The Gifts from Friendship

A Week’s Spontaneous Offerings. Tailoring a Suit to suit.

In the scramble to make any kind of progress in the mountainous world of book marketing it is sometimes quite hard to perceive the significant and generous. As an author there is always more mountain to ascend. I have probably been more whinger than winged, doggedly putting one foot after another without stopping for the view, or even a meal. Truth is I am too impatient to master stratagems I don’t believe will work anyway, and all the IT cleverness I might need I do not really trust. Besides there is always an Inbox waiting to be answered or emptied. Not to even glance at that Novella half written and short stories to be polished and posted. They must bide.

This week it is time to give thanks to my new friends; people who have hosted guest blogs like Chris Graham, the Story Reading Ape , who still comes to visit me and leaves his spoor, and Roz Morris who shows how it is all done, with one hand, and still has time to ride and read recipes, and one or two faithful friends who read everything like Ashen Venema, who gives heart to everyone in generous poetic images that blow roses into mid winter. You have all kept me going and I have not thanked you enough. This is for you.

What focused my attention on those who might feel less than sufficiently acknowledged in my obsessive Skinner rat existence have been two events this week that a professional publicist might die for. Both came as unexpected gifts metaphorically left on the door step, entirely unexpected.. Somehow this site and the book drew that attention of the first person ever to actually sign up as an official ‘friend’ which earned Brian George the questionable honour of the first Canto of the book. We exchanged a few letters and he sent some materials to a friend of his called Joe Moore who runs a podcast Interview site called Occult Sentinel. Joe interviewed me this week and within 24 hours the Interview was posted up.

Joe’s sympathetic and thoughtful questions gave the opportunity really to introduce the book to a possible readership, to define why it was written and why in poetry, and how it is different from the great wealth of books suggesting we have all reached the end of a road, or that Armageddon requires us to ‘Brace brace!’ His podcast can be visited and other things of great interest found on Occult Sentinel. Nothing is easier than talking about a book to someone who is genuinely interested. It turns the wretched sense of selling, to one of offering and that is another feeling altogether. I am indebted to both Brian George and Joe Moore for reminding me of that.

The other thing this week brought (despite the floods) in Devon and Somerset was a copy of the Holistic Science Journal’ which is subtitled ‘The quest for perception in lived experience’ and this issue (Vol 2 Issue 3) is devoted to various articles and thoughts on Parallel Time. As a compilation, dovetailing very diverse ideas, the magazine weaves together strands that complement one another, a new vision of something deeper pushing outwards in multifaceted worlds of experience, from plant language and intuitive medicine, marine systems and water harvesting, and then the world of mind and other minds. The Editor Philip Franses and his team of volunteers have put together a compilation of ideas and articles, all of which relate to alternative thoughts about time, matter, creation and relationships within the outer and inner worlds, from the mathematician Fantappie and Henri Bergson to Teilhard de Chardin and nestled in such company, yours truly. Rather daunting to find myself so seated at a high table. (Though the Editor had judiciously removed any frivolous challenges to the august company I was to keep, -never can resist the slight poke with a stick to see if it moves! I suspect he knew it would without any help.)

This offers a link to the Holistic Science Journal which is (barely) maintained by subscription. Survival of all such generosity needs friends. Do please visit. The ‘Contents will give you an idea of its breadth, the abstracts at the beginning of each contribution some indications of their depth.

I am not sure if this is good news for the rest of you but I confess myself renewed. This week I take on the tube strike with a talk at Watkins Bookshop on Thursday (6.30 Cecil Court Nr Leicester Sq) Perhaps I will develop a taste for talking and if you come I might have a chance to do some listening. That would be good. All welcome. Thank you and Adieu.

South African Safari (circa 1944)

New Year’s Resolution (Now to take Action)

My few followers (probably sick to death of THE BOOK) have suggested that the South Africa I grew up in might find its way into blogs and stories. They are more relevant to the book than might be imagined since all I grew up with found its way in somehow, furnished images, spoke dialects, poked fun. So are you sitting comfortably? What’s in it for you? A safari round Africa, encounters with elephants and elephantine characters and then some Proper Stories (note the capitals) if you’d like. Just ask.

Recovering Maweni Heights.

