tired. She didn't sleep after 2. Didn't go home again. I am concerned about her.

Call Ntombi, I say. Apparently I will be doing this all day.

All day. In retrospect, that night was a piece of cake.

*Dungeons is a surf spot in Cape Town

An intense feeling that requires your full attention

2011-10-18T10:16:00.004+02:00

Exactly one year ago as I write this I was soaking in the bath, observing my body start to prepare for the long haul ahead. I didn't know quite what a long haul it was going to be. I was excited. The first heady endorphins were flushing through me. I had waited long enough, I thought. I wanted to drop the fat, heavy, wriggly pawpaw I had been heaving along inside me.

A week earlier, sitting in the garden with my husband's niece, we were fantasizing about dates. The gynae's prediction of the 10th of the 10th 2010 had a great ring to it, but that date had passed without event. My calculation was the 17th. But 20.10.2010 would have been nice and symmetrical too. she's a kinaesiologist. I'll muscle test him, she said. She went through the days... 'It's the 18th', she said. I smiled and remarked that he would come when he was ready.

But still, on the night of the 17th I had had enough. I made a hot fragrant curry. I put on Johnny Clegg maskandi tunes and wiggled til midnight, bringing some euphoria into my weary bones. Early the next morning the (look away squeamish readers) mucus plug announced itself, dull period pain ache in my pelvis, endorphins making me giddy. I remembered what my yoga teacher had said: get in the bath for exactly one hour. The water will either bring the contractions along nicely or ease them off if its a false alarm.

The other thing she said was to carbo-load. And get some rest. I made pasta. I sat in the garden and giggled, marveling at how glorious the light was, the sunshine, the glowing green grass, the perfect strawberries in the strawberry patch. I smsed my friends and told them the early stage of labour was just like a mild mushroom trip. I started to make a cake. An hour between each gentle contraction, my heart swelling with a strong feeling of preparedness. I can do this. I have done the hypno-birthing course. I have done my kundalini preggie yoga. My body knows what a minute of intensity feels like, from those exercises where you hold your arms up in the air without moving. I've practiced my breathing. I've done the rainbow meditations. I've done my perineal massage and my pelvic floor exercises. I've programmed my mind not to think of the contractions as pain, not to use the word pain at all. Its an intense feeling that requires your full attention. That's what it is. I can do this. I'm ready to have an intense but enjoyable, fully natural vaginal birth without induction and without meds. Aren't I? Sure I am. Now where was I? Oh yes, I was making a cake...

Dancer in the Dark

2011-08-14T20:07:00.005+02:00

Once upon a time there was a little girl who wanted to be a writer. She didn't know why she wanted to be a writer but her grandmother had written books and her grandfather had written books and she pretty much knew that this should be her thing too. She thought that books were cool. She read a lot of them. She thought that a book that had her name on it as the author was about cool as it could get.

Except there was something wrong with her wiring. Whenever there was an assignment that was called "Your own composition", or "Free writing" or even just "Open topic essay" she couldn't do it. Couldn't move the pen across the page. Couldn't make the noisy clamour in her head turn into black and white or blue and white or even green and white on the page.

If someone else wrote it, that was ok. So, she dictated to her mother what her account of the Game Viewing story should be like. Her mother wrote it, and that was ok.

She would wander the fields and the pathways between the mielies and stories sprung from her like those weird jumping beans that came in the post once. She couldn't say who it was who took up residence in her and borrowed her vocal chords, but voices chattered through her like weavers at a nest building convention. Her grandmother, the one who had written books, would say of her - "there she goes again, reading, without a book."

"The thing was," she remembered, years later, to her therapist, "as long as no-one was listening, it was fine. And as long as no one was going to read it, it was fine."

It got so bad, even then, that her letters, simple letters to relatives abroad, or letters home to parents, never got sent. Decades later, cleaning out her boxes of paper treasures, she would discover these little notes. Dear Mum and Dad, we are fine, send more pocket money. Or post cards, with a hippo's bum on the back. Dear Mutti and Vati, thank you for your parcel of sweets. We are fine. Yesterday an elephant got into the vegetable garden.

Years later, with Gmail, her drafts folder, always full. Her finger hesitating over the Send button, nausea clutching her throat.

At University, deadlines made her see white. White, white, and nothing but cold, expansive blank whiteness like a dizziness, like the heroines in the 19th century novels she used to read who fainted dead away. That kind of whiteness.

Of course things got handed in. Scrambled pieces of paper - Compositions. She even got FeedBack. And survived. Even quite liked it. Even though at night sometimes her face would heat up as she recalled what an embarrassingly bad metaphor she had chosen there.

When she first heard the phrase "publish or perish" she shuddered, but held firm with the knowledge that for her at least, the phrase was "publish and perish".

Meanwhile, her notebooks filled. Sometimes she wrote in the dark so she couldn't see what she was writing. She quite liked that.

And then, the theatre. She sort of fell into it, really. In the country where she was studying they had a proud tradition of what they called "Workshopped theatre". This meant that everyone had a go at it, scrapped over it, but then one person ended up doing most of the writing and then giving the credit back to everyone else. And the best ideas always got kind of diluted, bullied, led to the chopping block by the worst ideas, Judas goats of the democratic process. She kind of liked that.

Of course she had plays that she was sole author of. Plays written at computers equipped with the delete button. The cut and paste function. The Save As function. It got so bad, that one day she counted 18 versions of the same play. 18 drafts with significant but barely distinguishable differences.

And then there was blogging. By this time she had learned to play the publish-or-perish pendulum, grabbing the vine when it swung towards a to-hell-with-it confessional exhibitionism and learned to regret the metaphors later. When the vertigo got too much she just pressed Save instead. Save. Save. Save.

Save it til later.
Save my soul.
Well saved.
Saved
Saving grace
Save me one, will ya?
Saved to drafts.
I saved you one.
Save the last dance for me.
Saving all my love for you.
Save now.
For later.

Oh fuck it.

Musa

2011-07-26T13:06:00.003+02:00

“You must show him, sister! You mustn't take this nonsense from him!”
My sister and I look at each other and roll our eyes. Its going to be a long journey. The women behind us in the bus are irritating us. Loud relationship counselling. Laughter. We're trying to sleep. But Musa's not irritated. He leans across from his aisle seat and starts to chat and join in the advice free-for-all.
“Just make peace with him,” he says. “All relationships are difficult. Life is too short for fighting.”

They get chatting and ask him what he does.
“I have the best job in the world,” he says. “I'm an actor. I'm so lucky. I really really love my job.” His positivity is infectious, as always. We forgive the vocal girl with the big hair and the nasal vowels behind us. We remember: we are so, so, lucky.

Its already been a long journey. From Lusaka we meandered in a borrowed car. From Livingstone we crossed the bridge at dawn and left the borrowed car at the Vic Falls hotel. Then we took the train to Bulawayo. Musa was like a kid. He was so excited. Those cool wooden cabins with all the colonial trimmings still intact, and he pulled the light cord on and off, lowered the beds and raised them again a couple of times, opened and closed the doors, checked the running water in the little basin under the fold-out table. He was so stoked. It reminded me of when Miranda took his son George game viewing and George, standing up in the back of the Landrover with a huge grin on his face, said “Ninjoya”. I'm enjoying.

We're heading to Joburg. We'll overnight in Bulawayo and then take the bus, where the irritating girls will keep us awake into the night. Then we'll spend a few days in a weird little mining theme park in the Magaliesberg. The three of us and the rest of the Report-back Africa team: two actors from each SADC country, the Theatre for Africa core team and the community conservation people from Africa Resources Trust, from Zim.

In a few months time these people will be one big family to me, but for now I'm the new joiner. My sister and Musa have already been working together for two years, making plays in dusty villages, creating images and props from thin air, funny, cheeky, provocative plays about wildlife conservation and communities that must have their share of the tourism spoils. CBNRM rolls off their tongues along with all the other fancy acronyms – Community Based Natural Resource Management. Musa and Miranda are a joyful, effective, affectionate team. I'm enjoying this time with them. Ninjoya. I want to be part of their mojo. And soon I will be.

But now its August 2000 and I could do with some relationship counselling of my own, time is speeding up like the spin cycle in the washing machine. I don't really know what lies ahead but I know it's exciting and important and I have to do it, even though it means leaving my fracturing relationship behind me for now. Its just the start. In a couple of months I will be in a small Karoo town with this crazy crew, making masks from paper tape and mobiles with dangling forests, zebras and gemsbok. We'll take great delight in pissing off the conservative locals by going to their church, a motley mixture of dark skins, light skins and coffeemelt skins, holding hands in the street and embracing outside the corner store. Soon my head will be awash with images – how to translate thorny issues, acronyms and political rhetoric into visuals that will communicate the plight of dusty villagers to men in suits in governments.

I'm just entering the Theatre for Africa fold. For Musa, its been a journey that started in 1996 when he auditioned for them in Chipata for Guardians of Eden. He can play a baboon, a lion, a feminine village beauty or a chief, all with great aplomb. There's something about him. His eyes blaze on stage, his presence sucks you in. He's one of those actors, the one you watch in the chorus line. You want to know him. Be around him. People did. Be around him. He loved it. He knew. He was lucky, and loving it. And just never arrogant.

He plays the President in A Light in the Night of President Khaya Afrikha. I forget what I make him to wear. Probably something garish in blue velvet. It doesn't matter. His eyes carry that show, and his knotted eyebrows, which make him look like he's being a great and concerned leader. But really, it's because he's trying to remember all those damn lines.

Two years later I'm living in Cape Town and he and Miranda are back home, and we're doing a show for the WSSD over email. The World Summit on Sustainable Development. Joburg. I'm sending them bits of script, scene by scene, while they're in the bush, turning it into magic. They play their hearts out to an audience of technocrats from across the world. I remember that line, the one that made people cry:
“What am I then? Am I an indigenous persons also? I thought I was the poorest of the poor.” Again those blazing eyes. As he played a hapless villager who travels to the big city to take his message to the big shots of the world.

Musa. This is not an obituary. This will never do him justice. I need a whole book. He deserves a whole book.

Fast forward to March 2010 and I'm getting on a plane to Cape Town when my phone rings. Its Musa.
“Tammy? We're here at the airport in Lusaka but we're not booked on the plane to Joburg.”
“What? But Musa your connecting flight to Cape Town leaves this evening, what's going on?”
They are en route to perform at the Out the Box festival. I'm pregnant and stressed. It seems there was a miscommunication with the funders who were supposed to book our flights. Its always a struggle with the funders these days. Funders based in European countries who cannot possibly understand what a mammoth feat it is to find a working internet connection to send passport details for five actors who have to cross rivers on their bicycles and dodge elephants and travel a whole day just to apply for their passports.

Several phonecalls and borrowed credit cards later and they arrive in Cape Town with an hour to spare for their tech run. The motley Seka crew with their patched together props and too-long bamboo poles and overweight luggage bills that weren't a line-item in the budget. Actors who are mostly farmers these days anyway, who set audiences alight when they perform but can't get food on the table for their families. And dear Musa, whose humour punches its way past the stress, whose hugs are as warm as ever. Who so loves the Q and A after a show – telling schoolkids about life in Mfuwe (yes, there really are elephants, yes, traditionally we hunt for food, but these days there are laws forbidding it, yes we have to look after trees, trees give us so much.) Musa, in front of a crowd. Ninjoya.

Dear Musa, I'm sorry, in so many ways.

That you had to do so much damn admin when you should have been acting the stages of the world. Too much stress, lately. Too much stress and not enough fun. Fun was your nature, your kernel. I'm swamped by memory and emotion. It can't be true. It must be one of your tricks.

I had a dream...and there was chocolate

2011-04-01T09:23:00.003+02:00

You can't make this stuff up. Well, you can, apparently. Or at least, my unconscious mind can.

So there was a movie shoot. It was on a field the size of a rugby pitch. Bigger, even. Sir Ian McKellen was there, being a wonderful, inspiring gentleman. We were following him, Pied Piper like. I was shy. His costume was kind of Roman gladiator meets sage.

It was complicated, as these dreams often are. But what I can tell you, is that the "set", if that's what it was, was a giant maze - walls at head height. And it was made of chocolate cake. ENTIRELY of chocolate cake. And some parts, like the cement between the bricks were pure hardened chocolate. That's a chocolate cake maze the size of a rugby pitch, people, and I was - well - harvesting it.

I'm not sure about the rest. I'm not sure exactly what Sir Ian was up to, or why. Normally in these dreams I am supposed to be director or scriptwriter or lead role and I am hopelessly unprepared and floundering. In this one, I was just crew. I had my cake and... wrapped it up in tin foil for later.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that I was shopping for clothes yesterday and feeling a tad depressed at the size of my new waistline?

breaking wind

2011-03-22T22:49:00.004+02:00

Shhhhh. Don't make sudden movements. Don't even exhale too loudly. You might break the spell.

I am blogging.

I am having a moment with my laptop.

If we're very lucky, I may even press publish when I am done.

It has indeed been a while, and the world has shifted on its axis since last we spoke. No really. It was the earthquake.

And the baby.

I have a baby now. I'll say it again, coz I never believe it when I hear myself say it. I have a baby now. Not just any baby mind you. I have Josef, philosopher child of the kind and thoughtful eyes, the wide open bellowing mouth and the gurgling drainpipe appetite. He who is patiently teaching his mother how to mother, sometimes with gentle chiding and sometimes with loud insistence at the top of those ferocious lungs.

Two blogs are not better than one
So about that two blog divide, and blogging about the baby on the baby blog and keeping this space for “me”. Ha.

You see, when pregnant, I maintained this teetering illusion that I could somehow keep a writerly self going, and reserve space in another room for the babytalk. Because not everyone wants to hear about reflux and winds and cuteness and sleeplessness. Not wanting to haemorrhage readers off this blog, I imagined I could neatly cleave the two apart.

The logic behind the two blog strategy was, I think, that I was guarding against that thing that I had heard that happens to new mothers, where their former identity + time + life + self + entire existence gets swamped by the minutiae of the baby's urgent (but, to the outside world, boring) clamours. I think I thought I would be vigilant about defending the space to write as tam the muse-chaser, rather than tam the poo-catcher and not to let the one be totally overrun by the other until I'd learned to edit my rapture.

Well.

That's not gonna happen.

This child is the everyday texture of my life now. Edited or not, the rapture, the babytalk, the tiny (and, to non-parents – boring) details of our emerging selves is all that there is.

And while there is indeed a cleaving, into self and mother, it is not neat, it is not compartmentalised. It is raw and messy.

It's like – there's a train leaving the station right now and you simply must get on it – a matter of extreme and utter urgency. You must get on this train with the baby, that is all you know. And so you do. And it roars off with a deafening clackety clack, while simultaneously slowing to a jagged stop-motion blur. And you look back at the platform and realise that you or someone who looks just like you didn't get on to the train. A ghost husk, hand raised as if to wave, or say stop, or open the door I'm getting on too- there she stands. Getting smaller on the horizon. And you keep wondering if she'll jump on somewhere else or catch a bus or catch up somehow, because you desperately need her, because maybe she knows what to do, how to be a mother, how to – slow down the blur.

No. it's not like that.

It's like - Suddenly you are a giant, a nimble, many limbed ubermom ogre who cannibalizes all other versions of herself in the quest to soothe and feed and wipe and shush.

No, its not like that either.

When I walk around the garden carrying the baby and singing om mani padme hum to get him to sleep, my mind is full of words. Stories I want to tell you, cascading glittering sentences unfurling, alive with poetry and song, jewelled with witty one-liners. If I could just get a moment at the computer, oh the stories I would write...

And then the baby gets to sleep and I am dizzy, frantic with all the possibility of what I could be doing with this entire 45 minutes... I could bath! I could have a hot cup of tea! I could clean the kitchen, blog, reply to emails, read...deal with festering growth areas of clutter...

And so I sit, and stare. Mute. Words draining away, thoughts snookering themselves down blind alleys. Aware of the shoulders (ow) the feet (phew). Things people have said to me floating across my awareness like a tacky screensaver: "it gets easier." "You must ask for help"
"You must take time for yourself"
"It does get easier you know. The first six weeks are the hardest."
"After three months it gets easier."
"After six months it gets easier."
"The first eighteen months are the hardest."

Slowly, the fog clears. The kettle boils. The bath fills. I am juuuust about to -

and then the baby cries.

On a good day, I might get to wash my hair. I suppose no writer ever lay on their deathbed and said “I wish my hair had been cleaner” or “I wish I'd done the dishes more.” But the woman who got on the train without me? She reaaaaallly needs clean surfaces, apparently.

But the point is (there was one, I could have sworn there was) is that in those weird segments of warped time which feel like hours but are actually only minutes, when you walk with the crying baby on your shoulder in the garden singing om mani padme hum, when long reels of blogworthy words flicker through the thoughts like home movies, you know you can capture it all - every tender moment. Fully realised characters wink at you through snarls of story begging to be untangled - but alas, without the time or brainpower to actually sit and do the work of stitching and cutting and threading, the words remain in burgeoning clutter areas of my brain, begging to be swept out. Blogging, it turns out, is not a big one on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

When I started this draft of this particular post, he was “15 weeks today.” Today, as I sit and revise it, with husband out of town, I realise that he is 22 weeks. For the six hundred and twenty ninth time since he was born, I realise that no-one is going to give me a medal for this. For weathering the ear-rattling crying that accompanied his first refluxy four months of life, when I could barely put him down, for the heart dropping feeling at the 1.00am wake-up (why, little guy? You just ate two hours ago...) or for the tiny victories - opening a bottle of tissue salts with one hand, crushing the tablet between two teaspoons with the other, salting his tongue with Camomilla, a tongue which is vibrating as loudly as your eardrums. Waiting to see if this works...it does. Working a tiny but treacherous little air bubble out... aah the beautiful silence after a burp breaks.

No. No one will give me a medal.

But thats ok.
Why is it ok?
Because of this.

And this

And this

this boy, who's making me into a mother.

OH – and about the other blog (I knew there was a point – there it is!) this is just me now, ok. Deal with it, or move swiftly along. These are the Poo Diaries. The muses have fled.

The Limen

2010-10-05T14:05:00.003+02:00

The delicious inbetween.
Many inbetween things are yummy, right? Like the icing or jam in between two layers of cake. What's inside the sandwich, rather than the boring old bread. The juicy bits of grass that grow up between paving stones.

Inbetween spaces are fun, and maybe a bit scary. Revolving doors have always given me the willies. Take that South African stalwart bit of architecture - the Stoep.
Magical compared with the inside front lounge or the street outside. People sit on their stoeps and watch the world go by. They comment, or are commented on, they drink beer and misbehave, just a little, because here they can be seen, so they are almost public, but have more courage because they are more home than public. Ne?

In between times are fascinating too. Crucibles of transformation. When we undergo rites of passage we are in a liminal zone. After the rupture, the separation from normal life, we are thrust into the inbetween place where we will be thrashed about, skinned, taught lessons, made to dance til we drop, pelted with confetti, circumcised, whatever...you get the gist - transformed. Until we are spat out on the other side, reborn, presented to society as new beings with new status.

Stories are no good without a liminal space, a transformative ordeal of some kind. A crossing of the threshold of ordinary life into the world of the adventure, where normal rules don't apply and fierce tests and ordeals will strip the hero to her core so that she may find out what lives there, blazing or glimmering underneath her defences. We know this. This is the stuff I teach. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist writes plenty about the stages of the Hero's Journey. Most Hollywood movies follow this monomyth structure.

Teaching and reading about it is one thing. Going on your own journey of transformation is quite another.

Birth is such a journey, naturally. For the one burrowing out of womb and into world as well as for the vessel that needs to cross the river and bring the cargo safely back to this (now other) side. Like all rites of passage, there will be mentors and guides, those that have made the journey before, and can show you where but, ultimately, can't come with you.

I'm not there yet. I'm in another kind of inbetween right now.
I've passed through the preparation phase. The period of debate and struggle, denial and refusal. I've had wonderful mentors. Tricksters that have unwittingly tried to waylay me with their gruesome tales. The villain - my iceberg shadow fears (and oh how they multiply). The trusty sidekick who appears at just the right moment. I've chased the dragon right up to his den. And now I'm waiting. Not planning. Not dreading. Just waiting.

I am ready but I'm not impatient. I'm alert but I'm not scared. There's something delicious about this moment. Like gooey jam spilling out the cake. I'm licking up shiny drops of anticipation. I'm letting go of the rehearsals and scripts in my head, even the positive hypnobirthing programming. Doing yoga, breathing, working (yes, still working, but gently). Not planning. Not any more.

It reminds me of that Buddhist story - the man who is chased by a tiger and stumbles off a sheer cliff, with the roaring sea beneath him. He catches himself on a ledge, grabs onto the root of a tree. Above him a snarling tiger. Below him the crashing sea and jagged rocks. On the ledge next to him, a strawberry grows. He picks it. Smells it. Puts it to his lips. How delicious it is!

I have also updated the mommy blog

Is that you out there? Can you see me?

2010-09-29T21:10:00.002+02:00

Hey I remember this place! I dreamed of something just like it once. There were words and stories. Friends dropped in to visit. I used to have a place like this. It's all coming back to me.

And then I was inarticulately pregnant, for months on end. No words to spare except for the ones needed for work, and that was a stretch. I was teaching applied drama, up in an airy sunlit room on the 15th floor of a building in town. I barely turned my computer on, for, well months, really. A heavy teaching schedule. A sweet collection of young facilitator-dramatists in the making. We played games and had earnest chats about theatre for development and character development and visual metaphor. And they watched my belly grow. And the games got less energetic. And the distance from sitting cross legged on the floor to standing on the feet got further and further. And the struggle to find parking close enough to my teaching venue made me more and more foul-mouthed.

Until one day it was over. It stopped, just like that. No more teaching. At 36 weeks, I believe it was. Though the pile of marking still scowls at me from my desk. But here I am, 38 weeks pregnant and a lot of blogs to catch up on, aside from my own. (Why did I start another one? What was that all about?) And a big restless baby twisting and turning like a twisty turny thing within me, trying to trampoline off my bladder to kick my solar plexus.

And there it is, the dull desire to write, which was thudding against my cortex like a Should knot, suddenly untangling into actual words again. Even sentences. Even in a sequence and everything.

Hello everyone. Are we still friends?

Readiness is all (Part II)

2010-06-02T17:35:00.004+02:00

So much of what we call good theatre these days is polished and slick. Performances that display impressive emotional virtuoso, sets that are tricky and conceptual, interpretations of the classics that leave you nodding sagely and going 'hmmm', because its all so clever. This is what we want to see, right?

Or is it? Sometimes, I go to an opening night of a new offering and I think its like the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone's saying how marvelous it all is and everyone's all sweetie dahling and congrats but I can't shake a deep feeling that its just not quite enough. I want something more - dangerous. More raw, more naked. Not so pat and rehearsed. I'm talking about a particular kind of theatre - the kind that fills the mainstream theatres in this country. And don't get me wrong. Much of South African theatre is moving and transformative, very alive and very very innovative. But even so, why does it always feel so.... safe? Maybe I'm just hard to please.

But now something has come along that really rocks my boat, lights my candle and peels my onion.

My friend James told me about it first - he'd seen The Seagull in London, performed by The Factory theatre company, and put through the cauldron of their unique method. What they do is they take a classic text, and everyone in the company learns several parts, really really well. There are no sets, no costumes, no character as such, and certainly no clever conceptual interpretation (as in, "I'm setting my Macbeth in a despotic African country and its, like, its going to be a comment on dictatorship and ambition in a postcolonial context..." blah. None of that.) On the night, in front of the live audience, they flip a coin to see who will play who. You may have prepared Hamlet, Claudius and Messenger, but you won't know which part you'll play, or which Ophelia you'll be up against, until seconds before you do it.

Then James spoke to Lucy and Lucy had seen them too and she thought they were pretty cool too and the Next thing we knew, we had a group of talented gung-ho passionate big hearted actors in Jozi ready to give it a go. We're doing Hamlet. Lucy managed to persuade the goodly boys from the Factory in London to come and teach us how they do it. They spent a week with us, and we all swooned at how delicious and gung-ho and marvelous they are. (Come on boys, you know you did too). And then, armed with a set of exercises to apply to iambic verse and a whole new philosophical outlook on our craft, we gave up every Saturday morning this year to mess around with Shakespeare.

Oh my word, it has been fun.

So the thing is, in a way, to undo the training that taught you to create a character. ("I think Ophelia is anorexic. She's a Virgo...") To resist what the goodly Factory people call being "on the bus" - what actors do when they feel a particular emotional choice has worked and so they stay there for longer than they should. ("Oh, it worked to play that bit angry. Angry works, lets stay with angry...") To strip everything that is acting and just live the truth of each moment, of each offer you receive from your fellow actor. Be a vessel for the story, and let all your acting be about the other person, not about you. To be utterly and faithfully and generously and ego-lessly in the moment, every moment.

Oh my word, it is so much fun.

We'll be having our first public showing in Grahamstown at the National Arts Festival. Not a performance as such, coz we're not ready. But a demonstration, sort of master class, directed, or facilitated by Tim Carroll in front of a live audience. I've prepared Gertrude, Ambassador and Francisco. It is going to be So Much Fun.

Terrifying? Well, why? Because so much can go wrong? But that is the point. That is the fun. That's what the audience gets out of it, too. Things do go wrong, will go wrong. And that's ok. And there will also be moments when you will look at this text with the newest eyes ever, coz you just never saw such sparks happen between a bunch of actors and these words before.

Its a dream come true. And the best part is, each show is totally unrepeatable. By definition.

Read more about The Factory's Hamlet here.
or check out their Facebook page.

The South African group is called the Framework.

Readiness is all (Part I)

2010-06-01T16:33:00.003+02:00

Ever since I can remember I have had dreams about theatre. There's a recurring dream with variations:

I am prepared. I know all my words. I step onto the stage and open my mouth to say my line, only to realise that I am in the wrong play. This is not the one I prepared for. Everyone else is performing a different script.
Or
The audience is gathered. They are waiting outside the venue. I go inside to where the actors are. We have no play. We have only minutes to put something together. I sort frantically through ideas surging through my head, and issue some hasty improvisation instructions to the cast and we are off. We somehow pull it off, usually with the help of some beautiful colourful cloths and cast members who really know how to move.

In these dreams my roles change. Sometimes I am director. Sometimes I am performer. Sometimes I am designer (fantastic sets, great big clam-shell sails and reticulated carriages that can traverse the stage and collapse in on themselves - but then the director doesn't want them).

In my patchy career I have toyed with these three alternating roles, and also experienced the lung-crushing anxiety of feeling hopelessy underprepared.

There was a turning point though. About a year ago I had one of those dreams - big festival venue, big cast, big audience gathered outside, including my mentor-gurus from varsity days. Play not ready. So I say to the cast - its ok, we'll each have a copy of the same text (from the Jungle Book, apparently. I hand out copies) We can work from this and do our thing. But the text is wonky and blurred and the lights too dim. So I do something I have never done. I go outside and I cancel the show. I tell the waiting audeince that sorry, we are not ready and there will be no performance tonight.

The show does not have to go on if it means that it may wreck your constitution, or may be really really bad.

I think that turning point dream was the day I grew up.

