Hello,
At Michael’s 70th birthday party on Saturday someone asked, after the hip-hip-hoorays, whether Mike had any wisdoms to share, seeing as he was the oldest person in the room. At first he said ‘no’, then he said, ‘Wait, no, I do! Enjoy it! Enjoy every part of it. Enjoy the sex, enjoy the food, enjoy one another, enjoy the music. All of it. Because it’s not very long’.
He put his two hands in front of his chest, one further ahead of the other, forefinger and thumb together on both hands to show points along a line, and then he moved the hand closest to him towards the hand furthest and said, ‘Because the fuse is getting shorter every day.’
This echoed something Sarah Bullen said. As you know, her husband died of a brain tumour while she was in a coma (if this was fiction, we’d have thought it a bit of stretch) when their children were small. At the launch of her book Love and Above she told the story that while she was in the coma, she felt (rather than heard) a voice talk to her – she’s very funny, as I think you know – and instead of saying something deep and meaningful, the voice kind of bent over her and said: ‘Have more fun.’
I might not be relaying this precisely (the launch was a while ago), but the way she told the story made us laugh. There you are, off with the fairies on a hospital bed, while your husband is being enfolded in his end, and your children are being cared for by stricken grandparents, and the big message is ‘have more fun’.
In recent months, people have said these things to me: ‘I don’t know where you get the time to read so much’. ‘I don’t know where you get the time to watch things on Netflix’. ‘I don’t know where you get the time to do things like that (when I sent someone a picture of an old blanket I mended).’ ‘I don’t know where you get time to do pottery.’
I don’t know either. Especially since (sorry about the boring repetition), I have been balls-to-the-wall with work since December and have been working weekends and evenings. But most especially since, now that I no longer have to wake up at 6.30 to get you to school, I have been sleeping for ten hours a night.
Ten hours, Child!
My whole life I’ve been an eight-hours on.the.dot person. This morning I slept right through the whistling and calling of the dustbin men, the roar and wheeze of the crusher on the back of the truck, and the clunk and rumble of the wheelie bins being emptied. I don’t hear my alarm, which still goes off every morning at 6.30, and I have no recollection of switching it off.
I don’t know what the meaning is of all this sleeping. I am glad though that I don’t have to work against my heavy sleeping with efforts to get up earlier. I don’t think a day goes by that I’m not glad I don’t work for someone else in an office with rigid hours.
Have you ever read anything about Wu-Wei? It’s the philosophy that the world governs itself and doesn’t need our intervention. It is described as ‘the ancient art of letting things happen’. It’s paradoxical: non-action as action. It means aligning yourself with nature and not forcing anything. If you force the flow of nature, it always leads to unseen troubles, is how the Lao Tsu more or less put it. I don’t want unseen troubles, so I’m just going to let my body sleep as it demands to right now.
I’ve also been thinking about how to do-without-doing in other aspects of my life. It seems like an impossibility. It’s like meditating: you don’t ‘achieve’ it. You don’t do it by trying. Or, a more pressing on-going issue for me as I try to overcome a life of obsessive thinking about food and weight, learning to think about food only when I am hungry requires me to stop trying to stop thinking about food. Do you know what I mean? It seems like to achieve a letting go that will liberate you requires non-effort rather than effort.
It’s counter-intuitive.
Rose sent me a link to a book she recommends called The Anatomy of Anxiety, by Ellen Vora. She also sent me a photograph of the quote that starts one of the chapters:
Where we think we need more self-discipline, we usually need more self-love. (Tara Mohr)
It feels like it is connected, by gossamer threads, to the ‘art’ of Wu-Wei. I just can’t quite work out how yet. Sam and I are going to listen to the audio book on our way to his parents for the weekend.
To answer the questions about how I get time to read, watch things and do things, I feel a need to clarify: I don’t know how I read so much. Some people think I speed read. I don’t think I read faster than most people, but I don’t know how to measure that. I know for sure that I read much slower than Sam, because when he starts a book, he pretty much does nothing else until he’s finished with it.
