No 102 - A Lockdown Story

"Solitude: Karoo after rain" (c) Dan Wylie. Acrylic/oil on canvas.

A LOCKDOWN STORY

“Are you moving in?” He gestured at the suitcase.

            She didn’t seem to know what to say or do, other than look imploring. She was soaked through, her quasi-Victorian, or pseudo-Mayflower white shirt plastered over nipples visibly rigid with cold, her long hair slicked into rat-tails.

            He wasn’t quite sure what to say, either, so surprised he was to see her there, and he was thinking uncharitably about whether she might after all be an unwitting coronavirus carrier, when she said miserably, “I just didn’t know where else to go.”

            He looked around into the scything rain. “You’re alone? Where is that delightful husband of yours?”

            “I left him. I – ran away.”

            He stared, disbelieving. Her body gave a long involuntary shiver and he suddenly made up his mind. “Come in. Go through to the bathroom.” He fetched a towel. “Do you have dry clothes in there?”

            “I hope so.”

            “This feels like the first blast of winter, doesn’t it,” he filled in unnecessarily.

            “I wouldn’t know. It’s cold, right enough. For the tropics.”

            “I forgot, you’re Irish, you’re used to being cold and wet.” He grinned ostentatiously but she did not smile back.

            While she dried off and changed he made up the bed in the little spare room, and put on the kettle. Unhappily, he had to assume she would need to stay for a while, breaching his habitual semi-hermetic state, filling his meagre, guarded, prickly space. Knowing he should not be unhappy, doing this, the obvious right thing.

            She emerged barefoot, wearing a simple if old-fashioned pleated dress and clutching a beige cardigan about her narrow body. He almost quipped that at least, fashion-wise, she’d made it into the nineteen-fifties, but thought better of mocking her at this unsettling moment. She was looking all at once nervous, grateful and wary, as well she might.

            “I’m astounded you ran to me, not to one of your churchy chums,” he said. “I thought you must have condemned me as your Number One Satanic Enemy.”
           "Satan is the Number One Satanic Enemy.” She didn’t seem to intend it as a joke.

            “Well,” he said, feeling obliquely accused of something, “I was pretty rough on you the other day.”

*

That he had been.

This couple had knocked at his door a few days previously. He had looked at them through the bars of his security gate and felt his heart sink. They had that over-scrubbed look, the unctuous too-friendly smile, tragically sensible shoes just right for tramping from one house to another, and clothes that hovered somewhere between the Amish and the law firm of Blatherforth and Sharx.

            Not to mention the young man’s opening line, sliding from a left-slanting mouth in a face clean-shaven but marred by old acne scars and a blond excuse for a pencil moustache: “Morning sir, have you been saved?”

            “Have you opened your heart to the Lord?” the slender, dark-haired woman slipped in. They had accents, Irish probably.

            “Jesus H Christ,” he breathed. “Haven’t you idiots heard about the coronavirus lockdown? Go home and stay there, for fuck’s sake.”

            The man bridled a little at his language, the woman tucked her chin defensively into her neck. But they had evidently been trained to weather all manner of abuse: they beamed simultaneously – he had rather yellow, crowded teeth, she rather lovely white prominent incisors – and the man said smoothly: “The Lord protects the pure of heart.”

            “Well, that sure as hell won’t include me,” he retorted. “Step back, will you. Two metres.” Which they obediently did; they had to move out of the shade of the porch into hot sunlight. The woman tugged a floppy hat out of a woven shoulder bag and put it on; it had, he thought, hibiscus flowers printed on it, and it made her look oddly more vulnerable, pixie-like.

            The young man said, eyes aglint it seemed, as if he sensed an opening, “We’d like to talk to you about the spiritual bounties of the Good Lord, especially in these difficult times – “

            “Oh, come on! You sound like an undertaker. Maybe you are. Is coronavirus the beginning of the Apocalypse then? Are you actually looking forward to the mayhem and slaughter, before you’re swept up in the final rapture?”

            There was nothing like a botched plumbing repair, for which he could blame no one but himself, to put him into a seriously bad mood. Even more cantankerous than usual, then, he could feel himself rising to the bait of the young man’s smugness.

            The woman cut in, “If you really knew your Bible you’d know we would never take pleasure in others’ suffering.” And added slyly: “And we bring Easter cheer.”

He looked at her a little more closely, then: pretty in a slightly angular way, as if a woodcarver had accidentally planed just a little too much off the cheeks. Her almost black eyes were direct, prepared for the long haul, fervent. Their challenge was almost a relief: it was a very long time since he’d had a decent theological argument.

“Oh, so you take no secret pleasure in Christ’s writhing on the cross, then? The necessary prelude to the resurrection? Your theology wouldn’t exist without suffering to feed off. Another fairy-tale as improbable as the Four Horsemen, by the way. You Jehovah’s people have some seriously screwy ideas, from any perspective.”

“Oh, we’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses,” the man said. “We’re the Church of the Golden Ascension.”

“Oh, great, another deluded cult, then.”

He could tell the young evangelist was feeling needled, from the excessive calm and diplomacy with which he intoned, “It is those who have not seen the light who are deluded, but they know not that it is so. Opening the heart to the voice of the Lord allows all those scales to fall away. It is a liberation from all that anger and cynicism.”

“Amen,” breathed the woman.

“An abdication of will and responsibility, you mean. So whose blindness and self-delusion is to prevail, yours or mine? Why choose one faith over another? Why would one church have all the truth? Rationality versus faith, yadda-yadda, the old circular argument, endlessly pursuing the unprovable.” He felt abruptly weary. “Listen, I have my own faith, and it isn’t yours. Go home and obey the fucking lockdown law, okay.”

“We are called by God to preach his Word, and not succumb to fear, however great. The Lord protects us.”

The woman murmured, “Amen” again, twisting her bag’s straps in her hands, then adding, “We were quarantined when we arrived in the country. We’re from Ireland. And we’ve been tested, we’re okay.” This earning a noticeably irritated glance from her companion.

“Yeah, but am I? Jesus, don’t you people read anything, or know no history? There have been dozens of pandemics, and no sign in any of them that God protected a single soul. In fact, the bloody God-botherers have repeatedly been half the problem. They insist on meeting, then end up infecting and killing more innocent people than anyone. You’d think you’d all have learnt something from the Black Death; back then even the Pope saw what was cutting and banned religious parades. And you’re trying to tell me that God’s paying any attention to who gets cut down and who doesn’t? Please.”

“God takes to himself those he loves, for his own purpose, ours not to question why.”

“Ah, there’s the same tired old cliché, the hidden Plan. So he’s killing off all those doctors and nurses in Italy and everywhere,  the kindest and bravest of anyone, because he loves them? Fuck that. What a cop-out. That is one nasty unpredictable bastard of a god. Not someone I’m going to worship, like some blind mole in a tunnel.”

He was, in a way, relishing cutting loose, while at the same time disliking himself for being so scathing, and rather wanting this winsome and ridiculous pair just to disappear now. The young man was looking into the distance and chewing his lip, having a hard time controlling his response. The woman plucked at his elbow, “Let’s just go, Paul.” For the first time he noticed their wedding rings. Paul shrugged her off brusquely.

