What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Just do your shit.

Paddy Considine in today's Guardian.

almost spring

 

forest at midday, awake and very noisy - in the evening with just a glimmer of light left in the western sky I feel safe cycling here again

Ten days after my 16th birthday. Fresh snow in the night and I am late for school, my bus was stuck in traffic and I missed the tram. When I sneak into the classroom all eyes are on me. The seat next to me is empty, M must be late, too. I know she went away for the weekend with her family. Maybe they didn't make it back in time with all that snow.

A in front of me turns around, beckoning me to move one row up. I sneak next to him and he takes both of my hands and I notice he is crying, that almost everybody is crying and staring at me. 

She is dead, he says, in the car, no, no accident, her neck it sort of snapped when they hit the brakes.

I see M's neck, her blond hair touching the collar of her favourite blue shirt, like the one I am wearing myself. We bought them last week on a mad shopping spree, giggling and running through town. 

Mustn't go into details of the day, no. Nothing about the teachers turning their eyes away, about a bunch of crying teenagers sitting on the stairs, about her big brother, the one I had a serious crush on, hugging me. Her big brother, who drove the car, who hit the brakes. The one who killed himself a couple of years later.

In the end I just walked out of school and sat at my bus stop staring into the dirty snow. A woman living on our street picked me up thinking I was drunk or had fainted. She held my hand on the bus and walked me to our door.

When I let myself in, my mother

my mother

my mother

she was mad because I was early and I must have upset her careful morning schedule of resting in her hazy valium world and doing nothing. Oh, I don't know. I have come up with too many versions of my happy childhood, imagining emotional scenarios, excuses, trying to accomodate the fact that all she did was tell me to go upstairs and stay out of her way until lunch was ready, and to clean that trashy mascara off my face.

But this all happened a long long time ago.

lifelong learning

This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have.

 Pema Chödrön

no snow, no frost, no wind, just fog, for a moment the air is still except for the birds, I can almost hear a long haired Germanic warrior shouting abuse from his hilltop across the river to his enemies on another hilltop, long before the Romans arrived building harbours, aqueducts and sewage pipelines, cultivating the hillsides with vineyards, and now, the tuk tuk from the barges, a heavy goods train speeding along behind the trees on the other side, builders' noises from one of the large villas behind me, this is a very busy place, all the world lives here, it seems

Looking out of our kitchen window into the wet and messy garden.
In about four weeks time, R said, trees and leaves and budding lilac.

This nasty little war between the person I think I am (the healthy superfit person I so desperately want to be) and the woman with itsy bitsy pain and itsy bitsy discomfort and a catalogue of agonies, general agonies, way too supersensitive towards potentially dramatic symptoms and all that shit. 

Get off it. 

Waste of time.

Let's see.

(Infinite space expands.)

From the window of Klaus Staeck's gallery in Heidelberg.

Last Sunday I read this article in the Observer and my heart stopped for a moment here:

When your tools for interpreting the world stop working, you cease to feel like the same person. You are not the same person. Not really. And you know that things may well get an awful lot worse before they start to get better - if they're to get any better at all  - and who's to know what "better" might mean, because no one's telling you anything anyway. "Better" might just mean "no worse". And that's when words like "disabled" start to incur on your thinking.

You then stop thinking.

And here:

What do you learn from such experiences? From losing faculties? You don't learn anything  - you just do the losing and then carry on. For sure, you discover that words like "better" and "worse" have infinitely more calibrations than you ever thought possible before, and you become almost infinitely patient in your study of what those calibrations reveal. But there isn't anything to be learned; only endured.

Yes, I have been there. I am there.

Today, the immunologist sends me her latest conclusions on my state of health. Precise wording, a neat list of the various shortcomings and irretrievable changes, history of medication and trials, suggested proceedings etc. etc.

While I am standing there in my kitchen with the letter in my hand, watching the snow falling from a grey sky, my house of cards comes tumbling down. For a while. With a heavy dose of self pity.

the river is a silver band

pink frosty air

just before sunset yesterday

today it started to snow, -14°C

Don't go into the tangled jungle
looking for the great elephant
who is already quietly at home.
Nothing to do,
Nothing to force,
nothing to want -
and everything happens by itself.

Lama Gendun Rinpoche

Heavy frost for the last ten days and more to come. Stories of frozen canals and schools closing due to burst pipes, while ice breakers are clearing the waterways to the coast. And records: coldest night in 20 years, thickest ice under this bridge ever, etc. I find it too cold to cycle. Good grief, this is the weather of my childhood winters, we simply walked to school when the air was too icy for the downhill runs on wheels.

