Coming Home to Story

Day Two: Tuesday 1 March 2016

This afternoon, I asked my guide Steve to help me choose an Acacia tree out on the savannah, to leave some of Chris’s ashes under. “Certainly,” he said. “We will find one with a good view.” I thought for a while that he might have forgotten as we spent a couple of hours looking at lions, cheetahs, hippopotamus, and two enormous crocodiles basking on the river bank.

I needn’t have worried because later on, as he drove the Landcruiser up a long shallow incline, he nodded at a lone tree ahead of us. “I was thinking this one might be good. Do you like it?” The tree was strong and tall; grassland stretched out for miles in every direction; at the bottom of the hill we had just come up was an area of scrub where lions take their ease. “It’s perfect,” I said.

Steve pulled the vehicle to a halt near the tree and scanned the area for potential danger. “You can get out,” he said. I walked over to the tree and picked up an ancient, bleached Wildebeest horn that was lying there and used it to loosen the soil surrounding the base of the tree.

I unscrewed the lid of the container I’d been using to carry Chris’s ashes and emptied them onto the ground. I used my hands to mix them with the dry soil, taking pleasure in handling her mortal remains so intimately. Then I took her ‘blank twins’ doll that I’d brought with me and tucked it into a crevice in the bole of the tree. I decided to leave it there, wondering who or what would see it next and what they might do with it. It seemed fitting to leave an artful curiosity as a marker.

I bowed my head to say farewell to Chris the adventurous traveller and lover of the more-than-human world. Here, I thought, as her soul makes its own safari, her ashes could enjoy forever the peace of wild things, an experience that she longed for during her lifetime.

“Kwaheri ya kuonana,” I said in borrowed and mispronounced Swahili.

“Goodbye. Until we meet again.”

Day Two: Tuesday 1 March 2016

At 6.00am this morning, one of the Masai night guards called out my name in the darkness and I woke up in what is technically a tent, although it sits on a stilted wooden platform under a thatched roof, has a double-bed, an en suite bathroom, and a terrace overlooking the river. Eco-friendly comfort, I thought. I’m glad it’s not one of those 5 Star Luxury Lodges I’d seen from the air.

Steve the guide had suggested an early morning game drive today, so I got out of bed – just as a small frog dropped from somewhere onto the pillow – and got dressed by the light of the kerosene lamp on the terrace, shining in through the mesh windows. I crossed the rickety footbridge over the river and climbed into Steve’s battered Toyota Landcruiser.

“Is there anything you especially want to see?” he asked.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Whatever you like, it’s all amazing.”

So I sat beside Steve for two hours while he drove slowly, following some internal compass that I could not fathom, along tracks and through grassland and scrub, pointing out animals in the distance and occasionally stopping to admire the view.

At about 8.30, the radio crackled into life and there was an animated (and to me incomprehensible) conversation in Swahili. Steve replaced the handset and the Toyota picked up speed. He turned to me and said one word: “Simba.” He drove with immense skill, cutting a swathe through tall grass, weaving between potholes, and crossing deep gullies, until we came to a ditch, lush with grass and bushy trees. He drove very slowly along the line of the ditch and then stopped.

How my unaccustomed, nearly colour blind eyes saw it, I don’t know. A sinuous flash of tawny fur almost invisible among the undergrowth, about five metres away. It was a mature male lion, retreating deeper into the bushes. Steve reversed the Toyota to give us a better line of sight.

The male now lay beside a female, half-hidden in the shadows. I stared open-mouthed. My heart beat faster. Such immense dignity and power. They looked back at us with unswerving gaze, each of us holding the other rooted to the spot. It would have taken very little effort and even less time for them to have attacked. “They seem very calm,” I whispered to Steve.

“Yes,” he said. “But we shouldn’t stay long. I know this pride, there’ll be more of them close by.” He started the engine and drove forward 10 metres. “There,” he said. “Another female.” A lioness poked her head above the ditch very close to the side of the vehicle. “The cubs will be nearby,” he said, turning off the engine again.