“This – man, needs to hear the truth. The Truth! Satan, sir, has his claws in you. That Devil has poisoned your mind, and you don’t even know it. He is subtle as a serpent. You, sir – I grieve for your soul –“

In reply he burst out with an involuntary laugh. “Serpents now! Christ! Actually, I rather like snakes, they’re beautiful, innocent creatures. And I seriously don’t need you grieving over me before I’m dead, thanks very much.”

“Those who insult and blaspheme will burn in Hell forever…” Paul the evangelist looked infuriatingly satisfied, sure of himself.

“More fairy-tales,” he scoffed back. “If you credit that you’re even more of a dunce than you look.” Which was unfair, and he knew it, and regretted it instantly. The man’s face twisted, he was about to lose it; the woman said smoothly, “We’re going now. May we leave you some pamphlets?” Glossy colourful brochures had magically appeared in her hand.

“Cool, they’ll make good fire-lighters.” The pamphlets went hastily back in the bag, and her mouth turned pinched and small in the shadow of the hat. The man was incensed now, his wife had been spurned, he was pointing a shaking finger.

It was clearly time to bail. “Go home!” he told them, “Avoid viruses.” And he closed the inner door in their faces. But he still heard their voices, first hissed, then raised as they moved away, and then a little squeal from her. Maybe they were disagreeing about how they’d handled this recalcitrant old codger. He opened the door again, to see them walking up the sloping driveway. The man Paul gripped the woman by the upper arm, she was struggling to free herself, until he shoved her; she fell awkwardly, and yelped in pain, but Paul, the husband, lunged after her and slapped her heavily across the head, so that her hat flew and rolled away, and the evangelist grated, “You damned well do as you’re told, woman.”

“Oy!” he yelled, and they both turned to look at him; Paul seemed about to snarl something, but now it was his wife latching onto his elbow and tugging him away. But when the evangelist looked back again, with every appearance of wanting to tear him limb from limb, he couldn’t help himself: he made that two-finger gangsta sign at Paul, I'm watching you, and calling after him, “I see you for what you are, you hypocritical piece of shit.”

*

"I was unnecessarily - robust," he confessed as they sat at his dining-room table.

            “You were – actually enjoying yourself,” she accused. She was cupping her coffee mug as if it were someone’s living heart. He raised his palms in mute apology. “But you were also the only person who has ever called Paul out for what he is.”

            “You could surely have gone to some of your – what was it, Church of the Holy Abduction, those people?”

            “Ascension. Exactly not. We’d only just arrived, I don’t know them. They’re just a handful in this country, all in Joburg. Anyway, they would just send me back to him. It’s our place as women to submit, as the Bible instructs.”

            “And yet you left him. To walk all this way to me. That’s a huge risk.”

            She shrugged. “I have no phone to call anyone.  I can’t go home because of the travel ban.  I thought you would at least be honest. And it’s the last place he’ll look.”

            “The church is based in Ireland somewhere? You met Paul there? Sorry, I don’t know your name yet.”

            She almost smiled. “Maeve. O’Shea. From Sligo. And I suppose 'met' is the word, for an arranged marriage.”

            “Maeve? I thought they’d buried you on top of Knocknarea! I’m Doug Bracewell, by the way. And I won’t shake your hand, I might infect you with my evil.”

            The two of them looked at each other mutely, as if measuring the distance between them, or calculating whether a third guest, Mister Covid-19, might not be also invisibly present. And, it seemed, mutually deciding that there was nothing much they could do about it now.

            “You know the Sligo area, then,” she said conversationally. “Queen Maeve’s grave-mound on Knocknarea and all.”

            “I went there once on a bit of a Yeats pilgrimage,” he said. “Thoor Ballylee, etcetera.”

            She made a little nasal sound, of amusement, or disappointment. “I heard of that. We never went to such places, though. We are taught to abhor the outside world, it is full of evil and distractions from the Path.”

“Well, full of evil it is, no question. And viruses. Yet they send you off into it, as missionaries, to sort it all out? You two seem as naïve as newborns!”

“Perhaps. Perhaps also we can bring a freshness, make a change. But, yes, from the age of ten it was all prayer, devotion, the Lord’s work. It was very safe, very comforting. Betrothed at fourteen, married at sixteen to a man I hardly knew. Accepted him. Loved him. I did love him,” she insisted. “I do."

            “Except that he beats you up.”

            “Mm. And like all the women I’ve accepted it for years. It’s Eve’s inheritance, our due for being sinful. I sinned all the time, I’m afraid.” She giggled, almost naughtily, endearingly.

            “You murdered Irish peasants, you ate their gall bladders?” But that just made her frown bleakly, puzzled. He lurched on: “Most cultish churches have some kind of Chief Bullshitter?”

            Her brows pinched again. “We have a Founder. McRorty, dead now, but we have some of his writings. It’s mostly the Bible, though, the Lord’s Word is enough for us. No one really leads, we’re a small group, it’s sort of communal.”

            “A self-perpetuating crucible of prejudices, then. So when did the doubts set in?”

            “There are always doubts. Doubts are the Devil’s work; they are sent to test our faith. The Faith is stronger for them.”

            He leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “I’m not even going to start trying to unpack all the inner contradictions of that. And yet here you are, in the house of a total non-believer, evil incarnate. Drinking his evil coffee.”

            She did smile then, those forward-leaning incisors. “It tastes good. And you are kind, really. I think you are on the Path without realising it. If you opened your heart to God’s gladness you might stop being so angry at things.”

     "Things, what things? I only get angry at bothersome evangelists who think they have the One Answer and try to inflict their neuroses on everybody else, and punt a book about this obscure, usually vengeful deity – a book which was, by the way, cobbled together over centuries by multiple dunderheads with all sorts of agendas and squabbles and mistranslations. God’s word, my ass. I mean, the naivety, the selective delusions, combine that with this smug arrogance – it’s breath-taking really.”

            Maeve put her coffee mug down sharply. “You sound like an evangelist for the anti-evangelists. So you have all the answers, I suppose. Being just as arrogant, as you call it.”

            “Hah, not just a pretty face, you’ve a handy streak of sophistry as well. Cute. No, I do not have The Answers. Well, it depends on the question, doesn’t it. I’m just like the Christians, I know what I believe. How do I know it? I just do. I love that word ‘just’, don’t you? The ultimate escape hatch. I 'just know' what God’s plan is. End of useful conversation.” He thumped his own mug down, suspecting that he had somehow frustrated his own coherence.

            She said primly, “I think you are angry at everything because you don’t have anything to base your morality on. You are a lost soul, flailing about in the darkness.”

            He laughed. “You people practically invented the darkness. The terrors of Hell, Let there be Light. It’s all a myth. A mighty effective one, to be sure, but a myth for all that, no more true than the fairy-tales of the Bushmen, or the Pawnees, or Buddha’s mother being bonked by an elephant.” He leaned forward. “So what is God’s plan for you, can you tell me that, O wanderer in the rain?”

            She looked down. The rain in fact was still beating at the window behind her, and she seemed to listen to it for a moment. Eventually she said gloomily, “I do not. Maybe I haven’t known for a while. Perhaps I need to pray harder on it. And even then sometimes we must accept that we will never know, it is too deep for us to fathom. That’s what faith is.”