I am fraying at the edges with stiff muscles and painful neck movements, another eye inflammation, sore throat and a general feeling of yuk. Ophthalmologist warned me yesterday that the immune suppression will have to be upped if I continue to have these inflammations. Ah please no!

So I watch the clear bright frosty world from indoors, shuttling my sore body to and fro in the car, waiting this out.

In a dream last night, Jenita walked up towards our house under the mango trees, Ki i dir?  she shouted all the way with a big grin on her face, her kids running along beside her.  Aw, mwan fatigue!   I replied.

This day sits half way between midwinter and spring equinox. The ancient Celts called it Imbolc and celebrated the beginning of the light, spring, the first lambs etc., the catholics obviously had to have their own spiel on it and made it into the feast day of an elderly abess, Brigid/Bride of Kildare, Lá Fhéile Bríde. The various rituals overlap and whatever you feel like doing (weaving the straw cross, dipping your hands in the well, dancing at sunrise or having a drink...) remember it's all about the light.
(Luka always makes me cry.)

the forest was asleep today

frost all day

Holocaust Memorial Day

This time, the country is deep into memorial mode. It's not only the milestone figure of 75 years. It's nasty stuff happening, the far right is lifting its nasty head in too many places here and elsewhere on the planet to pretend all is well.

This is what I wrote in 2012:

Friday evening. I am the last to go. I cycle past the lecture halls and down hill onto the round about. Very little traffic here, hardly anybody. People are at the gym, shopping, getting ready for the weekend.

Yesterday I had dinner with old friends. For the first time in so many years they were planning a holiday, somewhere warm, Mediterranean and we opened up an old school atlas and traced the shore lines with our fingers, Rimini, Greek islands, Ibiza, Mallorca, Tarifa, the French Riviera, Sicily... What about Turkey, I ask.

No way, they say, we are not going to a country with a military dictatorship. There are limits.

In Berlin this morning, an old man was invited to give a speech in parliament. An eminent literary critic, a sharp, often rude and somewhat arrogant presence in the talk show circuits and book review pages. In an interview last week he said, he was afraid of this speech. He survived Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto. He read from his memories of death and persecution and when he finished, he looked up and said, thank you. There was a long silence.

Friday, TV dinner night or maybe out for a movie, a couple of beers. When instead, we should be on our knees, with our heads down in silence, all day or half of the day, or for an hour, ten minutes, make it one minute, just one minute of respect and shame and remembrance. Is this asking too much?

Ancient history, you say? None of your business, long before your time. And anyway, what good does it do, a minute, an hour, a day? What day did you say it is today?

for the record

It is so uplifting to receive comments, you have no idea.
You know the feeling when you open a window to air the room and all the noises and smells come in from outside? And the sunlight? Sort of like that. Thank you.

Very familiar sensation:


And then the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn't an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.

Jennifer Egan, "A visit from the goon squad", last page.

the river is full again

Five hours on the superfast intercity train and I met the whole world, well almost. 

Across from me there was a very tall, very blond transvestite with a very tiny and very white dog who had a separate seat reservation. Transvestite spent four hours carefully gluing spangled sequins on a party hat and making phonecalls to Schatzi in Vienna, in between hugging and talking to dog. Gorgeous, the two of them.

Then there was the family of five, all of them deaf and involved in silent card games and sign language conversations and silent laughter. I admit that I watched in awe and I hope they didn't notice me gawking.

Next to me the budding tenor who gave me tips on how to sing properly (apparently what you need to do is wipe all expressions from your face and let go of any feelings of embarrassment or self conscience) while flashing his sheets of Schubert Lieder and Mendelssohn's Elias around. He was nice enough to talk to but when he went on and on about how hilarious (yes, hilarious!) Goethe's Faust really is and how he is reading it for the 6th time just for fun (oh please!), the words pompous and twat started to form in my mind and for fear of letting them slip out I pretended to read, which I cannot do on trains because I get sea sick. But Caruso was adamant and so I was given the list of famous but obviously useless tenors, incl. their various flaws and bad habits, and hence we were able to conclude that the world must be waiting for him.

And so we raced on through the dark rainy evening and miraculously, I arrived dead on time. Dinner was waiting.

once again

  Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Mysteries by Eminakaya

and this is the usual story

The inevitable frost came at last and that's the end of the nasturtium, but you were warned. The thing about frosty air and cycling is the runny nose and of course the way the cold wind stings and gets inside all the way through the tiniest gaps of the scarf wound half way across my face. And those fancy extra strength thermo mittens are a waste of money. But let's not get carried away here, this is nothing.

