7: no matter how good the soap smells ...

Solicited and unsolicited: advice in all forms – August 2022

Good morning,

I woke in the night remembering that today’s task was to write to you, and that made me feel happy, but as I turned around to see whether the full moon had arrived on this side of the flat yet, I remembered things about yesterday, and about the city, and then about the world, and I realised I would need to steel myself the way I did in the week before lockdown. That I need radical intervention.

This is a picture of the moon from our bedroom window. Sam gave me permission to use his drawings. Thank you, Sam.

You let in one bad thought in the midnight hours – did Salman Rushdie survive being stabbed yesterday? – and all of them come crashing in. ‘Salman Rushdie stabbed = hello a new wave of Islamophobia,’ was the first glum thought.

Then I wondered whether the parents and siblings of Aqeelah Schroeder were asleep in their beds or staring at a spot of light in their rooms. Aqeelah is a fifteen-year-old girl who was killed by a stray bullet in the gang wars in Delft, not half an hour from here, yesterday. Then I thought about Anne Heche dying and that she’d been kept on life support so that her organs could be harvested.

Does anyone I know, I thought, even know that I also want my organs harvested?! Do I have a living will? All the lawns in England look like veld! There’s no river in the rivers in Europe! There’s not enough electricity in our country!

It’s a slippery slope and it’s easy to just let yourself slide down it. I can’t resist the pull on my own so last time this happened, as we prepared to shelter in place in 2020, I bought myself Amor Towles’s book A Gentleman in Moscow. I thought that reading about someone who was under house arrest – or in this case hotel arrest – for several years, might be instructive. It was, but the comfort that book gave me was greater than just its circumstantial parallels with the whole world being ordered to stay inside. The main character has so much dignity and humour and shows so much forbearance and is always gracious.

The other book I read to keep me from freaking out was Pema Chödrön’s book Comfortable With Uncertainty.

Being as I am without a clear sense of culture, religion, tradition, language or sense of ancestry, I’ve always felt like I’ve made myself up along the way. There is great freedom in that, but it can also leave you floundering when you need something structural outside of yourself to hold on to when the winds blow hard. My default in these circumstances is almost always to reach for Jungian ideas to strengthen my psychic endoskeleton and for the philosophy of non-attachment to buttress the outer-facing part of myself.

Nothing, nothing, nothing I have inside of me helps to face the ugly world as well as non-attachment does, and Chödrön’s books are the most direct way for me to access the part of me that understands non-attachment on a cellular level. Consider this unsolicited advice for any time in the future when the world is too much with you: read a book, any book, by Pema Chödrön.

Earlier this week, I missed Facebook.

I have such a complex and unresolved relationship with Facebook. It’s like a love affair where both parties like one another, but can’t stand to be together, so the push and pull lasts over years and everyone, including the two parties, are bored witless with circularity of the relationship. Anyway, I missed Facebook and the fun interactions I used to have there with my friends. So I asked my Facebook circle to give me some unasked-for advice.

I got funny advice that I’m unlikely to ever need, some advice that was too vague to use and a few solid tips (don’t rinse with mouthwash after you’ve brushed your teeth, because you nullify the work of the toothpaste).

Offline, Annie sent me her ‘Advice for a drama-free life’. She says she wrote it in the middle of the night. I know she sometimes struggles to sleep, so I like to imagine that this is one of the ways she’s invented to self-soothe during the dark hours.

Advice for a drama-free life

Get married when you can pay for it yourself.
Ask for help, especially if you've been taught not to.
Trust your instincts.
Learn about money so that you can manage it, not the other way round.
Cherish your fur babies, they give far more than they take.
Always say yes if someone offers you tea.
If you have to choose, be more interested than interesting.
Be aware of the genetic imperative.
Don't be swayed by sparkly stuff.
Don't buy property on holiday.
Floss.
Let your hair be what it wants to be.
Sleep when you can.
Try a hammock.
Know what to do when there's blood, if you can.
Always save a bee.
Put your back to a wall on a zoom call.
Meet an elephant.
Tell your people you love them.
Know that there will be some drama anyway.
Make peace with your biorhythms.
Be nice to plants.
Don't break a heart on purpose.

Getting bossy guidance when I haven’t asked for it makes me quite cross (and sometimes even incandescent, as me and a certain other person recently discovered), so you may also want to take Fikile’s advice, which is to never take unasked for advice.

I really like the idea of asking for unsolicited advice though. Please feel free to hit me with any random tips you have the urge to share.

Asking advice from an expert when you’ve already framed the problem – now that is a whole new level of ‘whoa!’ I won an hour’s free business coaching with an amazing woman. I didn’t think an hour would do much more than give me a chance to hear myself frame my questions, yet I got several helpful ideas about specific things, and I had one major epiphany. I’m going to go back to Lauren until I have a few more of my tangles smoothed out.

A minor epiphany was realising that in order for me to do the things I need to do to clear the decks for a month or two so that I can write the-book-that-won’t-go-away-no-matter-how-much-I-ignore-it, and develop the course-that-no-one-else-has-written-yet, I need to make friends with the word ‘wealth’.