            “Fantastic, it makes sense because it doesn’t make sense. We don’t know what’s going on; therefore there must be a god. Please. But look, I mean ultimately we think alike, in a way. You don’t really know what the fuck God wants, or why he kills the doctor but spares Donald bonehead Trump. No one can tell you. And I don’t know what the universe is going to throw at me next, either. A global virus, wham! A weird Irish evangelist, poof, on my doorstep! Who could have predicted? I see no sense in interposing a capricious god between me and a capricious universe. Life is complicated and unpredictable, end of story. Deal with it. Day by day, moment by moment.”

            This appeared to give her pause; he took the opportunity to say, “Let me fix us a bite to eat, you can park your stuff in the study so long. Hang your wet things in the porch.” She did that, while he made some sandwiches. She took a curious turn around his living-room, bending to look at framed photos – “Is that your mother?” – touching the surface of a painting as if to confirm its reality. She came up short in front of a white alabaster statue squatting in a corner.
          "What is that?”

            “Oh, my Buddha?”

            “You worship that?" More a statement of sudden understanding than a question.

            He laughed. “My graven image? My personal carving of Baal? Nah, I bought that from the friend who made it just to keep him from starving that month. I mean, I’m sympathetic, but in any case one doesn’t 'worship' Buddha, not in Zen anyway. You know the saying, ‘If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him!’?”

            “That sounds horrible! All other religions are the spawn of Satan. So we are taught,” she added almost apologetically.

            “It’s a kind of joke, really. Zen people can be very jokey. The point is, the Buddha’s teaching is like a finger pointing toward the truth; once you see the truth, you can forget about the finger. It’s not about rigidly adhering to one icon, or even an unbending set of rules, like old Moses’ commandments. More about responding clearly and appropriately as circumstances dictate. You have water in your hand and you see a fire, you don’t drink, you put out the fire. A wet woman arrives needing help, you take her in. If I could see you were dying of Covid-19, I might have responded differently, or at least with a different strategy to help. If you were obviously about to try to kill me, I might kill you, no problem.”

            “It seems terrifyingly – ad hoc.”

“I prefer ‘dynamic and exciting’.”

“But – where’s the foundation? It’s so - hand-to-mouth, like.”

            “Exactly! You see the truth. You are enlightened! You can now discard me.”

            She gave a tiny smile. “Now who’s being the evangelist?”

            “Ha! You found me out. No, I think of it as more a way of being. A practice, not a religion. It might even be compatible with Christianity in some ways. Look, I know I’ve been taking a hard line, winding you up a bit. A lot! Sorry. I’m not insensible to all the good many Christians do. Jesus, and Paul - Saint Paul, that is – had some beautiful and valid teachings. I went through a whole churchy phase until I decided it made no sense of the world I saw in front of me, but I still enjoy reading some Christian writers: Kung, Thomas Merton, Pascal. Mostly mavericks, to be sure.”

            “I don’t know these people,” she said bashfully. “We never read anything except the Bible, really. Not – really.”

            “Oh, except the things you snuck a look at under the bedcovers, right?” She blushed. “Ha, you sinful little minx, you! It’s okay. A little contradictory knowledge is a bit like suffering, isn’t it. It could make your faith stronger.”

            “Sophistry!” she burst out, pointing at him, but she had her chin tucked down and she was actually suppressing laughter. Then suddenly neither of them could keep it in any longer, and they folded up in irrepressible giggles.

            “Well,” he finally gasped, “I think we’re going to get on just fine. At least until the Irish Embassy extracts you, if they can. Meanwhile – “he glanced through the window, where a bar of weak sun was shimmering – “it looks like the rain has stopped. I have a large property which we can walk around and eat our sandwiches without violating the lockdown. Would you like that, Maeve O’Shea?”

            Maeve O’Shea nodded. “I would, Doug Brushwell.”

            “Bracewell.“ He added, “I even have a nice hat you can borrow. With hibiscus flowers.”

***

 Visit www.netsoka.co.za for more Wylie-esque art and writing.

No 101 - The forgiveness of grass

One thing the coronavirus lockdown has not inhibited is my little alien-clearing project on the slope below my cottage. Where a year or so ago a self-seeded monoculture of Port Jackson wattle (aka long-leafed acacia, Acacia longifolia) suppressed almost all other growth, now you are waist-deep in fynbos species, little knobwoods, rhus and thorn-tree saplings coming up, all manner of tight ground-cover and tiny flowers. And, with particular prominence in this fecund autumn season, sudden tall grasses of various species. I had never paid a great deal of attention to grasses, much as I loved the way sun shone through fluffy or spear-like seedheads with a special coppery luminosity, the fragrance of Zimbabwe's dry tawny winter hillsides that I ran over as a child. Now grasses are growing apace in the wake of my eradication, exemplifying what Graham Harvey called, in his book of that title, the "forgiveness of grass". And where we humans pull back, or otherwise disappear, through pandemic or nuclear conflagration, what will first assert itself, in Jonathan Schell's phrase, is a "republic of insects and grass".

So I've made some effort to identify some of these amazing hardy creatures, apart from the ubiquitous kikuyu. I find this quite hard, many species being similar, or different at successive stages. If anyone 'out there' can see I've made an error, do let me know. Finding names for them, however coldly scientific they may seem, is my way of making friends with them, so that next time I can, as it were, shake hands and accord them due respect.

Natal red-top

Freshly-mown kikuyu makes an excellent venue
for dozens of tunnel-spiders to spread their webs,
shimmering with dew in the mornings

Yellow nutsedge, not technically a grass, apparently.

Small buffalo grass, Panicum colorata

Bristle grass, Setaria sphacelata

Bristle-leafed red top, Melinis nerviglumis

Dallis grass, Paspalum dilatatum

No 100 - Pestilence and words

I was set to devote my 100^th blog-post to the most recent wave of Zimbabwean fiction, but now that the bookstores are closed… I guess I’ll just have to write cheerfully about pestilences, plagues and pandemics.

"After the pandemic?" (c) Dan Wylie

My first impulse in all worldly matters is to consult the resources of history and literature. (After all, isn’t literature itself a kind of pandemic, saturating our global lives and changing our consciousness in invisible ways, albeit not often fatal?) The literature of plagues and contagions is vast, dating back at least as far as Homer’s Iliad. A minute or two on the internet of course turned up several lists of Covid-containment reading, as if that’s all we’d want to do in our lockdowns. One interesting list includes a couple I’ve read – Margaret Atwood’s unavoidable Oryx and Crake and José Saramago’s brilliant Blindness – and a whole bunch I’d never even heard of.  Scratching around in my own bookshelves, I emerge with some random thoughts.

I happen to be reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), a journalistic barrage of fast-breathing and alarming factoids and figures about our probably bleak global future. In his short, patchy chapter on plagues (written before Covid-19 struck), he focuses on those that might be released from ancient tundras by global warming. One needn’t look so far: epidemiologists have already recorded over 300 zoonotic viruses – that is, contracted by humans from animals whose territories and isolation they have increasingly invaded. SARS, avian flu, swine fevers, ebola and more have already rattled our collective complacency. There are still one or two people alive who experienced the last great flu pandemic of 1918, which killed anything between 50 and 100 million people (and one particularly tragic case of an ancient lady who survived 1918 but has succumbed to Covid-19).

