Gradually it dawns on her that it’s not enough merely to take cognisance of the twenty-three main groups of invertebrates (the crustaceans and coelenterata, sponges and insects; flatworms, roundworms, segmented worms, velvet worms and ribbon worms; arachnids, arthropods, brachiopods, gastropods and cephalopods; water bears, spider crabs, king crabs, tusk shells and chitons; molluscs, bivalves, cnidarians and Echinodermata), or of the five main groups of vertebrates (the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals).
To enter through the first gate, she must know more than the groups, the divisions and subdivisions. Book knowledge and knowledge of the facts, she is starting to suspect, is not exactly what is at stake here. For an intensive exploration of natural life, as the instruction directs, she must open up to the world in a different manner. To have factual knowledge, in all probability, means nothing — the pupil, or disciple, or aspirant mystic (she has no inkling of how Sofie saw herself) must be able to dig deeper — her wonderment must be founded on something else. Is that what Sofie was trying to communicate to her?
Sophonisba of PE
WHEN THEY WERE LITTLE GIRLS, Maria did not like her sister. She found her ugly when she was born. She was a whinger, she wanted to do everything Maria and her friends did. She was full of airs. She had too many tiny teeth. Maria thought Sofie was her mother’s pet.
It was only as young adults that they became friends. Sofie used to send Maria postcards and letters when Maria, after completing her studies, went to live and work in London for a while. In Sofie’s twenties and early thirties she wrote to Maria regularly, in the time before her first volume of poetry was published. Sofie married young, she and her husband moved house often. From three different harbour towns she wrote to Maria — Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. From Port Elizabeth she wrote that their kitchen was beautiful — Dutch like Vermeer: But I walk all around the walls praying for a second Jericho, because I hate the owner, Mister Barnaard. My neighbour’s wife is a darling — Missus Human — six sons and two daughters, all of them breastbabies except for the last chilt. Her husband is forever rolling the car when he’s so sloshed. And she’s raised two foster chillren as well. Her oldest daughter was 16 pounds at birth — afterbirth big and black and round like an iron ball full of veins thick as your finger. The second chilt was easy — just a sneeze and a fart and out popped the chilt. My wedding ring falls off, I fall off, my head falls full of holes. Oh Lord, thou pluckest me out, etc. Chris is working very hard and we’re insanely happy nevertheless.
From your melancholy sister, Sophonisba of PE.
She copied Rilke’s first Duino elegy by hand (‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?’) to send Maria, and on another occasion a poem several A5 pages long — also copied by hand. She didn’t say who the poet was. That’s how it is with me, she concluded.
From Cape Town she wrote that she found jazz a pain, like life itself. (Sofie was twenty-seven years old at that stage, with two children.) I’m shot of Chris, she wrote, he sits behind his typewriter without an inkling of anything amiss. He works very hard and so do I. He types. I think. During the day I wash nappies, look after the children, cook and tidy up. Whenever I have a moment, I write a few lines in my little book. At night we crawl into the double bed like a twin embryo returning to the womb. I no longer look for him in his lacunae. The random lines sometimes become poems. But here’s a confession. Burn this letter. There is a single ancient pain in my heart: R. Can you understand and forgive it? Only to you will I ever say it.
(R, Maria knew, was a woman, considerably older than Sofie, one of her lecturers in classical languages. Small, dark, unmarried. Somebody with whom she had contact at a personal level in her third year. More than that Maria doesn’t know.)
Sofie sent Maria a Blake quotation — neatly typed out on a single sheet of paper. An extract from a letter by William Blake. ‘I percieve that your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun, & Happiness is better than Mirth. I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel Flatter’d when I am told so.’
Your sister, Missus Lazarus, she signed herself.
Still from Cape Town, she wrote that she had bronchitis. My body is drunk my ka clings to me desperately like a locust to a swaying stalk of grass. I have had it with swimming against the stream — my kitchen-maid (still the commonly accepted term here, on the eve of the revolution; also kaffer, plural the blacks) has been absent for two weeks (throwing stones in Gugulethu), my washing machine has broken down, the children have tonsillitis. Chris and I have had the most tremendous dust-up he says I’m the laziest person alive so now he’s sleeping all evening to get his own back — I’m writing like an inebriate I can no longer discriminate between hallucination and holy ghost. I dreamt last night that C & I & the children bump into three old whores in the ghost town of Durban — painted and pleated — Prof S, Mrs L and R. Laura’s little face was so pale that her eyebrows seemed pitch black. She gazed at R in close-up for a long time and said slowly: Bye-bye Betty. Contemplate that if you should ever again come across the three graces somewhere.
I have just completed two goodish poems, she wrote, perhaps too small & backward etc. but now I have peace of mind again, perhaps I’ve found my feet again. (Drawing of two feet.) I write about the curvature of the earth, which connects the last things with the first. I read the Old Testament (fertile material), I read Blake, I still read Thucydides, and Emily Dickinson. And Sylvia Plath. I wish I was dead like her and old Ingrid Jonker.
Remember you’re inheriting my hands when I’m dead then you can play Ezekiel with the bones.
Once, before Maria was to visit her in Durban, Sofie wrote to say that she was making herself a bat dress with kimono sleeves to welcome Maria. Come before they demolish my house so that you can see all the symbols on my walls & my doorknobs. I’ll steal a few rand from Chris for a leg of lamb to celebrate your coming, after all I am raising his children and keeping his house. I have a servant who can cook, she’s a much better cook than I. As you know, if I can help it I don’t lay a hand on dead things with reproachful eyes. But the children are carnivores like their father. Chris laughs when I shudder. He is still doing his all for the struggle while his near and dear wife is struggling to keep body and soul together — the two threaten every so often to fly apart.