Hello my love,
There’s this newsletter I subscribe to because I like the topics the writer covers. The new one arrived last week and I noted it in my journal. ‘As always,’ I wrote, ‘it was beautiful and full of what seems like true sentiment.’
I became acquainted with this writer a few years ago and though they are charming, funny and likeable, I started seeing things that made me uncomfortable: cleverly cutting up an opponent they considered intellectually inferior at a dinner party in a way that was calculated to make people laugh; a profound lack of interest in the conversation of women or quiet men around the table; a petulance towards an old friend of theirs, who is also a friend of mine, and the grudging non-apology that followed their very bad behaviour towards them. Although I still like their writing very much, I feel differently about it now.
I thought about this now because I spent all morning with my hands hovering over the keyboard. I was overcome by stage fright. When I asked whether people might want to read the letter last month – and this really is not false humility, I promise you – I honestly expected fewer than ten to be interested. But I just kept getting request after request until I had to set up a spreadsheet of names and addresses of people who’d requested the letter. When I was trying to write this morning, I suddenly felt aware that I’m not writing only to you and I was worried that this knowledge would impinge on how I sound or what I say.
I decidedly do not want to produce letters that seem like they are full of true sentiment. I can’t see the point of that. I want to just chat. But at the same time, writing more publicly, even for a few hundred of my closest friends (jokes) does mean you can’t just let it all hang out. The restriction it imposes is that I must be certain of everything I say in case someone wants to challenge me on it. And, as you know, I don’t trust certainty.
I don’t trust it so much, that I have no fewer than three quotes about certainty on my notice board. I only realised that earlier this month when I was staring at it while I had zoned out from the work I was busy with.
‘Doubt is uncomfortable’ said Voltaire, ‘but certainty is ridiculous.’ He said it in a more flowery way, but this is the crux of it.
It’s the quote that comes to me when I am dealing with a windbag. People who have no doubt bore me deeply.
‘From the place where we are right / flowers will never grow / in the spring. // The place where we are right / is hard and trampled / like a yard. // But doubts and loves / dig up the world / like a mole, a plow.’ That’s Yehuda Amichai.
And then the words of Wisława Szymborska that are a triumph of a kind of feminine wisdom I admire so much: ‘I’ve reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don’t know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.’
So, my love, having worried myself into paralysis, I went for a swim, and I blew out the bubbles of worry. You have me fresh now. In my fuckits. Which frees me up to just talk to you and hope no one will grill me. I always try to be accurate and check things (Journalism 101), but I’m also not trying to win any arguments. I just want to have a conversation and I don’t want fear to strangle my thoughts.
Thank you so much for writing to back to me. I didn’t expect you to. It was great though, because there are things that came out in the letter that haven’t come up in our WhatsApp conversations. Like the impact of sounds and the feel of things on your sense of home. I smiled when you said that you miss the sound of our footsteps in the flat.
Thanks for the update on your team. I know we discussed this last year, but why is Tobi actually donating their eggs? Is it a combination of altruism and needing to earn money? Is it a political or value stance? I know so little about fertility and egg donation. I hope these aren’t stupid questions. Is it invasive or painful? Does this have any implication for their own fertility later?
I received so many letters last month, not just yours. The Love Letter seemed like a key that unlocked lots of old doors. So many people wrote back, most of them about correspondences that meant a lot to them. Malika sent me pictures of the piles of letters she has from a friend who now lives in Canada and a photograph of her and the friend taken here in Cape Town recently. Simon told me about the letters his mother wrote to him at boarding school. I had stories about love letters gone missing, or discovered by prying adults. Traditions and sayings that started as a result of letters between friends. And almost all of the people who wrote to me spoke about the anticipation of waiting for the postman (it was always a man when I was young) to arrive with their battered leather (it used to be leather – saying this makes me feel especially old!) bag over their shoulder and the feeling of elation when there was something in the box addressed to you in familiar handwriting.
I also got a few letters the week after I sent the first one asking where that week’s letter was. For a minute there, I considered writing once a week, but I’m going to put that thought on ice for a while. I’m still really working so much I don’t know my ass from my elbow and when I briefly considered feeling sorry for myself this weekend when I didn’t even have time to go for a walk, I was reminded by Max Ehrmann, who wrote Desiderata, that a career is ‘a real possession in the changing fortunes of time’.
And the fortunes have changed radically since my last letter. I don’t really want to talk about the war. There is absolutely nothing I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. I do think of you, though, going to the memorials and museums of European wars, with that very strong sense of history, politics and justice that you have. I think: how peculiar to be visiting these places while less than 2 000km from where you are now, people are fleeing and dying and hiding in bomb shelters, just like in all those stories we know from World War II. It just doesn’t seem real.
