Singing in the dark.

I've been reading - with delight and a sore heart, Marguerite Poland's Taken Captive by Birds. The people in Exclusive Books who have packed it next to the coffee table books about lions and cheetahs haven't the foggiest idea.

This writing strikes my heart like a gong. Is it an African affliction? I find it in the writing of my friend Marie, in faraway New York. In the books of my friend Diane, just down the road.

(Don't let's go to the dogs tonight.)

Singular miseries. Nobody knows the trouble I have seen...

But we recognise each other and there is comfort in that.

Over oceans and through windows.

Woman, I love you. This wry laughter we share.

I can't say it better than Wednesday Addams: "I'll stop wearing black when they invent a darker colour."

Boxes. Balls of wire.

I enjoyed reading Mark Gungor's take on the difference between the brain of a man and a woman. He says a man's brain consists of many small boxes. The boxes get taken out and opened one by one.
The boxes do not touch.

A woman's brain consists of a big ball of wire and everything is connected. It made for a rueful laugh, as it rings so very true. The tall man says he suspects there are smaller balls of wire leading off from my big one.
And I am convinced that he has at least one large box full of wire...

There was a concert this week. Heartstrings... wires, electricity, emotion. Call it what you will. Mine were sparking. Willy Mason: boy from the north-east. Such charm and wit, such talent. Smooth talker, voice like molasses. One understands what makes girls throw their underwear at musicians and wonders why no-one did,

last wednesday night.

By the time Cat Power cantered onto the stage, I was a quivering crow's nest of live wire. Useless at photography: two black frames, three blurred. Found wanting. Chewed up, swallowed whole.

Over the moon.

She reminded me that famous people are normal people too. And then. That voice.

Today finds me cooking hero food - food that will find it's way to a film set. Cooking this kind of very specific food is a dubious honour - perhaps our Nooi van Benoni doesn't actually like bobotie. Most definitely, if they do many takes, there will be a bucket for her to discreetly spit unchewed mouthfuls into. Maybe Mr Penn decides bobotie is just too weird and calls for fried chicken instead.

There's buttered yellow rice too. With raisins and honey.

But by the time they serve it, we'll be far away.

The world wanes and so it grows.

Frederick Buechner writes:

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

Don't be afraid.

At night, I lie awake. Surely: somewhere in this world, in some forgotten language, there must be a word that means both beautiful and terrible, side by side. I cannot reach for a pencil or the light, for we are big spoon and little spoon - too tender to disrupt.

I know that outside, life is burgeoning: nectar drenched and pollen dusted.

Some weeks ago, alone here in this house, I read a book so terrible and beautiful that sometimes I had to get up and pace in between paragraphs.

There is no neatness in any life - great or small. It is only an illusion men foolishly pursue. The face at the door is just that - the face at the door. All lived lives are a mess. The neatness in my life had begun to crumble some time before, but now it disintegrated completely as I vanished into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries. For the first time I began to understand how shallow neatness is.

How cramping, how limiting.

For the first time I understood neat lives are comatose lives.

Soon the greatest neatness of my life began to diffuse.

Even now, so many years later, I find it difficult to fully understand how it happened so quickly, but each word written in those notebooks became like a stitch pulled out from our relationship. I read and read and read - every spare moment of my day and night - and the stitches snapped loose one by one.

I fell into those books like a frog into a well.

- Tarun J. Tejpal. The Alchemy of Desire. 

Beautiful and terrible.

A man sits at a table in Gugulethu and with a knife and a fork eats the heart of his girlfriend's lover. A woman's eyes are gouged out for the sake of a cellphone. Someone who has less than me offers me something: here, you have this. Torn apart and stitched back together again. Love has tides that ebb and flow.

Heart strings, part two.

Readers! A big thank you for all of your positive comments, your letters and the likes on my page in the past few weeks. For someone who wants to make writing a much more important pursuit, it has been a balm for my heart.

These are the days I dream about when I'm working. Lazy mornings - coffee in bed - a second cup even. The sweetling child is visiting and that makes everything feel like a holiday.

On a slow stroll through town, we came across an extraordinary small man speaking in tongues. He spoke duck and cat and dog and chicken and sheep. He finished off in mourning dove. I should have taken his number as there are things I would like to ask him.

