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Editing Fitting and Turning Level 4 was just too soul destroying. So I spent an hour or so photographing daisies and pomegranates.
I have a new obsession. Well, two, really. One is boxing. And the other is roses. I’m not sure how the two fit together. But there it is. At night, when I should be in bed, indulging in my usual worries about work, money, life and the universe, I sneak off to the lounge to see what boxing programmes I can find, like that new history boxing channel that showed me Twelve Rounds with Ali (”What’’s my name, Chump?”), or what an animal Tyson was, sneaking in punches after the bell or while his opponent is going down. Or I channel surf to find KOTV, the knock-out fest of lean and hungry (okay, sometimes not so lean) fighters taking each other to the mat. And Friday nights, when my significant other is dutifully spending Shabbos with his mother, I wait for Blow by Blow to introduce me to a South African boxing champ I’ve never heard of before. Like the night I met the humble and eloquent William Gare, about whom I have managed to find very little information since, despite my (okay, obsessive) Internet searches.
In contrast, though, I head into the tiny couryard outside my bedroom each morning and peer at the various newly acquired rose bushes, some of them still in their black bags. I say peer because they tend to arrive from the nursery with only one perfect rose and not much more to speak of. The next bloom, and the next, one must wait for. And so I creep about, hunchbacked, clutching my second mug of tea for the morning, and peer in amongst the black spot, the aphids and the thorns to see if a new bud might be poking through. And, somehow, so far, I’ve been rewarded. The crimson Ecstacy, the deep red Prince, the delicately pink People’s Princess, Rhapsody in Blue, the wonderfully fragrant and abundant Double Delight, and any number of potted miniatures that I’ve snuck in amongst the groceries from Woolworths have lured me from my bed each day.
One of these days I’m going to be brave enough to haul myself and my camera to the ringside, soak up the noise, the smells, the energy and the sweat, and hope to grab that historic shot - like the pic of Ali towering over the KOed Liston, maybe.
Until such time, though, or at least until pruning season, I’ll amuse myself with more delicate and fragrant subjects.
I woke up this morning feeling glum. Not for any particular reason I could think of. But glum, nonetheless. So there I sat, feet up on my desk, keyboard on my lap, eyes burning a little from lack of sleep, hair feeling a bit lank and belly a bit slack, just feeling glum.
A gentle breeze sneaks in by the window behind me and tickles my neck. The sun is warm outside. All is quiet in the house. Children are at school, husband is at work. Work. Now there would be a reason for glumness. Work is not filling my life with joy at the moment. But that might just be because I’m not doing enough of it. Far too much time is being spent checking email, counselling friends - glum friends - on the phone. And then there’s all that time spent agonising over my portfolio: how lacking it is in stunning images, reworking it, revising the images I had spent long, long nights selecting and placing, revisiting the My Pictures folder, scrolling through hundreds, no, thousands, of images, trying to find one that will wow a prospective client.
And then there are the clients. The existing, loyal clients. Those nice people who give me work and then revise the brief after the job is done. Those who give me work and bargain me down, and then down some more, without a contract. Those who give me work and cancel the project. Those who give me work and don’t pay. And those who don’t give me work at all but keep mentioning the work that’s on the way.
And so my feet are on my desk and my eyes are burning. And I am feeling glum.
I didn’t go for my daily walk. Always a mistake. I did turn up at the page, though. Listed my grievances to the universe. Closed the journal and went to check my emails. Nothing. Nothing of any consequence at all.
I checked the Jobfinder, thinking that being a secretary might be preferable to being a freelance photographer. Maybe being an anything would be preferable to being a freelance photographer who doesn’t photograph, and who doesn’t get paid when she does photograph. Maybe. But paging through the Jobfinder, looking at those dismal career options was just too boring. If I can’t read about the job at its most attractive, I’m certainly not going to be able to clock in each day and actually do that soul-grating work!
So I pick up my camera bag and drive into town. I parked at the edges of town and walk to the Company Gardens. Wonderful morning light rimming the trees with glowing green halos surround me as I step onto the well-worn brown path. The ancient tree trunks rise rough and dark and moist where the sun cannot reach them. Patterns of light and dark play along the walkway reaching out ahead of me, narrowing to a pinprick width in a classic perspective study.
I reach into my bag and feel for my camera. My hand folds around its familiar, solid body, and I lift it out. As I do so, I feel my spirits lift also. It’s as if my soul is attached to my camera: when it’s down, I feel down, when it’s lifted, so is my soul.