Mandela’s death has pricked slow oozing memories from my earliest life, like bitter beads of sap from a cut aloe. They are of the beloved country with its smell of grass, and wood-smoke, and the whiff of rain promised in sudden moisture; of mielie meal in sacking and pungent sweet sweat beneath blankets. The sounds are peppered with incredulity ‘Ow Nkosi!’ and courtesy ‘Sala gahle’ reassurance, and always laughter behind shy hands. There is singing somewhere, in harmony of seconds, and in the evening’s low light wending figures piled with wood, or water containers, going home. The sky immense, and unending, the stars bright salt in the black velvet of a night that falls like a curtain at an appointed hour. The day closing with the sudden certainty of an angelus, and the dim lights of the kraal fires flickering soon after.

Most of my memories are cast in the remote areas where a bushbuck might appear, mountaineous from horseback, or flat and arid from a ten ton truck grinding through sand, but no matter how different the regions we inhabited or travelled the essence remained, of tolerance, and gentleness, and above all an open curiosity. People were books to be fathomed, and opportunities to read them were precious. I never recall fear or any warnings, or prohibitions. From the moment I could walk I was encouraged to walk wide, as far as the eye could see, and away. Where people were concerned, nothing was unsafe. Nobody ever asked when I would be home.

My earliest recollections offer the view of legs below a table in a room with an audible clock. A clean scrubbed kitchen, with a cat cuffing a dog and eventually lifted onto cushions to eat a bowl of yellow mielie porridge with brown sugar and cream. I do not recall the faces but the sense that things would always be just like this, immortal and forever. The barefoot maids came and went with piles of ironed linen, and basins on hips or heads, and when spoken to raised their aprons to hide the smiles and embarrassment. Through the open doorways the light was blinding, and by contrast the room dark, with surfaces so polished that gleams from the edges of things, silver and copper would whisper grander rooms elsewhere, the rooms I later found in picture books or museums; grand tureens, silver trays, and by the back door saddle trees and boot hooks. The stoep (verandah) was where the older family lived and entertained the always unexpected guests (people were always an excuse for more strong coffee and peach brandy if sunset threatened) and over the stoep railings Catorba grapes rambled, the round small black grapes you popped by squeezing their sour skins, (sour enough to freeze-dry the palate) into the mouth, an explosion of unique sweetness, unlike any other grape.

Down along the left, marching away from the house like defending warriors, were the oak trees and below them rusted old tractors where I had a swing and a bouncing metal seat afforded control of a steering wheel. The farm, braced against the buttress rock behind it, where a silver pencil of water fell into the pool below, was the only homestead visible in any direction. Behind that waterfall the dark python cave held shivers of courage. My days were endless roaming between the kraal where I was teased by the women who plaited my hair, and the swing and the grapes, with a pocket full of dried peaches so hard they had to be sucked before they could be chewed. They were sour too, and green or sour fruit has always brought memories and been preferred.

I was less than three and probably only a few months on that farm, but the memory has flashed unchanged ever since as though caught swinging below deep oak. I recall my first ride, in front of a saddle and the view of a rippling neck and the ears that flickered when the rider spoke but I have no memory of what the rider looked like. Three year olds seldom see a face. I recall the boots and the knees under khaki shorts, sharp brown against the blue-white sock covered skin. Mostly it was grass and the hurumph of a horse nodding and stopping to crop when it thought it could. I thought I might die for a horse, I loved them uncontrollably and breathed in their smell as though it was life giving. Horses understand passion, and accept it as their rightful due. So it is, which is why I daily gave my mother thanks for my name- lover of horses. My father was her big mistake but at least the first name she got right.

That was the van den Bosch farm where I was with my galleon grandmother while my poor abandoned mother returned to the Reef to finish her interrupted medical training. I was the interruption and I’ve tried not to repeat that in later life. I always retained the vivid memory of the farm but for seventy years no further encounter. Later the van den Bosches were spoken of, occasionally; the polo playing wild boys, the Dutch home in the Heerengracht from which their forbears had sailed, the first qualified vet in the country, but they were the hidden side, from my grandmother’s mother of whom there are forbidding photographs and a terrible tale. From that terrible event my grandmother had sought refuge in the other half of her blood and other places. Her father was a Barrett, related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a gentleman raised in a world of civilised discourse, at sea in those fields of limitless grass and the harsh barter of Afrikaanerdom. The farm might have been the setting for a book I had read rather than a memory. I was never totally sure.

Until…

Continue reading “South African Safari (circa 1944)”

Network Review January 2014

Continue reading “Network Review January 2014”

Mandela’s Idealistic Forbears- Some Even White.