Now, I've had to do it for real. I applied for my show to be on the fringe of the National Arts Festival in January. This is the blurb that's the in the booking kit for Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth:
Goddess of many names: Inanna, Ishtar, Queen of Heaven and Earth. This rare production takes an ancient Sumerian myth and transforms it into a powerful healing journey for the 21st century. Part therapeutic workshop, this ritual theatre experience will transport you into a shadowland of image, poetic text, movement and story.

Dreamed up before falling pregnant (why do we say falling? Is it really a fall?), before the trauma of Seka Theatre's trip to Cape Town and all the funding disasters that accompanied that. Before many other other potholes that have loomed at me since January. I know its the best decision, to withdraw this show from the programme and wait til it has "come to term" and has been deeply worked by the goddess-hands that will collaborate with me. I know there's no time to do the proper job it requires, to realise the gorgeous visions that have arrived here everytime I apply my dreaming mind to this project. I know all that. But it still hurts to see Cancelled Show next its name on the website. Before, I would have stubbornly clenched my jaw and ploughed on anyway, despite not having the right team together yet, the right funding together yet, etc. Just because I said I would. I can't do that now. And that's fine. Even though part of me is panicking that "its my last chance!"

However, there is something else afoot. Something so frantically, furtively exciting, so in keeping with all the dreams I have about the stage and being ready, or not. Something dangerous and sexy: the kind of theatre where everything can go wrong, and that's ok, coz that is just the point. I'll tell you about it in the next post.

branching out

2010-05-13T15:26:00.002+02:00

For those of you that may be interested, I'll be blogging about the belly over here.. There's one up at the moment, and the usual transmissions will resume here shortly, as I feel the block may be shifting.

But for now I am in Lusaka, relishing a few days of sun and family time. Back to the bright lights tomorrow.

Until then.

Underground

2010-05-03T22:11:00.002+02:00

At first, the words dried up completely. Or I thought they had.

Two pink lines in a tiny window on a plastic stick splattered with wee. Watching them darken.

Nodding. Smiling. Not telling.

I'm an iceberg now. If an iceberg can have a molten centre. The bit everyone can see is still sticking upright into the world, trying to get stuff done. Teaching, driving, shopping, organising painters, paying bills, organising actors to travel from Zambia to Cape Town for a festival, taking sick cat to and from the vet. But underneath, this growing bulk, still invisible to the untrained eye. A creeping, cumulative other consciousness that even I'm barely able to access, let alone share.

No, the words didn't dry up. Or freeze. They just went underground. Banking down into the earth, rooting, delving. Seeking some other place of renewal that I won't see or understand til they filter up again.

And until then I'm a sporadic blogger.

No, Minister

2010-03-03T09:44:00.007+02:00

Dear Minister

Many of my blogmates have taken to letter writing as a quiet form of protest lately. For example, Shiny, who writes to correct certain undesirable forces in her universe, or Mud, who gently questions the strange things she finds in her new home.

I too have decided to take up this form. I have a few things to say to you. Actually they are quite serious things and I do hope you are listening.

Dear Ms Xingwana, you have been appointed as the Minister of Arts and Culture. Clearly they didn't brief you properly. Your job is not to censor artists. Your job is not to take your petty puritan morality and project it onto the works of art that cause you discomfort.

Minister, your job is to take the pair of scissors and cut the ribbon, to open the exhibition. Not pass your judgement and tell artists that their work is 'against nation building.' I may have to check my facts here, but I think another aspect of your job may be to protect our constitution. Remember? The one so many people died trying to uphold. I don't think they gave you licence to decide that some people were more free than others to express themselves. That would be going backwards a bit.

Minister, we artists have a rule of thumb to ascertain whether our work is effective or not. Its to do with the function of art in society. If a work has the effect of making people talk, or causing a little discomfort, (I know this will seem strange to you) we generally see that as a good thing. It means we have made people think about an aspect of society that needs thinking about. There is a word for works of art that confirm or impose ideologies espoused by powerful ruling agenda. That word is propaganda. Mostly, artists are not so comfortable being a mouthpiece for the state. They like to interpret the world around them for themselves. They like to create and celebrate beauty, or turn the mirror on ugliness when necessary, so that they can provide a balance against the misery they see in the world around them.

Minister, perhaps you are concerned about the high rates of rape, sexual abuse against children and women in this country. For this reason you are uncomfortable about public exhibitions of pornography. This is what you have said. Minister, allow me to explain how to recognise pornography. Usually, it is an image where there is an uncomfortable level of dominance or a power imbalance in the sexual act. Minister, tell me, in the images below - do you see anything violent? Do you see anything other than love, tenderness, sensuality?

Minister, is it because, as some have suggested, there are black African women displaying love and tenderness towards one another? Dare we use the word, lesbian? Minister, I know this may come as a shock to you but there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that lesbianism has been alive and well on this continent for centuries, and that it was the coming of the white man, bearing Queen Victoria's flag and the Christian Church's moralities, that brought this prurience and intolerance to your continent.

Minister, allow me to draw to your attention some real concerns that you can get busy with. It is 100 days until we become the Fiefdom of the World Cup. Artists, theatre-makers, musicians and cultural activists are wondering why there has been so little invitation to share their works on public platforms so the world can see how talented we are. And what of those rumours about the R150 million that kind of disappeared, that was supposed to be for World Cup arts projects?

Minister, a friend of mine, a well respected choreographer received a grant from the National Arts Council recently. Two weeks before her work was due to be showcased, she still had not received the money in her bank account. This was a great threat to the integrity of her work. When artists get grants, generally they need the money before the work, you see, because unlike government officials they are not using that money to reward themselves or buy nice cars, they are using it to actually buy materials in order to make the work. I can't quite understand why it took the administrators of this important national institution so long to process a small bit of paperwork. Its not like there was a very long list of grantees. Please could you facilitate some sort of forum so that we the artists can communicate to those the bureaucrats what our needs actually are? We really don't want to fight with you.

Minister, every year we lose a national treasure, an artist of great talent and brilliance. We are losing these people not to old age, but to common preventable diseases of poverty, or to crime. We have actors and musicians who have worked their entire lives listening to the Muse, unmotivated by wealth or fame, who cannot afford medical care, who have no form of unemployment insurance. Make no mistake Minister, these are real 'nation builders.' We have graduates with artistic training, young people of great promise who are working as administrators and car guards because there is no vision from your department on how these creative minds could feed into the economy.

Minister, while I am at it, and I know I am going on a bit now, would you consider talking to the Ministers of Education (both of them, please) about how to improve creativity training in schools. I know there is an Arts and Culture lesson in the curriculum, but do you know how many teachers use this period to clean their classroom? I know maths and science are important, but consider the value of enabling young minds to be creative and literate as well. It has been well documented that this kind of education is essential in producing well rounded learners, and even in helping them to develop that much vaunted sense of morality that your people keep talking about. Let's not go back there.

Minister, audiences in Paris, Oregon, London, New York, are being wowed by South African artists. When these artists return to theatres in their home country, they struggle to cover their costs. Please, help to build an environment in which artists can just do their jobs. Don't tell them what they should be creating.

There is that small matter of the Constitution to uphold.

Thank you, Minister, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to read this. If you would like any other reading matter that could point you in the right direction and help you carry out your public duty, please let me know, I would be happy to assist.

yours sincerely concerned,

Hungry Nation Builder.

elephant whisperer

2010-03-01T17:24:00.010+02:00

[photos by Freya Reder]

And then in this other dream, I had discovered the ancient secret of communicating with elephants.

Oh my, it was a beautiful space to be in.

I'm busy reading Caitlin O'Connell's The Elephant's Secret Sense, which along with Silent Thunder by Katy Payne, goes into the whole thing of how elephants pick up infrasound using spongy pads in their toes. That low rumble that just sounds like the earth curdling underfoot, rumbles they can hear for kilometres.
Its a fascinating document - some stuff I didn't know, and lots that I had just kind of guessed, having spent a lot of my younger life in the presence of these enormous ghosts. But this was different.

This was me sitting with a cache of actual manuscripts: ancient, paleolithic translations of elephant speech. Oh, and I was the chosen one who was going to be able to transmit to the world the messages of these wise old beasts, and what's more, teach people how to talk to them so that we could solve this so-called 'elephant problem' once and for all. Oh so that's what I'm here for.

And I did it. I had full on conversations with a wrinkle eyed old elephant mama crone. Words of such wisdom and depth. Not words, no, just - thoughts. Bytes of knowledge, transmitted not through the brain but the heart.

It was so cool.

I can't remember a bloody thing she told me.

Undertow

2010-02-18T17:56:00.002+02:00

It didn't seem strange. I was there for a reason. Even though I barely knew his dad, it was right that I should be there for the funeral. It was a low-ceilinged house like those ones built in the 70s in Lusaka - complete with oatmeal and mustard tiles in the kitchen. You know those tiles, the kind that someone must have found beautiful once - a collage of several vomity looking surfaces that together sort of make up a set of mushrooms or roosters. Or wild horses running, their manes all stiff and jagged, like they've been coated in a lot of hairgel.

I remember thinking, huh - they still have the same decor.

But in reality, I have never been to this house. Nor did I ever meet his parents. This old flame of mine. Let's call him Gavin. But here, in this crisp and detailed world, I have come to mourn the passing of his father. His mother is distracted, her hair unraveled. But she says she is pleased to see me. There are ducks on the lawn and everything is tranquil.

And then, the weird thing. His girlfriend.

We hug, but there is nothing left of the old passion that used to lock our bodies together. Just a gentle warmth and that funny kind of ache you get for what could have been, but its ok that it didn't be.

She, though, is pissed off. She seems to actually hiss at me. I think,
huh, how weird. what's she worried about.

Then she turns into an octopus.
Seriously. A huge, pale, throbbing octopus with winding tentacles and a luminous, translucent head. Her eyes are terrifying but kind of seductive too. One of those restless milky tentacles wants to wrap around me. Wants to drag me down to where she is, this place of jealousy and rage.

I wake before she gets me.

A Room of One's Own

2010-02-02T16:30:00.003+02:00

It was not an impressive building from the outside. It stuck out in the landscape, like a tired figure with a slight limp. One of those structures that should have been knocked down but no-one could be bothered to do it. Or perhaps it meant something to someone and there were plans for its renovation. It looked as if it had staggered forward, but caught itself before it fell.

Who was I with when I went inside? I don't remember. I had company, I'm sure. Or were they straying on the path, telling me to go on ahead, bored with my interest in sad old abandoned places.

The door swings open to a world of bright light, high ceilings and a vibration, the sound of a cello, struck once. I hear wings flapping. A huge triple volume room, flinging the eye upwards to a wooden level like a loft. I climb the staircase that seems to be strung from cables but is solid, and lifts me gently up. Once on the level, more like a big shelf really, I tiptoe over to the window and look down. I expect an outdoor view - the bluegums in the distance, fields, cows. Instead - another room, the size of the one I just walked through. Curious. The place is bigger than it seemed.

Look down on the remains of an old pottery. Sealed bags of clay, stacks of powdery greenware, and packets of mysterious powders and glazes, spilling onto the shelves. Something has cranked alive in me. Like an old Lister motor that takes a while to spark, I am now chugging with excitement. My heart is whirring like a toy windmill.

Looking back, behind me, the warehouse-like room I entered now seems anything but a run-down derelict building. It's a treasure house, its vaulting white walls are crowding with images, projections, possibilities, sculptures, pots spilling out stories.

Next thing, I am flying - no, zooming with a zipping noise, first on cables that are strung about the ceiling (A great theatre this will make, this is where you'll hang the lights - wahaay - woohoooo! Steady on) I am truly flying, even out the window now, and loop back in, figures of eight, tight circles and swoops. Fantastic.

I want this place. Its broken concrete where the weeds grow through, its sagging bags of clay and glazes, and its mysterious way of materialising another room every time you look through a window.

Someone appears. A sort of estate agent type of someone. They tell me that William Kentridge has booked the place.

How much will it cost to secure it for myself?

R25 000 a month. I understand, deeply, that this figure is not how much it will cost, but how much it is worth to me. I understand the difference.

Here be dragons

2010-01-25T16:21:00.003+02:00

[Disclaimer: This post is full of complaint and whining sarcasm and offers no advice of any real value.]

I can hear my myself think and its not pretty
The tricky part of course is what you hear when you start to listen. Because long before your brain quietens enough for you to take in the angels' noisy trumpets, or the soft shuffling of their slippered feet, long before your spaghetti thoughts are lubricated by inward breath and untangle themselves, there's a deafening din that will put the entire Gauteng vuvuzela orchestra to shame.

Oh, the voices. Oh, the thinks that one thinks. The rattle and shout of criticising schoolteachers, we-know-better aunts and uncles, parents who in their loving blindness seemed to be pointing you down strange and nonsensical paths of self-regard. All the pieces of crud that you sucked up as a 7 year old, in all your eager porousness and wanting to be a real functioning member of the world. You took it all on, and somehow, somewhere, the cracked logic still runs through your psyche like faultlines.

Its been a noisy old week in this head of mine.

Because as most of you have figured out by now, living a life of authentic integrity, allowing your own voice to be heard, if not by everyone then at least by you, is the hardest dem task we have appointed ourselves. Most of us find it far easier to live the path we think our tribe / parents / zookeepers want us to live. And often that is not an explicit path at all, its just the way a whole lot of information fell into the vaccuum and was picked up and rearranged by the child wanting to please, wanting to be part of the pack, learning how to belong. This is how I am supposed to be. This is how they will love me. Most of us simply find it too difficult to listen to what the other path might be, to do as Joseph Campbell advises and follow your bliss. Or even figure out what that bliss might be.

Some of these crusty old imprints are obvious, and can be dealt with the old fashioned way, same as how you deal with cranky beasts such as dragons: stare them down, point at something on the wall behind them and when they turn around, grab the treasure and leg it. Others are sneakier, and wrap themselves around your lungs when you're not looking.

Yip, its been a noisy old week in this head of mine. A week of protest and name-calling. A week where Ms Serotonin took a sudden holiday and Mr Calvin wagged his worm-eaten finger at me.

You can't make a living from being an artist. That's not a real job. You need something to fall back on. To be a contributing member of society. Don't you have a responsibility to your family / community? To the economy? Shouldn't you be pulling your weight?

It is a real job, dammit!

It must be nice to spend all day doing creative things, I've had people say to me. It must be nice to be able to do what you want all day. Yeah. Its great. Aaaalll day, I'm doing that lovely arty farty stuff. I especially love the hours spent in the bank trying to convince paperclip pushers that I am in fact an ordinary citizen with a viable income, even though I don't have an actual salary slip. And sitting in long meetings that I can't invoice for, planning projects that have a 40% chance of coming off the ground. People with jobs love meetings, coz it keeps them away from their desks and their actual work. People who work for themselves prefer to keep these meetings short and snappy. You're giving me the job? Great. Can I have 40% of the budget up front? Thanks. Toodle-loo. Um, I'm not sure its necessary to have another meeting. It did take me an hour to get here. Climate change, you know. hahah. We can do the rest by email, seriously.

Live by the word, die by the word. Pay by the word
Writers /artists do what they do for the love of it, you see. Nothing else. Somehow, the logic goes that if you are doing something meaningful to you, that should be reward enough, and you can make do with less than those engaged with real commercial enterprise. Interesting that. Does it follow that if you are getting paid well your work is not meaningful? Hmm.

I wish there was an inversion we could do on our word count invoicing. I can do you a 2000 word article, no problem. But if you want 500 words, its going to take me that much longer. Is that so hard to understand? Come on, Writers guilds, isn't this a good plan?

"Remember," she said darkly, "all wealth comes from the earth."

Fugues

And then lastly, that unhelpful bit of myth about the creative temperament: artists and creative people are depressive. Prone to long bouts of alcoholic binge, followed by feverish bursts of activity followed by 'mooning about for days.' We are forgetful and can't be trusted to pay the bills. We commit suicide and adultery and drink too much and do our best work during bouts of insanity. We are dangerous to ourselves. Electro shock therapy has helped some.

I guess I may be proving that stereotype nicely round about now, but honestly, where did it come from, this prickly bit of pigeonholing? Those bloody Romantics have a lot to answer for. Does this have to be my sentence? Why do we buy into this, what does it serve us? Is it ok with you if I just have a quietly productive life, stable moods and a secure income? Or won't you take my work seriously if I'm not a raging depressive eccentric?

Don't answer that.

Anyway, if we are prone to such things? Is it too much to understand that this has less to do with some artistic gene and more to do with the fact that its a hurty world out there and those of us who are good at our jobs are a little sensitive. Born without a skin, the mess of the world gets in. We are the dying canaries in the coal mine, people. And we say, Remember: all wealth comes from the earth.

As the big man said,
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and watch?

Right, I'm off to hunt down some endorphins. I believe if you swim with them they heal all your pain.

Inspiration series III: Listen (and other acronyms)

2010-01-17T11:58:00.003+02:00

Being silent is an attitude. Its a state of surrender. Its giving the busy mind permission to not do and just be.

Listen!
Do it intently. Which means, don't do it. Just find a place of quiet acceptance where what is (all around and also within) will offer itself to you without any pretending.

How long does it take, before the sounds just become what they are, and the busy filter of your mind stops trying to do something with them?

For me, writing is an act of listening. The story is always there. The words are always jostling, trying to get to the front of the queue. It's like sorting out a noisy squabble between children: just listen, and the fight may unravel itself, even though its an intolerable clamour at first. But can you resist imposing your adult authority on the situation?

Gail Sher, in The Intuitive Writer, has some simple and insightful things to say about Listening, about cultivating what she calls an Imagining ear. Training your imagining ear is the same as training yourself in the ability to allow peace, richness, joy, 'harmony plus inquisitiveness'. Its to allow basic goodness to flow from within to without and back again.

'For a writer, developing an imagining ear is the work of a lifetime. It involves deepening her relationship with herself and everything that crosses her path. Enhanced by non-doing, anonymity, self-sacrifice, ultimately it is about her awareness of the world – her commitment to hearing it day after day with a beginner's mind.'

'Writers listen slowly,' she offers. 'They listen inward, outward, then around the world in the four directions.'

Its important to create gaps around each 'hearing event'. By creating space around what we hear, we allow our fears a bit of room to unravel themselves. Those same fears that create deadness and blindness when we write.

She also says,
'Hearing is also a kind of sacrament. Through this body, through these ears, the universe is able to hear itself.'

This, incidentally, is similar to what Rilke means in the Duino Elegies, when he says, in the Ninth Elegy,
'Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window -
at most, column, tower...But to say them you must understand
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.'

So,

Listen.
Be Silent.
Hear the earth.
Hear your heart.

Breathe.
Be heart.

Inspiration Series II Things that go dump in the night

2010-01-12T15:15:00.002+02:00

There's a wonderful book by Edward Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel, which is a quest for 'the source of artistic inspiration'. He distinguishes between duende, that earthy and mysterious force that Lorca would invoke, and which the Flamenco tradition acknowledges as its driving impulse, and the other more airy force, the angel brand of inspiration. Duende is dangerous and consuming. It takes over and blinds you to all else but the creative act, fueling you along with its dark fire. I'm guessing it's what seized Kerouac, and Ginsberg when he wrote Howl. And, no doubt, Strindberg had a fair dose of it as well. The challenge with duende is to channel it without letting it burn you up. No wonder so many writers medicate with whisky: when you ride the duende spirit you will need a way down. Or up.

Angels, no less terrifying, seem to come from above. The duende is definitely an earthy force, it uncurls from its dark caverns, where the guardian muses may have soothed it into sleep, and charges upwards through the base chakras. Angel fire is much brighter. And the authority on this type of visitor is Rilke, as he sets out in the Duino Elegies.
Every Angel is terror. And yet,
alas, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul.

Of course, if you are going to invoke Angels you need the constitution to deal with what arises. You need to have a stomach for beauty,
For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.

Terrifying indeed.

And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence.

If you're going to invoke Angels, you need of course to understand suffering for the gift that it is, we who are such “squanderers of suffering”. How would it be if we allowed ourselves to feel all that, to take delight in each thing that we encounter, for all its terror, its threat to overwhelm us?

Angels. Daimons*. Are they inscrutable beings, indifferent to our wracks and ruins? Of course not. They cannot resist us. If you call them, they will come:

See, I was calling my lover. But not only she
would come......Girls would come from delicate graves
and gather.....for, how could I limit
the call, once called? The buried always
still seek the Earth. – You, children, a single
thing grasped here is many times valid...
...
Being here is the wonder.

Have you ever downloaded a story, a poem, seemingly from nowhere? Have you ever received a payload in the middle of the night, and sat up, grasping for pen, word, paper, and watched the mist melt from your brain as the four walls of your room came filtering back at you? Things that go dump in the night. I've never quite managed to hold onto any of those. But my feeling is that the worthwhile stuff leaves a flare mark somewhere in you. As long as you are in a good practice of doing your morning pages and writing down your dreams, then some of it will stick.

Am I a regular recipient of this kind of night time delivery? No. Aside from the fact that I am blessed with the most technicolour stereoscopic dreamlife, no, not really. But then, would your identity really survive a fully conscious angel download?

Not that you could withstand
God’s voice: far from it. But listen to the breath,
the unbroken message that creates itself from the silence.

And there's the thing you see. Maybe we have it wrong. Maybe, instead of listening in the night for the muses, angels, whomevers to bring us these fruits from beyond the veil, maaaaybe, its far more valuable for us to send them messages from here. Describe this world to them. Find the right shaped words to tell them about where you live and what lives in you. The colour of that leaf you saw. What plastic bags do when the wind lifts them. That's where the inspiration really lies.

Praise the world to the Angel, not the unsayable: you
can’t impress him with glories of feeling: in the universe,
where he feels more deeply, you are a novice. So show
him a simple thing, fashioned in age after age,
that lives close to hand and in sight.
Tell him things. He’ll be more amazed: as you were,
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter beside the Nile.
Show him how happy things can be, how guiltless and ours,
how even the cry of grief decides on pure form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing: transient,
they look to us for deliverance, we, the most transient of all.

Well, there's lots more to say about angels and daimons*. But I have said quite enough and this is a really long post and I have some more Rilke to read.

*Daimon, as you know, refers to that voice, that higher presence famously described by Socrates, a sort of imp sitting on your shoulder giving wise counsel and inspiration. I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell or someone else has a robust neurological explanation for this phenomenon, but I'm happy with Daimon, Duende, Angel.

Inspiration Series I

2010-01-11T11:10:00.003+02:00

I suppose I've always been a little preoccupied with understanding the creative process. Ever since I went to Real School and someone told me I was Very Kreative and I was puzzled as to why they thought this about me. Isn't everyone? And then for Geography once I drew a forest. Also at Real School. A deep dark forest, with milky greenish white tree trunks and dark spaces in between the tree trunks. Because that's what forests look like, right? the gaps between the trees are dark, coz there's no light in the forest. Murky. And then my Geography teacher wrote in red pen next to my forest 'tree trunks must be brown.' And then I started to understand. Some people aren't lucky enough to have parents who give you a whole wall next to your bed that you are allowed to draw on. Some people are told they must not go over the lines when they colour in. Some people have their imaginations vaccuumed out of them quite young, poor souls. Some people forget that we are all entitled to call ourselves artists, because making stuff is just a normal part of being a well rounded human. Isn't it?

And then there's that weird phrase they tell you: '1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration.'

Well its true I spose. Kingfisher wings flash at you only once in a while, but ants toil to get their kingdoms built. There's a shitload of gathering and ferrying of pollen before the honey oozes.

This blog started as an attempt to take seriously those ladies who love watery grottoes. Honouring the Muses. Sounds pretty trite, but having been deserted by them before, I do take em seriously, and will make the necessary libations. Its true that there are certain conditions that need to be in place if you want the kingfisher to swoop malachite and turquoise at you once in a while. The one I'm most interested in is this link between wild spaces and the creative heart. For me they are intrinsically connected. As we box in our wildernesses and burn our forests for burgers, aren't we also collectively desertifying our imaginations? That's what makes me go all chilly in the night.

I teach young aspirant creatives, aka drama students. I also teach teachers how to nurture creativity in the very young. I'm always a little shocked by the attitude that inspiration is something mysterious, that Creative is something you either are or you aren't, like you don't have to work for it. Drink, take drugs, and let the Muse strike when she's ready. Er, sorry pal. She's got better things to do.

I'm also often engaged in the task of raising start-up money for creative projects and I'm equally shocked by how both 'The Arts' and 'Nature / Environment' are so low on the priority lists, how they are something 'over there', nice to have but not as important as dot dot dot, those other things old Maslow said are more important. And how we artits (spelling unintentional but I'll keep it)all participate in our own grovelling. (I swing pendulum-like on this issue: sure I believe I must be paid my worth for the creative work I do. But if the money's not there its not going to stop me doing it).

I don't believe in Writers Block by the way. But I do believe that anyone can become creatively bankrupt, burned out, stale, flat, blah, polluted. And I do think you can suffer from some kind of internal terror, a kind of page fright where you are so concerned with the Other, the Audience, the Big Scary, your Grade 3 English teacher or whoever it is that whispers in your ear that your words are Not significant /too self indulgent or whatever else may be your personal creative Tippex.

So, mindful of the fact that I've been an infrequent blogger of late, I'm giving myself a map. Some musings (yes, I know) for the year ahead. Talking points, you know. For when I have nothing to say, or when I'm saying it all somewhere else and forget to pop in here.

With apologies to Julia Cameron, lets call it The Muses' Way. Some proposed route markers in this conversation:

Angel or Demon (Or, Things that go dump in the night)
Silence (or, You can't hear the stars if the TV is on)
Food (or Eat your artist's dates)
Water (Seriously though)
Vantage Point (or, mapping, or having a nice view)
Company (or, Get the hell out of my space)
Pollen (or, Group sex behind the wild irises)
Privacy and exhibitionism (or, Do you want to see me naked?)
Procrastination (or, Ooh look, a recipe for pickled garlic)
Composting and Recycling (or, How do I get rid of all this old crap?)
Harvest (or, Don't forget to say thanks)
Theft: Steal, but don't lie
Forest/trees, chaos/order, left brain/right brain (and other mythical dualisms)
Curiosity (did not kill anyone, not even a cat)

Not that I am announcing all future blog topics here. Good God no. I need to leave space for the unexpected odd ramblings, rants and reasonings. Nor am I offering any words of self help how-to for the creatively malnourished. Sorry. No fountain of wisdom here. Hopefully, just some points to trigger questioning. Coz when the curiosity goes, that my friend, is the day you have become a frightful old bore. So, which one shall we talk about first?

Group Sex Behind the Wild Irises

2009-12-29T20:38:00.005+02:00

Not actually.

Just resorting to cheap tactics to get you back to my blog. I mean it's been the longest time, while I was in my confinement with novelitus. I'm in remission right now. But I hear that the condition has a slow recovery rate and that there are frequent relapses.

At the moment, while I leave my twisted plot to untangle itself, I'm favouring really short swift stories. Like this one:

"I will love you forever," he said to her.
"Don't love me forever. Just love me now." She smiled into his brown eyes. They flicked away.
"Ok. In a minute. I've just got the kettle on."

So, I'm on holiday now. Its been quite a decade, has it not? It deserves a moment of pause. I'm not making New Year resolutions. The last month or two has seen me running, doing yoga, visiting the gym regularly, writing daily. Saying No where required. I wouldn't want to mess all that up with a good intention.

