Dumbing it down, right down to the ground

Lady Antonia Fraser, in her diary of life with Harold Pinter titled “Must You Go?” recently published (to acclaim) by Weidenfield & Nicolson describes a taxi driver as: “ a burly man of suspicious aspect”. What a wonderful description. And in his poem to her the Novel Prize winner writes;

To Antonia

She dances in my life
Still you turn in my arms
Still we clasp
Still you swim in the big and brilliant bay
And come backing the wave
To my side
And you dance in my arms
And you turn
And stay in my clasp
Where I found you forever
In the only first time in my life
Which calls out again and again
In the light of this moon on our sea
In our fierce and young and tender tide
My dancer my bride

It's reading books such as Must You Go, which revel in the precise use of language, that makes reading such a pleasure. In the title too is a story. They met at a restaurant. They were both married. Not to each other. She was leaving then turned and walked over to Harold. Earlier she has sent him a note: scrawled on a serviette, which she, years later found he had kept. .: “You are right." she had scrawled. " Now shut up.”
She said goodbye to him and she turned to leave he asked: “Must you go”.
She did not. They fell in love and stayed in love. He died in 2008. There is pleasure in language but sadly, not as it moves to txt. Txt, in my opinion cnt say it with meaning. So I ask anyone reading this blog to post, as a comment, one sentence from a book or a poem, literature or junk fiction that moves you. (all credits due) I will gather these together and share what comes I get..
By-the-way, here’s a toast to Mike Nicol for what Leon de Kock describes in a crit of Mike's new crime novel Killer Country as a dumbing down of South African literature. I think it’s really time we got over ourselves and celebrated the fact that a writer of the stature of Mike Nicol can write crime (not God Help, us literary fiction) get low down and dirty.
Why do we have to be so serious about everything. Mike is about as dumbed down as Herman Charles Bosman is As dumbed down as Elmore Leonard, as Richard Price as Mickey Spillane, Ian Rankin and Dostoevsky - es[ecially Crime and Punishment. Well Ok, not the Russian but still.
So lets' climb down from our elitist towers, get over ourselves and love to read good writing wherever, whatever and whenever we find it. Well done Mike. By the way, horror of horrors, not only has Mike dumbed down local literature he has also published in paperback. Eek a penny ‘ orrible. The darkness the darkness.
For the record, if my memory serves me well, Leon enjoyed my anthology of poetry, Palm of My Soul, so the man clearly has taste. ☺ It’s nothing personal. It’s the elitist attitude that rankles. Us and them; the literati and the commoners.
So to begin; my favorite line by — in all modesty — me.” Sealed in a mesh of zip”.... from my poem Voyeur in Palm of My Soul (SNAILPRESS))
Now send me that line, that sentence from whatever source and lets see how dumbed down we who love language and what it conveys, really are.

Dancing through the pain of farewells to put my head on a blog

The long road unwinding. A view from Sir Lowrys' Pass to Cape Town.