The other historical touchstone of course is the bubonic Black Death of the 1340s, which carried off an even greater proportion of the population.  Wallace-Wells wrongly says it was largely confined to Europe. In fact – as I discover from revisiting my battered copy of historian Barbara Tuchman’s marvellous history of the Middle Ages, A Distant Mirror (1978) – it was blamed on China, where it was said to have begun. Then as now, that picture turned out to be simplistic: the world was already globally interconnected, albeit in slower fashion back then.  Still, China and India suffered massive loss of life before Europe did. Then as now, rumours, crackpot theories and misinformation swarmed and compromised efforts to combat the disease. In the absence of an understanding of the microbial and the viral, most in mediaeval Europe attributed it to humours, alignments of planets, or a punitive God. You’d think we would know better but even now, religious fervour has ignored all historical precedent, believers gathering in large numbers to pray and lament – in South Korea, New Delhi, Dallas and Bloemfontein - thereby only making it worse. To their credit, both Pope Clement VI then, and Francis today, ‘saw the light’ and curbed such congregations. Then as now, people looked to place the blame or project bemused anger: in mediaeval Europe the Jews were targeted, here the foreign and the poor are already being harassed. Then as now, inequalities are crucial to the disease’s distribution and impact. The impoverished always get it most badly, though in the end no class is spared; back then, princes and nobles – the Boris Johnsons of their day – also sickened and died. Then as now, many were by necessity abandoned to their fate, dying without their loved ones around, buried without due ceremony. Then as now, courageous and selfless charitable helpers themselves succumbed in disproportionate numbers, and the crisis brought out both the best and the worst in people.

Tuchman’s thesis is that the Middle Ages provides an illuminating ‘distant mirror’ to our own century; even she might not have anticipated so close a parallel to this crisis. She mentions the First World War as a comparable upheaval but not, oddly, the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed even more people than the war. And of course, there are significant differences: today’s numbers, technologies, communications networks and medical understanding will make our responses qualitatively different, and likely far more effective. The Black Death waned after a couple of years, apparently of its own accord; so will Covid-19, and we are unlikely to see the kind of toll the Black Death took – fully half of Paris’s population of 100,000, for example (it was a major world city then, but hardly bigger than Grahamstown today!).

That none are immune to such a scourge or its aftershocks is the burden of Edgar Allan Poe’s symbolic story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, published in 1842. It was possibly sparked by Boccaccio’s observation of Florentine’s notables during the Black Death. Poe’s lushly wrought parabolic tale opens with a description that parallels the terrible buboes and irruptions of the mediaeval bubonic plague:

No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men.

(Covid-19 may be less dramatically visible, but is hardly less terrible, drowning you from the inside.) In Poe’s story, Prince Prospero (doubtless an allusion to the mage of Shakespeare’s The Tempest) sequesters himself in a castle with his coterie, building impenetrable walls and welding the gates closed with great bolts, while the Red Plague mows down the hoi-polloi outside. Within, a great party ensues, with masques and dances reeling through numerous brightly coloured rooms – the nobility fiddling while the world burns. But in the background a clock tolls forbiddingly – then a deathly hooded, rotting figure appears, mistaken at first as just another masquerade, someone’s macabre hoax, until someone dares to rip at the clothes, to find nothing beneath but the Red Death itself. Self-serving delusions of grandeur and immunity, Mr Trump, will eventually be exposed.

My internet browsing also turned up an essay about another prescient story, this one a novella by Jack London, he of White Fang fame. Clearly indebted to Poe’s psycho-fantasy, The Scarlet Plague (1915) is an astonishing forecast of subsequent pandemics. It imagines San Francisco in 2073, and depicts the aftermath of a pandemic that has erupted there in 2013 (a century in the future when London published the book, but eerily the very year in which the bird flu scare would in fact occur). The story is largely related by old ‘Granser’ Smith, an erstwhile English professor (go, Prof!) who survives a mass die-off, the burning of the city, a futile attempt to self-isolate in his university’s Chemistry building, and years of solitary wandering, eventually to rejoin one of the tribelets who remain. (In this it’s not unlike my own The Wisdom of Adders, though I envisaged a more complicated catastrophe unfolding over a further century.) London extends Poe’s motifs of the scarlet rash and “dissolution”: his pestilence kills swiftly and the corpses disintegrate, releasing yet more germs, killing indiscriminately, without justice, even the bacteriologists in their laboratories. Supplies of gas run out, airships disappear, chaos and heartlessness reign, communications collapse altogether. Wild nature takes over again.

New York City and Chicago were in chaos. And what happened with them was happening in all the large cities. A third of the New York police were dead. Their chief was also dead, likewise the mayor. All law and order had ceased. The bodies were lying in the streets un-buried. All railroads and vessels carrying food and such things into the great city had ceased running and mobs of the hungry poor were pillaging the stores and warehouses. Murder and robbery and drunkenness were everywhere. Already the people had fled from the city by millions—at first the rich, in their private motor-cars and dirigibles, and then the great mass of the population, on foot, carrying the plague with them...

In short, “Ten thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an eye, 'lapsed like foam.'”

Simplistic and dramatised, perhaps, and we've taken the opposite tack - lockdown - but the depiction of pandemic fear feels psychologically true. As so many people are now belatedly trumpeting, we can hardly say we weren’t warned.  It’s a mystery – or a significant illumination of human myopia – that despite everything, the world still seems woefully ill-prepared for this calamity.

Even more uncertain, naturally, is how the future will look. Little or no fiction explores economics, the new demigods of the "market" that now dominate our lives. There are pessimistic and optimistic projections (well laid out by Peter C Baker).  Humanity will surely survive, as it has before, but in what mode? Will we be jolted into becoming somehow a better, more compassionate, more environmentally caring species than before? History is not too encouraging. Tuchman has an arresting paragraph:

Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings.

Covid-19, whatever its scale and duration turn out to be, looks set to be the convulsion to loose the moorings of our particular lifetimes. History does seem to indicate that we too will find ourselves “neither destroyed nor improved”. Old bad habits will die hard, forgetfulness of trauma sets in remarkably quickly, the good and the beautiful will still – as imagined by 1001 sci-fi novels and movies – struggle to prove the greater force.

"Sunset" (c) Dan Wylie

***

For more Wylie-esque paintings and books visit www.netsoka.co.za

No 99 - Paper conversation: Sydney Clouts and Stanley Kunitz

When I wrote my study of the poetry of Sydney Clouts, entitled Intimate Lightning, I framed it with his life-story, but otherwise pursued what Clouts himself termed “the method of the fleck and the speck”. In his poetry, this meant that he picked up on scintilla of material existence – a rock, a gesture, a bird, a beetle, the gleam of light on a coat-button – and placed them in startling, interdependent juxtapositions. In my study, it meant that I picked out ideas and images in the poems that intrigued me, and wrote up short responses, in no especial order. A different reader would make a different selection – just what Clouts would like, I think – and more can always be said.