I really don’t like that word. It conjures all that icky stuff like mindless earth-choking consumerism, big cars, people who water their lawns, golf courses, and, obviously, gazillionaires who don’t pay taxes. Or even pay their employees a fair wage.

The morning after I spoke to Lauren, I scribbled a mind map of what ‘wealth’ would mean to me, rather than what it means out in the world.

I had to drop a book at Annie’s yesterday and she offered me tea (and, as per her advice, you never say no to a cup of tea), and we spoke about the meaning of wealth.

We came to two conclusions: 1. Wealth, for us, means buying time to do the things we really want to do (like write the book or, in Annie’s case, do a PhD) and 2. Imagine if we could generate more money than we needed so that we could support the causes we believed in. Annie would support lobbying for the Basic Income Grant. I would support my local social outreach and gardening project with my time, and some sort of books-for-children project with my money.

I have (not entirely incorrectly) demonised the word at my own expense for too long. This week I decided to make friends with ‘wealth’.

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I’ve had a very good reading run on all fronts and I can recommend the following books highly:

·  Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, both by Lily King

·  Winter, by Ali Smith

·  Was dann naher so schön fliegt, by Hilmar Klute

·  Speaking and Being, by Kübra Gümüsay

·  We need snowflakes, by Hannah Jewell.

Also read an article about the erasure of Islam from work of Rumi, whose quotes in English were inaccurately translated by a Westerner. Siv and I were discussing this is in context of Rumi’s best-known quote in English, which is so good but, as we now know, is inaccurate.

Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.

Siv and I were wondering how we could move through the world without this guiding light now that we know its background? I suggested we carry on using the quote but instead of attributing it to Rumi we could attribute it to ‘Not-Rumi’.

We were both amused by this solution.

The New Yorker’s short films that brightened a few of my rare non-working moments this month were one about a Jewish father considering circumcision of his first son and one about people waiting for a bus in a grimy bus station. There are pigeons in the last. I know how much you dislike pigeons. I’m not crazy about them myself, but after I edited a wonderful novella by Edna Gee, I have become so interested in people’s relationship to them and read a lot about them. I ordered one of Edna’s pigeon drawings. (When I get wealthy, I will frame and hang it.) Even wrote a poem about the pigeons that roost on our roof.

Another short film we watched was on Netflix and is called In Vitro. It’s worth it for several reasons, but it’s bleak. Also finally got to watch The Lost Daughter. So good. Hard though, my god. There are many ways in which being a woman is hard, but that struggle between your children and your desire for autonomy and freedom to do the work you love was very relatable. It was a hard watch. But so very, very good.

At the end of September, my pottery group, which delights in the WhatsApp group name of the Useful Assholes (a long and funny story that can never be retold) is taking part in an art market in Porterville. (Remember the amazing hike we had there one year?)

I’ve been tasked with doing the playlist for the weekend, and in trying to set it up, I ended up listening to some old stuff that I’d forgotten about including ‘The State of Independence’ a song by Jon and Vangelis from an album called The Friends of Mr Cairo. The song was made famous by Donna Summer later, but the original is the one I want you to listen to. Loudly. It’s the current song for hanging and taking down washing, a task very much at odds with the song’s lyrics. But, hey, I always remind myself:

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

Or hang washing.

Based on the happy rediscovery of ‘The State of Independence’, I’ve started another new playlist called ‘Necessary Dramas’ for big, belting, orchestral, theatrical rock or pop. When you’re back, we need to do a roadtrip with Ollie so we can listen to that one and sing loudly.

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We drove past a van the other day with the word ‘reticulation’ written on the side and I thought what a pity we don’t have more opportunities to use the word ‘reticulation’ in everyday conversations. It kind of bounces off the insides of your mouth to come out. I began collecting words I like because of how tinkly or clanky their consonants sound: tintinnabulate, skorkoro, skedonk and capitulate all work. ‘Jammerlappie’ bounces off your lips, so it doesn’t quite fit in, but the category can be capacious (another nice word to say), as long as the emphasis is on the consonants and not the vowels.

I went to the launch of Khadija Heeger’s new book of poetry and she reminded me of all the other wonderful ‘Afrikaans-not-Afrikaans’ words that come from Nama that are so satisfying to gargle in conversation. I wish you could have heard her preforming this stanza:

Aba te

Fetch me back Diana, like you did Sarah Baartman

from the country of my dispossession

show the unmarked grave of my tongue

there were buchu still grows in the Khoekhoegowab

your blood and my blood in Khoekhoekgowab

dagga, karee

gogga en kierie

geitjie en kwagga in Khoekhoegowab

praat vannie kamma unity in diversity wat nog in die bek van

divide en rule sit

en die eina denial in my onbestaan wat pla en raas.

This seems like a good place to end. So let me leave you with the one piece of unasked-for advice I received on Facebook that made me laugh out loud:

No matter how good the hand soap smells, never walk out of the restroom sniffing your fingers.

Write soon.

Love,

Kowsk