I'm just pottering around the garden, doing some filing, chucking out old clutter and leaving the laptop shut. Leaving the muses to frolic, behind the waterfall curtain. Behind the wild irises.

Happy new decade everyone!

Prose and Cons

2009-12-02T12:49:00.011+02:00

Or,

Wry Moments in November

On the 16th of November, this is in my blogger drafts folder:
I interrupt my nail-biting, umming, ahing, plotting and swearing to give you a short news update on how the Nanowrimo thing is going.

I am on 16 000 words. I should be on 25 000. Last night I realised who my main character is - NOT the character I previously thought. That's ok. Apparently Moby Dick was going to be all about Bulkington, until Ahab stepped into the frame, and Melville had to wash Bulkington off the ship with an almighty wave.

Its ok, its ok, its ok.

But what of Nanowrimo? Is it working for me?
YES!
Because I am by nature a slow and ponderous writer and this is a massive kickstart.
Because I am a deadline whore and it supplies what many aspiring novelists never have - a deadline, and a sense of community
Because I am writing everyday
Because I am NOT editing and
NOT revising and
NOT being precious about what comes out.

NO!
Because I am a deadline whore, and I am trying to wean myself away from this dependence - I just want to write for the pleasure of it!
Because I thought my November would be clean like a new whiteboard. Its not. It filled up quickly, with the UN job finally coming home to roost (deadline, 20 November) and student exams and a conference that I just couldn't miss.
Because when I know that I don't have it in me for that day and I'm just writing crap for the sake of wordcount, I get irritated and stop believing in it.
Because I am ultimately a slow and ponderous writer.
Because I'm probably breaking the rules by using a set of characters that I developed years ago, and so I care too much about them to just do the fly by the seat of the pants thing that wrimo requires.

On Friday the 20th of November I was on 25k. A good friend came to stay for a week. We went to the Mountain Sanctuary Park for the weekend. Husband and I have a strict no laptops rule for weekends away, and so I wrote by hand. Lots.

On the 24th of November my Facebook status read: One thing I have learned in November: you can't write a novel and edit a non-fiction book in one month.

On Friday the 27th I had given up on the full 50k. Just be kind to yourself was the mantra for a full November.

On Saturday the 28th my Facebook status read: Tamara does have 30 000 words. The novel is half full not half empty.

On Sunday the 29th I logged on the Wrimo site, determined to do at least 1000 words, as this is my comfy rhythm for a daily output. Their front page story urged that every year, hundreds of writers flashflood in the last few days and lift their wordcounts from 30k to 50k in three days, or even from 5k to 50k.

I decided: I am a deadline whore. This is a deadline. Let me at least try, because I'm not going to get another strange self-imposed virtual deadline like this in a while, spiced up by a bit of healthy sibling rivalry. I went onto the forums and found scores of people who were trying for the same thing. They reignited my spark with their wild ambition, their gung-ho attitude and their staggering word count records (apparently there are people out there who do in fact write 50k in one day, I still don't understand how that is possible).

I wrote 10k on Sunday night, and 10k on Monday, posting the last 50k word count half an hour before the midnight cut-off point.
In that time I:
Probably contradicted my plot arc about 300 times;

Was tempted to cut and paste from previous fifteen-year old draft attempt of novel about 36 times (I didn't);

Asked myself 'what's the point you're only going to delete this later?' about 999 times;

Did away with hyphens altogether so I could have words count as two not as one;

Checked my word count every (on average) 500 words;

Deleted very little (only when I could replace something like simultaneous -with at the same time);

Ate a fair amount of chocolate;

Took reasonable breaks;

Had my characters shout at me for trying to impose expositionary nonsense on them;

Witnessed a weird little villain dressed like Michael Jackson burst into the middle of an elephant poaching scene;

Allowed him to hijack the entire rest of the story, just to find out who the hell he was. (I still don't know. Except that he has shady connections with the Chinese mafia and lives in a crumbling colonial house in the middle of nowhere and has his own aeroplane)

And at the end of it all, I got this:

and thought -
er, ok, and what was all that about?

Do I have a novel?
Emphatically not.
Might I have one if I add another 20 000 words?
More like another 50 000. Er, maybe I'd be better off cutting 20 000 and 4 subplots and keeping it as an elegant novelette.
Am I going to show you any of it?
Not yet, dear ones, not yet.
Will I do the Nanowrimo thing next year?
Hell yeah.

[pics from the old customs house on Ibo Island, Mozambique]

No Mo Scene Change Sweats

2009-11-04T16:43:00.003+02:00

I LOVE writing prose fiction!

I've suddenly realised how constrained I usually am when writing plays. Because I also wear a set designer's hat and a fundraiser's hat, I'm always aware of the practical stuff like, how will they do those scene changes so quickly? Can you really have six different locations in such quick succession? I'm always writing for limited characters because otherwise the thing never gets staged, because actor's salaries are the biggest expense. And because I'm usually staging the thing myself, I've learned to be darned careful about those casual ways in which the playwright makes the producer cry with stage directions like a daisy grows up from the ground, or blood starts pouring down the window panes or the city shuffles towards her, you know, that sort of thing.

Oh, I'm rolling in it now. Bring them on, need another character? Go for it! Short choppy scenes that move from city to bush to Yeoville toilet, in and out of time frames, periods and dizzying locations. I haven't done this in ages. I wonder what was stopping me?

Full Tilt Folly

2009-10-29T15:36:00.002+02:00

Ok, this is my public declaration. I'm throwing down the gauntlet now so that I am less likely to throw in the towel later. Got another metaphor I can mix in there? I'm going to need as many as I can get coz I am doing the NaNoWriMo thing. Oh yes I am.
A novel in 30 days? 50 000 words in 30 days. That's 2000 a day, with a couple of days to breathe in between. Or, more precisely 1666 point 666666 per day. Yikes.

Thing is, I wrote this half formed premature breach story, oh about 14 years ago, when I had to submit a novella as part of a writing course I was doing. The thing itself was shite, but the world that it spawned was compelling, and the characters that poked their heads out of the primal soup still prattle to each other on the pages of my notebooks from time to time. As I wrote two posts back, if you have the urge to write a novel, ignore it. If it doesn't let go and doesn't let go, you have to pay attention. So I'm rewriting the thing from scratch, starting Sunday. That's not cheating, apparently, because you're allowed to do some plot notes and character research, as long as all the words you post start from 1 November.

Craziness? Absolutely. What I need now is some fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, shoot-from-the-hip rollicking keyboard smashing. Silence the left-brain editor because, as they say on the site, "editing's for December."

Talking of throwing all your cliches in one basket, does anyone else get as much joy from tangled metaphors? A dear fellow I knew once used to mix n match his in the most delightful way. "I went white. White as a sheep."
And my husband and I have collected some fantastic ones from our encounters with corporate consulting. The cliches themselves are spectacular enough, like "pluck the low-hanging fruit", but there are some truly inventive ones too.
"Don't lets saddle up someone else's monkey" has to be my all-time favourite. What are yours?

So, 50 000 words, who's going to join me? Chimera from Holey Vision did this last year and I was awed and inspired by her courage and endurance. I reckon it's worth a try. 50 000 words? I can do that. Getting them in the right order, now that may prove a little bit harder. But if I just collect them all and make sure they're in one place, well then maybe I can unscramble them later?

Come on, sign up, it'll be - um... fun?

Who's that girl?

2009-10-27T12:54:00.004+02:00

She is going to the gym twice a week.
She is waking up at 6.
She is writing 800 words a day.
She is sorting papers into neatly labelled files.
She turned down a second glass of wine last night.

Who the hell is she?
Ask her to stay.

The Stone Gods

2009-10-18T23:16:00.006+02:00

[images from the Hubble site]

There is a book that I thought didn't exist but it does. I thought I was going to have to write it. Isn't that the reason people write books? Because no-one has written the one you want to read? But I'm happy to have discovered that it does in fact exist. Jeanette Winterson has written it. Its called The Stone Gods

This is a relief. I'm glad I don't have to write it, because I wouldn't do as good a job as she has done. Writing such a book myself would have been long, arduous and painful. Now I just get to read it and delight.

Y'see, I think its true that we only have one book in us, as they say. But there are also books on the outside of us, ones that float around looking for a home. Book ghosts seeking out potential carriers, vessels they can pour themselves into. This book, or parts of it, swooped past me a couple of times. I heard it, but only in the way you hear an aeroplane overhead and think wistfully to yourself, I really want to go to Costa Rica.

I resisted. I'm like that. My approach seems to be - if you have the urge to write something, resist it until it goes away. If it comes back and back and back, then you've got a story. Or, as Gustav Holst once said, "Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you."

Obviously, in this case the ghost gave up and tried someone imminently more receptive and worthy, namely Ms Winterson. She netted it. ("The word you put down is the net for the one that got away," she writes).

Oh, obviously I'm being whimsical. Its not exactly the same book that fluttered past me, but its speculative fiction (a genre I love) and its threaded on themes I've wanted someone to write about - what would happen if we did discover a new, life-supporting planet? What would we do with it? Intergalactic travel, post climate change evacuation, corporate control, space tourism, love between a human and a beautiful robot. A repeating world.

The imprint in me is Atlantis. Technologies and civilisations so separated from emotional integrity that they follow the doomed survivor imperative: destroy ourselves as we exalt ourselves. For Winterson, it's Easter Island. People that ran out of trees whilst erecting the gods that would destroy them. Well, stories such as these litter our histories, don't they? Great Zimbabwe, I seem to remember reading, had to be abandoned because the environment could no longer support the civilisation.

So she takes this premise of a repeating world, a world where we don't learn. Where we simply cannot lift ourselves out of our cycles. Programmed to forget as fast as we learn. She takes this premise and she spins it into gold-skeined meditations on starting over.

What I am completely smitten by in this book are the melodic incantations. The swelling, cresting breaking rhythms. The way she can make tension and narrative bust out of a list - not a preposition in sight.

Its not a perfect book. But she is such a magician with language.

These are some of the repeating themes that underpin the book's philosophy:
"Is this how it ends?
It hasn't ended yet."
(the repeating world)

"And I remember it as we had seen it on that first day, green and fertile and abundant, with warm seas and crystal rivers and skies that redden under a young sun and drop deep blue, like a field at night, where someone is drilling for stars."
(the hymn to earth)

"A quantum universe - neither random nor determined. A universe of potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.
Love is an intervention."
(the universe of potentialities)

And,

"Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was."

I'm glad this book imprinted on her. Read it, and let it be imprinted on you.

Pendant

2009-10-16T01:25:00.005+02:00

Y'know,

It's not what you do it's
the way that you do it
Its not what you do, its
the way that you do it,
that's what gets results...

is what's been lilting through my head lately.

So many things
So many things

Yeah, I have a Life, Haha
But I also have a
Back Log

and that's bad news for me. Coz when I have a Back Log (yes, its as nasty as it sounds, with just as nasty a stink to it), is when I get realllllly slow. Like I just shut down. There's too much to do, from too long ago, and so I just pedal down, and go into rebellious mode.

Oh. I don't even know where to start.
Like, stuff from the wedding. April. No, I can't even. Photos, thankyous, unfinished business.. oooh, hang your head, lady.

Like, Marking. Student essays. Oh, tell me, what is the real difference between a 65 and a 70 and why should I strike my pen in either of these directions?

Like, Tax. I can't even. I shan't. I shush. I must.

Like, the state my office is in.
I dream of a warehouse in Doornfontein. Like a Faaarm in Aaaafrikaaaa? Like that. A loft, a studio, a spacious old warehouse downtown. A room of one's own. I have one, you know. It's just that, I'm spoilt. I want triple volume. I wish it to be a rehearsal space too. And a space to build models (as in, scale models for theatre designs) and a space to put a lot of books, and like Dave Eggars, for it to be a space where kids come and read, and in the background we (me and my whoevers) are busy making Stuff, man, like, plays and books and stuff. Y'know? Like that.

Like, I have this list of Unfinished Fiction. You wanna see it? Sies man, it hurts. I'm going to put it up here, why? Because its 2 in the morning and its brinkmanship and there is not enough at stake, so here we go -
What I am (still) busy with:

Kestral the novel

Thin Air the play

The Atlantis Papers – letters from an ageing planet

Captions for photographs that don't exist (A memoir of sorts - from 2 sisters)

Road movie ( a short movie in sms time)

Zambezi play

Susi and Chuma ( a play, part of a trilogy about David Livingstone)

Unsigned: some poems

The above are in various states of finishedness. Some nearly, some not even close.

I'm not in a squeeze about them, its more like a slow unfolding. But some of them are old, and are getting that whiff about them. They need to be aired. Perhaps one of you could help? I need
a) someone to kick my ass and hold me to a few promises,
b) someone who will give me honest to goodness true fair feedback (family members need not apply)
c) some-one who knows someone who knows someone who can get the dem things in print.
d) Or, someone who can, if its necessary, tell me gently but firmly that I must go back to the writing desk and I'm just nowhere near ready.

Well, I'm not, you know. But by December I will be.
And so will my dem tax return!!!

Kreativ silence

2009-10-01T16:26:00.014+02:00

I haven't much felt the urge to post here lately. There's been a lot happening in my neck of the Egoli woods, and something had to give.

Then a recent post of Mud's jolted me out of my complacency and I remembered that I have some bloggiquette that I must pay attention to.

Dear Val of Monkeys on the Roof gave me this at a time when I ws too rushed to acknowledge it properly. And besides, it had rules attached and rules make me procrastinate. This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks. Oh, I haven't been online much. I've been teaching, or in rehearsals, or in the car... and when I do get screentime my inbox is like a clogged gutter. Ok enough with the excuses.

Thank you Val, I humbly accept and will pass it on to those bloggers I regularly read and love - sorry if they have already received it.

The award is the Kreativ Blogger award and the rules are:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award. (Thank you Val, I wasn't really ignoring you.)

2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.

3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.

4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.

5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers.

6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.

7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.

Ok. 7 things about me.
1. This year, I teach design and drawing to a group of first year students at Wits University. I love them and they love me and we have a three times a week great relationship. I also supervise post-graduate research essays and that's damn hard work. I don't know if I will be doing this next year. I haven't decided yet.
2. I try to dedicate Tuesdays and Fridays to writing. That means fiction. That means in theory the day belongs solely to me. Sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I get co-opted into income-generation activities, and I find it very hard to switch in and out of fictional worlds. I need long debriefing sessions, and long psyche-up sessions. Perhaps this is why I have several unfinished fiction projects.
3. I have a fascination with Atlantis. As a real place, as a metaphor and as some kind of memory. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that places I lived as a child no longer exist - they were swallowed up by a meandering river.
4. I have an elephant spirit who visits me in my dreams. I cannot explain the exchanges we have, but they are profound.
5. One day I will build a ceramic house and glaze it on the inside. I read that you can do this - a clever man called Nader Khalili has developed a technique called super adobe. This gets my motor racing.
6. I plan my life around Mercury Retrogrades
7. I am not as credulous and new-agey as I may sound. I believe that certain things like the influence of Mercury, angels, higher selves and whirling chakras have a plausible explanation, and just because we haven't been able to 'prove' it yet doesn't mean its not real. (but don't get me started, coz with the exception of Reya, you will all think I'm nutsos)

7 Kreativ bloggers:
Miranda my sister of the Times of Miranda who is a very kreativ lass
Chimera of Holey Vision who can make you roar with laughter while breaking your heart
Shiny of Almost Thirty Three to whom we must be very grateful because she writes the important letters that we never get around to writing
Tessa of the Aerial Armadillo (of course she already has it, because she is a supremely kreatiff and luminous soul, but hey, now she has it again)
Fush of Fush and Chips (I don't think he's the award type, but I don't mind if he takes it and runs or ignores it. His words and his mix tapes are proof that four years at a certain university did not blast all the kreatiffity out of him)
Reya of After the Gold Puppy, who is part of the mystery.
Siren Voices - fantastically written stories about scenes you don't want to witness first hand.

I also had another one from Val some time back - this little mermaid.
And, wasn't there also one from Miranda some months back? See? I'm a shocker. No manners. I do however greatly appreciate the recognition, so thanks Val, Miranda.

And I will break the silence soon.

Folding time

2009-09-08T08:50:00.006+02:00

I lead a busy life in Jozitown. I'm not complaining, because I mostly get to do things I love, exciting things. But when I count hours spent in traffic, or driving to and from places, or grocery shopping or fiddling on facebook, I know that there are far better ways to spend time. To fool time, and creep into its folds.

And here are some of them:

Staring at turquoise. A completely restorative vibration, Prozac for the eyes. This is source turquoise, like it's actually made here, pouring out from under the sand.

Watching shadows creep. Ideally one should do this for about two hours a day, for maximum benefit.

Honouring the coming and going of the sun. When I think of how many sunsets, sunrises and moonrises I don't pay attention to...

Making nature sculptures. One of my favourite artists ever is Andy Goldsworthy, who collaborates with nature to make astounding installations that he then photographs - like sorting autumn leaves into colour categories and then arranging them in concentric bands around a tree. Or building ice columns all night, by dripping accumulative drops of water, drop by freezing drop and then photographing at dawn as his labour of love melts under the first rays of sun. I love his cairns, his sudden suprises on a cliff face. I could spend all day sorting pebbles and making Goldsworthy tribute installations.

aliens

2009-08-26T23:24:00.005+02:00

Whew. Its gone. That shroud of a cloud that has been wrapping up my head and creeping into my bones and muscles and blood through nostrils ears pores. shudder. begone, mischievous wraith, begone.

Have checked all vital signs and I think I may still be human. though definitely, the aliens have been roosting in my body cavities for a couple of weeks now.

Other things that have been occupying my head (that echoing cavity) since the aliens left:

1. Will I like District 9? I mean aside from the fact that it represents a seriously exciting departure (arrival, rather) for South African film making. Aside from the numbers (profits, etc) and the thrill and the relief that we don't have to listen to bad attempts at soffeffrican eccents and so forth. and the fact that we get to watch bits of joburg blow up. does it manage to make comment about our treatment of 'the other' without actually otherising its own in the process? watch this space. (oh man. of course i'll like it. its going to be Fab).

2. Will audiences like Paydirt? we perform this fledging little play in two weeks time in its parent city, Jozi. eeeeemp.

3. How on earth will I get through all this marking before I go on honeymoon?

4. I'm going on honeymoon!!! five months after the fact. which is just bloody perfect.

5. the aliens are here. every where I look people are coughing wheezing dragging themselves around. the whole country is ill. they're everywhere i tell you. we just didn't expect them to be so small.

Hypochondriacs Anonymous

2009-08-19T13:28:00.010+02:00

Secretly, I hoped it was swine flu. I did. Something big and real and scary sounding, so it would be ok that I am languishing in bed. So that it had a name, and I had a real excuse for feeling so lousy.

Oh dear. Some things are hard to grow out of.
See, we kids, we stayed in a place where there was no doctor. Mom even had a big book called Where There is No Doctor. Now that I have Google I am even more of a compulsive self-diagnoser than when I was ten. When I really wanted an illness with a scary name so that I could be the one that everyone felt sorry for.

But see there really were big scary diseases around us and so it was not cool to cry wolf. Not cool at all. 'Sides, Bonkar was from the 'if there's no blood don't cry' school of hard knocks (and we're talking buffalo-sized hard knocks here.) Being strong and stiff upper lip made you more likely to get points, especially if you really were sick with something horrible. So first prize was to be really sick with something horrible, but not complain at all, and then get the gratifying diagnosis -'she's so brave'.

Worst thing was to earn the title of 'hypochondriac'. My friend Patrick periodically had every kind of feel-sorry-for-me attention-getting injury you can imagine - he would look in a cobra's eyes to make sure it spit in his. Hypochondriac? Drama queen? Oh, you couldn't compete with Patrick. But it was a competition.

And what were our childish aches and pains compared to the stories all around us - the man who was found by the side of the road holding his intestines in his arms after a buffalo encounter? The man who lost his arm to a leopard? Even a very ow scorpion sting has to be endured with a bit of grit, you know?

Sister and I, when we came to the big smoke for the first time, we shopped with mom at a huuuuge wonderworld called the Hyperama. It was a supermarket. I had never seen one on that scale before. Somehow, this became the tag name for if one of us was feeling sorry for themselves with an illness of some kind. "Hiiii -purrrr -rama!" we would chant at each other when anyone complained about an ache or pain.

I'm glad that complaining wasn't tolerated in my culture. I understand where it all comes from - the British Army stoic grandad, the need to be tough. My poor mother, with hepatitus, malaria and all kinds of other lurking lurgies around us - it was best not to alarm her. Or false alarm her, should I say. (though I did take great delight in creating false gory injuries on my body when I got my first Kryolan make-up set).

But truly, what a mess it created in my childish mind. I am still so bad at taking time out when I need to rest - I overdo it time and time and time again, pushing on through with the mind over matter until my body won't let me anymore, and then its silly, coz the downtime is so much longer. Matter can really give Mind a revenge-klap when it gets its chance.

Still paranoid about not being a wuss. If I complain about not feeling well theres a big tribal voice in my ear that says, 'Come on now, Stop dying and Get back on your horse.'

Of course now I also understand about somatising and how the body expresses emotional unfinished business. Oh lordy, and is my body communicative with me. I guess, what you resist persists. I am a hypochondriac. I do get very stuck in what Myss calls 'wound power'. And I've been hearing myself lately - full of complaints, negativity, blahblahness. Yuk. Hence the blogging silence. I just can't listen to that shit.

The truth? I need a lot more introspection time than I give myself. If I spend too long in the company of others, giving, giving out energy all day long, rushing from one thing to the next, I just end up getting sick.

Ok, well there's my navel-gazing confession of the day.

And I leave you with the story that a wise old therapist told me once: A man, wishing to become more holy and enlightened, went to the local holy man, and told him that he was going to survive on bread and water for as long as it took for him to get wise and holy. The response? "that is not a good idea. if you can survive on bread and water alone, you will expect those after you to survive on stones."

I love that story. To me this is the ultimate story for children of stoics.

Maybe I should form a support group?

PS its not swine flu. its acute sinusitus. owwwwwww.

today

2009-08-14T22:04:00.002+02:00

i submitted two funding proposals, prepared another, was told by my therapist that i'm having a breakthrough, found wheat-free carrot cake, watched my first performance of Paydirt with an audience.

Decided that, perhaps I could,

after all

*the opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect on the publication as a whole.

legal tender

2009-07-29T20:56:00.003+02:00

Every time I go to the Norwood Spar or the 'Tops' bottlestore, I get the best subliminal messaging of my week. I queue to ring up the groceries (loaf of bread, coffee - man do we get through coffee in this house - dishwash liquid, Tanglewood natural yoghurt) and she asks me if I need plastic bags (oh no! I forgot to bring them again!) and then as she totals it all up, and I tell her I'm paying with a debit card, and she swipes the debit card, and she asks me to punch in my code, I look up, and two words are flashing green on the little screen on her till - tender validation. Isn't that sweet? The same at the bottle store. Beer for the boys, a not-too-cheap bottle of red for me. And there it is - blinking green at me. Tender validation.

I'm usually in a grump at this moment, having wended my way through grindy traffic, or squeezing the shopping in between appointments that are Much More Important than bloody Grocery Shopping! Usually a little bit of a scowl lurking around my jowls. I'm not fond of grocery shops, supermarkets, places where I'm reminded that I'm not a hunter gatherer after all and the harvest from my kitchen garden is still not yielding packaged pizza dough. I grumble to myself, like the wolf who missed Red Riding Hood, until I see it. Tender validation.

And I always obey. I always tell myself something really nice, really tender. I do. I say - Tam you're so clever and nice and well done for getting through that traffic, and you're just the best, no-one knows what it takes to be you, but I do, and well done, I think you're great. Good choice of wine too.

Try it - a little bit of tender validation. It works a treat, it really does.

the root of all evil

2009-07-20T13:00:00.002+02:00

I need you to all feel very very sorry for me. I do. Feel sorry for me. But that's not enough. The only way I will get through the next few days is if I have your collective sympathy. Please?

I went to the dentist on Friday. For a root canal treatment. I've been putting it off (yes, I know, that makes it worse. I know I know. Ok! I heard you!!) She filled the tooth two and a half months ago and said if it doesn't "settle down" she'll have to take the nerve out. It didn't. Settle down.

So on Friday I went and writhed around on her chair while she "took the nerve out". Which involved her opening up a hole in my tooth so that she could scrape out my sinuses with a rusty nail file. Or so it seemed. Actually it felt like she was succking my eyeball out though my gums. The injection may as well have been a placebo. It soothed the pain like rescue remedy soothes a psychotic fugue: Not at all.

Eventually she stopped, put a plug on the blood bath, gave me a prescription for antibiotics and myprodol and sent me on my wincing way. I spent the weekend in a myprodol blurr. I yelled "s t f up" to the hippy within who doesn't like taking antibiotics.

I went back today, for more. Because she said that waiting any longer would cause me pain - due to pressure build up as the tooth drained. Funny, the pain had just subsided. But five minutes with her and it was right up there again. Even a second of that *%%##*** drill made the richter scale in my mouth skyrocket.

Has dental science progressed at all since 1300? I mean, call me unrealistically optimistic. Tell me I have blind faith in modern science, but really, isn't there a better way to "drain a tooth" than shoving what feels like a serrated needle up there, and poking around til the patient screams?

"Its a very long canal" she says.
"Sorry" she says.
"I know its hurting" she says.
WELL WHY THE FUCK DO YOU KEEP DOING IT THEN? I roar silently.
When she removes her rubbery fingers I say, meekly, "why do you suppose it still hurts even after the nerve is removed?"
"I don't know" she says. And goes right back in there.

My bib looked like a prop for a Tarantino movie.

"There's a lot of stuff coming out of here," she says.

And then finally.

"Well, we're just going to have to wait for the antibiotics to work." There's a big pulpy cyst around the root of my tooth, according to the x-ray. It seems I have been sporting this abcessy thing for some weeks now. Which would explain the low energy, foul moods and over reliance on soup and whisky for my nutritional intake.
"It's not in the sinus though," she says, cheerily. Meaning, she didn't actually puncture through to the nasal cavity.

Sorry to be so graphic. I really just need you to feel my pain.

To think she's going to invoice me.

Multiple career disorder

2009-07-10T01:52:00.004+02:00

When I was a little girl, quite a little girl, I wanted to be a child pyschologist. I remember it clearly - some kindly grown-up asked me, so what d'you want to be when you are big, Tammy? We were standing outside the creosote-coated wooden structure that I called home.
"A child psychologist" I answered, without missing a beat. Then wondered, why the chuckle?

I'm not sure where I got this from - or what I thought it meant. Was there someone who was that and I admired them? Did I read it in a book? Who knows.

The other thing I wanted to be, apart from a vet, a biologist and a motorbike racer, was a writer. This from as early as I remember.

Someone else asking me that ol question and I remember saying,
"I'm going to be a writer." Made sense. Granny had written books. So had Grandfather.
"Ah, said the person (one of many visitors that came and went through our lives)
"What kind of writer? Like a sign writer? Or a calligrapher?"
No stupid. A writer. The kind that writes books with stories in them. I wonder if I gave her a withering look. Patronising sort, she was.