Especially when more material comes to light. Clouts’s wife, Marge, who has been wonderfully generous with my intrusive project, recently sent me two hitherto unseen letters which contain some interesting commentary. These are letters written by Clouts to his twin brother Cyril, rediscovered and passed along by Cyril’s widow, Rose. One letter, undated but probably late 1959, discusses efforts to publish an early collection entitled “First Poems”. It includes some slightly diffident correspondence with the then more famous poet and novelist William Plomer (Plomer would later present Clouts with the Olive Schreiner prize for the collection One Life). More illuminating, given that we have rather little of Clouts’s thoughts on poetry itself, are his own comments on some of the poems, including some of his best-known.  The relevant sections of this letter read as follows:

Dearest Cyril,

            Your long 3-letter letter came a few days ago and now your letter about the ms. [“First Poems”] has arrived, with one from Plomer, whose words are friendly. He says, “I have read your First Poems with curiosity and attention, particularly as I had already seen yr work in Butler’s and McNab’s anthologies. May I say that the clear imagery and delicacy of touch in your poems are appreciated by me. The two I like best are ‘Roy Kloof’ and ‘Dawn Hippo’. Cape’s seldom publish new poets. Even where merit is evident, the prospect of financial loss is bound to influence them, and they do not feel able to publish this volume. But don’t let this discourage you. ...

Plomer suggests that Cyril try Chatto & Windus, to which Clouts adds wearily: “(Well, this of course has been done.)”  Publishing poetry was evidently no less difficult and unprofitable then as it is now.  Cyril, ever a sensitive reader and supporter, seems to be taking the responsibility for approaching publishers and small magazines. Sydney continued this letter with a critique of his own work which is more perceptive than Plomer’s:

I understand what you [Cyril] mean about the poems you feel should perhaps be ommitted [sic], and I don’t agree with Plomer in his choice! Dawn Hippo and R Kloof are simply not as good as a few others. The “Henry [the Navigator]” poems don’t completely satisfy me. Perhaps the best thing in Henry I is that “meditating lantern”. Yes, I think the poem has a too obvious rhythm but I wanted it in, if only for its treatment of a theme that is particularly dear to me [the Portuguese maritime explorers]. It still is but I should handle it differently now. “Dawn Hippo” gets better as it goes on, don’t you think. I think I’ll keep it in for those last lines. “The Sea and the Eagle” deserves excision. Please remove it and draw a line through the title on the contents page. I’d like to preserve “The Strong Southeaster” and “Reading an Old Book”, if only for their expression of certain moods. “The Sea and the Eagle” is rather clumsy from a technical point of view, the rhythms are imperfect; perhaps it only really gets going in the last stanza.

            I’m sure you’re wiser than Plomer in your feeling about “D. Hippo” which I must say I nevertheless have some affection for. So lets keep it. The manuscript is flawed, I know that. It wobbles in a number of places and I don’t know (anyway, I get a bit tired of my poems after a while) whether it really contains enough good matter to warrant publication. This is not lack of confidence but one must look squarely at what one has done, and then go on from there. ... I don’t delude myself into thinking that I have made a book of complete authority. That is to come, I hope.

“First Poems” never did get published, though a number of the poems remained in One Life, the one volume Clouts did publish some six years later, under the auspices of Guy Butler’s journal New Coin. That slender book was indeed as close to a volume of “complete authority” as any I know in South African poetry. Its quality was in no small measure due to Clouts’s ability to step back and evaluate his own poems with a cool eye, and with his obsessive last-minute changes, which would drive more than one future editor to distraction.

Clouts also hints here not only at his attunement to rhythm as a poetic resource, but his willingness to sacrifice rhythmic purity in favour of a more shaggy immediacy of mood or theme. This was part of his congruence with major currents of Modernism in other parts of the world, especially the United States, the contemporary poetry of which he preferred to the British. Much as he revered the formal solidity of early modernist W B Yeats, he gravitated as he matured to the more limber imagism of a William Carlos Williams or the elliptical lyricism of the Italian Eugenio Montale.

In Intimate Lightning, I take some time exploring the question of influence and originality. Like just about any poet, Clouts learned from his predecessors, from all ages. I look especially at the echoes of  William Blake, Yeats, and the Afrikaner modernist NP van Wyk Louw – but of course for a poet as widely and intensively read as Clouts, the ‘sources’ and provocations are multiple and mostly untraceable. One such contemporary – a fellow-traveller more than an influence –  whom I mentioned only in passing – was an American who has suffered a marginalisation not unlike Clouts’s own. This was another Jewish poet, Stanley Kunitz.

Stanley Kunitz; from the back cover of his
Collected Poems

Kunitz is the burden of the second letter Marge gave me, a folded blue aerogramme (anyone remember those?) dated 28 November 1959 and written, as was the first letter, at the Clouts residence at 20 Sir George Grey Street, Oranjezicht, Cape Town. Stanley Kunitz was some twenty years Clouts’s senior. Rather like Clouts, his densely-wrought, intellectualised earlier poetry restricted his appeal. However, he did receive a Pulitzer Prize for the Selected Poems that Clouts mentions in this letter. Unlike Clouts, who died relatively young, Kunitz lived almost twice as long, dying in 2006 aged 101 – having been rather belatedly appointed the tenth US Poet Laureate at the age of 95. His long life produced a lot more poetry than Clouts’s, and shows long-term developments of style into something rigorous but much more vernacular and homely in vocabulary and setting. For all that, as doyenne of literary critics Helen Vendler once noted, Kunitz has never quite got his due. He does not appear at all in three standard surveys of twentieth-century American poetry I looked at, and is mentioned only once in passing in Michael Schmidt’s compendious book Lives of the Poets. Much like Clouts’s reputation: treasured by a minority but frequently sidelined.

In 1959, nevertheless, Clouts had come across a review, and obtained Kunitz’s Selected Poems, as he related in his enthusiastic letter. As the aerogramme has been torn off down one edge,  it’s not entirely clear where the quotation from the review ends, so I hazard a guess.

Dearest Rose and Cyril,

            Both the TLS [Times Literary Supplement] and the Paris Review have arrived and we are now reading them with great interest. What you wrote about the belated “official” English attitude to American literature, music, painting, etc – is I think quite correct, but the supplement’s editorial is still only half a recognition, so typically frigid. It has the niggling sort of atmosphere of “Yes, so-and-so’s very fine indeed. Of course, he’s no Michelangelo”. I have recently come across the poetry of Stanley Kunitz, described as you have probably noticed in the supplement as “the most underrated poet writing today[”]. His Selected Poems is nothing less than a revelation, in the best meaning of that term. He writes great poems with the assured power of a man who has discovered the secret of turning life into art and back into life again. Entering his subject with immediate knowledge and vision, he explores it with an intense and passionate awareness that has not been equalled since the last  superb phase of Yeats. His poem “The Terrible Threshold” is without doubt one of the greatest lyrics of the century; and I am also sure that Kunitz is the finest poet of love since Donne. He proves that old point over and over again: the great creator can choose any form he pleases, since whatever he touches, once he has achieved his mastery, glows and builds into authentic flame. Any critic who hurls Kunitz’s book against the wall will find himself being shot to bits by the ricochet.