The winsome Marie invited me over to forage at her parents house in the green belt. Gum-booted and rain-coated, we made our way over to where the chickweed grows, only to have the heavens open wide. Then again, who needs chickweed when you can lie around the fireplace drinking Moët and eating smoked salmon? I practised a bit of corgi mesmerizing and then they did some spellbinding of their own.

The next day I tried a different method on a cat named Lucy. It also seemed to work. But there was brushing involved, so maybe it was that...

It's been a busy weekend and my heartstrings are still quivering after all the music...

At the door the security guard asked, pointing to the youngest - and he's eighteen right? I answered Of course! And that was that. He must have been the only twelve year old there and what fun we had. On friday night, at my left shoulder, I spotted Clare Danes - in town shooting Homelands. She was wearing a small trench coat with bright red lips. And a very big scowl.

In the bathroom I ran into Miss Hannah Parmandaram - we reminisced about the good old days of High Five. She was DJ-ing on the electronica stage, which we missed entirely.

There was so much to see and it was all astounding. We bumped into old friends and made a few new ones. Madala Kunene had good advice for the young one - he said: Boy, take two hours with the guitar every day - keep in touch with it. Then he said: And stay away from effects. Effects is the robber - play straight.

I often think of South Africa as a bipolar place. The highs and lows are equally intense. The feeling of bonhomie at these gigs is so high and so good. You can catch anyone's eye and you're guaranteed a smile. We all stood swaying, in the air the warm smells of patchouli, clean sweat - river water and sunlight. Standing next to me, watching Tata Madala play, was a diminutive Grace Jones and her girlfriend, an equally tiny pale girl with long lashes. Every now and then they would give each other a kiss of such exquisite tenderness that my heart strings got into a right tangle. Around us women ululated.

Then there was Sannie Fox, black Fender Strat slung over her shoulder. Better than Polly Jean. Better than Peaches. Badass personified, but she brought her mother up on stage to sing with her and waved to her grandmother. And before her, this lovely man of humour and virtuosity - Guy Buttery.

But. My favourite of all was Bongeziwe Mabandla. Only twenty six, I predict he is on a path of greatness. Music, sweet music.

Autumn.

Within days, the weather has turned.

Every morning I see with relief that the flamingos are still here. Their feathers have faded to a pale, pale pink. Yesterday, I saw two herons in the morning mist... CAN playing on the radio: She brings the Rain.

 

Two weeks ago, my mother fell off a step ladder and broke her wrist. In her efforts to save me from worrying, I only heard about it while she was waiting to go into surgery. Sleepless nights.
 

I went to fetch her from the clinic and we stopped by her place of work - a frail care facility. I met a man in his nineties who has emphysema. He is bedridden, but so gracious, with a twinkle in his eye. A lady in her nineties - sprightly, reading in the sun. Then, as we sat down for a cup of tea, a bearded man came racing down the hill in an electric wheelchair. Raised eyebrows from me to my mother: "Oh, he's Italian."

On my mother's dressing table there is a line of photographs. I see my father in dreams, but it has been a long time since I saw his smile, like that, straight at the lens. Flanking him, my sister on her wedding day and a much younger me, holding a favourite cat, it's limbs akimbo.

One afternoon, as I was driving back from set at high speed, I had to brake unexpectedly and felt myself losing control of the pick-up. No life events flashed before my eyes, just my voice in my head, saying not yet, not yet. And then the voice of my father saying don't break hard, stab and stab.

With a sense of great longing, I drove over the Salt River and past the bus stop with the handmade sign: Madiba is God.

The days fly by: on set we are surrounded by horses, Comanche braves and 1840's settlers with cellphones, skydivers with flapping parachutes. At night it all jumbles up in my dreams. Easter with egg-hunting and the fragrance of lamb and herbs, and damson plums with insides like beets or kidneys or hearts.

Mose Allison, he plays it like it is.

I love the "notes" on the sleeves of old records.

According to Mose, "Transfiguration of Hiram Brown Suite" is a serio-comic fantasy based on a perennial theme. Hiram Brown is the naive provincial who dreams of a life of opulence in the city. He goes there, is overwhelmed and disillusioned, longs for his youth, realizes that this too is an illusion, despairs, goes through a crisis and is "transfigured". This is Mose's own interpretation. He hopes that this Suite can be enjoyed from a variety of viewpoints and, most of all, that it swings. - Teo Macero

It had been a long time since they had sat at the same table. He said he felt out of sorts - a little queasy with apprehension. She drank coffee, he drank tea. An Afrikaans expression crossed her mind: koeitjies en kalfies. For a while they spoke of small cows and calves. That is to say of things that didn't bear weight or importance. Music. People. Four tears were almost shed - one from each eye, but only because she spoke with longing about his children.