I do know that I spend most of every day reading. I read for work. I read while I have breakfast and lunch on my own. I read if I have an hour free in the afternoon and I don’t have any manuscript to read (otherwise I read those). I read a book whenever I have to wait or queue. In recent years, I read less news, which has freed up some time. I also read short things, like novellas, short stories and poetry.
I know I used to read more than other people because I never used to watch TV. My explanation for that was that TV arrived in South Africa after my reading habit had been firmly entrenched.
I was a child of the movies though. Enormous screen and popcorn combined with total dark and full immersion into other worlds.
When lockdown happened, that’s when I really got into streaming stuff. I won’t watch anything and we don’t watch every evening. Every choice is carefully considered because we both would rather be reading a book (me) or researching obscure things on Wikipedia (him).
We watched the Coen brother’s The Tragedy of Macbeth with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in February (forgot to tell you). It’s shot in black and white and on a set, which gives it the feel of being on a stage, but with the advantage of camera angles. The witches are played by just one actor, Kathryn Hunter, who is also a contortionist. It’s a good production, but it is most memorable for the witches. Creepy and uncanny. The witches in Macbeth have never really made an impression on me until this movie.
We also watched The Father, which won Anthony Hopkins the oldest-ever best actor award at the Oscars last year. I saw this as a stage production at the Fugard Theatre (RIP, poor old, beautiful Fugard theatre) a few years ago. It was brilliant (both the production and the movie) – an absolute triumph of theatre writing. The writing forces the audience to live inside an old man’s confusion as his once-bright mind disintegrates.
I saw the play before Oupa became ill. Seeing the movie now was different. I often recognised in Hopkins’ demeanour, bravado and irritation so much of how Oupa was in the years even before the attack that lead to his total undoing. I felt so deeply sad for him again. For his inability to communicate his confusion, for his desperate clinging to some semblance of the dignity that a well-functioning mind naturally enables.
I started watching the Andy Warhol doccie, but stopped because Sam wasn’t here and I wanted to watch with him, so he’s currently catching up the two first episodes. This quote I wrote down (from Warhol himself) felt poignant, because I remember the same longing to be anywhere but in the dull place where I grew up:
…you can only live in one place at a time and your own life, while it’s happening to you, never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.
Last night, Sam and I watched Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love. Nothing about it surprised us, but we’ve both read Sylvie Simmons biography of Leonard Cohen (called I’m Your Man), we know a lot of his writing and poetry, and of course we know his music very well. We enjoyed the documentary and thought that the film did justice to Marianne and to the relationship. The documentary was hotly debated on some of my Facebook friends’ timelines. People are so fighty on social media, it would be amusing if it wasn’t so disturbing.
That’s not so many hours of TV. They certainly don’t feel like wasted hours. When I have a craving for something visual, but not a lot of time, I watch a short film. I really adore short films. They’re a lot like poems, I suppose.
This weekend I watched Federico Spiazzi’s very short film called ‘Refuge’ (it’s about ten minutes long). It’s my kind of storytelling: a small moment in a day, finely observed so that the irony, poignancy and humour emerge from the environment and characters, without having them artificially imposed on the storytelling.
Sam and I also watched The Windshield Wiper whence cometh my song for the month, plus whence cometh my list of all-time favourite animated movies (The Windshield Wiper was not one of them, though I did enjoy the mixed style of this one).
Song: We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow (cross ref Mike’s words of wisdom on his 70th birthday) by Soko.
List of my best animated movies ever:
Walz with Bashir by Ari Folman. Scenes from this movie are as vivid to me as the first time I saw it in 2011.
Josep, directed by Aurel, script by Jean-Louis Milesi.
Short and sweet. I could go into all the other ones that are better known, but it just so happens, these are my faves. I saw Walz with Bashir at more or less the same time as I saw Dave Eggers’ Where the Wild Things Are, which I adored. When I think of the one, I think of the other. It was a very particular time in my life. I feel like I remember things that touched me then in a very acute way.