A vigorous image – Clouts was quite disdainful of ‘critics’ – to back up some rather sweeping and perhaps untenable claims. But what sparked the enthusiasm? Curiously, the title poem of the Selected Poems, “The Terrible Threshold” apparently hasn’t weathered well: I can’t find it online, and it wasn’t selected by Kunitz himself for the Collected Poems of 2000.  Other poems from The Terrible Threshold retain strict stanzaic measures, rhyming and rhythmical – such as the opening stanzas from “The Dark and the Fair”:

A roaring company that festive night;

The beast of dialectic dragged his chains,

Prowling from chair to chair in the smoking light,

While the snow hissed against the windowpanes.

Our politics, our science, and our faith

Were whiskey on the tongue; I, being rent

By the fierce divisions of our time, cried death

And death again, and my own dying meant.

I imagine the strength of those images in the first stanza would have appealed to Clouts, though the obviousness of the allegory – “the beast of dialectic” – and the direct intellectual intervention of the second stanza are techniques Clouts would strongly eschew. He had already moved strongly away into free, almost instinctual verse. But he might well have responded empathetically to Kunitz’s poem “The Science of the Night”, in which the poet ruminates adoringly on his sleeping wife, oblivious and oddly estranged as she lies “so deep/ In absent-mindedness,/ Caught in the calcium snows of sleep”. It thus has powerful echoes of Clouts’s beautiful poem for Marge, “The Sleeper”, might even have been thought an influence had not “The Sleeper” been published two years before.  Similarly, Kunitz’s poem “The War Against the Trees” might be interestingly ranged alongside Clouts’s “The Cutting of the Pines”. Kunitz, as far as In know, was never aware of Clouts.

A few other poems in Kunitz’s Selected Poems begin to move towards the freer verse, more vernacular language and subject-matter that would characterise his later work; at this point – as Kunitz himself later acknowledged – his poetry was, for all its evident power and control, still a bit too abstract, formalistic, arch. He was prepared to comment directly on politics in ways Clouts generally avoided – a voice very different from Clouts’s own. Clouts’s evident disdain for regular politics, however, would doubtless have thrilled to Kunitz’s brief and timeless barb, “The System”:

To order Seahorn Messiah, a new edition
of Clouts's complete poems, contact
d.wylie@ru.ac.za

That pack of scoundrels

tumbling through the gate

emerged

as the order of the State.

In many other poems, though, Kunitz showed a detailed and attentive awareness of the natural world much like Clouts’s. In short, in Kunitz Clouts seems to have found a fellow-traveller through themes and techniques that preoccupied mid-century, late-modernist poets everywhere, responding deeply to Kunitz’s forcefulness even as he groped his way to his own distinctive style and approach. Like Clouts, Kunitz said he eschewed the nerve-jangling ‘confessional’ mode of many of their contemporaries like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. “The work is the thing,” Clouts said, not the personal life. Nevertheless, I think Clouts would have liked Kunitz’s statement:

The poem comes in the form of a blessing – “like rapture breaking on the mind”, as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of the poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.

********
For more books and art by Dan and Jill Wylie, visit www.netsoka.co.za 

No 98 - A new study of "Rhodesians"

Katherine Withers: Those were the days, my friend: A literary history of Rhodesian discourse in colonial times and beyond.

A number of recent studies have explored various constructions of ‘whiteness’ in Zimbabwe, especially the lingering and modified forms of pre-Independence ‘Rhodesian’ identity. I was raised myself on some of those constructions: arrogant in its very modesty, mythically self-sufficient, self-deceivingly racist. Studies by McDermott Hughes, Rory Pilosoff, Andrew Hartnack and others have tended to focus on the farming community. While an important segment of white society – thrust into the limelight by the post-2000 land reform process – that is only one slice of a broader community that was numerically more urban, artisanal and administrative, and more internally rifted, than Ian Smith-stimulated legends of the archetypal ‘Rhodesian’ imply. Moreover, such conceptions of Rhodesian-ism evolved subtly over the century or so of white occupancy. Imperial ideals of the 1890s, while lingering long beyond their natural demise, are markedly different from the decidedly anti-British sentiments of the Smith period, and different again from the new sense of belonging residual white residents after 1980 were obliged to forge – or tried to fend off.

We should not be surprised to find that, on close examination, even so apparently coherent a community as ‘white Rhodesian’ – like many other ethno-social entities which come to be defined more by a public stereotype than by the more complex reality on the ground – proves to be somewhat fractured and mobile. Still, stereotypes emerge for a reason, and some always find societal comfort and belonging in conforming to that stereotype, providing a centre of gravity for belonging, however fissiparous it might get around the edges. It was not all, or not only, clinging to the 'lifestyle' of the suburban tea-gathering depicted on this book's cover.

So how do actors within such a community actually express their values and sense of belonging? What might constitute a so-called 'Rhodesian discourse'? There are any number of ways, of course: through physical objects and places, aesthetics of architecture and landscaping, and through more cultural artefacts like paintings, novels, memoirs, more or less self-serving histories, and songs. We older folk remember the words and melody of the war-time song that Ian Smith’s son-in-law Clem Tholet sang about fighting through thick and thin and keeping the enemy north of the Zambezi.

Katherine Withers’ study of this unfolding sense of identity concentrates on the literary end of such discursive productions. Her title Those were the days, my friend come from another song, not Rhodesian particularly, but which I remember being popular in the late 60s and ‘70s. It captures the nostalgia that still suffuses segments of ex-‘Rhodies’, especially those that populate some online sites. But Withers' title is laden with irony: the study is far from being a retrospective defence or justification for white rule or supremacism. Nor is it a conventionally left-wing assault on an immoral regime. Withers, being English-born and a trained historian, has the capacity to take a level-headed view of the phenomenon, while being resident in Zimbabwe long enough to have an insider’s understanding.

The back-cover blurb reads:

1890 was not the beginning of white settlement in the land between the two great rivers, the Limpopo and the Zambezi, but it was a defining moment, as the Pioneer Column sent by businessmand politician, Cecil John Rhodes, made its way north from Bechuanaland to Matabeleland. Why did they and their many successors come to the country they called ‘Rhodesia’? What were their attitudes to the land where they settled and its indigenous people? What were the consequences of their perceptions?

Against compact chapters of historical context, then, Withers explores how selected literary works exemplified and amplified overlapping, sometimes conflicting, and evolving senses of Rhodesian identity. These works include memoirs such as those of Ian Smith, Ken Flower and Doris Lessing, Illuminating insights arise from unusual comparisons, such as Terence Ranger’s historical study Bulawayo Burning with Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning. The  crucial themes of Rhodesian-Zimbabwean history – the mythology of the ‘Pioneers’, the land question, the traumas of the war, the ambivalent position of the churches in wartime – are touched on. The examples are selective but provocative, showing ways of integrating historical evidentiality with the less tangible operations of emotion and sentiment that is the stuff of literature – and therefore also the engine of history. Each chapter could, and should, spawn further in-depth studies of this kind. It’s a wide-ranging, lucid, and sometimes unsettling read.

The book is distributed from East London. Contact 

Bridget Egan, <bridgetegan@cybersmart.co.za>.  

