… is both a quotidien and a subtle experience. You don’t share with just anyone. You’re sipping from the same bombilla, after all. There’s a technique to it: filling the cup two-thirds full of the ‘tea’; jolting the woody bits to the top, trickling on the cold water, not too much and not too little; inserting the bombilla; having the hot water almost boiling but not quite and pouring it each time in the exact same spot; never moving the bombilla! — which is the metal straw with a wide, seive-like base. On a bad day the yerba tastes like straw chopped with a cigarette butt; other times it might be clover hay minced with a small joint, perhaps. More stimulant than sedative.
You drink it with family, with a partner, a friend, or an acquaintance who’s proving simpática.
It’s an eloquent moment when the little cup is slid to you across the table for the first time.
At Elena’s flat in Buenos Aires, we were taking an inordinately long time to clean our teeth, and we had three tubes of toothpaste — but all at the identical stage of oversqueeze. (Thanks for the charming photo, Elena.)
Is it worth cutting off the lids and scraping the aluminium lining? When is it time to buy a new tube? Should I stick with the tried and true or risk a new brand? Why not go without for a while (salt and water served the ancesters, and frayed sticks)? How about having them removed (the teeth)? Or making a whole new hybrid product: is the world ready yet for cybertoothpasta?
A few (more) of us lost jobs this week; yes, Longacre Press is moving north, to live on Random’s verandah. So, it’s Opportunity Time. I went off to ponder mine in Naseby, ‘2000 feet above worry level’. Polly was in dog heaven, sniffing and poking and rolling about wherever rabbits have been — which is everywhere. The air was clear and so was my head. I had an idea and it seemed like a good one.
Back home, it doesn’t look quite as simple but I’m toying with a sort of manuscript consultancy seguing into a kind of publishing mumble-mumble …
I’ve tried to translate what Elena wrote to me (with the photos — thanks, Elena) about this important day in Jujuy in the north of Argentina; this is the gist, anyway, of the bits I could manage:
… people don’t go to work because their dead are expecting them. As I live near a cemetery park, I find myself in the middle of the fiesta … The night before, in their houses, they set up a table with bread for an offering — bread that substitutes for whatever the dead loved in life; also they prepare their favourite food and drink. They leave the table set up when they go to sleep so that the souls can come at sit down at their leisure, eat and drink with gusto and without frightening anyone …
Although I live in the country, in a very peaceful place, today the house is surrounded by cars, people have been coming to the cemetery since morning … to share lunch with their loved ones … They put coloured paper flowers on the graves and have a kind of picnic, they drink chicha and dance until they ‘drop dead’.
In Argentina the dead are given the goods: their own miniature town with the best view in the neighbourhood, flowers galore, gossipy prayer sessions with the living, and food. On the annual ‘day of the dead’ families spread picnics on the graves including the dead one’s favourite dishes, tell stories, and celebrate their life and memory.
This year (in NZ) we lit candles one by one and wrote beside them the names of our remembered dead: grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends who died too young. I thought especially of Clare at sixteen — stroppy, funny and fiercely intelligent. She loved hockey, Latin and our pink VW, and appointed herself window cleaner when my flatmates and I moved house in her neighbourhood. The day before a bus knocked her from her bike, she bought flowers for her mother. After the funeral I was shown the tiny striped socks she’d just knitted for our new first baby. Clare was always as bracing as a tonic; just thinking of her straightens my spine…
‘Congratulations!!! Congratulations on the pregnancy. How many months are you?’
Gosh the dangers of mistranslation. I thought I was signing off my message to Silvia with a hug. Con un embrazo. But no, I should have said un abrazo. This is how rumours begin. However, I was flattered that she considered it a possibility for me, and a joy… (and delighted that her father’s op went well for the removal of ‘waterfalls’ from his eyes).
I am not with child but there’s certain pregnancy in the air, don’t you think? In spite of political blindness and folly, in spite of our collective dimness and selfishness, Spring is irrepressible …
‘What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being…’
… and each morning, each moment, we have the chance to choose again, to make our corner a little greener, to write the stories in us, to create, to say yes, to love … to be pregnant with our own life — with our life.
Could be Canterbury? We were heading a little left of here, towards the marvellous rock faces of Mt Fitzroy. Or is it Fitz Roy? On to the Perito Moreno Glacier. Mesmerising, except that staring eyes eventually were stabbed by needles of snow.
3000 miles to the north it’s warm in Jujuy. I swam amongst demented Alsations, and Jorge cooked our dinner on the asado. Estoy muy feliz.
Work and play run together. Here’s the lunch table. Just un poco vino at this time of day…
When is a dog not on the (forbidden) sofa? Meet Pocha.