I take a picture or two. It’s not art, I know. I’ll probably delete them when I get home. But looking at the world through a viewfinder is looking at the world in a completely new way. It’s exciting, even when it’s not art.
There is very little space inside a camera bag for glumness.
I had gone to the pinecone mud hut alone,
without the others.
With them I had felt exposed, unsafe.
The sturdy spine of the hut, formed by the tree arching
its power above,
the strong branches, lashed together with ropes, forming its ribs,
didn’t embrace me then.
Its chest couldn’t hold my voice.
But now, alone, it’s quiet here, and safe.
Private.
I arch my back, my body following the tree spine in a silent dance.
I lift my face,
spread my arms wide to catch every strain of the music
swelling inside of me.
A voice I’ve never heard before becomes my own.
And I sing! Sing!
No fear of censor. I am safe here.
Am I cracking up?
Maybe.
I allow myself to drown
in my own voice, my own music.
And by drowning, I am lifted.
Lifted to a higher, purer place.
A place without censor.
A place that just is.
I am safe here.
I am safe here
A place that just is.
A place without censor.
Lifted to a higher, purer place.
And by drowning I am lifted.
In my own voice, my own music,
I allow myself to drown.
Maybe.
Am I cracking up?
No fear of censor. I am safe here.
And I sing! Sing!
A voice I’ve never heard before becomes my own,
swelling inside of me.
Spreading my arms wide to catch every strain of the music,
I lift my face,
my body following the line of the tree in a silent dance,
I arch my back.
Private.
But now, alone, it’s quiet here, and safe.
It’s chest couldn’t hold my voice,
didn’t embrace me then.
The strong branches, lashed together with ropes, forming its ribs,
its power above.
The sturdy spine of the hut, formed by the tree arching.
With them, I had felt exposed, unsafe.
Without the others,
I had gone back to the pinecone mud hut alone.
I’m going to dance.
I’m going to poledance, bellydance, crazydance
I’m going to open the doors, open the windows
I’m going to put the chairs outside
I don’t care if it’s cold
I’m going to light a fire
I’m going to light a fire in that stupid Weber braai dish that looks like a spaceship that’s lost its aliens.
I’m going to dance.
I’m going to poledance, bellydance, crazydance.
I’m going to be Old King Cole: I’m going to call for more music!
I’m going to call for more tea!
I’m going to call for another log for the alien-spaceship-fire.
I’m going to poledance, bellydance, crazydance.
Why not?
Why not fairies and angels and dragons?
Why not Ganesh with his elephant head?
Why not Shiva with his blue face?
Why not rainbows with pots of gold, and good energies and auras
all sparkling gold and silver and pink and purple?
I believe in fairies.
And dragons.
I believe in colours.
The swirling, twirling psychedelic colours of the lentil-head tie-dye.
I believe in fairies.
And I’m going to dance. Poledance, bellydance, crazydance.
Because I can.
‘So. Now for the surprise. Right here, at the airport, is an onsen. The Japanese hot baths. What we’re going to do now is …’
I felt myself go pale. You know the feeling. All the blood in your body drains away … into your ankles and through the soles of your feet into the shifting ground beneath you.
We had arrived at Nagoya, Japan, the night before. We had wandered the length and breadth of the airport – a massive, sparkling clean, glass enclosed, marble tiled shopping centre – for hours, waiting for our fellow travellers to arrive.
The group leader, a wispy-pony-tailed hippie from Oaklands, California, dressed quite ridiculously in a beige, embroidered, fashionably creased and generously sized Ecuadorian wedding shirt, and unflattering, voluminous black Japanese construction worker’s pants, had arrived first. Came strolling towards us, his fluffy, grubby looking socks and enormous trainers leading the way, bearing large white carrier bags, a backpack and an effuse Californian smile. Without a single thought forming inside my head, I could feel the negative charges bouncing off between us. The road through Japan was not going to be smooth. I also sensed that he was the hugging-of-total-strangers type and that, if he so much as spread his arms in my direction, I would be on the next plane out of Nagoya, straight back to Cape Town, without having taken my first sip of green tea.
So there we stood: three Westerners – two South Africans and one Californian – each with two weeks of luggage, in the middle of the arrivals lounge of Nagoya airport, waiting for the other two members of our group to walk through the arrivals gate. Even as not very tall people, we were conspicuous amongst the mass of more slightly built, reserved Japanese people moving through the thoroughfare. The Japanese people are quite incredible: neat, contained, impassive, with a graceful economy of movement. Fully aware of themselves and the space they each fill. Quite unlike the loud, large and klutzy group we formed.