Also available on Amazon Kindle.

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No 97 - Out of the hills...

He came down out of the hills, and descended into Hell.

            Because his home town was nestled amongst wooded ridges and granite domes, his school had adopted a biblical verse for its motto: Ex montibus robur – Out of the hills my strength. In full, in the King James version of Psalm 121, “I raise mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my strength. My strength cometh from the Lord.” Which no one seemed to have noticed made little sense, until – much later in life – he learned that this was a mistranslation from the Hebrew. Someone had left out a question mark: “I raise mine eyes to the hills. Whence cometh my strength? My strength cometh from the Lord.” Ah.

            If this technically eviscerated both the motto and the notion that one’s mojo might magically emanate from hills at all, for him it remained true at some level. Running as a rather wild child over the mountain slopes of his parents’ informal wildlife sanctuary had endowed him, he figured, with both physical fitness and a certain robust independence, if not an antisocial leaning towards hermeticism. His mother in particular had taught him to treasure every life, from leopards to moths, to be observant of the tiniest detail – of an ant’s nest, of the fold of a cat’s ear, of the glow of dawn light through the veins of a leaf.

            Now, this morning, he had diverted his long and solitary road trip to take a few hours’ detour through an unfamiliar game reserve, some temporary relief from hammering in his noisy bakkie along the highways. In the mesh of minor roads and turnoffs to mining compounds and near-slum townships, he’d had to stop and ask directions to one of the park’s less-frequented entrance gates. Once within the park’s confines, though, he felt its greenness and space descend on him like a blessing.

            The relief was not total, of course: he was still driving, albeit at the mandatory forty k’s an hour, and there were horned and toothy creatures, the brochure warned, ever ready to predate upon him, so he had better stay in his vehicle. He knew also that the park had been refashioned out of farmland; that there had been forced removals of human inhabitants (humans had been leaving their traces here since the Iron Age); that the twisting gravel roads had been designed to make you think you were going deeper into the wild than you really were; that it had been denuded by hunting and that most of the present animals had been more or less artificially re-introduced. There were other cars. It was hardly pristine “wilderness”.

Nevertheless, when he pulled up on a gravel apron overlooking a small dam and turned off the engine, an unspeakable peace soaked into his bones. The wind played in complex voices through milkwood trees, fringes of reeds, the surface of the water. Ripples spread and meshed where swallows skimmed a tipple on the wind, where the nostrils and eyes of wary hippos nudged through the sheen. At the dam’s edge a grey heron stalked, standing still for an age, watching, stalking a few paces on, neck curled back, a coiled spring. Slow food, he thought. Some squirrels chanced along, alert and hopeful, their feathery tails jerking and flickering in russet sun.

So it went: he drove a bit, stopped here and there. There seemed to be a rufous-naped lark every hundred metres, each one with a subtle but discernible individuality in its bush-top call. He watched a pair of young bull elephants amiably wrestling their way down to a pan, skirting a grumpy-looking hippo. A dung-beetle manoeuvred a ball of elephant poo across the road, and he waited until it had disappeared into the grass. Wildebeest watched him with idle curiosity; a baby zebra suckled, oblivious to his presence. A jackal buzzard floated on a liberating thermal. After recent rains, greenness pulsed and rustled in a hundred hues of quiet and fundamental life.

He wondered why he was leaving the park, eventually: wondered at the driven life of deadlines and obligations to which he would return, at the diastole-systole of adventure and home comfort that he discerned as having governed his life. On the far side of the park, where he emerged, he met the same charged busy-ness of crossroads and scrappy sidewalk stalls, of battered unreadable signs alongside new ones, of potholes and rumble-strips and robots and trash bowling along on a dusty wind. The park, he realised, was a tiny island carved out of a morass of oblivious human activity.

He stopped at a fuel station to fill up and to find something icy to drink: the day had turned forbiddingly brassy, and the midday heat beat up off the tarmac when he parked and opened his door. Nearby two burly farmer-types in obligatory blue-grey neo-military outfits, leaning against their massive 4x4, talked loudly, their mouths crammed with takeaway burgers. At his feet, as he stepped out, the desiccated husk of a chameleon lay, long flattened to a cardboard cut-out of its once-vivid life. As he walked across the esplanade, past the fuel pumps and towards the conventional one-stop shop complex, vehicles seemed to converge on him from all sides. A flushed, tight-lipped holiday-maker trying to edge his caravan-trailer into the pump queue; thick-necked business types in low-slung Mercedes swinging in at pretentious speed; small busybody sportives emblazoned with gauche advertising colours; a rusting Mazda saloon bulging with beanied youngsters jerking their heads in time to the doef-doef pulse of their sound system: it punched up into his very solar plexus and made him feel ill. Just across the road a loaded cattle truck had pulled up, the stench of its blue-black exhaust mingling with that of dung and terror; he fancied he could smell the incipient death of the abbatoir.

He almost stumbled to a halt in the midst of this assault. It was that: an assault. Noise: the petrol attendants yelling at each other, the poor imitation of music – some anodyne woman screaming unintelligibly over the PA system – all the vehicles revving and growling and purring like some herd of demented yet curiously pre-programmed animals coming into their mechanised troughs, as if their drivers were mere appendages to the grinding pumps and the nosing hoses, the beeping card machines through which intricate financial systems zithered through radio-active air into the very skulls of their human servants, the clang of bonnets being closed and the sharp hiss of compressed air. Reek of petrol and diesel and carbon monoxide and hot metal and rubber and deep-fry chip oil. Light assaulted him: everywhere sun spangling painfully off windscreens and chromium, reflecting off the uniform tar, on every side flat and curved surfaces of plastic and glass, impenetrable as an army of polished halberds, all the painted colours flat and primary and unforgiving, without nuance or meaning.

It was hardly better inside. Negotiating the glass front doors, disorientated by quavering reflections of the outside activity as well by as people brushing past him with their Cokes and Twizzers, he felt he was breaching the surface of some underworld, where air-conditioners seethed out their artificial cool, signs warned of perpetual surveillance, the drawers of the tills clanged dolefully. He visited the antiseptic toilets, repellently tiled in white, if thankfully clean: gauche men slammed the thin cubicle doors, flush mechanisms whined and sucked, the cleaner rattled his buckets, the music was louder in here than outside, there was no way to dry one’s hands except beneath the offensive bellow of automatic hot-air dryers thrusting out from the polished walls. He emerged with his head ringing and his belly quaking.

In the shop section with its rectilinear beige metal shelves, its ranks of glittering packets of sweets and flaky crisps and saccharine biscuits, he searched for something vaguely healthy to drink, picking out from the frigid glossy soldiery of offerings in opaque black or pool-cleaner blue a fruit juice he judged to be less addled with preservatives and colourants than the rest. Hungry, he needed something more than Lemon-Creams. He glanced into the restaurant section: named the Purple Steer, it appeared to vie deliberately with the chain eateries for plastic anonymity and blandness: those yellow plastic tabletops with cylindrical bottles of anaemic tomato sauce, families with caterwauling babies, most people not talking to each other but hunched with obsessed myopia over their cellphones, some of the men watching one or other of several flat-screen televisions – one vivid green with the astroturf of some soccer venue, men scampering inanely from one side to the other, commentary filtering in a slightly demented warble through the glass partitions; another flashing up quick-fire adverts, something that was Bigger, better, faster. There was a time, he mused, when they warned about photography that might induce an epileptic fit; now almost all of it seemed designed to do just that. Flash, zip, spin, shout: his senses couldn’t keep up any more.