Tennessee Williams (he wrote Cat On A Hot Tin Roof – I hope one day you have an opportunity to see it performed. You could also watch the old black and white movie of it, if you were dead keen, but that impressed me less than seeing it on stage) said that the world is ‘violent and mercurial’.
‘We are only saved by love – love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.’
So let me give you some love.
Rose came to visit from the UK. She stayed in Cape Town for a few days and invited me and Jay to have lunch at her host’s house. Rose and Jay are two of the four friends who always wrote me letters after we left school – the ones I told you about last month. Anyway, we sat outside in the garden of the home where Rose was staying, talking and laughing as though we’d just said goodbye to one another in the bicycle shed a few hours earlier.
Two things about our afternoon together struck me.
Firstly, how easily conversation flowed, and I don’t just mean that we didn’t struggle to find things to talk about, I also mean, how easily the ball of conversation was tossed between us. One of us would be asked a question. That person would respond at some length, while the other two listened quietly and without chipping in, talking over or getting antsy. When the speaker was finished, we’d ask follow-up questions or make observations. Then the next person would talk.
When I went home that evening, I expected to be exhausted from the outing – the excitement of it, the length of the visit, the amount of information that was exchanged. But I wasn’t. I felt energised.
That same week, a woman wrote on a Facebook group I belong to that she wanted to check something with others: did people ever feel like, when they went places with friends in one-on-one situations, that they were merely around to be the audience? Yes! I wanted to write. Yes! Yes!
Last year I decided that in spite of the fact that there are some people I really adore, I am no longer going to make any great effort to see them. The reason is that when I am with them, I come away drained. Even my toenails and my elbows feel tired. I realised that these people had one thing in common: they speak non-stop, only about themselves, and never ask me questions. When they do, they don’t wait for me to finish answering.
The lack of mutuality and reciprocity kills intimacy. There is no ‘shared relational excitement and experiential empathy’, as I read someone describing it. The desire I have for authentic connection – however brief and even superficial the exchange is – does not seem to be shared by the other person. And this makes me feel like I urgently need to sleep.
I remember at varsity that Max once hid in his room when Renate had a friend over. He stuck his nose through a crack in the door when I walked past his room and whispered: ‘Has the energy vampire left yet?’ I laughed so hard. It’s taken me this long to understand what an energy vampire really is.
Around the same time as Rose and Jay, I listened to the ‘Hidden Brain’ podcast in which Shankar Vedantam interviewed someone about what it means to ‘have understanding’ in a relationship. Understanding – that feeling that someone just ‘gets you’ – goes a little deeper than reciprocity, but it’s along the same lines. At any rate, you can’t be understood if you can’t even be heard over someone else’s onslaught.
The second thing I took away from my afternoon with Jay and Rose was that reading and writing is for everyone. This probably seems like a dumb thing to say, but recently it has seemed to me like the only people who show any overt interest in reading or writing are writers. Neither Rose nor Jay are writers, but they both still journal. I found this particularly surprising.
We started speaking about what we’re all going to do when we get old. We want to live in community with other people, but we don’t want to be in old-age homes. The three of us have mothers who need care now, so it’s what we’re thinking about. I mentioned that I’d read this book by Atul Gawande called Being Mortal a few years ago. They’d both read it too. That meant we could discuss his ideas around ageing and death without me feeling like I was imposing some fancy-schmancy bookishness on other people. I often talk about something I have read and then I think, jirre, Karin, other people talk about things they’ve done. All you talk about (somewhat vaguely) is things you’ve read. I didn’t have that feeling with these two sister-friends of mine.
When I was at school, almost all my friends read. The boys too. Our classes were divided so that the brightest stars were in the A class and those who did academically badly were in the G class. I had friends in all those classes and all of them read.
Being with Jay and Rose made me feel like my most familiar self – an unacademic person who grew up alongside other unacademic people who read all the time, and who use writing to sort through life and brain muddles.
Speaking of reading, I have five books on the go. Three memoirs (and I used to think memoir was my least favourite genre – ha!), a book of poetry and a thoughtful and gently written book by a psychiatrist about mental health in the public care system. But not having a novel on the go always makes me feel a bit ungrounded. I want to read a bedtime story. I want at least two lives going on all the time: my own and the one I’m living in the novel.