Then they bustled through the gate: beady-eyed, beaky, purse-lipped Anne from Washington DC and slightly goofy, vacant and very young John from San Francisco. Both tired from an eleven-hour flight but smiling expectantly, excited about being in Japan for the first time, and ready to absorb any new experience. This was going to be so cool. They were going to be such interesting people after this experience! Oh, the stories they will tell!
Our large, loud Western circle increased in size, colour, volume and spectacle. Our Californian hippie wasted no time in introducing us to a Californian hippie ritual. ‘Right, everyone! Give a thumbs-up!’ Obediently, albeit embarrassedly, we each stretched out an arm to the centre of the circle, the clenched fist at the end of each bearing an upturned thumb. ‘Okay. Now turn your thumb over to the left and clasp the thumb of the person to your right …’ ‘If the talking stick comes out, that’s it. I’m out of here,’ I thought as we each arched our hitch hiker’s thumbs over to the left and unclasped our pinkies to receive the thumb of the person to our right.
‘Okay,’ he rumbled in his counsellor’s voice – that special voice only the deeply insincere adopt when trying to sound as if they’re, like, fully there for you. ‘That’s your circle of support.’
A deep and meaningful ritual, indeed. Warming the thumb of a total stranger in the palm of my sweaty hand, in an airport in Japan was not likely to bind me to him in any way, I thought. Clearly an open mind is required here.
‘So what we’re going to do now is take our luggage upstairs to the baths and have our first truly Japanese experience. Let’s make a noise.’
‘Noooo …,’ I heard my voice calling. It had been as if for the last few minutes only my snowy white fingertips had kept me from slipping off the cliff and into the deep, dark abyss below. Now I had lost my feeble grip and all I could hear was the faint sound of my protestation as the air rushed past my ears. ‘Please let’s not make a noise,’ I say, pleading desperation painfully visible in my eyes, even to the most fanatic charismatic.
‘Okay, we won’t make a noise,’ he says, in a generous moment.
And then we head off to the Japanese baths. All five of us, wheeling our luggage behind us, exploding with the excitement: we’re in Japan! For the very first time! We push and stumble our way through the crowded space. Up escalators, through narrow passageways, past the Japanese crackers shop, past the crafts, past the restaurants to the onsen, where we are introduced to the first, and one of the most important Japanese rituals: removing your shoes when you step up to a higher level.
Each Japanese interior has a clearly demarcated area for which you are required to remove your shoes. The area is most commonly demarcated by a low step. If there is no step, a strip of wood or a change in flooring will indicate that you need to exchange your outside shoes for a pair of house slippers.What a herd of wildebeest we were. Loud, ungraceful, confused, disorganised, conspicuous and out of place though we were, we managed to remove our shoes, store them in the lockers, bundle our luggage in the office, and each take cautious ownership of a small, salmon pink drawstring bag before being directed through separate doorways, ‘red for women and blue for men’, as signalled by the short curtains hanging in each.
Once on the other side of the red curtain, it was as if having been pushed through a portal into another world. Suddenly it was quiet. The smells, the light, the temperature were all different. We had stepped into the changing room. A mirror and vanity lined the one wall, where two fully clothed women were drying their hair with hairdryers. In the centre of the all-beige room, starkly lit by fluorescent lights, were the lockers. Behind them a large industrial looking scale. To the right, next to a bench, a whirring fan. Sitting on the bench, with a vacant, somewhat exhausted expression on her face, was a middle-aged Japanese woman. Completely naked. And not in the least bit bothered by her creases, folds, rolls and girth. Beyond the completely naked, middle-aged woman drying herself in the fan’s breeze was the steamed-up glass door leading to the baths.
There we stood: three women, complete strangers to one another. Nina and I had been acquainted for many years but we had never so much as peed in adjoining cubicles. Let alone stood naked in front of each other. Why can’t these things happen when you’re in shape? Neither of us had ever clapped eyes on Anne before. I figured before I slipped into a nice hot bath with a stranger, I would have liked to, at least, have drunk a little too much wine.
