spuds and news and a nasty lump of coal

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan 

First things first:

After admiring Ellen's feast of blossoms forever, we ordered seeds from a hopefully reliable Dutch supplier and look what has come up:

Caesalpinia gilliesii aka Bird of Paradise bush

 

I speak words of encouragement everytime I pass the little pots. I am expecting only greatness.

One of these days, my energy storage tank, which is filling up nicely, will reach sufficient levels to become active in the blogworld again. However, supervision in this household is strict, nurse Ratchet would be proud.

So again, just a few bits and pieces. 

Because of about a hundred stickers protesting against the Nazi regime, Liane Berkowitz was beheaded with a guillotine 82 years ago today, on 5 August 1943, two days before her 20th birthday, in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin. Take a moment to remember her.

The potatoe harvest has been exceptional this year, we are reaching Irish standards. Here are representatives of some of the varieties we harvested and are now eating.

left to right:

Ackersegen (blessing of the field), Rote Emalie (red Emalie), Cilena, Blauer Schwede (blue Swede), Heidemarie (Mary of the heather)

The last tigridia of the year:

 

And two bits that came through the ethers this morning. 

This is not meant to be funny because it's actually disturbingly evil, where to begin, if women are bits of coal what's next . . .

 

Instead, let this be your guide today:

 

 

 

 

never a dull moment

 What should have been just another routine medical appointment turned into a rather lengthy painful procedure involving barfing all over the place and full anesthetics and sleeping it off at home - thankfully. Results in a week or so.

We had about seven drops of rain today. The sum total since I cannot remember when. This is the summer we need to seriously consider gardening in a changed climate. Daily watering is not an option. The rambling rose, however, is coping well. Even on a muggy day.

Words for our time:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.

Flannery O'Connor

The most prominent and most frightening aspect of the escape from reality (. . . ) lies in the attitude to dealing with facts as if they were opinions.

Hannah Arendt


Also, it's Friday. This is music from Sweden.

progress is incremental and not always linear

But there it is, progress nevertheless. From feverish snuffling and moaning to just being grumpy and shaky. The sighs of relief around me are loud and deep, even I can hear them. I am a rotten patient.

Ok, so this will pass and in a day or two, Monday the latest, I shall turn into a polite human being again. Meanwhile, let me provide three reasons why reading Louise Erdrich is such a profound experience.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. We all got to face the nothingness before us and behind. Call it sleep. We all begin in sleep and that's where we find our end. Even in between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake in life as much as possible - that may be the point.

Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives and we harbour its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion.

There is no trace where we were. No arrows pointing to the place we're headed. We are the trackless beast, the invisible light, the thought without a word to speak. Poured water, struck match. Before the nothing, we are the moment.

These are from The Bingo Palace, her fourth novel from 1994. I have read all of her books but in a higgledy piggledy way, whenever I found one in a library or at a second hand book stall - Germans do read English language editions (so do the Dutch).
This year I made it my task to read all her novels in the order they were written, which makes a lot of sense. But I am slow because internet etc.

And now for something completely different. Wonderful blogger friend Robin has just started what I hope and wish to become a regular thing, Music on a Friday.  And do you know what? I will do that too.
Thanks Robin for the idea and I hope you don't mind if I hook up.
From my songlist, Nadia Reid, a New Zealand songwriter.

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

 Aimé Césaire

When you have no choice, don't be afraid.

proverb from somewhere, I forget

Val Senales, Alto Adige, Italy

We humans need to be close to, and opposed to, and sometimes subservient to, and always respectful of the physical realities of the planet we live on. We need to receive its pure silences and attend to its winds, to wade through its rivers and sweat under its sun, to plough through its sands and sleep on its bumps. Not all the time but often enough for us to remember that we are animals. Clever animals, yet ultimately dependent, like any animal, on the forces of Nature. Whole areas of one's humanity could become atrophied if one remained always within a world where motor-roads are more important than trees and speed is more important than silence.

Dervla Murphy

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the human race.

H.G. Wells

My luck has come in again and I have been that adult on a bicycle for the last two weeks now. This is what it looks like every day when I have managed to survive 8 km of busy city traffic. This forest is my antidepressant. What you don't see - and why can I not take a picture on my phone that shows how steep it is? - is that right at the top here in this picture is where the first of two very steep hairpin bends begin.