Harold Jowitt -’Enlightened Visionary’

In the aftermath of Mandela’s death many have sought to exploit any political advantage by either claiming that they too were enlightened liberals ( like Peter Hain (et al) who have made it a career rope-ladder) or that no white man ever saw the light until led by this extraordinary statesman. What for me began as a quiet tribute to those I knew (and, like Mandela, knew of) has now escalated into an unedifying scramble for Mandela stardust.

The Times carries letters of both kinds, from politicians like Dennis MacShane, never slow to exploit an opening to discredit Thatcher or conservative policy

Minnie Humphreys Barrett (van den Bosch) and Harold Jowitt fluent Swahili and Zulu linguist — Minnie Humphreys Barrett (mother-van den Bosch) and Harold Jowitt fluent Swahili and Zulu linguist

or plaintive rebukes from those who had reasons to know otherwise, friends of Bram Fischer the defense attorney at the Treason Trial, committed to life imprisonment.

It seems I must join the fray. Not to climb the Mandela bandwagon, but to support a deeper truth, that South Africa incubated Mandela. Smuts, Sir Seretse Khama, Albert Luthuli, Trevor Huddleston in different ways all contributed the dignity of humanity free of race, or prejudice, which might have given Mandela his faith in what he sought to achieve. I grew up amongst many of them, Afrikaaners, English speaking Whites and Blacks of varied tribal origins. On the strength of the post I wrote immediately after news of his death I have been asked by several to recall my South Africa, in vignettes, stories, and recollections. It seems a suitable moment to offer these. Let me start with a history long before Mandela….

Before Mandela had been heard of, my grandfather Harold Jowitt, ‘Heli’ had been Director of African Education’ in Rhodesia, in Uganda,and when I knew him, Bechuanaland (Botswana) and then Basutoland (Lesotho). He spoke both Swahili and Zulu fluently. Rather than my views here is an extract from the ‘Journal of African Society. Vol 33 No 133 published in October of 1934.

Suggested Methods for the African School. By Harold Jowitt (Longmans) ( One of his books still available at a high price) The writer of this extract is not identified.

‘Some years ago an Inspector in Natal took the reviewer (this author) to visit a number of remote native schools. It was a very interesting experience. The Inspector was greeted with enthusiasm wherever he went. His aim was to help teachers to be better teachers and occasionally he would take charge of classes for an entire morning in order to show them how to do it. Arithmetic, writing, nature study, scripture- indeed anything on the timetable was taken just as it came, and all this was done in the native language without even a word of English. This was an Inspector after Matthew Arnold’s own heart

‘Heli’ The School Inspector. Riding throughout Zululand in a jacket and tie as any respectful Inspector would!

In a much longer chapter of a book only published in 1998, the following direct quotations about Heli and from his correspondence appear.

‘He was an educator of imposing stature, a dynamic leader of immense popularity…an innovator willing to risk his reputation in order to try new ideas’

‘Jowitt became a fragile bridge over troubled waters…He tried to mediate the conflict between political philosophy and the reality of human existence..between African desire for a good academic education as a means of eliminating old colonial stereotypes and the colonial intent to have…cheap labour.’

‘He warned of the consequences of continuing the attitude that ‘the security of one race can be ensured by the repression of another….The Africans must not be trained by an inferior kind of education to function as better hewers of wood or drawers of water for their white masters.’

‘He needed the wisdom of Solomon to play colonial hide and seek.’

‘His ability to perceive what was possible in light of what was ideal gave him the balance he needed as he walked this delicate political tightrope’

‘He wrote a stinging attack- ‘ the policy of practical training for Africans was ‘in the long run an immoral institution…because education must be universal there was no reason to practice racial discrimination’

‘Jowitt had a vision of the Africa of the future. He could not fit the system of which he was a part…He refused to subscribe the materials that were needed to build the laager.’

An Extract from a Book ‘The Last Defenders of the Laager:Ian D. Smith and F.W. de Klerk by Dickson A.Mungazi published in 1998…‘

My grandfather Heli- So named by the Baganda in Uganda and never called anything else

Heli and me. Roma Lesotho where he helped found the University of Botwana, Lesotho and Swaziland.

Noel, Heli’s Christmas present to me when I was nine. Saddled and tied to the gate on Xmas morning

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Cry the Beloved Country- Hamba Gahle Madiba

RAW MATERIAL.