A gang of super idealistic people has occupied one of those empty office buildings that were meant to make Cork city shiny and modern. Another group is squatting in the empty BoI in Belfast. Cheers me up no end despite the fact that they will most likely be kicked out soon, maybe even before they get into their first and unavoidable alpha male dispute on who can be king of the castle. 

Waves of deja vu and nostalgia: exactly 30 years ago. Funny how the wheel of time turns and comes back to the same ideas and hopes and dreams every so often. 

Would I do it again: no. 

Would I dream of doing it again: yes.

Spring is making promises outside. Snowdrops, primulas, crocus, the nasturtium that didn't die in frost (that never came - so far) has been going since September, a rambling rose flowering, fig trees with green shoots.
Hold it, hold it, fella, this is way too early.

we lived in paradise for a while

Siberia

I sat there for one whole hour having my teeth cleaned professionally (not that my teeth aren't clean, brushing and flossing are my rituals, but there is all that accumulated grit in the tight corners below the radar) by this little kwepie doll of a woman full of smiles and talk. Talk! I mean, there I am lying on this seat/stretcher with my fingers and toes clenched and the sweat running down my back while she tells me fabulous stories of a childhood in Siberia and clear frosty days and dry snow underfoot and salted fish and hot summers and insects and muddy roads and deep birch forests and old cars and dogs everywhere and all the time she is scraping and scratching and poking and sanding and then I get the glass of water and rinse it all out.

Essex boys

The battle is in full swing. 

On the one side, we have an imposing, tall, large man in his early 80s, someone who has all his adult life felt in charge of his destiny, confident that science has all the answers, generous and intelligent and safe in his knowledge that a folded banknote slipped into some hand will open doors when in a tight spot. Someone who never had to bother anybody for support or explanation and certainly has no intention to do so, now of all times, definitely not his offspring (who are his minors if anything), whose patience with casts and physiotherapy and clinical examinations and medical opinions of young (!) doctors has run out. Definitely.

On the other side, we have his eldest child, a primary school teacher (tsk tsk), quick-tempered, confident that she sees the bigger picture with all the answers and that he has generally lost it, incl. the ability to ever drive his big shiny silver car again, unwilling to allow him make mistakes and thus bring shame on the family (who?) and demolish his good name (and hers) and really really pissed off about his weight gain.

The referee: da baby boy, ignored. As yet.

I duck for cover. The blessings of being born in the middle.

The red blob just to the side of my right cornea is probably nothing. It looks like it but it doesn't burn like it usually does when the inflammation starts. I am nervous, but totally over the top. My ophthalmologist is on holidays until next week Tue and I'll be damned to spend hours waiting in the A&E for what?
Just doodle along, will you...

new year's resolution, sort of

To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

David Foster Wallace

in theory

in theory I am strong and courageous and generous and calm and compassionate, obviously compassionate, theoretically I am that noble

sometimes I find myself waiting for a bus - in theory I am a great proponent of public transport but in reality I hate going on buses - and I watch people to still my impatience
in theory I am patient, forgiving, relaxed, at peace, even kind

I really don't like waiting for buses

and so I look at shoes 

when I was a child, no: even when I was a teenager, I used to judge people by their shoes and I once broke off with a guy because he didn't have a single pair that was in any way decent

but looking at shoes gets tedious, they no longer bother me so much
I can handle ugly sandals or smelly sneakers these days
some kind of achievement

and so I start guessing that many of these people here mingling and waiting at the bus terminal must haved experienced death

death of a loved one, an elderly relative, a partner, a colleague, a neighbour killed in a car crash,

someone's child, a former boss, someone close, part of their lives, maybe even someone they are glad is finally gone, 

that long final thing, the life without

and they look ok, they walk and wait and some of them probably look at shoes while waiting

life goes on

look at them, the little voice inside me whispers full of awe, they can handle it, people manage
you are one of them
in theory

pale pink shirt, dancing

1980

when we were young and had long hair and absolutely everything was seemed possible

just as well

Not a single candle, the ornaments purposefully forgotten in some box in the basement, no angels, no sticky sweet cards lined up on the mantle piece, just us and the cat and long breakfasts and reading and not much else, we thought. And then the vague phone call about my father - while visiting his floozie -  stumbling and maybe in hospital and of course his cell phone is off. So I go online and call the hospitals in floozie town and eventually a friendly nurse in some A&E tells me that he is still in the operating theatre. 