Once I have managed these two tough bends, it gets easier and after about 4 km, it is all easy peasy level.

Right here at the t-junction I could turn left and cycle on through thick forest, vineyards and more forest for a couple of weeks, cross the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees and eventually arrive in Santiago de Compostela because this small road is a branch of the Camino, the Jakobsweg. There was a time when we were seriously contemplating this trip. Well, maybe in another life time.

But here I turn right and go on for another 4 km through the most gorgeous lush forest, complete with small bridges and streams and very noisy birds, until I reach the university campus and my desk.

I started cycling when I was 5 years old. This bicycle here is actually a fancy electric bike. I have just completed 10,000 km on it (since 2011). It has saved me from a life of miserable chronic illness.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus lived a very long time ago (he was born 2357 years ago on the beautiful island of Samos where people fleeing war and persecution and poverty are arriving everyday, if they survive the short crossing in these overloaded rubber boats having paid several thousand euros for the privilege. Should you ever find yourself in one of the many harbour bars in, say, Kusadasi in Turkey, and you fancy a quick trip to one of the Greek island so enticingly shimmering on the horizon while you sip your sweet chai, all you need to do is walk down to the pier and pay 40 euros for a round trip ticket. You get on to the shiny white ferry and let the wind ruffle your hair while you look at the blue sea and the fading Turkish coastline. That's your privilege because you own the world.). 

Anyway, Epicurus, he wrote lots of wise stuff. I know of him because my father insisted on a classical grammar school where the bored teenager I was then - dreaming of Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones - would spend hours translating and reciting and interpreting ancient Greek literature. I may give you a run down of Plato's cave allegory one day. But that's another story.

A friend of a friend died last week. Suddenly and quite avoidably. He thought he was strong and invincible and he never really needed to see a doctor before. Men tend to be like that in my experience.

He was wrong or maybe fate was waiting. Who knows. It is dreadfully sad, one way or another. 

And we who knew him, we who hear of his unexpected death, we are all now silently contemplating our health, our plans, our futures, our children's futures, our lives stretching in front of us.

Ten more summers? Fifteen? Two? Or is this it?

In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus wrote:

For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

The love one has for a child (. . . ) is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not "I love her" but "How is she?" The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold her in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that may child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies - you know those little white ones - I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimetres away from smacking itself against a windscreen.

Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

(Despite this quote - which rings true to some extent -  I gave up on the book about two thirds through. I did a quick speed read to the end to find out whether there were any big revelations in store but no, more splendid marble-based interior design details, bespoke suits and handmade shoes, trips to India and select exclusive European destinations, excellent menu suggestions and all that predictable suffering and trauma. However, no time frame, no history, no world events, just a handful of men ageing in style and incredible wealth and professional success so it seemed, with an absurd one-centred concept of friendship and compassion. In the end I just had to stop in order to get rid of the taste in my mouth, like artificially sweetened cotton wool. 

That and reading it in bed made my arms ache.)

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. 

Pema Chödrön

Let's pretend I read this quote for inspiration and relief. Let's pretend I am brave and can look my negativity in the eye and give out a tiny non-squeamish hiss of recognition. While I wouldn't have the energy to jump for whatever reason, I somehow managed to go to work for three days in a row. I am not sure about tomorrow. And every evening when I get home in this exhausted and foul mood I am starting to contemplate a life without the job. (Whereas every morning I think it's not really that bad.) 

But right now, I am ticking off days waiting for my body to pack it in once again. One way or the other. Yet maybe maybe maybe, plan C or D or whichever is about to begin, will actually do the trick. Only, I am waiting for my lovely immunologist to call me with the war plan and the dates and then I have to figure out a way to get there and back. I have been given a booklet with information on side effects and what to expect and how to react. I've attempted to  read it a couple of times but found the narrative difficult to follow. Every page is illustrated with pictures of extremely healthy looking people and I get distracted checking their outfits and their suntans. 

Matters did not improve when I went from Downton Abbey straight into The Leftovers. Talk about negativity. With a capital N. Like November.

This here was our back yard in paradise.