The words and the bees
Back to the biologist part - actually more of an entomologist. I loved insects. Words and insects. At eight I knew the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist. Duh. I was quite convinced that I would discover a new species of moth, termite, or glow in the dark mosquito. I studied harvester ant nests and intimately understood their social structures and movement patterns. Perhaps I was Eugene Marais in a previous life. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled a copy of Soul of the White Ant off my mother's bookshelf and realised that someone else had been there, done that which I had fervently planned. This was before I went to Proper School, and discovered there was a weird separation between arts and science and apparently you couldn't be a poet-biologist.

The last bullet was plugged into that hope at high school. I adored my biology teacher (Mr Sherry, wherever you are, you rocked). But Chemistry? The teacher was a perv who liked looking down the girls' school blouses. Physics? A cold war that started when he walked into class and caught me drawing a devastatingly accurate caricature of him on the overhead projector.

Without Physics and Chem, Biology A-level wasn't going to happen and by 16 I was firmly on an arts course, for better or worse. The fact that I grew up around bottles of turpentine and pigment can't have helped. Two hippy artist parents? I didn't stand a chance.

A cunning plan
Then I went to Varsity - headlong into more confusion. I started off with that chrystalline logic you have when you are 19. I would major in English Literature, obviously. And I would do Drama for two years only. To learn about character from the inside, you see. And then I would choose Philosophy or something clever so that I would be able to write books that answered all the really important questions about the outer frontiers of reality and consciousness (what can I say - I'm Sag/Scorpio). I think that was the plan, anyway.

Something to fall back on?
At the back of all this, the persistent ring of my grandfather's voice - "you can't make money from this artsy fartsy stuff. You need something to fall back on. A secretarial course. For God's sake don't become a safari guide."

Was drama my thing to fall back on? Or just into, the way one falls into a rich chocolaty mudpatch, sliding stiff-kneed at first (oh no, I don't wanna get my clothes dirty) and then gleefully (wheee! this is fuuun!) and then you sling your first mudball at someone and you're done for, hooked, wallowing forevermore. Inadvertantly calling everyone dahling and using words like emoting. And projecting.

But still, I have career A.D.D.
Let's see. I have been a perfume spritzer, jewellery seller, a costume and set designer, a drama teacher, a waitress, a potter, a proof reader (I suck at that), an industrial theatre scriptwriter-actress-director, a fundraiser (I suck at that too), a proposal writer (I'm good at that), a facilitator and a radio operations communications control officer (aka ROCCO. I'm really good at that). And every now and then, someone pays me to write a play.

No wonder I'm exhausted.

Its eclipse season, and its time to shed some dead wood. Its time to bloody well focus. I "twist and turn like a -- twisty turny thing", to quote Blackadder. Or was it Baldrick. Yep, even this post is making me yawn and squirm and stare out the window.

Really though, it should have been obvious a long time ago. Writing, making plays, whatever. Living in the deadly serious world of what if - that's the place where you can be any damn thing you want. Even - (duh! It should have been obvious!) Even (of course) - a child psychologist.

my whole wide world

2009-07-05T00:45:00.004+02:00

Tamara is feeling extravagent.
Tamara is cracked wide open.
Tamara has not been on facebook for months and suddenly she is all over it, spilling.
Tamara is swelling, surging, cresting, breaking with metaphors that potentially only surfers understand. And she's not even a surfer. Oh you don't have to be a surfer. You just have to be a partial sideline witness to...
oh bollocks. Let me just -

I am an aunty. An Onty, as they say here. My beautiful sister, of thetimesofmiranda, has made herself sacrosanct to that ordinary miracle - the giving of life.
Damn. She has pushed a small (quite big actually) live human creature ( I saw it. IT WAS HUGE. [and very cute]) through her vagina. Seriously. I am not joking. She did this. I was not there. To witness all the things she will ( I hope) blog about in due course. But bloody hell. I am not the first person to be struck dumb by this ordinary miracle. Her husband, for one, looked kind of - well - I've seen that look before. And it wasn't because the lions lost so badly to the boks. (with a face saving comeback today). He is a mensch tho. He hung in there. No fainting. They didn't have to call me. Tho I wanted them to - for what? why? no, I only. No. it was all. It happened as it should. Oh my poor mother, smsing through the night. what - how? now? what? when? Oh! oh bollocks. I answered the phone in my sleep (yes, i did eventually sleep, through my CAPS LOCK smsing to her man ARE YOU SURE I SHOULDN"T be THeRE? receiving his calm No, its ok, all good...responses and then finally, thank thank - yes, oh thank - janelle and i gmailing each other furiously should i be there should i
phew
Mark at 3;40 am its a girl - (yes I thought that, tho only this morning, before that i thought it was a he, in the bath this morning i thought it - of course its a she silly) its all ok she is its all its ok sleep now its a girl its a girl its a girl
And -
And -
I am learning new things about love.
I am.
This feeble heart of mine.

Heh heh.

Seriously though. Miranda will probably say things like - oh I know all mothers have said this before - and she will try to not be a gushing new mom who is a blogger mom who is all full of fuzziness for the babyness.

But just so that you know. And she may be mad at me because I am stealing the gap before she gets home and cozy with her laptop and can say about -

oh man.
Just so you know. She truly IS the most beautiful small piece of angel-mail that ever came to the southern hemisphere. (i can't speak for up there) She is so cute.

Assertiveness training (if that's ok with you)

2009-06-21T00:02:00.003+02:00

"I'm doing stress management and assertiveness training next week. A corporate gig."
My sister nearly choked on her soup.
"You? Assertiveness? What did they say? Hey - you're going to do this assertiveness training next week. Without pay. And you just nodded, ok, sure.... right?"

Um. Something like that. No. I am getting paid. Really. Just that, they sold it as an assertiveness course but its not geared for that. Its a stress course. So please just - make it into an assertiveness course, whatever, just, you know, throw in a couple of extra exercises...
Er, ok. Sure, Whatever you say.

Stress management, me?
She who has been eating her lunch at 4 pm because she forgot/ didn't have time/was rushing out the house and left the lunchbox on the washing machine...
Driving and putting on lipstick in the rearview mirror because she's late but she just can't arrive looking like, well, like that.
That funny feeling of - whats that brushing up against my earlobe? Oh, its my shoulder.

Yeah. Right.
But it was fun.
Me and nine stressed employees in a training room. I made them dance, I made them meditate, I made them breathe, I made them look at the deep beliefs underlying their stressors.

It's always the same with those corporate gigs. I gird myself for a long drudge of hard work. The ennui of powerpoint and melamine desks and carpeted rooms with canned air and poor coffee. But inevitably, you get to play with an interesting bunch of real South African DNA. On this gig, there was the poor-me desperately unassertive pet-lover, grappling with big family issues. There was the balding SA version of Ricky Gervais who made sweeping comments, old South Africa style about Zulus being a war-like nation (this was somehow a stressor for him, I didn't quite get why). There was the giggly make-a-joke-out-of-everything woman who is traumatised by Joburg crime and has a desperate need to control her environment and all the people in it. The shy first-born in a family of 9 siblings (father has two wives) who feels burdened by the need to bring his dispersed family together. The just-out-of-varsity bright young thing who is just biding her time in this job. The hardened credit-controller who thinks she has no issues with assertiveness, its everyone around her who has the problem.

I love these courses. They are exhausting. But there's something very rewarding about working with the raw matter of peoples' problems, stresses and organisational miscomforts. And trying to release some of that stuff, and forge new pathways. A two day course is a pathetic amount of time to do this, of course, and next time, I'll politely say that I think it might be better if they tailor the course towards proper assertiveness exercises, instead of asking us to make the shoe fit, magically. If that's ok with them, of course.

Out of Office Autoreplies

2009-06-02T11:15:00.005+02:00

My dear friend JC (you know who you are) recently introduced me to McSweeneys, that fantastic writing project/community, with their breathstopping beautiful periodical books. Where have they been all my life? In their own words,

"McSweeney's Quarterly Concern publishes on a roughly quarterly schedule, and we try to make each issue very different from the last. One issue came in a box, one was Icelandic, and one looks like a pile of mail. In all, we give you groundbreaking fiction and much more."

Straying from my task of hammering out a script ( I loathe writing to deadline it makes me cross and rebellious), I wandered onto the site and found these out of office autoreplies. by Jim Stallard.

I love them. And what a cunning and elegant way to disappear for a while, which is precisely where my fantasies have been this morning.

Let's see...
I will be at my desk from 5pm until 6pm daily, while you are stuck in traffic.

I will be out of the office until September when the weather improves. Please direct urgent enquiries to my therapist.

Students, I will not be responding to any more emails this month. I have already invoiced for the hours we spent together.

I will be out of the office indefinately until I become a successful fiction writer.

I have forsworn email, blogging, twittering and facebooking until further notice. Its a bet I have with my husband and a lot of money is at stake. Please don't tempt me.

I will be spending this week at the bottom of a well in the hope it makes me as good a writer as Murakami. You may send small folded paper aeroplanes down but please only do it at midday. Food parcels also welcome.

I will be by the bear cage at Joburg zoo for the remainder of this week. No sudden movements.

What's your out of office autoreply this week?

In the meantime

2009-05-26T11:15:00.005+02:00

As you may or may not be aware, the purpose of Fleeing Muses was to create a song to beckon those long skirted ladies back to a place where I could hear them. I needed to seduce them, to make a leafy grotto where they might feel at home. A fireside where they could warm their toes and voices, sipping wine and teasing frogs and crickets with their song until their friends joined them. So that stories could begin to waft around me once more.

Well, for now at least, the libations have worked. Thanks to your generous participation in the endeavour, I might add. Your comments have been like compost, and I'm really grateful for that.

The channels are open it seems, and this time its a steady flow. Read all about the project I'm working on, its called Paydirt, and its a ... hmm, well for now I'm calling it a sort of immorality play about Joburg. Its a space to have fun. It opens in Grahamstown at the National Festival of the Arts in about a months time.

So please do pop over and share in the excitement.

The Other Side

2009-05-19T19:07:00.003+02:00

You will forgive me.

I know you will.

I simply need some space.

The wedding, and all its attendant stories...it's just too fresh, too intimate, too close. For here, you know?

I had put so much on hold ("I'm too busy now, I'll do it after the wedding")
It stacked up against me, like the Odds.

And then I got the Odds. Tumbling down on top of me. (and everyone near me).

That to-do list grew teeth and a long, scaly tail. It lashed me.

Having so dutifully trained myself in the art of saying Yes, it seemed I had caught it like a swiney fever.

Tamara, will you supervise extra students?
YES!
Tamara, will you re-write this course for us?
I WILL!
By Friday?
YES!
(fool! you can't do that!) spake the sense voice. But sense-voice was in brackets. And smaller font.
Tamara, remember that proposal you promised us...
YES!
Can we have it this week?
YES!
Tamara, we start rehearsing our Grahamstown play this week, you know that don't you?
YES!

And - no-one warned me. That somehow, post-wedding, hubby and I would not so much wallow in blissful marital tranquillity as take the opportunity to Sort Through Our Issues. Once and for all. At high volume. Well, at least the passion is still there after 13 years of cohabitation. Of course, he had his reasons. (see above). Sense-voice outsourced itself to someone who cares. Sjoe, but a girl can hang on to her old issues if she tries, ne? And fight for them! Anyway, its over now, and peace has returned to the valley.

Baby steps, and I have managed to
a) clear the decks
b) remind myself of The Power of No (apologies to Mr Tolle)
c) forgive myself for not having sorted through over 1000 wedding photos
d) forgive myself for not having written up all the wedding anecdotes in champagne-witty prose
e) go to another friend's wedding in the Eastern Cape (a lekker skop it was too)
f) start the script for a certain extremely exciting project... a production called Paydirt. It's about being a Joburger. It premieres in Grahamstown at the National Festival of the Arts in a month. And we are blogging the whole thing here. Woooohooooooooo!!!

I'm back. Wedding stories must wait, I just can't put them here now, not yet. I need Distance. I need Assimilation. I know you understand. I just know it.

I am trying to learn something you see. I am trying to take things one at a time. I am trying to learn that the ability to multi-task is not equivalent to worthiness.

Oh look. Now I've gone and burned the supper.

bad headweather

2009-05-10T21:06:00.003+02:00

Unseasonally severe head weather has interrupted our broadcasts. Random electric storms, hail, occasional patches of heavy fog and isolated incidents of flooding have displaced thousands of scheduled activities.

We resume service when calm returns to the hood. the head.

It was a dark and misty night

2009-04-28T21:24:00.003+02:00

Being the perceptive readers you are, you will understand that if I now begin to spin tales of What Went Wrong, this is no reflection of me as a person somewhat prone to the half empty school of life. Nor is it proof that I have an obsessive tendency to hark back on regret and imperfection. Oh no. It is merely evidence of the fact that a good story is all about What Went Wrong. No one (really) needs hear the endless oohs and ahs of how wonderful it all was.

Truly, it was all splendid, and all was as it should be. But drama is not built on those details. Drama is about expectations thwarted, old schoolfriends biting down on old bitternesses, perfect plans being lanced by the fierce needle of, well, life, really. Drama is about the fly in the ointment, winking at you as it flaps its last oily flap. Drama is about breaking down a quarter of the way up the mountain on twos-day night and there's not a thing you can do about it. And lets face it, its drama you want, right?

You see, there was no margin for error. My to-dos seemed to bulk out and bristle at me every time I ticked one of them off. They'd just re-assemble themselves, multiplying, grinning, grasping at me. I'd slay one, and they'd breed. My notebook was full. The excel sheet long since abandoned. My house full of well meaning relatives who really wanted to help, if only I had time to sit for five minutes and think of a task for them. Or somehow, download the contents of my head into a verbal form that someone outside my head could understand.

And then I got a very bad hangover. Ha. I make it sound like someone mailed it to me in the post. Truly, my Pakistani Malawian Bridesmaid schoolfriend who now lives in the genteel countryside of Great Britain somewhere did a fabulous job of organising me a fine hen night. (I know. Apparently that's what it is called.) All was as it should be. Guffaw inducing gifts, my dear mates around one table, too much Cava. It was good. And like so many before us, we thought that More would make it Better. And it didn't. It made me lose my phone in my friend's couch and not know where it was the next day. It made me thirsty and barely able to concentrate for my very early hair appointment the next morning. It made me lose a day. That was Wednesday. Threesday. In the later part of that day, I fetched my mother-in-law-to-be from the airport. After dry retching in a toilet in Newtown, waiting for T to get to work (late) so that I could get my phone from her (do you have any idea how important your phone is on Threesday?), after remembering with faint horror that I had smoked a cigarette last night. After sitting in the bank for hours because I realised I had actually left my bank card in the machine the day before and, miraculously, someone had handed it in. I still got to the airport. I also fetched the wonderful P, a friend from Cape Town who was to be one of several wonderful wedding elves.

So on Thursday, the pressure was not only on it was unfeasible. The Plan was that on Thursday, mother and sister were to travel ahead in the slow Pajero, and we (bridesmaid and P and I) were to follow behind, leave my non 4x4 vehicle in Dullstroom and proceed together up the hill, with luggage and wine and mattresses and other very important bits and pieces. So that on Friday we would have the luxury of waking early, setting up the lanterns, picking some wild flowers, transferring the final playlists from computer to ipod, and just generally soaking up the marvels of the place we chose as our nuptual spot. Well.

A midday leaving would have been (just) feasible. But due to the lost Wednesday, and the fact that I still had ridiculous amounts of last minute emails to send, and B and I still had a last minute meeting with lawyer that morning, Thursday just didn't manage to make herself long enough for us. She tried. We actually were on the road before the bad traffic hour. But that didn't matter, because a truck had lost its load on the outskirts of town, and we waited. and waited. and waited. Tearing at my clutch in static traffic. And I won't tell you how fast I drove to get to Dullstroom because my mom is reading this, but when we finally got to her, in her patient Paj, it was late. Dark, late. No time for five intrepid women to be heading up a dark hill on a rocky road with a heavy load. But hey. Stubbornness is what we are made of, us Carr girls, and there were three of us. So off we went. In the valiant Paj.

We got over the railway tracks. Up the first bit of rutted nastiness. Up onto the stony section. And the Paj she coughed once, stalled and - that was it. Alternator. An old illness.

About 9, the moon is still high and perky. I phone Jacob the farm manager to see if he can bring the tractor down to tow us. Fine, in theory. But he is currently at the bottom of the hill and must walk up, to get the tractor to bring to us. This will add two hours. So we do the sensible thing - find the duvets, the bedding, the screw-top wine bottles. Its cold. we sip. we sleep.

Jacob arrives, in a tractor with no lights. The once-perky moon is slipping away and the hills are exhaling a soft, icy breath. The tractor can tow us, a bit. Slowly. I walk next to it with the torch, and easily keep apace. Its going to be slow work. Mom's windows are all misted up, she has to trust the pool of light that is my torch. But then there's a steep bit of road and big loose rocks, and just no way that the tractor will do it. We're too heavy. Jacob can't help. We must walk.

So, we grab the food we can - a couple of shopping packets in front of the car.. We can only find one torch, because everything was so hastily packed. Off we go.

Its 9km from the bottom of the hill to the farm, but in the dark and after the sleep, I have no sense of how far we are. We are a patient, strong lot of girls, really we are. My Ma, who's developing a bit of a nasty cough, my 6-month pregnant sister, my bridesmaid with bad shoes, and the silent stoic P, who recently did the Rwenzoris and doesn't have a complaint in her body. Except, did I mention that we are all pretty hungry, coz we ate badly that day, it being the day it was...

I don't know what time it was when we set out. But I do remember the moment we couldn't see the moon any more, when it sank below the last gleaming hill and the deep silence got dark. And we had our cellphones and a torch. And we trudged.

And trudged.

And at some point I thought of Xerxes and his crazy campaigns of war, pouring endless resources into a no-win ego-hole... we shall overcome. And I thought of British grit. And I thought of my grandfather, the walker. And I thought what on earth for?

But mostly we didn't think much, except (everynowandthen) about a Nice Cup of Tea and a crackling fire. Well, I did.

And then, as we reached the top, the part where the road splits and the one you have to take is the less travelled one, and its hard to spot - the mist came up. Like when you're a kid and they blindfold you and spin you around, and then you suddenly have no idea which way is left, right, up, down. The world just throws a cloth over your head and you have no idea which way to turn. And you're on a mountain and there's no moon and you know there are cliffs that you could tumble down...

It was 2 am when Tonglen opened her warm crackling loins for us (yip, that's what it felt like). And the aga was lit, and we had tea and we made heated up tinned sweetcorn and chickpeas and tomato salsa and I realised that the heavy item in the packet I had been carrying was not rice as I had thought but sugar. and we hadn't brought the bread.

And we slept soooo well.

Vote for Love

2009-04-22T15:30:00.005+02:00

It's election day here in the sunny south, and I'm sitting trying to sift out priorities from a clamour of to-dos, things that have been on hold for months now. Truly, I've had the busiest three months of my life. And those who know me will understand that that is quite a claim - I'm generally a buzzy backsoon kind of a gal. Aside from the military operation that was preparing for the wedding, I've been wrestling with starting a new job (part time teaching at the University. In subjects I am verrry rusty at) and starting my new company. More on that another time.

I've never been good at prioritising. I tend to do what other people need me to do first, and my other urgents slip and slide until they clamour angry all at once. Well, obviously the most important thing of the day was to cast my vote. We the residents of the blue wall were at the voting stations with the wind snapping at our ears at half past six this morning. My vote, my secret. It wasn't altogether an easy choice to make. Not this time. The three main protagonists are all very flawed, and there are a strange and motley collection of walk-on part(ie)s that leave you scratching your head in wonderment. Interesting times ahead. But still, I made my X and I'm satisfied.

Other things clamour at me today too - I want to sit and sort through these wedding pics, put them up on flickr, get the other discs from the other photographers (we didn't have one official person y'see. Many of our friends are gifted souls with great cameras, so we just imposed on them. I think there were eight in all!!)

I need to prepare reading lists for the MA students that I will be facing next week, and for some reason this whole prospect fills me with the Fear. It involves going back to my ten-year old MA thesis and digging up old Performance Studies notes. Postcolonial theory, ritual theory, arguments on cultural appropriation, the Other, ooo my blood pressure sinks to all time lows. I went to the library yesterday and came home with an armful of books, which normally would make me buzz with excitement.

But. I have Toothache. Aah, you see, I told you I couldn't prioritise. Before the wedding I ignored the little voice that said Just. Go. To the dentist. That loose filling will come back to bite you (arkark). You will. Be. Sorry.

And I am. Verry verry sorry. So my head is full of election manifestos and Richard Schechner and 'Decolonising Methodologies' and deep thud inflammation. I am swigging colloidal silver but I fear I may need antibiotics. Keeping the pain at bay with heavy painkillers, and my whole body just begging for immobility and silence.

So the stories wait another day, I'm afraid. The good news is that we have two more public holidays coming up, so this weekend you can expect a thousand and one wedding tales. But for now I'm taking myself back to bed, where I will sip yoghurt through a straw.

Before I go, though. I have to share this most hilarious photograph. After the ceremony, B and I and various family (and team of photographers!) were behind the dharma centre, having the official family pics taken. Everybody patiently sipping their drinks waiting for the bridal couple to arrive, and it was taking ages. The sun would go behind a cloud, and then we'd have to wait for the light to return. Then we had to turn and focus on each of the photographers in turn, to avoid the kind of fragmented staring in all directions look. And then the light just kept getting more and more beautiful and they wanted to take more and more pics, with more and more different backdrops and then it all got too much and I suddenly got fed up and said right that's it, no more photos, I need to be with my friends. I mean, really, I know the photos are important of course, but we had spent a monumental amount of effort getting everyone up the hill and I was suddenly panicky that time was swirling down the plughole. So we get back to the dharma centre, and all the wonderful radiant light-beings that are our friends cheer as we arrived, and then B insists on one more photo on the steps of the dharma centre, juuuust as the light is disappearing. This is it. This is the photo that confirms for me the true insanity of the whole undertaking.

I mean, who the hell do we think we are? Who do I think I am? Evita Peron?

I can't stop giggling at this picture. There's no-one there, in front of us. No big crowd that we are rallying. Its just us, a couple of shivering photographers and a marvelous view. Its my election pic for y'all. Vote for the Wedding Party. Coz love rocks.

Altared

2009-04-19T19:51:00.011+02:00

Ok, Ok, ok! I'm deafened! This is the sound of bated breath. There it is. I get it. You want pics, you want stories, you want the packaged version of this particular ritual of matrimony of Bernd and Tamara. AND YOU WANT IT NOW. Yes, I know. So do I. Believe me, the packaged version would do just fine. I'm awash with images and emotions and moments of overwhelm, both remembered and in the present. I'm tossed about like a bit of flotsam on the remembered current of sudden cringes and big heart openings. I don't know where to start.

I'm told it was a 'great' wedding. A 'beautiful' wedding. I know it was a success. I know I loved every single moment of the 4th of April. Though truly, the mad scramble days leading up to it, and the days immediately after were extremely challenging for me. And of course I have a stash of tiny regrets and oh nos for the event itself. But, yes. It was good magick. serious magick. And I am altered. Yes I am.

Gradually, I will find words, sequences, to describe this day, and its attendant dramas. But for now, I give you moments.

Here are some of them.

We will have very very many photos. We didn't have an official photographer, but about six people took the task seriously, and some of the six have reported a total of about six HUNDRED pics each. So I have some sorting to do, and I'll put the good ones on flickr, and I'll send you the login details if you ask me nicely. My man is shy about publishing pics in this open realm, so. Just ask. We'll email.

And words, stories... they're coming. We only had a week to recover from this massive organisational feat. And returned to real life - catching up on stuff left undone and a country preparing to vote in the most important election in a decade. big stuff, real stuff...

but stories still sifting and turning and bubbling in the pot. so stay tuned. much more to come, including top 5 wedding boo-boos...

AAaah, but in the words of Chimera, as plagiarised by me in my wedding speech... love rocks! Especially, love on the rocks.

You know you're getting married when...

2009-03-27T17:00:00.004+02:00

You trap your own arm in the electric window of your car when reaching for a parking ticket (Just one step ahead of yourself)

No matter how hard you try to be in the present moment you keep popping out of your body and floating over an imaginary table arrangement sometime in the not too distant future

Your bed time reading is Rumi

You keep filling up with tears for inexplicable reasons like how beautiful the peaches are that the street fruit seller offers you

Your boyfriend and you have never ever had such quick turnarounds between disagreement and make-up

You wake up in the night sweating about all the people you wish you could have invited but didn't coz you had to draw the line somewhere.

Your handbag is a clutch of receipts.

Your bank account is gasping

You stop at green traffic lights and don't realise it til people behind you hoot

You walk past florist shops and give them the same eye that hawks give when they spy mice in the grass

Your family members suddenly think you're a travel agent

You are immersed in 'life admin' documents but don't know what to sign your name as

You don't know if its too late to invite the people you wanted to invite now that two people have cancelled and you could theoretically make up the numbers but isnt that kind of rude.

You cannot, simply cannot think about anything else

You are trying not to behave like a diva, but....

You have any to add, those of you that have been through this particular little rite of passage?

The Revolution is for sale

2009-03-23T21:57:00.002+02:00

Its kind of a dusty taste, like eating cornflakes that fell in the driveway and then you had to scoop them back in your bowl coz you didn't have a choice. The realisation that the South African government is not going to issue the Dalai Lama a visa.

wtf?

Yip.

To a PEACE CONFERENCE!!!

Its "in the best interests of the country" if he doesn't come. Says the same government.

wtf?

It best serves us, if a world renowned leader of peace love tolerance compassion et al stays away? is treated as an undesirable alien? Hangonaminite. We are South Africa. We are a country that by definition should be in favour of love tolerance compassion respect, the constitutional right to freedom of movement... er..
wot? you gonna ask his holiness to show his dompas?

Ok, try not to emotional about it, says my love. Just do a discourse analysis of the press release. Just look at it coolly. Even if you do that, its kinda shocking. I mean, on what basis do you normally deny someone a visa? If they are a suspected terrorist? A convicted drug dealer? This is the same country that gave refuge to Aristide of Haiti when no-one else would have him. (try to look at it unemotionally, he says).

The press release says, no, we're not aware of any pressure from China. We just think it would be in the best interests of the country, Because its a conference about Soccer. (bow low now, bow low) and the link between Soccer and Peace. and so what contribution would the Dalai Lama be making? (to this great moment) The press release seems to be saying his Holiness will just detract from the whole soccer thing by drawing attention away from the 2010 World Cup (bow down low, bow down) and putting it onto the whole Tibet thing. And therefore its not in the best interests... etc etc.

Um, hang on, let me pick that logic apart once more... you DON'T want him to draw attention away from the conference... and so you're going to refuse him entry? Because that will keep the newspapers focused on the issue at hand. Which is... um, what was it again? Soccer, peace, tolerance, anti-racism, human rights... oh yes. Ok. Funny, I didn't know a thing about it til this.

Oh bollox.

Its not a bit funny. I wish it was. The worst thing about it is that the only active outraged voices are the octagenarians. The dear Archbishop and his ageing peacekeepers.

It does, it makes me feel like like I swallowed sawdust.

Might as well face it.

2009-03-21T19:24:00.006+02:00

Most of us have been disappointed by love at some time in our lives.

But this is not a post about that.

This is a random and a rambling post. Its about gloves.

A dear friend and I have a game we play from time to time - replacing the word 'love' in popular songs, with 'glove'. Its fun.

