Assorted Notes

TUESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 2004

DESERT or CITY?

To lose your identity-for-the-sake-of-functioning, or to accept it and to be that person for the sake of a (good) cause … say you have walked around in circles and criss-crossed the same areas for many years but you manage a straight path for long enough to finally come to the edge of the CITY, just before you enter the DESERT, where you no longer have to function according to conventions of time and place, and you turn around and walk back, re-entering the CITY, to live your live in pursuit and in the service of a Good Cause with the knowledge that you have about who and what you truly are, and who and what you need to be to survive and to function … until the time comes when you will enter the DESERT in a different form.

THURSDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 2004

A principle

Many of us are trapped in a life that is not the best we can achieve, because to make adjustments will require more effort than to merely maintain our current, sometimes frustrating life on a daily basis.

This is why change usually follows a proverbial flash of lightning that shocks us into action – an event or incident that makes our current existence unbearable.

______________________

THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2004

The whole truth, loneliness, and practical arrangements

I still feel lonely, but not as much as a year or three ago. One reason is I now know people need each other for the fulfilment of a range of needs, both emotional and physical. If these needs are eliminated, everything changes.

* * *

The belief in many cultures is that people need other people, is that not so?

Yes, because “many cultures” are trying to figure out how to provide basic comfort to the individual in the face of a terrible reality. It is a practical arrangement, like your name. It is not the Whole Truth.

MONDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 2004

For the record

For the past several weeks I have been contemplating a choice, in various forms: To live for this world, or to “die” in this world.

If I choose to live, my current half-life is not good enough.

If I choose to “die”, my current half-death is also not good enough.

* * *

Some people find appearing in the world very stressful; naturally they try to avoid it as much as possible. I understand this.

Existential question

The question remains: Should I continue to be what I have worked out I want to be, taken into consideration all the given factors – to cultivate a relationship with the world as “Brand Smit”, and to appear to the world as “Brand Smit” on a daily basis, to hopefully play a constructive role and to make a positive contribution while I function, for all practical purposes, as “Brand Smit” … OR … do I pull out of the game, and terminate my appearance and accompanying role and my functioning as “Brand Smit”, and see where it takes me?

______________________

TUESDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2004

Is the demonstration over yet? (Because I would like to continue with my existence)

At some stage of my life I came to believe that my only right to an existence would be if I could prove or demonstrate that I am not “the same as everyone else”. Perhaps it is time to confront the reality of my life – as created from the clay that was laid before me – and to declare that I have proven or demonstrated enough.

I say this because it seems to me that to claim my right to happiness I should after all be like other people and take similar measures – like playing the Game of Social Contact with the Exclusive Purpose of Being with Someone to Whom You Are Sexually Attracted.

(“Right to happiness?” you may ask. Yes. If I don’t have such a right, no one has such a right. It is either universal or not applicable at all.)

WEDNESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2004

Location and personal agendas

“Be dedicated to your own agenda.”

The question: What exactly is your agenda?

* * *

The question is not what location is perfect for residential purposes; the question is what kind of place is conducive to your ambitions and your aspirations, and your goals. In short, what place is conducive to the realisation and fulfilment of your own personal agenda?

* * *

It seems that I am expanding my focus. Initially, my focus was just on my own identity. Eventually I asked: What is identity? And if it meets a specific need, what and who am I (or will I be) if that specific need is removed?

Same with the agenda issue. First it was my own agenda. Now I say: Everyone has an agenda, so what’s yours? And can you express it?

The issue of place or physical location is another example. For years (and hundreds of pages), I asked: Where is my place in the world? I even attempted to establish criteria that might apply to other people. Now I say, place/location and agenda, and necessarily also identity, everything is connected, and the keyword is conducive. What place, and what other factors are conducive to the expression of your self-defined identity, and for the realisation and fulfilment of your personal agenda?

(Earlier on I made myself guilty of espousing the misconception that the end goal is to find yourself, while in actual fact that is merely the beginning.)

______________________

MONDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER 2004

Boredom, and actions that compensate (and my English class on a Monday afternoon)

I am okay by 16:25: my mind is manageable; my apartment is clean; plans, old and new, interesting enough for a Monday.

Within half an hour with a group of seven-year-olds (who are not unreasonably noisy or rowdy), the boredom and the farce of everything I am trying to do absolutely overpower me. Within minutes, my thoughts are rushing down a variety of dark corridors: What is the point of everything? Where are we heading? Face the facts! Etcetera. Regular Monday afternoon, 16:30 to 18: 00 routine.

Then the thought came to me that one needs certain things. If you don’t get these things, you will either deteriorate physically and emotionally, or you will get bored, or both (depending on your particular situation, and of what specific needs we are talking about).

COMPENSATING ACTIONS can alleviate the adverse effects of the situation, but if these types of action cannot be taken, then it’s physical and/or emotional deterioration, or boredom and frustration, or all aforementioned.

This is how I can describe, for the umpteenth time, my hours at home on my own, and also the result of a lack of actions to compensate, on a Monday afternoon between 16:30 and 18:00.

A few questions

What is the practical value of my idealism? What is my relationship with the world? What do I want my relationship with the world to be? What can my relationship with the world possibly be? What – and I mean this in all seriousness – is the meaning of life?

