I’ve watched her for years now. I’ve watched her grow, love a man and bear a child, and I’ll stay with her until the end. Then at last she’ll know what it’s like, when she’ll bend from the sky to touch her own daughter, and Hayley with flyaway hair will smooth her dress and believe that it’s only the wind.
I confess that there’s more that I seek out, more that I see. It’s become an addiction, I’m unable to help myself and my voyeuristic tendencies. I’m there at night, lonely as a leaf and watching, breathing in the air as they love each other with their bodies. I want to understand. I want to see what it’s like when it’s chosen, willingly and independently, between two adults. Not forced upon a defenceless child. I want to see if these two ways of being have anything at all in common, because the truth is that I hated Marshall for what he did to me over all the years – but not always.
I go to him too, sometimes, to his study at night when the window is open and the nervous wind howls so he cannot hear my whispered voice in his ear. I have seen him cry, alone, and I have watched him grow old. To witness a man cry in solitude is to watch the sky crack open. It’s to drown in thunder, to beat against the concrete of a wave. Sometimes I fell against him in my anger, but after my death he could not pick me up. I went right through him, and he only felt me in his bones. His skin will never know my touch again, but in his bones are where the real tears are formed. I might have offered him comfort, a calming hand on his shoulder, a breath of forgiveness on his cheek. But I will not absolve him, and he will live with what he did to me for the rest of time. I can still feel his hands upon me. His breath on my skin, the smell of old coffee, sour in his mouth, and his clean-smelling skin.
Forgiveness is the furthest thing, but I still sit with him sometimes, when he’s alone, when he has no idea that I am watching.
How I got my patchworked heart
A writing life is not for the economically squeamish, nor for those who like to compare. Writing takes you out of the world. It’s like gambling on a rank outsider, or spitting at the wind. It’s making a snowball in Alaska and convincing yourself that it’s special. Perhaps these days it’s getting harder. Social media constantly sings about what’s going on in the outside world. Real things; things that real people do. Like having children, or getting great jobs. Amassing cash. Taking trips. Anything other than sitting alone in a room with your imaginary friends, trying to make them do what you want them to. You start to wonder if you have some serious issues of control.
Your mother is past retirement and she makes more money than you ever will. Someone lets slip about lucrative contracts that someone else in the family has procured. You swallow your coffee. Nowadays your smile is less certain. You go back to your room, and you write.
You send out batches of emails that feel each time like they’re pieces of your own heart, diced and distributed evenly across the planet. Most often nothing comes back. Now and again you get a polite reply. Thank you for your enquiry. Unfortunately we are not publishing fiction/using freelancers/interested in your work. You used to get down, maybe sneak a cigarette or eat a whole packet of Cheese Curls to comfort yourself. Now you feel nothing. You just cut another small piece from your cardiac system, and toss it randomly about.
You get past your thirties and realise that your contemporaries all have nice clothes and houses. Some of them even have nice kids. ‘It’s not all about money,’ your husband tells you. But you know that really, it is. Money is the reason you are able to eat. Of course you have done other things too, mostly for money. You’ve been a waitress, a lecturer, a secretary, a teacher. But these are all things that seem to make other people happy, while you still dream of something else. You go back to your room, and you write.
You’ve had some success along the way. Once you almost won a couple of competitions. A distant friend finds a copy of your first novel, years old, on Amazon. A schoolboy in another city emails you, enquiring about the rights to your play. People start to tell you that you should self-publish. You can make more money, and isn’t this the egalitarian age of the internet? What you don’t mention is that you’re not sure that you want to be a marketer, editor, sales person and book-jacket designer squashed into one. Or maybe you’re scared to be the only person who believes so strongly in your imaginary friends. You still see traditional publishing as a rite of passage. Or maybe you’ve just got old.
Someone you know dreams of getting a novel published but you’re afraid for him. You’re afraid for his heart, that it will get cut up, that he’ll have to hold the blade himself. Because you know how that feels. You say nothing. Instead you go to your room, and you write.
Now the habit is so in-built that you don’t know what else to do. Sometimes you also paint, or you construct patterns or you make things, because after you write you need a place that is way beyond words. You manage your relationships as best you can, because it’s hard to share a world that no one else really knows exists.
And then one night at a random party an editor you’ve always admired tells you over wine that you are the real thing. You hold onto that for years. It’s as if she’s sprinkled fairy dust on your head, but still, nothing happens. Then a publisher’s reader calls you. He likes your work, even though your book has been turned down. ‘I really hope we can work together on the right project,’ he says. That call pushes you into believing further. Eventually, one of your manuscripts gets picked up after sitting on the editor’s desk for over a year. Before any contract is signed, the publishing house falls prey to the economic melt-down. Then it closes.