As he spoke, a fluffy spotted cub climbed out of the far side of the ditch. The lioness turned and followed, as if to keep a close eye on her offspring. We watched them disappear, as they merged into the background. We waited respectfully for a few moments then drove back to Basecamp for breakfast.

Just me, Steve and Godoi (one of the Masai night guards who had come along for the ride) in an open-sided vehicle, so close to a pride of healthy lions that we might almost have reached out and touched them. It was magical, thrilling and an initiation of sorts into the way of the wild.

Those lions exist in this landscape, I thought, because we humans have managed, for the time being, not to destroy it. We were privileged to be present with them for those few minutes because they permitted us to be there. Not such a bad arrangement.

If Steve asks me tomorrow if there’s anything I especially want to see, I shall say again, “I don’t mind. It’s all amazing.”

And I’ll mean it.

Day One: Monday 29 February 2016

The flight in a 12 seater, single-engined, plane from Wilson Airport, Nairobi to Olkiombo airstrip in the Masai Mara took 50 minutes. Time enough to get a feel for the grandeur of the scenery, to see both elephants and giraffes from the air – which was wildly exciting – and to notice the network of heavily rutted 4×4 tracks criss-crossing the plain.

At the airstrip, half a dozen liveried safari vehicles were waiting to ferry guests from a succession of incoming flights to various Lodges and Camps. My heart sank a little, as the reality of nature-tourism reared it’s head. I’m not sure what I expected, although I have to acknowledge a romantic attachment to Director Sydney Pollack’s Edenic vision of Kenya in Out of Africa, still one of my favourite films 30 years after it’s release.

Things looked up immediately as my Masai guide (I say my because I was the only passenger for Basecamp) climbed out of the least preposessing and most workmanlike of the 4x4s and introduced himself as Steve. “Really,” I said. “Are you the only Steve at Basecamp? My wife came here in 2012 and she told me about a wonderful day she had with a guide named Steve.” I showed him a picture of Chris. “That’s her,” I said. “Chris Seeley.”

He flashed a brilliant smile. “I remember her,” he said. “She has not come with you?” “No,” I said. “She died from a brain tumour a year ago. But we always talked of coming here together. That’s why I’m here.”

“I am very sorry to hear that she has died,” he said. “But you are most welcome. Karibu.”

Steve drove slowly to Basecamp with many detours to see the teeming wildlife, from warthogs to elephants including a close encounter with a massive solitary tusker. Later in the day, we came across a Cheetah eating a recent kill. Four other safari trucks soon pulled up alongside us to watch the feast. Steve told me that in high season it would have been a dozen or more.

Which is when I realised that the Masai Mara has become something of a theme park, albeit on very a grand scale. But I’m not cavilling: without the revenue generated by nature-tourism, there would be no economic reason for Kenyans to protect the habitat and thus enable the survival of this unique eco-system. It’s more fragile than it once was, and it would no doubt be better off without any human presence at all, but it’s still here and it’s still wonderful.

I’m very glad I came.

Safari is the Swahili word for journey. Tomorrow, my journey with Chris’s ashes continues as I fly to Kenya to spend a few days on safari with Basecamp. It’s the same camp Chris stayed at in 2012 in the Masai Mara. She adored her time there and we always planned to go together. We didn’t make it while she was alive so I’m taking some of her ashes with me to fulfill our dream.

I’ll also be taking this doll that Chris made and decorated as part of the Blank Twins art project with her collaborators, Kathy Skerritt and James Aldridge. She bound grasses and leaves picked from the Masai Mara to make the skirt and wrote on it the names of the different animals she saw there.

She also made the most extraordinary visual record of her time on safari, in a leather-bound journal which I’ll also be taking with me so I can look at it in situ. I hope it will enable me to see the landscape through her eyes as I make my first trip to Africa. The journal is very precious to me so it will be coming back to Folly Cottage when I return.

Even though I was working and couldn’t be with Chris when she went to Basecamp, it was a good time for us. There was no sign of the illness that was to strike her down the following year and we were feeling particularly loving and close. She took many photographs including one, she told me, of a lone male lion “looking for his pride.” I wrote this poem for her in response.