We happened upon a tango class. Lovely Alejandra (L) gave us two lessons before she and Ariel returned to Buenos Aires. In the class we met lovely Lidia (R) who happens to be a masseuse … Today she fought with the writers’ knots in our backs — and won. Tomorrow we’re going to let her have our forty digits. My first-ever mani-pedi-cure. Don’t cry for me (in) Argentina…
Okay, so the risotto looks oddly like the jellyfish I saw washed up on one of those toxic Auckland beaches the day before I came here, but it tasted fantastic (except that the mushrooms had the texture of, well, jellyfish, probably).
Talking of mushrooms, an hour up the road is the fast-growing city of Mar del Plata, filled in summer with tens of thousands of portenos — Buenos Aireans on holiday. Down at the port, sea lions sport amongst the fishing boats. They make Otago’s ‘Mum’ look like a pixie.
The next largest mammal frequenting our neck of the woods … every house has one, many two. This wag was beside itself to be petted; most are functional. They guard the house.
I walked home from lunch, half an hour along the Atlantic. Note the nor’west arch, and those are mares’ tails on the left. I thought I saw a penguin in the surf, looking to come ashore, but the sandhills are so (newly) built up, there must be many, many birds that have lost their original habitat.
I’m thinking of painting the brickwork when I get home.
Wanting soap, I held my hands under the pink thing. Waved them about. Squeezed it. Nada. Then I realised it was the soap. You wet your hands and caress it…
Go out the door of our little house and look left due west up the sandy road. La pampa begins.
Drive for an hour and a half to Ayacucha. Have a cup of coffee and wonder where everybody is.
Talking about the colour, okay? Fooksia.
I was alarmed when Elena whooped and began to scrabble up these hongos from under the pine trees. You know, the sort that turn to slime, the ones you’d tell your children not to touch. Perfecto, she says. Tomorrow’s risotto. Watch this space.
That’s taken up the first week in Argentina. We’re doing some good work on our novel, have hired bikes which we park inside at night like two pampered ponies. I’m working my way through Spanish Pastries 1, and Calvin and Hobbes, the Spanish version, for the sake of mi languaje.
That’s how they laugh in Argentina. That’s the first line of any email from Elena on receipt of another three laboured lines from me in Spanish.
Elena and P, Bo Gardens, Chicago
My young tutor Pia from Chile has been excellent. She hasn’t laughed at the knots I’ve tied in her language. She makes me feel I’m communicating. I can probably poner los vegetales en la cosina (put the veges in the kitchen) when I visit Elena in two weeks, and possibly mention las pinguinas de ojos amarillas (yes, the yellow-eyed ones), but knowing what she says in reply is another matter all together. In real life people speak fast and run their words together — and I’ll have to resort to counting on fingers, smiling, pen and paper, and if all else fails, tears.
It’s only fair that I try, though, to speak in Spanish. Until now our friendship (we met in Iowa) has been conducted in English, which is hard work for E. We’ve written our novel each in our own language, and had it translated back and forth. Now we have to practise subtlety together, as we examine its themes and polish the translations. The more skilled I am with my little Spanish-English dictionary the better.
Hay peligro de aludes? (Is there a danger of avalanches?)
Tantalised by Claire’s delicious story about a Moroccan chef called Mohammed making a tagine, I realised I had my very own …
May 2005, I was at Can Serrat Artists’ and Writers’ Residency at the base of Montserrat near Barcelona. From my memoir Digging for Spain:
When the original twelve Norwegian art students bought the crumbling casa … they needed a bricklayer immediately, to start shoring it up. (Moroccan) Mohammed, their man for the job … finished at Can Serrat, and was heading off for a new job in Tangiers. Someone at the residency cemented a lock of his hair into a brick wall to ensure his return. The hair did its work, the new job fell through, and Mohammed has been drawn back again and again
As a young boy he took the family’s produce to market in the donkey cart. Noted for his intelligence and aptitude, he was trained from youth as a muezzin. A couple of times we cajole him into singing the call to prayer. The resonant wailing, the glottal stops where silence pours in, and the sense of ancient authority reverberating from such a slight body, make the hair stir on our scalps.
… Mohammed now lives in the local village, fixing from scratch an old shop into a cafe restaurant where he’ll serve the wholesome vegetarian food for which he’s famed.
He turns up most days at Can Serrat, often with a basket of his handmade organic bread, dense, moist bricks with a hint of aniseed flavour that he sells for two euros apiece. He sits and talks with anyone who’s around, and makes himself available as taxi driver for which he won’t often accept payment.