They shared a messy sandwich.

He gave her the record and they said goodbye on the street.

After that he sent her a message:
I thought I had lost you.

She didn't write back, but if she had, it would have been to say: It's a combination. You have, and you haven't. This, now, is something else.
 
She remembered reading years ago about a choreographer, she couldn't recall his name. He spoke about the people he had met in his life - a succession of friends and lovers. He ended by saying: That's life, that's love, that's the world. It had angered her. But that was when she'd believed in the myth of one true love.
 

There was a time when even her skin hurt from missing him. Around her were holes in the shape of him. But as she looked at him across that table, unblinkered, she saw not the centre of a universe, but a man.
A man of flesh and blood and bone.

What it feels like to fall.

It's a bipolar world that I find myself in - this film industry. There are moments of elation and unequaled camaraderie and there are times of sheer angst and loneliness. Calms and sudden storms.

Last winter was lean. My heart hurt.

My friends are points of light. They cooked me meals and poured me drinks. We huddled around fires, there were companionable silences, there were hugs. Things got better by small increments and then suddenly in leaps. Now it's a year later and things are good. There's writing and the freedom it brings. Time for long lunches and music and books.

There are nights when I lie awake for hours, not from horrors that gnaw, but a buzzing excitement at being alive. The smell of the rain and the earth as I walk out the door. The crackle of vinyl. My heart in your hand and you play it to the beat.

Valentines.

As much as I sometimes wish for the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind - to wipe away a five year big dipper ride... along with the bad there were seeds of something beautiful. Sometimes that's what keeps one championing the struggle. I still believe in love. I saw it in it's purest form between my mother and my father. 

So, dear readers, happy Valentine's day and here's to brilliant sparkly love and dancing to songs on the radio with someone who loves every atom of you.

From the online LIFE picture archives.

Days of splendid indolence.

The place that we went to was a wild place, far away. On the first night there, we danced barefoot on the lawn in the balmy air and then we lay down on the soft green grass, under the milky way. He told me about the stars and how I made him feel when we were together. We kissed slowly and deeply in the glittering darkness. (Imagine desire, like steam, spiraling on the skin.) On a solitary walk early one morning, two brown buck rushed across my path. I felt my heart beating in my mouth as they galloped away through the low bushes, glistening, dust clouds slowly settling. Blue headed salamanders sunbathed on the high rocks and birds swooped in mid-flight to gulp drops of water falling over the edge of the ravine. I could see their tiny throats undulating from below. I floated on my back in the cool dark water, watching little sun flecks, small round rainbows drifting in the air above me. There was a low rushing sound in my ears and I felt utter, unalloyed calm.

Whenever I wandered away on my own, he found me and he touched me in some warm way, bringing me back to the undiluted moment. I would miss this in the solitary days that were to follow. At dawn one morning we found ourselves in the middle of a field of brushwood, near slowly running water. It was impossible to keep my eyes open - I'd open them briefly and see him flaring above me, surrounded by a disc of pulsing, blinding light, fiery particles hovering in the sky around us. There was a moonstone yellow glow on the horizon and the air was filled with the fragrance of the small leaved bushes that we were crushing with our movement, and the coppery smell of the water.

The time that we spent away had a strong dreamlike feel to it, of which there were few spells of pure lucidity. On the night before we left, I looked around the room and I felt the air shift. Seed pods rattled against the roof. We stayed awake that night, the murmuring of our voices continuing for hours. He told me the next day that it had felt like love in chapters. He said that one of the best things about going away with me had been holding my hand in the car on the way back.
 

Monday #52.

Two thousand and ten. What a bear market it has been. But through it all there is contact.
Letters and messages and songs.
Spiky blossoms blooming in my heart.
Thank you.

Fortune Telling Cards of the Celebrated 19th Century Card Diviner, Mlle. Lenormand, of Paris.

Good luck and love and long lives to you all. 

Almost time to hit the road and when I return it will be 2011.

Bring. It. On.