Oh, we watched another animated movie this month: Apollo 10½. I enjoyed it. Sam said he got a bit bored at times. What I thought about a lot was how life in the States in the Sixties for white people so much resembled life for white people in South Africa in the Seventies and Eighties: all the big new homes and lawns and public facilities and big enterprises. All the invisible black hands making life cosy for white people who could get on with living their best lives. The movie really conjured something for me of the innocence of being a child beneficiary of racist systems. The movie is about a boy growing up during the space-race obsession of the Sixties. I also thought a lot about the human compulsion to claim and own. To colonise. That said, none of these things are what the movie focuses on. It’s there in the subtext, but it can also be read purely as an adventure or a memory of childhood.
I won’t tell you what I read (check Instagram if you’re gagging to know), but I do want to tell you a little story.
On my very first day as a reporter for The Argus newspaper in Cape Town, I wore trousers and a top I had made and I remember my outfit exactly. I was lead to a battered old steel desk right at the very back of the newsroom, just before the passage that lead to the women’s toilets. There I sat, trying not to look new and petrified, when the cream-coloured telephone on my desk started to ring. There was nothing else on my desk. Computers – these huge, clunky things with a black screen and a flashing green cursor – were clumped around four sides of enormous pillars in the news room and when you wanted to write a story, you had to find an open one.
I looked at the ringing phone and then looked up. Everyone was getting on with their business. Slightly to my left, at a large desk tucked into a corner, a short man was just getting up and stretching his shoulders. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, popped a stick into the corner of his mouth and lit it. As he inhaled he looked up and he caught my startled eye. ‘Am I supposed to answer this?’ I asked him. ‘Always answer a ringing phone. You never know what kind of a good story you’ll find on the other end of it.’
I can’t remember what happened with the phone call. But I remembered that man when, in the book I was editing, the writers spoke about work mentors who shape you, but whose value you only understand much later in life.
Owen Coetzer was the first such mentor. He was the least flamboyant of the sub-editors. He spoke quietly, smoked like a chimney (yup, right there, in the office), and always answered my questions in a way that didn’t make me feel stupid. He never pontificated, gave more information than I’d asked for or made me feel incompetent. He was always friendly, but not overbearing or lecherous (I experienced so many men as salivating hyenas in my early twenties), and he didn’t show off his incredible knowledge or vast experience.
I lost contact with him after I left to travel and he had retired by the time I returned to Newspaper House. I knew nothing about him except what I’ve told you here. I had this great urge to acknowledge Owen Coetzer, now that it has finally dawned on me how much he shaped my attitude towards work as a journalist, so I wanted to tell you this story.
Always proceed with kindness and respect. Understand boundaries.
He didn’t tell me this. He showed it to me.
I have not responded to all the many letters I received after my last Love Letter. I’ve been a terrible friend to my friends. Ti-hi-hime has not been on my side, even though it’s been on my mind. Be patient with me. The very very terribly awfully ridiculously busy time has come to an end (I think. I hope.)
I will try to be better.
Five pages is a lot. Let’s leave it here for now. Write soon.
Love,
Kowski.
PS: Malika wrote me again after the last letter and told me that in her daily diary, half a page is dedicated to things she has to do, ‘usually in service of others or banal logistical reminders’. On the other half of the page, there is a to-do list for her. This struck me as an exceedingly wise plan. When you don’t have time to do the reading, drawing, tinkering, meditating, exercising, podcast-listening or whatevering you want to do, then it should go on your to-do list.
If how you spend your days is how you spend your life, then I suppose you should do a bit of what makes you happy every single day, the same way you tackle all the chores and errands you don’t enjoy. I do understand that not everyone feels they have this option. But if I also reckon that if you don’t shoe-horn in time for your true loves, you’re going to have gotten to the end of your fuse having spent your life doing only the things you felt you had to do and not enough of the things that, as Malika says, are ‘joy-filled’.