Ojalá Que Llueva Café
A couple of years ago I formed a theory that some of the lines from Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Tulips,” were inspired by Out of Africa—Karen von Blixen-Finecke’s memoirs about her years living in Kenya. I read the book once, I read the book twice, I watched the 1985 film adaptation (I say it was for research, but it was really for Robert Redford). I found it difficult to pity a rich, white lady who suffers mostly from vapid, superficial problems, but there was an aspect to her overall plight that hoisted a neglected point.
Karen Blixen did not get to marry the man she loved, he loved and married someone else. So, Karen married his brother, Baron Bror, who was also a dear friend of hers. She could have waited to fall in love again, I suppose, but she was 28 years old. By 1911 Danish standards, her tits were raisins. Mr. and Mrs. von Blixen-Finecke bought a plantation just below the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi and began their marriage in a happy, somewhat unconventional lifestyle that she called “paradisiacal.” They went on safari frequently, they hunted large, dangerous game (I know, I know, it was the turn of the 20th century and the British Empire said it was cool to rape the land they just stole so, they did) and they had high hopes for the fields of coffee that they were cultivating.
But Baron Bror was a philanderer, a gambler, and a careless egomaniac. Early on in their marriage, he passed a gnarly case of syphilis to Karen, who had to return to Denmark for nearly two years to recover. She returned to Africa to find that her husband had squandered all of their money, the coffee crop was suffering, the tensions between the British and the indigenous people were escalating, and her paradisical life that she had bested death to see again, was no longer paradisical. She chose to stay in Nairobi to beckon the beauty of it all back. Bror disappeared, then they divorced. Karen fell madly in love with another man, Denys, and they were happy together in their romantic arrangement. Karen even became pregnant at one point, which was a surprise because the doctors in Denmark told her that it would be impossible, considering how ravaged by syphilis her poor body had been. It wasn’t a surprise when she suffered a miscarriage. Denys never could give her the true partnership she desired with him, and it became irrelevant when he was killed in a plane crash. Meanwhile, Karen had been investing every cent of what was left of her family money trying to foster her coffee fields, but it was no use. I wasn’t aware that a piece of land could ever be declared “dead,” but her farm was. In the end, she sold her plantation for pennies and had no choice but to return to her family in Denmark.
Every obstacle that arises in life is a threat to sobriety. Obstacles are the reason that most people can’t stay sober or will blow years of clean time. Setbacks, tragedies, insults and losses hit us like addiction taking a cattle prod to our sobriety; it zaps and zaps and zaps, until we can’t take it anymore and we drink to end the torture. … or so they say. In the movies, in books, in other poor representations of characters struggling with alcoholism, all it takes is one big blow to knock them off their resolve. Their father dies, they drink. Wife leaves, they drink. Gets fired, they drink. Maybe that’s how it appears in real life too, through the narrow scope that nonaddicts leer through. I assure you, though, if a committed recovering alcoholic seems to fall of the wagon over one thing… it wasn’t just one thing.
From the very moment that we resolved to be sober, we started chewing and swallowing small portions of hell. Every challenge we encountered was difficult, but doable because we were determined to fight and succeed. At the early stages, getting out of bed seemed like an impossible task, but we pressed forward. Every time we accomplished a seemingly “impossible” task, we proved to ourselves that we could do hard things and that we could keep doing hard things. We retrained our minds to self-soothe with affirmations and encouragement, instead of believing that we could only be soothed with the balm of alcohol. When the pain was so strong that it blurred our resolve, we punched pillows, we kicked bushes, we strangled the steering wheel and yelped at the windshield—whatever we had to do to get us through. With every victory, sobriety got much easier and it happened surprisingly fast. The new pattern of thinking was, “I already got through the worst times, I can get through this rough patch, and if I can get through this, I can get through anything the future throws at me.” That thought process is deep and effective— to the point that we shocked ourselves with what we could tolerate.
I was sober for over six months, but less than a year when I was hit with my first real setback; one that could have made me believe that none of my valiant efforts so far had mattered. I had just survived my first Thanksgiving without my husband—the husband that I was still foolishly trying to win back with my sobriety, independence, determination, and size 2 waist. The ache I felt for him over the holiday was excruciating. It was too much pain for one little person to handle, which had believing that he must be missing me too. We were soulmates, after all, according to everything he’d ever said to me and some legal documents we filed in the state of Florida. The following Monday morning, he sent me a message informing me that he’d hired an attorney and had begun divorce proceedings.