In NIA classes, Kathy begins by asking us to take one step forward into the dance. And what a wonderful way that is to begin; to take one step forward into the new. And that’s exactly what I will do when this column comes to an end in the Cape Times today and I step into a blog.
So farewell then. Eleven years is a long time. But it’s the number of years I have been filling this space twice a month.
I have received a few klaps from people for sharing for my love of some remote places, which they believed would become less remote, thanks to my enthusiasm for them, but I have also received a lot of encouragement from people who have found what have written in this space has helped them, start the week with a smile instead of a frown and who have been comforted, particularly in times of trauma.
I received one abusive mail in all that time from a man who said I had wasted 10 minutes or so of his life— the time he elected to read my column. One of the most haunting e-mails I received was after I had written a column about an intruder in my house. It was from another victim of crime. She described being carried “like a bride” across the threshold into her bedroom. Her would-be rapist was disturbed and she was not raped. But that image has remained.
Another was from a person who said one of my columns had helped to come to grips with the devastating loss of a close friend. How wonderful it has been to touch peoples lives; to know that we share so much in what we love and what we fear.
In lighter vein a column that raised a laugh was my description at walking into a tree on a hiking trail near Stanford, when I almost knocked myself out while Greig doubled over with laughter. To his credit Greig has always been a most convivial companion.
He also taught me not to be afraid of cooking; in those days I could boil water and add milk to muesli. “Many men marry,” his mother had apparently told him as she taught him to cook, “ out of hunger.”
Years later Greig, still has a quote for every occasion; This from Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock:” Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl". Indeed.
Two shrink-wrapped woman appeared in those 11 years. One was a lithe German-speaking blonde who, unannounced, joined us for two days on the Tsitsikamma trail shrink-wrapped in skimpy black shorts, the other was a lady shrink-wrapped into a pink leotard gyrating at gym. And to my amusement, I still meet people who remember my description of taking my costume off in public in a stressful daze after a swim at gym.
“Stress,” remarked my optometrist at the time “is like dust, it gets into everything”
So thank you then to Jenny Crocker, who gave me space for my first column, to Chris Whitfield the then Editor of the Cape Times who allowed me the a more regular slot, to Ann, for being an encouraging and enthusiastic critic, bold enough to caution me when a column skidded off the data forks, and quick to praise when it worked.
And to my friend Peter who gave me the best advice of all when week after week I struggled to end on a punchy note. “ Sometimes," said Peter,” you have to just let go.” And I did. And so it was also that I let go of so much baggage earlier this year by jumping off Lions head under a paraglider and I will let go of this space today, after the full stop at the end.
That I even know what a blog is, is really impressive given that I am tech-impaired. It was, after all, only a few short years ago that I was asking which way up to put the CD in the CD player. This week it was the cigarette-dispensing machine at the restaurant. “Good grief,” I said.” Cigarettes 20.17 a pack these days,
“No Evelyn,” replied Greig “that’s the time.” Ahh. I replied as the price went up to 20.18 a pack.
In the years to come I hope to keep on dancing. I got hooked on NIA, (initially Non Impact Aerobics but now so much more) just before Christmas. What trauma closes down NIA opens up, and instead of curling into yourself like a fetus to protect yourself from the pain; you dance with joy and celebrate life. It’s wonderful.
So thank you and farewell then. As a parting shot, let me mimic Greig and offer a quote: this from the TV series Hill Street Blues: “be careful out there.”

Leaping into the New Year is one way to hit the ground running

I began my new year by running off the edge of Lions Head and leaping into the air.

My knees almost scraped the tips of the proteas at the foot of the “runway” but thanks Wayne, my paraglider pilots’ skill with the big wing, we were up, up and away in the nick of time.

I ended the year with walk on Muizenberg beach, a slalom ski through the crowds packed closer than the clichéd sardines in a tin. There I tip toed over a rash of bluebottles, caught wafts of conversation, and captured vignettes of humans on holiday to the smell of suntan lotion, and the low gravelly rush of the sea at high tide.

I will never forget watching a little girl, about eight years old, standing in the crowd at the water’s edge her arms outstretched, little hands waving, tiny fingers like propellers, jumping for joy.

She was yelling “thank you, thank you, thank you” as the high tide washed a swathe of foamy water into the trench she had scooped in the sand.

Then she squealed with delight as she jumped into her private tidal pool and splashed about in the few seconds the water lasted before it was sponged into the sand.

Much later on the same day, I walked behind a man, who was sweating with exertion, huffing and puffing as he tried to keep up with his 10-year-old daughter climbing step-by-step up a steep section of the path to the summit of Lions Head.

We were among the hundreds and hundreds of people climbing, just before New Year’s Eve, like a row of soldier ants, to bathe under the pale light of the full blue moon while the city, winked orange neon far below.

The little girl springy as a cricket in her bright pink top, all gangly legs and arms was hopping, step-by-step effortlessly higher and higher. Her father struggling to keep up, as she asked if they could climb Table Mountain when they had done with Lions Head.

He did not have the breath to reply, but said afterwards, to me; “Jus! Its hard to keep up with them, man.”

It reminded me of a footnote I received attached to an e-mail this week: It read: Every morning in Africa a Gazelle wakes up knowing it must out-run the fastest lion or it will be eaten up. Every morning a Lion wakes up knowing that it must run faster than the slowest Gazelle or it will die of hunger. Whether you are a lion or a Gazelle, when the sun is up...better be running.

And so it was last year that I ran. I sprinted to South America, to Australia, swam in the Amazon, walked the length of the Copacabana, to Ipanema and back, and dreamed of Long Beach, Noordhoek and longed for home. In the sultry rainforest I remembered the slopes of Table Mountain, and the in the warm and oily Amazon, the cool, refreshing waters of the Palmiet. And in Australia, they have beaches but who would there be to understand you if you said: “Jou ma’ se…”

So happy to be home, I took my life into my own hands jumped off Lions Head, to begin my new year with a gasp of exhilaration followed by a whoop of pure joy.