"What've gloves got to do with it?"
"All you need are gloves! Gloves are all you need"
"Might as well face it, you're addicted to gloves"
"Gloves are in the air"
"Oooohhh, I need your gloving..."
"A glove is in the air..."

Well, we think its fun.

This post is an antidote.

I got two awards, you see. I've been awarded for being a blog thinker. A think blogger. A Cognisense Blognosense foggisense blogger. Val should know, I was always a thoughtful child. (and a vomitous one, but that's another story)

I distinctly remember someone saying to me once "Stop staring at me like that!" I had no idea. I was playing my favourite game - stare at someone and see their face as a baby, and then warp your vision to see them as an old person. I loved that game. I guess it must have been kind of freaky to be on the receiving end.

At school I was always told by my sage friends, "you think too much."

So, dear Val, and Karen, who awarded it again (some time ago I admit).

Thank you. I humbly accept, and I'm afraid you are probably right. I'm a bit of a thoughtful lass. Thanks for the nudge. Time I got back on the old cushion and emptied my head a little. Too many thoughts - eish, not a comfortable place. As Louis van Loon once said - if your thoughts are like the spaghetti, try to be in the spaces in between. Don't be the spaghetti.

I am not my thoughts. They just borrow me.

But thanks anyway, dear Val and Karen, whose blogs are not devoid of thoughtfulness either.

If you could appropriate one invention or device from Harry Potter's world, what would it be? Me - the Pensieve. That marvelous tool that Dumbledore used to empty his head for a while so that he could think properly. Oh yeah. I need that one. Especially now.

In other news - I am trying to avoid being Her.

You know Her.

I'd only ever heard of her. The Zilla. Not that virulent lioness of Western Cape politics.

I mean.

Shhh. [Bridezilla]. She who must not be given space.

She who tears menus with her teeth and flosses with rose thorns afterwards.

She who rants at the shrinking groom, as she towers and totters and crashes and-

She who must not come here. No.

Its not true.

We don't all have a tiny bridezilla lurking in us, waiting to come out.

No.

Who said that?

I'll zap you with the registry gun and put you on my list.

I'll Seating Plan you out of existence.

Of course I remember why I'm doing this. Shattap!

In other thoughts -

You know how in many traditions there is a taboo around women preparing food when they are menstruating? Because they are thought to be Unclean? And then some feminist thought says that this is a patriarchal invention, that men associate female 'hotness' with impurity because they are trying to otherise femininity or some suchness?

Don't you think just maybe its a Cunning Plan invented by women, so that women can have a bloody week off? Pun bloody well intended.

Aaaaah.

That's better.

Thanks.

By the way....

Have you ever been in a glove?

P.S. I will award the thoughtfulness blog to 5 others, as prescribed. I'm just not sure who yet. I have to think about it.

*Bridezilla (a portmanteau of bride and Godzilla) is a generic term used to describe a difficult, unpleasant, perfectionist bride who leaves aggravated family, friends and bridal vendors in her wake. A bridezilla is obsessed with her wedding as her perfect day and will disregard the feelings of the family, bridesmaids and even her groom in her quest for the perfect wedding. -Wikipedia

Father, you'll do

2009-03-11T10:23:00.006+02:00

"Garsfontein, I don't trust Garsfontein. Ghastlyfontein, that's what it is. Klinkerbrick and vicious dogs, that's Ghastlyfontein for you. I don't want to get married by someone who lives in Garsfontein."

In spite of his grumbling, my love is being good natured about the Saturday morning drive to meet an unknown pastor that we found on the internet.

We wanted an old family friend of B's to do the ceremony. Someone he knew well as a teenager. Unfortunately, with two adopted autistic children to look after, the old man is not able to make the journey.

The ad, if there was an ad, should've read: Wanted: Lutheran marriage officer with strong Buddhist leanings, must possess own 4x4.

We were starting to get a little jumpy about the fact that this was still a big blank on the excel sheet. (yes, we have an excel sheet. we do not have a wedding planner. We are the wedding planner). The kind faced man who could have done some of it in German - not available. The Irish fellow who seemed to have a twinkly sense of humour - not available. My tentative attempts to enlist a certain pagan ritualist - not meeting much humour.

It's a tricky one. B chose this date because it is the anniversary of his father's death. His father was a minister. (the only man, who could ever teach me, was the son of preacher man...) B wants his mother, who is still stolidly faithful to her husband's memory after 20 years, to have a joyous association with this date. To freshen it with love and renewal. I'm so aware of the presence of this man I have never met, in the silences, the things that are unsaid. I feel the sway of his invisible influence. How would Papa have done the ceremony? is thick in the air, unspoken. Oh, on the surface, we know we want to make it our own, and we know that all weddings will ultimately represent a meeting point between two family's value systems, but... I was starting to feel that the date was lending the event all this extra significance.

One night I dreamed we were on the water, on a boat. One of the Seka actors, Simon Banda, fished up a head from the water. He thought it was a large mango or coconut but it turned out to be a head - I didn't get a look at it, but they told me it was my beloved's father. Still intact - not gruesome at all. My dreams have had base notes of kindness, with twists of anxiety and sudden flames of rage, but this one was ponderous and matter of fact

So a late night fever of filling out internet request forms and the only one who calls me back is the strong-voiced man from Garsfontein. He spams me with forms and glowing testimonials from brides and mothers of brides. Why am I suspicious of glowing praise? Where does that come from in my biography? Er, you don't have to answer that.

So we head out on the N1 to Pretoria early on Saturday, the green Merc crammed with expectations and doubts and jokes and family pressures and also just the gentle reminders to each other of what we want (and what we don't want) and what's the secret sign that we will use to communicate to one another that this one Won't Do.
B will touch his mala beads. I will flick my sunglasses on my head a couple of times. Ok.

Garsfontein is indeed klinkerbrick followed by facebrick followed by more klinkerbrick, and the roads are named after breeds of dog. Seriously. Mastiff, Borzoi, Boerbull. We are relieved the minister does not live in Pitbull drive. We are relieved to see that he has three very cute daschunds. We are relieved to see the twinkle in eyes framed by deep smile lines.

B does his thing - explains the intricacies of what we want and don't want, the traditional Lutheran order of service, the additional vows we want in there, and our anxieties, and our wish to know what he is comfortable with, or not. The oddness of sitting on a beige couch in a stranger's house, awkwardly trying to articulate the complexity of syncretic traditions, symbols and beliefs that have accrued to us over our years together. Trying to pin down an order of service that won't make his mother clutch her crucifix in bafflement, but will leave room for us to express ourselves. I think we did a good job.

"I am an inter-denominational marriage officer," he explains. "I have married Pagans, I have married Christians, I married a Jew and a Muslim last week. I have married Buddhists. I will include whatever vows you like. I won't do Pagan practice. I won't chant." He shares a story about two "nature worshippers" who chose to marry outdoors, "in nature". "Nature was kind to them," he smiled. "It poured with rain. The bride's mascara ran down her face, the guests were soaked...Oh, it always rains in April," he cautions me.

He has a big strong voice, he has a sense of humour. He is relatively open-minded. We hope he won't be sexist. He is prepared to travel. He can do all the legal stuff, so its an all in one go affair. He has spirit. Or, I suppose he would say, he is guided by Spirit. B says he will be sparing with details to his Ma about the man's Pentecostal leanings. He is obviously a tad theatrical and can work a crowd, so at least it won't be boring. There is no need to stroke the mala beads or fiddle with sunglasses. He'll do.

He won't chant, but he'll do. I wonder if he'll wear an Elvis suit?

This one is not about a wedding

2009-03-04T10:35:00.005+02:00

I promise. I won't mention it once.

I'm just feeling a sudden rush and swell of goodwill towards the beautiful city I live in.

This happened prior to reading this hilarious article by Jeremy Clarkson about our lavender lined streets. Ok, so Jeremy hasn't been to Alex in winter near midnight, and obviously hasn't had the experience of being young sexy poor female and Zimbabwean on the streets of Hillbrow, or rich and driving a verrrry desirable car on the Malboro offramp, but still - he's right, to a certain extent. Joburg is piss-easy and safe, if you play it right.

I'm busy working on a little something with a dear friend, for the Grahamstown festival. A piece about Jozi. A love poem to Jozi. An exploration into - what is it that makes you love and survive this place? One of my favourite things in this city is listening to people give directions. It literally makes me gas up with giggles, I can't quite say why. Its a certain goodwill promise we have to each other as citizens - we help you get where you need to be. You take the Riviera offramp, ok, then turn left but get into the right lane immediately...then right and second left into, I think its second avenue Houghton...
Oh, I could write a whole play with people giving directions. Or a dance piece. lost people, giving each other directions and missing. Wrong turns and dead ends, cordoned off streets "for security reasons" and negotiating the space between the rising panic of being lost and the delight of discovering a new road or two in a part of town you've never been.

I love this mad city, all of a sudden. When I was 17 my dad owned a flat in Hillbrow - its now a derelict part of town, but (perhaps) on the rise again. Oh, I remember walking up the rise of the 'brow, to the bookshop, to Look n Listen. I remember buying James Dean posters in the poster shop, feeding a sweet teenage obsession. I remember getting flashed by a Twist street vagrant - a foreshadowing of the days when one wasn't allowed to walk those streets alone. Again.

Aah, but this city gets her grip around you, and I'd never have said that five years ago when I was trying to be faithful to The Mountain (of Cape Town. yes, Shiny, I'm talking to you).

I love her history - the gangs, the fever of goldrush, the sudden streets, the dustbowl politics and the hastily erected rules and regulations and streets and forest plantations.

I love the way whole streets and buildings have their identities erased and pasted over and erased again. Joburg has been built and rebuilt and erased and built again several times over.

I dunno, I reckon the city she has a certain something, bouganvillia and koi pond outlets aside.

Since the Georges first hit paydirt here, and the whole fabric of lies and hustle and bluff started to gather momentum, I reckon its a space where you can spin your own hustle and bluff and blunder and people might just actually pay you for it. The tricky part is, she can just just as easily eat you alive as pay you out for your chutzpah. What's it gonna be?

Ah, Jozi, my city. You wanna visit? Text me, I'll give you directions.

The road to Tonglen

2009-02-28T22:19:00.011+02:00

is not for the faint hearted.

This is us, stuck. Note that it is a Landrover that is stuck. Not promising. But also worse than it looks, because the road had been badly chewed up by a logging company, who will fix this section. It won't be so bad in April.

Will it?

Surely the sheer volume of rain will have abated by then. Won't it?

Haha. Actually, the problem with this road normally is not mud but rockiness. High clearance vehicle needed. The mud is unusual.

We had fun though. When the wheels started spinning we jumped out to check which bit of road was safest - and A, battling the slippery slope, slid like a heavy ton of metal towards a deep donga. And so we paused, hovering on the edge of it. And phoned ahead to the farm to Louis who had arrived in the afternoon. Louis to call Jacob in the tractor to tow us out. Then we sat and marvelled at the milky way as it slowly emerged in all its finery. And slapped at mosquitoes and made bad jokes about the slippery slope and sliding to new lows and being stuck in a rut and such. Just the kind of chitchat you make with psychologists who own landrovers and are embarrassed to have to call for help. And when help arrived, B and I had that jolt of recognition in the dark, thinking, but we've met Louis before - where, where, when?

And later, when everyone was muddy and lighting the paraffin lamps to get dinner ready, we tried to figure it out -
B: was it Cape Town? Did you ever live in Cape Town?
L: Yes, for a while
[but no, it didn't seem like it was there]
T: did you ever spend time at the retreat centre in Ixopo?
L: no, never.
B: Durban?
no.

And in the freshness of the morning the conversation idled from wedding plans and family to conservation to art and sculpture, and I mentioned my mom's upcoming exhibition and Paul said, what's your mom's name and I told him and Louis said, Oh I have one of her paintings. Oh! He went to Kapani.(my family lodge/home village) When? For the Millennium, that fabulous crazy party - Oh Oh Oh!!! B, this is where we know Louis from, silly silly! And of course! He was there, he was staying with Janelle, he's Janelle's mate!! Ha! That bad mad crazy rainy floody muddy season when everyone seemed to be sliding towards ruin - and that bizzaaaaaarre party when you had to go dressed as something beginning with M, and mother was a malaria patient (literally - but she still went to the party) and father was a motor-cycle accident victim (literally, with real bruises in all shades of purple and green). That crazy season when everyone was fighting and B coined the phrase "come to Kapani, where the houses are closer than the spouses"

Oh I love this tiny world, and the fact that A, who owns Tonglen, seems to have a silver thread linking him and us to all sorts of spidery webnesses. And Louis is an events organiser and gifted me with heaps of excelelnt advice and ideas. And another of the Tonglen guests on the weekend (A does have fabulous friends) was also a delight to meet - a lass who shares so many of my passions and obsessions that she could have been a parallel life self. An environmental writer whose 'favourite issues' are elephants and human wildlife conflict andandand - what a delight. Its not easy finding such kindred souls in Joburg, so - yipeee!

So I'm not going to post loads of pics, as I want it to be a suprise for guests who may visit here. But they do need to be reassured that the journey is well worth it. So. This is what you wake up to. Just one of several lung-expanding views.

Sigh.

Yes, it is going to happen there, and I am truly mad to choose this spot. Its not geared for this kind of occasion, and just about everything needs to be brought in. But its beautiful. There you have it.

I came away with a hefty to-do list, and then suddenly it was Friday and my Monday to-dos remain undone, and now its Monday again. I'm not sure how this keeps happening. Compression of time, and lots going on. Last year I had an excessive luxury of solitary time at the laptop, ambling from blog to blog at the sedate pace of a rose sniffer. Now I check updates on my phone in queues. New teaching job, crushing amounts of life admin (the tax return still glaring at me from behind the cupboard door) and of course its that time of year when proposals need to get written, and, and and.

Off I go then, into the new week. Have a good one!

Location, location, location

2009-02-19T17:45:00.005+02:00

Geography has always been an issue in my life. Distance, between family and I, friends and I, loved ones and I. I love the landscapes that have created me, but for the most part they are far flung, and the spaces between them vast. Sites sewn together with with long knotted roads. From Chibembe to Mazabuka and back again twice a year, then Mfuwe to Blantyre and back again, with Monkey Bay detours. Grahamstown to Mfuwe. Cape Town and home again. Now Johannesburg. I love long car journeys, they lull me. Rough roads? Can't scare me.

My man is from Natal. Durbs. He's a Durbs boy. Like me he has ancestry in Germany, but unlike me, he wears this more confidently - mothertongue speaker, and lots of heritage coursing through the family customs. My father was a lone wanderer to these shores, whereas his parents came lock stock and Bible. His father was a Lutheran missionary.

To ask his family and our friends to trek all the way to Zambia would be - well, expensive. And it would be stressful, for the infrastructure that exists in my home village is... um... rustic. The thought exhausts me.

I've written about that crossroads moment we had, the two of us. When B fled to the Buddhist Retreat Centre in the singing hills of Ixopo. When he was there, he made a friend. When I met this friend later, we too became friends, realising we had all sorts of Zambian connections - a lovely small world story. Now this friend owns a farm near Dullstroom, in Mpumalanga, the land of the rising sun. The farm is called Tonglen. Its a very beautiful, magical, spirit-enhancing spot. And we have decided to get married there. More rolling hills, and craggy ravines, and a dharma centre built from the stone on the farm. So far so good. Spirit, beauty, and it means something to us both.

The place, however, is at the end of a very rough and rocky road. So, well, there are logistics. Guests must gather at a central point, we need to rally together all the 4x4 owners in the family and ferry people up the hill to the Event. The last stretch is about 20 minutes, and is nasty. Rocky and shale and really steep. Ok, so a bit of coordination needed. But still, in my minds eye, it's perfect, because once we are up there, we have the place entirely to ourselves, and its not a wedding venue 'sausage factory', if you know what I mean. Rather than pay ridiculous fees to some lurve farm, we can give something back to a place we care about, and contribute to the upkeep of Tonglen. That of course, and it's name - the beautiful practice of exchanging self for other. More on that another time.

But how did my guest list get so huge? My ideal number was 50. We sat down together and made a strict list. But people seemed to creep on, and it grew arms, legs, sidestreets... one person couldn't come so I invited another, and then the first person made a plan... and so it went.

When I tallied up all the rsvps and saw the final number, I think the whites of my eyes must've started to show. 70 people? Really? Ok, some of those are kids, but... really?

Then the late night qualms came. The kind where you visualise the caterers broken down at the bottom of the road and walking up the main courses in the sweltering sun. The kind where I have to bring in a porta-loo. Where the minister is stranded on another farm...Oh dear.

Think of the views, Tamara, think of the views...

Well, we are going to check it out this weekend, so pics will be forthcoming next week.

In the meantime, a wee something that I scribed when I was there some time back. I'm no poet (seriously), but it may give you a mood of the place.

*********************************************************

Tonglen 2003

We’ve come to the palace of the kings.
The shy gatekeepers
let us in.

Laughter from the temple
shining hills
this gleaming floor.
The shades are playful
against the glass
and in the valley,
ducks chiming.

The page squeaks as it turns.
I didn’t bring a notebook this time.
I’m using his.

Those girls walking on the slopes
flowing in white
blessing the path with their treadsteps
and filling their breath with
the earths own blessing.

Bees vibrate the air.
a wind chime records a passing thought.

I’d write a love poem
on the flesh of this tree,
on its silver skin.

I’d record my heartsong
on this rock
soft with afternoon heat.

I’d weave these sounds –
the girls in the distance on their walk
the boys worshipping
with laughter. The steady bees.

I’d dance a thin tune
in the weaving air,
stamp my quiet feet on this
resting floor.

I’d measure my heartbeat
and distil these growing thoughts
in a trickle of melody.

I would,

but I don’t want to hurt
the silence.

**********************************************

[and what am I going to do to that silence now?]

zen bride meets ms scarlet harlot

2009-02-15T22:02:00.004+02:00

Two sides of my nature square up against each other. Make that three. Well, its not that they're flexing muscles or anything. No, they just sit across the table and flirt. Making bashful eyelashes as each tries to seduce the other to her point of view.

I see it for the consumer folly it is: the magazines, the venues, the must-haves. Its a massive industry, a money making racket. Your day won't be perfect without a frothing of flowers, without special little confetti baskets to hang on the back of the chairs, hair like this, eyelashes like that, more swarovski crystal than falls out the sky in a typical Joburg hailstorm, and then of course, The Cake.
Not to mention, above all, The Dress.

I'm not into All That, she insists. When I was 13 years old I knew the perfect wedding was under a canopy of cathedral mopane*, barefoot, with a combretum pod circle around us, and me riding in (and off) on a motorbike.

Its about the words, she says, and getting that right. The sacredness of a simple declaration of where we are now, after all this time, with our nearest and dearest blessing us. Those who have already helped us get as far as we have. And thanking them, and having a big celebratory slap up meal with lots of dancing.

And yet, and yet...

Somehow, somewhere, the canonical bridal mythology has seeped in. Watch out. That archetype will get you.

No, no, horror - not frills and merangue. Believe me, not that.
I seek a streamlined, minimal profile. You will not catch me looking like one of those crocheted doily dollies they put over the toilet roll. (Zimbabweans of a certain era - you know who you are). Bustle schmussle. Not me.

Ok.

So we think of the clean lines, and yes, a simple silhouette - white, or ivory. No fuss, no beading or sequins or satin roses or tulle or diamante tiaras. (and I swore I wasn't even going to look at those magazines).

So I go to Lunar, because they are by far my favourite clothing designers in the city, with a clean, grounded aesthetic and an environmentally friendly outlook. I try on a simple linen affair, which is lovely. (or is it too austere?). But like the good saleslady she is, the designer asks me to try on something else - a luxuriant waterfall of duchess silk. Not frothy, not merangue. But definitely sensuous (nay, delicious). Still, feels wrong for the venue, the occasion (which is outdoors, on a farm called Tonglen, with bristling bushes underfoot). It will no doubt be expensive. And the practical girl in me says get a dress you will wear again. Come on.

And then there's that other lass, the one who woke up this morning and said, no, no white wedding for me. Give me blood red robes, and a trashy hit-list and the motor bike.

I have constructed an entire mythology around my red dress chronicles, it seems. Stories that are all based on real events involving several red dresses. There was the skinhugging one of Yeoville days, circa 1994. There was a long flowing one of simple cotton that I wore day and night, to lectures, rehearsals, parties. I slept in it and woke in it. It was a damn fine dress. I've warbled on about the red dress stuff before. Its about sexuality and wildness and freedom and life force. All issues that have surfaced with B and I at various points in our journey. Maybe the unfinished business here is really that I need to compile that collection properly and put it in print.

In the simple terms of nineteenth century literature, and whatever other Jungian and Myssian and what have you ideas that came after, I suppose the archetypes that square up across the table are these: the virgin, the princess and the whore. I am none of these, but there they are: these three fine ladies, sitting across the table from one another, with their cool aloof smiles.

What fun. I wonder who will win?

Cathedral mopane: when mopane trees in forest reach a certain maturity they form a canopy of vaulted arches like a cathedral. I couldn't find a picture.

the beans, spilled

2009-02-11T17:21:00.003+02:00

Ok ok! I didn't mean to start something.
Here it is then.

We're getting married.

Thank you.

Aah, sweet, isn't it?

Truly though, its been a long road to this point. For those of you that know me, or who have been reading at this address for a while, you may have picked up that this is not a whirlwind romance that has resulted in the sudden flowering of nuptials. Oh no. Me and this boy, we bin at it for some time. We met, oh, about 13 years ago, and yes, I 'knew' instantly that this one was different, this one was worth fighting for. And boy did we. Oh yes. We have already been through sickness, health, riches and poverty, better and worse. We have done the break-ups and the make-ups and the separating out of books and photos and the merging of them again. We have lived at ten different addresses. We thought its about time our mums met.

Seriously. I never thought of myself as the marrying type. Perhaps I defined myself too strongly as the opposite. Fiercely independent and all that blah. Perhaps I didn't have any really good role models for successful marriages. But then again, I think we have transformed our shit into something golden. Something quite workable. And we wanted to celebrate that. And then we realised that we actually both believe in rituals and ceremonies, and so it grew. And grew.

So we've set a date and its bloody soon, and I am being asked questions like “what's your colour scheme?” (er... its white innit?). And the guest list grows tentacles. And I will no doubt write more on the matter. (Please, tell me if you feel nauseated by it all.) But I have discovered that everybody loves a wedding. And so it goes.

There. That's the beans.

Neglect

2009-02-10T09:56:00.004+02:00

There are weeds growing up around this url.

The screws holding up the sign have rusted, and it's hanging lopsided in the rain.

The post has not been collected in days.

Are the owners home?

Numerous attempts to ring the doorbell have yielded no answer.

The whole place needs a coat of paint, really.

But early this morning I saw someone zooting off in a little red car. She looked harrassed. She waved a little red diary and said something about the diary being too small for the year. She said it was overflowing already. She said, economic crisis? What economic crisis, I've never been busier, she said. She said she was starting two new part time jobs, one teaching at the University, another doing corporate training. She said she was also starting a business. She said please to do some weeding and to water the plants. And then she was gone.

There was something else she said - I'm not sure if I heard her right, though. Something about - no. I'm not sure I can say it here. I'd better check with her first, before I start any rumours.

Poem and Award

2009-02-02T14:03:00.004+02:00

Interviewed, decorated, blushing, bowing, scraping. Kind compliments from all of you, and then this glorious award from Tessa, whose glowing blog really does light up the soul. I feel utterly humbled to have received this. I don't often win things. Although I did win a sheep when I was ten, but that's another story.

I must pass it on, yes? To those who have light in their souls.

It goes to Chimera then, of Holey Vision whose wit clinks and sparkles like ice in a gin and tonic. To Chimera I'd like to quote Leonard Cohen - "There's a crack, there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

It also goes to Reya of the Gold Puppy, whom I have never met in the flesh, but who seems to be surfing the same bit of wavelength as me. We're plugged into the same galactic thought source. So often I visit her page to find she has articulated something I have just said to someone, or just thought, or just written about. Its like finding a piece of treasured jewellery that you didn't know you had lost. Or a sister you didn't know you had. Or something.

And on her blog, I am advised that today is the Fourth International Bloggers (silent) Poetry Reading. So this, by Yehuda Amichai.

In This Valley

In this valley which many waters
carved out in endless years
so that the light breeze may now
pass through it to cool my forehead,
I think about you. From the hills I hear
voices of men and machines wrecking and building.

And there are loves which cannot
be moved to another place.
They must die at their place and in their time
like an old clumsy piece of furniture
that's destroyed together with
the house in which it stands.

But this valley is a hope
of starting afresh without having to die first,
of loving without forgetting the other love,
of being like the breeze
that passes through it now
without being destined for it.

(translated by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes)

And finally

2009-01-29T08:53:00.005+02:00

4. How did you develop so much internal strength of character? Did your parents show you how it's done, or was it something else? Life experience? Or were you just born that way?

I honestly don't think of myself in this way. Its an illusion. I do not have internal strength of character. Stubborn willfullness, yes. Bossiness, yes. Gritting my teeth, yes. But these are masks. I am porous, unhinged, composed mostly of water and fire (which makes steam, yes?). At boarding school I was pulled this way and that, getting into trouble for things that I didn't cause. Hapless. Serene on the outside, turmoil within.

I care too much what people think about me. I have a terrible record for starting things I never seem to finish. I am frequently late, disorganised, taking on too much. No boundaries!

I think I have outer strength, not inner strength - as in, the people around me are what have made me strong (or weak). I have an ability to sense the moods and needs of others with acute precision. I absorb emotional learning very quickly. I am far too aware of others, and very clumsy at emotional self expression.

The really strong role model in my life was my stubborn-as-a-buffalo, stoic, spartan grandfather. He taught me self-reliance. And I think being a lonely bookworm kid also shaped me in that way. I have a huge capacity for endurance - as in, I will passively accept discomfort (long bumpy road trips) and toxic relationships for ever without putting myself first. But I don't think that counts as inner strength. Agh, I don't know. Next question please!

5. When you're in a foul mood, how do you lift yourself out of it? Or do you just witness, or wait for it to change? When you're in a great mood, what do you do to extend it?

Excellent question. If I am in a foul mood, one of three things is wrong.
a) I am hungry and must eat. Low blood sugar turns me into a growling malcontent.
b) I am tired and must sleep. I don't function on a short night's sleep. I have a very vivid and active dreamlife and if I don't spend enough time there I get grumpy.
c)I am overstimulated (over socialised) and need time to myself. I am quite solitary and private by nature and too much intimacy leaves me feeling raw and naked. (Answering these interview questions has been quite taxing!)
This is a paradox however, and one I have been thinking about a lot lately. Its the double pull - for privacy, but also needing recognition. I grew up among adults - not a lot of other kids my age. In a safari camp. So always surrounded by people (adults) who have to 'keep an eye' on you and make sure you don't wander off into danger, but not necessarily taking a real playmates role either. Even now, when I go home, I feel like I'm in a petri-dish, under a microscope. Every one knows every one's business, but its still a kind of lonely space. Weird. So I want to hide, but I am also exhibitionist and gushing confessional. Can you tell? Over-exposure makes me nervous, but so does obscurity.

So - to counter a foul mood I must - eat, nap, or take a long walk. Yoga, of course, is marvelous for balancing. Meditation or breathing, the usual. Red wine is a fine mood enhancer too. When all else fails, the confessional pages of one of my notebooks is usually my best way of self-counselling and has saved me from myself many many times. If that also fails - a vitamin B shot usually sorts me out.