Forget the restaurant. The shop offered no fruit, or anything else visibly derived from actual life, so he opted for a chicken pie, which at least he had observed coming straight out of the oven behind the counter. He took it outside to a shaded bench and table; it was almost all flaking pastry, with a leaking gruel of filling which burned his mouth and tasted of nothing much. The fruit juice sizzled in his stomach, dispiritingly acid. He hunched into the cauldron of noise around him: a babel of languages, greetings, curses, laughter, orders, queries, denials. A street-bum, gaunt as a heron, grizzled and sunburned to a deep maroon, smoked some grossly acrid cigarette at a nearby table, but paid him no mind; only a small girl, clutching the hand of her cajoling mother, seemed fascinated by him, but when he waggled his fingers at her she did not respond. And a pair of sparrows flickered down and chirped at his feet; they at least flourished on human discards, perhaps more now than in any other era of sparrow history. Beyond them, great yellow earth-moving trucks roared and stank. The heat shimmered its illusory lakes on the tar.

He stood, brushed the remnants of pastry from his shirt, threw the packet and the juice-bottle into a plastic bin whose hippo-like lid boomed at him, a sardonic laugh. Is this what we have come to? he thought. Is this the actuality of all our genius for communication and cooperation, invention and hope? If this is civilisation, we are doomed. Frenetic, selfish, blinded by immediacies, drowning in its own rubbish. It seemed blindingly obvious in that moment that it was all unsustainable; something had to break, perhaps was already breaking, inside him not least of all. The perpetrators – and he did not exclude himself, glumly acknowledging his own inescapable attachments to vehicle and laptop, camera and stove, TV and cellphone – were probably on the individual level mostly quite nice, seldom actually malign, even probably quite interesting, caring of their own, just making do, yet palpably, cheerfully oblivious, or at least helpless, in the welter of what had become accepted as progressive life, determinedly muffled against its own destructiveness. This is, he concluded, Hell itself.

He managed to reach his vehicle without getting run over, gratefully closed the door against the world. It was a while before he could bring himself to start the engine.

******

No 96 - The wild potency of poo

Indigenous forest behind a fringe of aliens

I am an alien trying to vanquish aliens. That is to say, I am a displaced Zimbabwean of indeterminate national allegiance; I own nothing and am (I convince myself) unowned; but I am sufficiently enamoured of a local patch of remnant indigenous forest to want to do something to save it from invasion. Perhaps because this forest's lush and complex height reminds me of those of my childhood: species of yellowwood and rhoicissus, turaco and neddicky, bushbuck and blue duiker, are common to both. A certain luminous quality of evening light. 

The (other) aliens in question are largely Port Jackson wattle, a.k.a. long-leafed acacia - dense cohorts of Australian invasives that the Working-for-Water organisation battles right across South Africa. I decided to tackle just one small patch on a neighbouring slope. Which means tens of thousands of packed saplings, under and between which almost nothing grows; nothing nests in it or eats it; nothing curbs it but imported wasps who infect the trees with galls and hopefully prevent them seeding further.

Sterile Port Jackson monoculture

So I bought a tree-popper and a panga and made a start, one tree at a time, one square metre after another. A fire set me back by a year; in its ashen wake a million Port Jackson saplings sprouted, thick as the hairs on the back of a dog, as a friend put it. Anyway, I soldiered on, and still do, uprooting what I can, cutting thicker ones, ring-barking the biggest. I could make much faster progress with a chainsaw, but I can't bear the noise, and my method is better exercise. And I think the slow approach is showing advantages. Next property over, the owner called in Working for Water, who blitzed the slopes in a couple of weeks, chainsawing and poisoning the stumps. What seems to have come up predominantly is a harsh species of grass, almost another monoculture, apart from Port Jackson regrowth they've had to come back to.

After a couple of weeks: looks like Armageddon, little replacement
growth as yet; I dread the possibility of a fire torching all this
dead biomass and setting the whole effort back again.

Something very different has happened on my side of the fence. It's not quite what it was before, but the rewilding, as George Monbiot calls it in his book Feral, is progressing in its own intuitive way. Grasses spread quickly into the bare patches, helped along by a couple of resident cattle. Close on its heels are some fynbos species, seeding into the disturbed earth: we're at the easternmost reach of the fynbos biome here. In between, multiple other unnameable ground-cover plants slowly swarm; long-dormant stumps, cut and burned, are resprouting: rhus and knobwoods. An acacia karoo, a year ago just a twisted remnant, has grown a metre and a half and is presently flowering a blinding

After a few months: waist-high fynbos, dead wood rotting
back into the earth, very little Jackson regrowth.

yellow. With the flowers of course come the bees and moths and beetles and other winged pollenators; for the insects and the seeds come the birds, the cisticolas and the prinias. A variety of new browse attracts the bushbuck; new roots the porcupines and the bushpigs. It is such a thrill to see something like a functional ecosystem re-asserting itself.

It's not an unambiguous process. Each tree killed still feels like, well, a death. I am also killing the larvae in the bolls of the wasps, who are in theory my allies. Each tree downed is releasing its carbon dioxide into the already saturated

Knobwood, one of the hardy pioneer species that will form
the beginnings of a new forest.

atmosphere, and I can only trust that the replacement vegetation will reabsorb it, and plus some. Not everything that pops up is good: sometimes it feels like the Iraq situation: you take out the main dictator, but a whole bunch of even nastier people surge into the vacuum, thorny and sneaky and yet harder to control: more aliens like dormant pines, solanum, lantana, prickly pear. Still, on the whole, things are looking better and better. 

This is where the poo comes in. More and more creatures, from larvae to cattle, excreting fertile richness back into an acidified soil, feeding up the bacteria that break things into useable components, succouring the underworld fungal networks on which the above-ground vegetal kingdoms depend. Life dying back into fecundity. As T S Eliot memorably put it in Four Quartets, the soil which supports us is essentially "fur, flesh and faeces". Tell that to the fertiliser companies. So what follows is a little photographic paean to the potentialities of poo.

Bushbuck's round pellets, often fresh and glossy atop
the older, fading deposits.

Porcupine's distinctive 'bullets'

Baboons like to park their coils on visually prominent spots sometimes:
this example contained few granular seeds, as fruit is short in the drought.

Bird droppings often spread seeds as well as nutrients: this one
isn't likely to fertilise much, but makes a nice abstract.

Bushpigs sometimes establish temporary middens,
usually just where you want to walk.

Cowpats can take some time to break down - but lift a corner
and it's alive with hardworking little beetles and bugs...

... some the spawn of this fellow: what exactly he intends to do with this huge
dung-ball is a mystery - but in a day it's gone.

And the cowpats are the birth-place of such
magnificent silvery folk...

*******

Visit Dan and Jill Wylie's books and art at www.netsoka.co.za