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

Marilynne Robinson

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Susan Sontag

atrial fibrillation

My secret belief - the innermost credo by which I live - is that although life is loathsomely ugly and people are often terribly vile and cruel and base, nevertheless there is something at the back of it all, which if only I were great enough to understand would make everything, everything indescribably beautiful.

Katherine Mansfield

Last Monday I woke in the early hours with a feeling of urgency and dread like never before. I got up and as I walked to the window to find the moon I passed out. It was all very gentle, my legs slowly bending and folding onto the soft carpet. Almost elegant. For a brief moment only. I pulled myself up and that is when my heart started to race and skip and stop and start. These jolly occasional jumps have been scrutinised extensively in recent years. Extra systolic beats are nothing to get worked up about, they told me. Only, this was slightly massively more than an extra beat here and there. The regular and boring thud thud thud of my heart had turned into a wild jig and while I was lying there trying to decipher this new rhythm, which wasn't a rhythm at all, I felt quite curious, calm even. 

Anyway, to cut a tedious story short, I eventually had the unexpected  pleasure of the second ambulance ride of my life. I got the full treatment, sirens and all, and I was actually laughing, it was so exhilarating with trees and houses rushing by. Nothing like the first one three weeks ago when I was puking all the way. Hell no, this was great fun.

It was all very picture book really, like on tv, the monitors with the colourful curves and bleeps, the tubes and ports and needles and wonderful calm skilled people coming and going with reassuringly orchestrated regularity administering potions and performing rituals and - oh yes! - that weird gown. I really regret that I left it behind.

Sometime during the following night, my heart had enough of it and jumped back into its boring regular groove. And as it did so, all the monitors started to bleep and shout and flash and the night nurses came running and cheering and clapping and I called home and then took this picture of the heavens above me.

We are all in some way beggars in this lifetime. We are at the mercy of others and at the mercy of what will happen to us. Of course, we can chose how we respond to it, but we are always praying for something to happen or not happen in one way or another. We come with these empty bowls and there’s a great deal that is given to us … We are all vulnerable to whatever might befall us.

Ellen Bass

I have no patience right now.  No desire to wait this out. I wake up in a sweat, desperately trying to find the switch that gets me out of this. Fighting another wave of nausea, but too exhausted to panic. Maybe all will be well or maybe it really doesn't matter. Shreds of dignity here and there but barely so.
Oh heavens. Tough shit.

Human beings have hope built in. If they weren’t hopeful they would have died out a long time ago.

Margaret Atwood

. . . the lesson of Lacan is, living by your wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideas and ideals and not to measure your life by what you've attained in terms of your desires but those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self-sacrifice. Because in the end, the only way that we can measure the significance of our own lives is by valuing the lives of others.

"When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. "This is often considered to be man's first attempt at a calendar" she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. 'My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar.'
"It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women's contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men's place in the history books? (. . .) History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They're not all saints, they're not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering."

Sandi  Toksvig

Garry Knight

Garry Knight

We aren’t on this Earth to improve endlessly, forever approaching infinite perfection but never quite getting there. We are here to notice the enormity and beauty of everything around us, and to notice each other – to notice how flawed we all are, and feel connected anyway.

Heather Havrilesky

letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is 

Pema Chödrön

Cycling for 40 mins home in the dark, first the forest, no moon, not a sound, just heavy rain, then down the hill and into the city, icy drops on my face and the obnoxious swishing noises from my not-anymore-waterproof gear, the drivers who come too close in their fat cars, who forget to indicate, who try and push me off the road. Note: try, not succeed because I roar at them, cursing and hissing I move through the evening traffic. At home I peel off the muddy layers trying to find my solid self underneath and fail, shaking and weeping and tired, my gums shot to pieces, at least I hope it's just the gums - she said to wait for it to calm down, maybe a week. If not, we'll try and save that tooth, promise, she said. Don't ask me how I slept, don't ask about the gastritis pains at 4 am. At least I got to hear the blackbirds before sunrise. My sister calls to discuss possible procedures re our father. Wishful thinking. I want to put down the phone. We cannot lock him in, he is convinced he does not have osteoporosis. Yesterday, he said to me, sod the tests, ignorant young doctors, what do they know.

Most of all, I want to be rid of that tooth ache or whatever it is. As for the rest, I can handle it. I think. Maybe.

from a wonderful man

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

Oliver Sacks on learning he has terminal cancer