To extend a good mood? Aaah, how quickly they pass. I wish I could say that I make a conscious practice of keeping the good moods alive, but generally I tend to just observe, and not try to attach too much to either good or bad moods. My emotions are not me. They are like the weather, to be enjoyed, and sometimes to take shelter from. Sure, I have control over my mood. There's the logic of course of taking great delight in the little things, to feed the fire as it were. I do have a storehouse of images I keep. Things that have amused me.

Yesterday, a man riding a motorbike down Louis Botha avenue (a busy crazy Joburg road). He was dressed in wellworn tweed, he had a bashed up red helmut and he had an enormous pipe, firmly between his lips. He is now in my treasure chest, along with the image of that cute girl in the supermarket queue who kept putting the contents of her mother's shopping trolley into mine. And if there is one image that makes my heart expand it's the sight of baby elephants at play.

Thanks to Reya for these hefty, illuminating questions.
If you'd like to play too, here's how it works:
Below are the rules. I'll interview the first five people who ask.

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me." Please include your email address if I don't have it. I'll delete it before publishing your comment.
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. (I get to pick the questions).
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Thank you for being so generous with receiving my long rambling answers. I think I need a nap now.

pics by Freya Reder

Part two: travel and choices

2009-01-28T18:27:00.006+02:00

2. Everyone experiences defining moments in life, forks in the road of destiny at which we have to make changes, give up something, start doing something we haven't been, whatever. Will you choose one defining moment from your life and write about it? I'm especially interested in how you realized you were at a defining moment.

Hmmmm. Many of these. My life has twisted and turned like a twisty turny thing. Most often, these things are only apparent much later.

Nine years ago, I was teetering on the brink of what I can only think in retrospect was something like a nervous breakdown. I was confused. So 'other' oriented that I had lost all sense of who I was. My four-year-long relationship had come grinding to a stormy sticky halt. Years of stress from his ME, my depressive tendencies and the nasty things couples do to one another when things go bad. We had separated, but we were still writing, still knew we had a lot of stuff to deal with – so walk away, or go back and sort it out?

I was working with a theatre company as a designer. An exciting project that really meant a lot to me – a production on environmental issues, that would tour southern Africa and play to Ministers of Environment and other policy makers. The production part of things had come to an end, and they needed a manager for the road trip. An amazing opportunity to get to know theatres, arts journalists and environment bigwigs in Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique. I wanted it.

My on-again-off-again frustrated love was taking refuge from our storms in the Buddhist Retreat Centre in Ixopo. Sore, but trying to reach out. He arranged for me to come and stay there for six weeks – free of charge if I developed the small pottery studio they have there.

I hovered.

I knew it was a life-turning moment. I knew that if I walked away now from this man I would walk away from a lot of Drama but I would find more Drama elsewhere, probably on the road. It was more than a choice between a man and a career. It was about finding a new way of doing things, in myself.

We were staying a house that had once belonged to Olive Schreiner, in a small town in the karoo, where were rehearsing. I dreamed of an enormous spider that was fat from having devoured its mate. Hanging, pendulous from the ceiling above my bed. I realised that I didn't like who I was at that moment. This creature with so much capacity to hurt.

I knew that I had to choose kindness.

And I went to Ixopo.
Morning meditation
Introspection
Noble silence
Green hills, beautiful “beyond any singing of it” as Alan Paton has written of those rolling grasslands of Ixopo.

We have had one more major crossroads since then, me and that fella. But we are ok. In fact we are doing well. And I still get opportunities to contribute to environmental theatre in Southern Africa. I know that I am a much better person because of that choice. I didn't know it at the time, but it wasn't a choice about a relationship. It was about me learning how to receive.

Funny thing, I liked to think I was someone who gave and gave, inexhaustably. I didn't realise the inherent selfishness of this. The arrogance of not being someone who can also be small and needy. My time there was a slow painful slog, the way healing can be when you finally, grudgingly turn around and face your defences. The hard work of sitting, and sitting, and feeling the waste products of your biography slowly unknot from your shoulders. Life is funny. I thought I was choosing a person and 'sacrificing' something that meant a lot to me. But I wasn't. I was choosing me.

WHEW !!
Ok Time for this question -
Do you enjoy travel? Do you dream of exploring far-away places? Where would you go if money was no obstacle?

I'd like one day to explore Earth's most spiritually significant sites. I want to go to the Great Pyramid, to Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Chartres, Notre Dame, Delphi.

Then there's the decadent trip - Amsterdam, wine routes, food routes, whisky tasting in Scotland.

The theatre and ritual trip - ancient ceremonies in India, Mongolia, South America, West Africa.

I've always dreamed of sailing in a dhow up the east coast of Africa.

I loooong to go to the Amazon. This is one I've wanted since I was a wee gurli.

But also - Poffader, Paternoster, Pilansberg - so many places to see on our doorstep in South Africa. I want to make the ultimate African road movie.

America? Mostly because of people. Washington, to have tea with Reya. California - a walk with Freya, Alena and Lori.

The European Art tour - the one I was supposed to do when I was 17 but I ended up going to Hong Kong and Malaysia instead.

And also - atrocity sites. Rwanda, Auschwitz. I believe in simply being in places where terrible things have happened, and doing Tong Glen meditation, where you breathe in the sorrow and breathe out lovingkindness. I believe such things make a difference.

Um, Yes, I guess I do want to travel! Thank heavens for blogland!

Reya's Interview: the miniseries

2009-01-27T16:54:00.002+02:00

I knew Reya's questions would be weighty. If this were live on TV I'd drive the interviewer to distraction. I'd be that person who never stops talking about herself. So I'm cheating. I'm going to answer all of Reya's amazing questions, but, well, slowly. I'm answering the first one in full – a post of its own. The rest will come tomorrow, ok?

1. I would love for you to write about your involvement with theater - what
drew you to that form of expression, who are your favorite playwrights,
favorite plays. You're so talented, you could do anything you want. Why
theater? (This could be a whole interview, I realize. Just write what you
feel like writing.)

The heritage - er, none. My parents are visual artists. My grandparents - writers. So, while creativity was definitely encouraged in my household, theatre was the furthest thing from anyone's minds, I guess. I often wonder what they'd have done if I announced I was going to be an accountant or something. Anyway. I always knew my currency was stories. More importantly - voices. When I was a child I 'channelled' voices - played out long, complex dialogues, that just kind of coursed through me as I wandered around the mielie fields. My gran would say:
'There goes Tammy, reading, without her book.'
The funny thing is, when my mom gave me one of my early writing assignments as part of our home schooling curriculum, I point blank refused to write it myself. I would do the story, sure. But only if I dictated and my mom wrote it down.
I often refer to this tiny memory as significant - why?
Because it became a blueprint for so much of my creative expression later. It seemed I always needed a medium.

I think the reason I was drawn to theatre is because of how all one's utterances can be mediated through the ensemble. If you are the playwright, then the director is interpreting, the actors are interpreting - everyone has distilled your words through their own system by the time it reaches the end consumer. Putting my words directly out there has always been scary for me. I feel exposed. (Do you understand why blogging can be kind of terrifying for me?)

The Education
So I studied at Rhodes University in a mad little village-sized city (it has a cathedral - its a city). I intended to do a BA in literature. I was going to be a writer, see? But the drama department, that ship of dear, merry fools drew me in, sucked me in. I was in heaven - by day and night I mind-painted the black walls of the Box Theatre (still my favourite space ever). Worlds of play, of real delving into the psyche. The only place where you can walk into a closed room and someone is holding a gun to someone else's head and you say, "oh sorry," and shut the door. I could go on. I loved it. It became home. Grahamstown is home to an annual arts festival, and I took full advantage of this.

I studied acting, theatre design and scriptwriting. On entering the “real world” I realised I hadn't the temperament to be a real actress so closed that chapter (though I still love to perform, but only in self created wonderworlds, on my terms.)

Playwrights I love - I don't refer here to the 'masters' but those who have pinned down my reality, and hoisted it at the same time, the way knocking a tent peg into the ground enables both shelter and a sense of kite flying.
So - Beckett, Beckett, Beckett and Beckett.
Shepard - great craftsman, with distinct eras, that dovetail with eras in my life. I loved him, particularly in my late teens and early 20s. At 17, I could recite the whole of that monologue from Paris Texas. At 24 I was teaching A Lie of the Mind, a play I still think is extraordinary. And Buried Child, of course. Albee. The drunken cadences of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf found a familiar landing strip in my psyche.
Tenessee Williams - definitely formative, though a little too verging on the late harvest rather than the sauvignon blanc, if you know what I mean.
I'm a sucker for Chekhov. I think I was one of those pale long haired girls, mourning my life before its even begun and staring at the window at birds headed towards Moscow. I was one of those Ninas or Varyas, in a not-too-distant past life.
Caryl Churchill, David Hare, so clever, so important.
If Sarah Kane had made it through her Saturn Returns she would have written even more extraordinary plays than she did in the short time she was here.
The Shakespeares that are closest to me are The Tempest and King Lear.
So much for scripted stuff.

Pictures, words, energy, the body
You see, in Africa, things run a little differently, and if I have found a theatrical home anywhere, its in the ceremony and ritual of Zambian performance, and the raw physical, image theatre that South African artists have really made their own. The “poor theatre” that Jerzy Grotowski envisaged? That was taken, digested and transmuted by South African artists who had little but an 'empty' space and a burning need to show the world what was going on here. My aunt took me to a performance of Woza Albert in 1985 at the Market Theatre. I will never forget that visceral, blunt feeling, and can't remember what impressed me more - the Market Theatre, with its old 'no spitting' signs, or the performance itself. That may well have been the start of it.

South African theatre has done well with the physical theatre language. One man shows and two-handers proliferate in these parts. We do it out of necessity, because funding is scarce, and so we make what we can with our bodies. But for me, always a child of my head first and my body later, I floundered in this world. I'm not a dancer. I'm an ideas, concepts, images, stories person. But, theatre practice has also helped to ground me, and learn to work with energy and bodylines. It helped me, literally, to find my feet.

Now what?
So although I started as a writer, when I turned to theatre I learned almost all aspects of the craft, from hanging lights to chest resonance, costume stitching to blocking. When you run a tiny theatre company on no budget, you learn to do everything. I write, direct, act, design. I loathe admin and marketing but I can do it.

So – if images and stories are my building blocks – why not film? The answer lies in the power of theatre itself. Presence. Energy. Maybe you've never seen a piece of theatre that can heal, create community, and thrash out the real stuff that touches your life. I'm not talking about spectacular sets and big, miked up voices. There is something about the chemistry of a rehearsal process, working with the pliable, electric stuff that makes us hurt, recoil, lash out and be kind. Human emotions. Memories, tastes, reactions. That mysterious other thing – spirit, whatever you want to call it. Theatre process as shamanism. That's what I'm good at. Conducting the lithe, flailing serpent energy that comes from a cast of gifted performers. Drawing their stories out of them, taking their pictures, traumas and joys, and sculpting these frail things into sequenced image drama. Something that then belongs to the whole group. To the world. Wow. Why does no-one pay me for this?

Oh, we try to make a living from it. I've done problem solving tool in communities, I've created customised theatre for big conferences, safety shows for BP, feel-good stuff for Coca-Cola. Sometimes we call it Theatre for Development, Community Engagement, Theatre for the Environment. Sometimes we just call it play. Its phenomenally hard to make a living from this in this country, as I will never be a big musicals kind of gal. Image theatre, ritual theatre, theatre for healing mind and body – thats where I belong. Maybe its because I've got thin boundaries.

Stay tuned for Question Two tomorrow....

2. Everyone experiences defining moments in life, forks in the road of
destiny at which we have to make changes, give up something, start doing
something we haven't been, whatever. Will you choose one defining moment
from your life and write about it? I'm especially interested in how you
realized you were at a defining moment.

Have interview questions. Am thinking.

2009-01-26T21:14:00.002+02:00

Coming to a theatre near you. Shortly.
Or not. So shortly. Depending on the weather.

what you wish for

2009-01-21T22:11:00.001+02:00

Hey there. Miss me? What do you mean you were too busy? Oh, come on, just because history was being made, greatness redefined and the world peace pendulum swinging wildly from extreme to extreme...

It has been a quite a week hasn't it?
Is it just me, or did the world shift on its axis a little? No, I know the answer to that. It wasn't just me.

That speech! that benediction!
That an elected leader of that nation said to his electorate that his nation needs to learn to consume the world's resources more responsibly? That he said some of the hard things that many of us concerned citizens of the planet have been grumbling about, worrying about for at least a decade?
Its so cool.

Yeah, he'll do. Well done, you guys, for choosing this one.
We wished and you wished, and they wished, and it came to pass.
Maybe its a case of - this time, everyone was very, very careful what they wished for, and this time it paid off.

So I've been a slacker blogger. Ever since Fush and Chips posted that manifesto about slow blogging, I've been thinking, about what I'm doing here and do I really have to post if I don't really have anything to say?

Actually, I don't need to blog at the moment, because Reya of the Gold Puppy always says whats in my head, and says it first. Like her post of today.

Seriously though. I started this thing in May last year, and I started it because I was angry. It was the time of the horrific xenophobic attacks in urban South Africa, and I was bursting with stuff that I wanted to say, not knowing at all who I was saying it to. Trying to undo writers' block - the kind where you have too much to say. (Writer's backlog. backblog. oh shhhh) Then I met all these incredible, warm, interested blogmates. I didn't quite expect that. Beautiful.

But suddenly I'm like, uh? How did I get here? What am I doing here? Random confessions? Navel gazing? A showcase for writing snippets that don't have a home? A marketing device? Oh my Gaaad! She has the blogger ID crisis!!! Its doing the rounds. Miranda has it, Janelle has it. All a question of scale, you see. The worker ants are restless, and the giant aardvark is coming with its big sticky tongue of oblivion.

What. is. she. on about?

I started this as a place to launch some spells, to call back the long skirted ladies of the dim and watery places (Muses, to you). Recognising some deep fertile connection between wild spaces and creative impulse, I wanted a virtual alter where I could burn some incense. Lacking a stage, a rehearsal space, I needed a sanctified zone where I could pour all my randomings. Hmmm. But now, ever restless, ever discontent with what is enough, I neeed mooooore! So I'm starting a sister blog - one that deals strictly with matters of a professional and a livelihood nature. One with a bit more focus, you understand. To go with the fact that I'm, er, starting a business. Watch this space. Actually, watch the space next door. Oh sod it, I'll send you there when there's something to read.

And in other news related to rituals gone awry and wishes with suprises attached, I attempted some clumsy rain dances for our Arusha cousins. In my garden the other night. The kind where you run outside and thank the big soggy clouds for bequeathing you with their blessings, and then try to waft some of it northeast to where Janelle and Miranda suffocate under empty white skies. The kind where you sort of take a wild stab and point the clouds in the general direction of the Ngorobob hill...several thousand kilometres away.

The next day, as I was busy cramming for this EQ course that I am in the middle of teaching (yes, this missive comes to you from ....drumroll... Witbank...client is BHP Billington. Later, I explain later.) SO there I was, a whirl of nerves and a trial of errors, sitting at my computer screen, swearing at powerpoint coz I really wanna be blogging... when I hear our tenant calling me with an edge of urgency in his voice. Irritable, I pop my head out the back door.
"Tamara, we have a disaster."
She thinks: Disaster? I'll show you a blerry disaster - wha? Water? Flood? Huh?

Turns out their geyser burst. Two inches of water on the carpet, and they come home to a spaniel standing on the coffee table to keep her feet dry. Ok, so that's their problem. My problem, is that the water is floowwwing, not dripping but flowing, through a crack in the floor that separates their flat from the downstairs garage, where MY BOOKS ARE GETTING WET!!! Boxes and boxes of the Zambian ceremony book that I published last year, and which is stored in my garage. A thousand copies of it!!! AAAAHHHHHHH!

Oh yeah, I knew this Mercury retrograde still had a suprise or two in store for me.

Luckily, I ripped open the wet cardboard on the outside and managed to salvage most of them before the seep got in. Working feverishly to haul heavy boxes out in the pre-storm heat.

So, sorry Janelle. I er, didn't manage to send the rain very far.

Aaaah. Peace, y'all.
Love and too many fussy cushions, from a B & B in Mpumalanga.

Where there is plenty of rain.

Iwomba

2009-01-12T13:57:00.003+02:00

My sister has written about him here.

I'm adding to that, with this portrait of the man, written in 2006. It appears elsewhere, but I wanted to put it here as well.

He really was a magician.

Iwomba

Breakfast is slices of paw paw scored in a neat grid so you can scoop it onto the spoon easily. A squeeze of tiny hard limes from Malawi. Sometimes, its eggs and toast. and Iwomba asks, sclambala or flie? and sometimes, he shyly suggests, ‘what about eggie bread?’ Eggie bread is bread with a hole in the middle, and an egg fried in the hole. For some reason Iwomba thinks this is a special treat for me, and when I am home for the holidays he always offers it to me proudly.

After breakfast Iwomba asks me with anxious concern, ‘what’s for lunch?’ The cupboard is bare again. I am exhausted at the thought of searching the market on a blistering morning. Is there something in the freezer I ask, vague and non-committal. Lunch appears miraculously – slick cabbage salad and chicken pie.

Supper is soup and bread. Iwomba the alchemist, who can turn a couple of withered green peppers sagging on the bamboo shelf into a rich fragrant soup.

How do I write about Iwomba Zulu? Iwomba the herbalist, who knows leaves that make a scorpion sting disappear - but he’s not telling which leaves. Iwomba, whose memory archives store subtle combinations of allspice and cinnamon, bay leaves and clove. I’d love to take him to Zanzibar, to read the wind like he reads the steam rising from a curry.

Soup and bread. Iwomba’s made his preparations early. The soup is ready, cooked and cooled, balanced on a wobbly shelf in the crotchety fridge that we’ve had to tie up with legen* to keep it closed. The bread is cooling in the dark pantry. Iwomba’s going fishing.

When I was younger, I’d go too. I loved sitting on the bank watching Iwomba haul in hefty Cornish Jack and bottlenose while I struggled with the occasional wriggling squeaker and lots of roots and branches. Iwomba’s not a big talker. But he shows me how to tie hooks to line (twine, he calls it). And how to pierce the tiny frogs onto the hook and where to throw the line – where the water eddies and curls and the big fish are feeding. My line is always dead, or it tangles on the first cast. Frustrated teenager, I want to cut off my hook and start again. But Iwomba sits with the patience of a leopard and untangles it till the sun goes down. Lets me hold his line.

Iwomba never laughs when I don’t catch fish. Concern in his brown eyes. But when he guides them onto his own line with alchemy magic he smiles at me. And that’s the best part. Waiting for the smile.

Making Iwomba smile is a secret goal for each day. Actually it’s easy – compliment his cooking and his face cracks open with delight. All the natural worry that lines his face, all the kindly anxiety of no ingredients and ‘borrowing from the lodge’ melts like butter in a blackened pan. How do I write the life of Iwomba Zulu? It’s just my memories, marinated in woodsmoke, shot through with weevil dust. Iwomba using page after page of Delia Smith’s Book of Cakes to light the fire in the old Dover stove, coz he can't read it anyway. But his lemon meringue pie is like clouds with an underbelly.

1970’s: His early career. A dish-washer in the Chibembe kitchen, absorbing the recipes around him, he is patient and gloomy-faced until the day they are short of a cook. Iwomba do you know how to make Isaac’s green pepper soup? That big, cracking smile. Yes. He does. And it’s good.

1980’s: Norman moves to Mfuwe, to the all weather roads and all season prospects. Iwomba asks to join him. When Kapani opens, he loses the chance to cook for foreign guests, becoming instead a cook at the Ruins*, for Norman and family. This means no luxury ingredients or fluffy steam puddings. Cooking for Norman is like painting for a blind man. Soup and bread and eggy-bread and the occasional jelly and custard.

When we have guests he beams delight for they bring new recipes, spices and combinations. With closed eyes he smells the open spice bottles. In about 1987 Iwomba perfects his world-class curry.

1990’s: Iwomba returns to the world of safari guests, and lemon sponge cake for tea. Nsolo bushcamp. He joins a team of the golden oldies – John and Rice Time and a clay wood oven. I visit him there before he retires, driving the long powdery drive towards khaya trees that swallow me gratefully. And the tongue-smacking lunch that I swallow gratefully. I visit Iwomba in the back kitchen. He’s ready to receive guests – a slightly grim look on his face. But when he sees me the smile breaks like dawn. Hello Iwomba. Thank you. Thank you for lunch.

* legen is strips of bicycle inner tubing, universal fixing/strapping/binding material in Africa.
* The Ruins is my home. Its the family / behind the scenes / staff quarters counterpart to the Lodge.

Curious Rituals of the Valley People (Part 2)

2009-01-09T17:19:00.014+02:00

Honouring our ancestors

Uncle A decided to take to take us on the river. This is always a treat, not just because Uncle A has a fine aluminium flat-bottomed boat, perfect for this hippo-studded river, but also because he is simply a fine person to be in the bush with. Safe, experienced, deeply in knowing with the place, its rhythms and warning signals. Just like his father, Norman Joseph Carr.

We all have different levels of literacy in landscapes. When I am at the ocean, I always feel a slight tip and swell of strangeness. I love it, but I am not literate in oceanscape, not like I am in the bush. I can't read a shorebreak like my other half can. And when we are in the bush, and we wake in the night to a strange belly roar echoing across the dambo, it is he who will sit upright and say, 'wha wazzat?' and I will mutter in my semi sleep 'hippo' or 'elephant', depending on the exact timbre of the roar, trumpet or bellow. [elephant stood on a thorn. elephant shouting at lion. elephant shouting at human. indignant hippo.]

Well, Miranda has written about the role that our grandfather, Norman Joseph Carr played in developing this kind of literacy, and so have I. Somewhere.

But the gals, the young revolutionaries, are too small to remember him. So they learn from their Papa, and its the same lessons of course.

What a treat when Uncle A takes us to Bonkar's memorial stone in the National Park, by boat! In the dry season you can go by road, but not now. So we pack some water, and apply lashings of sunscreen. We drive to the river though its not far to walk, skip off the side of the landcruiser and tramp over soft ankle hugging grass to where the boat is moored. Past the trichelia where I sat and sulked, dreamed or smoked as a teenager. Now strewn with the ex-coals of a fisherman's fire. Clamber down into the boat.

I'm telling my youngest cuz, the one who was born hours before her grandfather left this world, what she said to me when she was barely two years old.
"My Bonkar is under a stone," she said to me, eyes big and serious.
"He's in the sky. He's under the stone, he's in the sky." she'd repeat this over and over, like a mantra, anchoring the concept of having had a grandfather, then letting it slip away again like a kite and hauling it back again. Sweet thing. She giggles and says, I don't remember. Uh. I'm not suprised.

I can't believe how crowded that riverfront has become in the last 11 years.

You see, the National Park is on the 'other side' of the river - untouched and just for the animals. Historically there were only ever a few permanent structures in the NP itself. Most of the other camps and the majority of the residents live in the Game Management Area (GMA). On 'this' side of the river.

At first, there was only Chinzombo, sweet little whitewashed chalets on the rivers' edge, with the flood marks of '76 painted half way up the wall, like a warning. Few kilometres upstream - a little thatched studio on the corner, then nothing til the bridge, which is also the main entrance into the park. Directly after the bridge, the house of Jemz Shuz (James Schulz, RIP) and then, the Croc Farm - built circa 1987 or 8. A major milestone in civilization, at the time. Concrete snake pens, a teahouse where you could buy lime milkshakes, how that rocked my adolescent world.

If you trace that riverfront now, its all different.
Chinzombo has been swallowed by the river. The pretty little camp where we played Marco Polo in the tiny pool on hot Christmas days of quite a long time ago. That pool is in the river now. The Luangwa ate her.

But upstream from there, especially beyond the bridge - Oooh, its starting to be like a Zanzibar beachfront I tell you. Squish squash no elbow room and [shock! horror!] sandbags tessellating the side of the river bank! Hmmm. Will that protect your camp when the river really rises to the occasion? Will it stop the steady lick of that persistent tongue? Hmm. Someone should do a socio-economic history of this stretch of river. Of land claims still contested, ruined walls of houses still occupied by tenacious ghosts. Deals are forged, fought and abandoned and everybody wants a piece of it and everybody is aghast at the development but of course they're not budging either.

Before the old benign patriarch (aka my grandfather) passed away he said that there was 'a gentleman's agreement' that there would be no development on the stretch of habitat between the lodge he built (inland, away from the Luangwa's licking tongue - he'd learned) and the Luangwa bridge, the entrance to the National Park. Keep it as an intact game corridor. A conservation area, even though its in the GMA, you can do nature walks and its still forested. A gentleman's agreement. Ah, but the age of gentlemen, bwana, it is passing us by. Reed walls are replaced by concrete, thatch with tiles. And where the mzungu settle, they bring their plants, their cats, their dogs...

To be sure, though, there are elephant aplenty and they still cross there, and there was an old gruff-looking buffalo hanging out the past few weeks. An elderly kakuli haunting the peninsular.

I digress. Again.

We got there, and moored the boat. We clambered out. Always a hush under those mighty ebony trees.

We talked a little. Not much. We nudged some msikili seeds into the ground so that they might grow there.

For company.

We examined the big msikili tree by where we moored the boat and Uncle showed his daughters how to tell that it had been inhabited by a leopard. The girls each got a leopard hair, unmistakeable, gleaned from the folds of the bark. Mimes kept hers the whole way home where she stuck it in her book. RoobyRu kept hers pinched between her fingers but then forgot as we were mounting the land cruiser, and released it into the wind.

The Curious Rituals of the Valley People (Part 1)

2009-01-05T11:45:00.011+02:00

Setting the table

Preparing the feast

Accepting rare and exotic gifts

Welcoming the guests - all of us strayed and flung far from family (even we, in this rare gathering, are missing many many parts)

Hence the cell phone calls even as we sit down to eat

And as we toast absent family and friends our breath is ragged for a moment. We swallow throat lumps the size of marula pips

and turn our attention to cracker tricks

and crap cracker jokes

as beer and wine flow like a frolicsome river

and chatter layers over twitter over giggle and guffaw til we sound like an aviary of mad scurrilous birds

Presided over by the Queen of Orientar*

And then

Post-lunch silliness takes on bizarre forms:
1. Stand in a circle and throw a small bouncy ball randomly around the group.
2. If you miss once, you get given the letter B
3. If you miss twice you get given the letter U
4. If you miss thrice you get given the letter M
5. Now you stand against the wall and everyone in the group gets to throw the small bouncy ball at your bum.
6. ???? don't ask. Its a good spectator sport.

but the light fades too quickly

and we have to submit to the blurr of the end of a fine day

* Remember "we Three Kings Of Orient are.." and how many like me wondered "where's Orientar, mummy?"

big wheel

2009-01-04T11:54:00.000+02:00

"Big wheel keeps on turnin
On a simple line
Day by day"
- Massive Attack

Happy two thousand and nine everybody. Two thousand and fine. Two thousand and shine. Anything except two thousand and whine. Okay? No more a that.