I grew up in the most openly reviled country in the world. Before I was old enough to understand the reasons, I was aware that hatred of South Africa was built on essential misconceptions. Its flagrant disregard of pretence made it conspicuous, not because it was worse than the more nuanced and subtle hatreds, the hypocrisies that lay concealed under laws elsewhere, particularly in Britain, but because its were worn onthe sleeve. It was easy to target what was visible. Yet I believe that that very visibility contributed to its redemption. Mandela was called out by that essential and brutal honesty, however deeply misguided its expressions. Reconciliation needs the truth as fundamental to it, and the truth was inescapable.

My early life was spent close to others not far from heroic, in quiet ways and my family all served South Africa with the deepest affection, the most emphatic allegiance. When Mandela walked downstage into the spotlight of South Africa’s liberation it was to eclipse the many others left in the darkness, and those he called out from the wings were, understandably, those whose loyalty he embraced and acknowledged. Mostly his fellow sufferers, and mostly black. Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Steve Biko, Desmond Tutu, so many self controlled stars that ushered him forward, and stood back. There were many white ones too but in the black and white simplicity of the foreign press they are seldom seen. That is the way of a very bright light and his extraordinary self-effacing heroism flattens the perspective. I am driven to want to call out others, to fill the curtain-call of his life with those whose love for South Africa he expressed, and they were many, and many were white. He acknowledged it, always, but others forgot.

His death has struck in me a deep well of longing and homesickness. It is a longing to recapture something seldom expressed. The country he loved and saved from itself was always more complex than portrayed. From a distance South Africa was reduced to easy generalisations. Apart from all whites as the oppressors there were smaller ones: Afrikaners were ‘verkrampte, at best paternalistic; Capetownians were smug and the citizens of Jo’burg rude, thrusting and materialistic; English speakers ( well sort-of English) were too selfish to heed their consciences but held privilege ( and mining rights) instead. From a distance these clichés could survive, ( and clichés all hold vivid but only part truth) and the man whose long walk to freedom bound them into a new alliance seemingly did so un-aided. F.W de Klerk gets occasional acknowledgement, though not enough, because his courage was to risk complete loss, on the strength of his personal trust, and to take the frightened ‘wuth’ as we might say.

Nothing I would like to write is to diminish the ‘favoured son’ Mandela’s qualities or achievements, but perhaps to explain the dancing in the street outside his home in Soweto. We all loved what he loved. If Madiba was the ‘father’ it was to the family we grew up in, and the love for which never left us, even in its darkest days. Of course there were, and are, opportunists, who turned their coats in the political winds, the new members of the ANC in 1990 no different from the new minted Nationalists in 1950 but that would be true anywhere.

Alan Paton’s ‘Cry the Beloved Country’ was written and published in 1948, the fateful year in which South Africa was closed, the Nationalists, having rigged the constituency boundaries swept to power while Jan Smuts was helping to create the League of Nations and had his back turned, disregarding his country’s own fortunes. The classic literature of South Africa; Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm; Herman Bosman’s Mafeking Road, Fitzpatrick’s ‘Jock of the Bushveldt’; all express the intense and conflicted affection for not only the landscape but the people, all the people. This remains so in its contemporary fiction: Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J.M Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Lewis Nkosi (who was for a time, before he had to flee in 1960, a close friend). It is too easy to imagine these are the words of the elite, liberated to ‘expose’ or articulate only because somehow, against the odds, enlightened and international.

I was blest with a possibly unique family; unique in how many divides it straddled, how many influences it absorbed. I have stories to tell, vignettes, and episodes, and perhaps the time has come to tell them. In honour of Mandela and to remember the raw material he had at his disposal. I believe it was that he recognised, and which tempered his self-control, because few were outright villains, and none were saints, but almost all were lovers.

Gateways of the Mind-Re-learning the Already Known

Gateways of the Mind- Re-Learning the Already Known.

I feel like one of those street artists whose flamboyant chutzpah will draw a crowd only to watch him fall on his face or make his name by buying his painting, basket, or beaded necklace and getting themselves photographed with the ‘fellow they stumbled across’. WOW!

I want to weave an argument with only the reclamation that blew into the gutter over the past week.

Some scraps washed down:-

First: the publicist to whom my entire fortune has been paid departed with a wave of the ‘campaign’ hand. Over fifty two review books posted, not one review, not a single interview scheduled happened, and of those still ‘in the pipeline and due to deliver’ not one has. Nor have they even confirmed that they exist. Every email unanswered. Colour? Sludge green I’d say.

Second: a presumptive apology from a blogger I follow, who seemed to fear that she would not be able to put her two hours a day into feeding a poem to the seals waiting at noon. They might read less and less often. Well, this is a ‘zoo keeper’ who without fail posts a poem every day. What struck me was her feeling that she needed to apologize! Suddenly a gift becomes an expectation. That lends a purplish hue, like a bruise.