… one afternoon, he flits home and brings back a chicken that he cooks up in an earthenware dish on the gas ring with garlic, chickpeas, raisins and cinnamon. This late lunch on a sun-drenched balcony is preceded by chilled melon, and served with unshucked basmati rice and strips of roasted peppers and aubergine. Mellowed by sun, wine and his own superb food, Mohammed tells how much he enjoys his weekly stints with the mentally handicapped at a psychiatric hospital in the city. We take another serving of chicken. This guy is unbelievable.
Okay. Quick change of topic. Are you stressed? No? Are you sure? Try this simple test.
This can happen: you find yourself up on a stool tonging moss from crevices in the aluminium windows, and I’m talking inside the house.
It’s in the order of nose-picking: wrong and thrilling at the same time.
Fired by that novel experience, I got out the sewing machine to hem the new bed cover. The man of the house strolled by on his way to the kettle. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just out of curiosity, would it ever occur to you to replace shabby curtains or … hem a bedspread?’
Blink, blink. ‘No.’
‘What if you lived on your own?’
‘Well, sooner or later I suppose I’d have to compromise.’ (His peccable aesthetic, I presume.)
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d get new curtains.’
‘How would you, exactly?’
‘Um. I’d measure up the gap and go to the drapery. Do they have those? Or Spotlight. And I’d tell the women the measurements.’
‘Yes?‘
‘And I’d bring the material home … and weep over it.’
Bududuudududududud (sewing machine ) ‘Oh.’
‘No, actually, I’d probably end up nailing it to the ceiling.’
Northeasterly rain: the wet, persistent, three-day kind. I’ve strung the washing up under the house, wiped the windows off for the second time, split some firewood, and huddled up to the wood burner; even the fire slouches along in this weather.
I wouldn’t mind something to snack on — something reminiscent of warmer days — so I’ve checked through the i-photo cake tins and come up with … Oriental lily anthers, dredged in pollen, to be chomped down with a glass of fresh rain water.
And then this morning I read that military spending worldwide has increased 45% in the last decade. A tidy sum at 1,226 billion dollars. (Curiously enough, now I look for the BBC page, it’s been removed from the headlines, as if it’s just too embarrassing to leave lying about.) What kind of malevolent energy does that represent, and whose? Theirs? Ours?
Is there enough benevolence, enough light, enough dancing in the snow, enough sweetness in the earth and stars, enough compassionate wisdom and will to live (and let live) to make this sum and what it has paid for look like the pile of wet ashes it will one day be?
Spending on arms has diminished since the recession began. We can hope that the pinch makes room for new ways of seeing, and of being.
This is Polly, got up in the top half of my gi. I wrote something for the recent pecha kucha evening (12 speakers, each with 20 images addressed for 20 seconds each) about the interface of writing and karate. I said that each might be seen as a way of containing and giving shape to the energy of Mars, in which we all partake, although its expression in each is unique.
It is the need to act on the world, to validate and make manifest who we are. Thwarted, this urge will find its release by fearful, angry, or devious means, sometimes in outright aggression. One of life’s tasks is to become skilful in the expression of our own Martian (or masculine) energy. Until then, we are likely to blame others for our own unwieldy impulses, to practise passive aggression, to be haphazard in our efforts, and fall short of our own hopes.
Gosh, is this turning into a sermon, or what? Almost done. I find karate a good way to observe, contain, generate and give shape — physically and mentally — to the Mars energy. Writing does much the same but on subtler levels. Both are means of acting with increasing accuracy, first on oneself, then upon the world.
Polly hasn’t got a clue what I’m talking about. Good dog.
I know I’ve used this image already but there’s more to be said about the feet, of which two are engaged to be married, two are homeless overseas, and two belong to the parents of the other four. One of the parents was discussing with another parent recently the states of daughterhood and motherhood — what a tricky little dance they represent at times as we try to gauge how much of our lives we owe yet to our offspring, how much to our parents, and what to ourselves as we follow our own stars. Never mind what we feel apart from the debts and oughts. Some people don’t actually like the people they’re related to (I’m lucky enough to know I’d probably choose mine all over again, she hastened to add), and some are pathologically attached. But we’re all tempted at times to rush in where patient stand-offishness would serve the situation better; or to put our heads in the sand when compassionate intervention is called for.
Anyway, the homeless one revealed her status on Facebook (in which place parents cut another delicate caper), ‘But, Mum, I’ve got a safe place to sleep,’ she wrote. ‘What, chained to a park bench?’ I jotted back.
But no, she’s safely, illegally, ensconced in the attic over a fudge kitchen. Just for a few days.
October 2007. Returning from a rainy bush walk on the Mississippi, I cheered myself up, and tested my knees, hips and footing, doing what we used to call a Dutch leap. One of the Middle Eastern contingent exclaimed (I paraphrase), ‘Omg, you can use your body. You bike and swim, and walk for miles.’ (Next day I climbed a tree, too, just for him.) His point was that the writers in his acquaintance smoked and talked and sat in cafes, oh, and wrote. But they didn’t DO things.