But I don’t know what I want to read and my usual tricks (another language, a different kind of novel, a translation) aren’t working. I want to read A Big One. A Big One is the kind of book that blew the top of my head off the first time I read it. I decided to make a list of the Big Ones. In no particular order, and without looking in my shelves, these were all Big Ones for me:
The Bone People Keri Hulme
Agaat Marlene van Niekerk
White Teeth Zadie Smith
Beloved Toni Morrison
A Little Life Hanya Yanagihara
Purple Hibiscus Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Secret History Donna Tartt
The Round House Louise Erdrich
The Door Magda Szabó
Inland Téa Obreht
The History of Love Nicole Krauss
What I loved Siri Hustvedt
More recently:
Kompoun Ronelda Kamfer
Mermaid Fillet Mia Arderne
After I scribbled these down, I saw there were only women on this list. I have no explanation for why that happened because it’s not an accurate reflection of how I read. So I pushed a bit harder and remembered these Big Ones:
An Unnecessary Woman Rabih Alameddine [I loved this book beyond words]
Breath Tim Winton
To The End of the Land David Grossman
Run Me to Earth Paul Yoon
The Moor’s Last Sigh Salman Rushdie
Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides
Saturday Ian McEwan
I know this much is true Wally Lamb
The Crow Road Iain Banks
Where these authors have written more than one book, I’ve read almost their entire oeuvres, but these were the books of theirs that whipped scars on my heart. David Grossman has a new book out, so there’s hope in the coming weeks (though I didn’t enjoy his last novel, A Horse Walks Into A Bar.) Mpush challenged his friends to read Ulysses with him. I’ve never read it. I found a copy and read the first few pages and then I felt overwhelmed. Not by the book, but by my current busyness, which seems to have no end. I want to read it. I want to try to do something I think might not be easy.
One of the Big Ones I never finished (I think I’d borrowed it and had to give it back and then never took it up again), was The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Sam found the movie the other day, which stars the recently disgraced Kevin Spacey. I thought it was very good. The movie looked like images I’d created in my head while I was reading. I love it when that happens. Like some sort of weird validation.
Wendy bought tickets for us to see ‘Life & Times of Michael K’ at The Baxter Theatre last week. It was packed, not like when we went back for the first time in October last year. What a great feeling for a place that spacious to be humming with voices and laughter before the bell rings for the show.
The play was a collaboration between Lara Foot and the Handspring Puppet Company. The puppets with their handlers were mesmerising as always. I’m so interested in that strangeness of being able to absorb the puppet as an individual member of the cast, while at the same time feeling that the puppet’s handlers are also members of the cast and not just the puppet’s ‘machine’. I feel unsure of where to place the character’s consciousness and it intrigues me, this relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet, and me and these entities. I always wish I could see every production that involves the Handspring Puppet Company twice. I was lucky that I could with ‘War Horse’.
Anyway, with Micheal K. I experienced again the sensations that what I was seeing on the stage had sprung directly from my brain. Especially the little trolley he makes to push his mother from Cape Town to Prince Albert in the Karoo. This experience of feeling like the pictures I made in my head about the book – in this case the book JM Coetzee wrote in 1983 – has to do with the author’s brilliance at presenting something, of course, and not my ability to render pictures from their words, no matter how chuffed I feel when the production’s pictures align with those in my head.
Wendy and I were struck by the simplicity of the language of the play and how familiar it felt. She went to check her copy of the book when she got home and sent me a message to say that it seems like Foot incorporated much of the original text. It’s astonishing that someone can write so vividly using such simple words.
When I got home, I told Sam this and he told me a story that a very well-known literature professor would sometimes give students a piece of JM Coetzee’s writing and ask them to edit and simplify it. She doesn’t tell them who the writing is by. They struggle, of course.
Simple writing is such an art.
So is short writing, and I’m not achieving that with this letter, and I haven’t even got to thing I most want to tell you: I discovered something called Radio Taiso, which means ‘radio exercises’ from the book Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles.
Now every morning, I get out of bed and first do the first three minutes and then the next three minutes of Radio Taiso dynamic stretching to piano music. It’s amusing (the music and how quaint the exercises are) and it feels like a sweet and wholesome way to get the day going. I do it by the window in my bedroom while I watch people walking to work. I wanted to ask whether maybe, just like we’re both playing Wortel now (the Afrikaans Wordle, for those who don’t yet know), you’d like to try it. I want to know if it affects your mood like it does mine. And don’t worry, you don’t get sweaty and out of breath. You just get smiley.
I’m so glad you enjoyed ‘Ted Lasso’ as much as I did. We’re not quite done with ‘Euphoria’. One does not simply trip through that one. Phew. I have thoughts (thoughts beyond ‘I’ve never seen so many penises in all my life’ and ‘I’m so glad I’m not young now’). I’ll try and line them up when we’re all the way through.
Rightio, songs for the month: ‘Liquorlip Loaded Gun’ by Sticky Fingers (Ollie played it to me when he came to fetch me for work away from the office one morning) and ‘Marigolds’ by Kishi Bashi. I thought about this when Sam and I took the marigolds out of the herb boxes to divide up and spread around. I remembered how, when I was little I passionately hated some plants. Marigolds were one of my absolute worst. I disliked their smell intensely. But so do insects. Which is why grown-ups have marigolds in their gardens.
Write soon. I loved your letter.
Love,
Kowsk.