Out on the Masai Mara, you told me
I saw a lone male looking for his pride.
And I began to wonder about this idea

That pride lies somewhere out there,
Waiting to be found in the long grass;
That one’s pride can be lost or found;

That one must look for it in another.
It puzzled me for quite a long time –
Until I thought of you lying beside me

And how you turn your head to look,
How you burnish me with your gaze
Until I become the mate you deserve.

Then I understood the lion’s search
And how the lioness makes him king
For she is his pride – as you are mine.

What story do we tell ourselves about who we are? Or, put another way, how do we declare ourselves to the world? Chris and I would talk about this sometimes, especially after she became unwell. Her challenge was to resist being defined by her cancer. That she managed this so well is one reason her life and death inspired so many people. She was an artist and an intellectual, a sister and a daughter, a lover and a friend, and a spirited woman, until her last breath.

My challenge is to resist being defined by her absence. Of course I miss her dreadfully but to simply take on the mantle of the tragic widower would be to avoid taking responsibility for living the rest of my life as fully and joyfully as I can. As a melancholic introvert, I could very easily fall into that trap, but Chris’s memory demands that I do more.

She used to make the distinction between negative images on films shot using pre-digital SLR cameras, and positive images on Polaroid prints, the former being defined by the absence of light and the latter by its presence. I understand exactly what she meant. Well into my 40s, I thought of myself as the little boy whose father had died when he was four. It took decades of therapy and years of menswork to claim my identity as a man in my own right.

Now, nourished by the love that Chris and I shared, enriched by all she taught me, and encouraged by her example, I am clawing my way out of the abyss of grief to stand on my own two feet. This is my vow – as sacred as any I have ever taken – to pour myself into life until I die; to love my family and my friends; to open my heart to new love; to honour the shadow and relish the light; to live as artfully and creatively as I can.

After 15 years with Chris, how could I possibly settle for less?

Captain Midnight here. Or is it?

You already know that I generally hide my super-dog persona in the guise of harmless pet Teddy and that I sneak out when Himself is otherwise engaged, to save the world as Captain Midnight?

Of course you do.

However, it seems that there is a Bad Dog who looks just like me and goes by the name of Mister Woo. I can understand why a dog would want to look like me but it’s doing nothing for my reputation. So I’d like to point out that even though you never see us in the same room together, he’s not me. He’s a different dog altogether.

He’s bad. He’s very bad. He makes Ernst Blofeld look like a pussy cat.

Mind you, Himself seems to find my discomfiture funny. He even wrote a so-called poem about my allegedly Woo-like tendencies when I was a puppy. I begged him not to publish it but he’s so pleased with himself that he wouldn’t listen. Which is why I’ve instructed my lawyers to sue for defamation of character.

We’ve got a brand-new puppy dog,
His given name is Ted.
He likes to eat and play all day
And snuggle up in bed.

He woofs and wags his happy tail,
He licks his furry feet.
When there’s a morsel to be found
He sits up for a treat.

Yet there’s another side to him,
It saddens me to tell.
For twice a day he turns into
The puppy dog from hell.

He’s got an evil doggy twin
Whose name is Mister Woo
And all the things that Teddy don’t,
That Mister Woo do do.

He chews your hand and bites your bum,
He nibbles on your toes.
He elbows in and steals your food,
He wrestles with your clothes.

He lies down when you want to walk
And then although you beg,
He gets a little boner on
And humps your neighbour’s leg.

O Mister Woo is not a dog
You’d really want to stay.
But when you think he’s here for life
That’s when he goes away

And back comes little angel Ted
Who never makes a fuss.
A schizophrenic Cockerpoo,
He’s just the dog for us.

The last time restorer Sarah Healey-Dilkes came to work on the repairs to Sassy Bear at Matara, she introduced me to a new word: sabbiatura. We had been talking about the damaging effects of weather and atmospheric pollution on marble and limestone statues.

In some circumstances, she told me, the calcium carbonate on the surface reacts to damage by transforming into an impervious layer of calcium oxalate. In other words, the stone protects itself from further damage by developing a kind of unsightly chemical armour.