Well, he had his own quirks, I’m sure. But I was thinking today about the things we do, and the little ways we have, that make us distinct. And how as we get older, these distinctions grow distincter, until we’re finally ossified in our eccentricities. Does it have to happen like that? How do we forge on, doing what we feel compelled to do in this life, AND remain supple, malleable and permeable, and if not ‘normal’ which doesn’t exist, then at least richly human and approachable?
Three occur to me, from this week: the new washing machine with our taps and plug (R.I.P. the trusty friend that washed perhaps 5,000 loads in her 19 years); myself with a ball of wool and the 6.5s (Knitting for Africa); and the one that’s fully engaging heart and mind … momentously, wonderfully, marking a new era in parenthood, daughterhood, and inlawfulness:
I sat out on the door-sill of the old shed, under the grapevine, to read through the newly arrived book contract, feeling the thrills of hope and desire (that word again) that accompany a new venture.
Ker-thug. A brown leaf, large as a hand, and as gnarled, dropped onto the open pages. And a second. I looked up and saw the remnant grapes, bird-pecked, and shrivelled into currants. The cat threw herself down a few feet away. They all remind me not to cling; that beauty and glory are momentary. They say, Don’t want too much. Have (lightly hold, enjoy, marvel at) what you have already. Be here now.
And look what the honey-man just brought in, here and now, to our kitchen table. Pure gold. A window for a gingerbread cathedral.
In the interests of beautiful feet (the material version thereof), I was shopping for a new piece of sandpaper.
Banish ‘callous’ heels said the tiny print on the box, and believe me, by the end of summer, mine are ruthless and I want them gone. I was in the 1, 2, 3-dollar shop, shushing my qualms, for the sake of unsnagged sheets and stockings. The device was a ‘nutmeg’ grater inside an egg with one flattened face to which could be attached a disc of emery paper for the finishing buff. The box further read, ‘U.S. and Worldwide Patents Pending’ and ‘Made in China’, which sounds slippery any way you hear it.
Egged on by a yip of anticipation at — no, from — my heels, I didn’t stop long to think about who wasn’t making enough money from the manufacture of this nifty gadget. I paid my $2, took the egg, and left. My feet are a work in progress.
This morning’s front page is crowned with the laughing face of the chief instigator of Dunedin’s Coming-Like-It-Or-Not Stadium(2010)/ Aquarium(2030)/ Sunken Treasure(2050). The disapproval of a majority of citizens has been formally quashed. (But really, could a plume of smoke and pair of little horns make his appearance any more Machiavellian?)
Like me with my heel-egg, he wants what he wants and nothing short of a bolt from Zeus was ever going to stop him. The Stop the Stadium movement built up its own impressive head of steam, but since the boys in power have refused to even glance its way, alternative means of disapproval are called for.
I can’t help wondering, though: where does power come from and where reside? How does it accumulate, and to what does it ultimately adhere? Even the name, Stop the Stadium, directs a certain potency towards the unwanted project. People think about it, imagine it; sparks fly about it — and these non-material energies ought not to be underestimated. What if we all found creative ways to ignore it? Yawned about it and went for walks instead over Dunedin’s lovely hills; threw more compost on our vege gardens; found ways to honour the patch of ground and river and harbour over which the conceived monstrosity looms?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but they persist, and I know that the force of desire, and the force of opposition have to meet somewhere, eventually (and there’s an awful lot of glass at stake in this particular configuration) …
Before one daughter photographed the other photographing this obliging Pisan dog now introduced to you, they had spent the entire night walking round and round Siena, there being no room for them in the inns. NZ girls WOOFing in Italy. At any moment, however, they were only a text message away from home. I think this is leading to a discussion about ‘small world’.
This morning I sat and looked at a lighted candle for a little while, and tried to think about breathing without thinking about it. I find this very hard (hints and companions are welcome). And yet I didn’t feel alone. People all over the world do something similar — tens, maybe hundreds of thousands at any given time.
I opened emails from friends: E in Argentina planning for my visit there in September so we can finish co-writing a bilingual novel; D in Utah delights in my delight in her manuscript; Burmese K, newly emigrated to the US, has a translation for me to edit. We’ll meet in September, too. I’ve heard from India, Edinburgh and Iowa this week. Overnight ‘Meeneusia’ has commented on my blog, whose own blog language I can’t even discern, but our lives and thoughts have now touched.
What once seemed extraordinary is now the ordinary, fabulous, webby fabric of our lives.
Just as rich as going away later in the year will be staying home tonight with friends, face to face, sharing food by the fire.
Face to face or via the ethers, whatever we do, we do with others — even breathing quietly in a room alone.
