re-imagine and re-story your life and work

Presence, Memory and Imagination

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things (Rilke)

In life drawing classes the artist Degas (1834-1917) taught students to work from memory. There were three floors in the building – on the ground floor first year students sat with the model. Second year students drew on the first floor and third year students on the second. So the model was present in the face of first year students all the time, whereas second and third year students had to trip down the stairs to look at the model, then climb back to continue their drawing. Advanced students had further to climb, holding the new insights of angles, images, proportions, shade, in their picture mind. Then descend to check.

“Attention”, a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had suddenly become articulate. “Attention”, it repeated in the same high, nasal monotone. (Aldous Huxley, Island)

A Capful of Stories

In 1962, the year this novel was published, I entered Rhodes University as a firstyear student. It took years to integrate and practice the symbolic message of Huxley’s mynah birds. Here is part of a conversation between Will, a cynical journalist, shipwrecked on Pala, the utopia island and Susila, an inhabitant:

“ Is that your bird?” Will asked. She shook her head. “Mynahs are like the electric light…they don’t belong to anybody.”
“Why does he say those things?”
“Because somebody taught him, …”
“Why ‘Attention’? Why ‘Here and now?”
“Well …” She searched for the right words to explain the self-evident to
this strange imbecile. “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you
forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not
being here and now.”

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light…
(St. Francis of Assisi)

Living this Prayer

This month’s letter is a tribute to the Carl Schlettwein Foundation in Basel
who, for many years, has supported and encouraged me. This March, inland
and at the coast, I spent another 23 days in Namibia where I lived for 20
years. Marsia Reed of the Lithon Foundation arranges my visit, as she is
connected to many of the NGOs, a free ambulance services et al.

People in a country with little resources, but rich in passion, altruism and imagination. The nature of the project? To train storytellers so they can pass on this life changing medium to children in need / at risk. I storyshopped at orphanages, ECD, a free ambulance unit, a Lighthouse ministry where they teach children archery – some 20 engagements.

I remain moved by the faith, power, humility of these women and
a scattering of men. In Okahandja I encoutered 25 women singing, all from 25 different preschools, most of them teaching in tin shacks. So open to story learning. They are PDF -Passionate Dedicated Faithful and ECD – Energetic Courageous Determined.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/April-2025-letter.pdf

Your Life as a Movie

Life is a tragedy viewed closeup and a comedy in the long shot.
(Charlie Chaplin)

Imagine directing/writing your life as a movie. We are engaging with this
theme in the Somerset West Magic Carpet writer’s group and also in a
Windhoek wordshop (see radar ‘what’s on’ at end.) What can close movie
watching teach us about writing? How can we absorb these techniques into
our texts?

This opens to further questions. Title? Opening scene? Defining moments? Music score? Landscape/seascape? The architecture of the buildings? Synchronicities? Mysteries? Fellow creatures with fur feather fin? Recurrent themes …repeated patterns? What symbols carry power?
How to represent them? What angles, shots lighting? Close-ups? Zoom? Cuts? Over voice? What’s left off the screen/page? And the ending…
and rolling credits? What of novels and memoirs turned into movies? I loved versions of The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein)

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/March-2025-letter-2.pdf

I have told so many love stories that I have become fiction.

(Rumi)

Tell me a story

This letter is once more about stories, specifically those I tell every Sat
morning. During COVID. stories for day one, day two, day three. Now a
weekly one with a quotation that counterbalances the story. (on Podcast
some 500 stories in dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za )

The joy of this commitment is that it goes out to 500 plus people yet arrives
individually on What’s App Broadcast and so becomes personal. People respond one-toone. The joy enlarges life. A story pebble thrown into a pond, the ripples washing up on far off shores. Tables spread with delicacies from exotic lands. You take from here, I sample there, and we are fed. Some stories I absorb from mythology, from the lives of saints, from quirkiness. I
adapt, embellish and twist. All the while, I learn about what makes a
measured story. For the more I know about stories, the less I know of this
vast untrammeled country. It’s TS Eliot arriving at the place and knowing it
intimately for the first time.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Feb-2025-letter.pdf

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end
is to make a beginning. (T S. Eliot)

As we move into the first quarter of the 21st century, the beginning of a year, I’m thinking about beginnings and endings. We talk as if they are linear. I thought I could coin a word begend so looked it up and
behold found:

• a song – Higher Intelligence Agency
• from the album S.H.A.D.O 2
• a TV soap -Begend the Endginning
• a definition – when repeats follow the end of miserable experiences

What if these ‘Begin End’ labels are circular rather than linear? TS Eliot in
East Coker writes of this cycle:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored ….
there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane….

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Jan-2025-letter.pdf

Inspiration and Discipline

This month’s letter concerns this relationship between inspiration, the subject arriving, and the blank page/screen, when we induce the labour and the writing yawns, stretches its limbs and arrives at its own pace. Being moved, by the spirit of the words or beginning you know not where.
The first throw of this letter is a 03.22 awakening from a dream.

Sometimes that night travelling angles (a Jungian slip) the writing. I think of Naomi Epel’s book, where 26 writers such as Maurice Sendak say how their dreams inspire, sometimes not subject, rather tone or atmosphere. (Although once I dreamt an entire children’s story about a crone who tells a
boy how to see his ear).

God, whose love and joy are present everywhere, can’t come to visit you
unless you aren’t there. (Angelus Silesius)

Someone knocks on God’s door. Who’s there? God calls. It is I. Go away says God. Puzzled, the person knocks a second time. Who’s there? Let us in. God flings wide the door. Is this what the mystic Angelus Silesius hints at? Or St Paul’s I live yet not I but Christ liveth within me? This month I touch on what has intrigued mystics, philosophers and poets across millennia – and now neuroscientists. The paradox, ambiguity and illusion of the first-person singular. Their insights allude to how we spend a lifetime thinking with
and about the I when there isn’t one. Knotting the rope that binds. Creating a theatre of the absurd.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Nov-2024-letter.pdf

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton

Last year I offered a storyshop to the Soul Carers network in Cape Town. This month I’d like to share extracts from this novel related to their work as death doulas. Clover Brooks ushers people peacefully through their last days, collecting their final words into three notebooks: ADVICE,

CONFESSIONS and REGRETS.
The book offers profundity through simplicity, on the other side of complexity. As a young girl, Clover ends up living with a grandfather who teaches her that curiosity and observation are as important as imagination. Ironically, while she’s studying thanatology in Japan, looking at how different cultures handle death, the old man dies.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Oct-2024-letter.pdf