As I sat in the Lusaka International Airport departure lounge, waiting for a delayed flight to Joburg and listening to Al Jazeera report on Gaza, and slowly bringing my consciousness back to this world, a world that seems to turn on different wheels than that valley world where I spent an all too brief ten days, I fantasized about the stories I would write here.

I felt fattened up on stories. Burping with details of Christmas silly games and creepy crawlies under the mozzie net. I wanted to tell you -

how strange it feels to come back to a place that is so familiar that you hear the sound of your own breath sighing, from 20 years ago. Still wisping down that footpath, still bored and disaffected.

how we saw wild dogs, pert eared under bushes.

how the river was up, and my uncle took me and the cousins on the boat, to our grandfather's memorial stone, and we planted trichelia seeds there.

how i didn't sit at a computer screen, (though blogs bloomed in my head) and how good that is for one.

how the elephants were all around, and the whole valley is steamy and green and writhing with life, life! crawling, biting, hatching, breathing, killing, sleeping, munching, breeding...

about how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

I wanted to. And I will.

When we got off the plane, though, I slid the SA simcard back into the phone, and turned it on. We were on the bus, that liminal space between landing and passport control. The voicemail was from a friend of a friend. I had to listen to the voicemail several times. Horror sinking into my belly. The kind of news that cannot, should not be true. But is.

My partner B has a dear friend, who used to be married to a favourite cousin of his. Six years ago that cousin was killed, while collecting pottery in northern Natal. I only met him once, (marveling at how perfectly like mine his bookshelf was - archeology, anthropology, museums, culture). In the grieving period after his death, we became close to his dear, beautiful poetess widow. B helped her through that time. And then in October we went to her wedding. She has found a huge-hearted, grounded man to be her new partner, to be a father to her gorgeous teenage children. It was such a moving ceremony - simple, small. The way they included the kids into the ceremony, vowing to make it work as a family. It made me cry, I loved it.
And on the day after Christmas, her 16 year old son died in a random accident. A jet ski. A wave. Doing ordinary things on an ordinary beach with the family. It doesn't bear thinking about. Her grief. The utter randomness of it. The fact that this beautiful shy child doesn't have life anymore. And his mother must face this second immense loss.

When I went to Durban for their wedding, I wanted to blog about that sweet marriage ceremony, describe in detail how it moved me. Somehow, I didnt. I wrote about my mother-in-law's ducks instead. Time moved, swept me along with other issues, other posts found their way here instead. Its not right that I should be writing this, now. But it also doesn't feel right to blog about Christmas merriment, when there is this immoveable fact just sitting here, making everything else so relative.

Make this year count, people. Its such a precious fact that we are here at all.

"Hymn of the Big Wheel"

[Horace Andy]

The big wheel keeps on turning
On a simple line day by day
The earth spins on its axis
One man struggle while another relaxes

There's a hole in my soul like a cavity
Seems like the world is out to gather just by gravity
The wheel keeps turning the sky's rearranging
Look my son the weather is changing

I'd like to feel that you could be free
Look up at the blue skies beneath a new tree
Sometime again
You'll turn green and the sea turns red
My son I said the power of axis over my head
The big wheel keeps on turning
On a simple line day by day
The earth spins on its axis
One man struggle while another relaxes

We sang about the sun and danced among the trees
And we listened to the whisper of the city on the breeze
Will you cry in the most in a lead-free zone
Down within the shadows where the factories drone
On the surface of the wheel they build another town
And so the green come tumbling down
Yes close your eyes and hold me tight
And i'll show you sunset sometime again

The big wheel keeps on turning
On a simple line day by day
The earth spins on its axis
One man struggle while another relaxes
As a child's silent prayer my hope hides in disguise
While satellites and cameras watch from the skies
An acid drop of rain recycled from the sea
It washed away my shadow burnt a hole in me
And all the king's men cannot put it back again
But the ghetto sun will nurture life
And mend my soul sometime again

The big wheel keeps on turning
On a simple line day by day
The earth spins on its axis
One man struggle while another relaxes

2008 escapes and emergenc(i)es

2008-12-18T09:21:00.007+02:00

Well the thing about doing that last meme is that it puts the fear of Christmas in you, and sends you scurrying off to complete a to-do list that grows like invader pond weed as soon as you pay it any attention.
So. Most of the urgents completed - ie, cats and malaria tablets.
And, in a packing / tidying / admin scramble, I found the missing cable for my digital camera so all the blog catch ups become possible now too - ie all the pictures I wanted to show you earlier.

In the spirit of lists, then, I give you some 2008 highlights.

January

New Year in Bagamoyo - the place to lay down your heart. Writing a play about Livingstone and his crew, I became fascinated by tales of this spot, where slave caravans brought their shackled and malarial cargo, sometimes having walked from as far as Congo. I feel so, so lucky to have been there now and breathed its sultry air. My year started with a grand ambition: to arrange a sponsored walk, along that same old route, to raise money to combat human trafficking.

February to April were spent in a kind of a depressive blur. Writing my play, dreaming and scheming and being broke. And collapsing under the weight of all that could be, if only, if only.

May - A horrible month in South Africa, as xenophobic violence erupts across the country. These events sear right into me. I identify with every displaced person, every travelweary homelost person trying to scrape together money to send home. The lucky ones, who don't get killed by a mob, or burned alive.
One day in May my therapist gets that look in her eye and silently pulls a book from her shelf, hands me a copy of Inanna. Reading this ancient story - such a gorgeous translation, starts to break my state of emergency. I begin to emerge. I start to blog.

June - spent a week in wintry Cape Town designing a show for the Grahamstown Festival. Still in a depressive blur but putting one foot in front of the other. My cat has a dire emergency on our newly installed horrible Joburg spike fence.

July - August - In Malawi, contracted to do a big writing job for the UN. Travel to places I haven't been since I was a teenager. Visit my old school and rescue my shadow selves.

September - October - weeks become months as I try to decipher what the UN really want me to write for them. The papers I read through, if placed end to end, would probably create a path, if not from Joburg to Bagamoyo, then at least to Mangochi. But its an elusive, Hansel and Gretel path with too many twists and u-turns. Unlike in the fairytale, where the lost siblings' trail is erased behind them, in this dream it is the path in front of me that keeps being blown away. The paper trail becomes a snowstorm of dancing pages, taunting me with glimpses of clarity, hurling acronyms and words ending with 'ation'.

I finally hand in a scrappy draft, and we escape to the Waterberg. Ah, the soul of the Waterberg. Deserves a post of its own. Where Eugene Marais wrote the Soul of the White Ant and the Soul of the Ape, (which was plagiarised by that bastard Maeterlink). Make acquaintance with some splendid trees.

November - my greatest achievement of the year. Convincing my house mates that I should paint our garden wall a splendid Mexican blue. The kind of blue that soaks up light and delivers it back when the sun has gone.

December - Cape Town again, briefly - this time in the midst of a heat wave, to visit an old friend. The view from my cousin's house changes each time you look at it. The city bowl. That mountain, it lurks behind the house.

And one long gorgeous jewel of a walk.

And now, as my departure date draws near, I am distracted and full of shifting plans. Like when you go snorkeling in shallow water and see your shadow on the sand beneath you - now its close, now its far away, now its a flat watery shelf and now its tangled in a grove of seaweed. Much of what I planned to accomplish this year did not come to pass. But that's also coz I know I always plan too much, too huge.

2009 is looking manageable. Ironically, as so many people wrestle with shrinking budgets and joblessness I feel somehow more secure than I did at the start of this year. I have some work, at least for the scary months of Jan - April, always tough on the freelancer. I have some plans, much more concrete than last year's ones. Sometimes it really really pays off to have a fallow year and next year feels like its going to be a hottie. As in, the tarmac is hot you have no choice but to fly

Anyone joining me on this? WWWooooooooHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

And I have this:

I am very lucky.

Sixes and Sevens (and eights)

2008-12-12T09:24:00.007+02:00

Well I don't normally respond to prompts and memes and tags and the like but in the spirit of it all I'll do the one that Miranda tagged me for - the seven Christmas things.

7 Things I Must Do Before My Parents Arrive
My parents are not arriving. Well, my dad is popping in on his way back from NY en route to Lusaka, but its not the same thing. I'm going to see Mother, in my home village, the wee cluster of dwellings known as Kapani Ruins. (we never quite knew why it got that name. Was it because the place looked so ruinous, or the inhabitants?)
Before we fly, I have a week to:
1. Get Christmas puddings and Christmas crackers.
2. Find a lift from Lusaka to the valley
3. Buy pressies for the girls
4. Find someone to feed the cats
5. or find a kennels that will house them (such a last minuter I am)
6. Do the admin I've been putting off since December last year when I was supposed to do it before Christmas! Aaaah!
7. Spend one full day polishing and finishing off my script. It has to be launched into the world in 2009 and it must look its best.
8. Prepare 'the room' for our lodger who arrives early in January.

Aaaah! Thats 8!!

find a medical aid. aaah thats 9. Do that creative voices list that was supposed to done last week. Get malaria tablets. Aaah. Stop it. Can we stop this one now?

7 Things I've been Doing Instead Of Preparing For Christmas
1. Reading blogs
2. Spending time with a friend who hasn't been well
3. Gardening
4. Reading blogs
5. Loitering on facebook
6. Reading James Martin's The Meaning of the 21st Century. Awesome book. Must.
7. Reading up on 2009's astrology

7 Things I Can't Do This Christmas
1. Spend time with my sister
2. Swim in the sea (my man and I usually try to get the ocean once a year, and its usually at this time)
3. Eat Christmas pudding (unless I can be bothered to make a wheat free version)
4. Swim in the river (it's full of crocodiles)
5. Forget to take malaria tablets (that's more of a mustn't than a can't)
6. See my Granny, who is in Cornwall and too frail to travel now. See my Grandfather in the flesh, but I will definitely see him in my minds eye wearing a silly paper hat and insisting we all do the same.
7. Talk to Angela Merkel in person about the climate change deal.

7 Christmas Wishes
1. A strong global climate change deal (how likely is this?) go and make your voice count over here. If serious planning doesn't happen now, Christmases are going to be less and less fun in years to come.
2. For the 'secret issue' to go really really well.
3. For Janine to find healing, peace, and a route to a stress-free existence
4. To see elephants as we eat Christmas lunch at my uncle's spot. (Very likely.)
5. For those gorgeous girls to have the time of their lives
6. For my admin pile to do itself
7. For the admin angels to appear

7 Things I Say As Christmas Approaches
1. Can't we do it tomorrow rather?
2. Oh! I forgot.
3. I'm just quickly going to check in on facebook
4. Oh! I forgot!
5. Thank you B, thank you B, thank you so much for going along with the Zambia plans even though we haven't been to your family for so long!!
6. Who will feed the cats?
7. Do you think I've left it too late?

7 Celebrities I'd Invite For Christmas Dinner
Hmm. I'd love to say - Angela Merkel and all the big heads who are supposed to be hammering out the global climate change deal, along with Obama and James Martins, author of the amaazing book I'm reading. But I'd like a festive Christmas, so I'll arrange that dinner party next month. Lets see
1. Stephen Fry - the wittiest, most erudite and articulate man alive. Superb conversation guaranteed (and my uncle's his biggest fan)
2. Emma Thompson coz she's his buddy and she's also extremely witty and clever and so down to earth and wonderful and I'd cast her in my play if I could.
3. Eric Francis - he's not a celebrity but he's my favourite geopolitical current affairs astrologer environmentalist
4. Richard Branson. I have some business to discuss with him over a couple of gin and tonics
5. Alan Ginsberg (you didn't say they have to be alive)
6. Oh well in that case, my grandfather. He's famous. Sort of.
7. Well if we really can go there, then Katherine Hepburn. Without a doubt.

ooh - can I have one more? Jeremy Clarkson. He'd have a ball testing out 4x4s in the mud. With a winch or two for extra games.

7 Favourite Festive Foods
See Miranda's post for a description of why we don't really have a strong grounding in Christmassy foods. But, still -
1. Marzipan
2. Pimms, or any minty refreshing drinks
3. I love the smell and taste of cinammon, and I know this is a Christmassy smell, from the time I visited my German aunty. I love chewing cinammon sticks raw.
4. Ice cream
5. Prawns. Its so much better to have light seafood for an African Christmas than heavy roasts
6. Anything that comes out of my uncles kitchen will be delicious. Usually some freerange game meat, I imagine. I'm not a vegetarian, though I am rigorous about only eating 'happy meat'. It doesn't get much more organic than Luangwa kudu.
7. I love Christmas pudding but due to a wheat allergy it usually means I have to donate the whole of the next day to the back of my eyelids. I must make wheat free something for myself.

Gosh, I'm exhausted now. And I think most of the people I would tag have already been tagged. Except maybe you, Chimera. I'm supposed to tag 7 people, but - oh go on, you know if you want to....

I'm just going to check in on facebook quickly

End of year delights

2008-12-11T15:07:00.008+02:00

I still have not been paid from my big mammoth job of the year. The shopping mauls are full of too much glare and shine - nothing I want in there, anyway.

Its been a dismal year for financial wellbeing, and I'm so far down the bottom of that barrel I've probably tunnelled halfway to Australia by now.

HOWEVER

I have some regular work lined up for next year!! Woohoo! I shall be teaching the first year design and drawing course at Wits School of the Arts, for the whole year. Only six hours a week, which is perfect because then there's a guaranteed income trickle, and I still have plenty of time to nurture the other stuff. I've missed teaching, and this way I get to do it without being an institutionalised slave. So that's really great.

AND

I'm going to Zambia for Christmas! Yes, last minute decisions, last minute bookings, NO last minute financial miracle (yet! - always leave space for the possibility!) but couldn't miss the opportunity of spending time with the youngest and most beautful members of my genetic pond - my sweet dear cousins the Kenyan revolutionaries. So I shall be sipping cooling pimms or gin and tonic rather than warming brandy, and watching cloudstacks that will not deliver snow but soaking rains that leave the ground steamy afterwards. We will see elephants, and hippos and frisky baby impala. We will wait for the river to rise so we can go on the boat, and we will overrun lodge swimming pools and bars that are supposed to be reserved for paying guests. We will check our shoes for scorpions and our pillows for creepy crawlies. Tis the season to be knee high in mud. We will slap at drunken mosquitoes and our shoes will slip and slide and our clothes will never again be free of the black luangwa mudstains and we will no doubt play too much scrabble.

I can't wait.

The muses that stood still

2008-12-04T17:44:00.012+02:00

Browsing various posts lately, I've loved that lots of people have been listing their gratitudes, from those celebrating thanksgiving, to those dealing with a recent diagnosis of cancer, to those who seem to have made it a regular part of their daily practice.

I'm aware of the power of appreciation. Quite literally, that which you appreciate grows in value. I have many things I'm grateful for, but I'm also prone to wingeing (complaining reduces joy, the sages say) and even the title of this blogspot is an alarmist protest to try and halt the escape of inspiration. So the list I'd like to make now is the list of the muses that didn't flee. The people and landscapes that have nurtured and inspired me over the three and a half short decades I have been inhabiting this (be)mused and (be)wildered self.

Family
Sometimes I forget, what a pedigree I have!
Mother - fine artist and image maker. Inspired me to know that you just stick with it. Even when the toddlers drink your turpentine, and the black dog of depression sniffs at your throat. Just keep pushing that pigment. Trust the daimon on your shoulder.
Father - the same really. Incredible discipline of someone who is self employed and takes himself to the easel whatever the mood, the extent of the hangover or the economic climate. Painter of wild skies and fleeting kudus. And financier of the education that has given me such a bedrock. Thanks dad.
(Actually having two artist parents can be kind of daunting for the germinating creative self. How high the bar? But the example they give is that it is possible to make a living from your art, if you are stubborn and uncompromising enough.)
Grandfather - the 'word of the day' games, the star-gazing lessons, the nature lessons, the stubbornness (Oh yes, we have that in abundance in these genes)
Grandmother - also a writer, like grandfather. Encouraged stories to breed in me.
And recently, I have realised how much that is alive in the branch of my family that I know less well - thanks Geli!

Teachers
My mother home schooled me for the junior years. And though I am hopeless at team sports, choir singing and long division, I believe that bush classroom of two preserved my baby creative soul.
When I did go to school, one English teacher saw some frustrated kindlings of wordsmithery in me and fed me combustibles to keep that flame going - poems, stories, big ideas.
Lindy Roberts - what a muse you were. Theatre design teacher at university whose incisive clarity and wisdom spirit were sounding depths of inspiration for me. She taught me about paring down. She taught me how to take a brief - ie how to really listen. Whalebone woman.
Junaq - when I beached myself at the Buddhist Retreat centre all broken and sore eight years ago, how could I have known that I would meet this tiny bird-like redhead who grew up in Fort Jameson and played with my grandfather as a child? She taught me so much more than meditation.

Collaborators
Stacy Hardy. Its so rare to find someone you can truly work with, to create a shared library of references, so that when you say - 'it should be like the scene in...' and they know exactly what you mean. I miss Ms Hardy, although its also been good for me to be on my own and hearing my own voice for a while.
Mavundla. Come on, lets do it again, guy!
Sister. What a friend you have been. To work with, rant at, intuit with. I'm so blerry lucky to have you.

Friends
As always, far, far too many to name. I have a host of creative souls who inspire me in ways they will never know. But right now - top of mind - dear Janine, you are one of those who never went away. And you'd better bloody well not do it now.

Standing still has never been one of my strong points. I seem grounded and serene. But it has taken a rigorous, sometimes nauseating effort to just stay put, when all I've wanted to do is run, but something deep in me just says, shhh. Sleep on it. And I've let the roots grow a little deeper.

Love
I'm not sure if I expected that B and I would last as long as we have. I think something bigger than me kind of insisted on it. But there have been many times, many reasons, when either one of us has wanted to run. And we haven't. Something has always intervened, to smack me in the face and make me see - that this is one muse that ain't going nowhere. And for this witty, brilliant, wounded, infuriating, wordy, care-full, holding soul, I am so very very grateful.

And then the landscapes. The spaces that have and hold the muse spirits. The watery dens, the vibrating hillsides of candelabra aloe. The winding river, crowded by gregarious trees.

When there haven't been people, when its just been me and my whirling vortex thoughts, and the feeling of being alone, I've always, always known that there is no such thing as an empty landscape. Rivers, rocks and mulching leafbeds all have their songs and their gossip.

Some places that have sustained me:
The River. Yes, that River. The one that hugs the curves and smiles its smug smile in the dry season, and churns with hungry violence in the rains. The one that eats the land we build on, but gives it back on the other side. The one that taught me that destruction and creation are two aspects of the same smile.

The red soil green scrub of eastern cape aloe fields. The white and aqua froth of east cape beaches.

The mountain,its arms folded, waiting.

The beautiful women who have captivated and enchanted me, who prompted me to lyricise inappropriately, night after night. And some men. But mostly, you, goddesses, who don't even know who you are.

Its late and I'm in Cape Town and I'm affected by the wine and the gravel-crunching feeling of being with a friend who, who -
is not sick but
whose life has presented her with a huge and extraordinary opportunity to heal.

What is a touchstone exactly? Is it something you hold in your pocket, like a familiar pebble, or is it a mightly monolith that you pilgrim to, and lay your hands on and it makes you feel whole? How dare we say that a pebble has no consciousness? Some rocks I've held in my hand and felt more pulse than I have off the vacant-faced mall wanderers of the suburbs.

Ag, whatever. We all need a touchstone.

There are those, who stayed still. And praise be to them. I've needed them.

Finally, something I've never really sought, never really had, but (I guess), always craved.

Readers
I love the instant gratification of reading your comments, and your posts, and seeing the mirror flash this way and that, picking up an aspect here or there. Adding another colour, deepening a half-thought-through observation. I just love this medium. And all you museful beings. Thank you.

Don't go away now.

Homesick

2008-11-28T13:07:00.005+02:00

Its the time of year. Sometimes I just miss it all so much. I miss the dry season, the way the plains roll out like rustling paper, inscribed with endless vehicle tracks. When evening campfires crackle and send orange spark showers up to meet the silver dizzying stars.

But now is when I miss most. The start of the rains. The way those clouds stack up against the gunblue horizon, and the winterthorns go an eerie green as the lightning zigs and the light rolls away. The way the wind twirls and pirhouettes ahead of big slanting sheets of rain, turning impalas frisky and making us humans do a rain dance because we're still so grateful for the slaking quench of it.

I like this time of year in the valley coz everyone starts to unwind and misbehave. Bush camps are shut now, and those safari guides and caterers that only work the 6-month dry season stick around for a little while, maybe until Christmas, until the malaria and the mud the bug onslaught gets too much. Then the die-hards will settle in for the real sog and slog and bog of the rains. That spinning in the mud time when the only thing that's dry is the bottom of the whiskey bottle.

But those magical few weeks after the camps have been wrapped up, and the cutlery put away for next year, and the sheets packed in damp proof boxes and the last clients sent off at the airport, but before the rain sets in - oh thats where I want to be now.

Waiting for the river to rise, so suddenly, overnight, so we can go cruising up the gulleys into areas that you only see from a vehicle in the dry season. Being at eye level with hippos is always kind of fun. Scary but fun.

I'm a nostalgic lass aren't I? I got a bit of a shock the other day though when I realised I hadn't been home for two years. Two years!

Ah well. I think we'll be having a Joburg Christmas, unless something miraculous happens in the bank accounts between now and then. But Joburg's great at that time. People leave the city en masse, braving the clogged arteries to the coast, leaving those few souls who stay behind to enjoy the quiet roads, the abundance of parking, the empty cinemas. I think we'll go away later. When everyone gets back. Yes, that's what we'll do.

In the meantime, if I can just get my sister to break her blogger drought, I could get some vicarious valley updates, some more of her glorious pics. Please help me spam her with comments until she comes off strike. She's over here.

The Elephant Conversation

2008-11-25T08:30:00.008+02:00

It comes up, again and again. At least in my circles, it does. And Val's post is right on the money. I especially like it because it draws no conclusions, offers no answers but gives you a glimpse into both sides of the story. Please read it if you're going to read this. It's what prompted me to sketch out these oft-thought thoughts for you.

The Biographical Stuff:
My grandfather killed elephants for a living, once.
Then he devoted a lot of energy to keeping them alive.
He wrote about them. He lived side by side with them.
He gave foreign visitors the extraordinary experience of walking in the bush and feeling the joy-rising fright of encountering one of these large beasts on their own terms.
He taught his grandchildren about them.
I grew up alongside elephants. I respect, fear, love and dream about them.
I have written plays and stories featuring elephants but have never come close to capturing what I want to say about them.
I dream about them.
I worry about them, for them.
I worry about the people I love who live near them.
Did I say I dream about them?
I think I was one, recently.

The Issues
Aside from humans, elephants are the most destructive creatures in terms of the effect they have on their immediate environment. Overpopulation of elephants in protected areas is an issue for biodiversity as much as it is a direct human threat. Anyone who argues that elephants shouldn't be culled needs to also look at the massive destruction they can wreak in a mopane forest, reducing a landscape to flat grey desolation and flattening much needed trees.

But this destructive tendency is also beneficial to ecosystems - they create access for other animals through impenetrable bush. Seeds that pass through their industrial sized digestive systems are germinated.

Obviously, the issue is a question of space. People who live in or near protected areas know this best. Imagine your only source of food for the year is your carefuly nurtured maize crop. The whole family has participated in tilling the soil, planting, chasing away birds, carrying water by bucket from the nearest river to water the struggling plants. One night an elephant family passes through and in the morning it is flattened - gone. Or worse, a child in the village was trampled to death. It happens.

Before humans and wildlife competed so much for space, the elephants would not have such a heavy impact on one area, because obviously they would migrate when food got low in one area. The population would regulate itself. This would happen in southern Africa's favourite reserves if the hands-off approach were followed. They would die of starvation. But it wouldn't be pretty and there would be a lot of casualties, including human casualties and other wildlife.

So - space vs numbers.

The solutions:
Population control method 1: Culling. Yes its terrible, and people who manage wildlife don't love doing it. There are various schools of thought the most commonly held right now is that it is better to take out a whole family unit and leave no orphans (elephants have very close family bonds) rather than just the breeding females.

Population control method 2: Birth control. Expensive, untested, problematic, but an option.

Population control method 3: Hands-off. Let the population control itself. Not really an option in our boundary controlled parks in southern Africa.

The More Space solution: Increase the size of protected areas? Create migration corridors so that they can move over wider areas?

Its hard to argue for that, when people have no land, or their ancestors were moved from tribal land to make way for animals which they are no longer allowed to hunt although their traditional food sources would have come from hunting. But the Peace Parks idea does, if I'm not mistaken, lay the foundations for more of a migration approach.

The solutions, generally speaking, are thrashed out by very dedicated people who love wildlife and are not, in spite of what animal rights activists would say, the enemy. They are scientists, who have to use hard data and take in a hell of a lot of competing factors. Like - the fact that the tourist industry relies on having parks that are well managed, well stocked, which means full of live animals and yet still with beautiful big intact trees and grasslands. Like - the fact that local people wage life and death battles with these creatures on a daily basis and would prefer it if their children and livelihoods weren't so threatened. Like - international opinion and treaties that need to be respected, CITES, etc. Elephant experts weigh all these factors up. They know what they're talking about. They can't afford to be sentimental.

And yet, and yet.

The point is, elephants are very like us. They attach, play, mourn the loss of loved ones, have clan gatherings to celebrate seasonal events, and become delinquent if they don't receive proper counsel as teenagers. They get lonely. They get maaad.

The point is, we're scared of them, and rightly so. We have to contain them, manage them. We can't invite them into our cities. Can we?

Can we?

At the World Parks Congress in Durban in 2003, they had a team of economists who just crunched numbers for that whole week. The costs of maintaining protected areas, the costs of research, the costs of policing anti-poaching, etc etc. They spun numbers and compared them to other costs - development, education, millennium development goals, etc. A random figure stuck in my mind. The amount of money needed to maintain protected areas the world over, and to create a few more, was exactly equal to the amount of money that Americans spend on ice cream every year.

I wish we could have a great big elephant think-tank to revise the issues and turn them on their heads. It would involve scientists, writers, poets, artists, traditional leaders and chiefs and policy makers and animal rights errorists, conservationists, economists and number crunchers and medicine men and women, and of course, psychics and dreamers.

And to pay for it - why the ice cream manufacturers of course. Anyone got an uncle in the ice cream business? I have a proposal for them.

No pics are proof of a good time

2008-11-24T10:46:00.007+02:00

I never used to have much birthday action. As an adult, that is. Throughout boarding school and university my birthday always fell smack in the middle of exams. My memories of birthdays when I was very small are of my mother valiantly decorating a table with a white bedsheet and magenta bouganvillia flowers. We probably had lovely fluffy lemon sponge cake a la the Chibembe camp chefs, or even a chocolate cake, thin candles drooping in the November heat. I'm sure we had the bounty of those wonderful care packages that used to arrive from my German grandmother (chocolate that had melted into every crevice of its silver packaging and shrilled the grown-ups' fillings, jelly babies for us, and salty liquorice for dad.) The only photographic evidence I have of one of these birthdays is a hilarious one, with me in centre looking jolly pleased with myself and Miranda scowling the jealous scowl of a younger sister, nursing her thwarted ambitions to the birthday throne.