______________________

SUNDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER 2004

By now, I have accumulated enough information on myself to recognise myself when I pass a mirror, and to respond (most of the time) when the name my parents chose to call me 33 years ago is uttered; a name I have accepted over the past 33 years as good enough for everyday use. I have fairly recently reached a plateau in my religious-philosophical quest for what it means to be human. I have a decent understanding of what makes me happy. I can act with an acceptable degree of confidence in a variety of situations. And I can explain without too much inaudible mumbling what I want to do with my life, where, and with whom.

Then, as I was bicycling past a nursery late this afternoon, the strangest thought came to me. If I had a lot of money – not necessarily billions, but much, much more than I need to merely keep myself alive, I would buy myself potted plants. Not just one, but dozens. I will rearrange my entire living room; portraits placed upright on bookshelves will be hanged on the walls; guitars will be moved from the corner to another spot; furniture will be moved into the storage room; all to make room for all the potted plants.

The data I have on the subject of me as a person includes the following: “Brand Smit likes plants because he likes nature. Despite this, he does not currently have any potted plants in his apartment because all the plants he had kept in the past died because of a lack of care. The reasonable conclusion can thus be drawn that Brand Smit is not truly a plant person.”

Whatever.

I’ve been having a problem for quite some time now. My emotional landscape is once again relentlessly harassed by a Storm of Scepticism. To my own embarrassment (since I thought I had left behind such amateurish issues way back in … July?) I am wondering again what the point is of everything. What is it all about?!

Frantically my fingers again flip, on a daily basis, through the steel cabinet full of answers: Satisfaction of Needs, Mathematics and Science, Find/Define and Be Yourself, Physical Existence as Part of a Very Long Process, Love and Togetherness … and on and on one file after another shoots past.

It is true that I have just returned to Taiwan after spending four weeks in South Africa. It is also true that I had just gotten used to the charcoal-scented air of the Highveld during late winter, and pecan nut pies for R27 at the greengrocer, and the charming woman who works the till at the supermarket. And, fair enough, I saw my parents, my younger sister and for the last two weeks also my older sister (and her firstborn) every morning on my rounds through the house between reading mass-market gossip magazines and taking smoke breaks under the tree in the front yard.

This is not August 2003. It’s not February 2004. It’s not 2002, 2001, 2000, ’99 or any other period of my life. It’s September 2004. I still respond to the same sounds uttered when someone wants to draw my attention, and (except for the moustache that I’m going to shave tomorrow) I still look the same. But my grey matter nowadays dictates ambitions for, and visions of, the future other than “repatriation to the country of my birth, marriage and children” and so on. I know, therefore, it is not the fact that I am back in Taiwan that is clogging my gullet again with lack of faith. The lack of faith was there while I was sitting in the late afternoon sun on the smallholding outside Bronkhorstspruit. The scratching at the hollow part of my soul was palpable while I was considering the value of the Highveld’s open spaces for reflective thought processes.

Pleasant, then, was the surprise this afternoon, as I was rolling past the nursery on a wet road, when I temporarily bowled my cynicism flat with an old joke like what I would do with more money.

Since I usually approach these matters with such diligence, it took me a good fifteen minutes before I had qualified the question to an extent where I could answer it. “I would buy myself a helluva lot of plants,” I thought out loud. “I would send my parents money every month, whether they need it or not. Then I will go on holiday in December … and buy myself twenty VCDs on a single shopping excursion … and the Alphaville Greatest Hits CD.” Later that night (feeling somewhat better about my bookshelves being sorted again) I added that I would also dine at a fine restaurant at least once a week. (“Because I’ve always liked good food,” I thought.) I would also make significant investments in new technology. I would get a new computer, a digital video camera, and the latest generation mobile phone on the market. I would also buy myself a new sound system – my faithful Aiwa Discman won’t allow me to listen to Metallica at a volume that does not destroy my short term memory … what was I busy saying?

The well-known phrase, “I am”, is usually completed with all kinds of data bits, traditionally including name, date of birth, family and friendship ties, how you make money, where you live and other information that, in the first place, tells you who you are, and then also facilitates the process by which you introduce yourself to other people.

Regarding myself, I can say that I, Brand Smit … wait, let me do this in a different way:

I, Brand Smit, am a man … 188 centimetres tall, weigh more than 90 kilograms, receding hairline on the forehead, hair on my upper lip … would prefer to weigh less than 90 kilograms, wouldn’t mind too much if my hair could grow back … South African … have no strong desire to be a citizen of another country … sprang to life in the ethnic group historically classified as either “Boers” or “Afrikaners” … currently living in apartment number 4~2, Lane 2, Ci Hui Xin Cun, in the city of Fengshan, Kaohsiung County, Taiwan … want to live here or in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, London or maybe Paris, and I wouldn’t mind to own a garden cottage in Bronkhorstspruit … was taught as a child that belief in the teachings of primarily the Protestant Churches is the only way to continue to exist after physical death in “Heaven” … happy with my current, vague beliefs about God, Jesus, the Immortality of the Soul, and Life after Physical Death … earn money as an English teacher … would rather want to earn money as an entrepreneur in collaboration with other people who also profit from my projects, so I don’t have to be too concerned with marketing and distribution … cannot currently watch TV even if I want to … would like to be someone who has the option to watch TV rather than write pieces like this one on a Monday night … don’t spend a lot of money, other than on the most necessary groceries, movies, cigarettes, and cheap video CDs … would like to be someone who has more money to spend when he wants to do something, or wishes to purchase an item … etcetera … etcetera … who cares? If the day were longer, I would probably have smoked myself to death. Just as well, then.

______________________