Third: the loss of a handbag from a locked shop. It happened like this: The night before I had a dream— I was dawdling round a modest antique market in a village hall when I saw another woman trying on a very perfect Edwardian outfit, lemon-yellow bell shaped skirt with pin tucked hem and tight trim waist, crisp white lawn blouse, both under a coat in putty coloured linen of such precision tailoring it made a cheetah look careless. I coveted it and waited with baited breath to see if the other women would bear it away. No, she rejected it! I snatched it up and realised that the woman who coveted that ’My Fair Lady’ look no longer existed. Not only was there no hope of those minute ‘hooks’ getting anywhere near their respective ‘eyes’, but I look dreadful in both yellow and putty. I woke up, desolate. ‘You are not who you think you are, or who you are trying to be’ Once a black hat, large shades and a long cigarette holder would pass muster for an Audrey Hepburn party. Now the Wreck of the Hesperus should be dressing down, in tweed and a hiding hat.

Yet the dream lingered and next day while killing time waiting for the cobbler to return with his lunch time sandwich, I drifted into a vintage clothing shop, newly opened, and opened up by an obliging beautician who held the key to the store in the owners absence. She drank coffee while I spun rails, gloomily mindful of the dream’s central message. I limited myself to the nearly burkas on the ‘not fit for Oxfam’ rail. Together we two left. She locked. I realised I had no bag. She re-opened. Bag had disappeared! Two people combing through a locked and people-free shop found no bag. Now ‘You really are nobody at all!’ Passport, Driving Licence, money, membership of anything cards, all gone. Into thin air.

For the weekend (next day) I had booked a place at the ‘Gateways of the Mind’ Conference’ in London. Was the loss of everything going to deter resolve? Very nearly, but no, I would not be vanquished by mere deluded misfortune. I had deserved it. Stuff happens.

This conference was promising to teach me how to Out of Body (OBE) at will and fly once I was ‘out’; introduce me to a power animal (Fish-eagle? Polar bear? Elephant?) which in Shamanic journeys would conduct me safely through the underworlds, and accompany me to the Himalayan heights of spiritual purity, and others would sooth my ruffled feathers with meditation, chanting and Tibetan bowls. What could go wrong?

Nothing went wrong. Not exactly. The bowls sounded just dandy, the meditations were great, but I could have done those at home. Each speaker diverted, and entertained. I wasn’t bored. It was just that the whole was less than the parts, and it is usually the opposite. This was frayed wadding of a greyish hue. In all the talk of new consciousness there was nothing of the numinous, nothing celestial, nothing grand or reverent; OBE’s were the new broadband tunings, better than Ayahuasca, safer than LSD. I came home with a new resolve.

I would not look for answers, images, advice, programs, how-to books, or marketing and publicity gurus ever again. That does not mean I shall stop reading what falls my way, but I won’t go looking anymore.

Suddenly this tapestry started to take shape and I recognised what has bugged me all along and why the word ‘platform’ makes me shudder. All those speakers were speaking from a platform and like everyone I have tried to emulate over the past year, (How much spent? Don’t ask) it was always through a loudhailer…my book…my method…my insight…my experience…my authority. Garish orange that clashes with every other colour I like!

Only a reader can validate a book. Who is an author to say (by whatever means?) ‘read my book…it will enlighten…assist…show you…anything?’ That may be true of how-to books written by conquering heroe(ine)s .People keep saying ‘If you don’t believe in it, why should anyone else?’ Truth is, they shouldn’t— unless they read and find it worthy of belief. (That was why publishers once existed, to broker belief.) How can I believe in something for which they are the only validation? How find them without waving garish orange which misrepresents the work in question? Liberty is its central component.

Guess what? As soon as I had clearly made up my mind on this, the telephone rang. My bag had been found—by a cleaner! All contents present and correct. I just forgot who I was and someone thought it worth while to remind me. The potency of symbols and living metaphors! Life keeps all the reins in hand. I shall slow to a walk through long dew grass, and see where the cavalcade takes me.

The Genesis and Embryology of a Rainbow

This post is taken from a recent article commissioned by the Watkins MBS Editor, and it explains both the experiences that led to the book and the reasons for writing it poetically. I provide a link to the whole article on Scribd which can be enlarged to full screen.(Click box at the bottom right corner)

Watkins MBS Magazine (November 5th 2013).

The Genesis and Embryology of a Rainbow

View this document on Scribd

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