I began to think about how we humans tend to do a similar thing. When we are hurt (shamed, abused, abandoned, overwhelmed, betrayed, bereaved, you name it) it is only too easy to develop protective armour. Because some feelings are so intensely painful, we unconsciously tell ourselves that it’s better to feel nothing at all.

For a while our suffering diminishes, life gets a bit easier, and the process seems to be working. But as those of us who have been there know, the long-term cost is immeasurable: when we forget how to cry (as I did for many years as a young man) we forget also how to laugh, how to live, and how to love.

The most difficult challenge that we all face, it seems to me, is to remain open to suffering, to face the world with our broken hearts, and to embrace all that life puts in our path. If we are lucky we can sustain ourselves in times of trouble with some kind of spiritual or artful practice. I don’t consider myself to be particularly spiritual but I do think of myself as an artful practitioner.

For some years now and especially since Chris died, I have sought to engage more fully with the world through the process of writing: memoir, stories, poetry, these blogs. I think it’s helped but only time will tell how much.

But no matter how hard we try to prevent it, the hardening can still happen. Eventually perhaps, things get so bad that we realise we’ve struck a bad bargain with life and we take more drastic action in an effort to blast away our deadening armour: therapy perhaps, or some physical change such as moving continents, learning to dance, or losing weight and running marathons.

Which brings me back to where we started. When stone-workers want to get rid of the hard oxalate layer on buildings and statues, they sandblast the stone. The Italian word for this process, used by those in the trade, is sabbiatura.

Most of us in the second half of life, I guess, would recognise the experience of being scoured in this way. Though it isn’t always necessary: if fortune smiles on us, we might simply meet someone whose gaze cuts through the layers of our self-protection to remind us who we really are.

“Are they are gift? Would you like them wrapped?” asked the florist.

“A gift? Yes, I suppose so,” I replied. “Wrapped would be nice, thank you.”

One white rose and one red.

I started buying roses like this a few months ago. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Instead of walking past the flower shop, I stopped and went inside. The smell of the roses cut through the myriad other scents and demanded my attention.

A single bloom would be lonely, I reasoned. So, I bought two: a red one and a white one to keep it company. Not a whole bunch because then they’d get lost among the others. Even when it comes to roses, I’m an introvert.

I’ve been doing the same thing every couple of weeks since then. I choose them carefully: one red, one white; strong stemmed with unfurled petals. Open flowers that have lived a bit, not tight, mean, virginal buds. There’s a pair of them in a vase on the kitchen table as I write these words. They are poignant yet comforting in their coupledom; ageing together side by side.

Chris loved having flowers in the house. I used to buy them for her. Now, I buy them for me.

They’re still a gift.

I was delighted last week, to come across the rope that Chris used during her clown workshops. I remember her buying it from a small chandlery near Lyme Regis. Designed for nautical use, the rope lies flat and doesn’t tangle. It’s used to delineate the boundary between the audience and the stage, where the everyday world ends and the world of the clown begins.

Stepping over the rope onto the stage is an invitation to embrace the possibilities that come from being fully present to whatever is and whatever happens. Don’t go on stage with a predetermined idea of what to do; don’t try to be interesting or funny. Breathe, feel, explore, allow the world to come to you.

Notice what happens when you don’t try to make anything happen. Be bold and generous (even when showing how scared and small you are). Clowns are whimsical, curious, sensitive, open to discovery, and wear their hearts on their sleeves. They say “Yes” to life and to death and to everything in between.

For anyone who knew Chris, it will come as no surprise that she was a natural and gifted clown. Some of our happiest times were spent clowning together at La Luna nel Pozzo, Robert McNeer’s theatre school in Puglia, Italy. I didn’t mind being in her shadow, it was so glorious to see her shine.

Chris’s genius was that she brought all those qualities that she so brilliantly exemplified as a clown into the rest of her life. She broke the rules and crossed the line.

“Clowning,” she once told me, “is the art of transgressing beautifully.”

Life too, perhaps?