Another puzzling New Year

CAPE TIMES, 3 JANUARY 2003

WHAT WERE YOU doing on New Year’s Eve? Were you? Really? Gosh. Wasn’t it painful? No such high-jinks and shenanigans for me, I can tell you. I started the New Year as I intend to finish it: painstakingly piecing together the sundered bodies of ballerinas.

I don’t know if this sounds peculiar to you, but I spent my New Year’s Eve in a painful ecstasy of absorption, poring over the jumbled smudges of a 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle, not that it matters, was a reproduction of Edgar Degas’ “Dance Class”, or, if you are the sort of person who likes their jigsaw puzzle unwashed, eating a baguette and wearing a beret, “Classe de Dans”. Oh, don’t sneer – it was either that or the 2000-piece photograph of seven dalmations in a basket. It was the first jigsaw puzzle I have tackled in nigh 18 years, and it was just the thing for a thoughtful New Year’s Eve.

You learn interesting things about yourself when you sit down to a diningroom table spread with cardboard pieces. I chose to do a jigsaw puzzle on New Year’s Eve as a kind of gesture to myself. I wanted to greet the New Year, if not sober, exactly, then at least with some measure of self-possession. A jigsaw puzzle seemed perfect – I would spend the last evening of the year piecing together the bigger picture, putting things in their place, rediscovering the lessons of proportion and perspective, and at the end of it I would have made, with my own hands, an object both pleasing to contemplate and greater than the sum of its parts. “As with this jigsaw puzzle,” I said to myself sternly on the Tuesday afternoon, settling down with a French painting and an even more French bottle of champagne, “so let it be with your life.”

By midnight, as I reluctantly broke from my labours to stand outside and watch the flares from the ships and hear the distant roar of the hippies on the beach celebrating the New Year three minutes too early, the puzzle was still French but the champagne was long finished. So was that shaker of gin I keep tucked under the sofa for emergencies. My eyes were swimming with tiny specks of colour and the after-image of long-ago brush strokes. I was cursing Degas’ enthusiasm for the colour green. What kind of a man paints the entire top-left corner green? And all the same colour green, at that. It must have made the painting go by more quickly, but what about the people doing the jigsaw puzzles, eh? What about them?

As I looked at the sky over Cape Town, I found myself thinking those deep and echoing thoughts that men and women have always thought, searching the heavens on New Year’s Eve: “Cor, I’m glad I’m not doing a jigsaw puzzle of the Milky Way! That would take forever!”

Eventually I finished, with the sun risen and my eyes bleary and my back in spasm, and I stumbled to bed with a jigsaw hangover as bad as any I could have acquired from less salubrious pursuits. And I remembered, as I drifted off in an impressionistic swirl of green, that a jigsaw puzzle is not a very good metaphor for a life. In life you haven’t the picture on the box to guide you, and in life there are very often pieces missing. But there is this similarity: in life as in jigsaw puzzles, it’s easier and a lot more fun with someone helping you. And then I thought something else, but I can’t remember what.