Outcome:

A father with a fractured arm and fractured pelvis holding court from his comfortable hospital bed, rescheduling his opera tickets, while he jokingly tells me that he was felled like an oak tree. (To which S calls out Timber! all the way from NZ).

But also: Two siblings mad at me for finding him and speaking to doctors etc. before they did. WTF!

The journey to floozie town was grey, grey motorway, grey fog, grey silent forests. 

These endless forests most of the time. I sit and look ahead and all these wonderful plans and resolutions come up in my mind. I always have so many fabulous ideas on the motorway, long lists of what I'll do differently, better, from now on. Can't remember now, but nifty things, small things, every day things. Also, I cleared up a couple a nagging thoughts, if only I could remember which ones.

The floozie was even more horrid than I remembered and of course she really is not a floozie, just a slightly pompous elderly woman who told me many years ago (in a foolish attempt to win my favours) that she secretly thinks that I must be my father's favourite child and I can still hear me clenching my teeth and vowing to never go anywhere near her again.
Well, there in hospital I tried to be nice and grateful and compassionate, I really tried but she was also wearing a gold lame top with leopard skin print.
So we left them sharing his hospital dinner and took off and ordered pasta and stir fried veg from the room service at the hotel and watched British Xmas TV channels, flicking between Downton Abbey and Armageddon and before that the Gruffalo.

 

Anyway.

And going home we thought, why not stop for coffee in Heidelberg and so we did. And that was lovely, never mind the tourists. It's really nice to reassure myself from time to time that this place is so well looked after - and with it our memories.

this film is a gift

winter music

Snow, ice frozen on woolly mittens, cold feet, cold red cheeks, toboggan, warm drink, back home. Memory.

Could be that one of these will come true: I think I found a choir to join. Nothing dramatic, more fun and games, no serious concert schedules. I'll have a go in January.

I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, wrote Christoper Hitchens. And so he did and what strange comfort I find in his reports and thoughts about being so terribly ill.

Anyway, I never did. But there was a time when all the struggle and resistance  became just too much and instead of this futile dream of waking up one morning to glorious health you start facing your new reality and hope every day a little bit more that the volcano won't erupt again too soon. 

The worst advice I received in the past two years was to start reading about Helen Keller because one - extremely rare - complication of my brand of autoimmune vasculitis is loss of hearing plus blindness.

The best advice in the past two years was to endure and be patient and watch myself cope.

And not run away from the experience. Face the fear and panic. Another way of saying, give in, give up.

No, I am not courageous, sometimes I am that small, cowering in fear, if only for very short moments, yet I do.

And I admit to distraction, hiding behind distraction, often. Sometimes stupid mindless distraction, killing-the-day distraction. Less so these days, I like to think. One day at a time.

cornea care

Another rumble from the volcano. After the first warning in my right eye three (?) weeks ago and a little interlude in the left one, those blasted autoantibodies took a full swing at the right eye again. But, hey, don't I know these critters! I was back in the ophthalmologist's dark room before they could hiccup twice and I have now a strict regimen of drops and ointments and more drops to keep me busy throughout the day and some of the night. And with patience and a good bit of luck this should be over by New Year's day - that's when the drops and ointment schedule ends, anyway. I tell myself that it's just a nuisance once the first round of drops has calmed the burning and my eyes look ever so beautiful now. Only Dr F with her fancy magnifiers  finds various ulcers and craters along the edge of my cornea. 

Was told not to read for a day, so I watched the sky turn dark and stormy and blue and sunny for a while and when I got dark and gloomy I watched almost all of Downton Abbey online in one go and I swear the voices in my head began to speak ever so properly to me, I daresay. How tedious.

The two windows of my mother's kitchen faced north overlooking her vegetable garden with the row of bean poles along the fence. To the left of the windows was an in-built larder where we would store butter and jam and cheese and bread, but it was also crammed with gadgets and boxes and an old basket to collect bread crusts. When this was full, she would cook bread soup, a dreadful concoction. The smell alone made me gag. But from time to time we were made to eat it in memory of how she suffered during the war when there was nothing to eat. I like to think she needed this form of cruelty to reassure herself that those days were over.

But she could also be found in a white lab apron, with a neat row of clean bottles and the juice extractor humming and steaming, full of red currants and sour cherries. In summer, we would sit around the table with scrubbed hands carefully placing peach halves into bottling jars, while she measured sugar and sterilised the clips. In December, cigarette in hand, she would watch us cutting out Xmas cookies from the dough she had cursed at just minutes earlier. Shortcrust was not her forte, but her yeast dough always rose to perfection.