I did not instinctively think about drinking. In fact, I had to force myself to wonder am I going to drink about this? Instinct did kick-in, though. My brain interrupted itself in the middle of that awful question and said, “Absolutely not, Kara. You are not going out like that.”
Soul-crushing disappointments and stab wounds are not an alcoholic’s greatest threat. Our greatest threat is evanescence.
Fiction or nonfiction, from a literary standpoint, happy endings are quite rare. I never expect a protagonist to end up with everything they want, but I like it when they get a percentage of what they want, along with moral fortitude from the things they’ve lost, and a scintilla of resolution and contentment. Karen Blixen got nothing. She lost her first love to another woman, suffered years of abuse in her marriage, as well as nearly-fatal syphilis, lost a baby (and any chance of ever having one), and lost the second man she loved—her soulmate—in a gruesome accident. Her husband squandered her wealth, then she spent her last pennies trying to salvage the home she made in her beloved Nairobi, but it failed. The universe would grant her no romantic love, no children, no financial security, and as a final blow, it would grant her no fields of coffee to gaze upon as she lived out her lonely remaining years.
A person—even and alcoholic—can rally from one fight and run headfirst into the next, as long as there is something to fight for. Sadness and anger may come with life’s casualties, but tragedy does not settle in until you realize that all the losses and the victories have added up to absolutely nothing. Imagine a battleship staying afloat through multiple wars, surviving the reverberations of atomic bombs, absorbing or deflecting every direct hit they’ve ever taken, then watching it sink beneath the waves because of a rusty hull. The greatest insult to existence is going under in a whispered defeat.
I know that life is about the journey, not the destination. I study epic poetry; my world revolves around that philosophy. You accept a chivalric quest, you travel many miles, you slay the dragons, the ogres, the cyclops’, the beasts with multiple heads, sometimes you get the girl, sometimes you don’t get the girl, sometimes you get the girl and find out on your wedding night that her hymen isn’t intact, so you strap her to a cucking stool and set her on fire…
Life doesn’t end at the moment we realize our ultimate plan won’t come to fruition. It doesn’t end the first, second, third, or fourth time that we think to ourselves: That’s it. My life is over. If it did, no teenaged girl would survive past her first taste of slightly public embarrassment. Life ends when we’re dead. Up until that point, we can always change our story, or at least change how we feel about it. My heart winced every time I reached the final page of Out of Africa. Then I remember that Karen Blixen didn’t return to Denmark and suffocate to death under the weight of her failures… she returned to Denmark and wrote Out of Africa. Her story had meaning. It had a purpose—she had a purpose. Even if that purpose was to make me cry and compose a blog post based on a poorly constructed comparison.
Great people have philosophized that life is about the journey, because the journey contains all the good parts. Man is not meant to die at age 80 in a stew of passion, grief, inspiration, anger, fear and joy. We’re meant to die peacefully, with gratitude that the journey of life gave us moments to feel all of those emotions, with such profundity that our hands quaked and our knees weakened. Nobody appreciates those moments like a used-to-be alcoholic because we missed opportunities to experience those feelings when we were drinking for the purpose of feeling nothing. Now, when we feel them… Good Lord… fireworks.
Emotions are beautiful, even the bad ones. I love feeling emotions so much that I let myself feel devastated on behalf of a dead Danish writer. She didn’t die in devastation, though. She died with her memories and the fruitful perspective that her lost fields of coffee gave her life’s journey the excitement of a rollercoaster ride. In fact, the only way to go out in devastation, is to die knowing that you drank away every opportunity to truly live. There is peace in knowing that you fought your hardest, even if you fail. There is torment in realizing, when its over, that you missed life itself because you kept trying to drown the emotions you didn’t want to feel. That’s a true tragedy. The importance of the journey of life has held solid from Dante to Ralph Waldo Emerson, to me. Unlike those men, I know the pain of having been physically present for life’s wonderful moments and being too numb to feel anything about it. And I ain’t going out like that.