I remember birthday parties with egg and spoon races, blind mans buff and cakes themed like cars, or exploding volcanoes, but there's an accompanying feeling of anxiety related to these. Other kids were always a bit of a mystery to me, having spent my early days in bush solitude. I was terrified of those games. I was terrified of a throw-away line my mother used once - 'cry on your birthday, and you'll cry for the rest of the year'. Where do these nuggets of terror come from? My first encounter with the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When I turned 30, Bernd invited some of my friends round and we shared such a beautiful evening together that I decided I would always do something with friends on my birthday, because this is what makes me happiest. So where other people grow out of birthday parties, I have grown into them. I love my annual gathering of nearest and dearest.

If I do an analysis of the wealth in my life, I would score very high in the friendship box. When I look around me see such a collection of beautiful, warm, talented, clever, generous and witty women as I saw in my garden this Saturday, I feel incredulous at how lucky I am. I feel mirrored in them, and consequently feel utterly fabulous, for this is what they are. Ok, there's usually a smattering of fine men as well, but this year, for one reason or another, the male of the species was under-represented. Except of course for my diligent co-host the unrelenting Bernd, maker of fine coffee, producer of garden umbrellas at the precise right moment, and intuitive DJ. You were a marvel my dear. Thank you.

I find it a little annoying when people try to match make me socially. "Oh you must meet so and so you'll love them, they also [insert irrelevant thing you have in common]. So I don't take it for granted that my friends all manage to socialise so elegantly with one another, even though many of them only see each other once a year at my birthday!

I love you all, you gifted and gifting gals. Hermien who can withstand the icy cold sea in the Western Cape with no wetsuit but wimpers (spelling intentional) and flees at the sight of a high-veld storm rolling over the hill. (Sorry you left so early, but thanks for bringing the water-bomb balloons); Nicci, I know you never let anything quite so inconvenient as a massive head injury get in the way of a good time, but thanks for coming, and I'm looking forward to being captained on the St Francis waters soon. Stacey (aka Spacey Spanks) the only Jewish Zimbabwean lesbian comedian actress filmaker poet I know who can really whip up a whoop in my lungs, a real one. And dear Zu, you are so utterly chic and fabulous you make my eyes hurt.

And there in spirit - Thandi, working on a presentation, sorry dear, and Renate, nursing a bad flu (chicken....) and A and A, thanks for your messages from colder climes. The sun is waiting for you, and so is our glorious garden, with its Mexican blue wall, purple basil, and seething spring chaos of lettuces mixed with pansies, herbs and spinach next to squash and beans, mielies next to ornamental bushes. YEeeahaaa! The chillies, cherry tomatoes and sunflowers are still rehearsing, and by the time you get there they will be ready for their big show. (and you Freya) Talking of rehearsing, Rob was unable to make it as he is gearing up for the next episode of Strictly Come Dancing... you can DO IT DUDE! And James had a valid excuse - best man at best friends bachelor party, yeah, yeah, I get it. Nesh, what do I call that fly-by drop in visit en route to the cherry picking festival? hmmm.... well, the gift does make up for it, sorta.... Anu, with her usual bounty stayed the full day (hooray), beyond the emptying of the bubbly. And you Jen, that silvergreen dress, your eyes... what can I say - a perfect garden accessory you are. Its important for designers to be decorative. All that and brains too. Janet - bravo! The number of hours spent chasing your 17 month-old Oliver must have utterly exhausted you. I fondly remember that a couple of years back you were the first to arrive and the last to leave and as your champagne drinking marathon record remains unbroken, it is quite acceptable to bow out early.

Glorious, glorious, is all I can say! If these are my friends, there is hope for me, and inspiration too. Much fun and silliness was had by all, and there are no photographs to prove it. Which in my book is proof that we had a splendid time - when you're too busy enjoying yourself to bother with cameras, you soak it up properly.

My favourite moments -
The poor little fiscal shrike attacking its own reflection in the garden mirror that Bernd put up. Ouch.
The way we so gracefully gathered up the blankets, the salads and food and whisked them inside when the rain came.
The elephant conversation. There's always an elephant conversation.
Watching Oliver attempt to drink the entire contents of the water feature, in all its green slime deliciousness.
Stacey in the mask.
Seeing Hermien leave in record time when she spotted that storm coming over the ridge. We usually take up to 20 minutes to say goodbyes but she was in her car in under 4 minutes.
Sneaking away to check my email on my phone and finding so many good wishes via email and facebook - thank you!
Oh, too many, too many moments to list.
You had to be there.

Oh just one more!

2008-11-20T21:08:00.003+02:00

Well I've cracked open an old vat and just have to spill the contents, y'see. Cleaned up the hard drive of an old laptop. These stories only existed on stiffy drive, you understand. So here's another. Hey, whats a blog for if a girl can't air her old selves from time to time?

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PAPER DOLL

I have wanted to do this for such a long time now. It's one of those things that I knew would just give me such satisfaction. I am not by nature a vindictive person, by any means. Unless of course you count the time I sabotaged Henrietta's petrol tank. But that doesn't really amount to the same thing, because I was actually trying to save her life. It was a good thing she couldn't go on that journey. She would have died or met with a horrible accident. Everyone said it was vindictive, but actually it was a very selfless action. This is completely different. This gives me great satisfaction.

I sneak in here while he is still asleep. You have to be very careful that the stairs don't creak. You have to miss the eighth stair because it's been all chewed by termites and it makes a hollow sort of breaking sound when you step on it. He's a very light sleeper. He wakes up at the slightest midnight footfall outside his window. It's because he doesn't remember his dreams. `Sleeping is a waste of time,' he used to tell me. And `you sleep too much.'

Still, he really hates it when even a single mosquito gets into the net. It drives him crazy. He sits up in the middle of the night as if terrorists have arrived. Sits bolt upright and starts swiping at the air like a fat drunk kitten. And then he'll keep dead still, like he's trying to fool the mosquitoes, like if he keeps still for long enough they'll forget he's there and land on his arm, but they never do, because his heart is pounding with midnight adrenalin, he's breathing too fast. Mosquitoes can pick up vibrations really well, they know if a person is asleep or just pretending to be there and keeping really still to fool them. Every now and then he'll make a mad lunge at the side of the mosquito net where he thinks one has landed, and he takes his hand away, squinting for the grey-red smear, but they're always too quick for him. He blinks at the pillow, but all he gets is that thin whine, sailing past his ear. It drives him crazy, especially when he hits the side of his own skull too hard. If he could, he would fetch his Winchester .22 and blast their tiny heads off but he can't do that either, they're just too small. All of this makes him very irritable in the morning, especially as I'm always lying there so peacefully, dipped in warm watery dreams without waking.

That's the way it used to be, at any rate. I don't know if Henrietta is such a heavy sleeper. She's not here now. That's why I chose tonight. Henrietta has gone off with my sister on Safari. `Do you mind?' my sister asked me. I told her I'm not the jealous type.

So I tiptoe up the wooden stairs without too much creaking. He is very fast asleep this time, and there's an empty whisky bottle next to the bed, with a sticky smear on the wood where it spilt and the dust has collected. My hands are quite sweaty because it's a hot night and also I can't stand that smell any more. Lemon soap. I stopped using it last summer. I have my mother's best scissors in my hands, they've got an orange handle. Round my neck is a silver whistle, the kind policemen and dog trainers use. I want to laugh out loud, but I won't, not yet.

You know when you're a kid and they don't know what to do with you at nursery school so they give you paper and a pair of creaky silver scissors and you're told to cut out shapes? And then they show you how to fold the paper so that if you cut a person out and then unfold it, you get a whole string of paper dolls holding hands, with stiff skirts almost touching? I like those shapes, those angular paper people dancing in a line, looking like they're getting ready for a curtain call. So that's the shape I'm going to cut out of his mosquito net.

I start at the foot of the bed. I don't want the snipping noise to wake him just yet. I cut out three smug little A-line skirted figures, all smaller than the palm of my hand. Then stand back, breathing carefully. He doesn't even move. A slight lung rattle is all that disturbs the air.(He smokes far too much, though Henrietta's trying to get him to stop.)

I step towards the bed again. This time I cut out a much larger shape, its body just a little bit smaller than my face. I step back. I position the wooden chair directly in front of the bed. My wooden chair. Which he still hasn't given back to me, though he said he would drop it round. I position myself in the chair so that I will be in his direct line of vision when he wakes, perfectly framed by the largest of the holes. I put the silver whistle in my mouth and take a deep breath. I can just see his face as he wakes. I know exactly what his eyebrows will do and how his cheeks will quiver. How he will fight with the sheet before sitting upright, bolt upright and alert as if terrorists have arrived.

I am about to blow on the silver whistle when I notice a small movement on the pillow next to him. Just a quick scurry, then it stops. I peer through the hole, my eyes are quite adjusted to the dark. I peer through the shapes I have cut and there on the pillow is a small black scorpion. Not one of the really bad pale ones which keep you swearing all day, but still. Enough to really hurt, especially if it gets you on the cheek. All at once I am completely helpless. There's a lump in my throat and I don't really know why. I suddenly remember being seven years old. My first scorpion sting and sobbing all night from how sore it was, wishing my frail wish for arms to be holding me in the dark.

It was a long time before I could do anything. Too many thoughts bumping into one another in my head. I felt even more foolish than that time in Henrietta's garage, barefoot, on cold concrete. The room suddenly much bigger than it ever was. I thought That's my book on the bedside table. Right next to the whisky spill. Lolita. I had a sudden craving for ice cream, like when we walked through the shops that cold day.

A rush of something in my chest then I am standing on the chair I blow on the whistle over and over and I think I might be crying I'm not sure but I'm shouting `Scorpion! Next to you on the pillow.'

Then I'm very still because before I can head out of there I hear click and he's loading his gun. Click. I lower my head without breathing so he can see me through the gap. We stare at each other for a long time.

I say, `There's a scorpion on the pillow next to you.'

I walk. Down stairs that moan under my weight.

My bike purrs beneath me with the wind clean on my face but I wish I didn't feel like this. Lemon soap burning my nostrils, and eyes raw. My sister's coming home tomorrow but I can't really speak to her anymore. She wouldn't really understand anyway, if I told her that I wish I'd never put that water into Henrietta's petrol tank.

I've hung my string of cut-out dolls above my bed. Four dancing girls in their net skirts. They are the last thing I see before I fall asleep.

Bathtub Red

2008-11-18T22:01:00.004+02:00

I am back in deadline city, with a major gridlock in all main synaptic junctions, [read - slow brain, slow words] so in the spirit of all that was and may have been, I give you an oldie. This from over a decade ago. I welcome your critiques, as I no longer have any particular sensitivities around these random little bits of fluff that I collected under the vague title of Red Dress Stories / Diaries / Chronicles what have you. After a while it became somewhat tiresome and I strayed from the theme, but still, fun to dig out old bits of juvenilia and read them with curious detachment.

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Bathtub Red

Look, I don't often wear red, but when I do I know there's going to be trouble. Like now. Like the size of the hangover I am waking up with.

When I force my eyes open, I can only wonder. Where I am. What I am wearing and how I got here. The flaming hug of scarlet satin that engulfs my tender and thirsty body is completely unfamiliar to me, and as for my location, well. I am in a bathtub, in a garden, underneath a jacaranda tree which is scattering a generous harvest of purple onto my breast.

And there's a face, above me. Looming in and out of focus. Not an unattractive face, I am pleased to note, through the scream and the rage of my hangover head. He is smiling, and scattering petals onto my stomach.

I smile back weakly and try to rub my eyes. I can't. Try again, suddenly aware of this tight and bruisy feeling around my left wrist. Eyes down and I realise all at once that I am handcuffed to this grinning dark-eyed man. Two silver hoops of metal join us, wrist to wrist, and the glint of the morning sun hurts my eyes.

"LOUI-EEEEESE" I cry out in relief, as the owner of the bathtub and the garden appears.
"What happened?" I say, quite pathetic.
"Nice dress" she says, eyes flickering. And like a treacherous undertow, the memory of last night begins to take hold.

I was visiting Louise, on my way to the boss's birthday party. It was one of those days when everything you wear makes you feel like mashed bananas. I was waiting for her to come out the shower. Her wardrobe door was open, a throat-prickling scent emerging from it. I began to page through her clothes, absent-minded, waiting.

Other women's wardrobes. That urgent feeling that you are violating some terrible code of privacy. The sensuality of someone else's perfume; the cool rub of unfamiliar fabrics, they all combine in a narcissistic throb of forbidden pleasure.

One dress in particular seemed to gleam in the patchouli scented dark of Louise's wardrobe. Without really knowing what I was doing, I slipped it off the hanger and over my head. Stepping into the light, I see that the dress I am wearing has the gloss of newly spilled blood. It is redder than Snow White's apple.

"Louise." I yelled to her while she was still in the shower. "I've just remembered something urgent. Must dash. See you later|" I turned and ran as fast as I could, out of her house, to the boss's party, leaving a flaming wake behind me.

In the swirling, strobe-lit vortex of the next twelve hours I am aware that the dress I am wearing has a deep and potent mystery. I have heard women speak of garments such as these: a dress or a pair of shoes that has the power to transform, to awake the slumbering carnivore, to draw out an ancient wolf-like craziness that you never knew you had. I am both predator and irresistible prey.

I remember leaning over the railing, my grip growing weaker and weaker. Below me the dizzy spin of city lights pattern themselves into heartbeats. Its a long way to fall but I feel sure it will be more like soaring than falling. The lights are foaming down there, like the trickle of bubbles in a champagne glass.

Voices behind me blur and hum in this moment of ecstasy between me and the growling city. But then a quick hard tug on my arm, I'm being pulled back, just at the moment that I might have been airborne.

Pulled back. I sink deep into this eternal pair of arms, this all-engulfing man-scent. Eyes that swallow me whole. The same eyes that are devouring me now, as I lie in the bathtub, awash with last night's madness. What do I remember him saying?
"I can't wait to get you out of that dress"
And we danced, and the strobe lights sliced up the night into bite sized slivers.
"I won't let you out of my sight." I accepted the handcuff around my wrist the way other women accept diamond rings.

But now Louise is staring at me, her eyes hard. My throat is dry, devoid of explanation. Her eyebrow arches like a cats back and she turns away and walks back into her house. I focus all my attention onto this stranger I have found. In my mind's eye his tongue traces thin languorous trails over my expectant flesh.
"Can it happen now?" he asks, his mouth quivering with promise.”You promised.”

"Can what happen?" is my coy reply.
"Please please please? Can I wear your dress?"

Don't throw that red dress away

2008-11-14T08:21:00.010+02:00

He's the man from that Coke ad. He has a generous belly, and big gold medals. He is the President. He is seated in a deck chair, surveying the open plains in front of him with corpulent satisfaction. And I cannot persuade him.

Me, I am dumbfounded. Why on earth? Numb.
But he is insistent, smug.
He is going to plant alfalfa. All this wild wasteland will become agricultured, tamed, greened.

But these are the salt pans of Chibembe. These wide open plains, where you can walk for three days in one direction and you won't see another human being. Where lions lie in shallow bleached grass, their yellow eyes hooded as they laze. To the east, mopane forests, grey and scrubby. These are the salt pans of my youth. There is no more wilderness like this. You can't just -

"Yes," he joins his sausage fingers together over his stomach. Binoculars round his neck.
"It will be good. Can you see it? Green farmlands. I can feed my people."
But. Wait. This soil, its salty. Your crops won't grow. Rather build a lodge. I'm telling you - people would pay, they would come here, to be in the wilderness - such empty space, at night you can't even see an electric light. You could charge $1000 a night. Come on, you could charge $10 000!! You could feed your people with that.

He won't be persuaded.

I turn away from that precious horizon and look at him. He has a crew of militarised dancers, about to perform for him. They are suited and jacketed and about to do drum majorette style acrobatics in his honour.

I want to go walking, one last time, to find the lions before they are all shot.

Now it is night, and I have been walking so long here, I have merged into the memories of my childhood on these plains, looking for lion. Now I am lion. There's a spotlight, wiping the darkness away in big strokes. Sweeping the bush. I must be still. It will find me. They will find me. I must close my eyes or they will find me by my eyes. I turn away. My eyes have become huge, I take in all the distance, the bush and the scrub and the tiny movements of mice. I take in the man in his safari suit and medals and his tumbling crew of cameras.

Now I want a camera. I want to record this place, capture it on film. Go to the papers. Something. But I have no camera. No one has a camera for me. When I find a clutch of them, they are old, outdated, falling apart. No match for Mr Alfalfa man.

But in that same room where they show me the cameras, I notice a pile of clothes. Old, second hand clothes, once glamourous sexy clothes. There - that one on top, its my dress. That's my red dress. Its kind of soiled and shredded, but I recognise it. I pick it up, hold it. Put it back on the pile and watch as they are carted away, to be destroyed.

--------------------------------------------

This dream, for me, is very clear. Its about wilderness, wildness and losing your wild spaces inside. Last night I had dinner with Billie, who has know me since high school, through university, through craziness and many wardrobes. We are laughing about those times, about parties under the stars and me with my black cowboy boots claiming Grahamstown streets. The late nights that she had to walk home alone because I was who knows where in my red dress or my cowboy boots. Throughout my twenties I always seemed to have a red dress in my wardrobe. I remember the soft flowing one I wore to lectures in the day. And another one I had, later, that fitted like skin, that always seemed to bring out a fire in me. She looks at me over her glass of wine, and with true Billie honesty says, "I prefer that Tamara to the one now." I know what she means. Tamed, domesticated me who worries about the dishes in the sink and the month end debits. It hurts to hear it, but I know what she means.
"Is she still there, somewhere?" asks Billie. And I think of the motorbike I sold, that I used to ride, at dawn, still drunk from the night before, shouting at mopane trees for jumping into the road. Running down to the river at dusk to watch the elephants cross. Taking the landrover out at 3 am to look for aardvark. Casually non-committal to all the boys who wanted a piece of it. Wild kisses under the moon. My collection of stories, the Red Dress, unshelved in some box somewhere.
I don't know.

I'm a nicer person. I don't break hearts any more. I don't drink tequila like I used to. Of course not. We have other things now. And what I've learned about love in the 15 years is so much more valuable to me. But the lions in the dream are about something else - the one inside who doesn't want to be nice. Hunted and threatened, by...by alfalfa!! By rolling green pastures.

A sense, when I woke up, that this is the trouble with where we are in the world. With land use policies. Environmental impact assessments. Biodiversity. Investment portfolios. We are losing our wild spaces faster than ice can melt, but we just don't really get it. And the reason, I think, is because we are not in touch with the wildness in our selves. The way a glimpse of a lion's yellow stare can fundamentally shift your chemistry.

We are being regulated out of existence. ID books and credit checks and driving licences and the way we gratefully hand over our freedoms because its for our own safety. CCV cameras and spyware.

But I know that wildness doesn't go away. That if its ignored and asked to be civilized and rapped on the knuckles and told to be seen not heard, it might go to sleep for a while, it might yawn and turn the other cheek. For a while.

But that's also when it subverts. Meekness turns into passive aggressive manipulation. Contentment masks boredom which masks a pacing snarl. The goddess will find her way out if you don't give it to her. She'll take it. I'd rather stumble on a lion in the bush than a lion that's been in a cage for ten years.

Sure we can deny our wildernesses, incarcerate our wild spaces, tame our flaming hearts. Sure we can. But isn't that when they become really deadly?

Your thoughts, o wild ones?

pics courtesy of Freya Reder.

Time

2008-11-12T14:12:00.004+02:00

Time.
Seems every body wants more of it. Life is short, we say. There's not enough time in the day! we say, in that pleading way. Er... who are you asking for more?

And then that old chestnut - I don't have time to meditate.
But meditation creates time! I remind myself. Doesn't matter. Once you're off the wheel you're off. It takes six months to create a habit.

I think its not more time we want. Its timelessness. Its the sense of not-time. Not having to rush, to have a deadline, to not have enough hours in the day for all the things we have to do.

We'll have time when we're dead. Plenty of it. Or rather, we'll have not-time. And that's what we're homesick for. The feeling of now.

Well, its definitely speeding up, as we hurtle towards the mythical date in 2012. Time is melting, warping, speeding up... becoming meaningless!

And will keep on doing so.

Have you ever played time games with yourself? You know you're late but you insist that time become elastic and stretch for you, and somehow, miraculously, it does. It just does. I forget this, but when I've done it with absolute assured insistence, it has worked. Within reason, of course. And of course, if you assert often enough and with enough conviction, there's just no time! the universe complies. Those obedient laws of time and space.

This morning I was awake before 4. I got up, ungroggy for once. I sat on my meditation cushion. It felt airless. I got up to open the window. I sat. I was cold. I got up to get my wrap. I sat. I breathed. The cat demanded my lap. I ignored. My back hurt. The other cat came and the two of them squabbled. I got up to let them both out. I sat.

And sat. My brain squabbled with itself. Ego sniped at breath. Shoulders hurt. Birds sang, twittered, scraped and creaked.

My spine unfurled by a hundredth of a millimetre. Then another. Breath lengthened me. Shoulder knot popped. Birds squabbled with my neck vertebrae. With my sitting bones.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to stop. Time. Knotted in every crunch of breath I felt the silted layers of time across roots and tangled impact of thought waves, my poor aching back. My poor racing brain.

Meditation creates time. It became a song, a groan. A lie. A truth. A clever thing to say later in a blog.

And then, for a breath, or a song or a cycle of breaths, I felt it. Not-time. A brief dip in the ocean, bracketed by a feeling of my day rushing towards me.

The seeds of it are there now. For today, I am not in a hurry.

Brainstorms in teacups

2008-11-11T11:41:00.013+02:00

I had an inspiring weekend at the Africa Research Conference on Applied Theatre at Wits this weekend. Lots of vigorous debate and real connections - remarkably free of the usual posturing and look-at-me intellect that too often happens at these conferences. This one is hosted by the Drama for Life programme at Wits University, and caused me to break out in feverish sweats of planning and get all excited by the electric storm in my head.

My best things:

Seeing dear Paula and the Bonfire Theatre company perform their version of Playback theatre. These guys are responsive, disciplined performers, with experience as drama therapists. They get stories from the audience and play them back in real time, in a very elegantly structured process. Paula astonishes me with her listening skills. She can hear through several layers of the body and aura. I salute you, Ms Kingwill.

Seeing people that I had kind of lost touch with - Emma, Caroline from Phakama theatre, all these powerful creative women that I miss so much. Somehow in Jozi I haven't touched into the same sense of creative community that I had when I lived in Cape Town. I wonder why. I have great friends here, and many of them make amazing work, but somehow the rules of the game are too much centred around money in this city of gold, whereas in Kapa I had a crew of magicians who were happy to just play and see what came of it, money no object. Perhaps its to do with age. I'm much more of a solitary worker now. And that's ok. But I had a lovely feeling of being in my real tribe.

"Networking" (hate that word) with other practitioners from the subcontinent. Becoming part of a forum that is going to create a proper network for applied theatre practitioners in Africa. Woohoooo! This has been a long time in my field of intentions, and is starting to take shape at last.

A workshop on stories, voices, community, landscape. Taken from a project that worked with communities that lay claim to Mapungubwe, the ancient civilization site where the famous gold rhino was found. A simple and very intimate process of sharing stories in a small group, thoughts on landscape, community, the significance of names, and then creating a map of your life landscape and putting little feet/footsteps at different parts of your map. Getting responses to these from the person next to you, and then interpreting these responses in a group still picture - how stories get interpreted and filtered down - diluted or added to. Beautiful Sarah from Ghana who describes herself as unstable and pure spirit, who said 'when I had my son I realised I exist', Yvonne from the Valley of a Thousand Hills whose son went to the school I went to, and who carries a breathstopping recent tragedy in her aura. Vivacious Kat with flashing eyes who misses the Jacaranda trees of the country she no longer lives in. Stacey who wraps layers of protection around her vulnerable core. How much intimacy and poetry can be created in an hour and a half. The way we had to pass round little slips of paper to create a silent story in the group (and this to be developed further - a gorgeous idea, I love the thought of a murmured act of communal storymaking in an audience, where its not ever 'aloud' - ie spoken by performers on stage, but passed on from person to person, everyone telling part of a scripted whole.)

The drama therapy guru Phil Jones whose paper sparked something in me - especially where he spoke of rethinking childhood - oh, so much there - how adults create 'others' out of children and silence them. Think about it - which of these words resonate with you and your childhood messages - 'invisible'; 'inadequate', 'not worth listening to'. And how this creates a cycle of incompetence. And his paper delivered in such a performative way, with some of the students reading out his case studies as if from a playreading.

Yes, the rains have started, as my fellow African bloggers Janelle, Miranda and Val celebrate so lyrically. For me, this conference was a much needed slaking of an old thirst. I haven't been working much in this field lately, because I decided to concentrate on the wordsmith aspect of my being. I still do the odd bit of facilitation, but I really miss the chemistry of a shared storymaking and theatre making process. It feels like the plans that have been slowly uncurling at the base of my brain can find some other sparks to ignite them now. Yay.

goosebumps

2008-11-05T08:54:00.007+02:00

Its palpable. The traffic on Louis Botha is celebrating. Everyone is hooting. Its bigger than when SA won the Rugby World Cup. And if you're not South African you don't know how big that is!

Congratulations American voters, you did it. Doesn't it feel good to have a warm-blooded mammalian creature at the helm again? The rest of the world is very, very relieved.

My prayer now is that this energy and excitement can be harnessed. "Follow it through" my dear grandfather used to say, ad nauseum. Don't sit back and think your job is done. That all too human tendency to let others lead, make decisions for you and when they do bad you just shrug shoulders while saying "ag, that's politics" is what gives leaders permission to inch towards forgetfulness.

Make no mistake, we are as besotted with the man as you are. But we'd like to throw in our penny's worth. Or Rand's worth. (its cheaper that way). Hell, what's a blog for if its not for a bit of opinionated chirping from the wings? We can tell you a thing or two about politics in Africa, oh yes we can. And even though this election seemed more like American Idol than politics, still, we'd like to share.

We can tell you that Charisma is bewitching, heady, dizzy-making. We love it, we want to be close to it all the time. Its like falling on love. Your partner is so wonderful they can do no wrong. So be like the lover who needs her independence - hold your man accountable for his promises. Don't just give him carteblanche coz he's hot.

We can tell you that Change cannot be outsourced. It can be managed, sure, but you got to do the hard uncomfortable work yourself. You can hire someone to clean up your mess, but then its easy to just keep making the same mess again. Do it yourself, and you'll keep it clean.

And we can tell you that Your Neighbours are important. What other people think is important. I guess by now many of you have realised that the rest of the world has an opinion about the USA and not a very complimentary one. We care because you guys have what we would call a big footprint. The power to do good, yes. But also the power to be the big kid at the party who ate all the cake and slurped up all the juice and didn't leave any for the rest. Years ago, at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Joburg, there was a very cool Tshirt that I didn't manage to get my hands on. Black with luminous green font, worn by slim bands of protesters at traffic lights - "What shall we do about the United States?" read the tshirt. It was a question that had to be answered, but that was back in 2002, pre-Baghdad, pre the last 5 grinding years of hope erosion. Finally, it feels like maybe the United States can do something about themselves. We hope so. We will be watching this man with great interest. We want to share.

But look at me, I'm the one spoiling the party now, like a strict old teacher with sharp gary larson glasses.

I truly am very excited. It feels like a real chance.

Enjoy the celebrations, and keep riding that energy - the hard work begins now, I reckon. Yes, you truly can.