‘Come on, girls. We’ve all seen it before,’ was Anne’s prosaic comment before shoving her clothes into the locker and pulling her towel from the salmon-pink drawstring bag. What unfurled from the bag was quite ludicrous: an almost opaque, 30 centimetre by 60 centimetre piece of towelling, useful for concealing no more than one offensive body part at a time. This is no fluffy white spa towel, designed to decorously envelop your abundance and pay homage to your white middleclass right to privacy. This is a purely functional item. You soak it in icy cold water, wring it out and mop your face and neck while you parboil yourself in steaming hot, bubbling and churning spring water. Once you’re completely squeaky clean, the wet cloth is wrung out some more and used to dry your whole body. And it works. Really. Once you’ve used one, you’ll never look the same way at the flokati rugs you use dry yourself with at home.
I don’t think I have ever been more conscious of the size of my butt or the hailstone damage to my thighs or the condition of my sagging belly and boobs and my jiggly upper arms than I was in those moments, walking the few steps from the change room, through the misted glass doors and into the bathing area. Nor have I ever been more conscious of not fitting in and not knowing at all what to do.
There’s a certain protocol to be followed when using an onsen. First you take a shower. I gathered that one does not use soap during this fully exposed first rinse. There you stand, not knowing where to put your towel or what to do while waiting for a shower to become available, while polite, reserved Japanese women cast sidelong glances at you. They don’t openly stare – well, not always – but you know you’re being looked at. After the shower, you pick a bath. There are usually at least two to choose from but some have more, and there is always one icy cold one (you don’t want to hop into this one first!). The additional options do nothing to help you feel more at ease. The baths are usually the size of a small swimming pool and so hot that at least 40 centimetres of steam hovers above them. Most of them have Jacuzzi-like jets and bubbles of some kind.
Getting into one for the first time is quite a shock to the system: the heat is intense and, for me, unbearable the first few times I tried to give over to the experience. After floating in one bath after another, interspersed by plunges into the icy cold water, you eventually have your proper wash: under a shower and with soap. This, again, is in close proximity to your fellow women. Low against the wall, rows of handsets and taps are set above small mirrors. Here the well-boiled women sit next to one another on small plastic stools, washing their hair, shaving their legs and brushing their teeth and chatting as if they’re out to lunch. Nothing is private. Once I even saw a woman shaving her face. Often they have small, always very well-behaved and very, very cute, children with them. The little ones are quite independent, and work the baths in the same way as the adults do, followed by a thorough, business-like scrub-down from their mothers. The onsen at Nagoya airport has large windows through which one can see the aeroplanes taking off and landing. Others have beautiful outside baths in addition to the enclosed ones. There are water features, fountains, plants and sculptures. Sitting under the stars in the outside bath in Kyoto, water spewing down from the mouth of a beautifully carved stone dragon, would be one of my fond memories of my trip to Japan. But here, at Nagoya airport, sitting with a Yank and a South African, each with a folded square of bathtowel on their head, I have never felt so foreign and so uncomfortable.
Once I managed to lower myself into the steaming water, I slithered away from them to the other side of the bath and settled into a bubbling niche and waited for the jets of water to pummel the stress from my back and shoulders. ‘Ahhhh …,’ I thought, and lifted my legs to brace myself against the low wall in front of me. ‘Hah!’ I exclaimed as I jerked my knees towards my chest. Pinpricks of electric shocks had shot through the soles of my feet. Yet another relaxing feature of a Japanese bath house: electricity and water.
I had had enough. My first bath house experience had lasted all of ten minutes. I skulked towards the soaping-off area, had a quick wash and left. I did not enjoy my introduction to this Japanese tradition. Not at all. As the days went by, though, I started to really enjoy it. In Kyoto I went to the bath house shortly before midnight, on my own, and learnt how the experience can become quite addictive. It’s almost meditative being their on your own. After a while of being immersed in the hot water, your head clears. You have almost no thoughts at all. Moving from the hot water into the cold and then back into the hot has almost a narcotic effect on the brain. And it was here that I felt most comfortable with other women. We may have nodded and smiled at one another, someone may have offered some assistance when I looked a bit lost, but mostly we were just alone together. Comfortably. Walking out into the cold night air after an hour or two in the onsen, I felt more invigorated than if I had hiked up a mountain to a waterfall. The experience was good. Very good. Liberating. It became clear why the tradition has lasted for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. What had been probably my most uncomfortable experience in Japan would be the one I would think of, and long for, most often once I was back in Cape Town.
Thank you for visiting my blog. I’m new to this, so please be gentle!