My mother's kitchen had clean surfaces. You could run your finger along the top of the fridge or the backs of the chairs anytime. An entire cupboard was dedicated to the various appliances and dusters and brushes we would need to carry out our household chores after school. You could open the cupboards and find neat rows of boxes and tins and orderly stacks of cups and saucers. But pushed well behind the tins and folders with recipes and the brown-cream striped pottery tea set from Denmark and the heavy stainless steel pots, in the back of the cutlery drawers and inside those neat boxes with the pastel coloured lids there was chaos. A grimy mix of spare buttons, rubber bands, hair clips, shop receipts, aspirins, newspaper cuttings, Xmas cards, dried up biros, broken crayons, candles, long lost notes from school never signed or returned and - if you were lucky - nail scissors, a pen that would write, coins, stamps.

My mother's chair was right beside the window with her ashtray and her collection of medicines within reach on the window sill. She would sit there for hours, smoking, her feet against the radiator, waiting.

Coming home on the last bus at night I would try to sneak past the glow of her cigarette shining through the half-closed kitchen door. But of course she had been waiting, hissing and where do you come from at this hour  as I was frantically fabricating stories involving cinemas and well behaved girl friends and ice creams, when only a short while ago I had been leaning against a wall at the bus stop kissing and smoking and drinking beer. I don't know what she believed or thought of me. I didn't care and, really, I don't think she did either.

look, no humans

except, of course, for one. And what a good one, indeed.

So there I was last night with my head swimming in nausea after the MTX injection, unable to sleep, contemplating - I mean what else is there to do in situations like this? - and snippets from the day rushed past me: another earthquake shaking the ground beneath my child's feet, cat dragging a dry bit of fish (whoever gave her that!) through the house, a colleague telling me in tears that he left his wife, one of the car low beam headlamps went as I was driving home through the dark storm, someone knocked over the paraffin container in the laundry room, both too tired for a meaningful exchange over dinner and then the dishwasher started to leak soapy water from below and behind and all over the kitchen floor. 

And I thought to myself - just for a second, mind you - this is good, this is wonderful, what a life we have.
Oh, mustn't forget those menopausal hot flushes.

If you have the heart to feel and the eyes to see, you discover that the world is not flat. The world remains a rich tapestry. It remains a rich topography of the spirit. The myriad voices of humanity  [incl. the so-called primitive societies] are not failed attempts at being new, failed attempts at being modern. They're unique facets of the human imagination. They're unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And when asked that question, they respond with 6,000 different voices. And collectively, those voices become our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. Our industrial society is scarcely 300 years old. That shallow history shouldn't suggest to anyone that we have all of the answers for all of the questions that will confront us in the ensuing millennia.

 

Wade Davis

Well, the bad eye is ok, but now the other one has started. Ah, the mysteries of autoimmune inflammation. Today the masters of war had their conference patting each other on the back for the great job they did in Afghanistan and the limos with the flags have been whizzing past down the road, apparently. While I listened to Lyse Doucet on the world service pronouncing it ever so properly (ofghonistawn).

R has started his campaign to save the little patch of wilderness/forest beside the school and I am so proud of this man, he wrote to the board very politely that they should think twice before destroying 20 years of growth in one afternoon for the sake of "security".

Fierce freezing wind today. There is talk of snow. Talk. Midwinter in 16 days.

The rain came. It's grey, wet, damp, shoes get mucky, hair curls again, darkness sets in at 4pm. Endless pots of tea, toast and soup. Satsumas and big round oranges from Spain. Fat Sunday papers to read - in print and online. Earthquake in New Zealand sent S diving under the table.
Surprising what a chubby little Irish man with receding hair can do to a relatively good Pink Floyd tune.

world aids day

December 1982. We were standing in the hallway, the drafty hallway of this old ramshackle mansion, between the mucky wellies, bicycles, a cat asleep on an old chair. Our breaths steaming up the cold damp air. Carefully, L handed over this warm little bundle, my baby girl, wrapped up in colourful wool asleep and warm after spending the last two hours carried tightly against his chest. We both looked at this gorgeous small life and suddenly he started to cry. 

No, L never cried, he was too angry, always, he quickly wiped away a few tears and shoved the latest issue of Gay News in my face. Read it, he shouted, they don't know what it is, but we are dying all over, gay men are dying, someone's trying to kill us!