You watch the world. You watch people as they progress. You see youngsters take on jobs that you could have had, earning double what you once did. You’ve fiercely protected your freedom to create, and you start to take stock of the price. You sort it out in imaginary conversations with the characters in your head. You do it in your room, at your window. You write it all down.
And then one morning there’s an email in your inbox. Your work has been accepted. Calmly, and without the world breaking apart. You sit on the news for two days before you tell anyone. When you do, others feel the excitement more than you ever will again. Because this is the one thing that really matters to you, and you’ve realised it’s as random and transitory as life itself. It may come. But if it does, it will certainly, at some point, also go again.
Perhaps it matters so much because you have known people, and life, and relationships. You have immersed yourself in these and found such beauty and meaning. But also discord, and wanting. You have formed ideas and visions and whole stories of your own. You are most grateful for whatever acknowledgement or acceptances you do get. But you start to realise that what you really wanted all along is already done. That no matter what happens, or how long this world exists for you, you will always want more. More time with your characters, more space to be alone in your head. So you take out your patchworked heart. You go back to your room. To your computer, your window, your vision of the world. And you stitch it all together, you start again.
You write.
Nieu Bethesda
There is a place that dances like a beacon of light on the periphery of my wanderer’s memory. The glitter of warm sun through glass. On still days in the city, long after the event, I am looking down a steep and winding hill and into the fertile and quaint valley where the town of Nieu Bethesda rests. Breathing slowly. Sweltering in the thick air, just as I was then.
The buildings, old and thick-walled with wooden floors and cool interiors, are built just right for this climate, the oppressive weight of the heat that pushes on the trees. I drove slowly through the few streets that comprise the town and it was all pretty, insular, well-maintained and easy. The Karoo Lamb restaurant, a pub and another restaurant, galleries, a community project, guest houses, and the Owl House. Helen Martins, curator of my own wide-eyed creative fantasies and obsessions. This town is my Mecca. It was what I had waited a very long time to see.
In the weeks building up to this tri
p, mentioning the Owl House elicited a variety of responses from different folk. A middle-aged Durban artist said that she found it disappointing, tacky, and too ‘crafty’. A retired lawyer shuddered when I mentioned Martins’ name, muttering that the whole thing was just too darned sad and depressing. Such responses made me question my own self – am I then just a sad romantic, someone for whom the name Helen Martins means everything to my creative imagination? Her life and work have both inspired and fascinated me always. Her ability to create beauty and meaning where there was none, and on her own terms. Harnessing loneliness, she travelled the singular road to intense productivity, creating along with her helper and craftsman Koos Malgas the array of statues and forms of intensely personal importance. When her arthritic hands could no longer manage the production of the work, Malgas continued to implement her vision, and then returned to foster the care and maintenance of the shrine-like dwelling after her suicide. Theirs was another world entirely, almost perfectly preserved in this isolated town in the current time. The empty consumption of today never featured for Martins. She became purely and completely a creator. How many of us have even touched on the deep fulfilment to be found in that? Her short marriage and the years caring for her elderly parents might have been the loneliest times of her life, and perhaps again towards the end, when she could no longer actively create. Such vision turned to action rendered the input of other people null and void, apart from Malgas and his shared commitment to her recreated world.
In the yard of the Owl House a woman stood among other forms, peaceful, with her eyes closed, her breasts exposed, hands crossed over a skirt of stone. Camels and wise men faced the hillside while a Buddha-like figure turned his back on it. Long skirts of glass played in the sunshine. There was an austere serenity to the amassed figures of stone.
My favourite part of the house was an orange windowpane set above an old school desk. Silhouetted in the glow, a crescent moon and star, while a reindeer leapt over the scene from above. The faced sun made up of broken glass is, aside from the actual owls for which the house is named, perhaps the most represented image from Martins’ work, not dissimilar to something you’d find on a hippie T-shirt. It is the detail of Martins’ work that captivates, the expression on the small dog’s face as two figures with all their might try to pull back the hands of time. We all make choices, again and again, that alter whom it was we might have been.
I walked the town as sunlight faded on the day. Bunches of picked flowers were offered for R5 by the local children, many of them as young as four and barefoot, already experimenting with their own entrepreneurial spirits. Later in the evening at the local pub I silently drank to Helen Martins and Koos Malgas, to the children, to the presumption and obsession of Outsider Art, to the isolation, the desperate poverty where dying is the easy part; to the beauty and legacy that remain. And that night I slept in a tent on a blow-up mattress like I hadn’t slept for weeks. I awoke to a cacophony of birds praising the beauty of the new day while a rustle of chickens foraged on the naked floor surrounding the tent. I awoke with my soul full. I carried through the day the vision of light through glass. I still hold tightly to the wonder and the promise of the artists’ gifts. That creativity offers its own salvation and transformation. That we can choose whatever it is that we become.
Kirsten Miller, Sister Moon
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